skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd hesitate to call RAC a true example of "scaling out". As you've mentioned, RAC relies upon shared disk in a SAN to provide data storage. Exadata would be the more appropriate comparison: there's also the "appliance" model and while Exadata was originally meant as an OLAP solution, it is claimed to be OLTP capable via SSDs and fast interconnect.

You're also very correct in that a caching layer in front of a database that _itself_ includes a cache seems like added complexity and resources (similarly to using a query cache in front of InnoDB's own cache with MySQL). A true scale out solution should not require (or even significantly benefit) from a caching layer.

However, I don't see how your product runs on commodity hardware: I can't buy a machine from Supermicro to run it, it makes use of high-speed interconnect (not something I can place in most data-centers). It seems more targeted at e.g., billing/accounting systems (which require strong transactional integrity) rather than storing high-scalability web application state (e.g., sessions, shopping carts, user histories, analytically derived data, CMS content, small pictures).

"Appliances" generally have the stigma of being difficult to manage, requiring more admins for for the same number of machines than regular hardware.

"Web scale" companies (e.g., Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yahoo) can run huge clusters with very few numbers of administrators (easily thousand machines per person) due to extensive automation of the whole process. Since the appliances running on a different OS image, the operations team can't manage them via their standard set of provisioning and configuration management tools: when one goes down, they can't use their main jumpstart/kickstart server to perform an unattended install; there will be difficulties managing its configuration via standard tools like puppet/cfengine/chef (much less custom tools that such companies write). From what I've seen, they end up typically relying on separate teams to manage their Oracle RAC installations due to these issues (these teams often have a much worse admin:machine ratio e.g., multiple-person teams for a <100 node RAC cluster). Facebook opts to stick with MySQL partly because their operations team know how to automate every bit of it.

How do you plan to address these issues?

That being said, I love seeing start-ups solve difficult problems. Congratulations on shipping a product that solves a tough problem.
tabata's are by far the most efficient but are very hard to execute at 100% intensity.

other than that, general crossfit programming is superb to anything else i've tried - the average crossfit.com WOD takes 10 minutes or less to complete if properly scaled and will leave you completely gassed.
I thought the holy grail of the web scale is being able to start with little (startups cannot pay 80K for a licence), then painlessly scale the thing. What they offer seems more like a better price option for large enterprise solutions - licence is (supposedly) cheaper than the cost of scaling. And that's cool, ok. But, personally, what I would like to be able to do is to launch a small application with a DB holding, say, 10K records and then scale it up to billions of records investing money when I actually have them. Or not.
Breast cancer awareness products
4THEFIGHT carries a wide variety of apparel, including our Fight Like A Girl Shirts, 4THEFIGHT Collection, Hoodies, Caps and Childhood Cancer Designs. We are the nation’s leader in cancer awareness product production because of our direct work as the supplier to most major nonprofit organizations
What a misleading title! I was all excited that he'd actually solved the problem, and I could download something.

As Toby says to Will in an episode of the West Wing: "don't come to me with half a thing and not be able to - you know, after you've walked me to the brink..."
Show your protest against the new Facebook Privacy Breach!
In my personal opinion, I argue that the effort to make before-private settings now-public with user confirmation is the "unethical" part, not necessarily the implementation. I will cede a point here: calling it unethical may be a little bit too strong. But I definitely do not agree with the decision, for the following reason:

Knowing that a design change will cause a certain percentage of the user base to expose their personal information (which retroactively they did not wish to make public) while providing little added benefit to the end user is what bothers me.

Facebook is known for its perseverance in the face of user complaints, which I can respect. I thoroughly agree that at times user complaints and petitions (such as those against the various site redesigns) are unfounded, as there is a clear greater good. I do not see the greater good of the new public-pages push, and thus, do not respect the effort to push user information into a more public space.

If you could point out benefits users receive by making more of their information public, perhaps I could be convinced.

[edited for spelling]
He's a indie Mac developer. And as an indie Mac developer, you can afford to ignore iPhones and iPod touch. But it's hard to ignore the iPad.
It says it only supports C89, and the largest type that C89 specifies is `long`, with a minimum size of 32 bits. So I presume it just doesn't provide `long long` (or `[u]int64_t`)
This is the best Harry Potter related article EVER! Chinese HP illegal extra plots...

http://welcome-to-croatia.com/holida...rac-apartments
This is both hilarious and really interesting. I cannot stop laughing about the one someone named 'velociraptor cloaca'.
I've never been a fan of: while (s++ = t++); I think it pretty just make the code harder to read. (Ok, maybe on some compilers it can be faster). I mean, everytime I see a line like that, I always assume there's a nasty bug hidden in it and I spend lots of time looking at it to be 100% sure there isn't.
Any UI engineer worth his paycheck should know how users feel about dialog boxes that aren't manually triggered. They get in the way, users want to bypass them however possible, and they'll click wildly just to get to the other side of the fence.

