skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with you assessment, the individual could have intelligently reasoned that disarming the man would make him think twice before confronting another individual. If more individuals took that tack robbers would give more though to what used to be an easy crime. No to mention in certain parts of South America the punishment for robbery can be as sever as murder so if you are going to do it you might as well not leave witnesses. There are a lot of variables that go into the decision to fight and making the decision to do so does not necessarily mean that you have made a foolish or less intelligent choice.
In fairness, this chart plays directly to SQL's strengths by simply implementing built-in functions of SQL like SUM using MongoDB MapReduce. Clearly the MongoDB version will be more verbose in this case.

Because MapReduce is much more general than these few built-in functions, one could probably pick a task that would make the SQL version look horrendous compared to the MongoDB approach.
At least touch interfaces remove a level of abstraction that currently exists between moving a mouse on a desk and moving a pointer on the screen. A touch screen with tactile feedback (the iPhone already has vibration... more apps should make use of this) would be nearly ideal.
Hard to see how BEA & Sun can be considered losers (at least when it comes to tech) - for better or worse they are some of the most popular enterprise technologies in use, alongside Oracle.
Fluff. The author suggests reducing the duration of software patents to seven years as a solution to current problems. There are no other suggested corrections. This does nothing to address the "One-Click" class of software patents. Further, it doesn't even make a very strong case for why seven year software patents would actually solve problems. I'm pretty sure many software patent trolls sue within seven years. In addition, the author seems to be under the bizarre assumption that Chinese companies actually respect US patents.
Here's a project that's taking a crack at disrupting this situation: http://cappuccino.org/ I know there's a few others like this, but it's the first one that popped into my head.
It is. I have been trained in unarmed combat and it is relatively easy with a little training. I personally would be confident of disarming, with minimal or no injury, someone unfamiliar in handling a knife.

No, it isn't easy. I'm no expert, but I have been taught by a couple of experts. A 95% success rate is good. It's also really crappy odds when the other guy is trying to stab you.

Plus, you don't really know if the other guy is unfamiliar or not.

Someone I know who actually is very good with a knife had the following experience: someone broke into his home and attacked him with a knife. After getting stabbed once, he did successfully disarm his attacker and stabbed him. The attacker pulled out another knife and stabbed him again!

(Eventually the attacker fled after being stabbed a few times as well.)
It is. I have been trained in unarmed combat and it is relatively easy with a little training. I personally would be confident of disarming, with minimal or no injury, someone unfamiliar in handling a knife.

The 'minimal' is where your analysis goes completely out of the window. Wounds hurt; being hurt throws you off. Even a relatively undeep scratch with a knife can disable your hand. You can be trained all you want: you are not trained in fighting with a knife wound: when hurting and bleeding. This is why martial arts teachers all over the world tell their students: the best defense from a weapon is to run. If the change of getting hurt is 1%, it is too large. Hand over the money and run.
No.

I've never indicated making that assumption though. Ive discussed your response to a robber who you judge to be unskilled.

As I mentioned in the first post I indicated this is usually obvious (if they are skilled/unskilled) and if you are trained you will recognize this.

The easiest pointer is how they hold the knife - if they havge it out in front of them (pointed at you) they are probably unskilled. Skilled handlers will hold the knife at their side a few inches from their body pointed away from you at a 30 degree angle.

Unskilled handlers will also glance at the knife a lot (you can use this - time your attack to their glancing).

If the robber is skilled then, clearly, you need to make a different assessment

(and I guess then it comes down to "is he planning to attack me")
I see what you're getting at, but don't believe that it really has much to do with intelligence. It doesn't help that the analogy in this case is particularly bad. The guy who's a stand-in for someone pushing himself just went through the same training that everyone else from his country did.

I believe ambitious people find their way to things that challenge their abilities. I also don't believe that there's a strong correlation between intelligence and ambition.

It's that missing positive correlation that you seem to be getting at, and most people tend to assume exists, but by recasting it as a negative correlation it offends my sensibilities. ;-)
Dorun, doseq, doall
Probably no. But there is more complex psychology and economics involved:

http://www.jimmyatkinson.com/papers/ticketscalping.pdf
The chances of "winning" the physical fight could be insanely high, but it'd still make more sense to first try cooperation, to see if you could avoid the knife fight entirely.
Agreed. And it certainly doesn't address the other trade-offs that make the whole SQL/Not-only-SQL discussion fascinating. I just couldn't resist referencing this: http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png
For me, this is the money quote as I pasted it into my fortune file

I knew there were a lot of other people as
intelligent as I was, and who had all [the
same] advantages [as me]. The only way to be
successful then would be to gain a slight
advantage over them - I had to work and
train harder than they did, I had to get to
know more people than they did, I had to
learn more about more things that they did.

