skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
competitive=admissions acceptance rate\exclusivity.
I completely agree that schools like Stanford (7.6% acceptance rate) and MIT (9.7% acceptance rate) are an amazing foundation.

My argument is: As competitiveness\exclusivity of a university increases, the quality of the student body increases at a much faster rate than the quality of instruction.

I once took a single semester at a local state school in the middle of my college career solely to get cheap credits for a new university\department I was transferring to. The professors were still very bright, had PhDs, and repeatedly encouraged students to come into their office (the vast majority didn't). They were however ALL foreign, from India, eastern europe, or china. In addition, the one programming class I took was taught by someone who had spent more time in industry than research. Also, they had to teach at a MUCH slower rate than they were capable of to cater to the student body. The limiting factor was the students.
Tacking "The end of NoSQL?" onto the title is karma-whoring via exploiting the silly database holy-warring we've seen on HN lately.
5 Excellent iPhone Apps for Small Business HR 
There are several applications that can help HR persons do their jobs more effectively, especially within a small business setting, which often requires employees to have even more time management and organizational skills.
the finder was rewritten (so i was wrong about that) but it didn't functionally change. Apple isn't actively innovating within the Finder.

Spaces and Expose are not "Finder" directly, but they are still concepts trying to deal with the issues around windows, multiple apps, and sharing between apps.
That's rather damning. As a casual but curious user, I "got" ØMQ and was up and running from a one page tutorial. AMQP left me scratching my head for longer. It didn't seem quite as orthogonally structured. It just wasn't UNIX.
IPhone OS still king of the mobile web space. Android nipping at its heels.
This is a cool idea. It will provide a useful index of Joel's writings.

I already used to to re-read one of Joel's essays about how to deal with chicken-and-egg problems, which is something I've been puzzling over lately.
I recall some long running misunderstanding between iMatix and RedHat and their roles in the working group.

Is this fallout from not being able to make that work?
Every app should be able to access the music, photos, videos, and other files on a system through smart APIs. But the user doesn't need to know about it or manage it
If any DB is taking 50ms to reply (SQL, NoSQL, even MS Access!), something is seriously wrong. If you're using Rails, I'd fire up NewRelic or something like that and check out what on earth is going on.

Of course, 300ms is also way too long. Do you mean under stress-testing, with request queuing? 300ms is a mind-boggling quantity of CPU cycles...
well, I'm a doc; I and every other doc in the military use a ncurses-like system on a VT500-7 emulator hundreds of times a day because it's insanely fast compared to the slick java/IE7 GUI that the gubm'n't spent $20B to write (AHLTA, look it up. Tons of money for you if you can beat it. Would be willing to help).
"However, if you give me a 50% fuzzy logical value of being in my living room, this means that I am lying in the doorway between my living room and my bathroom, such that exactly half of my body is in one place and half of my body is in another." Or it could mean any number of other things depending on what the "Fuzzy logician" finds convenient.

In other words, "Fuzzy logic" can mean anything vague related to numbers. In other words, it's just a buzz word that was trendy in the eighties for quantifying something without any particular logic behind it. In other words, it is crap.

I mean, seriously, the "discovery" of Fuzzy Logic involved no original or interesting mathematical machinery whatsoever, it just involved y Lotfi Zadeh coining a word to cover ad-hoc quantifying processes. It's the flimsiest of "pop" mathematics and it hasn't had much following for a while now. Sure you can "use" it in the sense that still engage ad-hoc quantification but you could do that before Zadeh came around.
This sounds like a great, very valuable service. However, as far as I can tell, this service is not fundamentally different than running a MySQL server with replication. Nothing indicates it's "scalable" in the way that say, Cassandra, is. Replication is a perfectly adequate system for many people but it has its limits, especially for a write-heavy workload.

If FathomDB is more sophisticated than a highly managed MySQL-as-a-service I would be very curious to know.

That said, many of the complaints about scaling out MySQL stem from the painful management overhead of running a replicated setup, managing backups, etc. If FathomDB can vastly reduce the cost and difficulty of doing these things it may move MySQL a long ways towards addressing many of the reasons people are moving away from it.

"The end of NoSQL" is just another piece of claptrap that I've seen recently on this and related topics. I would agree that "AltDB" might be a better term simply because it's less inflammatory and better expresses the goals of many of the diverse projects now lumped under "NoSQL".
Ahh, thanks! I was thinking of terminal usage as being synonymous with shell usage, when, of course, there are many users of character-mode apps that never see a shell.

An iPad running a terminal emulator and with a keyboard attached would be a comparable experience. Though, clearly, it's not the best solution for most such users. Linux/etc all the way for that.
Dialog dies with good faith; when you try to recast what other people have said in order to argue with yourself, it's clear that you're not communicating in good faith.

