skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" ... but people are clearly waking up to the fact that they don't need all this complex shit."

Telephones used to be complex, in that they needed many people to complete calls, then they got bone simple.

But then they got complex in a different way. I don't think you can buy a phone today that just gives you a dial tone and basic DTMF buttons.

Mobile phones are worse (so to speak). But as best can see there are increasing numbers of people using their mobile as their only phone.

There's a market for feature-less devices (check out Reader's Digest for their ads for phones and such; basic behavior and a few Big Button options for the AARP crowd).

But it seems there's a larger market for at least all sorts of complexity.
Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP.

It was on my work computer, which I don't have access to right now. If the problem persists (it's working on my Chrome OS X home computer right now), I'll see if I can get you a ss tomorrow morning.
The State of the Internet (vimeo)
More than how you really use your iPhone:

This is the way you really make a commercial for the iPhone.

That was absolutely amazing. I have no beat-box skills, no rhythm and no music, and I still want to buy that app.
"So there it is. SQL doesn't scale (effectively or efficiently)"

I think you just re-iterated the author's reason for writing perfectly.

Instead of saying 'SQL' (the query language) doesn't scale, perhaps you can say full ACID doesn't scale cheaply.

We spent a bunch of time looking at large scale distribution at Berkeley for the Mariposa project. The short version: if you want to break ACID then you have to take the semantics of the data into consideration. Transactional financial data needs full ACID, many other types of data have looser needs (status updates, etc) and those looser needs can be taken advantage of.

As it turns out, even common DB's like Oracle, Postgres and MySQL can be used differently to get much cheaper scale for certain types of data. See the FriendFeed article on MySQL as a docdb (also the Friendly ruby mapping on github).

To paraphrase the author:

"ACID scales just fine if you need it (and if you need it you most likely have budget for it). If you don't need full ACID, there are plenty of other cost effective solutions you can run on low bandwidth disks/memory limited CPUs. Mix and match to fit your needs.

Please, enough with the religion."
And performance... My non-utf8 1 GB file whose number of lines I need to count thanks Ruby 1.9 for not uselessly and forcefully making an in memory utf8 copy of it.
Yes it would seem that a developer who had successfully developed an Android application wouldn't need a free phone...?

The other way 'round though (as the comment above describes) would be a killer strategy.
To me the number's Facebook put out seem reasonable. I haven't seen evidence that Facebook's targeting capabilities have been yielding significantly higher CPC's for their ad network (and thus huge revenues). I've done some smaller buys, and yes you can control who views your ad on several grains (age, gender, location, etc.), however even with really great ad copy, CTR's are still surprisingly low given the boost you would expect from their targeting. They'll continue to refine their product but it still has a ways to go and targeting doesn't seem to be a huge competitive advantage at this point. I'd say that the big boost as of late (which was alluded to by other comments) was the loosening of their ad policies last year.

To the point about Yahoo, clearly they'll be less relevant going forward, but I don't think the comparison is completely fair. Keep in mind that they are still pretty much the king of display with an huge US reach (180MM Americans - http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/c...).
The whole idea with "NoSQL" is that you pick the best tool for the job. Most people that push RDBMS solutions try to shoehorn an RDBMS for every possible scenario. For modeling the majority of business data, an RDBMS is fine. There are many problems such as graphs, logs, lossy real-time data, etc that CAN be modeled in an RDBMS but shouldn't be.
I think that says something about how games are being produced, versus how they should be. One hour of quality, memorable gaming beats the hell out of 52 hours of rat killing, herb collecting and princess escorting. Yet the budget of a game is directly proportional to the amount of content you have to put in, not its quality—the quality is inversely proportional to the amount of time allowed to deliver each piece (so it hurts doubly to have to produce more), and the experience level of the developers/writers/artists/etc (so it hurts triply, since more content = more burn-out = more churn = less experience on each new project.)
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> So there it is. SQL doesn't scale (effectively or efficiently).

You might just want to say "cheaply".
A Word From the Wise
Future Founder # 1: Yo dude, I've this totally cool idea.

Future Founder # 2: How about we name it CutePuppy.

Future Founder # 1: Check if CutePuppy.com is available

I can bet this conversation theme has started 80% of new web-two-point-oh startups.
Protocol Buffers has limited language support, the implementation in one popular language (Python) blows goats, and even though it predates Thrift it was not released until after Thrift arrived so its community is smaller. The number of people who need this sort of product is relatively limited, so the early traction that Thrift has gained will take a bit of time or some compelling reasons to overcome.
It's another case of "right tool for the job". If you're just looking for a data store, NoSQL may be right up your alley. If you need a query language, you may want SQL.