We started off equals, but at some point all
the effort I put in started to pay off, and
where they stopped improving themselves, I
continued, and I got better and better.
Where they were afraid to try new things
because they would fail, I tried and I got
better and knew more, till I was good enough
for the job I hold now.

I recently figured out that compounding interest works for personal development and business just as well as it works for money.
57: Compiz actually has a small hint of part of this with their rain effect. A "butterfly effect" would be awesome. References to chaos theory included.
> Wounds hurt; being hurt throws you off

In my other posts I talk about an important mantra: Be first, Be sudden, Be brutal. You should be able to take down the assailant before any wound would take affect.

If you cant do that then your not properly trained and you shouldn't be trying it :)

I cant speak for martial arts directly because my training is military/civilian response based.
Google kills bambi - Tputh random image
$0.99 iPhone apps are underpriced
597 Ready to use sales letters, Business letters and forms - Free eBooks
it wouldn't have to be a SPoF, you'd just replicate your server and add an additional record, if the client can't reach the first server it failovers (failsover? fails over?) to the next one.
I don't think it adds to the complexity too much and it's hardly going to be slow - it'd be much faster than the time it takes to send even the smallest email message.
There's more here than the calculus of survival. Consider your right to life and liberty. To surrender that is to become a victim. Some would honestly rather risk it than enter into that class. Its a personal choice. Americans used to be famous for their backbone. This thread leaves me wondering.
I kind of agree, but I was conceding the most reasonable argument to the parent.
I had the privilege of working for Joel in the late 70's (he was the EECS department chair at the time) sysadmin'ing their student DEC-20 and Lisp Machines.

A delightful fellow.
Wouldn't being really good at Django mean I could get a lot of stuff done in ten hours of Django development? If you hired an employee at your company, wouldn't you want them to get a bunch of work done, rather than learning a new technology? Doesn't a founder need to do a lot of work?

I'm just asking. I'm the opposite. Once I learn how to do something well, I'm bored, so just when I'm becoming productive, I'm off to the next challenge. However, I've really benefited from knowledge of a whide range of technology. Sometimes, while co-workers spend weeks doing something the only way they know, I use different technology to get the same thing done in a couple of days.
Bingo. That was exactly what we were shooting for.
The fact that using the most trivial of examples triggers a discussion in on itself helps to prove my point.

Nobody debates session.getUser(id)
the tripling is above what we would normally expect with a new version launch

I read that as, "Our daily download rate tripling is above what we would expect for a new version launch."

However, it is still off base to attribute it to the MS page - I downloaded the new version and have (at least temporarily) switched to Opera from Chrome due to the announcement here on Hacker Hews. I've never seen an Opera release here before, so that must count as a one-off too.
States, Innovate in IT or Else
They're both nice. Because the data modelling paradigms are so different, I don't see much point in trying to shoehorn SQL into MongoDB.

Consider the case where you're modelling blog posts with zero or more tags. In a relational database you'd typically have a posts table, a tags table, and a posts_tags join table. In MongoDB you'd have a posts collection with an indexed array key for the tags.

Searching for all the posts with the tag foo is just: db.posts.find({tags: 'foo'}).

Looks pretty nice to me. Why would I want to use a relational query language for a document-oriented database?
> someone broke into his home and attacked him with a knife.

Key point: he was under attack. This lowers your odds quite a bit.

Once your friend was wounded (I hope he was ok!) things go massively against him.

The aim is to suddenly and brutally disarm your opponent and then disengage. Leaving him either senseless or unsure what happened (and you out of range of a new attack).

> Plus, you don't really know if the other guy is unfamiliar or not.

I've dealt with this elsewhere - it's mostly about body language and if your trained you can note the signals.
Sorry, didn't realize YT vids aren't allowed? Wasn't posting because its an ad, just thought it seemed cool...
Whatever happened to programming, redux: it may not be as bad as all that
Just to remind people: It's 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. I recently heard the CEO of OpenTable speak. You know, the HUGE success, publicly traded, etc. Did you know it took them over 10 years to really figure it out. Few remember that.

As a reminder, you want to get in the market as soon as possible (a la lean startup) to iterate and learn and look for opportunities and pivot points. That's what we are doing at PackLate.com. We are happy with our progress already, but we are iterating at a VERY high rate of speed, always looking for our next opportunity for even greater traction. Even now, after our last minute vacation rental marketplace has only been open for a month, we see 2 major nearly game changing opportunities for our model that we'll be pursuing. It will take time and we know that. We TRY to have patience.

