skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MyMapNow: My startup’s fizzled end and how yours can succeed
Because you want to do arbitrary queries on the data? Because the data needs to be exposed to other applications?
>"NoSQL" is generally understood to mean "Not Only SQL"

I think that that is a bit of convenient revisionism as it becomes clear that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.

There absolutely was a very antagonistic, "this changes EVERYTHING" philosophy behind the movement called NoSQL, and the name is not accidental. Perhaps it was just a bit of trolling to get attention, but in no way was it a live and let live initiative (data tactics that are now bound in "NoSQL" long existed in computer science, since before the days of SQL. They just didn't feel the need to make it a comfortable community of evangelists). It was a "that was yesterday and this is today".

Of course things have changed. A bit of realism entered the mindset, so now it's more of a "Heh heh...no bad blood right? We're all good, eh?"
Forex Legend Scam?
Customer Acquisition - are you being too generic?
self-post, but I thought it might be relevant to app builders on HN!
Forex Legend ::: It's Finally Here.
Forex Legend Is Finally Here...
Meet Nodeload, the new Download server
Ask HN: How should I go about finding an interesting job
Hello HN, I have been a long time user on HN and really respect this community; nowhere have I found so many bright people who are willing to offer genuine feedback and/or advice. And here I am asking for one.

I've reached to a point where I am finding it increasingly difficult to find a real development job in Canada (I live in the US but will be moving). It almost appears that there's a great devoid of opportunities for a good developer.

I have been following all the popular job feeds (indeed, workopolis, craigslist, top 100 employer etc.) for last several months and yet, I haven't found a compelling job and/or company which values developers as an asset.

I have been approached by a few companies, but they will filter me on my (easily fake-able) skill matrix or by code spit on phone. May be it is because of my background (Java), or may be it is just me (slightly above average developer :) ). Or my be my resume has never reached to human.

Sometimes I think I should rather drop the idea of working for someone and start something of my own, but I have tried and failed in the stage of ramen-profitability so many times that I don't have strength to really pull this off with dependent family anymore. As frustrating as this sounds, I really seek the direction where I can feed the family and still work on an interesting job.

How would you go about finding job you want in Canada? What am I missing?
Update: The first Minneapolis meetup will be on Wednesday, July 14 at 6pm at the 5-8 Club.

Map and details can be seen at link below:

http://litlift.com/minneapolis-hacker-news-meetup
These arguments make me feel like DBMS technology is insufficiently distinguishable from magic.

Databases do two things: they persist data, and they answer queries about data. Neither of those requirements put any restrictions on how they serialize data. Relational storage, object storage, document-based storage, key-value storage, graph-based storage, etc.—it all just seems like different optimizations on the same "real" data, something that should be abstracted away from the database administrator entirely.

Why can't we just have a database that gets fed a normalized, relational-algebra-style model of the data, but then profiles the kinds of queries fed to it, and the kinds of data given, and builds whatever kind of denormalized tables/indexes/k-v stores are optimal for your usage patterns, using a Relational, or Object DB, or Graph DB, etc. engine when each is appropriate (perhaps firing them off in parallel and returning whichever answer comes first, killing the other threads)? Is this something anyone is working on?
Since Facetime is running SIP over WiFi, does AT&T still charge you minutes for a Facetime call or is that only for the non-facetime portion of the phonecall?
If you live on the gulf coast, would it be more appropriate to say that the oil spill is covering you?
If you believe the rumors, Verizon will be selling the iPhone in January 2011.
In defense of SQL syntax, I think that, in its very constrained domain, it models table / set operations with the best balance of expressivenes, readability, and generality today. At least compared to any other syntax I have seen, including ORM's. We take our old friends for granted until they are gone, and I have had to work with a number of data environments without SQL and its lack was sorely missed. The SAS community was overjoyed at the addition of PROC SQL for this reason, and the goofiness one has to do in R/ SPLUS is quite unpleasant.
Wouldn't it be hard for Amazon to claim that you owe them more than $80 given that they sell Prime for that price? And, Amazon probably won't ask everyone (or even many students) for proof given that most would probably forget -- an outcome which hurts Amazon's goal of capturing student revenue.
You're welcome.

