skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is pragmatic from Apple's perspective. They don't need it to support the most popular video content. They don't need it to sell their product. They don't want to depend on third-parties for anything they don't have to. So they omit it.

Google can't do the same with Chrome and Chrome OS, because their product is the browser. They need to support the web as-is or they stand to lose many more potential customers than Apple has over the iPhone's lack of Flash. They have no particular need or desire to omit it entirely, but it does have problems, so improving support for it is a wise choice.

Both companies have chosen the pragmatic solution for them.
Wow. Thank you so much for turning me on to MonsterDebugger!
The new technology does scaling across machines in the same way that Cassandra promises, or that Oracle's Exadata does for relational DBs.

Care to elaborate a little bit more on your approach?

The claim you make (linear horizontal scalability) implies you have either created your own RDBMS or patched an existing one in a really exciting way.

I'm curious about how you managed in such a short time-frame what so far only Oracle can offer (with 20 years of experience under their belt)?

I'm also curious about when your new database offering will be available for public testing? Because currently the exorbitant claims make this smell a lot like vaporware...
I made a post about it some time ago on here, and at that point the poster asked for the opposite (not too simple).

You can find it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108498

I have since added a few minor details, but largely it's the same. I still feel a bit bad for ripping off their design, but heck, it was just up my alley. But in all honesty, it sounds like http://teuxdeux.com/ out of the box would be just your thing. Personally I wanted to be able to have it stored "locally" where I had full control.

And to answer your question: I use what is outlined above and it works really well for me. The only drawback, perhaps, is that my "To do Some day" list has gotten pretty big. Everything I can't do right now but find interesting, or every little idea end up in that container. Not sure if that's entirely bad, though.
A lot of people probably share the sentiment of Joel > Rework. I think that's because Joel reasons things out and his reasoning is nuanced, consistent, and intellectually honest. The 37s advice writing, more often than not, consists of generalization of simple concepts (that worked for 37s) without analysis of their caveats.
Meanwhile everybody involved accepts that there was no Unix IP in Linux, either from IBM or otherwise.

But SCO, or some of it's backers, felt there was mileage in continuing to claim this. And further to claim that end users could be sued over it.
In 2003 I was working with a national bank on a project, and we needed to get data dumps from them. They told us they would be happy to provide the data in any format we requested.

"Great!" we thought, and asked them to send us the data in XML since we already had a process for handling it that way.

There was a moment of silence as they muted their side of the conference and when they came back, the IT manager who was heading up this project on their side goes "okay but... what is XML?".

At that point I realized that bank IT is where government IT workers go when government work is too demanding.
Ruby distinguishes between begin/rescue (analogous to Java's try/catch) and throw/catch. I never understood it until discovering that throw/catch is perfect for dealing with nested cases where rescue or break fail. Also, it works through function calls and isn't interpreted as an error, which makes it great for cases like Ramaze's redirect or render calls; unlike in Rails, they interrupt execution immediately.
"Interviewing. It is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. You’re looking for people who are smart, and get things done."

This made me think. I have read lots of things about how to best hire somebody. What are strategies for picking the right company to work for? If there is a shadow of a doubt, don't accept?
This is also an exercise in Four Hour Workweek. It's also how I met Craig of Craiglist -- it was literally "Hey, you spoke at my commencement and I'm a programmer in the Bay Area. Want to get coffee?" Now if someone has advice on how to not become starstruck when they actually meet these big shots, I'm all ears :)
Not on my Mac, OS X 10.6.2.
This means his Mixergy interview should be coming up soon too. We agreed to wait till after the big change.
(1) Right -- and, even if it is possible to recover the password, walking a non-tech-savvy customer through the process may not be a palatable option, either for Support or for the customer.

(2) I wish I knew. Not really our place to ask, though.
GTD style git.

I have a private repo on git-hub with minor things I am writing (i.e. not multi-week projects), priority registers (only allow myself 3 things on it), lists of things to read, list of things to do in spare time, list of ideas for future projects, and directories with notes on books and practice applications that I write when learning something new.

It's very effective for me.
Meh. Keeps the bums out. Have you -seen- California?
[Ask HN] How should I teach myself about investing?
I've been told "go and ask a financial advisor" but having read "24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment" I'm not so keen on mainstream advisers ...

I want to understand the field of investing myself, but I'm in the awkward position of not knowing who the experts are, or what the successful methodologies are.

Anyone care to offer some pointers?
Oh, neat! Is there much of a startup scene in the Cities? Where do folks meet up?
I wish I could mod your comment up more.