Steve Barsh
CEO, PackLate.com
@packlate
http://www.PackLate.com
Interesting, I wonder if my game purchases will migrate platforms too.
I guess my training revolved around the idea that the you should never surrender an advantage if you have it.

So my bias disagree's here :)

I suspect we are both right.
Valve teases Steam for OS X
Microsoft to spend $9.5 billion on research in 2010
So they got their wish. They got the EU to enforce a browser ballot to gain popularity because their marketshare blows. It's funny how Mozilla never needed to use government to get to the 25% marketshare they have.
Perfection By Subtraction – The Minimum Feature Set
IPhone case rehabilitation
There is fun and exciting work to be done still. The fact that most of us chose to work on boring plumbing has little to do with programming having changed; it became a more diverse field a majority of which is 'commoditized'.

So why complain? Go do something interesting. If the problems you are solving as your daily routine are themselves boring why would the process of solving them be any more fun?
LOL, hadn't seen that before. Very apropos.
From Hamming's "You and Your Research":

You observe that most great scientists have tremendous
drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell
Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or
four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey
was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and
I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's
office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much
as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put
his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said,
"You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know
if you worked as hard as he did that many years."

I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity
are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately
the same ability and one person who works ten percent
more than the other, the latter will more than twice
outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you
learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more
you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much
like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate,
but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly
the same ability, the one person who manages day in and
day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be
tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took
Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my
time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I
found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like
to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect
her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect
things if you intend to get what you want done. There's
no question about this.

The entire essay is well worth reading and makes many excellent points. It's been mentioned many times here on HN, and is one of the essays on PG's site:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515

http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da...

Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...
PyCon 2010 Wireless Network (success)
Swordfish - High-level persistent key-value database
True but that's a recommendation, not a requirement. Honestly most of the teams from last year had a bit of runway after the three month summer program. Granted our funding was different last year but founders need to be focused on capital conservation which is, I think, the point of the statement.
Well organized, well armed Somali pirates hijacking commercial vessels does not equal a guy with a knife robbing you.

Did you know the pirates actually have a code of ethics (ironic as that may sound)? Why have they never raped or killed any of their hostages? Because all they want is money. Pay up, and the hostages get let go. Thats how their operation works.

Don't even try to compare that to a back alley robbery.
Breast Milk Cheese recipe
Apple yanks Wi-Fi detectors from App Store
That mugger had all the signs of being a drug addict trying to get the money for his next fix. Here in São Paulo, professional criminals specialize in items with a better payoff, like laptops and motorcycles, and they rarely, if ever, act alone. Sometimes, only one approaches the victim, while his backup stands a few meters away.
Maybe the person just doesn't understand that data doesn't need "human" organizing in first place. It's us, the users, who make a mess out of it.

Files and directories were fit when we had 1 GB drives. Now, with a 1 TB standard coming for laptops, sorting data is just as complex as SETI. It's not the problem in the programs as much as in the inherited cruft knowledge of rapid acceptance of personal computers. An intuitive solution doesn't have to be explained, while I spent so much time explaining folders/files although it should have been obvious.

Indeed, "the only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." Now, I am not saying filesystems == nipples, but it's one hell of a goal to aim to for such a foundation in information management.

Although I wrote (long time ago) about sets/tags as a possible solution [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709814], I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. Lifestreams make more sense to me with each thought, as I can see how I would use it.

Thinking aloud - naming files doesn't make sense as 1) information can have multiple names dependent on the perspective, 2) information is divisible, so naming should be too.
I seem to spend way too much time on what I call "guessing the magic password"

It's always been this way, but lately it's gotten worse and worse.

You need to fix a problem. Your friends tell you about technology X which seems exactly what you need. So you pick it up, take a quick look at the samples, and wham! Within minutes the thing is working exactly like it is supposed to!

Well almost. There's this little part that's broken that ruins the whole thing and then you spend hours or days (yes, perhaps weeks) digging up obscure configuration documentation and tweaking APIs in ancient Klingon, sacrificing turtles to Ba'al or whatever else it takes to get the damn thing working like it's supposed to.

Then it's on to something new.

The funny part of this whole story is -- when your friends ask you about how programming in X was, you are more than likely to brag about how easy it was to solve your problem. After all, the bulk of the problem was fixed almost instantly. Don't want to look like a dweeb. And so the cycle of pain continues.
They indeed only needed to be the almost only free alternative to IE for a while, on Windows. Anyway, this "using government" is as good for Firefox as for Opera, no need to be condescending.
Past companies we've invested in are on the web site. They're around if you are in Atlanta and a bunch of them are also on Twitter.

