skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a senior DBA that has done many interviews for more junior DBA/database developer, I too have been surprised by how many candidates cannot answer a question like that at all.

With that said, many developers (other than database developers) really do not need to understand that. They don't need to understand it because they will normally have a good DBA/database developer that handles that part for them. In fact, large projects may have many specialized DBA roles including Architects focused specifically on schema design.
This is interesting. Clearly it's not just the hardware that makes mainframes this fault-tolerant. I'm curious why other platforms haven't appropriated some of the core features and functionality of the mainframe machines? Is it lack of familiarity? Patents? I'd love for one of my database machines to be this reliable.
CSS framework for building cross-device layouts.
Wouldn't you want to take the opposite trade? To guarantee someone else's tuition at a flat rate (or a flat rate plus interest) and then pay for their classes at the market rate once they get to school?
Ack + TextMate = AckMate
Standing out in the current job market: What's your story? What have you done?
We're currently in the process of interviewing candidates for three open positions in our software development group. This process typically takes us several months on average. We see several dozen people during the process of weeding through a large pool of candidates. Our goal is simply to hire the best candidate for the job - and perhaps we take that too seriously.

Two questions I always pose to candidates are "What's your story?" and "What have you done?". I'm always interested in hearing about the paths that people take during their careers. Sadly, most people are unprepared for such direct inquires. Nine times out of ten people refer to their most recent experiences. Are their careers so boring that they can't remember what they did five years ago? I don't think so. At least not in all cases. The issue may be that few people think of their careers as an unfolding story. They're unable to weave together the events that lead them to this point in time.

When asked, "Have you worked with such-n-such technology?", candidates often answer: "Oh, I didn't have an opportunity to use that in my last job". What? Who waits for opportunities to appear at their door steps? Apparently many people do. The successful ones are those who spend some of their spare time exploring new technologies and ideas. Consequently, they're typically the types of people who have interesting stories to tell. One of my favorite and well worn t-shirts reads: "Carpe Noctem - Seize the Night".

One employer I once met had a saying, "We try to hire people with the right DNA". I've come to understand what he meant and perhaps I've been guilty of doing the same. It's been my experience that software development is a tough business. Many people aren't suited for work in the field - even many of the seemly talented developers we've all met.

Sooner or later you'll meet someone who is interested in more than what's on your resume. Perhaps this has already happened?

Here's my advice:

* If you don't have a genuine interest or some degree of passion for what you do then you may be wasting your most valuable asset. Consider a career that will make you happy.
* Reflect on the experiences you've had in your career. How have the twists and turns helped to refine your views and interests? What sorts of patterns are visible?
* Document your story. A blog is a great way to do this.
* Carpe Noctem - Seize the Night. It's never too late to refine your story.

Doing any of this will separate you from the pack and seriously increase your earning potential.
Web companies operate in a different world entirely. If Twitter goes down, it's sad, but nobody really cares. They also don't have very much money, so running lean on development time and hardware is critical to survival. If Twitter had the IT budgets like banks and insurance companies, things would be a little different. Of course scaling isn't that hard when you have billion dollar budgets. Per byte of content processed, Twitter probably operates at orders of magnitude more efficiency than banks or insurance companies. Each byte of data HAS to cost almost nothing, or the business can't exist. Nobody would pay for social networking, so it has to be dirt ass cheap.
For the record, I love the idea of a company named Beard, Beard & Beard.
Well, nobody would have built another search engine either, but google did it. Part of the problem is the legacy mindset of the higher ups at financial institutions combined with their extremely conservative nature.

I currently work in a fairly large financial institution, giving them a web presence for various services and the backend system is no longer a mainframe but an AS/400. Though it still runs COBOL-based apps, so it's really no different than the standard mainframe.
Guy Kawasaki offers Designers an opportunity, they get pissed
If you want to remember details of things you don't use in everyday life, I'd recommend that you try Supermemo. There is also a lot of resources about learning on the Supermemo site.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/power.htm
If you're relying on obscure not well known operator precedence rules, you are writing less maintainable code. It's as bad or worse than using meaningless variable or function names. Use parentheses so your code communicates your intention.
Saving money on a plumber - game theory in practice
I think you can save 2 characters. Here is the original

char i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x[98];i++)i*=!++x[i];

Here is my improved version

int i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x[98];)i*=!++x[i++];
I don't really want to go through the expense of trademarking it (£250 starting price in UK) and on a seperate note I find what Groupon did very unethical (although the guy got a really nice payout).

I'm more interested (if anyone knows) whether I should be sending these guys an email pointing out that I already operate a website in the same space with the same name and whether prior use (without a trademark) counts for anything. They haven't launched yet, and I don't want to find in two years time that I cannot use my domain.
Please can we stop promoting these language-bashing articles?

