skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Filesystem is the original document store. Unfortunately, most filesystems really suffer when you put $LOTS of files in the same folder, so you end up implementing a nested folder structure and that complicates your code. Now, if this is more complex than running an entire "object" store depends on the application. Also, the filesystem's addressing may not be granular enough (and so waste a lot of space,) if you are going to store < $BLOCK_SIZE files.
which kind?
AdWords implemented on top of MySQL? Perhaps the CRM portion of AdWords (i.e., where the advertisers submit their ads and publishers view their balances) is -- it's fairly easy to partition by functionality and doesn't have extremely tight latency bounds. This isn't where real time auctions (what really distinguishes AdWords from what came before) happen.

You can be sure, however that the data used for real time ad auctions is extracted out of MySQL and into a highly customized data store (likely, a pure in memory one). It's all about using a right tool for the job. You can also be sure that you'll never see a paper on that data store, as that's their competitive edge. If you could duplicate it with off the shelf components (whether MySQL or Cassandra), Google would be toast.

Likewise, I am sure Amazon uses Oracle for their billing system and catalog submission interface, but they use specialized systems for search, shopping cart and recommendations.

For a business app that only needs to scale to the amount of paying customers (i.e., advertisers, account managers and customer support) and has no real time constraints -- but on the other hand involves complex and frequently changing business logic (e.g., where altering tables may be required) an RDBMS is the right tool for the job.

Where latency matters, data grows much faster than Moore's law (in relational to main memory size), Amdahl's law starts to matter in regards to computation (computation work load needs to be partitioned to take advantage of parallelism), and traditional caching strategies simply don't work, something else is. That situation is starting to become more and more common across web companies. You can also be sure that places like Wallmart and the like employ plenty of non-relational technologies (my personal bet would be is that they're likely using Coherence or Terracotta): usually, however, they're expensive and are built/configured by field-engineers to be custom tailored for their workloads. When you employ a world-class engineering team, "build" starts to make more sense than buy when you're solving a very specific and constrained problem (e.g., fault tolerant shopping cart system).

You don't need to be of Google's size to be at that stage. Talking about scalability and performance without taking the workloads into account (e.g., "Google Facebook or Amazon" as if e-commerce, search and social networking were compatible) is also an anti-pattern: I am sure engineers at Google would laugh when you compare Facebook's scale to theirs; likewise Facebook's engineers would laugh when you compare the real time aggregation that happens on their site to what happens at Amazon; Amazon's engineers would likely tell you holiday season pager duty horror stories that would scare Facebook or Google engineers.
He probably should care that his arm is going to get tired holding his iPad for more than 15-20 minutes. Seriously, I'm failing to picture any long-time user of this device being really, really happy with it.
There's a market for that. But I don't see it as being "transformational" in any significant way.

The combination of features, form factor, and App Store, will put all of the above within reach with practically no requirement for being tech savvy. That's "transformational". I can do everything the iPad will do with my 4 year old tablet. But only the truly tech savvy would tinker with it as much as I have to get it to that point, and it's still not as slick as the iPad appears to be. I suspect my 71 year old Dad will be able to pull his out of the box, turn it on, and have an even slicker experience.

Lots of non tech-savvy folks with money will want one.
I don't drive when high. And if I did, it would still be a DUI even if marijuana was legal. DUI laws are not whats under debate. You're confounding the issue. And on a side note, I agree it's less harmful than driving drunk and alcohol is legal to possess.
Steve Wozniak on iPad
Then don't talk about it.

Other people thought it was worth talking about with regards to a blog post by a guy who makes a point of giving each post a unique, custom design.

The color choice also hasn't been the only thing criticized - the layout is cluttered and confuses some people. It's overall a much poorer design than many, if not all, of the other posts on that site.
messaging (rabbitMQ, ejabberd, ) and async event frameworks (twisted, eventMachine,

(which tie nicely into FP languages and doc store databases/DHT's)
Could you elaborate on what all it has to offer?

It's understandable why you'd say that, of course. Clojure has more libraries, more users and is probably more complete. But is the core language as elegant as Arc's?
Why can't you do in app purchase, with the titanium, or phonegap?
Short answer: yes, ten of the previous twenty years, and fourteen of the last thirty (as a percentage of GDP).
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.ht...
I am currently reading the beta ebook version of "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages" : http://www.pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-sev...
My expectation from the book is to get a brief but fun tour of seven programming languages and the different paradigms that they embrace.
Already answered.
Socket programming of binary protocols. In my case, VNC.
Well, I just spent about an hour reading up on the history of India, and you're right on a lot of counts. Let me ask, since you seem quite knowledgeable - do you think the British meant well in India, or not? It's fashionable these days to bash colonialism, but my understanding is that the British generally tried to do right by the people they governed. (With some exceptions - Oliver Cromwell, for instance)

