skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you need to drag your understanding and drop it onto his concepts. You're far too bogged down with all of this "seeing". When are you people going to stop just seeing, and start truly knowing? Drag and drop your mind. It's the way of the future.
Then that's another win for many NoSQL databases -- they often operate in a way that's much more natural for developers.
Why? Advertising has been around for hundreds of years, and is involved in nearly every medium of communication. I'd wager that a high percentage of HN users who own businesses are advertising on Google or Facebook.
Seriously, guys. Just flag it.
"Care to cite some specific examples?"

or, brasher

"Citation needed."
The problem is Apple didn't really INVENT[1][2][3] the concept and technology for multi-touch. They just implemented the first realized product (in a phone). So what if they filed a patent for that product? It doesn't mean it wasn't an obvious technological concept.

1) http://www.macworld.com/article/49738/2006/03/interface.html

2) http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface
People have to use various non-straightforward meanings of "profitable" to define Facebook as such.
a disturbance in the (data) force?
I think he wasn't calling the phrase itself deceptive. I think he's saying that you use it in an undisciplined way. From the final paragraph:

[the phrase is] useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y.

Nothing personal, but I think he's onto something. Especially if you take a more generous outlook and expand it to "circumstances where you don't demonstrate any substantive path from X to Y." (Even if somebody fails to demonstrate a substantive path, the path might still exist.)

Re: patterns, there was a blogger who did some kind of screen-scraping, machine learning, NLP analysis of my blog and claimed their analysis proved I was really a bot. I would take that kind of thing with a grain of salt.
Well, he did specify a 5% chance of success...
I've always thought good DBAs were the rarest thing in the industry. And the most valuable.
NY Tech Lives and Dies by the Social Graph
No, that's exactly what CAP doesn't allow. Unless by scalable you mean non-horizontal scaling. In which case yes, but we already knew that big machines make things fast.
who said that's a bad thing? All I tried to say is that it's possible to both be actively looking for members and simultaneously rejecting them at the same time; possibly without even realizing it. So even when you think you're being inclusive, you might be exhibiting in-group behavior that's offputting to others.

I suspect that often girls in CS are effected by this.

If you read me as implying judgement, I apologize, I did not intend that.

(Also, your implication that I was not a nerd and/or cool in high school is way off. But that's cool.)
The Palaeographer and the Manager: A Cautionary Tail [RTF]
Among the more absurd patent claims being litigated: "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image"

Seriously? I'm not sure if it's a step above or a step below one-click, but it sure as hell ain't far from it.
Myself, I've stopped using protobuf because it's super slow in Python.
A PDA with a good ebook reader boosted my reading rate by about 1 book a week. During the day, there's an innumerable amount of 1 - 10 minute pauses in your life that you can use to whip out a PDA and read a couple of pages.

Unfortunately, now I have an iPhone where the web browser is better than the ebook reader so I find myself reading hacker news rather than novels.
My bad, I'm with you gojomo. Thought you were taking the bet against growth.
Here's how you really use your iPhone
You have to know where to hang out. Try 2w on EC.
Would would the need for "specialized gear like infiniband to reduce intra-node latency" be limited to parallel databases? (I assume you mean "inter-node"...)
UOL Mail
I've always wondered what goes on in people's heads when they jump down something like that. Do they ever muse about the irony of what they just committed?
Those are definitely reasonable concerns!

PHP has been more dominant in the Web world for a longer period of time, that much is definitely certain, and there's a lot of resources out there already. I think this Google Trends chart captures my impression of the relationship between the two languages, though: http://www.google.com/trends?q=php%2C+ruby&ctab=0&ge...

In addition, although you're definitely right in that there must be much more PHP documentation out there, you're not going to have much difficulty Googling for Ruby errors either - just because there will be fewer results doesn't at all mean that there won't be any. Just like in any other programming language mainstream enough to be considered a good language to learn on, any problem you have in that language will have already been experienced by someone else, and there'll almost definitely be an easily found Google result that'll solve that problem.

If you're really on a quest to create web apps and you'd like to invest in knowledge that'll help you and your webapps grow, I'd really strongly recommend learning Ruby (or Python) over PHP.

edit: on closer examination of that Google Trends chart, it looks like a good chunk of the Ruby results are from non-programming-related hits, but I'd still be willing to bet that the overall trend is the same.
I worked at a for profit company as an unpaid intern in college, just for experience. The experience/letter of recommendation was my compensation - legally or morally would there be a difference in your case?
Hey, I remember that guy from posting crazy comments on ESRs blog. He has got stome great stoff on "Artificial Intelligence From The Bible": http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html
I don't understand this patent world. From everything I've read, it is obvious to me that I could get about 5 patents out of every casual conversation I have with my fellow grad students each day. Is everyone in the judicial system completely oblivious to this insanity?
BDB has proper transactions, provides the same type-safety as sqlite (i.e. none), doesn't have to go through abstractions like JDBC (overkill for sqlite), is backed by Oracle, has pure java implementation, has replication.

