skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Africa Nutrition Society - http://answeb.org/

I'm doing pro-bono work for them to move their flat html to a CMS so the people running the organization can update news, events, calendar, etc. on their own without need for tech support, but am still just evaluating CMS's and hosts (probably gonna be Django-cms or Vosao on GAE for the amazing price point).

Their flat html site was designed by a company in UK, but is not as modern looking as it could be, and the information architecture is busy imho. They don't have all the content available for it yet either, but had to make it public for their annual African Nutritional Epidemiology conference in early October. It's also all table-based, and converting the non-tabular elements to div/span something I'd like to do, but getting it converted over to a CMS is a higher priority.

I've got my hands full getting the backend up and running and would love to have a review by a pro web designer. In addition to being able to blog about it, I'd be happy to include 'Design by Sahillavingia' at the bottom and introduce you (via email at least) to the organization principals.
Wow, thanks. I can't believe I didn't know that. I've only had a Mac for a few months.... Thanks!!!
For example, it's extremely awkward in SQL to find all the elements in a tree. There are at least 4 hacks I know of to fix this, none totally satisfactory. In a NOSQL context you can just store the entire tree - your implementation becomes straightforward and simple.

In general though I agree with you. I can whip out SQL queries in seconds that would take me minutes to write against Mongo, even though they're all technically possible. I love SQL. But it's not the right tool for every situation.
Storing objects with any sort of hierarchy is so simple with Mongo that the LOC required to do so is ridiculously smaller. Querying them is also faster--for instance we can filter in our dictionary data with queries like {"entry.definitions.relatedWords":"cat"} instead of making some huge join and filtering against that.
> The underlying issue is that people are afraid to try and explore.

> Skilled computer users, on the other hand, don't let a failing model bother them. They just try something else.

I don't agree with you.
The fear of new ideas and places is a human quality, not a consequence or a property of a particular group of people.

I, for example, feel very comfortable learning a new programming language. I feel excited and content when I'm picking up some new language or library -- I can easily hunt through pages and pages of information that does not help me without being deterred in my goal. To phrase it objectively -- it's an environment that's completely foreign and largely without immediate payoff, yet I feel comfortable within it.

In stark contrast to that, I've listened to the same ~20 songs for the last 4 months. I know there are plenty of great songs out there, but I'm happy with what I'm listening to right now. I don't want to explore and find new or neat music -- I'm perfectly happy with what I've got. I know there are countless "unknown unknowns" -- wonderful gems of music just waiting to be discovered -- but I don't want to hunt after them. When I feel comfortable with these 3-4 albums, I'll go look for something else.

I don't think advanced computer users are in any way immune to feeling, at least, uneasy or uncomfortable when exploring a particular set of new ideas or places. It's just a question of what type of things they're comfortable exploring.

I happen to be pretty comfortable with programming, but I am hesitant and uneasy when exploring new music. Why? I don't know. I've come to accept myself as I am. :)
My only exposure to NoSQL in production is using document oriented databases for data that, if put in an SQL database, would require schema alterations over time.

This might fall under scalability, but I've worked on a few projects where we just continually added new tables because applying an alter on the existing table in production would take an unknown amount of time. Another thing we sometimes did would be to have 2 active tables and migrate the data over a few weeks while applying updates to both tables. Both options kinda suck. Its generally not an issue if you only have a little data though, so hence "might fall under scalability."
I think that you may have erred on the side of too easy. I have very little web development experience, but I was able to solve it in a few minutes. I didn't even use any developer tools.
Oh, I know. When that was news, I laughed at it, and told her about it. That's why she's now partly cognizant that URLs exist. It hasn't changed her habits much, although it did allow me to persuade her that setting bookmarks can have its uses.
There is a bit of a bad psychological effect on HNers: don't say things that might get people angry/to disagree, or your Karma goes down. But there is also a good psychological effect as well: don't say stupid things (like "LOL, wut?"), or you'll get down-voted.

Either way you look at it, there's a bit of good and bad in HN.
I agree with what you're saying, and it's been severe enough that I've taken to either not bothering to comment, or simply deleting my comment because HN had apparently deemed it that bereft of value.

The circle-jerk behavior is what is damaging the credibility of the startup scene and it's making it harder for me to convince my fellow programmers that it's the place to be.

I don't think just low karma users are guilty of down-voting in inappropriate situations. I had a discussion with Justin Kan awhile back and he was demonstrating the viewpoint that you're finding problematic.
Gas Boom Mints Instant Millionaires
You could run mysql with the memory storage engine and with our schema--which would require multiple outer joins OR subqueries--mongodb will still be much faster. So I think it's much more than an fsync issue.
Funny, I've been using MongoDB for well over a year, and I use it not for scalability/durability, but because it's so nice to develop on top of.