First, there is no Times paywall... yet. It's due to launch start of next year.

After viewing 8 (?) or so articles on the NYT site you're asked to log-in. That's it. Clearing cookies will reset this. If that doesn't help then it's some other quirk.

Any pay wall will not be OS or browser specific.

Hope that helps. Let me know if clearing cookies does the trick...
Ask HN: We're looking for suggestions for API features
Our new startup, Repustate.com, is trying to shake things up in the social media monitoring and measuring field. A lot of companies are charging hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month for these services (sentiment analysis, keyword analysis, "brand reputation management" etc). We're trying to push the cost down to 0, but we need some help.

If you go to http://www.repustate.com/suggest-a-feature/ you'll see we set up a little feedback section to hear from people about what kind of API calls they think would be useful. We'll build the best ones (for free) and then you can use them (for free) in whatever area of work you're in. For the MBAs out there, we call it our crowd-sourced API.

So any help is highly appreciated and all suggestions are welcome.

Thanks HN.
Was it the 10" model? I found the keyboard on the 7" to be too small to touch type but the 10" is just large enough after some adjustment.
You've gotten distracted by the handwaving and forgotten that the "copyrighted work" here is essentially a wristwatch. Specifically, they're talking about the logo they put on the wristwatch, but to argue that a logo on an item brings the whole item under copyright law is madness.
ExpressionEngine 2.1 released
For those of you who prefer ExpressionEngine, this is a huge update because it's now built on CodeIgniter. This is the first production release.
Things like Lego Mindstorms help kids move on to the next step - maybe Visual Basic or Python. No one starts off with programming, it's usually WYSIWYG or similar paradigms.
I think he's got it backwards. He says SQL is a great language in front of a crappy model, the relational model. I think SQL is simply a limited language in front of a great model. The NoSQL folks are throwing out both, so I guess that's "the only way to be sure." Going to be fun seeing them re-invent the wheel for the next 5 years.

What we need is a more elegant, flexible language instead of SQL for data retrieval. SQL++, since the relational model is sound. Beyond that, we need a more intelligent data store that will be able to translate a fully normalized schema into a high performance, distributed, persistent representation that is queryable by this language.

There's no reason in theory this can't happen, its just hard. To think that dropping us down to GET and PUT operations is the answer is just saying "we give up."
All these people who cry out for affirmative action to be removed, I will see them write two pages about why it should not be there, but they will never advocate the really fair solution, because it will make them extremlely unlikely to ever get into the schools.

But this is essentially how admissions works for whites and asians. They look at your scores if you make the cutoff your in (barring sports scholarships or legacies which I'm also against).

Are you saying of all the applications from black people they received, they did not find 50 that met the cut-off mark? That's a bit unlikely, is it not?

Then why do they have different admissions standards for minority applicants? If it were possible for minority applicants to meet the normal admissions standards affirmative action programs would be unnecessary.

If you want a score based system, then say so and accept that whites will be a tiny minority in those schools

I want a score based system. I'm against affirmative action precisely because it is a hybrid system. Whites and Asians are held to one standard, minorities to another. As I've said before, if you want to admit lower scoring minority applicants adjust the general admissions standards accordingly so they can get in.
To me, it's not a real competitor. Just looking at the photographs solidifies that I am not in the market that these guys are targeting. I'm willing to bet that a lot of iPad users would agree.
Ask HN: How does your (startup) office look like?
Luckilly we are 3 in our startup and the 4th partner is about to join us full-time. In our country rent contracts are for at least 2 years so we are looking for offices which are suitable for 8-12 people. So I was wondering how do your offices look like (size, space, layouts, desks). If you have some pictures to share they would be more than an inspiration to us. Of course ideas are more than welcome also.
I'm so glad this article was posted on HN recently:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/...
I may be missing something, but isn’t he saying that the FaceTime call, once initiated by a traditional phone call, is encrypted?

