skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MongoDB is extraordinarily easy to develop for. It's a big (I would say the biggest) advantage of the tool.

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to do their superbly written tutorial -http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Tutorial.

That simplicity, however, is a front-end simplicity that -- if it isn't perfectly defined and appropriate for all future use -- can cause you tremendous pain in the future. A MongoDB document store tends to be very single purposed, and is horrendous to use outside of the narrow bands of that original intention (a simple aggregation is an exercise of extraordinary inefficiency). Which is fine for a straightforward, simple app like the one linked here, but isn't applicable for most projects. An RDBMS design encourages that you think about and abstract your data to the constituents, which often yields tremendous future flexibility, but with more front-end costs (and ongoing significant costs if you don't make the right decisions).

Once again, though, stories like this really...grind my gears (get off my lawn!). We have no idea how correctly or incorrectly they used their RDBMS, what their pain points are, etc, however they drank some of the magic elixir and all ills were cured. Anyone who questions the assumptions will be told the rote "Apples and Oranges!" quote (which is always humorous when the whole context is talking about moving from Apples to Oranges and how grand it is).
In summary:

By being part of X, you are at least somewhat blind to the cost which people who are going through X must pay.

And: no-one can know everything, so everyone's an idiot somewhere.

Not much debatable there. And the anecdotes were interesting, so don't take this as an attempt to cut down your post :)
Q&A with Jignesh Shah about PostgreSQL 9.0 and Virtual Environments
Firefox has never looked or felt like a native application on the Mac. It didn't even have native form controls or pixel-perfect scrolling ala Safari until fairly recently.
Here's another religious one:

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+is...
Database servers like PostgreSQL can do the most common updates (add, delete, rename columns) instantly, S they Re abstracting over the underlying data storage. Only changing the type of a column should require reading and writing it, and you can do that change using a new temporary column and renaming it around, rather than using a whole new table. Even the alterations that take time can often be run with MVCC semantics, so existing users won't block. I don't even think MySQL (which is really bad at this) is as bad as the reality you are describing.
It's a joy to use. We work with objects in our languages. We don't work with rows of data.

And I totally get that, I really do, but to me, that's more of an issue of personal preference, and less of an issue of a clear advantage. There's nothing wrong with personal preferences. For instance, I like schemas that aren't easily changed, and a clear separation of logic and data, and I prefer to think of data as rows, not objects. But that's my personal preference. I'm more interested in how the functional approach to a use case would make NoSQL the clearly superior technology in that scenario.
I agree. As a trader, I see no point in joining. I really do not care.
I may be alone in this, but I like expressing my thoughts/feelings, as a matter of fact, most of the time I want to make it really clear that what I say is just my the way I see it.

Do I go a little bit too far with it? Maybe.
I agree with danieldon, it used to be interesting and fun to read such comparisons, but after a while, I've begun to notice that comments became more and more similar almost to the point of regurgitation.
http://www.ampnote.com/ - Guitars and Gear, Mostly Text
Schmidt's strategy seems to be to make himself and Google look bad, but since Schmidt is a smart guy and I'm an idiot, I'm trying to figure out what's really going on... Will Google be entering the housing construction market and offer protection from Street View? Does he want people to immigrate to third world countries without a Google presence? Does he want people to stop using roads? The mind boggles!
That's the oddest way to agree with what I said I've ever seen. But at least you agree.
"You're not going to get investors coming to you."

My experience has been the opposite of this.

Traditional VC firms have "Associates" (1-2 years out of grad school) and "Principals" (5+ years out) who work for the partners. Often, there will be 3 or more associates/principals for each partner.

One of the main responsibilities these people have is to find new deals, which they do by reading TechCrunch, Mashable, and, yes, Hacker News. Once they get a hot-lead, they hand over to one of the partners to try to close.

I have limited first-hand experience with raising money, but of the 4 people I personally know who have raised VC rounds, 3 of them were approached by investors and not the other way around.

(As with anything start-up related, sample sizes are so small that it is hard to extrapolate.)
I think it depends on the person. Personally, I make it a habit to forget rules as soon as possible. But I know plenty of intelligent people who need the structure of rules (even to the point where they enjoy a certain level of micromanagement). I think those people are masochists, but they usually think of me as a loose cannon, so it evens out. Sometimes I feel like they're the programmer equivalents to the "by the book" partner in cop shows, while I'm the "never read the book" partner. But maybe I really just like imagining myself in a cop show.
I second that! HN has become a bit of a echo chamber; more or less as a direct result of the decision to have down-vote privileges scale with the number of HN commenters, thus disproportionally weighting down-votes in the direction of those who have been properly cloned. Although, I must say, the echo chamber effect is not as bad here as it is on (for example) the Derek Sivers blog [[ http://sivers.org/blog ]].
I definitely see where Patton is coming from. I was heavily bullied early in school, then honed my "too cool for school" smart ass streak and said a lot of mean shit to a lot of people.

Once you get in the habit of finding smart ass comment for every situation, it's really, really hard to stop. It wasn't such a big deal as a plain old dev, but I'm managing other devs now and it's too easy to be an accidental asshole.

It would have been much easier if I never started. Now I've just got to try and watch my mouth and break the habit.
http://tambramsham.appspot.com/
A Geography Quiz app! The maps are from the CIA Factbook and there are some countries no one is ever heard of :)
Notepad++ works just fine. It has plugins for source control.
I think the point about how an app needs to do one thing well is becoming outdated because there are too many functions people are doing to spend time jumping from app to app. People probably only have time to really use about 3 or 4 apps in a regular day.

Please understand that I'm only making a wild conjecture based on my experience with end users in the real world, not any sort of data based claim.

