skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"reducing friction increases jobs as it not only frees up people who have to navigate the complexity - ie the tax accountants and lawyers to doing something more productive"

Har. Yes...because if we reduce the complexity of the tax code, somehow, droves lawyers and accountants (who chose to do what they do, and spent years training to do it) are going to switch to "productive" jobs.

I get it. You don't like lawyers and accountants. But I think you need to separate your judgments of these jobs from the reality that these people do productive work that is clearly valuable -- even outside of the need for tax code compliance. Lawyers and accountants are not going away.

"I find it remarkable that you don't think there's an increasing cost to this compliance."

I didn't say that. I said that small businesses don't spend that much on compliance relative to all other factors, and that I'm therefore skeptical of the claim that reducing tax code complexity will increase jobs in any substantive way.
I'm an extrovert...and I want a separate office. It has to do with shiny interesting people not distracting me from code in my head.
Hardcover list prices are pretty much pegged at $24 in the USA, ever since word went out within Borders (or was it B&N?) about eight years ago to stop buying hardcovers with SRP over $24.

Yes, Tesco (in the UK) and WalMart can and do demand discounts up to 70%. I have heard hearsay reports (I can't cite sources, due to confidentiality) of Amazon demanding 80% discounts off ebooks from British publishers -- which is why they only launched Kindle in the UK about three months ago: nobody would take them up on it.
I agree, that's about as far as I got. It's almost a new record for Godwin's law, I think.
Actually, since he was effectively doing SELECT * ... it still has to go pull the rows from the table after seeking the index. This likely isn't a huge problem though.

To prevent going back to the table in this case, you'd either need the index I mentioned to be the primary key, or a construct like INCLUDE (which mysql appears to lack).

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188783.aspx
"you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site."

+1 ... Preach on!!!

The only reason there an (alleged) need for nofollow is because they are scraping tons of content & displaying it without any editorial curation.

If they actually were a human powered search (as they falsely claim to be) and did editorial review of the links then why would they need to add nofollow to links that passed their editorial guidelines?

Further lets not forget that in the past Mahalo did provide direct outbound links. 18 months ago I predicted them adding nofollow at some point, Jason stopped by with what he called a "fact check" ... and then they later added nofollow...pretty funny!
http://www.seobook.com/when-will-mahalo-add-nofollow-outboun...
The videogame history timeline explained
You missed out "and Amazon can set the price they sell it at".

So: you (the publisher) guarantee not to sell ebooks for less than $9.99 elsewhere, and not to publish a dead tree edition for less than $12 ... and Amazon are free to cut their competition off at the knees, sell books for $6, drive their competitors into extinction, and then can raise their price to whatever the market will pay.

Meanwhile, as the author's royalties are a percentage of the SRP, that 10% of SRP cut they're due -- $1.20 of a $12 title -- comes out of whatever Amazon pays you -- $4 in the case of a book they choose to sell for $6 on Kindle. The SRP is set to reflect the price at which the publisher expects to sell enough books to gain sufficient sales to break even -- assuming a 40-50% discount. If the discount goes to 70%, they're in the stinky stuff up to their eyeballs. That $12 ceiling is forced on what was formerly a $24 SRP, and a $14-16 expected sale price. The money has to come from somewhere, and it ain't going to come out of Jeff Bezos' wallet ...
I'm a high school senior looking for a programming internship for the summer. I'm admittedly quite inexperienced(both in terms of hobbyist activities, having worked on no projects of any significant size, and in terms of work in the field, of which I have no experience yet), but I am a fast learner and a very hard worker when I have a project to work towards. I'd be happy to take either a paid or an unpaid internship, although unpaid internships could be a problem if they required me to relocate outside of Tennessee because I don't know that I could afford to find housing.
Your seeing the start of an age, and this is the mess that results.

Take a little of the framing of these stories with a grain of salt. The press needs to sell headlines and "everyone loves a fight". Bloggers feel more relevant when making big, bold, and violent predictions. It's all hollywood with big explosions and {INSERT-PRODUCT-NAME-HERE}-killer devices.

All of these things are kinda like debating every block and pivot in a hard-fought basketball game. There is no smoke or fire, its just how the game is played.
MySQL can only use one index per query. If you need it be on two or more columns you need a composite index with both columns in, populated from the left. If MySQL finds a column in the index you not keying off (WHERE/SORT etc.) then it will stop processing the index at that point.

The key_len column in the EXPLAIN shows you how far it got through the index, based on the size of the columns. In your case it says 4 which if device id is of type INT it just read one column in the index (though there is probably only one column in that index)
Well said.