“Only the call part is Vanilla SIP. The procedure for registering a Facetime user into their servers etc. is all non-SIP, encrypted/ciphered.”
Apparently no:

“The voice call ends as soon as the FaceTime call connects... the FaceTime call is over Wi-Fi so does not use carrier minutes.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20008289-37.html
Yes; but even this only goes so far. Execution plans change based on statistics collected by the query optimizer. SQL was invented because query optimizers do a better job than humans. The same is commonly true for ORMs.
Is it too silly to suggest that people check the status of of the authors and their institution or the importance of the journal that published the paper?
We should all really be thinking in terms of sustainable competitive advantages. Serious question: How can a startup software company create a sustainable competitive advantage?
If you can build this, please, please let me buy it. Or preferably invest in it.
That's an overly simplistic framing of 'NoSQL'. Despite every piece of FUD to the contrary, 'NoSQL' is a stupid name for a set of tools designed to solve an entirely different set of problems.

I don't want some data in a relational model. Yes, I could put it there, but I would be doing so solely so that it fits in the relational model. Which is pretty pointless.

The fact that the relational model is "sound" doesn't mean that everything belongs in it. Plus, I'm not holding my breath waiting for an "intelligent data store that will be able to translate a fully normalized schema into a high performance, distributed, persistent representation that is queryable by this language". That's the description a mythical database panacea that solves all problems with no downsides.

The continual pitting of NoSQL vs SQL is a gross mis-characterization perpetuated out of holy-war fervor, yet based on few facts or even understanding of the differences.
It is all relative to where you are. People in Ramsar, Iran get a daily does of about 5 rems. See this paper http://www.jpands.org/vol13no2/luckey.pdf

Radiation can widely vary and very little is known about low dose radiation. The nuclear industry follows a rule called ALARA As Low As Reasonaobly Achievable which really just allows for these strict minimums. There is little proof that 5 rems will actually cause a higher probability of cancer.
This sounds suspiciously like a sufficiently smart compiler.
AOL sells ICQ for $187.5 Million
This is already taken care of by the fact that I rarely use my .edu email account.
If you little all your code with CRUD, your code is horrible indeed.

If I hard code filenames all over my code, I also have horrible code. This doesn't mean that files and file names are a problem or that they caused duplication.

The normal (I hope) practice is to this in terms of transactions or activities and create functions that wrap those activities. SQL should only live within those functions that provide a logical interface to the DB. Its called TAPI or XAPI (transaction API). Think of it as your own domain specific ORM.
It made you a believer in the 3D technology used in Avatar.
The '5 Rem per year' allowance was set on faulty logic. It is all based on the linear no-threshold theory which took the acute radiation exposures from the Nagasaki and Hiroshima detonations and linearly projected them down to such small amounts as 5 rem. This is in essence saying that if 100% of people would die from jumping of a 100 ft building then 1% of people would die from jumping off a 1 ft ledge.

Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen of Pittsburgh University has a lot to say on the matter: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/
If you have a Gmail account, it won't work for this. You have to sign up with a .edu email account and verify that it's you.
As you state in your article, the ability to easily phrase ad-hoc questions and have them answered with almost no programming is a very useful tool.

Why not use two tools where two are needed?

Many databases run a mix of OLTP (which requires fast cache and no ad-hoc queries) and ad-hoc business intelligence queries.
Actually the name was very much accidental. Read this post by the guy who coined the term: http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name.ht...

"it was one of 3 or 4 suggestions that I spouted off in the span of like 45 seconds, without thinking."
Well it certainly doesn't force anything. I could probably adopt some bad practices if I really tried.