Take education:

Wikipedia:

"Between 1867 and 1941 the British increased the percentage of the population in Primary and Secondary Education from around 0.6% of the population in 1867 to over 3.5% of the population in 1941. However this was much lower than the equivalent figures for Europe where in 1911 between 8 and 18% of the population were in Primary and Secondary education.[18] Additionally literacy was also improved. In 1901 the literacy rate in India was only about 5% though by Independence it was nearly 20%.[19]"

So things improved, but slower than Europe. India also de-industrialized through British rule, but then, the Industrial Revolution in England absolutely wrecked all pre-Industrial workforces everywhere, not just India.

It looks to me like there was an initial surge of chaos after the British pulling out, but that can be explained by inadequate police, safety, and emergency response personnel which the Indian government did try to remedy quickly.

Nehruvian Socialism looks like it was a disaster - per capita GDP looks like it shrunk from 1950 to 1995:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Per_capita_GDP_of_South_As...

But I'd just chalk that up to socialism, no? Socialism historically has slow rates of growth, more poverty, quality of life lagging.

Since the free market liberalization, India's growth rates have been crazy fast. From '99 to '07 the lowest per capita GDP growth rate was 7%, the average somewhere around 12%. Which is fantastic.

Beyond that - what's your take if you have a free minute? I don't want to be ignorant on global affairs and you're obviously quite studied in Indian history. What's your take on the British, the socialism afterwards, and the liberalization? My previous thinking was that the British were trying, but upon reflection the improvements they made did lag the rest of the world. Mixed socialism was probably the worst thing India could've jumped into after that (me: not a fan of socialism at all...) but the liberalization in the 90's was really good.

But what's your take, and can you recommend anything to read? I try to overcome my ignorance when it's there.

And yeah - I'll wind up in India for some reason sooner or later, and I'll look you up. I'd say do likewise if you're in the same place as me, but I'm not sure where that's going to be! I'm in Kowloon, Hong Kong if you're here in the next week or two, most likely Beijing after that. I'll do some more reading on Akbar - I'm familiar with the name but haven't spent so much time checking him out. Thanks for the recommendation, and thanks for the discussion.
American TV is Great, is That a Chicken or an Egg?
Body Language Expert on Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt's Photos
That's because you waited years to address the problem. Not only that, you also rewrote the code, as I advise. But you did not take the opportunity to address the structural data issues you were having, contrary to my advice.

My strategy is to rewrite the code, if needed, but with an eye towards addressing structural data issues. After a few months use of a web app you have a good idea of any surprising usage patterns that may appear. Readjust at that point when you are 'talking with data'.

This advice is for small startups of the HN variety, where 'customers' are a lot more important than 'authoritative' data stores initially. NoSQL systems are useful tools for mitigating the danger of doing too much engineering upfront. Many tech entrepreneurs fall victim to doing too much upfront engineering in the hopes of their data store not 'decaying to garbage', only to find that no one wants to use their product. NoSQL makes it easy to go back and migrate off the data you want to store 'on the move'. When you have a better idea of how much of it there is, and how it is used.
Excellent idea, looks like a good implementation and very clever.

That being said, I'm skeptical on the fun factor lasting more than the time it took to watch the video.
I can't believe some of what is said by people on both sides of the NoSQL arguments. Discounting use of RDF data stores, almost all of my recent work involves PostgreSQL and MongoDB. I think that it is blatantly obvious which to use in specific circumstances. I have not had to do this yet, but using Datamapper.setup, you can integrate the use of both in the same application by storing some model data in a relational database and some in MongoDB, as it makes sense to do so.
I'm jazzed about my Windows slate at 3 pounds, and yes, I can browse and post on HN all day with it, even from bed. You don't have to hold it up to use it in any context you can use a hardcover book.

My iPad will weigh half as much and won't require a stylus.
There is a world of difference between what Schmidt tried (and failed) to do with Pattern Oriented Software Architecure and what Java programmers managed to do with the Gang of Four patterns.

You really, really ought to follow that Norvig link I posted. There is more insight and utility in that 10 minute read than in everything Fowler wrote.

There is a "Singleton" in the Ruby standard library, but since every Ruby class inherently includes a "singleton", you'd be embarassing yourself to use it. Note that it occurs nowhere in current Rails. Note also that "Singleton" is notoriously derided as an example of how superficial some of the GoF patterns are; it is, at its core, a puffed-up way of saying "global variable". Maybe a better name for it would be "very global variable".

Regardless, the twin problems with this blog post remain:

* The idea behind design patterns isn't that they give you a library of pre-built components that you can pick up off the shelf and use to assemble complete programs. But that's exactly how this blog post uses them.

