skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most common type at HN (INTJ) is one of the rarest found in general population. (2.1%)

http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti-...
seems like a relational database to me...only without the ability to join?
It sounds like you have the attitude of the government just providing the basics. I've taught you to read to go read what you want. But without access to a decent library, without training on how to appreciate literature it seems that your point of view is to utilitarian. The arts enrich us all in ways that can't be counted merely by monetary utility. I would like to live in a society that recognizes this and is willing to support it. It's not like it would cost a great deal or that the money could not come out of the budgets of other government agencies. It doesn't have to mean an additional expense.
Agreed, I'm very impressed with the changes to both the content and tone. For me the annual charge to run my own code on my own hardware and the prohibition on non-appstore distribution are still dealbreakers, but this will undoubtedly keep many developers around who otherwise would have jumped ship. It will also allow more apps to be ported to and from iOS, which is beneficial for everyone.
I agree, so perhaps we could phrase it as "the world seems to be resistant to revolutionary ideas, but generally accepting of good ideas as long as they function within the status quo and are 'good' by available standards." ;)
I'm not sure why you consider it hubris for me not to trust the competence of other developers without evidence.
It was a just bit more than a "slight" increase. I think Apple had been planning on being able to double it all along - hence the initially lower dpi. But of course they'll never say for sure.
> I'm no SQL guru, but won't that subselect will break down when users and events grow to the millions?

Databases like PostgreSQL are excellent at performing joins -- which is all this subselect really is, namely joining two relations -- even when the datasets are quite large.

But this particular MongoDB query comparison is pretty worthless, since it's simply giving an example of denormalization, a concept which is equally applicable to relational databases -- the main difference being that with MongoDB, you hardly have a choice in the matter, since joins don't exist.

Don't get me wrong, I love MongoDB, but there are much better reasons to use MongoDB, such as the fact that every document is a flexible data structure, not a strict collection of columns. You can add keys and values as you choose, and store them as arrays or sub-documents depending on the encapsulation you need, etc.

So generally you will have an easier time working with data and being impulsive about it, than the square-hole-fitting-only-square-pegs model of relational databases, which require more planning and schema design, which in turn tends to squeeze all the fun out of working with databases.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, of course. MongoDB is not as mature as modern relational databases, by far. On the other hand, it has a nice feature which nobody apparently mentions:
With MongoDB, the old relational theorist's pet peeve about the meaning of null values becomes moot, because in MongoDB a null value (ie., a missing value) is simply a value which is not there, ie. its key is simply not there. That's much better than null values!

Another advantage is the ability to work with hetereogenous collections of data without having to jump through too many hoops. For example, you can have a collection (table) called "publications". In this table you can store different kinds of publications: Books, magazines, comics, newspapers and so on. Each type of publication may have some common fields, but many have type-specific fields -- hence, hetereogenous data.

A relational database designer will tell you that in the relational world, you would denormalize. A central "publications" table with all the common columns, and then tables "books", "magazines", etc., with each table having their type-specific columns, and also having a foreign-key reference back to the "publications" table. Fine. But think of all the joins you will need just in order to list all and query this stuff; if you have only the publication ID, you have to go through all the tables to determine what type of publication it is. There's not just the performance aspect. The relational model is quite different to how people _think_ about data. MongoDB is easier on the brain, that way.
What are the apps?
A currency is "legal tender" because a government will accept taxes in it, so in practice everyone has to have it, and use it for their own commercial activity.

But in an economy where no-one pays taxes anyway...
Scott Adams: Future Jobs (and Irreplaceable Skill Sets)
How on earth did you get from your question and my response to that? You're not merely making a non sequitur, you're misrepresenting what I said.
I meant they accomplished a slight increase in DPI across the genre (not relative to the iPhone 3GS) -- a large number of phones that came out months earlier are within spitting distance of the iPhone 4's DPI, but it just was never a big deal.
somebody's gonna get SUPER RICH implementing a "copy and paste" javascript snippet that allows you to accept payment from paypal, amazon, moneybookers, credit cards, SMS, and whatever else is fashionable in the local region.
Stack unwinding (stack trace) with GCC
Sadly, the Canadian version of the Droid (Milestone) isn't scheduled to get 2.2 until "Q1 2011"... It's the same hardware, I don't know why we have to wait 6 months.
I have a natural aversion to "SELECT *" (it is almost always a bad usage), so while any decent database system will parse it to yield the same query plan, I still use SELECT 1.
This looks to be a fairly strong implementation, and I have no doubt you've done your homework, and it might make a decent open source project.

