skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correlation != causation. Despite the title submitted here, what the article actually says is that people are trying to subsist almost entirely on ramen, foregoing other nutrition that they need like fruits and veggies.

I eat ramen every once in a while, when I'm too busy or too tired to fix any better kind of meal for myself, but that doesn't put me at any kind of risk because I don't do it every day for every meal. If you live entirely on ANY one kind of food (ramen, hot pockets, tuna sandwiches, etc), you're going to have health problems because you're simply not getting the different kinds of nutrition your body needs.
Remember back when Silverlight apps were actually written in JavaScript?
But isn't the nightmare a human, collaboration problem rather than a technical one? Assuming that the purpose of these stored procedures is to ensure data integrity at a lower level of abstraction and that you have appropriate staff to maintain that layer, I don't see where the nightmare part comes in.

In my experience, and perhaps with my bias as someone who's very comfortable with (relational) databases, I have seen plenty of nightmarish scenarios involving, say, Hibernate.
FetLife says "Goodbye Cassandra" for a 15% speed boost and better reliability
Original link requires registration: http://fetlife.com/groups/311/group_posts/815190

---

Goodbye Cassandra
by JamesLennon
about 1 month ago

I just finished turning the lights out on our cassandra cluster. For the past 2 weeks, I've been slowly rolling out the new technology that has now fully replaced cassandra. The result, so far, has been a faster and more stable FetLife.

FetLife is around 15% faster overall. Our average latency has dropped from around 150 milliseconds to around 130.

The home page is just under 50% faster, having dropped from 350ms to 190ms. And the time it takes to retrieve one page of the activity feed has seen the most impressive (mean) speedup, going from 125ms to 25ms.

The code that now powers the activity feed is extremely simple. We store each of the "stories" (the updates that you see in your feed) in a MySQL database with a big cache in front of it. The timelines are stored in redis, which is really just linked lists, hash tables, and sorted sets exposed as a network service. It's all really simple and pretty easy to debug when stuff goes wrong.

We've also put a lot of extra effort in to fault tolerance and availability. The new services gracefully recover from intermittent failures. Since we switched the new code live, there have been a number of these kinds of errors, but not one has been seen by a user. In other words, shit is working.

As with any project like this, only time can tell us how successful it is. But, so far things appear healthy, and we'll be watching very carefully in the coming weeks and months.

If you have any questions, leave a comment or feel free to contact me directly."

---

(The original post is a month old, but the only post about FL on HN was in a "Who's hiring" thread.)
Have you checked out ZingChart? Transparency: I'm on the team.

Zing renders both Flash and HTML5 Canvas charts. Compatible and customizable + interactive API.

For your consideration:
http://www.zingchart.com
http://www.zingchart.com/flash-and-html5-canvas/

Shoot me questions at abegin@zingchart.com or http://www.twitter.com/zingchart (Andrew)
I like it. Another benefit is it could help you filter out prospective employers. Most people wouldn't get it, but the ones that did would be promising.
I rarely care so little about a tech-related article that I flag it, but here you go.
Great Tricks For Video Optimization in Websites
There is tight competition going on between the players of E-Commerce business market. The success of the business depend on multiple factors. The major includes: good and user-friendly E-Commerce website design, clear navigation scheme, more than one payment gateways, presentation of the product specifications and so on.
The maintenance issue is tractable, I'm just saying that PL/SQL doesn't make it easier and probably makes it worse by being hard to unit test, refactor, etc (although this is very subjective and depends on the strengths of your team).

The scalability problem? Good luck getting 90%+ of your processing out of the database. Rewrite from scratch?
Would using javascript's same origin policy have solved 90% of the issues?

On the face of it that seems the case.
I guess part of the consideration should be that while the final product may be custom all the components are mass produced. As such you're going to have to pay for the custom assembly but the cost for the components will be more reasonable.
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities
Do you have any knowledge of objective-c or java? Making a mobile app you're passionate about is always exciting.
And it's a PR hit. Would you have commented on HN about GSM reception finally available in random-underserved town?
Nice one! Though I think you getting into the schools was a lot more a result of your past work than this essay. I like that you kept it very simple and just showed your passion instead of talking about big dreams like most of these essays do.
It is certainly interesting news to me that 5 out of 5 random users won't change their habits, even after someone provably breaks into their account and tells them how to avoid it in the future.
Another update that I don't see as a problem, the information was available before and yes there are malicious uses for it, but making it easier to access isn't the issue. The problem is users putting information on facebook they don't want everyone to see. Yes there are a wide variety of privacy options, but in general simply don't put questionable content on facebook. I think the responsibility largely falls on the shoulders of the users.
My development falls into the giant right circle and I never considered developing for the Mac OSX until after I created my first iOS game this month and learned of the Mac App Store opening in 3 months. Now it's as easy as reexporting higher resolution art from Illustrator and a few UIKit changes and I can redeploy my iOS game for Mac OSX and find myself in front of another large app hungry audience that will happily open their wallets.

