skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about you, but I try to avoid hand-crafting SQL just like I avoid hand-crafting machine code/assembler. I use tools for that (either generators or O/RM).

Dynamic SQL doesn't have any specific advantage, correct, but neither do SProcs, so why put all your stuff in sprocs? Why not let a tool do the SQL and guide the tool to do the right thing?

SP Security: If you don't trust your devs and applications against the DB, you've already lost. SP security is just mainframe-thinking and a lost cause.

Efficiency: At least with SQL Server, there is no difference between SProcs and dynamic SQL (caveat: Parameterized queries, which should be the only type of dynamic SQL anyone is doing). They both get compiled and stuff in the parameter cache and are treated equal. This is as of SQL 7.0 (it's in the docs)

Maintainability: Wha? This is the silliest argument I've heard. If you're swapping data around out from under the application you have HUGE maintainability DECREASES because now there is non-obvious, hidden magic going on.

This is all data-centric thinking and DBA protectionism. The DB exists to serve applications which in turn serve users. Rather than pushing off applications, DB's should work as closely as possible with applications.

"Consequently any dynamic SQL operation can be rendered more efficient by rewriting it as a SP."

This statement makes no sense and has no bearing in fact.
I just called the FEC. This is apparently illegal.

I'm going to take the site down and return the tips.
Yet Another YC Clone
This solution is already functioning (via self-selection), and without need a top-down "you are only allowed if you meet X criteria" administrative layer. It should keep working this way (hopefully) so long as we keep the front page entirely boring to anyone but he or she who has the mind of a hacker.

It all relies on perceptions -- our own (those who participate in this community), as our perceptions create the atmosphere of this site, and those of the outsiders (both the outsiders we'd like to join, and those we'd like to keep out), as their perceptions determine whether they decide to join and participate here or not.

As has been stated more simply by PG, we want to maintain the perception to unwelcome outsiders that this site will be a waste of their time, and one very good way to do that is for our active participants to keep the front page on-message and full of considered, reasonable words, which most 14-year-olds avoid like leprosy.

One thing I really like about this site is its lack of flashy headlines. As soon as people start screwing with post titles to make them juicy and full of the "10 secrets to X, Y, and Z", then we'll get trouble, because the 14-year-old minds won't even realize that they have no interest in what we think and write about. They'll just jump in and turn this calm abode of thoughtfulness into a garbage pail of dandruff.
nb. The article covers Postini, which is like SpamAssassin/DSPAM (or Zimbra for that matter), only it costs money. There are some details that I am eliding, but fundamentally, that's what we're talking about.

Postini likely adds a great deal of value to Gmail by virtue of the vastly larger corpus. If that means that Postini is no longer a viable product for 3rd-party deployment, tough shit for the 3rd parties.

What I don't understand is why a Postini user (eg.) wouldn't just switch to Gmail for Domains and forward everything through an IMAP relay.

I originally replied (on autopilot) regarding the existing Google Docs/Applications framework. If they don't merge the entire mess into a rollup offering, I'm going to be flabbergasted.
No, that day won't come. You'll have lots of little epiphanies along the way every time you grok some new big beautiful idea, but there isn't going to be any sudden moment of True Enlightenment.

I suspect you've already passed the "hacker" milestone without realizing it. The metaphors you're using are a good sign. How do you rate on this rubric?

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#hacker_alrea...
Reading this article gave me insight into the interaction that typically occurs in Lisp discussions, where someone will present sample code where they are having a problem and requesting a solution. Instead of getting the answer they expect, what they typically receive is an explanation of why that is not "the Lisp way". On the surface, this looks like nitpicking, but when you look at it from the Programming as Theory Building viewpoint, it is clear that the respondents are more versed in the theory of Lisp and are merely trying to enrich the original requester with the same enlightenment.