It's hard to say how we're different without direct experience of going through the YC program. That said, all the partners of Shotput are successful entrepreneurs who have or are running Internet/tech businesses. There's a wide breadth of experience with the partners from the highly technical to the highly sales/marketing based.

That said - best way to get to know us (if you don't already) is to come to our office hours (one today and one on 3/24). Details on the site.
1. Every language under the sun would already have a client library for talking to it

2. Existing mechanisms for scaling HTTP (caching proxies, HTTP-aware load balancers) would work out of the box

3. HTTPS would be available if you needed it

4. You wouldn't need a new port assigned, and existing firewalls wouldn't need to reconfigured.

5. You wouldn't get people like me asking "why not just use HTTP?"
Ads Posted on Facebook Strike Some as Off-Key
Oh yeah, most of us don't have MBAs, BTW. I'm an exception. But I got mine AFTER doing my startup so I don't view myself as being pre-programmed for ridiculousness. :-)
Solzhenitsyn discusses this attitude extensively in The Gulag Archipelago, both from the perspective of standing up to government thugs that come in the middle of the night to arrest dissidents and when he notes the irony of how military officers recently pulled from the front lines were cowed by common criminals in jail.
You're audience probably will be larger on the iPhone OS. Plus, you might enjoy coding in Objective-C more than Java (for the non-OpenGL ES stuff).

I'm biased toward the iPhone, though.
Well, if you're looking up a name, for example from a dialer on a mobile device, or navigating through some kind of directory service; are you going to be happy hanging around for a HTTP request (or several)?

DNS was born to do this; it's lightweight, super fast and wonderfully distributed. :)
actually it's not true of cattle either.

We care about the individual cattle when we process it.

I.e. when it goes to the slaughterhouse we want to make sure it's not contagious, that it's not a kid cattle etc.

We might even group them males or females.

The answer is context not categorization.
Related, I think, to OP's point: Smart People Can Rationalize Anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-ration...
Smart People Can Rationalize Anything
jdietrich, you have EXACTLY nailed what I was trying to say (but in about 1/10th as many words as I needed). Thank you. I have linked to, and quoted, this comment in my followup article, http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-happened-to-... -- hope that's OK.
I think the mistake that some parents may make is failing to establish that simply being smart isn't good enough you actually have to do something useful with that intelligence to be rewarded in one way or another.
I wouldn't say that Ofer was pushing himself. He was superior to the guy with the knife, by virtue of his past training. It's like a brilliant lisp coder vs a mediocre C++ programmer. The C++ programmer will be much faster than the lisp programmer in achieving some task using C++, simply because he has past training.

So basically, the effort put in over time will keep you ahead of any competition, unless a person of superior inherent ability also decides to put in effort in the same area you are in.

Will an ambitious person always find something to challenge their abilities? I know many people who are ambitious - they talk about money all the time. But if you observe their actions, they are basically doing nothing, or doing something unimportant and easy.

I'm not convinced there is a correlation between ambition and an active search for things that are difficult to do. I'm sure there is such a subset of people, but the proportion compared to those who are content with not challenging themselves, I believe, is low. But I don't really know, that's just a guess.
On the one hand, this is pretty cool. On the other, I'll wind up wasting more time on HN now :) Good job.
Nokia never said Apple couldn't use GSM, they said they are the only large maker of GSM devices that don't pay a royalty for it. They were suing to make Apple pay up like everyone else.
Confucius Institute Online Expands Content and Traffic Capacity with F5
I think the people pointing out an alternative solution are just trying to join in the fun.
Unlikely!? Doing damage with a knife is tough? Yeah, 4 inches of steel in your chest is no problem, lol, walk it off.

Final point: There may be a time in my life where I get robbed with a knife wielder. I'll assess the situation, and I might even take action. But it'll still be the stupidest decision of my life, and I might have to pay for it.

ErrantX, you must be some sort of superman. I hope to God, for your sake, that no one armed maniac ever tries to rob you. Goooood night, take care.
It was one of those people that live under and around this thing: http://www.thebrazilshow.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/8bd00f7...
That's corporatism, which Mussolini named as a synonym for fascism (and is largely held to be a precursor to totalitarian rule).

It's also what we see today in the healthcare mess: private insurers buying off politicians and blocking any real progress.
The idea of total jobless-ness makes me think of a short sci-fi story:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm