skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DCI actually "gets" the fact that punishments should vary according to level of play

Indeed, which is one of the things that makes it scale so well. Felten's insistence on uniformity doesn't address that at all, really, and I think it exposes one of the big weaknesses of his argument: a Magic pro tour event doesn't just have stricter enforcement, for example. It also has a huge staff of officials, additional supplies and equipment, and all sorts of other stuff. From that point of view, insisting on having no "official" clock at the World Cup because your local neighborhood game doesn't have one just seems silly; when you get to a certain level you can and should introduce those things.

FIFA officiating was pretty bad, true, and I personally think that instant replay (sparingly used) could improve it a bit as well.

I don't personally care one way or another about replay. I would require referees to explain their calls on request (as a Magic judge I don't even have a choice -- I have to explain my rulings even if no-one asks me to), and look for a way to deal with fouls which occur but aren't immediately witnessed by the referee (golf, where you're expected to call an official on yourself if you do something wrong, is a good example; soccer could have a similar system and it would help with things like Thierry Henry's handball).
The problem is that most applications have instances where using a relation database is more natural and some where using a document store is more natural. Supporting two database products adds overhead. Postgres, DB2, and Oracle have (or will have) XML or JSON datatypes, allowing both methodologies to be combined in one database product.

For the author's specific problem, why not use triggers to populate a table with all of the calculations calculated out? Our in other databases like Oracle or DB2 you could use materialized views.
Having spent the past 30 minutes trying to get this guy's web server to even return anything, I'm thinking he may reconsider...
I found them on backorder at Mouser for $5.07 plus shipping:

http://mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/MSP-EXP430...
Don't forget Scala, which is a strongly typed language in the tradition of ML or Haskell. Type-erasure in the JVM does limit what you can do with static typing somewhat but Scala is proof that it's quite doable.
I meant free as in freedom...
I wanted to quit school just about the entire time I was there. Some days, I still think I should have; my economic outlook at this point would be better if I'd gone to a union plumbing apprenticeship.

But to do it almost and not quite? I'm giving you advice based on my own rationale ("Hey, steve, do what I did!"), but you should go back. Finish it. It's 3 months, and it doesn't close any doors to you.

It sucks to jump through Java-shaped hoops when clearly Perlythonjureskell would be the best language, but unless you're in greenfield projects your whole life, it's one more harsh reality.

You might want to do greenfield projects, but a degree won't close those opportunities to you.
Cheaper than going to a movie and, for the hacker-minded, almost certain to be at least as entertaining as many movies.
Once compiled, how does the transfer to chip go?
Tried to comment on the post, but so far still "Awaiting Moderation". I have never heard reports of missing documents w/ a production release of MongoDB (or a dev release, for that matter). Would love to help debug whatever issue he saw, but will need more info than that post gives.
You'll want to take that up with George Washington; the armed forces have been governed by military law, not civilian courts, since 1775.
I doubt that - it wouldn't make sense to write something that wasteful (in terms of computation, not tech) for something that primarily target embedded stuff.

Most likely you will have a relatively simple C api (not C++, as the C++ isn't likely to be portable across compilers).
My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto
There is nothing useful about those numbers, there's nothing based on hard fact, it's all conjecture, but worst he's presenting conclusions off the numbers that make no sense. In my mind this line summed up his total lack of understanding:

Today if you decide to develop a free app, you pay your $35,000 development cost, then you find your free app competing against just a modest set of 60,750 rival free apps on the iPhone. Imagine if you are your consumer, scrolling past that set, to find you.

Firstly 35k assumes a decent sized app, not a few day job like a lot of these apps are. Secondly a lot of these apps have NO rivals. Search 'Nottingham Cinema times'. 2 apps. But guess what. Those guys also make 'Leicester Cinema Times', 'Birmingham Cinema Times', 'London Cinema Times', etc., etc.

All the same tiny piece of code.