In general, I thought the article was excellent, as it voiced many of the ideas that I've seen pg express in his likening of Lisp programming to working with clay, as well as many of my own insights of what programming actually means to me. Unfortunately, it also helps to justify my constant rewriting of my code to make it more elegant, as any mathematician would be expected to do the same. While this may be a good intellectual exercise, it's not necessarily good for getting stuff done.
Do your validations let these names through?
I'm fine with being downmodded, but I'm curious why. I know that Joel has a lot of articles submitted here and that me questioning his insights is probably not a good idea (in terms of karma, at least), but does someone actually think that implementing code to handle different epochs should take several days?
I don't think this article would ever have been written by someone with any significant amount of experience writing assembler.

The reasons to move away from low-level machine code and towards high-level languages like Java are numerous (safety, portability, programmer productivity), while the advantages of writing raw assembler basically boil down to two: low-level machine access and performance. The former is only useful to a small number of applications, and the latter is mostly covered by Moore's Law.

SQL, on the other hand, is not itself a low-level language. It has powerful, declarative constructs for efficiently dealing with large datasets, and modern database engines already serve as high-level runtime environments abstracting away the mundane details of page faults, index maintenance, and caching.
I have another idea--why not just give people on the leaderboard the ability to "downmod", except it wouldn't affect the points of the submission, just increase the gravity so it drops off the front page quicker.
I spent a year trying to start a company from China with an angel investor and partner remaining in Canada. Suffice to say that, while there are good arguments on either side, and there are certainly special cases, I can understand why YC forces relocation, and if I were in their shoes I'd do the same. I think it's easy to underestimate the effects of frequent, face-to-face contact.
I think an important distinction to make is that there is no such thing as 100% community driven. Certainly reddit is a lot closer to 100% than Hacker News which is a lot closer than CNN, but no matter what there are admin involved. For example reddit decided that posting ascii pictures of Fry was funny... once. Then they changed the rules so you couldn't.

At Hacker News the admin have been pretty up front about what they will do; edit titles, penalize stupid people as defined by the admin, etc. I think the threat of intervention does a lot even if it's turned off at the moment. I'm sure it's in the cards to keep the site as good as possible and that objective is correlated with being community driven as much as possible, but there's a trade-off there and I'd bet sometimes it goes the other way.
6 Reasons Why Hiring Good Developers Is So Hard...
Looking for a start-up opportunity? at Chicago Beta
TECH cocktail Remixes With TECH CONFERENCE
Cloudo - The Pretty WebOS
How to decide if you should start a company
The top 10 lies of entrepreneurs
One Day Compilers (Graydon Hoare)
The idea might work.

I do think that it's a sad state of affairs for Reddit, however, when we're considering Reddit's front page/karma system to be a fluff filter for Hacker News.
An old suggestion I made: Just put a downmod arrow on once a submission hits the top 20.
Effortlessly farm work (using Ruby) to an EC2 instance without batting an eye
It seems like the major criticism leveled by the article is that Postini customers want support and are willing to pay for it and google is not offering support and not making them pay for it.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to sell Postini support now that they aren't bundled anymore. Support isn't Google's core competency anyway, they're probably leaving this to others on purpose.
Javascript null surprise
I just encountered this while tracking down a bug in some Javascript (verified in FF and IE):

null < 0 || null == 0 -> false

but

null <= 0 -> true

Would you expect that? I didn't. Obviously <= is implemented as !>. Time to look up all uses of <= and >= in my code...

p.s. Is this too trivial to post here? Too specialized? I'm curious.
thought it was decently artistic.
Facebook sees decline in users
No idea. However, it specifically affected B-trees in memory. A search revealed US Patent 5283894: Lockless concurrent B-tree index meta access method for cached nodes ( http://www.patentmonkey.com/PM/PatentID/5283894.aspx ) which may or may not be relevant.
Heh, you sure? Everyone I know who runs a Rails site either uses nginx or lighttpd and mongrels. Apache's way too heavy and since there's no mod_ruby yet, mongrels (or maybe thin) is the way to go for dynamic requests and nginx for static. Nginx is an absolutely amazing piece of software.