Simply put: it gives you a much more natural way to persist the objects you work with in the OO language of your choice. It's a joy to use. Until I used it, I didn't realize how unnatural it was to map OO programming to an RDBMS. We work with objects in our languages. We don't work with rows of data.
I second that - a while back I wrote a MySQL application with a lot of interviews, made up of questions, answers and conditions etc.

I rewrote a very similar application with MongoDB this year and the code was way cleaner, and that's not caused by my increase in experience: the document-orientation is really helping here.
Stupid iPad and my finger. The down vote on your comment was from me and it was unintentional. I liked the link you dug up and shared. I'm sorry. =\
"Fabric" To Weave Security Into Code
> But I love the fact that there are options.

In a year when we've seen iOS increasingly restrict its own ecosystem, limit options it doesn't like (see the current story about Jobs nixing the orientation lock on the iPad) ... and even start to take over The Mighty Desktop (see OS X Lion), that thought is a breath of fresh air.

Nuff said.
I agree with that the 'taking a step back' but I am not liking that they took on consultant/lawyer etc versus geniuses. Are they saying that everyone else except those who worked on the ENIAC would have thought of going straight to the mouse trap ? Why the bias in that ? I am still young so maybe there is some underlying meaning I am not seeing. I really thought consultants at least were some of the best people (at least those who came from engineering). Then again that is my bias; consultants (that come from engineering) are geniuses.
Actually, it's that the joke was a small part of his overall post, but it was all of yours. His comment was useful _in spite of_ the joke.
Ha! My grandmother had the same fear! (But signed up for AOL anyway after I told her the difference.)
Occam's Forgotten Razor
I've found the contrary. On Reddit, the hivemind is ever present. On HN, generally it's far less prevalent... though it could just be confirmation bias.

Just like Reddit, downvotes should be cast on comments/submissions that don't add anything as opposed to providing an unpopular opinion.
This seems like the sort of optimization that should be occurring in MongoDB itself - instead of acquiring the lock, loading the record into memory (if it's not already), then making the change and releasing the lock, acquire the lock after the record has been loaded into memory (if it's not already).

Have you spoken with any of the MongoDB developers about why it's currently the way it is, vs. a more efficient update path?
Puzzles are always fun, thanks for sharing.
Why are you determined to identify a subtext in my remarks?

I'm interpreting your comments as straightforwardly as I can.

In the general case, though, it's a dick move to criticize the merits of a complete stranger's marriage. The exact substance of your criticism is a comparatively minor issue.
Based on a cursory look at your comments I would guess the problem is not what you say but how.
Digg’s former CEO Jay Adelson has 'no regrets' about not taking offers
Only had 5 days with MongoDB and I found it a good alternative for persistence of basic data structure in Python, my main concern was something that can $set individual elements of a JSON instead of retrieving the whole doc and modify it.
Tell HN: Developers get in free at co-founders meetup in Mountain View
We are celebrating the first year anniversary of the co-founders meetup, in Mountain View (a few blocks from YC headquarters). We have a pretty strong line-up of founders. Normal entrance fee is $10, but all people with technical skills, not currently working on their own startup, are invited to attend for free.

That's Nov 2nd. URL is http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/calendar/14858537/
I remember reading that when the developer of Sphinx was benchmarking MySQL's fulltext searches at Craigslist, most of the time spent performing a query was spent in locks and mutexes. The actual query time was very fast, but the overhead was what killed performance.

From what I understand, Postgres doesn't (necessarily) have those kinds of locking issues, but MongoDB does let you fetch documents (especially hierarchies) in a much more simple manner, rather than fetching them via potentially complicated join queries.
"Ode to a College Education"
Digg is facing issues on two fronts.

First, it’s struggling with delivering unique value to its customers. When Digg launched in December 2004, it faced limited direct competition in the market of social media aggregation. Since its launch, Digg now competes with a myriad of services, such as Reddit (launched in 2005), Techmeme (2005), Huffington Post (2005), Newsvine (2006), and Hacker News (2007), just to name a few. There are now a huge variety of media aggregation websites targeting general and niche audiences. In addition to increased direct competition, Digg is now also facing a substitution threat posed by companies such as Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), and Google Buzz (2010). An increasing number of consumers are turning to these services for their daily fill of news.

Second, Digg is struggling with an untenable cost structure. With about 72 employees before its reduction in staff, Digg has about 9x the number of employees of Reddit, a key competitor. Consider another competitor, the Huffingpost. It attracts about twice the number of visitors per month, employing a full-time staff of just 60. Commentators have also noted that Digg had unusually high infrastructure costs, although I suspect they have remedied some of these issues since these reports. With revenue of just $15 million, and a unsustainable cost structure, Digg is currently operating at a loss.

