skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My suspicion is that Facebook revenues could be much higher than they are letting on. I say that as a non-Facebook user and a fairly neutral outside observer. If they were being coy because revenues were actually too good, it wouldn't be the first company to do so. Google was coy about its revenue in the 2002-3 timeframe, and it surprised a lot of people when it was later revealed just how much they were making.

Here is my theory: Facebook's traffic, measured in terms of users or page views is about even with Yahoo. Facebook has the added advantage that every single page view is a from a logged in user, who has provided Facebook with a fair amount of personal information, far, far more than what Yahoo has. Facebook has considerable information from the users' profiles as well as their various activity streams that Facebook tracks. This should enable Facebook to target its ads more precisely than Yahoo can, and therefore achieve at least as much revenue as Yahoo. From an advertiser perspective, it would seem like Facebook, with its vastly superior knowledge of user behavior, should be a better bet than old-school Yahoo. Of course, Facebook probably hasn't pushed its sales efforts as hard as mature Yahoo; still, I would expect Facebook to be doing a goodly fraction of Yahoo's revenue, which is running north of $6 billion per year.

If you buy my theory, long term, Facebook should overtake Yahoo in revenue; in fact a lot of Facebook revenue will likely come by stealing advertisers from Yahoo. So the company with the most to fear from Facebook is not Google but Yahoo.
Judging by the TV's in the film, they had 9 or 10 goes at it, and still had 4 more TV's to go.
Eight Naïve Questions About Apple's Suit Against HTC
Does Postgres partition across a cluster? That's what we're talking about here.
Unfortunately, what you call incompetence a lot of other people call best practice.
I'd be more concerned with people doing it in essays.
eh, amazon was losing a billion a year at age 6. I'm sure facebook isn't losing even a 1/5th of that. They may even be near even money year over year at this point.
I think I know where he's coming from. Being unemployed when you just get out of college sucks in a big way, because you feel like you never got a chance. Partly because we hvaven't really had a chance yet, and because interview skills don't always correlate with job performace and interviews have a random component, people in my subgroup really would appreciate feedback, though I realize why that's imposssible. The parent poster is merely expressing a sentiment from my age group. Joel is really more of an innocent bystander that got caught in a generic rant.

I try to stay more upbeat about it though and work on a portfolio in the meantime so I'll get a competitive edge. Maybe you'll even see a startup by me in the near future ;-)
You'll probably be interested in the discussion on the below thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120820
"Cool, where did you learn that?"
Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection
I don't think it's possible to explain COSA such that we could understand it, because that would require designing it to an extent that its flaws would become obvious.

(Although Savain doesn't have time to finish designing COSA, he sure has plenty of time to write blog posts...)
I was really with this article, right up to this:

> If you lose a Status Update, or several thousand of them, it will likely go unnoticed.

What? If Facebook lost half of their photos, or of Twitter lost a few thousand tweets, there'd be riots in the streets. Okay, maybe not quite that much unrest, but still.
Just imagine some sort of ProTools, Ableton, FinalCut, or other interface on the iPad, connected to a Mac via USB. Or by wireless. Or a virtual Kaos pad :)
Well that ruins it for me. I always thought ship-in-a-bottles were much more awesome than that- i.e. you assemble the thing inside the bottle, rigging and all, using a stick and glue or something like that.

Sometimes the mystery... it's just better that way.
Maybe facebook will be one of those powerhouse private technology corps like SAS that make money hand over fist but stays private to do whatever the hell it feels like in terms of personnel benefits and R&D expenditure.
I don't think the original poster was making the argument that Twitter should run fine on a SQL database; in fact, I think he seemed to indicate the opposite. Namely, that large, nominally non-relational datasets that can afford to lose a little data here and there, or at the very least just take awhile to save it, are really what you need for serving up a big, fresh pile o' Social Networking.

So, bringing up Twitter or Facebook really doesn't make a good case against RDBMSes as a good tool in the toolbox -- they've got a very unique set of needs that don't apply to a lot of rest of the world. So, of course, SQL isn't the best solution when you're dealing with trillions of rows of data, and don't really want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the infrastructure required to guarantee that you never go down, and never lose a tweet.

And keep in mind, RDMBS helped them get to point where they could enjoy these problems; Twitter probably wouldn't exist in all its current glory if they spent a year building it to be 'scalable' before launching.

I think the reason that a lot of people end up hating RDBMS and SQL is because of one-or-more of (a) their only experience is with MySQL, which really isn't that awesome; (b) they've been burned by bad schema design; or, (c) they don't really get relational algebra or set theory.

For an example of 'bad schema design', I once worked at a company that had indices on nearly every column of their DB, even though almost none of these ever got queried. There was one database table with five indices on three columns, and of course this was the table that logged every single HTTP request processed by the front end. Including API calls. Did I mention that this table was never queried by any part of the application?

