skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a problem I've had to explain to too many developers recently. It's not faster just because you throw away data modeling practices and jam bits of info all over the place.

If you have semi normalized data relationships, Mongo really doesn't fit the bill that well as your primary data store.

Where it shines is when you've got computed pieces of data to display (parts of a user data feed for example, data for a live graph, etc), you want to quickly store some data to be processed later (analytics, event processing), or you just use it as an object cache for expensive queries.

I have found that with a decently tuned DB, and I mean barely tuned, a decent data model, and sane fetching strategies (don't eager load everything always), a database can be good enough for quite a while, if not forever.

The answer I pretty much always get from people when I ask, "Why did you start with (whatever NoSQL they chose)?" Is, "Because (whoever) said it's faster and scales better."

I think younger devs that have options besides relational DBs find the barriers to entry on NoSQL lower (it looks mostly like how it went in and it's just JSON) so they pass over the learning SQL and basic data normalization fundamentals.
The article is from 2013, so its very much likely that some of the issues has been handled by MongoDB itself or some agreed practices.
Or in other words, how to "parameterise" a container. An interesting idea.
I appreciate that this is likely trivial for mathematicians. For me, I was quite lost. Something I found a bit more obvious was constantly dividing a squares sides into two. When done infinite amount of times, getting the perimeter of the shape would equal 2xpixr
Of course, it can be taken too far. But that doesn't mean that reasonable restrictions aren't desirable. I could take your argument to its other extreme, and point out that the lack of any sort of HOA/neighborhood association/city code enforcement can lead to run-down slums.
There is -- just not on the unicorn level.

But startups are not only those designed to be unicorns and be sold for $10 billion -- "lifestyle businesses" are also startups.
All your code proves is you don't get my point. If those 13 sentences could stand alone, they wouldn't need all the explanatory paragraphs.

Here's my Startups in 1 Sentence: Know what's important and execute. I'm being half facetious, but also half serious. My sentence is more universally applicable than the 13.

See how silly this click-baity title game gets?
TypeScript is merely JS with added type annotations, annotations which are stripped off when it compiles to JS.

There's no usefulness of TypeScript as a target for a compiler for Swift, because Swift already has static typing.
I know a simple blog isn't the type of site this contest has in mind, but a couple years back I tried to shrink my blog's homepage. I got some good feedback and was happy with the result. Since I go long stretches of time without doing frontend, I felt it was a worthwhile exercise.

This is what I learned from the experience:
http://openmymind.net/Minimalist-Markup/
I grew up in a tony suburb. Sure, the average kid who lived in one wasn't obese (although their parents are another matter), but for every McMansion there are 1000 people who work in the Walmarts, Home Depots, and AutoZones, and obesity rates among them are sky high.
They just recently re-designed their website, its rather swollen now.
Maintainers Wanted, open source projects looking for new maintainers
> Yes, however the contents of the free sample seems very real.

The only people who could verify if it's real are the Equation Group themself. For anyone else it's impossible to verify - it's just some names.

So: If it's real the Equation Group will bid - probably a lot. If it's fake no one will bid.

So it'll be easy to tell which it is.
Are You a NativeScript Champion? Late Summer App Contest
The Woman Who Put Men on the Moon – A Comic Based on Margaret Hamilton
I think those have Alps key switches. I liked Apple's ADB keyboards as well, and I kept one even after moving a few times, in the hope that I could use it again some day.

I wonder if I could find a USB adapter for one. Microchip actually has an application note on talking ADB with a PIC, and there's probably an Inside Macintosh book on the subject, so if it came to it I think I could make one.
You can define arbitrary constraints of any level of complexity with Postgres for any column, be it plain int, hstore, jsonb or anything else. Most of that will also be efficiently indexable out of the box.
Multiple Sclerosis is a Parasitosis
Not sure how many more times I can say "the impact is debatable" in recognition that individuals voting as other individuals would be an inefficient way to sway an election. However, it is fairly well documented that this happens to some degree:
https://ballotpedia.org/Dead_people_voting

and that it is completely feasible to pretend to be another person when voting:
https://youtu.be/pZMU2oMJNHU

But, since you asked, here is a scenario that I think is entirely plausible: A group of over-zealous activists travel to a very tight state with a handful of close precincts. They look up recent deaths in the areas and get a list of 1000 names and addresses that they then use to vote, each voting multiple times. They simply go in, give the name and address, and vote, then go to another polling location and repeat. Other groups decide on other tactics. A poll worker decides to stuff a box. A hacker changes a few 100 votes just to see if she can. No one technique alone would have swayed the election, but in concert they push it to the opposite of what a 100% fair election would have been.