The screen really isn't that small. I disable scroll-bars, tool bars and menu bars in emacs. Using 11pt profont I get two vertical buffers of 81 cols by 102 rows. That's quadruple the size of a vt100 terminal. How much more could you need? haha

If I had to use gnome this display size would be unusable but stumpwm makes it very usable.
The Nuclear Energy Option by Bernard L. Cohen
How did that toothpaste get to the store?
Apple's Core Foundation data structures do this sort of "usage-based implementation selection," though in a much simpler context: (see e.g. http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2005/12/23/array/). I'm not sure why this technique isn't more widespread.
Most people stopped believing the rumors after around the 5th time they were wrong.
Consumer Reports confirms iPhone 4 signal issue
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this like Twitter telling Tweetdeck that their application is horrible- I have never used it, just an example- and that they will no longer allow them to use their API?
Amazon Prime is a genius program, and I think Amazon Tote has the potential to be as well. Free weekly deliveries of anything you order is perfect for most folks, who probably go to the store once a week to stock up.
Even in its own domain, SQL sacrificed parsing for "user friendly" English-like appearance.

SQL error messages are very unhelpful in every DB. You can't easily debug misbehaving queries and there are no tools to help. There is even a lack of indentation standard.

Fixing very long queries that fetch the wrong results is something I've been doing daily for the past 10 years of my life. It is not easy, and I believe the language is to blame for a large part of the difficulty. In some aspects of doing unexpected things with no warning - it is worse than C.
Well another issue is that costco is a wholesale company. Anything that is anti-costco is also opposing the untold thousands of small businesses that use costco to get cheap supplies and increase profits.
they were all pretty unremarkable
Papyrus Watch
CORRECTION: Amazon Prime free for anyone with a .edu mail address. I graduated long ago, but my .edu mail address is for life, so I occasionally mooch on these discounts. Too bad I already ponied up for an Amazon Prime this year :|
aha! I had fallen victim to the classic correlation != causation fallacy. Your fix works. It turns out that the bit that mattered was not the OS, but in fact the type of computer (I read less on my net-book and thus it had not hit the 8? page limit)
my guess is it's because you have two periods in the @... section
I used my regular gmail/amazon account and it just had me add my .edu email. I think most comm will come through my gmail.
Java Puzzlers. It's a fun book that teaches you to really understand the language by making you deal with its corner cases. Highly recommended.
this is awesome! this'll save me much time (cumulatively) that i would've spent going to the HN front page and seeing that I've read all the articles anyway .. great idea making it top-like.
Not at all. That's the conclusion that was drawn by researchers at Harvard from many postmortems of companies who tried (occasionally successfully) to create spinoffs to address disruptive innovation. Their strongest finding was how over-funding the spinoff killed it.

The key problem is that if you've been given $10 million by investors, you're going to be unable to go after a $5 million opportunity that you find. By contrast if you've bootstrapped up from $100,000, that same $5 million opportunity is very tempting.

It is in the nature of disruptive innovation that those $5 million opportunities tend to grow over time. But by the time they do that, it is too late for the over-funded startup.

Back in the startup world, when you start you have no idea what your potential market is. At the beginning you're generally wrong about what the market is. You generally can't even judge to within an order of magnitude. However if, along the way, you find it clearly enough defined that success becomes about acquiring large numbers of customers on a fairly well defined value proposition, then you're in a great position to go look for funding. And if, along the way, you find a comfortable business that makes you happy, you have the freedom to go after it without having to justify to anyone why you're not going to generate decent returns on a large investment.
Free PSDs of gorgeous UI
See http://wellplacedpixels.com for a more curated look at good, sexy UX
Argh, I just bought some books last week too.

Oh well, I'll need more. Signed up!
In 2007 I had been working as a network engineer for a big networking vendor for 6 years, making close to 6 figures. I had also been preparing for 6 months to pass a very hard networking certification (CCIE), when my boss decided that he could hire a cheaper engineer and fired me. I had no idea what to do next but I had lots of free time on my hands. So, when my gf, who was into handmade crafts, asked me to set up a wordpress blog for her, I immediately decided to help her (even though I knew nothing of HTML or web development) because my self-confidence was going down in a spiral to the ground.

