skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For us the big thing, during the current refactoring of http://www.funadvice.com, is eliminating joins.

In testing of the new up-coming platform, that was a huge, huge win for speed. And we're a Postgresql shop too.

MongoDB allowed us to:
* Have embedded documents (very large performance improvements)
* Have arrays and hashes as "columns"

We also use Redis in a few crucial places, because of its really good support for lists (queues), and sets, besides, just its blazingly raw speed.

Downsites? Yes. Many rails-style plugins don't work well. But an upside is that we're forced to write leaner code and not depend too much on those.

Another downside, MongoDB is super-fast, but is still a work in progress in some places, and the ORM we're using (mongo_mapper) is somewhat of a moving target right now.

But hey, thats what happens when you're on the bleeding edge.

MongoDB:
* build-in replication
* basic sharding
* embedded documents
* very very fast
NOSQL = Not Only SQL - I don't think you should ever expect it to completely replace SQL since they're good at different things. I've played with a bunch of NOSQL engines (including CouchDB, MongoDB, App Engine, Solr, Xapian and Tokyo) and while I really like them and would use them for a bunch of problems, for most of my projects the ability to create arbitrarily complex queries using joins is essential for rapidly iterating and trying out new ideas.

Instead, I'd suggest using NOSQL stuff to complement SQL. Songkick use MongoDB as a fast caching layer for example: http://effectif.com/ruby/manor/denormalising-your-rails-appl... - and I've found Redis incredibly useful as a way of handling write-heavy parts of my applications and dealing with requirements to return random elements.

One of the most interesting aspects of document stores such as CouchDB is that they are schemaless, which for some problem sets is incredibly powerful - anything where you might be tempted to use key/value pairs in SQL for example.
NoSQL simplifies queries to the extent that it makes complex queries impossible and thereby forces people to design their data structures in such a way as to allow them to do everything they need using only simple queries. :-)
"I'm getting tired of writing and maintaining all those SQL queries." - learn a good ORM. The Django ORM is a heck of a lot better at writing SQL than I am, especially the kind of queries that make up 95% of a web application.
If you look at another and think "he is better than me at x,y,z" and you feel jealous, and want some type of retribution or revenge, you are a B player.

The A-player makes their skill or activity look easy and isn't conceited about it, they are primarily trying to out-do themselves. They aren't trying to add some egotistical emotional experience to themselves via the startup process.

A B-player won't want an already successful, serial entrepreneur as a co-founder. They want the glory. They want to own any success, even it is another's, with which they'll aim to claim.

Also, B-player investors are those that follow other investors, they can't make an investment decision on their own, so they follow the A-players and pretend to be A, but they're not.
Optimizing python with Cython
The article pretty much repeats the main points Bruce Schneier, and other privacy advocates, keep making: the fact that some individual or the government doesn't consider your behavior offensive now, doesn't mean they don't will in the future. A message I think cannot be repeated often enough in the current climate.

Once, stealing an apple from an orchard was kiddie mischief, punished by a spanking from the owner. Now it's a criminal activity, which gets you taken away from your parents if you run into the wrong police, or 'children safety' officer. Writing about stealing an apple when you were eight won't cause employers to blink currently (at least, I think). Who knows how moral values will have evolved ten years from now?
I've been using MongoDB to rewrite the activity feed on one of my apps. I wouldn't use it for everything though (not just yet anyway).

Having said that, the guys behind Harmony (http://get.harmonyapp.com/) use MongoDB for everything, as far as I know: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/12/18/why-i-think-mo...
You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether the stories are real or not. They're just there to illustrate his point that all of us commit minor infractions of the law from time to time and avoid the repercussions thanks to the level of privacy we're afforded by society. If our privacy is stripped away we get in a situation where we could be prosecuted for giving our mothers a couple of pain killers after her back surgery.