As for the book, I have the early beta and the beta that followed it. It's THE book on deployment. Ezra and boys at EngineYard really know what they're talking about.

If you're deploying a Rails app, this book is a must. It will save you hours and hours of wasted time.
The Airbag guide to SXSW for newbs and veterans
Why Google finds a Microsoft-Yahoo combination "unnerving"
If all children in India are typically being taught square roots by hand at age 6 or 7 with the fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division already mastered in previous life (3-5 yrs of age), then all of the "laggards" (England, USA, Japan, EU) are definitely pretty well screwed.
In w3m:

You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser.
Please keep it real with
one of the following browsers:

â¢ Firefox
â¢ Opera
â¢ Safari
â¢ Flock

Facebook (C) 2008

Hacker News, on the other hand, is quite usable:

â Hacker News*new | comments | leaders | jobs | submit login
[grayarrow] Facebook's fail is going to be epic (theregister.co.uk)
48 points by nickb 1 day ago | 68 comments
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]

¢ [add comment]

[grayarrow] 14 points by pg 18 hours ago | link
¢ *Judging from the eager way in which people are seizing on
this tiny bit of evidence, it seems like a lot of people
want FB to fail. And when you want something to be true you
* should be especially skeptical of evidence for it.

Sites have flat spots. I would be careful before counting
those guys out.

¢ nreply

Facebook has already failed ;).

/sarcasm (just in case)
This is definitely on-topic. We've had JavaScript gotchas before ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115914 ).
The flaw I see in that argument is that you have no guarantee of service. Some people (my employer) care about that, and some don't. I'm not saying it's insurmountable. I'm just saying that the idea of a Boeing or a General Motors converting to Gmail isn't going to come to fruition under the current model.
This is sort of old but yeah its cool right? There are also people using candles as the IR source. I'm not sure how that works...
1) This may be helpful on a small scale:

Like many, I love building new features, and don't love fixing bugs. But after a while of not fixing bugs, I get this 'ewww, my code is icky' feeling, and slowly start to hate my project.

That's when I know I need to spend a whole day fixing bugs. By the end of the day, I feel differently. There's something about quality that's viceral, the sheen of quality makes it easy to love my project again.

2) If you are really questioning the value of your project, ask:
- how could I morph this into something else?
- What else could I use my existing network of contacts for?
- What is an adjacent problem?

I recently went through this after feeling very trapped in my problem domain, and it resulted in a great new insight and, I hope, and entirely new set of products in an adjacent domain.
I have half a dozen locks behind my monitor. But I made a starter kit for my niece by removing pins from four locks and gave her my picks. Need to pull another tine from the the lawn rake and make a new pick.
I agree entirely, but in a limited way.

That's sort of like saying that the way to change policies in a democracy is by voting; it's true, but as an individual (or someone involved in setting the rules/administering the technology of the community) there's a lot more that can be done to change a system than casting the single vote to which your citizenship/membership entitles you to.

It's these other measures that I haven't got a good grasp on, and am curious about.
If someone would just do the signing-dongle thing in a user friendly way, maybe plugging/unplugging that is closer to authenticating the user ('something they have': the dongle, 'something they know': a passphrase to activate the dongle on plugin). Then the browser could use that as the signer/verifier.

I do something similar with a standard usb drive and pageant + portable putty/winscp.
Keep making shitty movies like 2 Fast 2 Furious, Deuce Bigalo: Male Jigalo, etc. and it doesn't matter how you distribute or sell it.
Electron Caught On Film For The First Time
It worked for Slashdot.

Once you rely on centralized human intelligence, expect a decrease in speed. Of course there are other ways to do it. I prefer a market system. If I had critical mass at my disposal, no second thoughts about using such a system.
From the article: "All we have to do is get 1% of the market."