Also, the article he linked had absolutely nothing to do with homelessness. Even if we assume San Francisco to be a horribly governed place, it doesn't automatically mean that the social services lead to homelessness.
> This post is a hollow re-tread of the "lower my taxes and I'll trickle it down" argument, which has been the primary platform of the Republican party (and wealthy people) since I've been alive. Our tax rates are dramatically lower than they were even 20 years ago, and I have to say...it doesn't seem to be working that well.

You don't think life has gotten much better for poor people over the last 20 years in the United States? I mean in absolute terms.
Be advised that partitioning a MySQL table makes seemingly unrelated but important features (like foreign keys and subqueries) stop working.
Honestly, the first thing I did was add indexes. On device_id, user_id, and date_added.

I'm using Linode and I kept getting these I/O notifications...and the site would load extremely slow at times.

After looking at the log of my Rails app, I saw that some requests were taking > 20 seconds. I determined that this was some kind of blocking at the database.

I connected to MySQL and ran something simple...

select count(*) from location;

It took a long time...I turned profiling on and saw that it was taking a really long time in "table lock".

I assumed (which probably wasn't a good idea) that it was going through and counting all the rows.

I didn't really know what to make of this..because I didn't think that getting the count would take so long.

I embarked on reading about partitioning, which may have been a solution for a problem that didn't actually exist (based on the feedback here). I attempted to partition (on what I put in the article), and everything seemed much snappier after that. If the indexes should have solved the problem (given that they were correct), I don't know why the location queries were taking so long.

Anyway, I still have lots to learn on the database front, and maybe the fact that my VM had 7MB free of memory was causing weird things to happen, I'm not sure.

Thanks for all the feedback and I have definitely learned a lot in this thread.

kogir:

I'm using MyISAM (which, in retrospect, seems stupid), so I don't even have foreign key constraints (InnoDB only, I believe).
I think McClure is pointing out an opportunity for law firms that exists for both startup and established customers. One of the major barriers to lower the friction in the process is defining the value based on billable hours. What you really want from your attorney is a risk assessment and recommendations. The value of which is proportional to the size of the opportunity you are contemplating and the likely effect of the risk mitigation strategies offered. You have to change the business model to effect a transition to some of the technologies that McClure is talking about.

Some suggestions:

o Subscription models for legal services and cloud storage of all of the relevant documents might convert much of the due diligence process into a "configuration management" problem where you are always ready for a transaction because you maintain your relevant agreements and contracts in a known (and hopefully good) state to minimize the need for a fire drill before a transaction.

o Subscription models for advisory services would encourage attorneys to use more secure IM, document generators, cloud storage...We need to move beyond a billable hour model.

o for public agreements like privacy policies and terms of services there is an opportunity for a subscription service to monitor changes in posted policies, and perhaps for an additional fee provide customized interpretation of the significance. I had suggested this to the Legal River folks for their http://privacy-policy-generator.legalriver.com/ and http://terms-of-service-generator.legalriver.com/ that it might be as useful to classify the existing agreements already posted on the net. This would extend what EFF is doing with http://www.tosback.org/ (in itself a valuable service).

There is an event coming up Wed-Mar-3 at Churchill Club on "Innovation & Change, a "New Normal" for the Legal Industry?" (see http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=853 ) that explores what Cisco has done to leverage current technology and new business models in managing legal work (internal and outsourced). Hopefully some of these techniques trickle down to the startup world as they gain more acceptance in Fortune 500 / AmLaw 100 relationships.

George Grellas makes some excellent points in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090615 that the more adversarial the negotiation the less impact technology can have on cutting costs.
Actually, I'm picking a third choice: I'm pushing Macmillan for a DRM-free open format based solution. (And I'm pushing on a door that's ajar, but jammed: probably most or all of their editorial and many of their executive staff know that DRM is stupid, but changing corporate policy at a large, staid multinational headquartered overseas -- Macmillan is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck -- is difficult and takes time.)

The real solution is for the publishers to switch from wholesale (via channels like Amazon) to direct retail. The agency idea is a step along the way, but not the whole way. Some publishers already have done this: Baen's Webscription web storefront, shared by some other smaller publishers, is a thriving example of Doing It Right.

Interesting piece of public information that not many people know: Baen is a private company, about 30% owned by one Tom Doherty, CEO of Tor, itself a subsidiary of Macmillan.
PS3 (Cell Broadband Engine processor) security architecture
No, but the author of the article claimed that you can see "bits of different languages in them", which you can't. Neither morphemes nor phonemes are preserved, only letters. The method for creating these words make it probable that there will be at least one letter in the lojban word in common with the word in the six original languages, but there seems to be no guarantee that the letter or letters in common are from the actual root of the word, which are the important letters of the word.

Therefore, the way the root words in Lojban are constructed does not make the learning of words easier for the largest number of people, it just makes it really difficult for everyone.