I'll be one of the first in line to get on the Mac App Store when I've never before developed or sold software since this month. It is making is so darn easy to have a chance.
There's some incentive to be honest. If they catch you cheating in one place, you will lose credibility on all aspects. (Also resume fraud is a crime in some places, isn't it?)
Honestly? The word "douche" springs to mind. Regardless of the legality of it and how grey it may or may not be.

I'm sure you thought you were doing something good. But, short of not using Facebook in a coffee shop, what do you expect people to do? Set up their own VPN? I bet that of the people you scared off, they'll all be back on in another day or two. Maybe at the same coffee shop.

This is a problem that needs to be solved by on the website's end, not the user's end.
If p is bimodal, then p = 2*p1 is not possible. Either p = 0 or p = 1. The values in between do not occur.

Then the only thing to quibble over is G. But if you believe p = 1 for a company, what's the point of quibbling over G?
I think even Kleiner Perkins would rather have invested in Google at a $7.5 million valuation than a $75 million valuation as they did. However, negotiating hard on valuation can cause you to lose the opportunity to invest, and the people who argue "bimodal" are saying that this is a poor strategy since it may lock you out of the best deal of the decade just for a few quibbling valuation points.
In my opinion, session cookies are primarily used as a work around since HTTP Authentication is incredibly ugly. Perhaps if that core problem was addressed, the need for cookies would be dramatically reduced.
Whoever designed and built the Mars Rovers deserves a huge amount of credit. These things lasted far longer than expected and continue to produce useful data even after they were trapped. Fine hackers must have put these together.
As an encore, does anybody know about a library that lets you modify charts in realtime? I would like to have basic pie charts, where I could resize partitions, add and remove.
No, but i'd still prefer the later.
A friend of mine started VC-backed company when his 3 kids were 2-4 years of age. That was several years ago and since then the company has grown to 400+ employees, millions of paying customers and went public with the market cap of over 500 mil. Call it an "old-school" start-up if you will.

His HowTo is nannies. That freed up lots of time without making him feel like he was neglecting or taking away from his children.

YMMV however, because many people simply do not accept the very idea of letting strangers care for children of a very young age (them being the formative years of the personality and for other reasons).
To nitpick, the surface area of the Moon is roughly the same as the area of Africa plus the area of the contiguous US. Much less than the total land area of Earth. It's even less than the area of Asia.
Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
Does this mean we are getting closer to computers booting up as fast as tvs turn on?
Yeah, it does need to be solved by the website. That doesn't change that users are vulnerable and don't know about it.
+1 for High Charts. We're using these for some of our newer, light-weight charting options at PatientsLikeMe.

Great bang for the buck as your go-to first charting solution until you need something custom.
Contrail - Bicycle Community Tool
I usually just put dates next to skills (2005-present, etc) which gives some indication. Unix file permissions are a good idiot filter, but unfortunately most recruitment agents are completely clueless and wouldn't understand it.
Thanks, I've been looking for a Kohana-esque ORM that comes without the Kohana for smaller projects... paris looks like it fits the bill perfectly. Uses very similar configuration per-class: belongs_to, has_many, has_many_through. Awesome!
Rate my "Rate my App" app idea, very beta
Yup, I second violin.

They have it about right when you're really starving for IOPS. It naturally comes at a price. But last time I checked the violin's were a much more natural next step after maxing out local SSDs and RAM than the FusionIO devices (which seem more like a stopgap-solution rather than a scaling path).
There's an awful lot more to computing than websites.

FWIW I work on a "non-scalable" RDBMS that comfortably handles thousands of commits/sec, tens of thousands of selects/sec and tens of terabytes of data. All done with stored procs, one database, no need for "sharding" either. Will it scale indefinitely? No, but neither will anything else. The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.
For those (like me) who didn't already know, the FetLife homepage appears NSFW.
I've never understood whats so "ugly" about http authentication. Digest auth can get a little verbose, to be sure, but Basic+SSL is simple, and both are far easier than roll-your-own Cookie auth. In fact, the way most people & frameworks implement cookie auth sessions are no less secure than Basic auth. Haven't the events of the past week demonstrated we should all be using SSL anyways, in which case Basic auth would be fine for everyone.
this has been clear for a while. Ballmer said as much at a recent financial analysts' meeting: http://decav.com/blogs/andre/archive/2010/10/27/ballmer-micr...

"Interviewer: "HTML or Silverlight, what is Microsoft's lead strategy for developing rich internet applications? Silverlight, HTML5, or acquiring Adobe?"