It's not "unethical" in the strictest since of the word, but I'm sure you'll have a very hard time telling me it isn't an underhanded tactic just to make the user do what you want.
There's a Firefox addon, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442

Just like the bookmarklet, but easier to customize - and doesn't involve sending the URL of every page you Readablize to a third-party website.
> it was always had the smallest footprint of browsers, as well as memory

So . . . features for power users, right?

> didn't work quite right on Opera

Sounds like something power users put up with more readily than most other people.

> have IE or Netscape handy.

Using more than one browser is something power users do.
Interesting that after all this time MS still haven't fixed this bug. I mean, I realize the patch is probably a business agreement rather than some code, but still.
I tried to digg a story and it won't let me do it.
Ouch dude, that's way defensive.

It has nothing to do with taste. It has to do with Zynga providing incredibly shallow gameplay solely optimized for virality and addiction. It's not entertainment, it's a money grab. If you can't see that and you feel the need to shout down any opinion along those lines then you may not have the stomach to succeed in the social gaming market...
Animated Button Using CSS3.
Flash like effect using CSS3 animation property. Just go and check http://goo.gl/KaGp this out and find out whether you liked it or not ..
anti virus and firewalls are much closer to basic OS functionality- it's like self defense, but for software. That is much less objectionable than competing with Netscape was, which was the biggest software war of the time (that I know of)

Or, you can look at it from the POV of firewalls and AV is needed to fight flaws in their product. Should they be prohibited from defending their own product, even if it isn't a direct patch => resolution but a prevention?
Who said Apple doesn't have a de-facto monopoly in smartphones? For some definition of smartphone, they seem to own the market.
They were supposed to launch on May 4, but the story seems to have got out a day earlier. There should be more details coming, starting from their official launch at Web 2.0 tomorrow.
> You're also very correct in that a caching layer in front of a database that _itself_ includes a cache seems like added complexity and resources (similarly to using a query cache in front of InnoDB's own cache with MySQL). A true scale out solution should not require (or even significantly benefit) from a caching layer.

Caches can be implemented at different levels. I'm talking about query caching (Exact SQL -> Exact Results). How would a query cache be effective in an environment like Clustrix (distributed MVCC)? Invalidation would be almost as expensive and hard to manage as the DELETE/UPDATE itself. With lots of RAM, it's probably cheaper just to run the query.
Why You Should Quit Facebook
I believe it supports the entire mysql api.
yep, I'm happy that my final exams are over
Hmm I wonder if there will be a causal relationship between this release and a bunch of startups deadpooling . . .
It's All About Selling for Survival
AxeBox Update : 03-05-2010 - شركة الصباحي
Please stop using hyperbole to describe job candidates. I'm begging you.
Can you remind me again how you qualify a phone (lost, drunkenly) as 'stolen'. You seem to be using that word rather loosely, when the person who found that phone in fact found lost property, not stolen property. Nobody stole from Apple here, rather Apple made a grave mistake which it seems in hindsight they then used the police to assist in helping them recover from.
How can you say that Apple's clear and apparent ability to influence the actions of the police isn't at least a little bit frightening? A little bit?
It doesn't matter whether Gruber or Gawker posted those pictures, the fact of the matter is that the journalist who did post them faced what seems to be police persecution at Apple's direction.
Consider, just for a moment, that it had been a Windows Mobile 7 phone. Do you think the police would be breaking into his home?
I would go with Wordpress despite the fact that I am a web developer. For websites which mainly consist of content, it doesn't make sense to develop something off the ground. And static HTML is a bad idea as its hard to maintain and change unless there is one person dedicated to the task. CMS's like Wordpress also makes it easier to be consistent in your design using themes and templates.
In any case, whenever I use Wordpress, I dig into the templates and modify the HTML/CSS to my needs.
It would be pretty hard to prove that what you made was a derivative work, especially if you used Tor.
The guy bought something that was obviously stolen. This was willful behavior. He spent $5,000. Come on! This article was written as if he saw it sitting on a table in a bar and took pictures of it.
Spam also gets real customers - doesn't really improve the ethics of spam.
i actually had withdrawal symptoms when i quit starcraft 1. what was that like 8/9 years ago? craziness.