Programming is becoming an essential tool for scientists and engineers and it isn't taught it enough. Interestingly my mother was taught Pascal back in the day when she went back to Uni to study Environmental Science as an undergrad, looking back on it I am most impressed.
It seems that men and women read different books, so matching based on simple similarity is likely to be ineffective.
> To me, it's about reducing the impedance mismatch between your data model and the implementation of that model in the database schema.

The whole point of that "impedance" in the relational model is to for people to think about their data and describe it in a program-independent way: years of experience in the field is what led to its development and what contributes to its continued relevance. Saying that's a problem with the relational model is like saying that design patterns are flawed because they describe commonly used OO designs.

> To me, it's about reducing the impedance mismatch between your data model and the implementation of that model in the database schema.

I'm not sure what sort of impedance mismatch could exist between a program and a relational model but not between a program and a document model. The latter is trivially implementable in terms of the former.
It's not all bad.. goto is actually a pretty good way to implement a state machine efficiently.
Has it? The iPhone is popular with geeks and rich folk, and mostly only in the US. Last I checked, such people weren't the majority of people. The iPhone has certainly pantsed WinMobile and Palm... but those were pretty easy targets to begin with. They haven't even come close to touching the global Symbian marketshare.
Talk to the appscale folks. (Search "appscale".)

Google almost certainly isn't going to swap out their appengine stuff for your stuff. However, other folks (especially potential competitors) are potential users.
"How does a universal interface look like, that allows arbitrary other apps to get photos from iPhoto"

Apple has an iLife media browser. It lets any application access any of the media on your system, including photos and music.
Though sometimes "you don't see many" is used to imply "because none exist," it doesn't literally mean so. Just because she had a Chihuahua/Husky mix doesn't mean that they aren't rare.
Look at Gnome shell for some fresh desktop innovation.
Thanks!

TeuxDeux is very, very close to what I'm looking for — I'll give it a try for a couple of days. Too bad they don't have an iPhone version ready (even just an iPhone-optimized site).
Unfortunately Apple bought it

I suspect the founders of the company would disagree with you on the "unfortunate" part.

How is that innovative?

Technology once sold as an expensive niche keyboard is now in the hands of tens of millions of people worldwide. Darn.

If somebody clones an ipad, or whatever, then the markets will decide who the winner is.

How is that innovative? When products do not differentiate, they compete on price, which drives prices down to levels incapable of sustaining any significant innovation.
I imagine I'm like a lot of HN readers that mostly lurk but have quietly gotten a lot of value out of Patrick's comments and blog posts. In fact just last week I ended up implemented his omnibox idea and automating the cancelation process for our site because of these two posts:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-met...

Both ideas have saved a lot of time and effort already and I'm kicking myself for not doing them sooner. I expect to save more time and make more money by following up on a few of his other posts that I have I bookmarked.

So a huge thank-you for all of the information that you've shared. It's extremely valuable and very much appreciated. Congratulations on going fulltime. I'll be quietly cheering you on.
Is this drizzle?
Pretty sure OkCupid is the dating site about books. Or at least every profile I've ever read there is.
Yep. ZeroMQ kicks ass; blinding fast! But people shouldn't know about two big caveats:

1) It's a messaging library, and not a server.

2) It has no persistence.

The lisp binding (cl-zmq) is specially attractive, but I ended up using Redis since I knew it well anyway.
Emacs' org-mode. I've been using it for the past several months and love it. Some links:

http://searchyc.com/org-mode

http://orgmode.org/org.html
It depends on how badly you need it. This matters in both directions, but it is a lot more relevant when picking a good place to work: if you can't pay rent next month, you'll probably take a bad gig.

In the hiring direction, "how badly you need it?" is usually not as time-sensitive since adding people to a team effectively lowers productivity at first. However, if for some reason you are trying to grow a team by an order of magnitude, you "need it" pretty badly, so to speak.
You are all incredibly kind. I would say more, but today is my last day and after I get to work there are four issues in Trac with my name on them.
And so, the gap between those who can make and those who are limited to consuming widens. A computer ceases to be a bicycle for the mind and becomes just another environment for consumption.

Is this really what we want?
No - the scalable database is our own technology. We looked at writing a MySQL/Drizzle storage engine, but there's a lot of pieces that are different that stretch up through the stack, and I was a bit concerned over the MySQL licensing now that it's part of Oracle.

In future we could build a MySQL/Drizzle storage engine, and we'll probably run Drizzle-as-a-service once we start to see customer demand.
"you don't flatter technical people by complementing them; that just makes us feel weird"

Honestly it sounds like we are very nearly on the same page, though this quote is a bit odd to me. I don't think it's fair to define "technical people" by saying that compliments make them feel weird. I should point out that I'm not the one that has talked about flattering as a tactic.

