skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. With his mother willing to sign a waiver releasing the school of any liability and being willing to go with him, at her own expense, I think they should allow him to go. Without those two things, I think they're perfectly justified in saying "no" but with both of those in place, he should be allowed to go and study.
Ask HN: How do you best prepare for a programming test?
What are the best ways to prepare for a test of programming, computer science concepts and algorithms? Can you recommend books to read, good websites and relevant problem sets, to prepare for that all important programming test. I have a computer science degree and several years of work experience, but think that I need to review some things a little to perform at my best.
Web Laureate Classic: "Microsoft: Bye Bye Bill"
Absolutely. Facebook. Google. All great examples of the need for a different solutions. But I'm not sure about Digg. It seems like a very straight forward implementation would work for them. But given the small amount of information they've provided about their setup, it doesn't sound like they've ever gone for one.

Compare them to StackOverflow, which at recent evidence, has about 10% of the traffic of Digg. They're running a very straight forward RDBMS configuration on rather pedestrian hardware. If Digg has a 50 node cluster (for example), StackOverflow should require at least a 5 node cluster.
For people deploying to cloud services, in-cloud latency is all the same no matter who the app/database provider is.

For instance, Heroku and MongoHQ are both using Amazon Web Services, so it wouldn't increase the latency to swap a MongoHQ database instance for a Heroku one.
Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs
It is really impossible to argument something based on the fact that people that are supposed to be very smart are doing it.

There's been a strong undercurrent of posts which basically consist of ad hominem "non-SQL databases are only for idiots who can't figure out how to manage an RDBMS properly". Pointing out that there are people who very definitely are not idiots and who can manage an RDBMS quite effectively, but who feel non-SQL databases are still appropriate for their use cases is, so far as I'm concerned, an acceptable rebuttal to that.
It's moving to India!

That's a freer country, right? If not, please enlighten me.
A Review for Developers: Ben NanoNote
Increasingly it seems that "entrepreneurship" is becoming synonymous with "internet software startup," which I find very troubling. It's critically important to recognize that web startups are in a unique position compared to almost every other type of business.

In a web startup it can often take roughly the same amount of time to make a first version of the product as it would to write a business plan. When time to make a product or a plan are equal, the relevant question becomes obvious: Will I learn more from making and testing V1 or from making a business plan? But there are very few other business categories where there is parity between the resources required to write the business plan and the resources required to create the product. For example, I work on electro-mechanical systems which often have multi-year development cycles. In our case the relative cost of a business plan is very low, even if we only gain 10-20% additional knowledge about the venture.

The value of a business plan is also likely to be tied to the volatility of the market that the business is entering. Web-based businesses are outliers in terms of market stability as well. Given how quickly the web is changing, a plan would likely contain outdated information before it was even completed. But if you're starting a restaurant the costs are much more stable and there's no reason you couldn't figure them out before spending any money.
Isn't that SimpleDB?
Did anyone call the number? (415) 315-9375

I am so tempted but can't right now.
Anyone who hasn't realised that shouldn't be allowed near a compiler.
I found I can listen to music so long as it doesn't have lyrics (non-lyrical vocals are OK). When I was in college, I had a special playlist of wordless electronica I would use for writing essays.

Someone once told me that there was a study showing that most music tends to decrease work effectiveness, but classic music actually increases it (I do not have a link). Sadly, I'm an uncultured boor and while classical music sounds pleasant it's not my favorite by a long shot. I compromised by including some techno remixes of classical compositions in my essay-writing playlist.
Top Online Services to Encrypt Text Messages
Writing link bait is a legitimate job skill, it's harder than it looks and the execution environment is flakier than any javascript engine.
There's no SQL behind Hacker News, the persistence code is custom and straight-to-files.
I completely do not understand this sort of thinking. It's like saying, "All you people driving motor vehicles: trains are better". It's a meaningless comparison. NoSQL systems are really great for certain things. RDBMS systems are really great for certain things. What I would really like to see is if all this effort writing these kinds of articles went into well-thought out pieces that discusses very specific cases NoSQL backends provide an advantage and why. Use cases that are not a blog, digg, or twitter clone would be most helpful. Some of us have to work outside the bay area for companies like banks, insurance companies, hospitals, etc... Can I use Cassandra as a data warehouse for electronic medical records? Hell if I know, without actually having to learn it and implement it to see if it works.
Many (perhaps most) hard problems don't need to be solved from scratch; rather, it is a matter of applying a well-known solution that somebody has already found.