Also, he's disclaimed up the top that

To the police and future employers:

1. I don’t really do illegal things. I’m actually a pretty top notch guy.

2. Some of the stories in the article may be embellished/fabricated. I do have to say that, right?*
Starfleet Commander on Facebook
I should have been more precise in the article. Here:

A system which uses an adaptive hash function like bcrypt is ~6 orders of magnitude less effed in the event of a compromised database than a system which uses a standard hash algorithm and a salt, ceteris paribus.

I would hope you agree that those ~6 orders of magnitude could well be the difference between "not noticeably effed" and "profoundly effed."
I would guess the autonomous image recognition will be for use in the drones, which seems to be the way US warfare is heading.

It still makes me uncomfortable, the thought of armed drones wandering our skies. I often wonder if the future wars will be about cyber warfare in controlling those drones?
Hi Retric,

I do agree that the problem of controlling Q > 1 plasma becomes easier as you increase the volume. However, I don't think that's the biggest problem. As you yourself point out, you're limited in how much heat the wall can take. This is fundamentally the limiting factor in fusion power plant designs, unless a much more efficient direct conversion scheme is feasible. Why not instead take the tungsten panels you'd use and point a bunch of mirrors at it, achieving the same heat flux? Mirrors are just not that expensive.

PS: Do you work in fusion, by the way?

PPS: We should chat more. Send me a message at dfong at lightsailenergy.com
That's a great way to look at it. The problem here comes when you want to add a new feature, and you find that your design doesn't allow for the new queries needed.

The relational model and data normalization are reasonable at stopping you painting yourself into a corner, and SQL's bulk data manipulation operations can get you out of trouble.

With NoSQL, you're on your own, which is great for those that are infallible and omniscient. Ironically enough, I think that means that only Larry Ellison should be using NoSQL, to twist the well known joke.
I had no idea they were intertwined so throughly in each others past; I knew they were, but not quite that much.

More interestingly, I enjoy the jokes the make to/about each other. And it's great how (somewhere in the beginning episodes) Steve cut Bill off while he was telling a story and said "Here, just let me tell it," (or something like that). Very old couple like. Very amusing.
If I permit myself to indulge in a little bit of criticism I would say that your comments however articulate they are, when we consider the semantics it simply does not make any sense.
I think the title is a needlessly negative frame wrapped around a very good idea: let people know what you're working on. It helps promote a sense of responsibility about the work before you have, e.g., a finished product or customers. (After you have a couple dozen people who paid you money and would be left in the lurch if you quit, that tends to be all the motivation to keep going you need. Well, for me anyhow.)

If you've told your friends and family what you're working on, if your project should die you will have people asking you "Hey, whatever happened to...", which will motivate you to not die. For similar reasons, I recommend having a blog, as if you didn't have enough reasons to have a business blog already.

You don't even have to do a launch party -- I just told my dad. He told me my idea was, ahem, crazy and that I should go get a job at Google. (Best bad advice ever in terms of motivating me.)
Oh no, the "free iPad" offers are here.
The iPad is a Comedy Gold Mine
The real power of masses of laws that are regularly broken is selective enforcement. When you add lack of privacy to the picture, it can look downright dystopian.
You can't patent logos but you can copyright them.
I feel like there's beauty to this post that goes beyond parody.

These answer seem strain to go beyond the realm of brain teasers towards a statement about the human condition...

... perhaps something _why_ would have written...
> It somehow feels cleaner to me, this separation of contexts (contexts in the usual sense of the word, not strictly Perl contexts).

I've made the argument that the intended type of an operation is as much a context as the amount (void/scalar/list) context. The relevant Perl 5 literature flirts with that phrasing, but Perl 6 goes much further to extend that metaphor. That has proven very useful in discussions of consistency.
How? Basically, it’s slow as hell.