For Digg to survive and prosper into the future, it must refocus and develop a service that delivers unique value relative to the many competing services that are currently available. Given the range of competition, it’s not clear what Digg can change to deliver unique value. Next, Digg must continue to reduce its cost structure by reducing its human resource and infrastructure costs. Needless to say, increasing value for customers while reducing costs is a difficult challenge.
Startup Weekend Atlanta (Start Atlanta)! We are planning the 3rd annual startup weekend in Atlanta. We have a base Wordpress site up, and need some graphic design help. The more pressing need is for a logo. The event will be held at the Georgia Tech ATDC in January 2011. Our team of 6 has no graphic design expertise, and we will otherwise have to pay for the design work out of sponsorship dollars. The upside for you is getting your design in front of Atlanta's entrepreneurship community. Sound like a win-win?
Neat idea!!
pitiful? It's all relative I guess.
Fewer people pointing out their spelling errors, if nothing else.

I'll entirely admit it's a white-collar bias. But skill in a language is important, especially when communicating with someone who isn't fluent in your language (ie: most of the world). Proper spelling and grammar causes fewer problems than poor.
streaming version: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/mark-shuttleworth-talks-u...
I think there are some possible timing issues with making that a general behavior in the server. 10gen did make it the default behavior on slaves, where the inserts are controlled by the oplog (http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1646).

For us, our DB abstraction layer made this behavior so simple to add that we didn't make much fuss about it.
iPhoto 11 upgrade problems
Erratic reception problems? An inconvenience, at most. Irrecoverably losing hundreds of gigabytes of your users' irreplaceable photos? That's way, way worse.
So true. Maybe part of the 'problem' is the pool of talent living in places that aren't the Bay Area are discovering that telecommuting can pay the bills and are comfortable staying put (or conversely, traveling the globe as a nomad). I know thats been the case for me, and a good chunk of the guys I work with.
Warren Buffett Flags a Successor
For any recent applicants to YC, how much does your expectation of contributing to the forum affect the comments and tenor of your posting?

If I were to answer my own question, I would say that I probably focus more energy than I should on sounding more insightful than I normally am and I get frustrated with a lot of the inane types of discussions such as: "What does it mean to be a successful tycoon who conquers the world and what's wrong with people who aren't successful tycoons who take over the world?"
When the boat is sinking the solution is to:

1. Throw stuff off the boat (including passengers);

2. Bail water off the boat; and

3. Fix the hole in the boat.

Kevin Rose tried (2). The new CEO is trying (1). Both of these delay the I editable.

The hole in the boat in his case is the $40m in funding Digg has received. I'm not sure there's any recovering for that.

The crux of Digg's problems is that it went the way of most online communities: it became extreme, exclusive and inbred. That's hard to recover from.

Ultimately Digg is now largely irrelevant. Twitter and facebook have supplanted it as the sites for discovery for most people.
You can't Fake Real
Here's a brief white-paper from Sandisk on how to calculate expected life times of a flash drive based on typical usage with wear leveling:

http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/WhitePapersAndBrochur...

Note that in general there is two types of NAND flash, SLC (single-level cell) and MLC (multi-level cell). MLC is cheaper and denser, but isn't as fast and doesn't last as long as SLC.

His cheap USB drive was most likely MLC so it's pretty amazing that it lasted for about 90 million write cycles.

http://www.oempcworld.com/support/SLC_vs_MLC.htm
Define 'rural'. I live outside Raleigh, near a petting zoo (I smell the geese, chickens and llamas when I drive past to go grab something from the dollar store). Is that rural enough? mgkimsal@gmail.com if you want to talk.
HN doesn't seem a significant threat:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;
That was roughly our thought process (I'm another seatgeeker btw). We wanted to come up with something that would be pretty quick to solve if you know what you're doing, but at the same time, demonstrates that you've got a pretty good understanding of a bunch of the moving parts of web development.
Answering the rhetorical question...

I discovered it when I got momentarily distracted by something while entering text.

On Android letters with alternate versions have ellipsis on the image of the character which pops up when you sweep over it.
Most likely they wrote their own parsing library. I'm not aware of any out there, but it's pretty trivial to write code that will login to an IMAP system and parse messages.
I've done that before too, so it all evens out ;-) Hopefully this will be a thing of the past when the HN iPad app I've heard being released by a couple of HNers comes out!
You usually want to query and update subtrees, often concurrently. Storing the entire tree is a horrible way to think about this problem. While some NoSQL databases try to help with this, they are not in any better position to solve the problem than a simple library over an SQL database.
Wow, the security implications; just... wow.