Sqlite has columns and can search based on them. It can also save you a couple of lines on manual joins. Does it provide something more?

(although tbh, I'd take Tokyo Tyrant over both of them - has columns, writer lock + server-side scripts instead of transactions, same model of replication as BDB)
yeah. I thought it sounded pretty gay.
Context, man, context. That site design is running Ars Digita, Philip Greenspun's original community system (http://openacs.org/), circa 1995. If I recall correctly, Greenspun helped set it up. Full disclosure: I am at least partially responsible for a few tweaks to the GUI circa 2007 (constrained the comments, added the local menus (with optional thumbnails).

Here's all the CSS for that site:

.fullwidthtable {}

.forum {color: #CC0000; font-size: 11px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;}

.text { font-size: 15px; color: #000000;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;}

.textsm { font-size: 14px; color: #000000;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;}

.textxsm { font-size: 13px; color: #000000;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;}

.link { text-decoration: none; color=#CC0000}

.link:hover { text-decoration: underline; color: #CC0000}

.belink { text-decoration: none; color=#000000}

.belink:hover { text-decoration: underline; color: #CC0000}

.taglink { margin-top: 4pt; }
They're dealing with taxes (ie, money) and the comments are vague, so it could just as well be that the comments are coming from ungrounded n00bs who get blown about by the winds of every passing fad. I'd expect someone good at actually figuring out new technologies to be able to come up with some rather non-vague reasons to use them.
"... I'd be interested to see a list of all the 46 passages though ..."

There is more than 46 (725) ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fpaulgraha... If there is a pattern, could it be emerging from "asking questions", thinking, then finding non-obvious or surprising results? Reading through the authors site I found this gem also another explanation.

"... If one is convinced that mind is a computer program, or at least if one thinks of that as a fruitful metaphor, it may be helpful to think about these “thought-generating phrases” as function calls. They are like little labels that execute a useful module, or packaged set of computational instructions. And the point is, just having a label makes it easier to find the code, and therefore more likely that you’ll execute it. Which is exactly what you want if the code is worth calling. ..." ~ http://jsomers.net/blog/generating-thoughts

It quite possible the phrase, "it turns out" is also a thought generating phrase.
"how does this play with the thought that if an idea doesn't find enough traction in 3 months you should move on?"

Depends entirely of your definition of "enough". If anyone pays you only 1$ within 3 months of putting up a "Buy Now" button somewhere, you're onto something --- now grow it if and only if that "something" is what you can bear doing for the next few years to come.
The Art of Negotiation According to Pawnstars
Yes. Also, if your livelihood comes from the judicial system, it's in your best interest to keep it active.
Its also worrying that he does not want the best products for his family but only the ones in the Microsoft family. Somehow he seems to place his image as Microsoft's CEO above what his closest people think about him.

Strange bloke!
The Hit Men and the Startup
Except when you have pdfs that use certain funny image-compression things that make it look fantastic in Acrobat and xpdf-based viewers; Preview does horribly on those. I agree in general about Preview, though. (It might be jpeg2000; I just know that when my dad scans a book, it looks good in acroread and xpdf, but in Preview it's very slow and pixelated.)
You make some good points.

However, the original author's point basically boiled down to: if you define scalability as the problems you can scale an RDBMS to solve, RDBMS systems are scalable. I'm not big on arguing the finer points of someone's tautology.

The particulars of a situation determine the scalability of a solution. For a lot of us working at web scale or on interesting new problems, an RDBMS won't scale. Sometimes it won't scale within the constraints we have, but sometimes it won't scale because we won't be able to build the system we're trying to build. His example of a company-internal billing system really only served to highlight the disconnect between the crowd following along well-trod ground, and the people out front doing innovative work.
Usually "I stopped reading after..." is used as a metaphor, and the article still gets read.

In this case though, I really did stop reading after "as a matter of fact, any self-respecting programmer you’ve ever met is mostly self-taught."
Preview is good but I like skim a bit more. It has the note taking features and smooth zooming with trackpad pinch gestures. I cannot believe how fast it is too! Great app. One thing I wish it had though is the pdf editing commands that preview had to remove a page and concatenate different pdfs together.