It was a poor design decision, and sure enough, it completely torpedoed performance. But the problem wasn't the RDBMS, because it did exactly what it was told to do, no matter how asinine.

So, in short, RDBMS aren't the solution to all problems, but they do solve a lot of problems adequately. NoSQL databases also serve an important role in the toolbox, but are much more narrowly-focused.
A less troll-y overview: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm

I don't buy the argument that textual code is a remnant of our mathematical past and visual programming is the future. Surely our writing systems are just as text-based and yet, I don't see anyone proposing we supplant them with pictograms.

Aside from that, many problems are simply not suited to an event-based model, just as many problems are not suited to functional models and others are not suited to imperative models. There is not, and will never be, a one size fits all approach to development.

The reason software is so susceptible to errors is nothing to do with the model of its development, but rather that bugs can be "hidden" until the program is running, and commonly much longer after that. This is why you rarely get bugs in CSS, HTML or PNGs - the full results of modifications can be seen in near real time. When you do get bugs in HTML or CSS, they are browser issues or issues with resizing - things that are not immediately apparent.

Importantly, any programming environment sufficiently well equipped to be useful, will always have places to hide bugs. Event-based programming does nothing to address this, in fact I think it provide more bugs.
I'll take jacquesms position on that bet. You game to double down?
A fair point. My datasets have been relatively small, topping out at less than a gigabyte. I didn't have any crashes in production, and I had a small enough database that I could export the whole thing to the file system every six hours. Dumping and restoring from that dump was fast.

10gen has delivered, time and again. They're looking at ways to be smarter about replication, and I am confident that by the time I need that level of durability, they will have brought the product up to where I need it to be.

The additional productivity I feel I get from MongoDB is, of course, balanced by the knowledge that I am working on a platform that is a bit of a moving target. It's been a wild eight or nine months in some ways, but I've been thrilled with both the product and the relentless drive from 10gen to improve an already kick-ass tool.
I don't think using the phrase "it turns out" is intrinsically deceptive. Pragmatically it's just declarative sentence + expression of surprise.

I'd be interested to see a list of all the 46 passages though. I wonder if there are patterns.
how long of a response do you want on this? i've got lots of theories.

i suppose you can make this argument for any top engineering school, but anyway:

1. the economy is starting to pick up - the activity on the eecs jobs list is crazy. hundreds of emails a week for any possible hott tech job you could imagine.

2. there's a pretty palpable division between the business school and the rest of campus. another topic entirely, and one that's likely been debated ad nauseam on HN.

3. people at mit are not short on opinions, and some would-be entrepreneurs have trouble handling it when someone (especially a professor they respect, for example) tells them their idea won't work. see #1, rinse, repeat.

4. there's also the whole east coast/west coast theories on startups + entrepreneurship that's relevant here as well. i wouldn't say acceptance of failure is "alive and well" on the east coast.

5. the e-center at MIT has undergone almost a complete makeover (both ideologically and physically) in the past 6 months with the new managing director, and hopefully there's more to come in the next few years.
> There are plenty of databases that will partition data without giving up any SQL features, but they cost money.

They also either rely on a single huge SAN for storage (single point of failure + expensive as hell) like Oracle RAC, or they require specialized gear like infiniband to reduce intra-node latency like Exadata (starting price: seven figures) or they're analytics databases that are designed for huge queries with latencies to match like Vertica, ParAccel, etc. (Think minutes between data being loaded and being available to query.)

I'll take NoSQL, thanks.
If everything that you say above is true, then why is the US health care system so fucked? Huge amounts of spending, very little return, much poorer outcomes for most people than other countries, etc, etc.

You're not making much sense, and I can't help but notice that you're not providing any sources for your opinions either. If you're not going to comment on the sources I've mentioned above, or provide some that support your opinions, then there's not much point in continuing the discussion.
Chromium 4.0.249.78 (36714), Arch linux, installed a week or two ago (so pretty much the latest)

Works perfectly; it's just you.

Have you tried sending just a plain text file of maybe a KB max to yourself? Perhaps google is blocking whatever you're trying to send; have you done the same in firefox? Or on a different operating system?

... wait, this is HN, not a Chrome support site/helpdesk. Perhaps you should ask them? Submit a bug, try to reproduce the issue on another system, etc.
> I'm curious how services like Amazon's RDS will change this perception.

It won't. It's just hosted MySQL.
The infinite injury article is (IMO) complete hogwash. Its author assumes (but never explores or explains the assumption) that there's some unidirectional arrow of improved understanding and pedagogy through time (“progress”) and that therefore modern explanations are inherently more sophisticated/subtle/polished than the original grapplings with a subject.