The example in the article is a good one: there's absolutely no need to attempt to design a Sudoku-solving-algorithm from scratch (except as an exercise), and it is pitiful to see Ron Jeffries flailing around aimlessly in TDD-land when a simple trip to Google would have done the trick.

The difficult part, the part that comes with experience, is recognizing which class of problems the specific problem you are grappling with resembles. In the case of Sudoku, it's an "exact cover problem", and once you realize this, all kinds of solutions present themselves.

In this way, the "incremental progress" is not made on attempting to solve the problem incrementally, but by incrementally sifting through probably solution-spaces for known algorithms.
Yeah, I'm a little surprised that Digg has moved away for performance reasons. Maybe their data model is fundamentally more complex than StackOverflow? Or maybe SO has a better caching layer in front of the service?
I would start attending a user group. Linux, Java, functional programming if you can find one, any group with users that are passionate about technology outside of work. At the very least, you should be able to find like minded people.
You read for a whole 3 minutes? I'd call that a success on his part. And if the grammatical errors stopped you from reading further, then perhaps you're not his target audience ;)
Oh, and a lovely nugget in his "about":

Do You Have Favorite Sport?

We don't play paintball here. I like to go to Bosnian woods and kill some wolfes. I also take some clients with me to the woods.
my fav quote from his about

http://www.rainfall-daffinson.com/about/

What is the Best Moment of the Day?

It's a Monday after you spend whole weekend canal digging at friends farm. Web design is for pussies.
There is the difference in legal responsibility of the university. I think this is probably the biggest stumbling block here - even with parental consent there is risk to the school.

Imagine facing the newspaper headline "UConn loses 13-year-old prodigy in South Africa" . . .
How cheap do you want that computer ? Because pretty sure you could get an older Mac.

Also -- HTML5 and Javascript-level frameworks such as phonegap.com seems to gather some following. You might want to look into that.

I've written a few apps and even published a few but, in retrospect, none were so complex that I really needed to use Objective-C. As long as you have access to all the features (ie. camera, accelerometer, etc) Javascript might be the way to go. The only situation I think you really need Objective-C is for the Open GL ES part but rumor has it that the canvas on Mobile Safari uses that.

In conclusion, I think using a Hackintosh to develop for the iPhone/iPad might be just a way to find yourself a challenge, unless you plan on using your existing PC-hardware. Buying new PC-hardware instead of a mac isn't logic. But the side conclusion is that using the SDK itself might be unneeded for most of the common apps.
The design is clean, I like the concept. I didn't see attribution for each photo, did I miss it? I wouldn't feel comfortable visiting the site everyday if you don't give credit to the photographer.
Very Cool !!!
Facebook proposing another set of revisions to its privacy policy
Broadband Speed
"Can any of you remember what this feels like, as a young developer with no credibility? Have you ever been there? Can you just empathise?"

I still feel like this often after 17 years of professional programming. Don't worry about it.

"How do you guys find MENTORS and ROLE MODELS?"