But this is not going to be a successful business ever. The end user has no way to know if your application is legitimate or not, Google, Facebook and Twitter can run authorization services that third parties can rely on because they provide valuable services that establish their user's trust in them. You are asking them to hand over their passwords to everything because you have a clean well-lit website.
Castro has his doubts on Communism
This comes without the bogus $30/mo Pro membership fee PayPal charges for checkout on your site. I have limited experience with both, but sounds like a score for Amazon to me.
I like the website. It isn't nearly as cluttered as LastPass.com. Which brings up my main question, why would I switch from LastPass.com to you? If I do switch, do I have to enter everything manually? I didn't see any mention of import tools.
NSF: Time for an Internet do-over
huh. All this time I've been assuming they're incompetent for not being able to monetize the site, without ever considering they might not have any intention to do so. A good ad strategy wouldn't see the reddit people any richer, but it would increase the risk of reddit implosion and the loss of their jobs. In this light the Reddit Gold strategy is brilliant. Reddit Gold gives them just enough revenue so they aren't a liability for Conde Nast, and Conde Nast can't fire them for not producing real ad revenue without cutting off the Reddit Gold revenue. That, or they really are idiots.
I'll give that a shot, and if it works I'll 'gift it' - thanks!
The social utility of hacker humor
I think two concepts are being combined here: one is that Android is open source and the other is that's not restricted like the iPhone. The former is not a prerequisite for the latter. Android is as open as Windows Mobile and Symbian in allowing arbitrary app installs.

I agree with you, benefit of installing arbitrary software does exist -- but that benefit alone doesn't justify the significant "openness" hype around the platform. The article points out the many ways in which you are not in control of your device.
If you keep asking a person in different ways if they're always in the middle of a party or standing next to the wall, you'll eventually find out if they consider themselves to be introverted or extraverted. Likewise for the other traits. But, at their coarsest levels, people probably already have an inkling about those. (E.g. before you took the test, did you think you may actually be extroverted, feelings oriented, and sensing?)

I think when it comes down to it, we take these tests for the enjoyment we get in reading about ourselves later. (The Great Facebook Personality Quiz Epidemic of Ought Nine is the foremost recent example of this in action.) It tickles that part of our brains that says "Someone's taken the time to get to know me—I must be important!", even if that someone is really an algorithm. And it's that, combined with all of the parts that are "right", that allows us to overlook the parts that are vague, over-generalized, right-but-with-certain-caveats, or flat-out wrong.
The fact that it is written by a female founder is what doesn't make it linkbait. It's a case of "hey girlfriend, here's the list of things you need to do to be a founder, and guess what, none of them involve dropping testicles".

They psychology of these things is quite complicated.
4) You're using a 64-bit OS. http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations
Selling drivers on the right to speed?
Rank was invited to speak at a dinner at YC on SEO and blew the doors off. The links above are great. You should also check out SEOmoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors list ( http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors ). Description of the methodology for building the list:

"Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. This year features contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and many more.

Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document, representing the collective wisdom of expert practitioners, is, in opinion, one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization."
So is an iPhone scripting environment now allowed?
Viral Marketing -- hitting a pinata over the web
Cam.ly is a video monitoring platform. We sell cameras that stream and record video to the internet. You can place our cameras to watch anything and you can watch from anywhere. We originally envisioned our product as a Security Camera, but could work well as a baby monitor, nanny cam, or dog watcher. We built this demo to showcase our product (keep posted for a blog post about how we did it). We would like some feedback from HN. What do you think of demo? Does the demo help you understand our product? And finally how do we make this go viral?
I am not advocating something that extreme here. Not sure how familiar you are with Greece. Each of these organizations is overstaffed to a great extend. Then some of them are totally useless, like the public railroad. On the top of that there are businesses that would be very healthy in the private sector (see banks) and that the government has absolutely no reason to be in. The fact that the government is actually in those businesses, profitable or not, screws up the incentives of everyone involved.
> I have one client purely because they tried middleware and it ran like ass, so they wanted a native app.

This will continue to happen. And just because the tools are allowed doesn't mean that their output is allowed to be below standards.

> Time to get Java installed on the iPhone.