When you lash out against anyone calling you on it, that's only confirmed.
You're kidding, right? iPhotos email button for photos is exactly my point. There should be intelligent communication and data sharing between apps, not at the Finder level.

in iPhoto, there's a preference to set which email client it sends to
I think you mean Partition Tolerance. I would ask you whether you've actually read the proof, but that question seems redundant.
$615.5 million, is that big enough? That was a huge settlement.
Is this more Awesome Foundation, where it's $1,000 to just build something or is it a mini-YC where it's $1,000 to really do a company?
ok, I searched for two books -founders at work and the little schemer.

Founders at work found me 'Kate' who is a total babe but sadly in America. The thing is, founders at work isn't actually in the list of books in her profile.

little schemer found me 'Polina' but she doesn't have it in her book list either.

I tried searching with and without quotes around the title.

Hope you fix that. I like the idea of the site itself though. Bookmarked for future use.
But maybe my viewpoint is out-of-date... How many datacenters are you currently distributing your webservers across?

Heh, heh, heh. I work for Google. Need I say more?

That said, we like to insist on N+2 globally or N+1 per region. Meaning that if it takes N data centers to host a specific service world wide, we need at least N+2 data centers. And if it is a global application we insist that every region have at least one more data center than needed. (If 2 go down then we can spill across regions, but we'd like to avoid that for latency reasons.)

Failover from one data center to another usually is fairly automated. Which means that we are keeping data mirrored on a constant basis.

Obviously we're not in your target market. But my suspicion is that as cloud technology becomes more broadly used you should expect variations on our approach to become more common. And therefore you should at least keep the needs of multiple data centers in your head.
that's actually worth more, on a consulting basis, than selling bingo cards

Of course, you can sleep while your bingo cards are sold. For consulting, you get paid to not do that.
日本語を喋れるんだ！
It's clear they're looking for any legal basis to do so - to the point of threatening to have someone follow him around all day, every day, "talking" to people in the area to figure out his needs, and trying to discourage people from giving him food.
AFAIK sound wasn't part of NPAPI before and plugins had to use platform APIs, so any sound problems were Flash's fault alone. Even so, Flash is hardly the only program that behaves badly when hotplugging sound devices so you can't really fault them too much.

Speaking of Flash problems, another one I want fixed is keyboard focus handling; specifically how keyboard navigation between HTML and Flash is impossible and browser keyboard shortcuts won't work when Flash has focus. Also, finally killing the windowed/windowless mode distinction will also be great.
Or looking at porn or having swear words displayed on the screen. I'm sorry this is complete bullshit, morals on a computer are the equivalent of censorship on TV.

I think the majority of people on this planet are mature and responsible enough to handle the internet, if you're not you shouldn't rely on an arbitrary third party or program you should simply avoid the internet.

Why should I buy a computer that reflects well on me? Why are you proposing extending peer-pressure out of high school and into the tech-world. It's ludicrous.
Analysis: Who Benefits Most From the Chrome-Flash Collaboration?
Maybe it's what you don't do with the space, rather than what you do with the space.
I'm having trouble adding the books I want to my profile.
Your website FAQ question 1 says it's standard MySQL. In another comment here you say: "a new database which we've built ourselves, which we've announced but isn't publicly available yet."

If it's standard MySQL, then you hit the same issues as if I were to host MySQL myself. If it's your own database you've built yourself, but is not available yet, then I am not going to trust it with my data.

In what I do I often need to have a high-availabilty website where by a loss of connectivity, flood, power issue etc in that data centre can cause outages. Most of the time on our critical projects we have one or two physical data-centers with EC2 for testing and disaster recovery.

Although being based in Europe - we do a lot of work in SE Asia. The connectivity between Asia and Europe (often you end up with 400ms+ RTT and 10% packet loss) means you have to host local websites in the region, and even in country (you might be able to drive between Malaysia and Singapore, but the internet inter-connectivity is terrible).

If you have any kind of application that ever needs high levels of read-write traffic you quickly end up needing to distribute the database in some way, and for this type of application, it's an awful lot easier to build upon Cassandra and do a bit more work in the application then to try and get MySQL or PostgreSQL to act as a multi-site, multi-master database over sub-optimal links.
The more I read about the brain and experiments like this the harder I find to believe in free will.
$25 eBook Reader Application Scenarios
You're right that I did mean partition tolerance. And yes, I've read the proof, but that was about a year and a half ago.
To answer your question, there's a number of reasons. Undoubtedly some do just come down to "historical reasons" but there are many reasons why a command-line is actually the right choice. The main reason is that the scientist wants to run a very specialised analysis of her data, and so is almost certainly either running custom code, or at least code that was developed in an academic environment. Creating GUIs that are flexible enough to cover all the things somebody might do with their data is a complex and time consuming task, and does not directly produce "science". It is a lot easier to use the command line to interact with your dataset. Moreover you often don't know what you want to do in advance ("if we knew where we were going, we would't call it reasearch"). Therefore a typical user may fiddle around with the command line trying to get the most out of their data, and then string it all together in a script - so again, a command line makes a good prototyping environment.

