skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have no idea how many developers I've wanted to hit in the testicles with a baseball bat for crying my ear off to use redis, mongo, etc... anything but mysql. Really you want to take our 99% relational data (billing/invoicing, crm, etc...) and put it in a key store? You're fucking retarded.

What I found is that I can browse the posts here in the AM and then by noon they will be asking me for whatever landed on the front page here. I just laugh and tell them to go back to work.
because new employees worker harder and get paid less. old employees are getting lazier and less productive
I've answered this question once before, and this is what I wrote. MySQL is battle tested and operationally sane to manage at scale; I'm talking specifically about replication.

I've been a DBA for thousands of MySQL hosts in production and just a handful of PostgreSQL clusters, so I'm not a PostgreSQL expert by any stretch. These PostgreSQL machines were also inherited from a company we acquired, so some of my negative impressions can likely be explained by them being set up poorly, which sadly seems to be the norm.

PostgreSQL's replication has evolved slowly over the years, and as a result it's idiosyncratic, complicated to get right, and hard to generalize about. There aren't a lot of great setup guides and tutorials on the subject either.

Postgres replication works by shipping WAL (transaction/redo) logs to slaves, and the slaves are in a constant state of DB recovery. Streaming replication does so as writes happen, and file based log shipping copies the logs when the 16MB segment is complete. Ours were set up to use streaming replication, without having a separate file-based archive log host to use to fetch older logs. Whenever the write load became too much and the slaves could no longer keep up with the master WAL logs on the master would expire and replication would break entirely, requiring you to rebuild all your slaves from backup. This was my introduction to PG replication. WAL logs were also applied without checksums or verification which corrupted the entire replication chain, and as I remember we didn't discover this until the corrupt pages got hit by a query. Software upgrades with PG seemed to be a huge pain as well, we could never figure out how long they were going to take, and even if the on-disk formats didn't change, somehow all the cardinality stats on our tables disappeared, and all our query plans went to shit until we ran some process to rebuild them, which took days.

Operationally there were some things that made our team angry. We couldn't figure out how to reparent a slave without completely re-cloning it from the new parent, even though it was completely up to date from the authoritative master at the time of the reparenting. Also, do you really have to take down the entire cluster to change max connections on a slave? Many such settings seemed to not be dynamic and must remain in sync across the entire chain. One of the things people seem to love about PG is how correct and proper it is respecting the sanctity of your data. As an ops person I'd much rather deal with slightly inconsistent replicas (common in MySQL) than have to fight with how rigid PG is.
I agree. Also, MariaDB is being actively developed. A lot of Linux distributions are defaulting to MariaDB. The recent release of Debian stable (jessie) has MariaDB. So far I've only been using it on new machines, but I may even migrate my existing MySQL servers to MariaDB.
Dell Is Offering EMC $27.25 a Share in Cash Plus Special VMware Stock
@Whitenoice, recruiters hire them mainly because of their skill set. Keep in mind, most layoffs are because a department is being eliminated and the is no where for the employee to go but to take a severance and leave.

Not their fault they are being laid off you know.
"This personal voice gets at the heart of how social media function: They make people care. NASA’s probes have (or rather, appear to have) wants and desires and goals, and that makes us invested in their successes."

Great read, there is something in this statement that goes to the heart of story telling. Something that could be done in/via code.
Run, and never look back.
Ask HN: Why are there no open-source phone unlocking projects?
When a person buys a phone from a carrier in Canada, the phone comes locked to that carrier. Unlocking it is an expensive venture and one that phone companies recently had to be compelled by law to offer. There's a small kiosk in every shopping mall that will do this service for you as well, but it seems strange that a person can't simply download and run something that will unlock their phone.

Ideas?
Is that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?
It's acquihires all the way down.
Elon made sure to take a jab at it during the recent Model X event. I hope it is.
They don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would:

- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut

- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average

- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs

- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs

Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.
> The heavy downvoting of the GP, which was a well-written, thoughtful comment, demonstrates a close-mindedness and refusal to engage with (or even consider) ideas which one disagrees with

You could also have a well-written, thoughtful comment about how vaccination is a Government mind-control device - I suspect it would be no more welcome than one suggesting the biblical genesis story contains the truth about chromosomes.