* The GoF design patterns in particular describe ways to patch around the weaknesses of C++ and Java; they are, as Norvig writes, transparently implemented in modern languages, and reimplementing them is something akin to writing your own string matching or filename globbing code.
You said:

The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand obviously
turned out quite well largely modeling British systems of common law,
trade, treaty, military organization, and government.

and

The African countries were much better under British Rule than
non-British rule.

I'll ignore the fact that you're trying to mix together countries that
have been independent for centuries with other ones which only
acquired it roughly 50 years ago.

What I don't understand is your circular reasoning. If the rule under
the British empire was that great, shouldn't the US and Canada be in a
much worse state right now compared to that golden age? This seems to
contradict your thesis.

And lastly, you seem to forget that most of the conflicts in Africa
are due to the artificial borders imposed by colonialism. Some tribes
like the Tutsi are spread across Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern
Democratic of the Congo. Bring in the fact that most of these
countries were governed by dictators largely supported by the former
rulers and you'll see a cleaner picture of the situation.
Macs are better than Pc, C# is better than Java, Unix is better than Windows, RDBMS are better than NoSQL databases...

Why can't people just use the best tool for the job and move on...

From a personal stand-point we've switched from MySQL to Google AppEngine (and BigTable). Although I find there are some major drawbacks (e.g. joining tables) not having to worry about database servers and scalability is a major advantage. That said, if MySQL becomes the best tool for a particular feature, then let it be...
I literally thought it was a joke until I read the description below the video.
I never claimed Active Record was a GoF pattern, in fact, I'm sure it would be easy to read that I cited "Martin Fowler". Whether or not it's GoF, Fowler or any other source doesn't change that it's a design pattern, though. GoF patterns are no different from Fowler's EAA patterns. One is not meant for static languages while the other is meant for dynamic. That's not how patterns work. If you think that GoF patterns were specifically made for Java, you should look at the publishing date of the book. You might also consider that the book uses Smalltalk in its examples. PS. Smalltalk is dynamic.

The problem with your argument is that the "triviality" of their implementation has nothing to do with whether or not you use them.

class X < DelegateClass(String); end

This is using the delegate pattern. It's pretty damn trivial to implement. But we are using the delegate pattern. This is a fact. We can do the same for singletons, factories, facades, visitors and strategies. How you implement them does not define whether or not you use them. Whether or not you tell people you use them is what matters, because patterns are about communication, not implementation. If you don't understand this simple concept then you're completely missing the point of design patterns.

Yes, you can implement the Adapter pattern in Ruby without doing anything explicit-- that doesn't mean you didn't use the Adapter pattern. This is where denial kicks in. If you say "I don't use strategy patterns, I use DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING!" you're seriously deluding yourself.
I don't know about that; the fact that the highest-rated comment on this page is a rant written by someone who apparently didn't RTFA makes me think this is just another holy war in early stages.
Here is an article on mixing Datamapper + MongoDB + MySQL: http://lunarlogicpolska.com/blog/2010/02/15/mysql-and-mongod...
NOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEE
Google OAuth Playground
To juggle. It's very fun too.
Hope you reserved your iPad. Apple just ran out.
Surely stands or docks will be(or are) available, but I definitely see your point. Judging by the 'lifestyle' photos and videos, the device doesn't look very ergonomic.

I'll stick with my Eeepc; I'd just get Egg McMuffin grease on the touchscreen anyway. And I wouldn't be able to play MAME while I'm standing in line at the DMV.
we should be up and running -- if you run into any more problems, email us at contact@jobspice.com
>Yes, when British colonization was happening Britain had outgrown that stage, but perhaps they were able to outgrow it because they were allowed to develop independently as a people? I'm not sure justifying colonization because of people like Shaka is valid. Colonization might have slowed down Africa's growth out of the tribal stage

Although the Britons weren't exactly allowed to develop independently. They were alternatively conquered by many stronger cultures, starting with the Romans and continuing through to the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and eventually the Normans. As far as cultural shifts go, that's quite a bit more extreme than that experienced by colonies during 19th and 20th century European colonialism, with British cultures being not only shocked by exposure to outside forces but in some cases completely obliterated. But they turned out ok. Strong cultures have been invading weak cultures for nearly all of human history, it has traditionally been one way for cultural innovations to spread.