You mean, a static Java to arm-apple-darwin compiler? It's not possible to run a JIT interpreter (HotSpot+Zero) on iOS.
Adobe's stock price skyrockets after Apple loosens chokehold on app development
GridFS is just a standard convention of how to map files to key-value stores like MongoDB -- you can implement GridFS over MongoDB in just a few lines of Ruby code. GridFS breaks files into fixed-size chunks, and uses a single MongoDB document per chunk. It's not exactly rocket science.

The author of the blog post touts it as a _feature_ of MongoDB, but it's more accurate to say that it's an artifact of MongoDB's 4MB document size limit -- you simply cannot store large files in MongoDB without breaking them up. Sure, by splitting files into chunks you can parallelize loading them, but that's about the only advantage.

Among the key-value NoSQL databases, Cassandra and Riak are much better at storing large chunks of data -- neither has a specific limit on the size of objects. I have used both successfully to store assets such as JPEGs, and they are both extremely fast both on reads and on writes.

Neither is built for that purpose, and will load an entire object into memory instead of streaming it, so if you have lots of concurrent queries you will simply run out of memory at some point -- 10 clients each loading a 10MB image at the same time will have the database peak at 100MB at that moment.

Actually, Riak uses dangerously large amounts of memory when just saving a number of large files. I don't know if that's because of Erlang's garbage collector lagging behind, or what; I would be worried about swapping or running out of memory when running it in a production system.
Ask HN: How did you learn Ruby/Ruby on Rails?
I recently started learning Ruby in the beginning of the Summer by reading Why's Poignant Guide. After Why's poignant guide, I purchased and worked my way through Foundation of Rails 2 and created a simple Rails app up on Heroku. Now I'm reading meta programming of Ruby until Agile Web Development with Rails fourth edition is released.

I'm just curious how everyone learned to program, because my college's professors are simply abysmal when it comes to mentoring. I've found out that a majority of my professors haven't created anything in ages, and their skills are outdated.
My company has built a tool that aims to give you the basic page analysis from an SEO perspective fairly quickly. We had some decent reviews from people a few months back.

http://www.pearanalytics.com/

I'd recommend you run the tool against some sites, and tweak things around.
Use 2 collections (tables).

Users

- id

- events_attended (array of event ids)

Events

- id

- users_attended (array of user ids)

If you want to get events a user attended, do a query like:

1) get the user.events_attended array

2) events.find({_id:{$in: [user.events_attended] }})

3) now you have a nice json object of all events the user has been to

If you want to get all users that went to an event:

1) get the event.users_attended array

2) users.find({_id:{$in: [event.users_attended] }});

3) now you have a nice json object of all users who attended and event
What I find really funny is that a certain breed of fanboy applauded the restrictions in the first place, saying that they were needed. Yet I don't see anyone complaining now that the restriction is removed!
Couldn't agree more with the monster.com angle. We're also very hesitant to reach out to outsourcing shops as a way to get tech resources as I'd much rather find someone passionate about the business, close to home and smart than just another contractor working thousands of miles away.

Ogranic is definitely the best approach and we need to maximize our exposure to developers as much as we can. The meetup might be an idea worth trying.

I found this just googling around http://www.techcofounder.com/. Have you heard of this before?
I think that this is a function of a lot of things that change over time. I am/was heavily influenced by my parents opinion of me. I used to think that if my mother repeatedly says that I am not good enough to exist, then maybe that's the truth. As, if I am truly that bad then how could I possible know? That would be a really silly recursion. If I was crazy how could I tell whether or not I was crazy? Surely, some other reference was needed.

I know that this sounds silly, but this is an improvement.

For the life of me I can't think about a pattern that follows specific types of opinions. It's just the nature of this chaotic world. There is an infinitely large range of possible permutations of experiences and reactions to those experiences. So, it's quite tough to say if given the same set of circumstances whether or not two people will have the same opinion, or think the same way. Hence, it's tougher to extract a broad pattern surrounding such things. Unless you spend a lot of time with the person and find out the why and how.
And Picasso copied Cezanne, who copied Pissarro, who copied Corot, who copied Turner, who copied Poussin, who copied Titian, who copied Bellini ... everybody copies, so why are we talking about it? Oh right, because somebody made $500 million a year doing it. Copying is an accepted fact of life until somebody gets rich. Ditto Facebook.
Watch out Java, here comes JavaScript
Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets
Yes. For more commentary, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675131
That's a very valid point and I have thought about it.