I think we completely agree on having something interesting to talk about as a helpful quality.
Show HN: My Hacker News widget for Chumby
Don't forget that Imatix has a long history of producing top notch infrastructure software. Their code is consistently, tight, fast, and pretty.

For anyone who wants to improve their C hacking, I highly recommend the SFL (Imatix's Standard Function Library): purtiest code you have ever seen.
At that point I realized that bank IT is where government IT workers go when government work is too demanding.

My experience is different. The only non-OSS programmers I've ever met with a clue work at banks.
It seems unlikely that the file system would disappear/become inaccessible altogether. Sure, when you want to edit photos you should have to dig around in folders. But existing apps already insulate you from these details - just by layering suitable abstractions over the file system.

Having the more general layer underneath gives you more power when you need it. It also gives all apps a simple, standard place to store their data. The raw file system has been slowly losing its prominence over time, but I really don't see a benefit in scrapping it altogether.
It would be nice if they pointed out why rather than a simple "this sucks" with no reasoning.

I tried getting OpenAMQ up and running about a year ago but it was like pulling teeth. On the other hand, I got RabbitMQ installed and working in almost no time at all so I don't think the AMQP standard is what's getting in the way of building a quality messaging product. 0MQ was still in pre-alpha with nothing available to download at the time so it wasn't even possible to use it. It's nice to see that the project delivered something useful.
I hope the #1 issue is "Move PM to Redmine" ;-)
Personally, I think that when an account is setup the option should be a prominent one with an explanation of the security implications, as well as noting that you can only reset the password, but not recover it when it is hashed. Then the onus is on the customer since they made the choice when presented with information explaining the risks/rewards of the options. It's kind of 'passing the buck' in that a single employee at a company could choose the wrong option, then if the company ever complains you just point the that person (though indirectly, since you would only be replying that password hashing is an account option that was turned off).
That's a good question. A lot of places. I've met a lot of likeminded folks at Minnedemo/Minnebar events (see http://minnestar.org), and just through working/networking, and the local Ruby group (http://ruby.mn).

Tech.MN has a pretty thorough local event calendar: http://tech.mn/events/

One group that seems to be gaining momentum is a newish MN Lean Startup group. http://leanstartup.mn/

But yeah, there are many great people here doing many cool things.

Would love to see posts about folks in other cities doing or trying similar things. Silicon Valley is great and all, but not everyone wants or even needs to be there. I'm sure the Twin Cities is not the only place with a lot of enthusiastic folks creating the tech culture they want to see around them...
Nothing wrong with paper and pen but you need a system to make sure things don't fall through the cracks. I use and recommend the Franklin Planning system now Franklin Covey.
http://www.franklincovey.com/
You clearly don't get the semantic power of written language over gesturing over icons. I wonder if we are not intentionally de-evolving ourselves with all this gesturing.
School Should Prepare You for Life [video]
I absolutely don't agree with that. I mean, I'm sure there are some books that bias to one sex or the other, but in my experience, most fiction is universal. I've met a number of women in my short life who matched very closely my personal taste.

Do you have any particular reason you suspect this is true?
I find OmniFocus to be very helpful. The difficulty is making sure you enter everything.

http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/
That's funny. The first time I heard of bingo card creators I thought it was a great idea. That and other niche hobbies like knitting, aviation, models, etc have huge untapped potential.

and they're probably much simpler* to succeed in than yet another social widget. They also appeal to my "God-those-narcicistic-valley-kids" personality.

* Simple, but not easy.
In a weird twist, today it was 70 degree Fahrenheit in the Twin Cities.
Take a look at my comment again, I think you think I'm saying something I didn't.

The whole point of that "impedance" in the relational model is to for people to think about their data and describe it in a program-independent way ....

The relational model is hardly the only way to reason about data in a program-independent way.

... years of experience in the field is what led to its development and what contributes to its continued relevance.

I agree, never said otherwise.

Saying that's a problem with the relational model is like saying that design patterns are flawed because they describe commonly used OO designs.

I didn't say there's a problem with the relational model.

I'm not sure what sort of impedance mismatch could exist between a program and a relational model ...

I never said the word "program," you did. I said "data model." You're conflating the data model with the program code (or maybe you think I am, can't really tell). They are not the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_data_type

All I said is that there are some domains for which relational models make sense and there are others for which document-oriented (or other "NoSQL") models make sense.
grats!
Google officially announces OAuth support for IMAP/SMTP Gmail
Thanks for the props 100k. We noticed with Michael, the first recipient of a ScaleWell grant, that the community recognition allowed him to more efficiently collect feedback and support (his existing business seemed more "real").