Also: foxit reader is a great reader for window. Not quite as polished as skim but still the best reader I have come into contact with on the windows side of the fence.
The arrows at the bottom work for me on Chrome under Windows and an older build of Chromium on Mac.
My own survey of medical students suggests this is exactly opposite of truth: note-taking was strongly correlated with improved performance, and the class note-takers, the ones who compiled "official" notes for noteservice were the best prepared, while the consumers of noteservice actually fell below the median. Suggesting that if medical students were self-interested and well informed, then noteservice would be untenable.
The article makes a good point that Palm would be a good acquisition target with all its patents (they did rule the smartphone market for many years), relatively tiny market cap and uncertain position in the market (small player amongst many giants). It would be a bit out of place for google to buy them (ie buying a hardware company whose software can't fit in google's), although it may work as a talent (Jon Rubenstein) and patent acquisition in their fight against Apple.
Yeah, I know the price wouldn't change much. The real benefit I see is that Intel would have to stop disabling the ECC support on their desktop chips, and I'd have more choices available next time I'm up for a new computer.
Well, you should read his recent posts on why Frederic Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" was wrong:

http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2010/02/reliable-software-p...
Then how should I get started with Ruby?
"Ten Seconds": A useful iPhone app with almost no UI in ~500 lines of Obj-C.
To elaborate:
It's a camera timer app. Instead of waiting for Gorillacam to load and then fiddling with the timer menu, you just start up Ten Seconds and -ten seconds later- it takes a photo, then exits.<p>Full disclosure:
It <i>is</i> my app, but it's free (<i>and</i> ad-free) and shall remain that way forever. So I don't feel too bad about pimping it out to everyone.<p>Enjoy, and tell me what you think!
This guy is a crackpot. Everybody knows that Time Cube is the True Physics: http://www.timecube.com/
The genome is software and evolution is a software developer
Lets wait a few years until all the bells and whistles are bolted (in ad hoc, product specific manner (until someone invents ... a formal query language ;) in layers and tiers that take a NoSQL data store to a full blown database which requires management.

(Didn't we go through this with the XML hype? Wasn't it the "simple" golden nail? Have you checked out the "Simple" landscape of SOAP and W[TF]S-*?)

We're not living in past; its more like back to the future. (Just wait for it, and "No-NoSql" ..)
Not necessarily "hacks" per se, but Language Log is quite good: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
> "Citation needed."

And you have to hold your hands up to indicate [square braces].
Mr. Sokal, is that you? ;)
While SQL can scale, I think this argument is a little spurious.

I truly dislike the NoSQL stance of "never SQL;" it has its place, and its place isn't necessarily at the twitters or the facebooks of today. SQL scales very well with datasets that make sense for RDBMS. CRUD style applications. Core business apps. Data that doesn't necessarily need to be mined furiously. Trying to shoehorn, say, a high-volume message system or intensely self-referential (graph) dataset into an RDBMS is a recipe for disaster, however. Many of the performance issues people see with RDBMS seem to stem from this, I believe.

If your app is hugely real-time datadriven and the datamining (if necessary) can be offloaded to cron jobs, a K/V store is great. And can scale very quickly and relatively cheaply.

If you're doing something hugely relational that, if loaded into a SQL server would require an immense number of self-joins (I'm looking at you, graph analysis) that must be done in real-time and not offloaded to a cron job, a graph database is probably the way to go. They're harder to scale to a huge amount of data, but certain datamining tasks are made much easier - and don't require distributed map-reduce execution. Scaling will get much easier once some systems come out that use k-means (or similar) to cluster and shard the data. That kind of smart scaling would be nigh impossible on either a KV store or a traditional RDBMS. Google gets away with it with BigTable because they can throw so much cheap iron at it - a truly brute force solution. The same solution that needs to be taken with RDBMS when you shoehorn datasets into it that don't make sense.

Emil Eifrem (Neo4J) said it best in his presentation ( http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation-graph... ): NoSQL doesn't mean Never SQL, it just means Not Only SQL.
When Google released the Nexus One it revealed another very important strategic imperative for offering Android free of charge. Google realized that all the smartphone manufacturers were scrambling to build/acquire mobile operating systems that would stack up to the iPhone OS. These handset manufacturers were vulnerable, in other words, to the kind of offer Google would present to them in the form of the open source Android OS. They needed what Android had to offer and the risks involved with sacrificing so much leverage over to Google (by relying on a third-party company for a key component of their product) did not outweigh the benefits of the collusion-like behavior all these manufacturers planned on partaking in by together building-out a large mobile app store that could champion iPhone's app store. Now that Google has released their very own handset, the Nexus One, it's obvious why Google wanted as many Android handsets in hands as possible: higher the market share, more developers willing to build apps, the more apps in the Android app store the better the Nexus One looks in light of iPhone's enormously successful app store, the more Nexus One handsets Google will sell.

