skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some database heavy applications were not designed with sharding/scaling out in mind. Rewriting an entire application to do so is not a trivial task and takes away the focus of an entire company and development team during the process of such a major endeavor.

At my last company we had this problem. We had a simple application for tracking inventory that morphed in to a CRM with tons of data from emails, notes, etc. Database grew to be terabytes in size. Using fusion-io cards and replicating to read only databases was required to keep us going and it worked. We had to keep buying bigger iron. A database server with 2TB of RAM!

At my new company, Stackify (http://www.stackify.com), I made sure we gave each client their own database so we knew we could scale out from the beginning. Now we manage over 1000 SQL databases and that has its own set of challenges. We use SQL Azure so that makes it all pretty simple thanks to their new elastic pool features. Versioning SQL schemas and using tools from red gate have helped us keep our sanity.
That's pretty minor, and could be almost trivially rectified with a preprocessor.
Microsoft buys an app that can track how far you travel
This isn't quite zero-sum. There is also the aspect that any trade deal that removes existing tariffs represents a tax reduction for any businesses that do international trade, and a corresponding reduction in government revenue for participating countries. On both sides, it represents a wealth transfer away from government and towards business. You may interpret that as good or bad depending on your point of view, but either way it's a policy change.

Another side of this is that free trade allows businesses to move production to whatever country has the weakest labour laws and environmental protections. In effect, it rewards countries economically for having lax regulations, and encourages a "race to the bottom". In the short term, it may be good for workers who now have jobs, but in the long term we don't want employment to only be economically competitive if it's indistinguishable from slavery.
How much are you willing to bet that this investigation leads to new physics or experimental methods? And are you willing to assert that this is the best way to achieve those same results?

I would not bet enough to cover a team of NASA engineers spending their time on it.
Is it ECC protected?
The anti-Amazon, anti-tech circlejerk is so strong right now in Seattle, especially by locals[1]. Search /r/seattle for "amazon" and behold.

[1]locals is a loosely defined term for anyone who was actually raised here (like myself) or who just happened to move here from Portland, SF, LA, or NY before about 2010
I'll save everyone some time:

No, it's not in the public domain. The copyright was renewed for another 1 million years. Make your own. :)
2008 proved you wrong for the one's that had what the parent referred to. Confess to crimes and crash economy results in $1 trillion bailout, no audits, some fines, and criminal immunity. Doesn't happen every day in industry.
Stallman considers hacking to be "playful cleverness". To him and a lot of the old-time hackers, programming is fun and even "immature" or at least not super serious. Look at The Little Schemer, for example. Even Knuth allowed some jokes in his Concrete Mathematics textbook!

That said... carbonmade is too much for me.
Thanks for the tip. I knew a number of "craft" whiskeys were from MGP, but I didn't realize that Templeton was as well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templeton_Rye

Now I'm really curious about the "alcohol flavoring agent" from Clarendon Flavor Engineers. I've had Bulleit Rye and High West as well and did not enjoy them.
yup, we will get it properly reviewed once complete.
I don't know, that sounds pretty out of touch. Pretty much no spam ever is something someone's going to be tempted by. People can get fooled by spam, but if they know enough about how to eliminate all sources of advertising from their life, they're not likely to accidentally sign up for a penis enlargement pill program.
E: Scrollaway makes a good point in a sibling response.

========

An easy way would be to use telemetry to measure how many of your users change default settings. ;)

I only have this from 4 years ago [0]. But is also something I've observed.

> I think over the years I saw a lot of outcries when there were visible changes in various applications.

Visual changes are typically seen as unwarranted. It's a huge risk with minor gains (UX of new users) by alienating old users and hoping 'they'll adapt'. But to touch on this a bit...

Unhappy people are also the loudest. If a platform has 1,000,000 viewers and 1% change their settings and you screw with those settings - you're going to have 10,000 people who are pissed off and venting. Which can seem massive - and out of the 990,000 others maybe 2 or 3 might voice their approvals/thanks for the update?

This is why many game studios ignore their forums. Forums are typically only a minority of the overall fan base, even if they're typically the most outspoken/loyal fans.

[0] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-t...
Attention (as an actual, formal market)?

Self-driving car rental? (The self-driving matters - it can drive itself to your door. Today, if my car dies and I need a rental, I have to get myself to the rental car place, which is hard since my car doesn't work. And yes, I know that Enterprise delivers, but that takes two people and two cars. That's expensive. A self-driving car would be cheaper.)

Concerts? (I don't mean concert tickets. I mean a market where fans in different cities bid against each other for their favorite acts to come to their town.)
I have an adjustable desk at work so I put it in the standing position often.

Standing for hours really hurts your feet.