I mean, the fact is that there are a lot of servers out there even today that are running SQL databases to be used simply as dumb data stores. It's not the most efficient coding, but it happens, at least partially because MySQL is available on every shared host and their brothers (wait, what?).
:) Well said. upvoted.
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Seems like an extremely risky strategy, even established authors happen to write books that sell badly. If you hit on a book, which you couldn't sell, what then?

Probably a good idea to filter only the "good" books, but how?
SQL has, by modern standards, a shitty API. The DSL is an ugly mess and it's extremely difficult to reason about performance, especially when joins are involved.

Ergo, some not-by-choice SQL users only scratch the surface and use common features: INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT, also known as CRUD.

Ergo, it becomes easy (although wrong) to conclude that SQL isn't doing very complicated work behind the scenes and that it's just another overcomplicated dinosaur POS like the Windows operating system, one that remains popular only because it's a standard.

Thus, a lot of undue hate gets directed at SQL with little attention paid to the subtleties of what it does extremely well and where it behaves poorly.

I think "SQL isn't scalable" is in the same league as "Java isn't concurrent". It can be, if you have learned the necessary skills and are willing to deal with a bit of pain. Is Clojure astronomically better for concurrency? Sure, but people can and do scale with SQL databases, and they do this in large part because there are problems for which SQL is the appropriate solution.
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This person was telling people to spend time with family. The fact that he is the CEO of coke which may or may not be healthy is completely irrelevant.
I'm going to declare something else the worst holy war ever.

Then we can have an even worse holy war than ever was before, making ourselves both wrong.
Scientists Taking Steps to Defend Work on Climate
You're arguing semantics. NoSQL = No"ACID-Compliant Relational Database with Normalized Table Design"
I think I will go get the app just because that video was awesome.

If every iPhone app did something along those lines, showing someone actually doing really cool stuff with the App, they would probably sell more apps. Then again, if you could do really cool stuff with most Apps on the iPhone, that might also sell more apps....
In case anyone questions why the HN title is different from the NYT title, I adapted it from the subhead which reads as follows: "Grudgingly, many climate scientists are beginning to engage critics, admit mistakes and open up their data."
Maybe I'm missing something here, but where's the shakedown?

1. It's $20. In every company I know you can give and accept $20 gifts from clients and customers without it being considered a bribe.

2. Paying $20 to have a link to the app store at the bottom of a review is good value for money. It will encourage impulse purchases, and it doesn't cost the review site anything.

3. The email explicitly states that the $20 don't affect the review process. So you're not paying for a positive review. Why would the review site risk their reputation by asking for $20 bribes?

4. You can just say "no thanks", so it's not a shakedown.

Geez, people.
Ask HN: simple affiliate tracking software?
Working on a site that is similar to groupon - what would you recommend as an affiliate tracking software if you were to work with a handful of publishers who are not your usual "affiliate people" but rather large publishers?

Mainly we're looking for a system that is simple to administer both from the merchant's side and especially the affiliate's side.
It should also be easy to integrate and support delayed tracking (someone might signup for a service but only buy a couple days later - it should still be accounted for)
Yeah, right. I have worked on storage systems that run into the tens of megabucks and even with pricey "4 hour" support we were often SOL when we actually needed the company to live up to its claims. The different with the garage-built system is that I sometimes have components sitting around my desk or that can be pillaged from a VPs desktop to repair the system -- try doing that when the specialized disk controller on your gold-plated solution goes tits-up.
The Y Combinator Experience
I'm pretty sure Steve Ballmer isn't terribly worried about his image.
zacka, RJ...are there others? I'm an '09 5w alum now bootstrapping a startup and living in the area! Maybe I should visit 2w a bit...
It tu... I mean, I suspect that it's ability to 'deceive' correlates strongly with how much you trust the author on that subject in the first place.

