skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've only spent a week or so there but I was similarly impressed. Limiting the sprawl and repurposing their old buildings saved them from turning into another strip mall & freeway American dystopia.

I'm a little concerned about the migration of tech hipsters to Portland though. Californian expats have this nasty habit of turning their refuges into exactly what they fled.
Thanks. In fairness, I can make a list of things I liked about San Francisco too:

* Beach bonfires on weeknights.

* The drive to Monterey. Also, the drive to Half Moon Bay for Halloween pumpkins in a very nice car. There is no better city in the US to own a nice car in.

* Dim sum.

* Freshwater aquarium supplies.

* I used to really like Zeitgeist, although I hear it's gone downhill. The last time I was in town, SF seemed to have a decent cocktail scene going.

* SFBay in general has unusually good access to produce and local protein, if you go out of your way to get it; no, you can't go to Whole Foods or Berkeley Bowl and get something better than you can in Chicago --- but if you want (say) 20 duck legs for confit, there's no cheaper place to get them than in San Francisco.

* SFBay has two amazing campuses to bum around (Stanford and Berkeley) and Chicago only has one.

Unfortunately, I just spent 4 minutes trying to add something to that list and couldn't. I could go on, and on, and on, and on about Chicago. Or NYC. I think --- I can't promise, but I think --- that I could put Ann Arbor head to head with San Francisco and run it to a draw.
Unless you live in Nevada, IA, where the first "a" is pronounced like the letter A. :-)
Businesses with deep enough pockets.
That really depends on where you are and if you can offer specialized value to the company.

Here in NYC I can comfortably charge my clients $80/hour ... but I do more than just PHP development.
You're right. Flat was a bad word. I'm referring to the west coast style of architecture, where things are built "out" instead of "up"; the landscape itself though is charmingly bumpy.
"Sequel" only when talking about MS SQL Server.

Ess-Queue-Ell all other times.
Overall I love the idea of software improving the gym experience but I'm not too sure about this simultaneous team effort idea. Anybody who's tried to grab a cardio/weight machine or even a squat rack at peak usage hours before understands the pain in the ass that is swapping sets or having to find a completely different exercise to do.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671519
Building a Twitter clone in Haskell using the Yesod web framework
+1 on "I miss Techshop".
Joining a fraternity was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It is a million times more easy to become involved on campus activities when you have a large social network via the Fraternity.

I've got 100 friends for life, 20 of which I see frequently at various events like Homecoming or football games.

Stay with it until you get a better feeling for how well you mesh with everyone else and decide then - just make sure that you give it your all and try to hang out with them as much as possible.

Good Luck.
> I'm pretty disappointed with HN being party to the same smug, knowing, tongue-in-cheek Rails (and to a lesser extent, Ruby) hating that you constantly see on Slashdot and elsewhere.

I don't code Ruby, so maybe I'm not as sensitive to these things, but I haven't noticed this here at all.
Was there something programming-related to celebrate on 10/10/10?
Ask HN: Please Review my Node.js + MongoDB Fantasy Football MVP
I'm looking for feedback on how to improve on my Fantasy Football service!

This is an MVP first product of my fantasy football app offering. The purpose of this MVP is to get a real-time stream of fantasy football updates while being able to participate in a fun way.

You will need this URL & Beta code to sign up & test it out, as well as a real email.

http://www.sleeperbot.com/signup

Beta Code: kickoff

Also, if you play fantasy football, please join in tonight for the MNF games!

Built with: Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, ZeroMQ, Python.
> This kind of attitude makes me keep looking for ways to move away from Python-land. The new "we're better than everyone else" attitude

Is this not accusing him of having the "we're better than everyone else" attitude? If not, apologies, but that's what the comment seems to say.
best part:

fed to an ibm computer, capable of making 50k calculations per _minute_
100k views/day, while not huge is certainly way more than what the usual application you'd build nowadays is hit with.

To recommend against rails based on the assumption that it'll scale badly in cases where it has to handle more than 100k views per day isn't really helpful.

Once you reach these values, chances are, you'll have team, budget and need for a custom solution anyways.

Now, I'm no rails developer and I never got to really like the framework. So if you ask me, I would find other issues that prevent me myself from using rails (many personal soft-facts - a matter of preference). The (supposed) inability to scale beyond 100k views/day isn't one I'd consider first
http://www.sleeperbot.com/signup

Beta Code: kickoff
If you're not saying he said that, why leave the comment in reply to him? Either you think he said that (or conveys that attitude), or your comment is blatantly off-topic.
I have some odd sort of deep seeded hatred for people who pronounce that as "Earl".
H-P To Buy IT Security Company ArcSight For $1.5B
As another poster mentioned, data lives on while applications come and go. This is a truism that has shown itself time and time again, in organization after organization.