And what about all the hoo-hah about those guys who had 20,000 apps like 'Pamela Anderson Pictures' that were eventually pulled? Guess what. Search 'Claire Danes', 'Kiera Knightly', any female actress. 59 p app for each one of them. Probably thousands of them. Same piece of code.

And look at some of the numbers he throws about, 2.1 billion app capable phones vs. 80 million iPhones. I'm sorry, but add up ALL of Europe and ALL of North America and you've not got 2.1 billion people. But I bet a large proportion of those iPhones are in that market. And I bet the vast majority of app purchases are in that market.

And worst of all for those 2.1 billion phones. THERE'S NO MARKET.

Roughly 50% of the people I know have an iPhone. And I'm probably downplaying that number. Young professionals with large disposable incomes. Just the sort of people you can make a lot of money off.

He's not comparing like for like, he's not realising that the median earnings per serious software shop is actually higher much higher than the average per app because of so much dross and he claims a 'typical' app costs 35k without considering that they probably only asked the serious software shops and not people like the poster above you or those shops which are pumping out 100s of apps per week.
I would suggest moving the 'sign up' form above the two column split. So you get the basic pitch, you see that there's a signup (if you are interested and say "what should I do next?") and if not, you've got text below to get them engaged.
Corruption... as I said, doing db.repair often brought the records back, although it did take my application down for quite some time.
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS)
I wouldn't say its a very 'low' design site as much as it is a very 'simply' designed site. I find HN to be very easily browsed and wouldn't have it any other way. The simple design shouldn't have any bearing on the number of female visitors to HN.
So...

- Lack of Transactions

- No joins

- Schema-less

If these are important, you really shouldn't have been using schema-less document database.

- Unstable

This is the only real point I can give to you unless you were actually running the bleed edge version. If you were using the trunk/head version you were just asking for the problems you were having.
80% for VCs, 5% for the CEO, remainder split for everyone else is not uncommon. The first employee should be looking for 1-2%, maybe 3% for the CTO.

If you can, find out how much is the funding, and how much of the company was allocated in return for funding. If the funding level is low, you shouldn't go there unless you have a really good equity position. Also, if they are not transparent about the funding and funding conditions, don't go.
Google Voice transcription is a (really bad) toy. If you hate checking voice mail but want transcription that's immediate and even better than deciphering audio yourself, try http://www.phonetag.com/

PhoneTag is more accurate than our most human receptionists.

Agreed on the lag. I had to change cell phone voice mail to delay 30 seconds before answering or calls were going to GV voicemail for "no answer" before I could get to the cell phone. To the caller it had rung 5 times, to me, once.
FWIW I finally bought a Kindle this week and the software and device portability really didn't factor into my decision. I still fail to understand how people are able to read books on their phones. My eyes start hurting after a couple of minutes. Am I in the minority on this?
"He's not supposed to be ruling on policy, just on legality."

Not exactly. As a court of first instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_courts) "[...] evidence and testimony are admitted under the rules of evidence established by applicable procedural law and determinations called findings of fact are made based on the evidence. The court, presided over by one or more judges, makes findings of law based upon the applicable law."

Also note that the domain of the ruling is not the engineering per se but how the executive came to its moratorium decision.

In the case of a preliminary injunction he's supposed to assume that all the questions of facts go in the favor of the defendant (the government) and to then decide if as a matter of law the plaintiff would likely win anyway. Hence the closing paragraph I included above.
MongoDB does not currently have single-server durability, so a crash can cause loss of data. As you point out, replication is the recommended path to durability. We'll also probably be adding support for single-server durability by 1.8.

That said, the article seems to imply "missing documents" with no crash. That is something I've never seen reported before this post.
Create Colorful Composition in Photoshop
I dunno. I see it in terms of the sunken cost fallacy: yes, it could be three months and a few thousand dollars... but if I don't need it, why throw more money and time down that pit?