Many of us have engaged with these ideas, found them wanting, found their advocates to be essentially unmoved by reason, and now are happy enough filtering them out.

(I am also happy enough being filtered out, as it happens)
You're spot on about Twitter basically being far overvalued. However their problem isn't lack of real revenue. They're tracking to $2+ billion in revenue in the next four quarters. Assuming a significantly slowing growth rate, they can easily double that sales trajectory to $4 billion in three years.

Their problem is that costs are far out of line, which is why they're cutting. Twitter could turn a significant profit if they design for $3 or $4 billion in sales (rather than pretending they're heading toward $20 billion). Their margins should be comparable to Facebook's, their business is no more difficult to optimize.

They have 12% of the sales of Facebook, with ~38% of the employee base. It's an extremely poorly run, bloated business. They're built to scale to Facebook's size, but they will never achieve that size no matter what happens. Long-term they're a $20 or $40 billion market cap business, instead of $250 billion.
"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants.

Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
I'm surprised it took so long. Hopefully the other social-networking giants follow suite and we start getting more companies that have actual sustainable business models.
That explains why their recruiter stopped responding to me a few weeks ago.
Tells when interviewing with a startup?
I've been wondering about the tells/cues a hacker should be on the look out for when interviewing with startups. Like, if Person X does Action Y, it could potentially beget Outcome Z where Z is something favorable or unfavorable. Not, of course, X and Y always imply Z, that would be taking things a step too far.

Excluding the obvious bad signs ("the CEO roared and threw a dev against a wall iron man style") what kinds of small technical or cultural subtleties do you automatically notice when interviewing?
It's not really a competition. Yet. Anyway, I think you're missing the point. There's a great mystery here. How can the human mind do this? "Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180". And dollars to donuts Constable Collins used a fraction of the energy too -- maybe even a just a donut's worth -- he is a copper after all.
USDCHF Turns Down on Further Price Extension
McAfee and Brynjolfsson deal with why the robot revolution will likely be unlike previous tech revolutions in their books. Here are a couple of articles on it:

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-work...
> MySQL has been one problem after another.

Please elaborate. MySQL/MaraiaDB can be pretty relaxed when it comes to SQL standards (which you can disable/tweak), but I've yet to have data loss or data corruption. And speaking from experience - the system would be at it's knees and MySQL would happily do it's best to answer queries.

I'm not saying Postgres isn't stable (haven't really used it) - I'm just rather suspicious of the comments here. I find it hard to believe that it's as broken as people here claim when big businesses are using it [1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113381/what-databases-do...
How does the blowtorch work for things like melting cheese, toasting bread, etc.? Or is that just not feasible?

edit: wait a minute, it seems that Searzall is basically just an addon to a normal blowtorch. So if you just take off the "Searzall" addon, you are left with a normal blowtorch. (Or am I misunderstanding something here? Please confirm!)
I see this as a good sign (other than for those laid off of course), Twitter is fantastic but they don't need half as many people as they currently employ for their product. As companies get larger their agility and ability to change decreases. What's important is if they're laying off the right people.
> as though there's no new economic sectors to replace those that are being automated away

Before, it was always "I'd like to build houses / learn to plumb / build widgets in a factory, but I need food, so I'm tilling land".

Now its "I'd like to do pretty much anything, but nobody will pay me to do it, because the robots are better at everything I can do".

Unless your labor is intellectual, your function in society as a bag of meat with limbs and a bunch of neurons that make you very easy to program instructions into is going the way of the horse in the early 20th century.
couldn't understand your idea. can you please elaborate ?
WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year.

When you have several hundred million users, that adds up.
An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.
Again, you assume perfectly-rational, perfectly-informed spherical frictionless humans.

This is why you don't understand the criticism you receive, and why others do not understand you.
> I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.

Then you'd assume wrong. The goal of the board is to maximize return for investors. In WhatsApp case, it's not hard to see that their goal was to grow as fast as possible, revenue be damned, so they could be a very attractive takeover target for a company like Facebook who could eventually hope to monetize that user base.
I think it's a good moment for Twitter to get back in track, Moment is a great feature and it shows that more good stuff is coming.
Wi-Fi hotspot loans from Kitchener, Ont. library a Canadian first
Kanye West: Fuck any game company that puts in-app purchases on kids games!!!
Choice quote:

"There's still a large population that don't have access, in any form, to the internet. So we believe that we're providing a service for a group of our customers who don't have access and could use it; whether it's students working on projects or individuals looking for work," said Chevreau. "The library is the greatest equalizer in our society."