Proposing an idea for a new language that avoids a flaw in existing languages might be interesting.

Actual implementation of such an idea in a working compiler/interpreter that we can play with might be very interesting.

Just reiterating a bunch of potential dangers in an old language is not interesting, and it's never going to be. This goes double if the presentation is subjective and/or incorrect anyway.
textmate is great. If you haven't installed them yet, check out Ackmate for super awesome fuzzy search, project+ for a decent project drawer & dvcs state visualizer, and the getbundles bundle that lets you get up to date versions of bundles via github

this blog post has a nice set of links to the tools in question:
http://al3x.net/2008/12/03/how-i-use-textmate.html
I'm not sure I follow you on the google link here.

Google built another search engine, which ran on a cluster of PCs and did so more efficiently than the big competitor at the time, AltaVista, which ran (afaik) on a cluster of Dec Alphas. Because google needed lot of horsepower and had a tight budget they came up with some pretty clever packaging ideas for their cluster.

In that sense both these companies took the best route to a solution. Now a search engine is materially different from a bank in that if something goes wrong in a bank the potential damage (not just to the bank, but also to the customers of the bank) is enormous.

A search engine that spits out 'wrong' results is still a search engine. A bank that doesn't know where your money went is no longer a bank (at least, not for very long).

Financial institutions rely heavily on their image of reliability, much more so than any web company.
I don't see the problem. The nodes of the list are freed from beginning to end, and then "Done" is printed. What's supposed to be wrong here?
I know there are several conversion functions for a USIM to be able to authenticate on a 2G network, but I didn't think it was possible for a 2G SIM to register on a 3G network. Can you explain this more thoroughly?
> No doubt android is an excellent platform, but the barriers to obtaining an iPhone seem relatively higher than android.

That's a feature of Android, not something that just happens because of factors outside the control of Apple or Google.
Right on - it is a good way to test a concept for some time, without suffering from high costs.

If/when it catches up, it will be time to externalize. I did something similar (~ same costs) for a project that was a huge gamble - risky, but with excellent returns if it succeeded. Turns out it didn't work, which was the most predictable outcome, but I lost much less with home hosting that with dedicated hosting.

Some people will say that's not trusting one's project. I disagree - like you allot time, you should allot a budget to any given project.

It should succeed or fail within the given budget (which can always be adjusted depending on the situation) unless you want to go bankrupt for a bet that failed.
You are entirely right, but permit me to respectfully add a few points I think are critical.

First, the two domains of knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Almost all SQL experts/DBAs are also able to do many forms of more conventional programming, and do them properly. Similarly, many software developers know SQL reasonably well and can write good set based code when they choose too.

Second, if working in the other domain, you pay a hefty price for not approaching that domain on its own terms. Using loops and cursors in MS SQL Server is enormously less efficient than the same solution done in sets (Oracle has a slightly narrower gap, but still a gap. I suspect the same is true of all RDBMS but I can only speak to those from experience). On the flip side, if a normal database developer is shoe horning data into an RDBMS that is not relational, that will cause complications as well.
I really do recommend the C++ FAQ book. There is a lite version online: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/

Since I've read both the lite online version and the book I strongly encourage you to obtain the book version!

rgds, René
The First Digital Camera
This is only interesting if you look at it the right way.

The way I see it is that there are many manufacturers of Android phones, while every iPhone is manufactured by Apple.

Also, every phone that runs iOS has specifications much more the same than that of every phone which runs Android. Apple's approach makes it easier for developers to get their app running consistently on as many devices as possible.

http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/smartphone-switch.... is interesting, though. If the data is to be believed, 20% of Android users will buy a phone from Apple next time they make a purchase and 90% of iPhone users will buy another iPhone.
Not in my experience. In general, employers seem to view my math degree as more or less equivalent to a CS degree. I know for a fact that "PhD dropout" is good enough to get you in the door for quant jobs at many banks/hedge funds. Tech startups don't seem to mind either if you demonstrate that you actually like to code and aren't ivory tower (i.e., use grep rather than build your own regex parser).
Believe the blog post, I don't doubt the math.
> But this is risky, because the bubble's only going to burst when the government gets around to changing policies.

Out of curiosity, how would the govt change their policy to improve the situation? Should they just stop subsidizing the loans? Or should they let students declare bankruptcy if their promised dream job doesn't matterialize when they graduate?

I think regulating the deceptive marketing should also be considered. There is a huge discrepancy between the advertised ROI and actual ROI. People should be made aware of the actual ROI of a college degree. Then a lot less will be willing to spend $100K to get a piece of paper after 4 year that turns out not to help them much after all.
A good idea, but giving children new parents is both expensive and legally sticky.
The thing is, both things can be true. They're just true for different people.