There's two fallacies in this argument. The first is that getting 1% is sufficient. The second that getting 1% is possible. I've seen the first technique working but it isn't sustainable. In the UK, there was an early cable channel and I believe its strategy was to be visually arresting and therefore catch 1% of channel flippers. This is viable when you have 30 channels, but it isn't viable when you have 500 channels.

The second fallacy is the Chinese Sock Syndrome. If you could get 1% of the Chinese sock market then you'd have a huge turnover. Unfortunately, it ignores the possibility that the natives can service their own market at less cost. This is probably how Pets.Com failed.
Wii Headtracking in Boom Blox coming this May
More in-depth discussion at Joystiq http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/21/gdc08-boom-blox-to-include-head-tracking-seriously/
This is really odd, but i always watch one of those VH1 "fabulous life of billionaire" TV specials whenever i feel like i'm losing momentum.
I knew this was going to appear here and I came here just to upmod it.

This is so cool, I'm almost high from seeing it!
What about turning on the existing voter power algorithm? (The one that has never been turned on as it was not making much of a difference in tests).

Would we see much of a difference?
Escaping from sql-reader-syntax in CL-SQL
Are you talking about the teachers making an economic analysis out of the lego game, or the internet-comments making economic analysis out of what the teachers did?

If the former, then I can at least understand your point, though I would disagree (I think that going through a simulation like this is a very interesting way to teach kids about economics and power, and I wish I'd had teachers who spent that much attention on trying to teach their students things they felt were important in life).

If the latter, than it sounds like you misunderstood what the teachers did and why they did it. They were not primarily interested in the organizing a system that would merely provide kids with equitable access to toys in the playroom. They were interested in teaching the children their own version of how economics and social justice should be understood in real life, a version which many people (including me) take issue with for its fundamental lack of awareness of how wealth is created, and the effects of a system of organization on that wealth creation process.
Do it Fucking Now.
No More Tasting: It’s a Bad Year To Be a Registrar
Interesting and not what I would have expected. I just confirmed it in Opera. Also, null<=null is true.

You can use the following javascript link to confirm this:

(Note - I can't ever remember how to embed links properly in YC... is there a reference somewhere?)

javascript:alert('null < 0: '+(null< 0)+'\nnull ==0: '+(null==0)+'\nnull > 0: '+(null>0)+'\nnull<=0:' + (null<=0) + '\nnull < null: '+(null<null)+'\nnull == null: '+(null==null) + '\nnull > null: '+(null>null)+'\nnull<=null: ' + (null<=null));
More haxoring, less poor life choices plz.
maybe people over, say, 500 karma? seems like enough. reaching the leaderboard is a lot harder than a fixed number.
Good presentation! Johnny Lee has been evolutionary in wii hacks, a genuine hacker
I challenge this.

The decision to broaden news.yc's scope to include other "interesting" information instantly adds fuzziness to the selection criteria. I have seen submissions that fly over my head, but other submissions in areas where I know more than the author.

Next, "interesting" content usually involves a mental challenge just slightly beyond the comfort zone. And so, given greater breadth of topics, which compromises depth, there will be enough submissions that are "interesting" to most people, including the 14 year-olds. To phrase differently, my knowledge in Latin American history might be comparable to a 14 year old, so we both find similar articles interesting. A BBC documentary link can easily be top quality, but appeals to all experts and novices alike.

The way you write it, is like 14 yos have an aversion to knowledge. Even if many Diggers seem immature, I'd bet they are more educated and tech-inclined than most in the same age.
To make the workings of Hacker News dependent on Reddit or any other site looks conceptually wrong --- can't it stand on its own?

The same holds for explicitly favouring topics like programming, math, science or whatever. From ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (emphasis is mine):

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
All these will look shiny to the eyes of a newcomer, and
will probably accept your lies.

Phrases determine people as much people determine phrases.
So, if someone has the power to act instead of talking, then
even accusing that someone of using those phrases will be a shot
in the water, because this kind of persons are untouchable, as much
if you want to hurt them with a blog post!