Certainly in my area (astronomy) I have seen some attempts to provide gui based intefaces to data reduction, and even mocked up a few myself; but the effort to reward ratio isn't worth it - especially since you are dealing with people who can, in general, follow instructions.

Also, do not underestimate the higher effiency of the commandline - after all, there is a good reason we all use it. Even if there was a system administration gui out there, would most sysadmins use it? It's actually faster to type.

I think the "appliance" model of computing (eg. iPhone/iPad) is perfectly valid for a good percentage of the population at least for some of the time, but it won't render "classic" computers obsolete.

I also have to say that personally, I have generally been dissatisfied with attempts to disguise or flatten the filesystem by, for example, using tags instead. I actually think pretty damn hierarchically, so I often organise my material as IF it was a filesystem, when the application will allow me to do so - maybe it's just me?
We need to work on our messaging! We're offering two different technologies: a fully managed MySQL as-a-service, and the new scalable database technology. But they're both relational databases in the service model.

With the MySQL-as-a-service 'traditional' tech, we take care of the backups, monitoring etc. We'll offer fully managed replication in future. As you say, these basic steps will make running MySQL much more attractive.

We've learned though, that there are still problems even here. You still have to think about how big your server should be. You still have to think about what happens when you outgrow the biggest server your cloud offers.

The new technology does scaling across machines in the same way that Cassandra promises, or that Oracle's Exadata does for relational DBs. It lets you start on a shared server and grow seamlessly to the point where you're running across multiple servers. But it's still early days for that tech (after all, lots of people still think it's impossible, despite the fact that Oracle is happily selling it!), and so we're not opening it up publicly yet, whereas the standard hosted MySQL is publicly available.
I'd never heard of Awesome Foundation, sounds cool though.

Obviously $1K is not a lot of money to build a company, but the goal is to get people over the mental hurdles that are stopping them and hopefully get them to a place where they're making money online.

I'm a YC alumni so I'm influenced by that, but the idea is lifted from Scale Well in Chicago: http://scalewell.com/

The winner of the first Scale Well grant used it to refine his synthesizer, and he now sells Beep It on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=25223176
The Linux Cookbook (older edition but free)
DRM we can back: Humiliating pirates for fun and profit
Accusations of karma-whoring are karma-whoring ;)
Joojoo Tablet: Only 90 Preorders (With 15 returned)
This is bad. Sure, you can make the user forget about files most of the times, but not kill it completely, because:

1) It'll be a hell of work to parse everything. Should my music clips go into the music folder or video folder? Sure, you can associate file extensions, but what if the software isn't installed yet? If two programs have to share files? The relations can fail in too many ways.

2) All software to ever run in this machine would have to fully implement it's own "file explorer". The picture manager will have to be able to rename, organize move files, as will the document editor, the video player, the text editor...

3) Less freedom of movement. What if I want to send a set of videos, documents and audio files to someone else? Would I have to open each app and politely ask it to send an email (which they will have to implement, too)? What if I want to backup an entire hard drive, with hundreds of different file types?

3) It'll be a complete hell if things go wrong, and you will have to resort to file management anyway. File lost extension somehow? Major file extension conflict? Unknown file type? You are screwed without manipulating the files themselves.

And don't even get me started on the reliability of your "in the cloud" future.
Zero carbon, zero waste city being built in Abu Dhabi (w/ Video)
"Hey this thing X is broken our new product solves all problems and is superior in any way."

While I too would like to see AMQP 1.0 rather sooner than later and despite the open standard there are only a few usable implementations, I doubt that this new and great wire protocol will solve all of AMQPs problems which are located in other areas.
There's a lot we need to do... we just put up the page with the DEMO video today, everything else isn't yet updated to reflect the announcement.

This is why we're pursuing both products: if you have a hair-on-fire problem, and are willing to spend the time to investigate and become comfortable with a new DB, then you should use the new database. If you're not there yet and MySQL works for you, we'll run it for you so it's less painful. You've chosen Cassandra because you're obviously in the first group; willing to learn about new databases because of your Asia/Europe pain. You're invested in that, so I'm not going to try to persuade you to change your mind; we're looking to help those that have the same problem, but haven't already locked themselves in to non-SQL databases like Cassandra.
Just to add one point to this. Back in February this article was published: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...

In it the founder said "Fusion Garage will beat Apple to market and will benefit from the awareness Apple brings with its iPad. Orders and inquiries, he said, have gone up since the Apple announcement."