Choice snippet:

Patrons will be given the benefit of the doubt and limits will not be placed on how the hot spots are used or how much data is consumed.
That's the key take-away. This is a massive advantage for entrenched, larger companies. They're getting a special political protection order, which is unlikely to be available to everyone. It's a big lose for pretty much everyone else until a better framework is found, which could take years. The EU is handing AWS a leg up.
It's quite strange to say that private individuals should spend their personal money on social causes instead of whatever projects they prefer, while the city should spend taxpayers' money on your pet beautification and ecology projects.
How come? Isn't that exactly what RDS is designed for?
Right. Part of what's missed is that we don't need great GAI to get rid of lots of jobs; weak "AI" / deep learning / related automation techniques get us a long way there. We have existing examples in law document review, article topic summarization, etc.

Another thing which is often missed is how complementarity may play out for certain jobs: it's NOT going to necessarily be "program / robot replaces every job X", but instead "program / robot allows one person to do the job previously done by 50." You can still have massive unemployment without getting rid of every worker doing a certain job (and their job may change more to be a machine guide / manager / error corrector.)

An example I see all the time now is in supermarkets. You have self-checkout lanes that are overseen by one person. It used to be 5 lanes staffed by people. Now you only need one to intervene when something goes wrong. 5 workers have become 1 without eliminating the job "register person" completely. Instead, they've changed into "auto register checkout manager" while everyone else got the ax.
There have been a couple accessories, like pressure sensitive pens, that transmit to smart phones via infrasound via air. They aren't very reliable.
The engineers may still work to support advertising/marketing/sales.

Deciding which ad is the most optimal to show benefits from every input (metadata?) you can make available and analyze.

That must require some multiple of effort vs. making sure 140 chars get shown where they're directed to go.
Except that isn't playing out. There is no motivation to move to Elysium or Galt's Gulch because it takes a lot of money and effort to transport the worlds elite to one place.

And to be elite is to be superior to peers. A huge part of the ethos of power is that you need the powerless to prove your position.

The rich and powerful already own tremendous vast swathes of the world under the control of governments recognizing private property rights. (adjusted for land value, because I'm mostly talking about owning inner cities, but they also own the industrial complexes and megafarms). Again, supply and demand sets in, and when you use real estate as an investment and asset and are constricting its supply in most parts of the world as a source of revenue and profit, you aren't going to give that away any more than you will give away the robots.

The property market is as bad as the labor market in how concentrated power is becoming. And property is not competitive at all since its a fixed resource and the value of it is only relative to its location which cannot be reproduced or innovated upon. Easily, at least.
Blessed is awesome--I'll plug the ClojureScript UI framework I'm building on top of it: https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n

And by the way great work with vorpal, I'm kind of rolling my own CLI command trickery in an app/platform I'm building on top of i9n (kind of a platform to integrate dev tools like a database app, a pluggable IDE of sorts), but I'll probably put Vorpal into i9n soon and use its many features from there.
Except that isn't how you get rich or powerful, or stay rich and powerful. You do not give away your power, and land is power. Look no further than the middle ages and the age of serfdom to see the extreme of the power you can have owning land.
The whole idea of economic integration is a slow incremental approach. I support a global government but not one that ignores popular sovereignty, natural rights and is marred in bureaucratic lobbyist-infused asinine laws.
Yeah, honestly I'd think it were sad if they were, say, manufacturing employees who were laid off and had poor prospects, but in today's market any decent engineer or product person who worked at Twitter would be snapped up in a second.
The fact that we have to guess what our phones are doing is very weird.
My name is nfx, and I never trust in a closed source software.
"I could create the replacement to the internet and destroy the current corporate powers in doing so. And despite this replacement's power, it'd be designed in a way that governments could never infringe on it. I just don't because I have a comfy job"? Oh, please.
Sounds like the beer industry. Five companies own half the world market. And new breweries are easy to start. If yours gains traction, you get acquired.