Is that it? bcrypt is good only because it is slow? In that case, why don't we use whatever we like (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3, etc) and add a sleep(500); just before the call? It is guaranteed to keep up with Moore's law as well!
I don't think you were really trying to spam anyone, but your plug came off as such, to me, because: a) HN has been inundated with iPad blog posts and we've already heard opinions of all angles, so it's safe to say your post wouldn't have made any points not already made, b) Your post is somewhat irrelevant because although this submission is about the iPad, it's not about whether it's revolutionary or not, and so it seems like you were trying to shoehorn your plug in here, c) You plugged your blog by linking to the HN submission when you should've just linked directly to your blog post, and d) You admitted you desperately needed readers, which was probably meant to be taken in jest, but others might think you were being serious. HN humor is pretty hard to gauge sometimes.
from your comments here, it seems that you are a bit confused by the term nosql. it is kind of a misnomer, inmho, and should rather be called nordbms. what this movement is really replacing is the traditional rdbms approach to data storage, retrieval and searching. as @emileifrem points out in his talk at nosqleast.com, nosql should be referred to as "not only sql". further he likens the explosion of new systems under the nosql banner of that to the explosion of rdms's in the 1980s and 1990s. i tend to agree. there are a number of solutions out there right now, each approaching nosql from a different angle.

watch some of the videos from nosqleast 2009, https://nosqleast.com/ to get a better picture of some of the different options and major players in this area before making a decision as to what nosql solution to base any of your future projects on.
Spirit Communicator Based Ghost Whisperer DVD - Free-Press-Release.com
Investors view default by U.S. Treasury as more likely than Coca-Cola
Free UI Set From MediaLoot,
Redfin's Kelman: The real estate industry is still screwed up
Did you read the article?
The problem is that someone trying to bruteforce your MD5 hash won't add that sleep(500). Bcrypt is slow by design.
I don't think the comparison is applicable here. In 1997 Apple was clearly not in a position to transition from a growth-oriented company keeping it all for investment, to a profit-oriented company paying back a large chunk of its profit to shareholders. In 1997 Apple profits were minus 1 billion dollars. Even if you factor out Next buyout (400 millions), that's still deep down in the red. Not profits to distribute.

But that would definitely apply to 2010 Apple & Microsoft : should they continue to look for growth at all cost, or start paying big (bigger) dividends to shareholders? I lean toward investing... continue to try to change the world, please. Even if lately Microsoft seems to be bad at it (but are they really?), trying to follow the leaders instead of implementing a vision, it doesn't mean it's too late...
I don't think that privacy in this case is all that good.

If there is a law that you could break without knowledge and without harming anybody then this law is against common sense and should be abolished.

Upholding privacy as a way to get around stupid laws is like suppressing exceptions in computer programs so that errors would not manifest themselves.

Because no one is bothered there is no incentive to fix it.

When it comes to laws we don't need privacy as much as we need common sense and latitude.
I dunno either. However, a while back I needed to bring a new technician on, and I was out of personal contacts, so I posted to Craigslist. I got a number of responses, and a couple of promising ones.

One of them was the "former senior software engineer" for a major newspaper in the Bay Area. The prospect of bringing on someone like that positively scared the piss out of me. I'm a young guy, my business is doing well in spite of me, and this person would probably be my senior in every way.

So after thinking about it for a day, I contacted him first. (As it turned out, the situation wasn't nearly as unbalanced as I thought.)

So I have no idea what an A, B, or C... player is, but I figure that hiring the best people you can, even if they intimidate you, is a good start.
Jet plane emotions; iPad cycles - open vs closed systems
I don't think the Wikiracing page would be all that easy to get to, either, so it probably wouldn't significantly decrease the difficulty.
I honestly am amused at those guys who screwed over TechCrunch at this point. They're sitting at a device they need to sell at a 500 buck price point, in direct competition....
I hope you're being sarcastic, but if not, it is because an attacker could take out the call to sleep(500) again.
> 3. '3 ^ 4 ^ 5' parses to '3 ^ (4 ^ 5)'.