I don't find it surprising at all that people sit more at home if they have a standing desk.
I want to put by DB in ram. I just need to keep it under 64TB. https://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/uv_300_30ex.html
Navigating the Tech Talent Bubble
I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination was to hop onto Amazon and find as many used titles at $1 or less as I could. Only after filling my cart did I discover my $24 worth of books would cost $80 to ship.

I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd otherwise be decomposing in a landfill.

With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my money rather than 7 cents per book.
The only reason F-15s are going to Syria is to shoot down Russian jets
The point was to illustrate the areas I saw were not large blocks of empty buildings with no one in them for miles around. Surely the area has changed a lot since I was last there.
Head Mount setups - as you point correctly out - are required for a long-time VR consumption.
But they come with caveats:
- They make the devices heavier & bulkier.
- You need a good mechanism to fastly switch back to use as a mobile phone (i.e. when you receive a phone call while in VR)
- You need to make sure that the phone is tightly in place. If you move your head considerable force is applied to the casing.

Using your hand allows InstanTRIP Pad 02 to be tiny. It is folded together so tiny that you can put it in the back-pocket of jeans and forget you put it in there. Other VR boxes have to be carried in a bag and consume a lot of space in there.

Other head-mount-less "cardboxes" cost at least 20% more than InstanTRIP (for most you pay double the price) and the setup time is considerable.

There have been trade-off's made but I don't think that they are all bad (feel free to correct me)
Microconf is the best conference anywhere. Other options if you enjoy that one: Baconbiz and DCBKK (less software focused but much of the content and crowd generalizes).

To the extent bootstrapped SaaS has a playbook, it is Start Small, Stay Small. I'd probably write one eventually but Starfighter is cutting into my writing bandwidth at present.
If you think it's a problem that 2 billion people have negative net worth, ban lending. Good luck with that.

As for Jerome Kerviel, take it up with the folks pushing this silly statistic. It's their methodology that counts him as the poorest person in the world.
To a photographer, a few seconds of error in sunset time is the difference between an awesome sunset with oranges, reds and purples, versus an uninspiring mass of grey clouds.

Of course a photographer would start well before sunset and continue well after, but if you want to program a machine to photograph su sets you will end up having to use techniques other than checking the time.
Ah, yeah true. I could kind of see it going the way of wine.
And RFCs.
Two really good off-the-beaten-path ryes: Old Potrero (a high-proof "single malt" rye from San Francisco) and Few, a craft distillate from Chicago.
"demo video" is defined in small print as artistic impression and conceptual rendering. Dont get too hyped.
It was a different, more innocent time. Your $500k Sun box shipped with broken tools, and horrifically buggy RPC on by default.
Study: On AirBnB, Asian-American Hosts Earn Less Than White Ones
Ah, I've already read that and I didn't realize you guys wrote it :)

Thanks for the writeup!
Nicholas - Yes, it's definitely a big deal. And I can only imagine the potential costs of supporting users and keeping it updated! Thank you to all of Mozilla and especially the team that put this together.
I love the design. The little kid in the Where the Wild Things Are style gnu costume gives me a warm, Katamari Damacy type feeling. And that's what Guile needs, because it's so comfortable to use but there's no marketing suggesting that it would be better to use than, say, Perl (ugh) or Python (less ugh, but scoping rules=fail).

Though I do wish they had used the slogan "Guile goes with everything"...
I think it's more in area of respecting user freedoms. Either users can have an opinion whenever they like the changes or not. I just happen to prefer to be asked explicitly in a lot of cases.

The issue is not silent updates (an option to have unattended upgrades in some places are godsend!), but in not generally having an option to prevent those and not having a way to roll unwanted ones back.
React-like micro-library riotjs 2.3 is out
As someone who has never touched any of this stuff before, where might I actually find it useful in my day-to-day programming (assuming I might have an application where it would be useful)?
I can easily submit a patch to remove pocket and place about:reader more prominently.

Is it going to get accepted into Firefox? No. Just like the last 5 times people tried to do this.

What I currently do is constantly keeping my patch up to date and recompiling Firefox for my Desktop and Laptop (ARCH and Kubuntu) every night based on the current source from the latest trunk release.

But it’s not nearly worth the effort to do this when the browser could easily accept one of the many patches people have written by now to get rid of pocket as part of the system and to move it into an addon.

Same with the ad-ridden new tab page. Put that stuff into an addon and allow me to uninstall it.

Expose the EME DRM feature as plugin on the plugins page, and allow me to uninstall it (I do not know if this is yet the case, I haven’t checked).

I don’t want to have to maintain a huge patchset just to run my browser.