Google has always explained that they give Android away because it will encourage more usage of their web services. But after Nexus One, it's obvious Google has more of a vested interest in Android than just "the more people on the internet, the more money Google makes".
Earlier conversation on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161467
Portal Puzzles by Valve
Looks like a straight forward patent money grab. Apple just has to win on a few of these patents to negotiate a license fee with HTC. With one win under their belt they can extend it to other handset makers without too much trouble. All the sudden Apple is making some money off every cell phone sold as dumb phones disappear and get replaced by SmartPhones (or they just get smarter and infringe) Obviously Apple would never license iPhone OS to third parties so this seems like an attempt to simply license some of the technologies instead. I don't know the math but just based on the huge volume of cell phone sales alone it's gotta be worth a ton of money. If Apple loses in court other handset makers just continue to use these technologies and nothing changes. Unfortunately that's how the system works. Apple share holders were probably not too happy about the prospect of leaving all that money on the table.
This could be added fairly trivially, however, and it is easy to emulate inside your app. You still get the efficiency that spatial indexing provides either way.

From reading the documentation, this seems like a standard R-tree implementation, which is just a way to efficiently index two columns at once. If your dataset is two columns, x and y, a normal index could limit the xs efficiently, or limit the ys efficiently, but it couldn't limit both at the same time. This means you'd always have to do a scan over a large number of irrelevant records. The R-tree lets you get at the pair efficiently; you can get 2,2 without having to also look at 2,0; 2,1; 2,3; 2,... This is the performance benefit; if you want to know about all the coffee shops near 2,2, you can just retrieve 2,2 and not have to look at the rest of the dataset. If you need to implement wrapping, you can just retrieve the squares on the other side of the jump when someone requests records near the jump. This probably behaves differently for "things on earth" than on arbitrary two-dimensional datasets, so it is left as an exercise for the reader.

I assume. I have never had the occasion to implement (or even use) spatial indexes.
Presumably she meant dressing fashionably when not at work.
Hotel Excelsior website - Belgrade
And my anecdotal evidence contradicts your "intuition". Now what?
That's the main topic of the post under discussion. I give some advice about your question in the "the email" section at http://jrheard.tumblr.com/post/421656059/you-yes-you-can-tea... .
Well, Savain would say, "If the Turing Computing Model is as awesome as computer scientists make it out to be, why doesn't it solve the parallel programming crisis?"
Disclosure: I wrote the piece.

But yes, I agree. SeatGeek fits the model perfectly, in terms of applying analytics to publicly available data in search of non-obvious or otherwise difficult to intuit insights. Good mention.
I'm a freshman majoring in CS at Wisconsin-Madison looking for an internship this summer. I'm experienced in Ruby/Rails and PHP, and I have some experience in Clojure and Java. Location isn't too important. My email is rjsmith9@wisc.edu
Ask HN: Is it legal/easy for a foreigner to open a bank account in the US?
I have a website hosted in the US, sustained by adsense ads.

Adsense transfers my earnings to a local bank account, and every month I pay the hosting provider with my local credit card.

However I lose a lot of money transferring money internationally due to taxes and rate conversions, and I'm wondering if I could keep the money in the US without being a US citizen, without having to physically go to a US bank.

Does anyone have more information on this?
The light switch and moon examples are really bad. There's no good practical reason for either of those. Running your own startup can be a lot more fun than working at a big company, and running five miles every day is just good for you.

The drawing example is good, though. Reminds me of moral luck: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/
Discrete Math Problem Solving for Middle School Students
"[SQL deal for when] "Data consistency and reliability is a primary concern"."

I'm curious: lets say you have a tweeter scale app that must satisfy the consistency and reliability as a primary requirement. Is there really a NoSQL solution that can take you there without (effectively) raising the costs to the point that a scalable (money not an object) SQL solution would provide? (Kinda like how the difficult to extract North Sea oil became economically viable once oil prices crashed through a certain ceiling?)
its funny you say that, because I remember everyone saying that youtube was going to get sued into oblivion as soon as it was obtained by a company with deep enough pockets to make it worthwhile.
I've built two, and both were completely trivial compared to this. One took me about a week, the other took me and two other people about a month. (In both cases, working an hour or two each day.)

I can't imagine the work that must have gone into this.
Article Underground
You’re also going to discover why this is the easiest system for even a newbie or lazy marketer. This system is so easy to implement… if you can copy ‘n paste text, then you can make money online using this system… starting today!
True, but my sincere hope is to outgrow Postgres someday.