In this scenario, note that there is no big evil conspiracy - just a handful of misguided people taking actions with a collective big consequence.

Obviously the risk of fraud has to be weighed against the risk that someone due a vote will be unable to do so because they couldn't obtain an ID or lost it. It's also worth pointing out that before the general election, the various shenanigans of the primaries and two parties mean that the general is not really "fair" before it even starts. Again, my point is that it's not "ridiculous" to posit that US elections have systemic flaws that could sway the outcome.
A lot of projects end up abandoned because their maintainers wanted to move on but couldn't find anyone to reliably take over.

I thought it'd be useful to create a list of projects looking for new maintainers: Maintainers Wanted.

If you know of any projects that should be added, feel free to make a pull request or write an issue!
If HOAs truly cared about aesthetics, there would be no market for asphalt shingles.
African-American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries [pdf]
Thanks for the hint. I wasn't aware of that option.
> There are a lot of applications where your database is not the or even a source of truth, but effectively a big cache that you can either fully rebuild or where rebuilding isn't necessary (the data is too "fast moving" for there to be much point).

This use case doesn't mean it's okay to lose data randomly. Cache invalidation should happen intentionally via an intelligent algorithm, and other data stores (such as Redis) provide this.

> Here is another: A search engine for classifieds where the source of truth of 99%+ of listings were external feeds that'd get re-crawled at least once a day. If we lost a few million updates, who cared? If it was few enough, we'd just let the normal updates take care of it. If we had a major problem, or needed to do a major update that'd have compatibility implications, we could just do a re-crawl of all the feeds.

Just because some data loss is acceptable doesn't mean it's desirable, and while I agree that most of the time some data loss doesn't matter, I don't think you can actually say it never will. What if the 1% listing happens to include an client's feed when the client is doing a major product launch?

> You're scaling reads by replication, and so the vast majority of your data exists in multiple data stores. You may choose one you consider reliable for the source of truth, and the rest are basically caches, but you may want/need something more capable than a straight up key/value store for various reasons.

Again, cache invalidation should happen intelligently via a well-thought-out algorithm, not by randomly dropping data, and there are solutions which supply that.

> I believe the vast majority of data stores I've worked with have been ok to suffer a total loss of because most of them are not the source of truth, and the source of truth can be re-queries fast enough for it to not be a big deal to deal with losses in secondary copies.

Okay, I don't buy this, but let's say it's true. What about the memory leaks?

And what if your needs change, and you're no longer okay with data loss? Are you willing to take the risk that you're going to have to rewrite your storage layer because you chose a data store that drops data randomly, and your needs changed?
Those are all great! One thing I've never understood is the ironic shitty web design of these blogs. I understand some of these websites are as they were way back when it was started, I can see the nostalgia effect there.
Can someone add to the reasons?
Not everything needs a schema.

The alternative I've also been bouncing around in my head is multiple tables: objects (rows in the "primary" table) have traits (rows in "secondary" tables with identical primary keys) that break out columns according to what they do.

Having 9000 columns in a single table is a bit unwieldy.
That's 6.3% of all Bitcoin currently in circulation. A crazy amount.
Disabling Postgres constraints
Look, the fact is that the suspect was never a terrorist, nor harbored concrete plans of violence. From this follows that at no point during this debacle did they have real evidence of a terrorist plot!

The intelligence they had can at best be of the quality you described in your post. You state he was friends with a high ranking Fijian military officer, but this is incorrect since at the time of these suspicions he was friends with a defector from the military, which is quite another thing. A defector has no formal power, and most informal contacts within the military will be known and monitored. As a consequence, defector is not the rich source of resources you imply.

You state that his travel patterns aligned, but this is just circumstantial evidence of the known fact that they were part of the same NGO, which reasonably was known from the outset since the NGO was the original target of the surveillance!

The most serious intelligence is the loose talk about killing, guess how hard loose talk about killing is to come by? On HN I easily found a comment endorsing the assassination of Bush Jr by use of a drone strike, so I guess we are all terrorists in the eyes of your law given that we're both members on this organisation that is planning to assassinate Bush Jr.
What exactly is "paranoid" about it?

Elite just means "the small minority of people with big power/wealth".

And "globalist elite" just means people in power in governments, multinationals, etc, that are in favour of an extension of their power and reach etc through global treaties, etc -- to the detriment of regional governments.

That's par for the course for having power, and how the world has been running since forever.

Except if you also think that 10 countries having 2/3rd of the world as slaves in their colonies up to merely 5-6 decades ago was also a "conspiracy theory" or "paranoid rhetoric".