Ballmer: "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question, the world is going HTML5... The world is just pushing down that HTML5 path, and so are we... What we've really done [with Silverlight] in very good ways is to repurpose it as an important part of the client platform, so yes, you will embrace HTML5, but it's also clear people want client apps... So we're dedicated to Silverlight, but with a little different concept, and we're embracing HTML5."
I also wonder how Django not adopting it for a while is going to affect the transition as well. I realize a lot of other things are in play but Django is a big one I think.
Ask HN: Designing Architecture for Large Javascript Application
Hi,

I have mostly seen procedural javascript code.
Can you point me to any Large Javascript app which I can study and learn how to design architecture of Javascript Apps.

Thanks.
This is great because there are many times I find community discussions/forum threads much more understandable than technical documents.
Fixed. I've moved the rational number stuff to a comment, I'm working on the formatting, but I think what I've got now works.
This is a superfluous use of technology. The people that go there already take plenty of precautions. As a climber, I would not rely on a communication channel installed by someone else as anything more than a hail mary.

The notion that people are concerning themselves with costs as small as a satphone when already paying upwards of 120k is absurd.
I think there's a "baby and bathwater" issue here, on both sides.

IMO, the basic principle of TDD is solid: write the tests, then write the code. Like most ideologies, this takes an acorn of wisdom and grows it into an oak tree of folly (or some other really pompous metaphor -- that sentence rather got away from me).

The problem comes when people think the tests are something valuable in and of themselves. They aren't. They are only valuable insofar as they show a developer (a) if something is broken and (b) what it is.

I generally agree that Mocks are more trouble than they are worth -- they are an entire mini-codebase that doesn't contribute business value and must be maintained. But usually you can get most of the benefit without spending the effort: e.g. instead of a Mock::DB, have a separate instance of your prod DB running a snapshot; instead of a Mock::HTTPConection, just do a real HTTP request.

In short, I relate to your philosophy and share it to a certain extent, but I encourage you not to let the TDD zealots drive you away from what can be a useful tool.
Which open source tool is best for building a biometric app?
Which open source tool is best for building a biometric app?
> backing the next google may not be as profitable as you think

No, I'm sure it's pretty damn profitable, if you're lucky enough to invest.
Ah, wow. This could not be further from the truth. This wasn't a "murky area." Its a big fat red zone.

Let's look at the Florida statute:

815.06 - Offenses against computer users. -

(1)Whoever willfully, knowingly, and without authorization:

(a)Accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network;... commits an offense against computer users.

(2)(a)Except as provided in paragraphs (b) and (c), whoever violates subsection (1) commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

So you committed a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, informed the victims, and documented your crime in explicit detail on your blog. That's a tad more dangerous than using unsecured cookies.
Keep in mind though that IE only won't resize text based in pixels, so only the initial value is taken into account if I'm not mistaking.

You can do font-size: 76.5%; for the html element, and font-size: 14px; for body, and it should resize (because the base is set in a relative unit).
Very inspiring, OP. The little tips and tricks are always helpful, but what is best is getting us to think, "If he can do it, then so can I."

One giant question, though. You describe a life where you often squeeze in a few hours on your start-up here and there. This sounds like it would work rather well for repetitive tasks like stuffing envelopes, folding apparel, or answering emails. But what happens if you have trouble getting "into the zone" for writing software during your short window of opportunity.

I have found this to be my difficulty developing leading edge software. Finding time isn't always the biggest problem; getting creative is. It's tough to get creative. It's tougher to get creative when you have to right now and you only have 2 hours to work on it.

How do you handle that?
decompiled by Google?

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dxmvr/oracle_go...
I've only surveyed what's out there a little, but I am impressed with Protovis's demos and apparent flexibility: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/
This is a win-win for both SO community and MSDN. SO has a lot more Q/A on .NET than any other platform/tech. That means there are a lot more .NET folks on it. Good luck to Joel, Jeff and SO community.
We use jqplot
I don't get it. Their brand new phone doesn't support HTML5.
In Opera by about 2000, I believe, when IE 5.5 was all the rage.
Real Men Use Android: Special Forces Favor Google Phone
The term "NoSQL" has always been misleading. The various "NoSQL" systems have very different underlying models, and defining them by their lack of SQL makes discussions about tend to develop an adversarial, "us vs. them" tone. It adds way too much noise.

I don't care about "NoSQL" - I like Postgres and SQLite. What makes the individual "NoSQL" databases interesting, though?

Redis is in a design sweet spot, IMHO. The pure key-value stores seem way too low-level to me, but the support for atomic operations on lists, sets, etc. in Redis is very handy. It also works well as a cache for other databases, and newer commands like BLPOP are very cool.