The internet allows you to learn from the best. Peter Norvig, Paul Graham , john Carmack, Linus Torvalds( my role models in programming , you may choose others) all have code and prose online. Dive in.
macbooks are real hackingtosh notebook
Augmented Reality Real Estate Listings
I just noticed the attribution is missing on the photo page, but present on the homepage. If you were only going to do one, it seems the one that would benefit the photographer them most is on the photo page - because likely that will be the one that is indexed and possibly found on your site later - thus the link would help them.
Thoreau spent a year in the woods, but he was not an anchorite by any stretch of the imagination. Besides being a civil libertarian he was also an accomplished engineer who developed pencil making machinery and built milling equipment.
The point of the SWA article though, is that airlines don't seem to realise that people carrying masses of carry-on onto the plane slow down the boarding/exiting so much they delay the flight and cost far more money than handling bags would.

Also it isn't the baggage fees with Ryanair so much as the price you pay is completely unrelated to the advertised $1 price for the flight. You can only find all the taxes and fees once you have completed the booking - they have even sued external price compare sites which show you the full price. They are constantly being investigated for this under various Eu consumer laws.
I've never once checked someone's credentials to assess their credibility. I assess credibility by whether the person in question writes/speaks correctly, clearly and creatively.

I know nothing of Jon Skeet's credentials, but he still commands respect because his answers on SO are almost always correct, clear and creative. He doesn't answer when he doesn't have anything to say, and when he does answer, he not only answers the question but answers the questions that his answer will raise. Who he is doesn't matter. What he does matters.

I don't imagine I'm atypical in judging the credibility of developers. If this is how we judge the credibility of others, why do you expect your credibility would be judged differently? How do you start building your online credibility? Start having something creative to say and saying it correctly and clearly. For me at least, that's all there is to it.
racket n. an illegal or dishonest scheme

Makes perfect sense.
I don't think you will get customers to ditch the competitors product they are already using for yours unless these extra features are a game changer for the customer. If you cut features and just work on what you need to be on par with the competitor you will just be a little later to market, and you can continue working on the remaining features. If you wait to finish your extra features, the competition will already be picking up those customers you could of had if you released early. Ultimately it depends on if those features are something you consider to be at the core of your business, if they are then maybe you are right.
Copy: http://kegoconsulting.com/

Looks like "rainfall" was his first shot, and "kego" was his second according to whois
I don't think the the 50-node cluster mentioned in the article is for Digg -- it's for http://simplegeo.com. :)
There is a difference between personal privacy (which does not affect others) and government secrecy (which affects many people).

If the military/police force killed people, whether those people are terrorists or civilians, the deed should be reported and let the public decide whether it's good or bad.

Maybe the public decide killing a few civilians in a war is acceptable and voted in agreement, who knows?
Anyone have a write-up on the limitations of html5 webapps vs. native apps? eg. push-notification only available through native apps?
It's very fun how basically most people agrees about this subject, that both systems have their strong and weak points (for example i don't think i've seen many articles saying that facebook/amazon should have kept their whole system running on rdbms), but still the endless queue of blog posts goes on. Isn't this a case of violent agreement , as per http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ViolentAgreement ?
how are you doing distribution? by hand or is that outsourced?
It is a direct response to the article discussed previously in this YC thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1216833
But it doesn't give them much negotiating power with Boeing.

That's why Easyjet recently bought a bunch of A320s, you can bet the next round of shopping at Boeing will be a lot more interesting.
Instant Mail Notifications Using Node.js
Geeks On a Plane
Obviously its not a water-tight proof but its generally safe to assume a correlation between smart people and intelligent implementations.
The Big Picture: Robots
From personal experience, I highly highly recommend hackintoshing a standard laptop and not a netbook. The netbook screen size is just too small to do anything productive in it. Just try imagine coding in a window a quarter the size of the laptop you're looking at right now. Fun, huh?

Hackintoshing a netbook is really just for fun and novelty.
I was planning on getting a Dell Mini 10 to put OSX on it but literally a day before paying for it Apple release some update that killed support on Atom CPUs. Nowadays I think it's working again but it showed me that perhaps it won't be as streamlined as I though.