> but unless you're in greenfield projects your whole life, it's one more harsh reality.

I'll go back to making pizza before I take a Java job. I don't need much money to be happy, and I'll hate my life a lot less. I can still enjoy programming in my free time.
its a bit complicated but it seems it could work well
They have a pretty good email campaign you can subscribe to. I use them for the Toronto one and found some pretty great events.
Mozilla updates Bespin cloud based IDE - The H Open Source: News and Features
TI Launchpad Microcontroller Dev Kit $5.03 from Mouser
> First, copyright violation is not necessarily wrong

You're right. It's illegal. But this isn't one of the cases where the law differentiates from what's right for most human beings.

> Just as abolitionists who refused to follow the fugitive slave act, weren't doing something wrong by refusing to send slaves back to the south.

I'm sorry to use this language...wait, I won't. I'll be polite.

Do you make something? I've made something, so have my colleagues.

TPB distribute it when they're not allowed. Stuff I spent all those late nights on, and my colleagues the same.

Do you make anything? Do you use it to make income? How would you feel if I steal it?

Would that be wrong, or right?

Do.

You.

Think.

Stealing.

My.

Work.

Is.

Like.

Conscientious.

Objection.

To.

Punishing.

Escaped.

Slaves?

Don't just read that and then start typing. Think about it. Really think about it.

Do you, Daniel Gagne, feel that way? In your heart, in your brain? Do you genuinely agree with this analogy? Are you sure?

Or would you like to change your mind?
Why don't we just go to the bar for a glass of something with our friends instead?
Awesome, thanks.

I'm actually in the opposite boat that the author is; I'm trying to find a good excuse to start using Mongo. I need to get better at modeling data without schemas... I don't feel comfortable using it until I get better at the design aspect.
Beware of Cloudfront urls in email
Aaron Patzer (Mint CEO) gave a really good talk at the Founders Institute on equity and compensation in startups. It is worth the read/watch and gives you a good ballpark idea.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/08/startups-101-the-complete-m...

tl;dr
Just an Idea and you need a tech or other important role expect to give away half.

Have a little traction and the makings of a company 5-10% range for a key employee.

Established and but still paying reduced salary 1-3%
I remember somewhere in MongoDB documentation that states why you shouldn't use Mongo for sensitive information (i.e. money related) because of the lack of transaction. (No reference, but obviously I read it somewhere because I remembered it.)

Maybe he skipped that part?
There was a similar post in the Signal vs Noise blog a couple days ago. Copying is a good idea, we all need to learn from somewhere.
We use MSP430s at work albeit much larger versions with more RAM and peripherals. MSPs are pretty nice processors if you need something really low power and they have some models with built-in USB endpoints, which means you don't have to add an FTDI chip or similar.

From the looks of it TI used another micro to generate the JTAG interface via USB. In the past they used a USB chip with built in 8051 to turn USB into JTAG. It's kind of a hassle but just having the USB part on the experimenter board is worth the money since you can use it as a USB-serial converter (I think.)

As to the development tools: CodeComposer is great if you already know Eclipse and the code size limit is high enough that you can still do some real work. IAR is good too but the full version is much more expensive than CCS so we're going with CCS.

Haven't tried the GCC msp backend.
Jake Humphrey has been lugging an iPad around during the BBC coverage of F1 since they were released. It's fairly prominent and I was wondering if Apple put it there.
101Androidapps - Great way to get traffic for site
Oh no, going back isn't for sunk cost reasons, quite the opposite. I'd advise just about anyone against starting college.

But, ignoring the time already spent (which is already wasted), there's a 3 month period between you and the bump to employability that comes with a bachelor's degree. Nobody's making you take a Java job afterwards.
Firefox 3.6.4 with Crash Protection Now Available
The Best iPad Apps for Creatives for $0.99 or Less
The iPad truly is a great device for creative types, everything from photography to graphic design to writing, as well as just to help you keep organized.
Hi HNer's,

1) No, I'm not employed or affiliated with 101androidapps.com. I am co-founder of Phone Halo

2) If you have an android app that you're trying to get some attention for (probably alot of us), this has been a great place to attract users for us.