I actually think that a trained mathematician would have no idea what to do with 3 ^ 4 ^ 5. It's a completely ambiguous statement and has no proper mathematical parsing.
There's no doubt I was trying to plug my post, but it's not as if I simply commented with that link.

I linked to the submission because I was hoping it would jumpstart it so that more people could see it. If I only linked to my blog post then I couldn't potentially bump up my HN submission. It was a practical decision, and morally I don't see what's wrong with it.

I could understand if people didn't bite, but I'm a little overwhelmed by the negativity. Sometimes this place can feel a little too stiff.
I believe that earthquake swarms actually reduce the probability of a larger quake because they release the pressure avoiding a buildup that causes big displacements and tremors
臺中禮儀公司
Infographic of the Day: Government Bailouts Around the World
1. right "Wrench" -> Options -> Personal stuff -> Reset to default theme

2. https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html
I'm curious: how do you structure an activity feed in MongoDB? Are you doing anything special to support the case of "show me activity from all of the people I am following", or do you just use it as a fast append-only log?
Like noted in that benchmark it's non scientific and it should be taken with a grain of salt - - like any other benchmark. It should be said thought that I have evaluated both Twisted and Tornado on a lot of open connections in production and they did not scale (capped on CPU and used too much memory).

Also regarding node.js we run around 8 I think and we plan to introduce more as node.js does not have threads or processes and currently our CPU and memory usage is very low. They are load balanced from our Python servers, but nginx would be a good load balancer as it's non-blocking.

It should be said that I have coded a lot in Python and I love Python - - so I don't have any bias and I would gladly use Python if it could scale.
I don't know how you can call it a new version with no new features. It's strange.
The energy released in the tiny quakes is many orders of magnitude less than in the large ones. It's like throwing an ice cube on a bonfire.
I'm busy reading both now and I'm in total agreement. I am, however, reading it cover to cover.

I've learnt a lot, but that's because I went and read up about the topics that I didn't know about.

I'm also enjoying founders at work more.
Increasing the tracking (letter-spacing in CSS) of body text i.e. choosing a design gimmick over legibility really aggravates me.

Inside Facebook does this too.
Given the track record which is more likely to be effective? Continuing to wish for common sense and latitude in our public officials or protecting yourself from their normal behavior?
In truth we have no idea what kind of activity would precede such an event. Geology as a predictive science remains in its infancy.
I think your comments here are off base.

The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free on the Adobe website. You are permitted to construct alternative implementations based on this specification. I think it meets the definition of an open standard.

Would HTML not be an open standard if the only browser we had was IE, and it was horribly buggy? No - the quality of the available implementations is irrelevant to a standards "openness".
Is it really because of privacy though, or is it because of reciprocity? Do people not get prosecuted for trivial law-breaking because the relevant authorities don't know about it, or is it because they're afraid that if they set the precedent that these laws will be enforced, they wouldn't want to live in the world that results?

It's always been fairly easy to dig up dirt - even felonies - in peoples' pasts. All you need to do is find one of their childhood friends, act all buddy-buddy, and buy him a few beers. Then as in now, these usually only get prosecuted if somebody has a vendetta against you.

Think of the times that people commit crimes right in front of a police officer and walk away. Haven't you ever driven a few mph over the speed limit when a cop pulls up behind you, think "Oh shit, there goes my insurance premium" as you pull over - and then watch him speed past you, because he's got something more important to do than write you a ticket? When I was in college, the campus police would regularly turn a blind eye to underage drinking right in front of them, as long as no property was being destroyed and nobody had alcohol poisoning. When teachers show a movie to their class, does anybody actually believe that they've acquired public-performance rights to the movie?

In polygraph tests, questions on these sorts of crimes are asked as a control, on the assumption that everybody lies about them. The theory is that a normal person will be more nervous about the little crimes that they're sure they must've committed at some point in the past (even if they can't remember exactly when), but will know they didn't commit the particular crime they're being accused of. A real criminal will be more nervous about the big crime they just committed, and all the petty misdemeanors pale in comparison to that. Makes me wonder if polygraphs give false results for those saints who don't actually do anything wrong.