Those high salaries won't generally motivate an "in it for the tech", startup-friendly developer of the type that commonly frequents HN... but a bank with a legacy mainframe system probably doesn't want to hire that person, and they don't need to. The technology isn't the core of their business.

On the other hand, there are many highly competent developers out there who view their job as a means to an end, a way to support their family/life/hobbies/etc. To these people, learning a highly specialized legacy skill and making lots of money is exactly the right motivator.

As an example, I present my father. He has been writing data management software for hospitals for decades, and does all his work on midrange IBM AS/400 ("System i") systems. He writes all his code in IBM RPG--"report program generator" code. In recent years he's learned Java, C and Unix systems to keep himself fresh, but he's never found the need to actually use any of those skills, or a job using these that would treat him as well as his legacy work.
If you are interested in practical application of your knowledge, I would suggest you to build a mid scale real life distributed system on AWS. You would need to spend around 100$ per month though.

Currently I am trying to analyze a huge public data set using AWS, it is cheap at same time powerful enough to do practical work.
Well there is a certain "wall" that employers need to climb.

For .NET the "wall" is 30-50k $. For COBOL the "wall" seems to be 50k$ + (I'm conservative about this estimate on purpose). So beyond this "fair" compensation for ones troubles, the pay doesn't scale anymore.

So It's not that people wouldn't want to work with COBOL or perceive It as sexy - It's just that the "sexiness" point is a couple of 10's of thousands of dollars higher then for other tech.
As someone points out in the comments, isn't this true of any NP-complete problem with large enough inputs? This isn't all that surprising then.
I was expecting the article to reveal a new service that is competing against Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. I suppose that says something about Tumblr -- at least in my eyes it's pretty well established.
One of them is true when money is limited, and it's actually possible to know everyone else in the company. Another is true when you can throw millions of dollars at a problem to make it go away and barely even notice that the money is missing.

The rules a company follows at small sizes and large sizes are not necessarily entirely the same, especially once bureaucracy sets in.
Read it the exact same way.

Surely a semi-colon wouldn't have hurt, but I think most people are scared of using one nowadays.
A DTrace author leaves Oracle (for Joyent)
I think that explains a lot about why not many people seem to be actually using alternatives to LAMP (as opposed to talking about them on forums like this one).

LAMP is simple: OS as foundation, web server, database server, programming language to join them up.

I wonder how many people reading this article know what all of the above technologies do without looking them up...
Agreed.

It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate lisp.
The mainframe is built from the ground up for transaction processing. Have a look around Wikipedia for terms like: CICS, IMS, TPF, Sysplex, WLM. Everything, the hardware, the kernel, the rest of the OS, the programming model, the languages - all for this. It has no pretence of being a general-purpose computing platform.

The mainframe would suck for what you'd use the Altix for, e.g. weather forecasting. The Altix has a lot of processes that want to work on a common dataset, but it would grind to a halt if you tried to use its interconnect to serialize transactions.
"Shouldn't throw exceptions in constructors"? Seriously?
It's actually strongly recommended to do so.

Unlike what this article says, it works just fine:
- if you throw from the constructor-initializer, it destructs all the members and the base classes that were already initialized,
- if you throw from the constructor body, it destructs all local variables in scope then all members and base classes.

As for not being able to call virtual functions from base classes, there are good reasons why it is not allowed.

About bounds checking, GCC does provide a debug mode with operator[] doing bounds checking.

Local static initialization is thread-safe (see the C++0x standard)

Exception-safety is a serious issue, but solving this problem -- which is fairly easy, just use RAII -- actually leads to better and safer code.
As I had not seen this mentioned here or in article; You can read more about Chris's work here, http://www.tombom.co.uk/blog/ and I would have posted the 'OpenBTS on Droid' a while back if I'd known it was a 'scoop' :) My thoughts were of some kind of shared cellular access point that could be used in the developing world to give access to a sub-let access point with a 'real' connection.
"The Web Startup Success Guide" by Bob Walsh is fantastic
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430219858?tag=keysofgeni-2...

In case you don't know Bob, he's the guy behind the http://www.47hats.com/ blog, which is a great resource for startups and MicroISV's. He also does The Startup Success Podcast.
I think it's even better than that. Interesting names show that the company has a creative slant to it. As we start to approach a point where increasing computer speeds are no longer increasing our uses of a computer, we need companies that have the imagination to do things better, not just use better hardware.
lol not everyone. SEC and FBI don't take that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Stanford
Allen Stanford 2.2 Billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson
Richard Branson 2.6 Billion

In the same league.
Most phones do issue a warning if ciphering isn't enabled. On some you may be able to force it to require it. But keep in mind that this is only applied on the radio interface anyways (and GSM encryption is so broken you shouldn't be relying on it anyways). If you want end to end encryption of your calls you will need to use encrypted VOIP over your data connection.
Right, but big System p also plays in a similar class price than a mainframe with Linux. You get similar functionality on an easier platform (Unix), but the architecture and middleware functionalities are similar.
Isn't the different behavior of at() versus operator[] in vectors intentional? So you use at() if you don't mind a small performance penalty for the sake of safety, and operator[] otherwise?
Can you contact me off list johng at forum foundry dot com....