The data should be architected for its own consistency, usability (and re-usability), and robustness. Of course for very complex needs the data will intrinsically become incredibly complex, which is why you should be using decent design tools to organize and document at a higher level.

Applications are layered on top (often many applications), and often there will be an impedance mismatch.

However what I hear a lot from the NoSQL camp is essentially that by hiding the complexity away into unbounded documents, the problem doesn't exist. That is, pardon the bluntness, unbelievably naive. Try to model one of those ERP systems and seriously -- have fun.

There's no big surprise that most of the success stories of NoSQL have been examples of intense simplicity scaled to large heights.

Not every problem is so simple. Few problems are so simple.

To your orginal comment -- while SQL is not the most elegant language, I like it enough. I love relational database design, however, as there is a purity and elegance in it that is very rewarding. In many ways it's like programming in assembly, and while it might not be for everyone, for some of us it's deeply enjoyable.
The thing about titles, is that sometimes even though they don't reflect what you really do on a day to day basis, they do help with career management - i.e. finding the next job if the current one goes bust. So sometimes its ok to give someone a high-falutin' title as long as they understand up front that they have to earn it.
All the great salespeople I have known were nervous control freaks hiding inside a breezy exterior. The great ones are like painters who would never let you touch their canvas. Of course they will freak if you keep changing the product. Stability is a primal urge (for customers, not HN readers) and sales people know that.

The solution: Hire crappy salesmen who will call anyone you want? Not exactly.

Find the smartest customers you can and practically pay them to work with you. After all in the scenario outlined, you don't even have a product they want. The salesperson needs to "get" that they are selling the team not the product.
There is no worse place for a 20-something tech person to live than in one of those South Bay apartment hives. If you're new to the area, please, for god's sake, cross Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose, and Cupertino off your list. Read Christopher Alexander; those apartment complexes will make you insane and sad. Live in Oakland, in a shared house in San Mateo, or (if you can) the city.
The biggest problem with SF is that it's in the state of California. A lot of your disappointment resides in that fatal flaw... folks who come from within the state have much lower expectations and higher opinions ;)
Meh. I'm not buying it.

I never said it was trivial. And when I said it works or doesn't work, the implication was that transforms more naturally map to requirements, not that the requirements are always understood.

I guess I could have written a more complicated article full of all of these caveats, but I'm happy that testing and developing functional code is much different than imperative. Things like parsers and ASTs are more complex concepts, sure, but they are common concepts that leave little room for doubt.

I think data structures become much more important in FP for some of the reasons you've outlined. Hence my comment that those OOP skills and Codd comes in handy. This is also why used the SQL example.

But thanks for clarifying yourself. At least now I know that I disagree with you and you misunderstood the article, instead of just wondering wtf you were talking about. I'll make a note on the article to help clear up this confusion.
Yep, had this discussion with people at the recent DjangoCon sprints, knowledge is a dangerous thing. When I first learned web development I didn't know that somethings really were complicated so anyone offering a simple solution was giving me an easy win. Now I know better, offering easy solutions to what I know to be difficult problems to me says that either a) they have a really novel approach that I need to learn about, or b) I'm going to get bitten in the ass pretty quickly. b is a lot more common IME.
Hm, thought IMS was the original IBM database. You'd be surprised how many legacy mainframes still run this system.

I spent a summer at the IBM San Jose Research Labratory and met some of the original database team. Bruce Lindsay was one of them and he is a fascinating guy with a genius brain.
I get the point the guy was making, but it seemed a little dickish. Thanks.
I go exercise, hard.

Everything seems better after I get the blood flowing and I feel that awesome combo of being physically tired / refreshed.
Brilliant idea! Now if you can add content indexing (i.e. a sort of ToC) for each interview, that will be just purely awesome!
That might be possible (free desktop edition, limited to 2 cores and 8GB RAM?), but I can't honestly blame Oracle for wanting to make money out of Java. Sun had the COBOL of the 21st century and still failed to make much money out of it. Oracle isn't going to make the same mistake.
Geesh... you couldn't spent two secs to actually reply?

I wasn't trying to throw FUD: I very clearly stated where I was coming from, and that it was only a doubt.

I also asked for some information, from people who knew more. You seem to, but you felt better just to bash me without providing any helpful hint. Your choice.

Finally it wasn't a criticism as such: as I explained I don't need to have 4 different ruby versions installed and to swap between them. On the other hand, I fear that having macport > rvm > gem in order to install a gem may be a bit too much. Hence why I didn't install it.

shrugs suit yourself, though personally it seems you are the one contributing absolutely nothing.
It almost sounds like they want to switch to Haskell.
If they're looking to reduce space, they should have us lie down horizontally. I don't think I would mind less space if I could lie down the whole time.
Amazon marketing gets aggressive, manages to make iPad look uncool.
I had a coworker who used to intentionally pronounce it "SQUEEL" as in squeel like a pig.
Yes, he has that attitude. No, he didn't explicitly say that. Those are two different things.