While I haven't used CouchDB much, its model is also interesting, and I can see its trade-offs being an excellent fit for certain problems (just not mine).
There are many job postings which say that knowing language X is a big plus. If I had non-expert familiarity with language X, I may not apply to a job where it is the primary requirement, but I would definitely put it down on my resume with the permission assignment corresponding to what I felt my level was. This would let me say, hey I sort of know it and also give the interviewer a chance to figure out if I knew it well enough for their needs.
everest has had a relatively elaborate basecamp for years.
You make it sound like porting an app from IOS to OSX is easy. Maybe you could write up a blog post or something for ignorants like me who would be interested in doing the same. Thanks for any additional details.
I felt like I explained that: that was a phenomenon that I noticed, and I'm not even 100% sure that was happening, as I have no way of verifying. I also don't invite my twitter followers to upvote anything; I simply tweet a link to all my blog posts when I post them. I don't tweet links to my posts on HN.
Now I have no more excuses for why I am not trying to climb Mount Everest.
Ask HN: Is eBay-style Feedback for the World a Startup Idea?
A few years ago I blew my life savings, retirement fund, and the kids' diaper money on a self-funded Craigslist competitor. (Kidding about the diaper money. Mostly.) Over a million dollars down the drain.

Part of its USP was that you bought and sold only with registered users, and there was to be a feedback system so both buyer and seller could feel a bit safer. That feedback system would appear roughly similar to eBay's, though far richer.

It had global ambitions and would cover more than eBay's does. For example, it would have name verification like Amazon and would even obtain credit rating information from anyone willing to give it up (this would make more information for sellers, obviously). At least one elegant algorithm was involved, but we were dealing with old media as our distribution mechanism and they didn't get new media.

<p>The idea of developing and maintaining a solid online identity with different views of trustworthiness makes sense to me. I don't know if it's a good idea for a startup, because the field may already be crowded for this very idea. Has this been done a thousand times before, by people Michael Arrington actually likes, or does it actually stand out a little?
"For instance, IBM now has about a 90% share of the mainframe market, but mainframe sales account for just a fraction of IBM's total revenues and profits."

Look at how much of the rest of IBM's revenues come from services related to mainframes. A significant part of IBM's service and support revenue is tied directly to IBM's mainframes -- a bit like Microsoft's Office, which isn't a core product, but it's tied to Windows, and it's part of what makes Windows profitable.

What differentiates IBM's mainframes from the few remaining competitors (there are only something like 10 companies in the world in that space) are advantages that Windows has no analog for -- Windows' biggest advantage right now is, comically, Windows (i.e. market share).
You should be able to do this with Raphael. (http://g.raphaeljs.com)
Proprietary client side solutions don't make any sense with the advent of what is being called HTML5. Apple's refusal to support RIA platforms on iOS is just accelerating their demise.
Now comes the question: if 'px' isn't it, is there any unit that corresponds 1:1 with a bitmapped image?
Hey, We’re Social Too YouTube Passes One Billion Follows, Er, Subscriptions
Does anyone know if there are enough compatible libraries out there to make using Python 3 in production viable yet? Last time I looked into it (about 6 months ago), it was a non-starter for me.
There is a navbar that appears when hovering near the bottom of the page (or just use the arrow keys).
Sparked - the micro-volunteering network
Nor does any MS browser for Windows XP, which still has > 50% of the Windows market share. It's very doublespeak of them:

Yes we love HTML5, but we won't have any of it on our most popular OS or our new mobile phone

...wtf?
also in use at Mixpanel.
Ask PG: No queries to winter YC 2011 applicants?
Wondering if not getting queries from you means we are out of race? Or still there is some hope? Thanks
This whole debate is getting wildly out of hand.

Just because someone says 'I don't unit test' doesn't mean they're not testing their code.

Most code spends 80% of its execution time in 20% of the code. Test that code and fix the outlying bugs as they come up.

Most of the hard bugs crop up where subsystems interact. The bugs inside the subsystems themselves are usually pretty easy to spot and fix.

The goal isn't to produce a 100% tested product that you can have supreme confidence in when you deploy. The goal is to provide a reliable service that people are going to pay you for. It turns out people pay for things that aren't perfect all the time.

Every line of code you write comes with a maintenance tax. This includes your test code. This is a fact.

Unit testing is a tool. Use it wisely and it will help you. Using it for everything is overkill.

Come to terms with the fact that there will be bugs, no matter how much you test.
I'd recommended finding a code-savvy cofounder who is interested in marketing/has marketed before, and bringing them on as a minority partner. Not all marketers are tech morons -- the ones that aren't know a good product when they see it, get excited, and want to tell the world about it.

It's one of those innate desires. When you see a great application, you may want to get deep down into the inner workings and understand/improve it (I'm assuming). The marketer you're looking for should be interested in how it works and how to improve it, of course, but he should also clearly see your current product and future iterations on everyone's desk innately. That way the two of you can chase your respective visions: you with the better product, the partner with getting the product out into the world.