But if you look at these documents they give the sales for Dec '09 ($0), Jan '09 ($37,858) and Feb '09 ($6,257). The iPad was announced on Jan. 27, 2010. So it looks to me like the iPad effectively killed the Joojoo's sales.
Bringing US privacy law into the cloud computing era
Thanks djm. We start with an exact search and (if we don't find anyone) then we bring in "related" books, using Amazon's recommendation engine.

Given the small # of people we are starting with, this progressive search is gonna "go broad" pretty often. So it's looking for all kinds of books relating to the words "founders" or "work".

Not satisfying in the short term, I realize. As we get more people, the "exact" part of the algorithm will give better results and the "broad" part will get less relevant.

And yeah, Kate is a babe.
What should your company's blog be about?
Mother App
Excellent answer, thanks, and I think my (also-hierarchically-inclined) gut agrees with your last paragraph: if you're gonna expose a complex filesystem to the user (and, for many usages, that's a good thing), hierarchical — with metadata/content indexing for fast querying — is probably the way to go. I'd like to hear of situations in this area where people think a tag system is/would be better than the hierarchy+index system, though.
I agree, integration would be great. It's a pain to input a bunch of books, reviews, and ratings. If Goodreads had a "turn this into a dating site" button, I'd press it in a heartbeat, but there's no way I'm going to start over inputting books and ratings on a new site.
(1) Fair enough, I suppose some keychains might make it difficult to recover the password.

(2) Why not just ask the other employees for the old password?
Very interesting - obviously your employer is considerably ahead of the curve compared to where the rest of the market is right now!

Care to introduce us to the right person on the AppEngine team? Imagine AppEngine with full SQL support...
browsershots.org is good, but some generator nodes can be extremely slow (30 minute wait times). For IE-only screenshots, I like to use http://meineipadresse.de/netrenderer/index.php , which provides IE screenshots in about 7 seconds.
Dude, it's PHP.
Exactly why I consider it a Good Idea to make commits that are either style or substance, but not mix both.
VaultPress: WordPress backup service from Automattic
What if I want to do something else with my photo, that iPhoto doesn't yet have a button for? How does a universal interface look like, that allows arbitrary other apps to get photos from iPhoto?

Intents on Android do something like that, but I am not sure how much they live up to their potential yet.

I am new to iPhoto and don't know about the config. I saw other people having problems with emailing photos from iPhoto, too.

Not everything Apple does or want is automatically the best way of doing things. This model they push works best if all applications are from the same vendor. Guess who has a vested interest in pushing that model?

Will all apps have the same kind of config? Or will I have to learn each new app, to make it work with another app? If I don't want to listen to my MP3s in iTunes, what do i do? Suppose I can send photos from iPhoto to Photoshop (or should I request them from within Photoshop, or should it work both ways?). Can I send them to The Gimp, too? If the Gimp adds a "request from iPhoto" button, will it add a "request from <Flickr|someOtherPhotoApp>" button, too? Will Photoshop?

Because the file system is pretty simple and universal. It's true that a lot of people have some trouble with it, but there might be trouble with the alternatives, too.

I think something like desktop search has maybe a better chance than the shiny GUIs.
I would still expect a C++ programmer to know when assembly might be used (i.e. the use cases, the benefits, the drawbacks and the alternatives). Admittedly, I'd also expect them to know it really isn't an area they should mess with unless they really have to.
Dragging Privacy Regulation Kicking and Screaming into the Modern Age
[Ask HN] How do you organize your tasks/to-do lists?
Just curious.

I might be old-fashioned, but I'm still using a pen and notebook. I'm thinking of going digital, but all of the online to-do list applications are far too complicated — I don't care about categories, tags, or priorities. I'd just like to be able to type in a list of tasks for a given day and hit a box to mark them as done.
Narcotics?

Jarc could have been Joan (of Arc, of course)

With all due appologies for these silly puns...
High Scalability, where I actually found the video, provides a great review.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/30/running-large-grap...
+1 for Pivotal Tracker. One of the most polished UIs I've worked with. It's a pleasure for development teams to use; I use it for both freelancing and the day job. Also helps management have its finger on the pulse of progress, and have an accurate answer to the question "when will X be done?"
It feels a little bit like the whole Erlang joke all over again.
He's reported that his time is worth $125-$175/hr based on the bingo business profits. He might be able to get that rate as a remote consultant--but not as a remote consultant who worked five hours a week on average, but couldn't tell you which week, much less when the hours would be.
This was exactly my problem with it. Although in many cases it is pragmatic, there's no real _reason_ why I ought to hold to utilitarianism except that I feel like I should. That's not what a lot of people think of when they hear the word "morality."
I use post it notes. But there is also a little known feature of gmail that has a very simple task list mechanism.
It's free to send SMS within Gmail. I'd like to see Twilio go free as well, or more likely, Gmail put an API over its free SMS.
Oh good, thanks!