If someone tell me "turns out, the astrologers have been right all along!" ... that's not going to sway me unless they're sitting in front of a library of relevant peer reviewed evidence, and can guess which irrational number I'm thinking of.
One complaint that I have with SQL databases that you don't often hear elsewhere is that they are very complex. People often use them where a much simpler solution would suffice because they are what people are used to using. All else equal, we should choose the simple solution over the complex one, because it is less likely to fail and easier to extend.
Tasteless title, considering the death toll.
But it's not. Because SQL databases (strictly speaking any requiring strong consistency... which is mostly RDBMSes) are highly latency sensitive, where NoSQL databases like Cassandra design around that by saying "hey, you could not see the most recent write for a few ms, unless you request a higher consistency level." And most apps are fine with that. As a bonus you get multi-datacenter replication with basically the same code, another place most RDBMSes are weak.

It's a classic design hack -- redefining your goal as an easier problem.
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That page wreaks with scam/phishing.
I'm not even so sure that they are unnecessarily complicated to scale, or that you should need or have to replace the features you list. I am sure, however, that everything you list ends up needing to happen if the solution chosen doesn't apply well to the problem at hand.

When you really dig deep down into each and every article on this subject, whether for or against NOSQL, the most important (and yet unstated) fact is this:

It isn't that RDBMS systems scale or don't scale, or that NOSQL systems scale or don't scale, it's that any solution which prioritizes (just for example) consistency and availability is not going to scale effectively for a problem that instead prioritizes availability and partition tolerance.

I am willing to bet that any time a problem and a given solution don't align on the two attributes they've respectively prioritized from CAP, there will be a claim that the solution "doesn't scale". The reality is just that the solution wasn't applicable to the problem at hand. If instead one evaluates solutions which match the problem's CAP priorities, the solutions will scale effectively (modulo their individual pros and cons relative to the other options within the evaluated CAP-priority-matching set of possible solutions, of course.)
Lying and Procrastinating at Work
Let's just hope nobody records anything obscene so that our Apple overlords don't remove it from Their store.
I've got a screen full of icons, and nothing really tells
me that there is another page of icons waiting (unless I
look at the very small dots at the bottom of the screen).

This thing only takes once to learn. From then on those small dots will tell you where in the screens sequence you are without taking much space.

The Zune has the same effect, though it isn't necessary
because they've added the negative space.

Without effect you might be left to wonder, is my device stuck, or is there really nothing more. When it springs back you are sure, that it responsive and there is indeed nothing more to see.
It is a bit weird looking. I guess they're just dogfooding Google Sites.

Mark Murphy (popular android book author) says it's legit:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread...

Also, this:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/google-handing-out-free-nex...
Why are SQL and RDBMSes conflated? Couldn't one database speak both SQL and something else if it wanted to? In the same way that Clojure and Java both end up as JVM bytecode, couldn't SQL just become another layer on the encoding stack, above something simpler?
What it boils down to is choose the right tool for the job and sometimes that means using two tools that do similar things. I for one won't be giving up SQL any time soon but also look forward to replacing some of our poorly performing sections with NoSQL (we sort of already do thanks to memcache).
NoSQL is designed to address a certain problem space and RDBMS is designed to address another.

I don't see it that way at all.

It's more like RDBMS is the all-purpose data store that attempts to distill the maximum number conceivable data storage, integrity constraints and lookup requirements into a set of powerful primitives. And NoSQL is a large group of technologies that are each optimized for specific cases which SQL is traditionally bad at, but which don't necessarily have much in common with each other.
This is the way I assumed making music worked when I was four. Glad to see it realized :)
Ask HN: What is the best FTP client for OS X?
Free would be preferable, but commercial is fine too.

I have been using Cyberduck, but it seems to spazz out when moving a large number of files - e.g. a rails project (both upload and download). I get a bunch of listing directory errors, etc.

FlashFXP on Windows works wonders for me, but am looking for something of that calibre on OS X.

Any suggestions?
The first comment on that post is quite hilarious.
Ok, but how about a service taking whatever scalable SQL systems the financial or pharmaceutical industry use, even Oracle, Postgres, or Microsoft SQL server, and then selling it as a service similar to RDS?

My point is, I think there is an opportunity providing enterprise-level SQL scalability on a per-use basis. It won't replace NoSQL systems, because there are some problems where they're clearly better, but it could be done and provide relatively-affordable, scalable SQL access to startups.
I don't disagree with you at all. I was just trying to explain what I think his motivations are from a more neutral perspective to promote cross-segment understanding.
I read about 40 books a year[1]. The main way I do this is not alienating my friends but by not watching TV. I have started watching DVDs and Netflix instant stream recently and this has cut into my reading time.

I do recommend requesting books at your library. It is awesome, like Netflix for books.