In which case I salute the historical ignorance and naivete.
The cost of small modules
I wouldn't call this auction even remotely smart. Bitcoin is public and can be tracked -- if the files are legit, this is a great way to end up on every nation state watchlist in the world. Oh, you're bidding on these files? That's a great signal to every government that you're a big target.
They would need to reveal several chunks, otherwise they could encrypt the same thing n times.
Lack of isolation and multi document atomic updates is one of the biggest difficulties. If you are updating multiple associated documents under a semantic transaction, it's possible there will be a window in which the partial update is visible. Sometimes this is harmless, other times quite harmful (changing constraints and budget on a bidding platform can result in overpaying for undesired inventory for example).

This can be worked around somewhat. If you only ever update the parent documents, then you can create new associated documents and atomically update the parent document to point to all the new ones. It's a bit of a song and dance, and definitely has limitations and gets complicated fast.
It is curious that wtbob knows better than the countless militaries and policy makers around the world on this topic.
I meant scale on a single box, sorry for confusion. It used to not be a great idea to get a really big SMP box to run MySQL because locking would kill performance; I think the locks are fine grained enough these days.
It's an iteration on those frameworks. Not ground breaking, but it's a new option.
And yet many blog dbs fall over under what is ostensibly read-only loads. It could be inefficient connection reuse, shitty disks or it could be something as stupid as writing visitor data on each visit. But it's irrelevant to the main point which is that it's a blog.

This comes up every time a blog falls over that discusses or criticizes a database on HN and it's just as shallow as it ever was. Do we really expect anyone to spend significant time optimizing their blogs for load that may not ever come? We talk about "pre-optimization" and "core competency" routinely on here and then shoot the messenger when a wordpress blog using MySQL falls over that's criticizing something like MongoDB. It's irrelevant to the point of silliness.
They most likely said "The wave function is differentiable and its derivative is continuous", which isn't obvious. If you think that it sounded strange you should have asked during the lecture and they would have explained. Now instead you just assumed that you knew better and made a fool of yourself...

Also this isn't advanced mathematics, this is something most who are interested learns in high-school and I can assure you that most physics professors are aware of this fact.
I'm not sure what the actual licensing is because the license in the repository is GPL, but the README and the project licensing page state that GPL cannot be used for commercial projects [in addition to closed source]. I am not a lawyer but that seems at odds with the contents of the GPL license in the repository.

Even further clouding the license is the GPL license in the repository has been modified with a '+' at the end, which seems like an opportunity for further confusion of the kind that lawyers bill by the hour for sorting out...i.e. adding the extra character to the GPL license might be a violation of the licensing restriction to verbatim copies.
When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to learn nowadays. My first real computer was a commodore 64 - completely self contained, no internet, no GUI, and something you could really understand from beginning to end after a few months of study. When I started learning more complex architectures and things like virtual memory and pointers, I had a solid base to fall back on that I don't think this younger generation is allowed.
It can be environment-induced, but need not be. It is worthwhile to test this, because it is a strong indicator of the origin of the anxiety which can help determine proper treatment. Basically, all you need to do is go on a holiday for a couple of weeks. If your anxiety isn't gone by the end of the holiday, then your anxiety is probably not environment-induced.

Also, if you wake up every morning with a racing heart, then probably your anxiety is not environment-induced.
> That, and also no one needs AAPL stock in order to live, but everyone needs housing

If housing should be protected from 'distortions', please explain how foreclosures help? I'm not being snide - my economics knowledge is basic, kindly explain it like you would to a high-school graduate.
ArangoDB would have been a good fit, it's basically mongo db with graph features.

By the way 99.99999% of the time a WordPress blog can't establish a database connection is because they used mysql.
DHH – Joel Spolsky is wrong
Snowden – Report of death greatly exaggerated (?)
HOAs are great in theory, but in practice they're staffed by people with no sense of aesthetics whatsoever, and too often define "aesthetically inappropriate" as "different from my house". Thus overcomplicated monstrosities with squiggly hip roofs, no lintels or arches over openings in masonry walls, and fake historical details are allowed while a simple, elegant box house with gables and a standing seam metal roof isn't.
> they are highly theoretical and biased against people who are not good at math

Maybe it has changed but it's certainly not the case currently.

> I studied CS, and I had to take more electrical engineering and math courses in my first two years than programming-related classes.

Nowadays, most of the classes are CS related. There are still some (basic) maths because they are relevant to so many branches of CS.

> are full of useless classes

Well, that may be true. There will always be useless classes because there are many different career paths.

But I think you shouldn't underestimate the value of more foundational classes.