Zealious... i wonder if he's still out there... (is that even how you spell his name?)
Between the unproven nature of the patents in the case of third party implementations, the uncertainty of how enforceable software patents are at all given recent court precedence, the RAND terms, and the Community Promise, one can hardly say that Microsoft can "pull the plug" on an implementation of ECMA CLI. If anything, it would seem more protected from patent litigation than the average bit of software.
IMO, the benefits are from having your interests represented in a structured format. For example, you can now go to Pandora, and Pandora knows what music you like [and what music your friends like]. You can start actually building up an identity and using it across the web. There are tons of possibilities for features useful to users that come from having a structured list of what you like and don't like. Hopefully you'll see Facebook make good on the promise to give you more useful things based on the structured information in the near future.

The privacy changes are a side effect of having these be connections instead of free text. Keep in mind the number of connections that an average user makes (all the Likes they attach to Pages, to Open Graph objects, friend connections) - would you have a Privacy control per connection? It's already not an easy task to keep the privacy controls so the average user can understand and use them correctly [and we can always improve this] -- just imagine the complexity we'd add to the system. What exists instead is the ability for you to control the visibility of all these connections on your own Profile. "Public" means that your association with these objects may appear elsewhere [for example, a friend may reveal that you're friends with them, or a Page may reveal you Like that Page.]. I think this is a decent balance between giving the user what they want primarily (to control whether visitors to their Profile see that they are connected to something), and managing overall complexity.

[Edit: this is my opinion, I perhaps don't know enough about the privacy decisions to represent them completely. ]
I like how you imply that someone being in their late 20's would not do something that could be attributed to the foolishness of youth! Late 20's -- yeah that's practically the age of respected senior statesmen, the jaded world-weary traveller, the wise old man down the -- oh wait, wrong end of the spectrum. :)

This is not a criticism on your post, just a humorous point about the subjective perception of age and maturity. I'm in my late 30's and definitely look back at my 20's as the decade where I was (a) an adult, technically, but also (b) still engaging in a lot of the foolishness of youth. I'm sure others would feel the same. One's 20's is that decade where you are an adult and yet still in many ways still like a teenager. Especially for folks that don't start having kids yet.

On a separate point, I think the fact that he was entrusted with a super secret prototype AND then chose to bring it with him to a bar where alcohol drinking would be going on and lots of people in close proximity to his body, some strangers/non-coworkers, and possibly darkly lit, and so on, says there was some poor judgement going on by him. It may or may not have been a theft, but he is at least partly to blame because he could have taken different actions that would have prevented it from happening.

On your point about Apple not hiring idiots: I bet even if Apple hires folks who are smart about engineering they are going to pick some who make poor choices when alcohol is involved. Logic goes out the window after a few shots of vodka and a glance from a pretty woman across the room. :)
"A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids."
hehehe..
No, not just due to standards-committee politics. Many people didn't like ECMAScript 4 for good reason. I read the spec. It's monstrous. I have hardly ever seen a language with so many overlapping, redundant, completely pointless language features. I'm glad it's dead and I hope it doesn't become undead one day.
Based on some similar experiences with a corporate client:

- Purchasing-level decisions have to be approved by someone who worries less about the money being spent now than the situation the company will be in later. In other words, if I offer a free alternative to expensive commercial software, they'll be concerned that even though they'll save a few hundred or thousand dollars now, they'll be hamstrung if I ever leave, or if the free software vanishes.

- These decisions are also often made by individuals who are not all that technically inclined, so they're suspicious of what they see as "amateur" versus "professional" (or commercial, or enterprise) software.

- They're concerned about compatibility with their business partners.

- They find many of the things that we like about the representation of free or open source software -- names like "Mozilla", "Firefox", "Thunderbird", "Foxit Reader", the FreeBSD daemon -- to be amateurish and annoying.

Yes, that leaves the door wide open for startups. However, there's a reason why this tends to be the pattern as businesses go from "startup" to "enterprise".
Unvarnished = TheFunded for Co-workers and Bosses
Last I checked, Braintree doesn't want most startups - their site says they didn't want anyone under a threshhold of $LARGENUM per month. I recall it being quite high for a non-existing service - like $20k to $50k.

Braintree seems to simplify the work by a lot. On the other hand, use another provider, and PREPARE TO SUFFER!

I wrote about our pains w/ Auth.net in specific (and cc processing in general) here: http://letsfreckle.com/blog/2008/12/ecommerce-stuff/
Gizmodo is Innocent - Because of "Innocent Intent"?
Now That's What I Call Music:
http://tones.wolfram.com/xid/6785-514-9680-596-5232
The Xiph comparisons were made with x264 when possible. It would have been silly to use something different than Baseline profile as Theora cannot compete with H264 on an advanced "HQ" level and no-one ever seriously said so. We are talking about web videos, something where Baseline is the main target.
It reminds me of the way that aircraft avionics are sometimes made more reliable - they build N complete controllers from scratch, to the same requirements, then use a voting system to discard the output from a controller that is malfunctioning (and therefore producing different output from the N-1 others).