"No one can do what we're doing"

“Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.”

Oracle or any other big company is a threat if you
have a poor idea and execution. All the rest are useless.

Patents

you can say whatever you want about patents,
but for a startup is not about suing others as it's about
gaining IP, which makes it an easier target for an exit.

1% of the market

define market first, then define what you mean by 1%
expand the leaderboard to 100 people
Actually the book covers both apache and nginx equally so you should be straight. Although I must recommend that if you have a choice then you go with Nginx. Nginx is much more scalable and ues much fewer resources then apache does. The only reason to use apache with a Rails deployment is if you have other legacy sites to support that run on apache. If you are just deploying a Rails/Merb app then Nginx is far superior in every way.
The operating logic of most environmentalists is:

* Something must be done.

* This is something.

* Therefore it must be done.

Most environmental activists (and sadly, even many environmental policy-makers) tend to see you as standing in the way of progress if you try to get them to understand the engineering implications of what they want to do.

The key is that they understand "negative environmental externalities" (== "Destroying The Earth") in emotional rather than engineering terms, so they have no way to access concepts like "good-enough solution," "necessary evil," or "minimal impact." There are only environmental problems they know about ("Nuclear Fuel Comes From Satan's Pooper") and ones they don't ("Several of the reactants used to make solar cells are toxic enough to use as chemical weapons").
While I do agree that most enterprise software support offices are-let's be honest-crap, that fact doesn't negate the enterprise's need for software support. Companies desire that safety blanket and "having someone to blame" even if they are lying to themselves.

A friend higher up than me in business once told me that large corporations are in the business of managing risk. This is in stark contrast to a startup founder's penchant for taking them.
ok: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
I disagree. If you're talking about personal projects or tiny start-ups with full control over server configurations, sure nginx is a viable option. But I too find it unnatural for so many Rails-related blogs and books to ignore Apache and this is why:

Apache is an industry standard and there is no shortage of people who know how to deal with it. I like nginx, but neglecting Apache is a mistake: I find it much easier to talk to corporate drones if I mention that "Rails runs behind Apache". For many of them words like Ruby or Rails are already too much to swallow, why make matters worse by introducing yet another new kid on the block for no tangible reason.

Also there are hosting companies and your clients who may (and in most cases ARE) already running an Apache instance and have an admin who's in charge.

Basically what I am saying is that deploying on Apache is #1 thing to learn about deploying Rails, but it is by no means the only or even the best option.
Do you have any evidence these arguments always boil down to who has control of the raw materials?

I think access to intellectual capital and social capital are far, far more important. In the future, perhaps, access to raw materials will become more important. But now, you can get access to raw materials easily if you have the rest (intellectual/social capital) -- people will sell them to you in exchange for renting out your brain & the smoothly operating institutions of your well-managed community.

It is nearly as simple for a man in China to order a container of wood as a man in Canada. But you cannot simply order a container of culture, or a container of civilization, or institutions, or habits, or education. And these things set the west apart far more than access to raw resources.

Low-resource cities fabulously wealthy due to great social/intellectual capital: Hong Kong (where I"m writing from, a city built on a rock with a great port and not much else), Singapore (built on swampland), numerous others.

High-resource locations mired in conflict, poverty, and struggle: Democratic Republic of Congo; Guatemala; numerous others.
Hm, does it really matter? There is much more private information thought my browser than my mailbox... that's what we should worry about more.
"left partners reeling and searching for more channel-friendly vendors for their customers’ e-mail security needs.”

doesn't channel-friendly just mean higher priced?
Ask YC: Has anyone here deployed Mod_mono in a production enviroment?
Any feedback on performance etc.
Why exactly is this crap on the front page of hacker news?
Awww... "Banned by the FEC".

Sorry guys.
hauhufjfk
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114861
Oops. Just reread the thread and your followup in the other branch.