What he misses is that the seminal papers in any field are forced to really grapple with a subject for its own sake, while later works fetishize dogma and ceaselessly pander to the interests of whoever is paying for the work to be done, simplifying concepts to be understood by those of uncertain prior experience, and packing in features (ooh, glossy pictures! companion website!) that will sell copies.

There are some areas where studying the originals is not especially helpful, because subjects weren’t yet understood. For instance, the founders of quantum mechanics really had no clue what was going on at the beginning, and their early papers are mishmashes of math pulled from other sources which sometimes fortuitously explained their experimental results. So by all means, go grab Townsend’s Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics (2002) as a more practical and informative work.

In other areas, the famous “originals” (which is to say, those works which were good enough to last centuries while their contemporaries faded into oblivion) are wonderful. There’s much more insight packed into Machiavelli, Tocqueville, or James Madison’s writing than any modern political science textbooks.

And yes, economics as a field would be way better off if its practitioners had any idea what its foundational assumptions were about, or tried really deeply considering (e.g.) Smith, Veblen, Marx, or Keynes (or even, say, Von Neumann and Morgenstern), who had a real world to answer to, not just other economists.
Yeah, boy, Facebook sure is in trouble.
RDS doesn't scale at all. The performance of RDS won't exceed that of MySQL running on a "Quadruple Extra Large" instance (because that's what RDS is).
typical of most bay area startups ?
Or sometimes by the user, if they're sneaky. Or tech savvy. Same thing most of the time.
I've run a few medium sized sites (with traffic most people here would drool over) and I would say that people are much more forgiving of slow pages than lost data. Losing a few forum posts would cause riots in the streets.
A More Balanced Look At Barefoot Running
4 mistakes we’ve made as fresh engineering graduate doing web start-ups
Just like everything else, the decision's based on nothing but trade-offs. Here's my analysis.

If you learn PHP:

* You'll be able to see results running in your Web browser a lot quicker

* Your knowledge will be really relevant if you're looking to work on slightly older, more established Web sites like Facebook or Yahoo!, but

* You probably won't learn very good programming practices on your own - PHP has been pretty notorious for this, but maybe this has changed with PHP5, I haven't been keeping up.

If you learn Ruby:

* First you'll have to learn the language, and then you'll basically have to learn a framework like Sinatra or Rails before you'll be able to do awesome Web things

* Your knowledge will be really relevant to most startup-style Web sites begun since 2005 or so (e.g. Yelp, which is written in Python, which is basically sort of like a sister language to Ruby, give or take)

* You'll be much more likely to learn a lot of really good programming practices as you go that will serve you throughout your career.

Having worked with both PHP and Ruby, I'd recommend Ruby, because I think it's easier to learn, it's more fun, and it's a better investment; I'm pretty sure most HNers would agree if given the choice between those two languages, but your sample of respondents is probably pretty biased :)
I know about and keep up with this topic because of my background. It's not the result of a casual google surf.

Hartman's work with over 100 world class athletes is "real data". Aside from that, there's a great deal of literature about overpronation, probably the most common bio-mechanical foot defect in runners from rich countries. Additionally, has been conducting research about this topic for a while. In fact, the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation published a couple of months ago, saying that running shoes often increases joint torques at the hip, knee and ankle. Their study did include athletes and did look at long term bio-mechanical defects in those who wore sneakers of varying degrees of padding.

You may not be able to find all of this data for free from your computer desk, but it does exist.
A summons for jury duty is one obvious example.
We used to have a joke like that at CMU as well http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/djj/architectsLeap.html

Stopped being funny when someone committed suicide there
Something else to remember is that when they get acquired, depending on where you moved to as they grew, you're left with a crappy payout and either get eliminated by the buying company or you're stuck with a well below market rate salary stuck at the company's "max annual increase" which usually tops out at 10%. Essentially, get salary reevaluation at set intervals locked into a contract with the salary adjustments only allowed upwards and based on your past and company performance.
The disconnect here is that only a tiny percentage of sites on the Internet have the requirements of Twitter and Facebook. They are outliers. Using them as an example here is ridiculous.
As someone who actually spends a lot of money on Facebook ads and thus has a little more insight on where those revenues are coming from, I'll take jaquems side too.

A significant portion of that increase in revenues is due to ad policy changes and deals with branders rather than any type of growth that could be sustainable in the future.
Ok, I didn't understand that.
Maybe you don't have a monitor big enough? :)

(I merge conflicts by inline markers too, which might mean that like you I'm simply Too Old. But for a vanilla diff Meld is pure win.)
I'm not sure why, these days, anyone would choose Berkeley DB over something like sqlite.
Your Finger Length Ratio And Its Oddities
This reminded me of the nerd/geek/dork method of categorization (or perhaps stereotyping):

http://www.goingthewongway.com/208/difference-between-nerd-g...