There's no point in arguing about it. This is only my opinion, and really I'm nobody; just someone who uses this stuff.
this lady has some good ideas...
http://www.happiness-project.com/
Just moved back to SF for the first time since the end of the first Boom. Compared to Boston, Seattle and especially San Diego SF is a crappy place to live. It still beats LA and NYC, though.
Mac OS X Public Beta
S-Q-L here. Every time I hear "Sequel" I get this strange fluttering twitch in my left eye and an inner desire to go postal :)
Alter your perspective on it a tiny bit:

It's Monday morning and you're sitting in a cafe, negotiating and moving forward the sale of your startup. You're about to go outside and bike in the fresh air.

Places you're not:
- working a menial office job daydreaming about working on your own projects

- trapped in a cube farm with no prospect of enjoying the day, whatever it brings weather-wise, outside

- stuck in traffic with your only means of transportation being a vehicle that has a tendency to, well, get stuck in traffic

All will be well.

(edited so it's readable)
But I don't pronounce hardly any of the words {hello, this, is, Linus, Torvalds, and, I, pronounce, as} the same way he does, so why should I pronounce "Linux" the same way? (In other words, pronunciations are localized.)
Exactly. My fear actually started when I realised exactly that. Now, maybe it works beautifully... dunno, and if someone does please enlighten me. :)

I can see the appeal of something like RVM. But despite using Ruby a lot, it's mostly stuff for myself so I just use whatever it's the latest. The reason why I thought about RVM was that I wanted to try MacRuby (and rare cases when I need to move back to the system's ruby) and was suggested to use RVM.
As one of my coworkers exclaimed: "wtf are we doing here at work?!?".
Google This – 13 Years of World Domination Visualized
September 15, 1997. That was the day Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially registered the domain google.com, and the internet was never the same.
Reading in the graph and putting it in a tree structure is a reasonable problem, but not a 10 minute interview one.

Traversing the graph to find the optimal path? Wow, that's known to be a tricky problem.

This question wouldn't be appropriate for an interview, but I think it's just right for a pre-screen. It's not hard if you realize they're not asking for the optimal path, just the biggest total.

It's not my question, but I did take a second look at this company and I probably wouldn't have based on the rest of the posting.

The Quora challenge problem, on the other hand, seems like very hard one:
http://www.quora.com/challenges
Why does this water in the freezer only actually freeze when taken out?
It's interesting to see how this idea is being received. My startup (IActionable.com) actually provides a way to make this happen to a degree. We're mostly focusing on game mechanics for websites at the moment but I really like the idea of moving in to other types of areas as well (we have a few other ideas already). Our informal motto is "If you can record it we can reward it".

I wonder if this co-op mode would be better suited to teams within the same gym. Maybe it would work better without any teams at all? Individual competition through leaderboards could be interesting. The motivational factor, especially for new people could really be useful as well. I know a lot of people are saying that it is not in the best interest of the gym - but which gym would you rather sign up for? As soon as one big gym does it the others would have to follow just to keep up if it does well.

The co-op mode is still pretty interesting too though. It could lead to better camaraderie and feeling of belonging amongst gym goers. Any time you can get a group working towards a common goal I think you can accomplish some interesting things. I really like this idea and hope to be able to be a part of it someday.
Don't forget to also drizzle with honey and cracked black pepper.
100% right, thank you! This really helped, very much appreciate it.
[Fake News] Is IE9 beta getting leaked today?
This seems like the standard gloom and doom article that is easy for journalists to publish for an audience looking for an enemy to hate on.

Energy efficiency and end-user economic efficiency can be separated. The simplest way would be to tax the fuels and use those funds to subsidize the financing or purchase of efficient equipment.

The article is stretching arguments too far. The savings of money do not necessarily get applied to more energy intensive purchases. They have no data to back their argument up. Those savings could be applied to renewable energy investments...then electricity is almost free and not scarce/finite.
Man not to be a downer but there is literally nothing even remotely healthy on any of these suggestions. Not even the typically healthy Chipotle is spared.

It's easy as developers working late or odd hours to fall into the trap of unhealthy eating habits. But don't do it - if anything our hard working hours requires really smart food choices.
Probably just personal preference, but for me, I like to have the .rvmrc file in source control so that I don't have to think about setting it up.

The first time I navigate to the directory the gemset is created.

Still a good tip. Thanks.
I am using it for a web application I sell to public utilities.

GLASS stands for "Gemstone Linux Apache Seaside Smalltalk". http://seaside.gemstone.com/

To put it simply, it is an object database. Instead of having clients connecting to it, it is a bit like running the Seaside framework right in the database making development just like having infinite RAM. The database itself is made in two parts, a Stone which persists data and Gems who execute pretty much everything. Scaling usually mean adding more Gems.