The blog made $500 in the first month from Adsense. A year later, close to $1000 a month. I created a few more websites around the same concept and now I make close to $2500 a month in passive income, which allowed me to spend a year studying Python full time (and web development in general) and also lets me work full time on my startup. I'm not rich, but I make my own time, work on my own projects and it's a nice sum of money for someone living in Brazil.
'Barefoot Bandit' Run Ends in Bahamas
Perhaps the thieves return later to remove the shim and its data.
It seems to me like Amazon could really use it's own shipping co. The Kindle really helps reduce delivery burden I'm sure, but the best model for Amazon involves reducing delivery times across the board. Bringing the middleman (delivery service) into the fold would help them reach that goal.

Acquisition of FedEx or UPS imminent?
I was mostly thinking of the profile-driven optimization of the HotSpot JVM—something that was repeatedly called a Sufficiently Smart Compiler, until it happened to actually work.
i've been shaving in the shower without cream for several years now (enough to not remember when i started). always let the water get hot to make it glide easily, and change the blade when it gets too dull.
This is not as harrowing as the story referenced, and I have a memory of playing with a childhood friend around age 9 with an Erector set. For some reason, we decided to connect the metal parts (don't remember if there was a motor attached) to a nightlight (we moved the bulb). There was a spark and the house went dark. I quickly said goodbye to my friend's parents and learned the next day that we had managed to make the entire suburban block go dark. The teachers at our school heard about it. To be honest, I felt it gave me some sort of notoriety.

But in retrospect it was a really stupid WTF episode. I think my parents didn't let me play with him much
afterwards. I should try to look him up on Facebook. He probably won't remember or will claim not to remember. Stupid childhood mistakes that you survive. Memory is a good thing because it can be over-written.
The fact that a related movie is coming out no doubt plays a role in the timing.
Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)
AmazonFresh (http://fresh.amazon.com/) and AmazonTote (http://tote.amazon.com/AmazonToteLearnMore) are already up and running in the Seattle area. Modulo sales tax concerns, I could see them expanding to other areas.
How a sports betting hedge fund works
Hell, I live in Oklahoma. We have no beaches, but I still appreciate what he's doing.

Thanks for the hard work.
The iPhone 4 is great (but there's a giant asterisk)
Maybe, but only if Brighthouse Cable was paying Twitter to only offer the official Twitter client to Brighthouse customers.
I can see it now:

Would you like to install WeatherBug uTorrent edition along with this program?
Sorry I didn't realize the e-mail field didn't show up publicly! I'll send you a quick note and updated my profile to include my personal e-mail going forward :)
Google Latitude: Knows where you & Your Loved One’s are
Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications
That's only for people who visit your site, though, people from places like /r/programming. Let me tell you, there are divides between those who are savvy enough to understand places like /r/programming and those who aren't. I'd estimate reddit's overall adblock usage at being just the same as the rest of the news aggregation sites.
What happened to the person that had this job before me?

It doesn't apply to all positions, but I've asked that a couple of times. When I've asked, it usually flusters the interviewer and they can't give a good answer. That's a bad sign. If it's a quick "his wife took a new job in <city> and he needed to move," that's batter. Today with LinkedIn, there's a good chance that you can find that person and ask them directly.
I said experiments since that landmark 1982 paper...
Code rewrites are always a bad idea...they just need to refactor instead.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Can you provide some better examples?
From what I understand this is an API that "talks" with uTorrent, and they are throwing the word 'Apps' out there to be trendy?
I wonder how this relates to Reddit. Both sites (SO and Reddit) have unique, community driven and created sections.

Would a site like Reddit benefit from turning some of these sections into top-level domains? I know that they are having financial issues right now, and could this be a possible step to move away from their problems into something that would be profitable?