You can be an extreme of either, or more likely a custom mix of all three. The thinking goes not all combinations necessary mesh perfectly with one another.
I like the article, but the first comment left on it is telling:

I've been dealing with vague "we should use NoSQL" comments from a few of the less capable members of the team.

This appears to be a common attitude of development managers in the corporate world: that anyone who starts suggesting anything vaguely "new fangled" is surely a naïve novice.. rather than being good at picking up and investigating new technologies.
follow us on twitter @pickemfirst to et a notification when our Chrome extension is released.
Man, this is the first time I've stumbled on a netkook page that doesn't have huge blocks of 28 point times new roman and blue underlined text that isn't links.
If I hadn't read your previous HN post, I would have no idea what your site does. It needs more descriptive content to clarify the immediate benefits of your app.

If you're running it on Adwords, unless you want your campaign slapped in a few days, you need:
1. More text on page
2. Privacy policy/ contact us on bottom
3. Basic SEO- top keywords in h1 tags or at least in text
Nike Dunk High Back to the Future II Custom (horrible pack)
What does Synn labs DO? This is amazing. I don't think anything I've ever done could possibly be as hard as that shot.
As a side, I was struck by the really nice use of the css property 'text-shadow' on that site.
I've heard it said that 'perfectionist' is a misnomer -- because in fact we are not focusing on the perfection but on the imperfection...
This entry scores very high on the crackpot index ( http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html - replace some scientist notables with computer-science notables) and is generally just funny.

It did make me start to think though about one reason I enjoy computer science (or the engineering side more specifically) - it tends to be much easier to get traction on good ideas than many other fields. For the most part, good ideas in computer science are self-evident, and easily adopted by practitioners. Too easily sometimes- without enough scientific method being applied. Of all scientific fields, computer science would be the _last_ one I'd accuse of engendering blindness to obviously good ideas. A cadre of older programmers dictating to the younger generation how to think about programming? Seriously, lol (:
I like FoxitReader. It's non-free, but it does do facing pages continuous, which is great for reading on widescreen monitors.
The challenge of training new developers
Would it be smart of Google to buy HTC? Many people speculated that YouTube would have been sued to oblivion had Google not bought them.
Details about the video:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/
75k is not bad, considering "abt 4 years of experience". I would say make sure to enjoy working there before anything else.
Unfortunately, managers who aren't defensive about new technologies end up working with XML databases! Not all new technologies are better and certainly the benefits of NoSQL are up for debate.
At 22, I'm also part of "this age group."

If being unemployed just out of college is such a problem for the young man (and that's not unreasonable), he should drop the attitude of "I'm pretty particular about what kind of work I want to be doing, and that makes me a poor fit for most jobs". If he doesn't want to work or only wants a very specific job and can't get it, that's reasonable. Just don't complain about it. Otherwise, this young man who believes himself highly qualified should take a job that's reasonably satisfactory as opposed to perfect until the "Worst Recession Ever" is over. There are a lot of people out there who'd kill to be in his position.
Whats the current valuation of the startup? Raised money? Profitable?
Thanks for the response. I'd prefer to learn Ruby over PHP but I'm hesitant because it seems like PHP has a larger audience / more documentation that would help me in my quest to create web apps.

Googling for help with errors in PHP would be easier I imagine, seeing as more people know PHP. Also, there are a lot of existing PHP scripts that I could build off of.

Those are my concerns.
"One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well… to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship."

Thanks for pointing this out.
It seems to be more of an attempt to attract attention.

Synaptic were working on Multitouch sensors before Apple Patented, and researchers have been for years before Apple too.

And looking at the patents, they are obvious. Hopefully Apple don't win this.
Using the word "is" is troublesome. It spares the writer of any need to explain his/her authority in making such a statement.
eg "This article is not useful."
Wanted is a terrible example because it's a terrible movie. All that proves is that you have bad taste in cinema.

At least go with an example like... Wedding Crashers or Old School, or Bad Boys if it has to be an action movie.

ANYWAY, games are not a geek exclusive thing anymore (at least not if all of the frat bros I used to know in college are any indication). Comic books still are somewhat, but there is an ever growing independent movement that's causing the interested parties to become more diverse. Science Fiction is clearly no longer niche since like, 9 out of 10 of the top earning films are Science Fiction or Fantasy.
Roger Ebert debuts his 'new voice' on 'Oprah'
I'm sensitive enough to criticism and guilt that I actively avoid people a lot of the time. I didn't blink reading that. It makes sense to me.
Can someone explain why Protocol Buffers (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/) is not being used more widely?? It it 'cause of the limited language support (Java/C++/Python only) or some other reason??
Sometimes even an “intuitively hand-waved” proof substitute, it turns out, is well beyond the scope of the course.

(Then again, I’ve had uncommonly thorough math courses, and would likely share your frustration.)
How the Rube Goldberg machine Was Built: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/