I already have to hack-fix bugs like the before mentioned drag-and-drop bug myself (or downgrade to Gtk3.14).
Testimonials 6 weeks after launch of my bootstrapped startup
> The merchant doesn't see your real cc number, just a one-use token

It's worth noting that the token is one-per-vendor, rather than one-per-payment. This is what allows TFL to match your tap-in to your tap-out on the London Underground, and what allows them to apply daily/weekly capping on fares.
Perfect! I wish we had this 2 years ago when we first started with Cordova. We've since "hacked" our own similar system to dynamically load cordova content into our mobile app.
I'm so sick of update notifications that I've muted the Play Store on my android. There are just so many of them each day that I don't care to keep track of it. Most of these native apps are just improved versions of web apps anyway, and you don't get to choose when a web app updates.
Good luck with her "watering the desert" analogy while bemoaning the rise of productive disciplines, like civil engineering.

The article reeks of bland arts prejudice -- that it is more noble to be the "educated" artist writing verse about how ghastly a problem must feel like, and then write something even more verse about how dreadful it is that so few read or understood your beautiful words, than the "merely utilitarian" person who understands how to analyse the cause of the problem and is equipped to design and create a means to fix it.

There is nothing inherently less "prepared for citizenship or democracy" about an engineer. And neither, in these design-intensive times, do they necessarily understand humanity or social ills any less than an artist writing about them.
To be honest, WFP has existed since Win2000 too.
It's one of the reasons the most instance companies have been mutually owned until recently.

Now they've mostly turned into cash generators for investment banks.
This describes my experience exactly. When I worked at an ad-tech startup a few years ago we wasted so many hours dealing with SRED consultants, writing things up, writing specifications... flowery language. IMHO big company stuff when we needed to be writing code and iterating fast to produce product, instead.

And in many cases there are web development or design agencies claiming and getting SRED, achieved purely by hiring consultants who know how to spin things.
Strange. I went yesterday (had to do something while I waited for dumplings) and thought it was just an ordinary bookstore. What grabbed you so much that I missed?
This is as good excuse as any to link to my rant post that we need a new term for startups that are not focused on VC funding.

1. http://www.tillett.info/2014/11/24/lets-kill-the-term-lifest...
> has been in the process of laying off most of its staff in an effort to run more efficiently

Is that meant to sound quite as much of a death knell as it does to me? I hope not.

I've made a few comics purchases through Gumroad (Skin Horse, Narbonic, and Inhuman Relations, amongst others), and found the process quite delightfully straightforward. I do hope this isn't their end - they deserve better.
Better than Powell's City of Books in portland?

http://www.powells.com/locations/powells-city-of-books

I'd find that hard to believe.
Who Owns Molecular Biology?
http://i.imgur.com/X7tC8Ov.jpg

That’s what’s done here. You see that it is not the exact original product (sometimes you don’t even want the original product, but a specific fake of it), and you see still what it’s similar to.
Wow, a Microsoft product that doesn't reference other MS products! I'm so used to the 'click a button' in Visual Studio to publish your C# / ASP.NET code to access SQL Server in the cloud supported by Azure.
I don't know anything about Omni-Path, sorry. However, based on the publicly available information, it does look like a very interesting combination. One major advantage of SPDK over the traditional kernel-provided storage stack is lower latency (by avoiding interrupts and other context switches), and it would fit nicely with a low-latency network stack.
Other than the typo in David Henney's testimonial ("you'll only every profit" should be "you'll only ever profit", right?) this looks fantastic!

Congratulations on your success!
Not really, he did it inside a big company with a nice cushy salary and lots of hardware supporting him. Absolutely ZERO risk.

That's not a founder.

It's a great product, he did a brilliant thing, but he's not the gmail 'founder'.
(1:40)
The general purpose answer to that question is OLTP. The transaction processing community has a number of benchmarks which look at the cost per transaction and large mainframes typically "win" in those scenarios. As for why they win, that is an interesting question.

As a systems enthusiast and someone who has watched as computers got small and then big and then small and then big again, I believe the fundamental answer is based in state machine theory. Specifically around how data becomes "entangled" with other data. That is the essence of what makes transactions hard.

I first ran into this looking at scaling file systems. Unlike RAID where all of the blocks in a stripe are related mathematically, a "file" as a sequence of octets is defined not only by the mutations that happen to it, but the order in which those mutations take place. So "append 1, 2, 3", back up one, append 4, 5" leaves 1, 2, 4, 5 if applied in sequence but leaves 1, 2, 3, 4 if the last two steps are swapped. Thus both operations and the order of the operations are important. To hold the state of a complex sequence stable, you generally have to have it all in memory ready to complete (commit) and then rapidly verify its stable, and then commit it.