The iPad might be a good replacement for an OSX-capable netbook, even if it's just running iPhoneOS.
Mamet's view on "acting" is not an uncommon one among playwrights.

Tom Stoppard was once asked what he wanted most in an actor, and he said "Enunciation."
Haptics Gaming Vest Simulates Punches, Gunshots
Can I use Cassandra as a data warehouse for electronic medical records?

I don't think people building those systems are supposed to talk about them...
Couldn't agree more. Lately I've read through some code in a language that I never used before. But what I have learned from reading the code has had a significant impact on the way in which I write my own code.

In my case I was reading some Clojure code. Functional programming was something I had never really done much of. But after reading through code and programming in it, I can say that it has significantly impacted the way I both write and read Ruby code (not that I'll try to do functional in Ruby though :).
Good point, but the iPad is still a far cry from an OS X netbook in terms of extensibility. I still think Apple would have a market for a small, cheaper-than-macbook laptop. That said, I pretty much only use my Eeepc as an "internet appliance" anyway...
use whatever makes your product useful!
and appengine
Really? That’s where you want to go? It’s the author’s fault that people here talk (mostly) rubbish for trying to make his post look great (even if he falls short)? I don’t quite follow.
Yes. (puts on coach uniform)

I started with nothing -- no degree, no money, no job, no home. Nothing.

Here's what you do: forget the role models and mentors. By the time you find them life will have passed you by. Or you'll get one and he/she will turn out to be a dud. Instead learn to read boring books. Not only read them, but learn to read them and get something out of them.

Then go on a reading spree.

Pick a topic that seems hard to you. I think my first one was Object-Oriented Programming. Something that "real" professionals would know.

Get 6-10 books on that topic. Make it a point to finish them all within 4 months.

Do this a few times. Whatever you do, pick what you think you need to move up. Don't stick with a narrow area. One of my excursions was negotiating. One was marketing. I spent a summer learning C++. I just finished up a sprint with functional programming. I tried to concentrate on the things in which I was weak, assuming my strengths would take care of themselves.

Do this, and I guarantee you that within a couple of years, you'll be moving out/up/on.

But it's hard work. And (smart) hard work, padawan, is what separates the real achievers from the stuck-in-the-same-job complainers. Now let's get out there and kick some ass!

(takes coach uniform off)
I wish he'd come up with some rules for fighting his own suck. I mean, he hasn't witten anything really good since Glengarry Glen Ross.
NoSQL/NoREL is a tradeoff of features for performance. If you don't need certain features and you can make the trade and need the extra performance than it can make sense for some people. I don't think it applies to everyone. They made the decision that was best for them and congrats on that.

Also I can say rotational disks may not provide the economics that make RDBMS seem attractive—but FusionIO cards have really changed that. And I didn't just read the datasheet and get a nerd boner. I watched the queries from 8 beefy physical database boxes (that were getting hammered) combined onto one physical box that was identical in all ways except it had an FusionIO card. It handled 8x the number of queries with ease and could have taken a lot more punishment. Yes, the cards are expensive but in the scheme of getting rid of 7 servers it was actually saving significant amounts of money.
Why would these kind of details be better kept in secret?
I'm confused... What the hell is this guy babbling about? Is he trying to sell us his services as a web designer? I hope he doesn't expect to be writing any ad-copy.
Just try imagine coding in a window a quarter the size of the laptop you're looking at right now. Fun, huh?

I do this on an OLPC and a "normal" MSI Wind netbook.

It's not bad, if you have a large crisp font.
You may want to try STATE AND MAIN.

It juxtaposes his typically 'cold' direction and odd locution rhythm with a pretty clear statement of his position on acting and emotion.
Things learned from building a best of class enterprise product and trying to beat out the competitors. We were the last entrant in the market.

(i) List all completed features. - Guarantee these will work now & compare & contrast with your current competitors. Preferably give them a testing environment after the demo.