(That poem also needs to be read with a healthy sense of sarcasm.)
Tony Hsieh interview
Erratic reception problems? An inconvenience, at most. Irrecoverably losing hundreds of gigabytes of your users' irreplaceable photos? That's way, way worse.
>you will see a few financial and ecommerce sites

Could you provide some examples? Scanning the list I see a couple that have a very periphery relation to financials, but the actual applications have very little financial applicability (and the implementations are trivial).

Though the person you responded to didn't actually say that `"anything that deals with money" has no use for MongoDB"', so you're setting up a strawman regardless.
It doesn't matter what system you use, it will have good points and bad points. Ultimately, people issues aren't resolved by a better voting system or some such. They are resolved by fostering the right culture, which is somewhat independent of the system.
The situation your wife was in is an example of corporate insanity, it doesn't mean that every company has to operate like that, does it? I'm pretty sure that's going overboard in any country. Also, some countries have saner laws than others.

The problem I see with not having rules is different: it can only work when you have people who actually care about the results of their work, and feel that they can make a difference.

I think it can work (see Semco for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29) but only with carefully selected people and with conscious effort to foster such culture.
What you need is a whisky glass, not a rocks glass. In terms of size they are between a tumbler (or "rocks glass") and a shot glass.
Well, it's not so bad. I only use letters that are common to the Greek and Latin alphabet. My Nexus One doesn't mind.
IntelliJ does use JNA quite extensive, already, on the Mac. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine more extensive use of JNA e.g., for custom widgets.

JetBrains guys are very smart (I dislike Java as a language, but I continue to be impressed by IntelliJ)
and I have no doubt they'd be able to switch a native layer if needed: they have all the motivation to (it's a commercial product).
if you happen to also have the ipod nano with a camera, then the switch is priceless for watching the videos. Otherwise, you cannot make is full screen unless you physically tilt your head ... depends on how the video was taken.
Look more closely. He was hired _after_ the Digg 4 launch - likely was agreeing to a contract during the debacle, but certainly arrived afterwards.
Yeah. I usually resort to: "Here, just let me type that for you."
There's criticism and there's negativity. You seem to be confusing these two things. You can put your point across without snarky comments like:

"Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?"

(As we're quoting rap lyrics today) I think that you'll be doing just fine if you relax a little.
Ask HN: Geolocation(HTML5/PHP): Tutorial on plotting numerous users on map?
Can someone can refer me to a tutorial or such that provides information regarding how to capture a users location and plot other users around them? I'm hoping to build an app that contains a functionality for you to open the app on the phone and see other users within a set radius that are also running the app. I'm using HTML5/PHP, and I'm newbie to this, so I'm assuming I'd need to use Google Geolocation APIs or such to pass/capture multiple user locations and plot them? All help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time and assistance.
My RapLeaf Profile is Amusingly Mistaken. This is What the Fuss is All About?
This is because you are simply never updating your schema: if you actually want to rename a field, change a datatype, or reorganize your content, you are still going to need to run a migration, and now it won't even be possible to transanction lock the upgrade (better database servers, like PostgreSQL, can do multiple whole-daabase schema modifications within a transaction while still allowing non-conflicting access). In essence, your underlying schema is now "id->blob". ;(
I need a cofounder in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. I have a vision but I can't code. I'm looking to bring in a developer looking for a big project. Let's discuss.
How many web servers do you know of which are CPU bound, and not through massive code stupidity, and not I/O (in some manner - waiting on SQL, disk access, bandwidth)? Encryption can run while other threads are waiting for a response.

In general, it's a negligible cost; it adds a very minor delay compared to latency / transfer time, and uses CPU otherwise highly unlikely to be pegged. If you're pushing threading limits / CPU usage limits, you're probably inches from needing new hardware anyway, and SSL should be considered part of the cost of running a web server.
This is fascinating, because there was a post a little while back proposing the opposite effect, titled "the default position of HN is skepticism". Here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629583
Single page link:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wheelbarrow-rockets-...
Until I lose it, typically.
Unfortunately this classifies as enterprise software, and therefore the quality of the software is not particularly important for its adoption. See http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0... for more on this.
I'm based in Seattle. If I happen to be in the bay area that night, would I be welcome at the meetup? Or are most looking for a local co-founder?
Secret Button Sequence Bypasses iPhone Security
Perhaps HN isn't a significant threat, but it still poses a threat; each new service likely eats away at Digg's share of the market, assuming that people have limited time to use social media.

As an anecdote, I was using Digg substantially up until the 2008 elections. I haven't used the service since then. Instead, I'm spending time on Hacker News (+ Techmeme, Twitter, Facebook).
and Kevin left money on the table. Hood Business Rule #1 get your money then get out