Clusters of smaller systems have a hard problem with this. That said, I would love to play with some of Google's spanner systems to see how well they handle the OLTP workload with respect to cost/size/power. The paper suggests that there is a credible path there as flocks of distributed systems get cheaper and more easily connected.
Better than the University bookstore?
Germany guarantees a right by law to use the router you want, regardless of ISP [pdf]
True.

I got a Windows 10 laptop recently and took a look around the OS. Relevant to the discussion, one thing was just brilliant - user satisfaction feedback buttons (the smiley/frowny faces in some apps). Hope such things help debiasing feedback.
Why Childcare Workers Are So Poor, Even Though Childcare Costs So Much
Great catch phrazzld. This will be fixed before you can 'say cap production deploy'.
"In 1965, electric guitarists really only had four different effects pedals available to them: tape delay, tremolo, spring reverb, and fuzz (distortion)."

Of course this didn't stop "old-school" guitar players like Linc Wray and later Neil Young from cranking up the Amp, and moving the guitar close to get feedback.

Valves really give off a special sound. Another Linc Wray idea: punch holes in the speakers with a pencil to get that "distorted sound". Rumble, 1958 ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjs5QWjvNWc and Linc talking about the sound ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjjb8RmcgA
Thicket: Create a bulletin board for your community (featured on Product Hunt)
> It's just opening Mozilla to direct liability, while not providing anything for the privacy conscious person.

I would guess that there are many people who use Private Browsing mode that don't understand or use security addons. This change may not help many Hacker News users, almost all of whom do understand and can easily use the addons, but we are only a tiny fraction of the Internet.
It's a strange thing that this targets react-native

react-native, despite one of its core values probably being cross platform support, is extremely disinterested in providing anything but OSX support. Check out the wording from their site: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/linux-windows-s...

""As React Native on iOS requires a Mac and most of the engineers at Facebook and contributors use Macs, support for OS X is a top priority. However, we would like to support developers using Linux and Windows too. We believe we'll get the best Linux and Windows support from people using these operating systems on a daily basis.

Therefore, Linux and Windows support for the development environment is an ongoing community responsibility.""

Which is to say "At Facebook we like Macs, we have Macs. Maybe someone else who likes Windows will build for Windows and Linux. Go ask them to do it."

I was recently looking for a cross platform development environment and was very interested in react-native but I completely lost interest after reading about their attitude to non-OSX support.
For all its faults, Zite/Worio would've surely folded without SR&ED credits.

(In the end, we launched and were acquired by CNN.)
Sort of similar:
micheleincalifornia.blogspot.in/2014/03/i-love-lucy-lifestyle-business-that.html
It's strange that other defaults weren't reset though.
Spaceship Engineers Who Build Their Own Planes
Looks pretty cool!
Ask HN: Why did DHH's last article get pulled from the front page yesterday?
???
> Even today, after a century of spreading of Buddhist ideas here, it's cultural impact in the popular culture of West is negligible.

The reason for the global proliferation of christianity is super duper ironic in light of the central thesis of your post...
The NVMe driver will only work for a fairly narrow set of uses in which the whole NVMe device(s) can be dedicated to a single application (this is because the user-space application takes control of the NVMe device directly, so the kernel driver can't simultaneously use it).

Some of the straightforward use cases would be inside network-attached storage appliances (ideally in conjunction with a user-mode network stack) or in a database (database systems already typically want to avoid any OS interference with storage access). In general, the NVMe driver can be dropped in fairly easily when existing code is using something like Linux AIO with O_DIRECT on a raw block device; the AIO programming model maps quite directly to the NVMe driver programming model (create a queue, submit I/Os, and poll for completions).
The company had 22 employees as of earlier
this year, and it has been in the process
of laying off all but what is expected to
be around 3 of its staff.

Normally, when I hear the words "layoff" and "restructure", I think 15% of the company, not 'basically everyone.' That's a bummer, and I expect this won't be the last time we hear this story this year.

I hope the frontend engineers making $75,000-$125,000[1] for a shot at one day accumulating up to 1% of Gumroad decide to pursue market wages at the next company they join :-\ The economics of startups rarely offer a worthwhile return to those who choose to play the game. For what it's worth, this is something I've found out the hard way.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130516103241/https://angel.co/...
That's kind of the point!!

The trajectory was clear enough that all those investors DHH called "star struck" put money in.

To quote him: Irrational investor exuberance indeed. I think it would be more sensible to class them as "investors who had more foresight than DHH".

He berated them for being dumb. Since we can now see that they weren't dumb at all we should consider DHH's insights questionable.
Some shady devs may compare serialized string to know whether object was null. db value Contains null value for null able string