Take your example of "klama". I can see that it shares "l" and "a" with "travel", but how do you construct a mnemonic for remembering it? It shares no morphemes and no phonemes with "travel", and there's no phonological resemblance either, so there's nothing to help you learn it if you are an English speaker, you just have to memorize it as-is.

I'm sure there are many other features of Lojban that are interesting, and I'm sure that compound words in Lojban are pretty easy to learn and construct, but the text I quoted from the article about root words shows a complete lack of understanding of how human languages work and grow and evolve.
>> care about not being branded <<

Absolutely right. They care about brand.

If you look at the content (and I don't mean the top 100 guides, but the hundreds of thousands of backfill pages) most of it is nothing without being part of some branded collection (leveraging Google's authority site loophole). And thus protecting their brand is crucial to protecting their livelihoods.

If a scraper site is branded as a scraper then it falls out of Google's good graces. And without that traffic the site loses probably over 50% of its revenue.

But if they removed the scraped content they lose a huge chunk of revenues as well (if I had to guess I would say at least 25% to 30%...and it is the all margin piece of their business).

I think the only longterm solution is some sort of editorial curation and removing nofollow from the links.

Sure it will increase costs in the short term, but in the longterm it increases the value of their operation significantly. And it sets up a huge competitive barrier between them and other would be semi-legit to illegitimate scraper sites.
Well he is being pretty misleading about the issues surrounding price fixing. Yes with physical goods it causes shortages and surpluses, but with eBooks the entire argument is bull. The amount supplied is exactly equal to the amount demanded in eBooks, and the only relevant issue is whether the publisher makes back the initial costs. Pretending ebooks fit into the same category as rivalrous products is dishonest.
Yes, but they'd have more money to spend. They'd be getting value for their money, whether it is expressed through corporate spending or through their personal spending. As it is right now their is giant drain on the us economy where people have to spend tons of money preparing taxes when a much simpler system could easily be used.
Generally speaking, a scripting language comes from the set {Python, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Lua, Ruby}.

Its a tricky term to define, much like "compiler". Actually "compiler" is a nice analogy: everyone knows what one is, but the actual test for "is this a compiler" is shaky, and returns true for lots of things that aren't _really_ compilers.

Anyway, Ousterout coined it in his paper on TCL, but annoyingly chose not to formally define it. The set at that time was (I think) {TCL, Perl, sh}.

But because he didn't define it properly, the word has been used for years without a proper definition. The best I can do is to say read my PhD thesis, starting on page 7, where I'd spent a meaty six pages explaining in as much detail as I can what it means to be a scripting language.
Can you tell us the size of your query cache and your key cache, if they are enabled? If not, we should talk about enabling them. :-)
Do you have a link to the research by Sun? It sounds very interesting.
Many programming languages have infix expressions, but get associativity wrong
Interpreters are not JITs.
Being utilitarian about it, India or China is ahead no matter what, because of all of those little sacks of utility known as "babies" they've produced. ;)
They are rather low...I figured that would be good on a limited memory configuration (maybe not :( ).

query_cache_limit	= 1M
query_cache_size = 16M
key_buffer	= 16M
max_allowed_packet	= 16M
thread_stack	= 192K
thread_cache_size = 8
But it already exists, see the link. Or you could do a hackintosh with a windows tablet. But then all you have is a laptop without a keyboard and why would you want that?

I guess I wasn't paying much attention but what I heard pre-launch was that it was going to basically be a giant iPod Touch. Which seems like quite a good idea to me. Not quite a cure for cancer but what do you expect?
Maybe it's more that this is normal and the web has been surprisingly open in the past. Of course big companies are going to try and use their advantages to try and sway people to their platform or ideas.
I would be more worried in the absence of any "streams of negativity".
MySQL does not scan any rows for SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table — the number of records is stored in table metadata. (Mind you, it only works for this kind of query, as soon as you add WHERE the story changes).
On the other hand, MyISAM only has table level locks, not row level.
I guess it is time for you to analyze what your app does with DB and how it can affect locking…
They even have an iPhone app.
1. Were the keys composite or not? The correct key for the queries you listed is (device_id, date_added DESC). In MySQL you'd add this by doing "ALTER TABLE location ADD INDEX (device_id, date_added DESC)"

MySQL uses one key per query, so having an index on (device_id) and an index on (date_added) individually will do no (or very little) good for the queries you listed.

2. MyISAM uses table-level locking. This will block all reads (selects) while writes (insert, update, delete) are happening. It does not prevent multiple selects from happening at the same time. If you have a write-heavy table that you are also reading from you need to be using InnoDB.

3. SELECT COUNT(*) FROM location should be instantaneous in MyISAM . It will be slow(er) in InnoDB. If this query was blocking it's because something was trying to write to the table.