Hope this helps!
-Chris
I haven't used any TI processors specifically, but most MCUs that run on a 32kHz crystal will only use that clock speed either in very low power operations, or as a timebase for a real-time (i.e., wall) clock. The processor has PLL circuitry inside it that will multiply the 32kHz into the MHz range and use that as the main CPU clock.
Have you checked out this page:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Schema+Design

I think there are also some videos linked from there that should help.
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair

"Of course, some problems require greater durability: we would not recommend using it for a bond trading system."
I have had great experience with Acrobat Connect. I have mostly used it for small presentations and even some one on one.

At the time it was free for the level I was using it.
So injuries are the reason they don't play golden goal? If so, that's ridiculous. All sports deal with injuries and sometimes that means star players don't play.

What really bothers me is when teams "play for the tie" in certain situations and that's a viable option. Sports are not about playing not to lose, they're about playing to win. That's why the old Brazil teams and the current Argentina team are so fun to watch -- they're not worried about losing, they're playing to win. That's why the last US game was so entertaining -- they had to go for it in the second half so at least salvage a tie. Soccer should encourage more play like that.
Dan Ingalls on the History of Smalltalk and the Lively Kernel
I'd say there are a lot of pucks, and he's suggesting skating towards some of the less sexy ones. The app store is shiny and new and fun for hackers, but his point about market size is pretty valid.

All iphones are SMS-capable. Not all SMS-capable phones are iphones. Just like Twitter never killed blogging, smart phones still haven't killed plain old dumb phones, either.
Mike, you must have super ears. Let it be a testament to how much you care about MongoDB that I see you very often popping up offering to personally lend a hand helping someone who is having a problem. The handful of production environments I have either used MongoDB in or know of have never had a problem of missing documents when using a production release (or even 1.5).
If you look at the UI changes they made for the bigger screen, it isn't just a big iPod touch.
I'm a little rusty on this stuff (haven't messed with it for ~5 years) but IIRC you have the ICCCM specification and some non-standard but well adopted extensions[1] that define how a window manager communicates with the X server, and in this specification you will find all the virtual desktop goodies that every X window manager implements (including metacity, beryl, kwin, twm, fvwm2, etc).

In short, as far as virtual desktops go, what GNOME (metacity/beryl) does is the exactly same thing every window manager has been doing for the past decade at least, and the concept of virtual desktops (non-ICCCM+ implementations) goes much further back than that.

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html
Here's the trick to getting Yahoo abuse to listen to you--go through your advertising rep. We had a problem where our mails to Yahoo email addresses were being bounced for "policy reasons". All the abuse people would tell us is that it means a link in the email is bad. This was stopping Yahoo customers who purchased our products from receiving their receipts, software activation instructions, or email tech support.

We were making no headway getting this cleared up.

This was particularly galling because many of those customers came to us through our search advertising at Yahoo. We pay them a ton of money to send is leads, and then they are blocking us dealing with those customers!

So our search guy called up his Yahoo rep and explained the situation. The Yahoo rep conferenced in the abuse or IT guys (not sure which) and told them this was not acceptable and our sites need to be taken out of the blacklist or whitelisted or otherwise made to not be blocked.