(ii) List all features currently being developed. - Estimate when they will become available. Make sure you fudge enough, so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot.Share this road map during the sales cycle.

(iii) Request your clients for any features that are important to their business, that you have overlooked.

(iv) Make a list all future features including the ones from the above list - Request your clients to prioritize these and give them a date by which you'll have the estimates done and have built a product roadmap. Share the roadmap.

(v) Be in constant communication with the clients. Keep them aware of any changes that is happening to the roadmap.

With all this we got beaten up on pricing as the clients were comparing apples to oranges.

So we hired sales people with expensive hobbies, and watched them work the magic.
Wow, that is one of the most unintentionally poorly written articles I've ever seen.
They wouldn't, but often times certain regulations may require it.
Ah, you mean 3rd party access to gmail via IMAPOauth. I forgot about services like threadsy that do just that.
I know brazil's biofuel process is based off cane. Wonder if beets would work too.
You're talking about promotion. Equating "marketing" with "promotion" is a common misconception. Promotion is part of marketing, but so are place, pricing, and (at least some aspect of)[2] product development. [1] When you're talking about adapting a film to different languages and different screen formats, you're talking about product and place. You're still talking about marketing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#Four_Ps

[2] Obviously product development in most fields contains a lot of engineering, design, filmmaking, etc. It's pretty fuzzy, but the kind of stuff in this article--adapting to different screen sizes and languages--is definitely on the marketing side.
Here's the issue with this entire topic:

1. It's not just which can do reads/writes better--it's not apples to apples, it's apples to oranges. You're right.

2. If you look the type of reads Cassandra can do and the type of reads MySQL can do. MySQL blows Casandra out of the water in terms of flexibility. (at a cost obviously)

MySQL simply has the best flexibility. Cassandra has a ways to go.

3. In Cassandra you essentially have to hack your data model to fit the data structure to make things work and if you decide one day you read things differently it's not always easy. You have to massively denormalize. (but hey disks are cheap as they say)

In a nutshell, use the best tool for the job. Cassandra happens to just fit lots of use cases so it's worth looking at. I don't think it would be best for a company to port everything over, MySQL is still very good at many things and the flexibility in reads is worth the cost.

You shouldn't wait for someone to have to tell you it's going to work for y use case. It really matters what queries you end up asking your data store and Cassandra really shines for simplistic ones and be hacked for complex ones. You need to just dive into the docs and http://arin.me/code/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-mode... is a great resource.

FYI: I love what Casandra does and I think it's the best of the NoSQL options out there.
The link mentions a Norvig-Jeffries showdown on writing a Sudoku solver. Kinda unfair since Norvig pretty much wrote the book on it. :P
Sweet, thanks.

I've been doing some beginner tutorials as well:
http://www.mobilehtml5.com

Also, my startup (http://www.appstorehq.com) provides search+discovery for mobile apps, including mobile web apps. We're trying to push the boundaries with mobile web apps (e.g. easy, App Store style payments) and are looking for alpha testers.. If anyone is interested, email me: iseff@appstorehq.com
I always thought Steve Jobs was the Steve Jobs of film. Or at least John Lasseter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar
raises hand

Single people and Dual Income No Kids.
> Currently sucking it up and learning ObjC

Keep at it. I seriously dove into it about three months ago. Objective C/Cocoa is no longer the problem, it's the solution. Don't worry if the code you write sucks when you look back at it (e.g. no categories, protocols, NSNotification use). Interface Builder has a thick skin; curse at it. Part of learning this is learning the non-optimal way first. You'll grow into it. The best part of Cocoa/Objective C is how well it was designed. Highly recommend "Cocoa Design Patterns".
Great job. It would be a lot more addictive if it was in a hot-or-not format -- random sequence of pictures and you get to vote on each one. Each vote shows you the next one.
Facebook is especially poignant considering how Friendster died due to scaling at a tiny fraction of the traffic and feature set that Facebook has.