4. Foreign key constraints have nothing to do with anything here. That's one advantage of InnoDB, although most web apps I know don't use them, but not one that would help you. Rather, what will help you is the table-level vs. row-level for MyISAM vs. InnoDB.

This allows selects to happen to unaffected rows while writes are happening.
Between this and the co-founders spreadsheet and the recurring 'Who's hiring?' threads, I think it's about time for a HackerJobs.com or something.
Very interesting. Can this kind of technology yield further speedups for languages that are already fast (compared to getting dynamic language speed closer to fast)?

BTW these technologies are not interpreters, but compilers (but runtime compilers).
Sort of true -- for the InnoDB engine SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table is more complicated because each transaction has its own view of the table. So unlike MyISAM (which uses one big table-level lock to guarantee consistency), it can't store a row count on a per-table basis.
The concept is sound; however, the execution is far from trivial.

GAAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAAP) and IFRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporti...) are two great examples of accounting standards which approach regulation from two very different perspectives. I'd be interested if someone has info comparing administrative costs for businesses operating under each regime.

Regarding the tax code, my opinion is that all corporate income tax should be eliminated in favor of steeper progressive tax rates for individual income taxes. Effectively eliminating this burden from corporations and shifting it to the wealthiest who can afford the administrative costs, while also having a neutral effect on government revenues.

By its nature, capitalism demands regulations to inspire confidence in investors. So don't fool yourself into believing "all regulation is bad." The question remains, "what is the most effective & efficient means of regulation?"

Finally, here's some advice, an LLC is generally the most effective form for a small business to take. When you get to the point where additional equity must be issued or raised, you might then consider the advantages of C or S corporation.
bad idea, it'll get spammed by recruiters and big companies...like all job boards are.

I think the more personal "is anyone looking" is a much better idea.
Har. Yes...because if we reduce the complexity of the tax code, somehow, droves lawyers and accountants (who chose to do what they do, and spent years training to do it) are going to switch to "productive" jobs.

There are legal and accounting tasks to be performed in any company that are not related to tax and regulatory compliance. Lawyers will still be lawyers, and accountants will still be accountants, but instead of working (indirectly) for the government doing nothing that provides value to consumers or the business, they would be working on things that are of value to consumers or the business. Contracts need to be written and negotiated, books need to be kept, projections need to be made, copyrights and trademarks need to be defended, etc. These things make our world run smoother, and our economy grow, and helps small businesses defend themselves against larger incumbents, and helps them plan and finance growth.

We're talking about a baroque tax code and regulatory environment for business. This cost is relatively higher for small business than large business (because large business has full-time legal and accounting staff, while small businesses must outsource or do it themselves, poorly, and at the expense of productive expenditures of money or time).

I'm, frankly, stunned that you believe that small business "don't spend that much on compliance". I spend about two days a month on it for our three-man company; that's more than 13% of my productivity gone to keeping us out of trouble with the government. Given that the other two people are part-time employees, it's about 6% of our entire available work. You consider that small, when it does nothing for our business' growth or for our customers? When added to the actual taxes we pay out, it's a wonder any small business can get off the ground while staying legal.

Note that while I'd also enjoy seeing small business tax obligations reduced, I'd be extremely happy to see reduction in the complexity of paying those taxes at both the state and federal level. If I can put off employing lawyers and accountants (who make more money than I, as CEO, currently make, lawyers, in particular, who make more than I've ever made even when I was a well-paid contractor) for another year, that'd allow me to grow faster, and hire another employee this year.

And, of course, if it means lawyers don't work quite as much, and have to put off buying that new BMW for another three months, I think I can live with that.
I find freelancing perfect around uni, sure most of the downfalls are valid but what other job could I do that got me more experience in the field while being able to navigate around changing uni commitments.

Also depending on how demanding your clients are you can afford to have a slow week where you don't get much done if you don't really need the money, then ramp it up again when things aren't so busy in your life.
Because this is their chance to make a killing and they don't want to share with the rest of the children.

Like most big bad arrogant businesses, the customer is an afterthought.

Luckily, the web is awash with alternatives. It's like the music business: there are little guys out there trying to get a break. Pay a little more and avoid the noid. Avoiding trends is good for the soul.
Intel/Micron to announce 25nm flash memory tomorrow
Apple is refusing to support Flash because Flash has stability and performance problems.

Google doesn't support old browsers because it would be a lot more work, and most people trying new stuff like Google Wave have new browsers.

Google will support Flash on Android because it's their policy to allow pretty much anything non-malicious, and because it may boost Android sales.

It's not correct to see Google as anti-iPhone. Google is pro-Android. iPhone is a competitor.

I don't understand Apple's blocking of the Google Voice app; that doesn't seem to help Apple in any way.
Not only are they not at breakeven yet. Unless I've misunderstood badly, they haven't even got fusion occurring yet.