So $1000 is not a lot, but in certain situations it is enough to propel an existing project toward revenue generation.
I use http://toodat.com

I wrote it myself because, like you, I didn't like the complicated nature of the other tools out there. It's pretty basic but it works.
We're looking for early-adopter customers with hair-on-fire problems with their database that would also make good reference customers in a few months. If you fit the bill, please contact me!

Otherwise, sorry, but you'll just have to wait :-)

To put the effort into perspective: it's not a new DB from scratch - that would be a Herculean effort - just the lowest levels. It's not based on MySQL/Drizzle; it's based on a different open-source DB with a friendlier license and more hackable code. It's a new technique for scaling cross machines, which is refreshingly simple, which is why you're not seeing too many details :-) It's not just Oracle that knows how to scale databases, BTW; Greenplum, Netezza, Vertica etc. have all built distributed databases (admittedly for OLAP workloads) in relatively short timeframes.
It really gets old, doesn't it?

I've seen so many market changes in my career and, yet, I still write code in a text editor with a terminal window on its side. All of them under a nice windowing environment.
So, ad hominem attacks aside, which tradeoff did you make for your product, or did you find a way to sidestep the problem altogether?

I mean, you're announcing this thing like the 8th world wonder ("The end of NoSQL") and seem to have no problem comparing yourself to Oracle, no less.

Do you have anything to show for it? Or At least a date when you will show us something?
I use http://orgmode.org/
You know... Most of these nosql databases feel oddly nostalgic for me. It's the kind of stuff mainframe folks were using in the 70's with some clustering thrown in.
Linux on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.

Opera: 24-27 fps
Chrome: 27-30 fps
Firefox: 26-30 fps
I am hoping that the ipad will help me get better organized with e-mail, calendar, etc.....
I take that back; firefox's default plugin is significantly faster (on linux). At a much higher resolution (this test is very resolution dependent) on my Core 2 Duo 6600 running ubuntu 9.10, I get 25 fps in chrome and 30 in firefox.
s/Burp Suite Pro/QuickCheck/.

Basically, there are two stages to a web application; understanding the request, and processing the request. The understanding part is a parser, so you are going to have to ensure the correctness of that with test cases -- you can never prove correctness, you can only show that it works on a lot of input.

The rest of your application, however, will be modeled on a finite number of possible states that this data structure represents. This means you can use better tools (things like Catch) to ensure correctness; you can literally prove that there is never a case you don't handle, for example. This gets you reliable code more quickly than random testing does.

Anyway, to answer the OP's questions, web apps should be tested like everything else. A web app is a pure function from Request -> Response, so test it like any other pure function.
Just noticed that they're using an ad-lib style signup form: http://vaultpress.com/signup/
Using MongoDB with CakePHP
F5 Wins 2010 SC Magazine Reader Trust Award
It's not that imatix is some random company saying AMQP is broken... they are part creator of said beast. I think they've simply come to the conclusion that there is a better way to do it.
1) They should act professional during the the interview. That means starting the interview on time, and being prepared, not just coming in, reading your resume while you wait, and asking whatever questions they can come up with on the fly. It doesn't mean dressing a certain way.

2) They should ask you difficult technical questions, because you want to know that the people you will be working with were smart enough to pass a tough interview.

3) They should welcome difficult questions from you. I'm not necessarily taking about technical questions about their product, but more the way they run their shop.

4) They should not act like they are in a hurry, even if they are.

5) Ideally, they don't have a lot of unplanned turnover.
How will Apple cracking down on "cookie cutter" apps affect your business (assuming that this was even posted by someone from this company).
Cool. This is an experiment for us, but we are going to tie the winner(s) into our existing events like MinneBar and MinneDemo to increase their exposure.

And in fact, we're already getting some press about the event...it was written up next to the $130,000 Minnesota Cup in one of the business papers here.
There's some speculation that the vague wording (your item 9) comes from AT&T knowing that some of the code in System V wasn't the cleanest with respect to copyright. AT&T did essentially lose its own lawsuit against Univ of California over BSD Unix. Some SysV code might actually be BSD code with UC copyright notice removed. Also, some SysV code might be 32V unix code, which was distributed without the copyright notice that was required of copyrighted material back in the day. So 32V code was in the public domain.

In any case, copyrights aren't all that clear with SysV, so Novell selling them outright might have caused even more litigation, with System V maybe ending up public domain.

But it is an unholy mess.
This is exactly why I hate iTunes and the Apple ideology. I was using it for a while before I decided that the UI sucked for my massive collection of music. But getting those files out of proprietary codecs is a pain. No I do not want your monolithic Apple apps.