I would like to try blocking my favorite websites. I don't know if I would read more, but I certainly would work more.

[1] I have kept track of this since 2006, inspired by Kevin Drum. Here's my lists:

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2009/Jan/2#books-2006

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2007/Dec/31#books-2007

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2009/Jan/2#books-2008

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2010/Jan/24#books-2009
How I saved $1932 in ONE hour…
Dude, plenty of people launch lawsuits at the drop of a hat. Even if they are something like 1 in 100 people, a lawsuit is _expensive_. The cost benefit analysis just doesn't pan out. If I were in charge, I'd do the same thing. Protecting your own people far outweighs a questionably existent responsibility to someone you don't know. It really is nothing personal. The way to beat the system is with volume and constantly making yourself more competitive.
Ask HN: Top HN articles a day via SMS/Twitter
I would really like to have an RSS feed that just lists the top (points) RSS feed of Hacker News articles. Ideally this would only select the top 10-20 articles in a day. Until a few minutes ago, I followed the Twitter feed via Google Reader - http://twitter.com/newsycombinator - but it has about 230 posts/week and has started to get a little overwhelming for me. It also seems to be hand-picked entries and for the most part most of them appealed to my taste.
My other issue with that Twitter feed is that they linked directly to the articles and there is no link to HN - so I miss out on the discussions as well.

I don't want to miss out on any of the HN goodness but don't want to waste much time here either.

In the perfect world, PG would have a YCombinator startup write a quick program that would have you vote the articles that interested you and match you up with others and give you the option to subscribe to a person (or two) with most similar tastes so you can supplement each other with articles that interest you.

In the mean time if anyone knows of an RSS feed (other than HN's own http://news.ycombinator.com/rss with ~750 posts a week), please do let me know.
I thought the mantra of presentations and UI design was
Know your Audience. It would dopey to design for designers
rather than trying things out with the people who are going
to use the thing.

The problem is: your audience does not know itself. Your audience in general will only know what it wants. Knowing your audience means knowing that,knowing how it is different from what it needs, and knowing what it really needs.

At the famous Ford quote goes: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”.

Jobs and Ive do know those differences so asking questions "what would they say" is not "designing for designers" it is speculating the opinion of those who know
the difference.
Ambition I had to look up, Ludic I already knew. The short explanation is that both of them have way too much potential for collusion, malicious or not, to really work as serious tournament games.
You should have titled it "How I saved $3864 in ONE hour (and over 2 years)".
Talk about mis-application; I know this is off topic but the over use of virtual machines everywhere is starting to trip me out. Why in the world would you buy a brand new machine to run your production web site and then put VMWare on it and run one machine instance?? I could understand if you buy a big powerful machine and carve it into multiple smaller machines all serving separate and unique purposes - that is a common and good use case for it but people aren't just doing that, they are taking it overboard.
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I largely agree with this, but in my mind using an RDBMS for a sub-optimal task is not always shoehorning—it can be a powerful hedge. In an early stage startup you don't know what the final business model is going to be, or how your data will need to scale. Spending time researching and setting up optimized data stores for things that change drastically or never end up being important is a tremendous waste of time.
I understand your perspective, but chinese poker is a popular gambling game, and so is blackjack for that matter, so not everybody has the same taste in games as you do :-) The obvious way of bolting gambling onto this game is to simply have an even money bet on every deal. Note that the cards are initially dealt out face up, which makes the whole game really just be one round as in chinese poker.
Or it would be nice to set a threshold that I want to see articles with more than X upvotes or Y comments.

I used to be a fan of Digg when it first started but once the content got overloaded, I stopped visiting except for my friend's Diggs.
Startup Success 2006 Reid Hoffman, Joe Kraus, Guy Kawasaki & more [2006] [video]
Enterprisey databases are just too expensive for the HN crowd; making them into a service can't fix that.

Azure might come close, but I don't know what performance it can provide.
I don't know. I think any holy war in which people aren't killed is pretty good as far as holy wars go.
It's quite legit. Thanks Google! Hopefully they'll mail them out soon.
This interview raises pro-Bing questions.
Toto, we’re not in Topeka anymore (welcome to Google, Kansas)
"“We have to do a better job of explaining that there is always more to learn, always uncertainties to be addressed,” said John P. Holdren, an environmental scientist and the White House science adviser. “But we also need to remind people that the occasions where a large consensus is overturned by a scientific heretic are very, very rare.”"

That is a... curious word choice for the White House science adviser.