And that's in an industry where the products are close to fungible, without depending on network effects.
Some similar articles and threads:

- Choose Boring Technology: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology, comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215

- Chasing the Shiny and New: https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html, discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279008

- Tech is moving too fast for me, I'm out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7947551

etc.

I especially liked the first one, which described the idea of "innovation tokens": every startup or project gets three innovation tokens. If you decide to use a new development language, you've just spent one. A new framework, you've just spent another, and so on. If you spend more than three, your chances of launching reach epsilon.

I find that as I'm getting to be an older (and older, sigh...) developer, I'm also more and more reluctant to keep throwing away all of the knowledge and hard-won skills I've developed in favor of picking up new ones. It seems enormously, almost criminally wasteful. How many times should I throw away tens of thousands of lines of code in polished, battle-tested libraries, and knowledge of edge cases and gotchas and little efficiencies and everything else, so that I can start over again with a blank slate and a new language and a long road of new bugs and edge cases to learn?

No other industry is as wasteful in terms of talent expended than ours is. Imagine if every single bridge ever built in this country was torn down and replaced every five years with a new bridge that featured new materials and new technology.
The agreement that was in place allowed US businesses to self certify and then sign a voluntary list at the US Dept. of Commerce which made them untouchable in the EU.

Why? Well, because the agreement says so and because any legal proceedings would be in the US according to the agreement and enforced "primarily by the private sector". Because that makes sense right? Courts, lawyers and laws are so boring anyways...

This change means that EU countries can now question the claim and act if it's a lie. Since EU is moving to harmonize data storage laws among it's member countries there won't be any bureaucratic mess only a return of citizen rights.

[0] http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018476.asp

[EDIT]
Ah, yes, the data storage location thing. That's mainly a consequence of the NSA thingy. Thanks to that no US company can any longer fully claim that any data stored in the US can be kept private. It's kind of silly since everybody spies on everybody else but the US got caught.
Yes, its a general purpose monitoring solution. Currently I don't have the permissions to change the description but will try to get it changed tough.
There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?
Except the rich do not just leave to paradise to never return. At the sign of wealth to be had, at profit to be made, they probably will return to reap the fields and use their market-destroying automation power to crush "competition".

That, and as has been said elsewhere, I highly doubt the elites just go to an island. Ownership of land is a tremendous wealth, and while the elites have captured it they will not relinquish it willingly.
> How will those rich people sell consumer goods if the poor don't have money?

But how will the poor have any money if they have to pay money to the rich in order to afford basic necessities.

Also, if they had money they wouldn't be poor, now would they?

Another way to look at it is, just look at what happens at extremes -- really poor in developing countries. Well, lucky for the rich and powerful, it turns out the poor have kidneys, muscles, blood, the can work for the rich, they can sell their bodies to the rich.

So have no fear, the rich will figure out a way to take advantage of the poor even after the poor don't have any pieces of green paper or stamped metal circles left.
Thanks! Your project looks pretty cool!
I don't think the actual term changed, just the documentation.
I'm not Sam, but I'm a Brazilian enterpreneur. The bad side of Brazil, compared to SV, is we have way less capital available to fund startups, specially earlier and more innovative ones. Our government doesn't help either, definitely way harder to be an Enterpreneur here (not only for startups, the same is true for small businesses as well). The good part is you don't have as much competition when doing a product that targets the local market. And there are much more unsolved problems and needs to be tackled here.

I believe most of YC's advice is universal and fits Brazil's startups well. Some are even more important here: try to make money from day one and spend as little as you can - you can't count on investors money here, no matter how good your KPIs are.
Lazier and more productive, you mean.
This is where you insert of the arguments about basic income to balance the employee / employer negotiating position and progressively ward off the failing of market economics while scarcity goes away.
"Its not clear this [lab-vs-road discrepancy] is any kind of problem."

I agree with what you said, except this.

Clearly these NOx emissions are a problem, because they cause smog (like ozone), which is a health hazard. The city where I live has too much ozone for many days of the year, for example.

Unless this problem can be controlled, vehicles like these should not be sold here, and people will have to find other options, or technologists will have to develop better cars.
The Chaotic Wisdom of Wikipedia Paragraphs