The free version prevents you from distributing the gems over several machines. It also limits the size of the database itself (it used to be 4GB, now 16GB) and the size of in-memory data (used to be 1GB, now 2GB).

I use nginx and connect and distribute to several gems through FastCGI. It is a VERY convenient environment to develop for with pretty good performance, then again, I don’t have many concurrent users anyway. I still get better performance than my original web app with a Postgres backend but I beleive it is a lot due to changes in my design.
There were academic systems that (a) didn't use the SQL langauge (b) came before Oracle, but wasn't commercialized as quickly as Oracle.

Oracle's biggest business decision was standardizing on IBM's standards, according to Ingres founder Mike Stonebraker. Hugh Darwen and Paul McJones have all had stories about this. One source is: http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/ DB2 was also only funded by IBM on the premise that DB2 would increase disk storage sales: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database_apps/s...
> * It's about to be Autumn here in Chicago. Autumn in the midwest is amazing and I missed it, a lot.

I live in Chicago and I still miss it, because I keep blinking every year. I feel like I have to go back to Minnesota to see a real autumn.
If the tickets are cheap enough, people will use these seats. The question is, how much cheaper does this make tickets?

Edit: Made some very rough estimates
Flight from Chicago to New York with United is $178, (found on Expedia). There are 112 economy seats = $19,936. Flights aren't going to be full to capacity but let's just assume for now.
Assume that United replace it's entire economy section of the flight with these seats.The economy section is 617" long. 617/23 = 27 rows of seats * 6 seats/row - 2 emergency exits = 160 seats.

$19,936/160 = $124.60

So if you replaced the entire economy cabin with these seats, a flight from NY to Chicago would go from $178 to $124.60. That's a pretty significant price cut.
Or perhaps incanter with all it's lispy goodness.

"Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics."

http://incanter.org/
As noted in the article, the legality of such a plan is questionable on safety grounds. I suspect a plan for tranquilizing and shelving passengers for the journey would fly further (and be a lot safer).
Best way to have a logo designed?
Hey guys, any thoughts on the best way to find designers to build a great company logo? Should I use 99 Designs and actively manage the designers (with a guaranteed prize). Or should I go to Logo Pond and Behance to find a custom designer?

I'm a rookie at this so your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,

-Andrew
Nice methodology. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how these numbers impact traffic or conversion rate.
Right on, no one cares about what you did yesterday, but what you are going to do today.
Agreed, a good run / bike ride often takes care of things.
I saw this when the article was originally posted in March, but was fun/interesting to review. The Rodeo burger is pretty decent (it used to be a 'limited time' special menu item). Also, my favorite all-time secret item which didn't make the cut: the "Poor Man's Big Mac" -- order a double cheeseburger without ketchup/mustard, add special sauce and shredded lettuce.. cost =~ $1.30
Whoa, this seems a bit unfair.

What feels like aeons ago, python-land created the huge monolithic monster, the Zope framework, which was absolutely great at the time. Then people were bitten by writing classes that would unexpectedly manifest some behaviour "as if by magic." The problems became (1) determining whether you would one day out of the blue have code "act weird", (2) figuring out where this behaviour was coming from.

Save to say, many people got bit/burned/scarred. Lessons were learned. There is a fair bit of cross-polination going on; I can't think of any python framework that has not tried to learn from this, and also from the successes/challenges of others (and that includes those of Rails btw).

So when a "battle scarred veteran" makes a terse statement such as this, I don't think by any means it expresses a "better-than-thou" attitude. But you can understand why there might be (rightly or wrongly) an anticipation of pain to come.

When pythonistas look as Rails (for example) and say "hmmn, this pattern looks sort of familiar, wonder how they're going to avoid that type of pain we had", surely this is neither unfair nor over critical, it's just part of the technical dialogue that ultimately advances everyone's "state of the art."

And I don't think anybody in the python world really claims to have the "one true answer." Rather it's more the case of "there is no one true answer, only many flawed attempts; so if you think you've found nirvana, be prepared for some disappointment down the road."

Generally people acknowledge that it's a difficult problem and that we're all dealing with variations of the same issues, irrespective of language or framework. A bit like a balloon; you can squeeze it in one place to make it "thinner" there, but likely it will pop out some place else.
Most people I know in the city have abandoned their cars. Zipcar has good penetration there but most people I know stick to public transit. I have friends that regularly do the trek from the Duboce Triangle to SF State without cars.

Public transit isn't as good as NYC or Chicago, but it's decent.
I don't mean specifically Redis, the in-memory key-value store. Obviously mobile has huge restrictions on memory that would make this difficult and unwieldy. I mean more the approach of Redis than the implementation. Storing simple data structures in a quickly retrievable format without the need for up-front configuration and schema creation.