It seems to me though that there is a big difference in the problem domains. Biological systems can produce a range of outputs that are on a sliding scale of more or less desirable - but software systems are generally specified to produce a single correct output, and any deviation from that is regarded as a complete failure.
Your intuition regarding California Law is wrong.

"One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft."

CAL. PEN. CODE § 485
Get your privacy back on Facebook: did you forget any tweak?
The Skim PDF reader/annotator takes advantage of this (as I understand it). Not having a Mac, I haven't tried it, but when I read about it a year or two ago, I became quite envious.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
Nope, I didn't see that. I wonder if it was because I left a few items that I knew would not be publishing to my stream (such as 'city'). Perhaps that box only popped up if a user unchecks every single item in each field?
Congrats Sergei and the Clustrix team! Scalable databases are a really hard problem to solve. It's great to see products that push the boundaries of what's possible.
Mindfulness Training Improves Sleep Quality; Lessens Need for Sleep Medicines
You can read about e.g. New York Times Co vs United States and decide for yourself whether shield law benefits the society or not.
Blogger: Masuk
Yes, I believe so. That is a fair point, I'll give that feedback to the people concerned.
If your customers pay with PayPal, and it's a subscription, they cannot cancel their subscription from within your app. They will have to log into PayPal and do it directly there.

That's one reason.

Second, anyone who's ever been screwed by PayPal or Google Checkouts (they stole my money without warning) is going to be wary of it.
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
I can't weigh in on your statement with any factual additions but...

If you start dialing a number, and somebody calls your name and you turn around and talk to them for 10 seconds, you probably can't resume where you left off, either. :)
Ask HN: How to write a business plan for a web startup?
I am building a social network and would like to write down a business plan that outlines the goals of the site and the long-term vision, as well as financial projections.

However I cant get started since I have no idea how to structure the entire thing.

There are a lot of resources online about writing business plans for a non-web business, but I cant find any that helps out with writing a business plan for a web-based app or service.

Any ideas where I can get some help? Any resources you guys know of?
How can a journalist, who writes a piece about the iPhone 4G proto and then spends half his article praising "good hard reporting", get the name of the product wrong? s/G4/4G/
Wonderful boomarklet.
While I don't use it often, it's absolutely crucial for some problematic websites, which make your eyes bleed.
It's a good thing that every month or so someone links to it so that others might find out about it.
Or Zip files. Or backup/restore. Or picture viewers. Or...
If you want to get into online payments with a lot less text, and a checklist of what you need, try my cheat sheet:

http://jumpstartcc.com

It even explains the different types of accounts, and how the whole shebang works - incl. Ruby and JavaScript code samples.
What would I suggest? I would suggest hiring UI engineers who actually perform A/B testing before rolling out another design iteration before users can even get used to them, and then I would apply those same principles of testing to things like this.

Secondly, I would give users better options what you're giving them right now. Letting FB do Link data automatically, or letting the user do it him/herself is a false choice if the user doesn't want to participate at all. The means lead to the same end, and the user is coerced into making a choice one way or another.

Thirdly: I would do a MUCH better job of designing these dialog boxes to inform users of what's about to happen. As it stands, users are simply going to think their data is simply getting reformatted, when that is not the case at all.

That's what I suggest, but honestly given the track record of Facebook actually listening to their user base, I honestly don't think any of what I said matters. Given that "what do you suggest" has been your retort on another comment very similar to mine.

Let me remind you, by the way-before you make an attempt to inform me otherwise about the 'opt-out' choice-, users are not left with much solace if they don't want their profiles linked to public places.

If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don't want to connect to.

This comes from your own FAQ on Facebook.com. What you're in essence saying, is that the only way users can tell their friends about where they've worked, where they've gone to school, what they are interested in, is to subject themselves to the public atmosphere that is Facebook Pages 2.0.

No. Absolutely not. I'm not buying that at all.
Microsoft produced a free antivirus for MSDOS 6.2, if memory serves.
Good move, a VC this guy was not. In his own post he whines about Bryght, his last startup, and Bootup being "underfunded." Well who is to blame for that? The ecosystem? I am sick and tired of whining like this from founders who don't have what it takes to provide for their own businesses by bootstrapping, driving revenue or being coherent and credible enough to raise investor capital. Face the facts, he's a total lightweight being blown off here by his own partners.
The issue with pointing out MS innovations from over a decade ago is that the only thing that matters with web technology is what's happening NOW. IE refuses to keep up with the way things are headed, and has essentially made its previous accomplishments irrelevant.