If a culture is strong enough to be able to so comprehensively conquer another, it's obviously doing something right. I've often thought that the optimal strategy for a conquered territory in that sort of scenario might be to assimilate their victor's culture as far as possible, gradually take over the reigns of power and build up strength locally so as to eventually present the reigning power with a fait accompli. See for how example how the Boers (called Afrikaners later) in South Africa went from being mostly ill-educated and rural farmers who badly lost a war with Britain in 1902 to running most of the government when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 and being dominant enough to declare the creation of an independent republic by 1961 without significant opposition and no bloodshed. Ignoring apartheid and all the rest, that has always struck me as a particularly smart way to go about achieving independence. Whether the same approach would have applied in all situations is an open question, but it must surely have been better than overthrowing an external authority without any kind of viable replacement ready for it.
NodeJS is awesome. I love it. However, it is not a web framework. NodeJS is more like Rack than Rails. There is no default persistence engine, no template rendering and no concept of a controller. There is not even a router! These things are not "core" to writing server-side javascript. NodeJS also speaks more than http! You can do raw TCP or UDP if you please.

You can build web frameworks on top of NodeJS (and lots of people are,) but that's kind of boring to me. NodeJS is particularly good at handling lots of open connections that it can read from and write to whenever it gets around to it. This means writing chat servers is trivial, writing a "socket server" for a game is trivial, push notification for websites is easy, and on and on.

Because of how little it does, it is a lot easier to get my head around than any of the other big evented frameworks (twisted, eventmachine &etc.)
are you in sfbay? i am thinking there might be enough people interested in a little nodefest
(Ignoring the article itself here) The top picture reminded me of this ok/cancel comic strip: http://okcancel.com/comic/3.html

I know it's not the environment where you'd normally use the device, but still - how are you even supposed to hold it?
Yup. I started reading, found myriad writing errors and thought "who is this guy?" Found that sentence in the bio. Stopped reading altogether.

Why should I deal with it? That's your first impression? That you're arrogant and unhelpful? I really don't think I want advice from someone like that - why should I believe you know enough to give good advice if you can't even write properly?
This article has to be a joke. Assuming you have a modern contract (non-compete, IP assignment), working on your startup at work is stealing from your employer.

Well, not only that, but it's written like a joke. "Walk around so no one can read over your shoulder, if you're afraid your coworkers will read your code over the bathroom stall wall"?! (paraphrased) Really? Come on.
No math until after elementary school? what?
I remember doing multiplication timed tests in 2nd grade, waiting until 6th grade would seem to be catering to the lowest common denominator and doing a great disservice to many bright students.
Just three words needed: One million sold.
http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/one-million-ipads-s...
Trying to learn some Rails to maintain one of my own websites.
I'm curious - before math clicked for you, were you good at other subjects and generally one of the brightest in your class? IE - did your teachers think you were dumb overall, or just that you were a smart kid who for some reason didn't get math?
The three hundred dollars I spent on my laptop is combined with the money of millions of others to give Intel a hefty profit.

The $2000/year these folks spend on their engineers is combined with what?

So the question is how sustainable is a model like this? For example, do they really expect support two years from now? Perhaps they won't need it or can do that in-house. Still...

"They get a paying customer and improve their offering. But I still feel a little bad. Because I know that most of them will never makeup for the time and heart they invested"
This year, java and sailing.
i've always constructed monitor stands from phone books, but sometime in the near future, there won't be huge stacks of them for free at the supermarket
And I'm sure the magazines will be littered with canvas tag-based banner ads that would be much more intrusive than a full page print ad. No ad-blocker plugins on an iPad.
He's dealing with a self-described "student of history" who puts up a slew of easily-demolished false claims before retreating behind Well, gee, don't you think the British meant well in conquering and occupying your country?

There's nothing inappropriate about his tone.
I was taking it in the "not the intended use" sense, like the posted clips. And I 'll disagree that a good hack must look ugly ... for example, yesterday's beautiful Turing machine is a hack in my book.

The stand's not my idea, anyway. Posted because of the title, someone else might like it. I'm alright ;-)
(intend to look at arc any day now..)

try the labrepl, really really nice tutorial + gentle install

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

halloway's pragmatic Clojure book is still quite worth reading, but describes a slightly pre-1.0 release (if you can borrow or browse Halloway's book in a bookstore, i would do that).
As a developer of a small, in-house specialized data warehouse for medical research purposes (built with 100% open source), I would be curious to hear more thoughts on this. The flexibility angle is certainly a huge win. My issue is that I can't quite get my head around how one runs ad-hoc queries like "give me everyone with a bmi >x and age between a and b". In the key/value view of the world, that doesn't quite fit.
I would love to see this become standard for a few big browsers. There are so many cool things that could be done that right now are impossible.
Building the user interface for Snippets.
I'd say it does matter quite a lot, which is why I use Fedora on my computer and Android on my phone. OS X itself is even rather open by comparison to the iPhone OS platform, which illustrates rather nicely that Apple tends to favor openness when they're the underdog and closed platforms when they're in the lead.
This has been my pursuit for a while. So much so that it inspired my next side project web app.