The problem was fixed within 5 minutes, before we were even off the phone with the ad rep.
is the $5k the only money you have in total, including savings? if it is, put it into a good online high yield savings account and keep that $5k for emergencies. having a supply of liquid cash on hand can literally be a life saver.

do you already have some emergency savings and you just have that $5k to throw around? then i would stick that $5k into a Roth IRA with someplace like vanguard. get it started now, and if you need that money back further in the future, you can pull out the original $5k after a few years. put it into a reasonably diverse set of investments, but heavier on the risk/reward side of things. look for funds with lower expense ratios.
See, I don't think there's an actual bump to employability to any job that I'd want to have. And also forget that we're talking worst-case; Ideally I'll be self-employed for the rest of my life. But if something terrible happens, my GitHub, reputation, and connections will do more than a piece of paper ever could.
"No Matter How Hard The Past, You Can Always Begin Again."
An Infographic about Infographics
Checkout this hilarious Infographic about Infographics
Certain amount of sanity of Whitehouse copyright enforcement plan
I can't understand why anyone would start a project with Mysql instead of Postgress.
Webex works fine behind firewalls and not. It also lets you use your computer as a MIC and speaker instead of dialing in. It can also handle large volumes of people.I've been in some large meetings myself and haven't seen terrible slowdown. For personal stuff you can use the adobe connect now(http://www.adobe.com/acom/connectnow/). It's free for 3 people and pretty darn good. It's got 3 way webcam. That way you can see when someone is sleeping. Skype will let you screen share with one person.
I have not, thanks! I've asked about this topic a few times, and never got a good response. It's not like I was trying hard, though.

Bookmarked. I can't wait to dig into this. Thanks again.
There's been a few of these posts recently and in every case it's the fault of the author either because they chose the wrong product for their use, because it's not being used as directed or because the unstable versions are being used.

- There are no transactions in databases like MongoDB. That's clear.

- Reported "corruption" and data loss but no reproduce steps. What version? Did the server crash? Have you reported to the developers? We've been using MongoDB for over a year in production having started at v0.9 and now using only stable releases and have never lost any data when we do 5-8k inserts per second.

- No joins. It's a non relational database, what were you expecting?

- Schemaless. Yes - don't make typos / QA your code.

- Unstable replication. We've had a few issues with replication but nothing that can be described as "unstable". Again, a general statement "nothing but problems" without going into specifics.

- Not stable. I refer above with our long usage history. It's unstable if you use the dev versions, as expected.

I don't claim MongoDB is perfect, indeed I've written about several issues we've had[1], but nothing critical or show stopping. It seems it just isn't a right fit for what the author wants.

[1] http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-...
An Intimate Look at Infographics
yet again the important question:

Which version was he using? I've never had data loss in a year of production using the "stable/production" version of MongoDB.
Hmmm:

A complex LED flasher? Maybe one that instead of flashing, smoothly fades the LEDs in or out?

Want to run that lawnmower more efficiently and cleanly? Be the first on your block with a mower that has an onboard engine management controller.

Of course: robots, robots, robots.

A Newton's laws demonstrator that times how long it takes from when you release it to when it hits the floor and uses that to calculate the initial height. Bonus points if it displays G force when it hits the ground so you can experiment with different types of padding.

A temperature controller for your overclocked game machine?

And that's just simple hobby stuff without even getting into real industrial uses!

I love being a hardware hacker!
And now Sun is owned by Oracle, which means they probably haven't an interest in exciting things like Self or Lively, unless they can get a new way to optimize left outer joins that they can sell in an upgrade or something out of it.
I'd go with one of those blogazine-style posts. Dustin Curtis, Jason Santa Maria, etc.
You first.

And while we are at it, let's deep-six Microsoft Office and have a perfectly compatible replacement (down to the VBA level) that is completely open source.

I mean, if we only have to say it, then we may as well get all our other good-sounding but completely unrealistic statements out in the open too.
Free apps have in app purchases, and ads. Some developers do very well off of free apps.
I agree with many of the individual factors he cited, but I think that quitting a job, especially a 6-figure job, after only 6 months is neither wise nor mature nor ethical, at least under the conditions he cited. It's not like it was an abusive situation or there was any significant dysfunction there. So I suspect he's on the young side. Bright maybe, but young.

That said, I'm not knocking his aspirations or desires.