To be honest, I started building it when I got fed up with entering passwords manually throughout the day. It was more of a hobby project.

There are similar services (Last Pass, Passpack -- in my opinion both much more bloated than PassKey) which are businesses (whether successful or not -- I don't know.

Having said that; I didn't build it with making a ton of money in mind (although it would be nice).
I like the site. It's uncluttered but seems to give just the right information in an appropriate level of detail.

I've never really looked deeply at "password keeper" applications before (I think because Firefox seems to a reasonably good job of it), but your approach seems like a good one. I think if I tried hard enough I might be able to come up with a JavaScript-based attack vector to steal the browser's key, but I suppose that would be a lot of work for relatively little payoff (unless they've already stolen your database and are now looking for decryption keys).

I'm curious about your business model. Do you intend to make money from this? How?
Andrew,

First off, it was very cool to chat the other night at the night owls. Very much appreciated your thoughts on connecting to different APIs.

I do agree with the other reviewers that the purpose and uses for this product need to become more obvious. I would suggest including some brief illustrative use cases on the front page for people to start salivating over what cool things they can now do that they couldn't before. Having to read the FAQ via "What's Quirk" should not be the primary way visitors learn about your product.

Also, for the dramatic effect of getting your Quirk, why not actually generate it right on the front page with a subtext of "make this Quirk do...." with options for people to chose from? I think that would also help communicate the use of the product better.

Also, why can't I just paste a link (any link to anywhere) that I want my quirk to go to? You could make it a pass-through your site and probably find business models for that as well (I am making the assumption that the Quirk embeds the link back to your site specifically but could go anywhere).

"Link your social network accounts" makes me believe I will get a Quirk that takes people to my actual Facebook profile rather than a Quirk profile.

Smaller Things:

Once logged in, when I click you logo, it doesn't take me back to your front page as I would typically expect.

When I chose to log in via Facebook and then subsequently denied your oauth request, i just get an error page on your site.
Hey, don't knock the annual charge. If we have garbage in the App Store right now, imagine the crap we'd see if Apple removed that particular bozo filter.

Still, it would not be out of line for a developer account to permit the creation of only developer certificates/provisioning profiles, limited to five devices a year or something, to suit personal noodling not destined for the App Store.
My line of thought: You notice hyphenated words when reading. I had to ask myself, "Do I?" I don't recall noticing, but it's hard to determine that you don't notice something. So I then had to think about my reading material. Online, most text is not hyphenated - that is the genesis of the discussion, so I knew that immediately. Then I realized that the majority of my reading material is hyphenated - books, newspapers, magazines and research papers. (I even had to check some research papers to verify it.) So I concluded that I don't notice hyphenation, since I a) can't recall noticing it when reading, and b) I encounter it a lot because most of my reading material has it.

I was surprised that you did notice it, since most books are hyphenated. And now I get to ask: how is what I said a non sequitur, and how have I misrepresented what you said?
I hope they add searchability to in app purchases soon. If you make travel guides for many countries, it looks like you can't sell them as separate apps easily anymore. If someone searches for Bali, it's going to get missed if you make a travel guide for Bali and 50 other regions.
I imagine it's something similar to the Facebook Graph API. Popup for login, website receives a token to retrieve data. Can anyone verify this?
Android may be a credible alternative to the iPhone now but that wasn't originally the case nor was it guaranteed. Many carriers had essentially anointed the iPhone the One True Smartphone. The US is a special case with the AT&T exclusivity but carriers in other countries even built out new GSM networks just for the iPhone. The first version of Android was nothing special, so Google did what they needed to do: give the carriers and manufacturers everything they wanted and more.

Manufacturers want to be able to customize the UI and software to distinguish themselves and not just be commodity hardware provider for Google's OS -- Google allowed that. To get the carriers on board, Google gives them the app store revenue (minus transaction charges). They also give both carriers and manufacturers a cut of the search revenue. Google has done everything possible to ensure that the carriers will have a reason to promote Android. One of the reasons they do promote Android is that they can load it up with NASCAR apps.

It's taken that much to get Android to the point where it as credible alternative to the iPhone. Trying to undo that now is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
The ease of use is my main selling point. I've tried LastPass and Passpack and they are much more complicated.

No import tools at the moment but I like the idea. I'll add it to my todo list.
wolf-howl.com is another SEO blog that's a must read for me.