To give you an example, when I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, I was taught OCaml (many people complained it was a useless academic language), as well as tons of maths. Recently, I decided to learn myself some machine learning and Spark. It was a breeze as I already knew most of the maths and the functional programming model. It would have been much more difficult otherwise.
"like a little girl"

Why not like a little boy? Because Joel thinks women are weaker then men, obviously.
Actually, when you have a toy project that needs a RDBMS, go ahead and use SQLite.

The consensus is that relatively few applications are a good fit for MongoDB, irrespective of scale.
If you excuse the buzzword, data warehouses are built for this very reason. So you are right in the sense that cache invalidation and denormalization are problems in sql based large scale systems, but they are largely solved problems whereas in mongodb you would need to do this work manually.
> has no idea what their doing

You complained about bad grammar in your article, so I feel the need to point out this error in the last sentence.
Nowadays facts don't matter. Everybody follows whatever they already believe, including myself.

If we look at the TrueCrypt audit report:
https://opencryptoaudit.org/reports/TrueCrypt_Phase_II_NCC_O...

It says they found 2 high severity issues, 1 low severity issue, 1 undermined severity issue. All in the cryptography category.

There were additional issues found by the Project Zero:
http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.de/2015/10/windows-drivers...

Even when faced with this clear evidence, people consider TrueCrypt as being safe.

VeryCrypt is under active development, so the situation is much better since the issues can be fixed in the future releases. However, people might blindly follow whatever is reported and consider VeraCrypt bulletproof regardless of the previous experience with other crypto projects.
Like most of the US, DC is not an engineering or manufacturing culture as much as a sales culture. Politics and customer-facing roles are valued much more than engineering typically. What's the evidence for this? Most technology companies don't have engineering-centric offices here, they have federal and commercial sales offices - literally entire offices of nothing but sales teams with an occasional visit by a sales engineer. If the engineers aren't in the Bay Area, then they're typically associated with New York finance connections. Barring that, you're looking at even defense contractors that source to lower cost of living engineers in the South / Southeast while the majority of the revenue goes to pay for the lavish lifestyles of the already-rich and well-connected in the DC metro area.
Err, number of people agreeing on a specific meaning is exactly what determines the definitions of a word.

Same for usage of things.

There were always be outliers for whom a thing is better used for Y rather than X, but in the end is what the majority sees the tool as useful for that determines how it's defined (in casual use, dictionaries etc).
Sure. It would be great if they supported both. The suggestion is to use their tooling because it provides a lot of added value, but yes, it would be great if they also provided a standard "dumb" PGP/GPG keyserver, too.

Maybe consider contributing to the effort?

Quick searched turned up several issues tracking the question:

https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/327

https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/890

https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/1266
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Forensics tool nabs data from Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp
I don't think anyone would call it trivial; it might be that the submitter erroneously translates elementary as trivial. Here elementary means that it doesn't use higher math (calculus, analysis, etc), it doesn't say anything about ease or complication, and indeed the elementary proof of the prime number theorem is hella complicated.
> It has seen the expansion of the middle class in BRIC. Between 1981 and 2005

1981 - 2005, also known as the period when the US and Russia couldn't maintain their hegemony over B, I and C anymore.
I don't think it does. The title states "Someone in Australia wants server sales hidden from view". Servers ("multiple-user computer hardware") are explicitly excluded from the confidentiality request.
The database backend of a Wordpress blog has nothing to do with this conversation. Any software can be poorly tuned/configured. NoSQL wouldn't magically solve this problem.
Unicomp sells actual buckling spring keyboards. They bought the tech from IBM -> Lexmark. Not bad keyboards, and pretty cheap compared to some of the hipster keyboards. I got mine with hardware Dvorak layout.
Reasons for Hackers to Blog
you can totally do this, you can even go one farther and put the value into a JSON column which can allow you to do queries on the value
Is the 10kb limit per page? Per site(including backend)? Per content served to the user on a single page load?
>It amazes me that it's 2016 and none of the windows based laptop makes have come out with anything that approaches the macbook pro.

The problem I see is that Apple sells a business quality laptop at premium pricing yet people compare them to consumer junk on the Windows side of things. The problem is these models aren't at Best Buy, so a lot consumers don't see them, and if they do they balk at the price because a laptop should be $599, not $1099. You just can't compete with a macbook at $599 or $699.

I find the Thinkpad line in general is really nice. HP and Dell also have a business line of lighter/thinner laptops that compare in quality, but cost just as much.
Oh lawrd. I need to stop writing blog posts in vim. Thanks for the catch.
Imagining a Workout Can Make You Stronger