It's not lack of information that stops most people from being prosecuted for giving our mothers a couple of pain killers, it's that most of the people doing the prosecution figure that they would do the same thing.
They're two completely different things. AES is an encryption algorithm. bcrypt is a special-purpose hash algorithm.

If you're confused, I'd highly recommend Practical Cryptography by Niels Furguson and Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/book-practical.html

It will give you much better advice than the internet will.
More exercise better in long run
This post boils down to 'Avoid Hiring Mediocre Co-Founders by Hiring Good Ones'. Every day I learn something new here.
I think this is very very important.

I'm myself suffering having made such a move. I get things done very fast, my cofounder doesn't. It makes me more tired every day, as I see that every problem that arises (or anything new that has to be created, administrated) will eventually end up on my shoulders. I do the programming, administration, legal work, financing etc... Everything we sell, all our intellectual property was created by me.

Also in our business plan (which he spent like 4-5 months working in it), we should already be ultra profitable right now. But guess where we stand. And this journey already takes over 1 1/2 years.

I guess it's time for a change soon. I wish I would have been much more careful choosing whom to start my business with.
Well, then you just have to invent a fusion reactor that:

- does not work by creating heat but by creating electricity directly (I am sure fusion creates plenty of high energy charged particles to make some electricity), and

- does not require any isotopes but fuses ordinary and plentiful atoms, such as ordinary hydrogen.

Well you are the scientist, get to it. After there are many alternatives but we all know their limitations. Regarding fusion, we know there is a potential for incredible amounts of energy that do not suffer most of the limitations of the other methods.
oh shit! a lot oh people died in haiti because of an earthquake... we're next.

the nytimes loves to do this sort of thing. it sells papers... or whatever they are selling to stay in business nowadays. here is an article printed a few weeks after the devastating tsunami of dec. 2004, replete with the title of "It Could Happen Here":

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E7DD1738F...

in other words, "oh shit! a lot oh people died in asia because of a tsunami... we're next."
The bcrypt algorithm has salting built-in.
They might. I don't know. They didn't ask me for help getting it tuned.
The variations weren't dramatically different. Seems like it would be good to start off with a few very different approaches and then tweak to "climb the hill".
The problem is, with jQuery specifically, not all functions are declared in the conventional fashion. E.g. trying to find the "height()" method is quite hard with a simple IDE search tool -- look how its defined: http://gist.github.com/291542

It's easy when they're declared as "function name(){}" or "name: function(){}" (in an object) .. or even "name=function(){}" ... but beyond that, it's simply not worth using your IDE's find tool.
Honestly, in my experience - wishing for common sense and latitude in public officials.

I know its fun to rag on public officials on Internet forums. But most of the ones I know have been fairly decent people who are just doing their jobs. There're a few bad apples, but there're a few bad apples in any population. Even the TSA officials (which gets my vote for "worst government bureaucracy") were very apologetic when they confiscated my toothpaste.

I think that you're more likely to get absurd institutional behavior - like confiscating toothpaste - when you deny latitude in employee judgment. The TSA screeners have this massive rulebook that they have to follow, and they risk losing their job when they deviate from it, even if they personally believe the rules are stupid.

Same with the private sector. Companies that have the best reputations tend to be those that empower their employees to solve the customer's problem, like Virgin or Nordstroms. Companies with the worst reputations tend to be those where the employees can't do anything but follow the playbook, like most telecoms.
If A players hire A players and B players hire C players, how do the B players ever get hired?

Yes, I'm being facetious. But even fortune-cookie level business advice should pass basic sanity checks like this one.
The philosophy of Steve Jobs is a healthy one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvLTlQWT6A&feature=relat...

(They speak about startups and devices a few minutes later)