Also, have a portfolio to share? What have you built?
Slicehost for my personal website (plus $5 extra a month for snapshot backups). At work, we use Rackspace dedicated servers & managed hosting...its expensive, but it means we don't need to hire a sys-admin
> He has an iPhone, a Macbook, and a Mac Mini. He loves the fact that iTunes ties them all together, and wouldn't get a different phone because of it.

I have a macbook, mac mini, iPad and formerly used an iPhone. iTunes was the worst part of that.

I simply never plug any of that stuff into my computer unless I really need to get photos or something off of it. That's a usability pain. It doesn't help that I have more music than can fit on my computer, so I also have to hook up an external drive whenever I use iTunes.

Every one of my Apple devices has high speed internet service any time I'm using them.

I carry a Nexus One now. My calendars, contact lists, etc... are always up to date. Things Android doesn't ship with are alway up-to-date, such as my instapaper offline reading list, twitter, RSS feeds, SMS and voicemail from google voice and other junk.

And speaking of integration, the fact that my browser is notified of my SMS and I can respond from there is just awesome. And when I do respond from my browser, the message is marked as read on my phone. Apple is just way behind here.
Conservation of Stress
Why it's a bad idea to warranty your code
Ask HN: Is a phD a good way to focus & motivate you?
I'm thinking of undertaking a phD in an area that interests me - part-time, whilst I continue to work.

Apart from the questions I have around time commitment, etc, I would like to know if a phD is a good way to focus and motivate me to complete an original piece of work?

I spend a lot of time starting numerous projects but never getting them to where I want to take them. I think this is mainly down to it being very difficult to motivate myself when I'm 'tinkering'.

In a dream scenario, completion of the research would lead to something, that could be end user ready/commercialised/exploited through some more work.

Any war stories, anyone here taken that approach? Is it flawed? Anything I should watch out for?
There is no connection between thisweekin.com and TWIT, other than they share a common naming convention.

For the record, I got permission from Leo to buy and use the domain. however, since we launch 17 shows in under six months he is a little upset with me.
Also if you explain that you are an American company (if you are), they will waive the VAT which bring down the cost per month to 44 usd or something.
In floating point, yes you are entirely correct. But that old mainframe'd show you a thing or two about I/O.
The integration point for Google's stuff is the cloud, not physical devices. I expect this to gradually become a key differentiating factor. Apple is riding the coattails of an old paradigm, and, like Microsoft before them, they're too invested in the money they're making in the old paradigm to make the sacrifices necessary to properly address the new one.
That box has only one disk, which is inappropriate for most uses. Sure, they'll put up another server for you, but that's not the hard part; the hard part is restoring your backup. Until you are large enough to have redundant everything, mirrored disk, I think, is a must.
I'll quote Scott McNealy, at a recent conference (after he "left" Sun/Oracle). On the screen were the recent investments from the VC firm sponsoring the event. Unprompted, he pointed to the screen and said: "This investment portfolio teaches me one thing: all good names are taken! What happened to my old days. We had, Apple and Sun".
If both 'layers' of traffic are moving, not sure this is any better than a double-decker bus. Certainly, it has less route flexibility, if it requires special rail/roadway support.

My hunch is that computer-driven cars are the real transport innovation we should be concentrated on. When a region can go 100%-auto-auto, it will increase road capacity and eliminate congestion, without tearing up roads with massive new (and inflexible) rail construction.
HMHHFJHPOAZ doesn't quite have the same ring to it, although I look forward to listing it on my CV.
Essentially people are locked into those mainframes. It doesn't make sense to pick them if you are starting from scratch.

I wonder if in 20 years people will be locked into the cloud systems they are investing in now in the same way.
Ignorant to think Android is remotely as big as iOS.

The numbers say Apple sells 230k iPhones ipads and iPods per day.

This compares to less than 100k droids per day.

If you are getting into the business, make your iPhone version first. We only get about 10% of our revenue from Droid.
SEO What? SEO How? Great Tips For All
If you back those out (assuming that they had equal subscription so could be a random variable), what were the next two reasons?
Do you have links? That's a scenario I've always been curious about, and would like to read about situations where it actually happened.