My point is, at some point apps get too specific because people are using the social web for more than 4 or 5 functions. Skipping between 4-6 social apps is confusing and exhausting for me personally and, I suspect, most users.

photos - Facebook keeps expanding its capacity in this area. I suspect that Flickr is mostly being buoyed by it's current community of users.

video - Youtube is the workhorse in this area, Vimeo is the smooth luxurious sedan that keeps all the crap out. Basically these networks are hosters, not viable mainstream social networks.

email - Gmail killed this. Google wins. Move on to next function.

broadcast of one's thoughts/links to one's friends- Twitter/Facebook haven't quite settled who will win this one. I suspect Facebook will even though it's becoming quite played out.

all other blog related functions - most people don't blog. all other services that help blogs are natural products of services demanded by bloggers. until blogging becomes more prevalent, demand for these services will not grow. I don't see demand growing for content sharing services. I barely know what I'm talking about so don't take me seriously.

I'm working on something different to appeal to mainstream users who are not bloggers. I don't want to share what it is until you sign a form and submit a blood sample.
That's when the schools worked, people had consideration for others, and people wanted to work and get ahead. Businesses worked better back then.
When my daughter was two she had a knack for crawling up next to the computer, mashing the keys for three seconds, and causing an unbelievable amount of software carnage.

I think at one point she changed the default language to Swahili. It was impressive.
It feels like too many laws make people judgement-lazy and eventually stupid. We're all adults and should be able to figure out what's appropriate. If something isn't, we should be able to talk about it. If you spell out everything that's wrong you're implying that everything else is right, and you're speaking in absolutes.
I think your site already looks quite good. Just clean up the about bar (remove underlines, vertical center text, add more space between each item)
A bit part of the optimization is the flattening of deeply nested calls to tiny functions that are prevalent in the STL. In the general case of STL usage, these calls serve an important purpose in the design and flexibility of the library. They also generally inline away in optimized builds. However, in the specific case of game development, they greatly slow down the performance of non-optimized builds. That performance is a big deal when you are debugging a game that by design stresses the limits of the fixed hardware platform it is running on (you can't upgrade the CPU in a PS3 devkit). The nested inline functions also make debugging much harder because stepping into observe simple actions can result in walking a long chain of calls that each effectively do nothing.
How Gmail Filter Email-Matching Works
Cool experiment. I didn't expect that result either - anyone know if ext3 is doing some shuffling behind the scenes, or is this entirely due to wear leveling?

I'd be interested in seeing how many random data fill-ups the disk supports, as that would probably be a more accurate measure of "lifetime" (assuming infinite reads). Who knows what could be happening when you're just re-writing a single chunk over and over, and it's unlikely all drives will exhibit the same behavior.
I know 10-year-olds who do this already.
I wrote about this on my own blog, and someone from Hacker News came and posted a highly critical comment about me. They concluded:

"The reason you were downvoted and will continue to be downvoted is because you don’t discuss topics with any intellectual integrity."

The comment was interesting since it was such a pure, mirror reflection of what the commenter was doing. For instance, they posted anonymously, whereas I always write using my real name, yet they called me a troll. They also accused me of repeating myself, though they had also repeated themselves many times. You can see the comment here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/politics/the-stuff-that-gets-dow...

As the post indicates, I'm feeling ambivalent about Hacker News right now. Sometimes the conversations are really interesting, but there is also a lot of noise. Sometimes I learn a lot by participating in the conversations, but other times I feel like I'm talking to people who have no interest in understanding what I'm trying to say, and who are willing to use downvoting as a method of shouting me down.

I'm ambivalent. I enjoy this forum, but I'm also thinking I should probably invest my energy elsewhere. I've been reading this site for almost 2 years now, and I've learned a great deal, and every day there are interesting new articles posted. All the same, I get bored with conversations where I think the other person isn't really interested in hearing what I might have to say. And no doubt, vice versa, of course - clearly I upset someone, if they were willing to pursue the conversation to my own blog (where I was writing about Hacker News).
Speed of development. I know perfectly well how to write SQL, but I would rather write "Post.where(:published => true).first.comments.count" and move on to the next thing.

If I need to later on I can go back and write a raw SQL query, but why do it unless I need to?
Damn, you guys are way smarter than me. Took me like 2 hours for the first step. The rest was easier. I am not good at riddles I guess...
Most of the time, I get the reverse problem: It's pretty odd to map data to objects. For a lot of applications, a relational view is pretty natural. That's why I never got the "NoSQL instead of RDBMS" rhetoric. A document-oriented database is just another tool in your kit. Choose the right one, depending on the usual format of the data. If one is always reaching for one tool, it's much more likely that there's not enough expertise with other tools than that this one tool is so great and universally applicable.

Silver bullets…
Most people will do this for anything but computers, though, which is weird.

I'm not so sure about that. A majority of people (no data, sorry) confronted by danger or an accident will panic or freeze. People can have extensive familiarity with physical tools but be blind or even reject nonstandard configurations or uses when first proposed.

There are complex problems I can solve in my head and simple ones that make me go stupid; my wife is way faster at abstracting information from a 2d layout like a videogame or a map, I'm much better with 3d or data with multiple overlapping layers. So she kills me at Tetris, Scrabble and reading transit maps, whereas for me Space Giraffe, wire puzzles and tree scheduling come easy. She likes LISPs, I like assembler, and so on.
Stop trying to convert people. I'm sure that all or nearly all of the people that can benefit from Mongo has already heard of it and has heard of its benefits.

Please have a little faith in other people, that if for any reason they're not using nosql it's a good one!
Every community values different things. On HN it's insight. If your writing style or attitude obscures such insight, it will be voted the same as if there were no insight at all.
That's like newspapers running articles saying so-and-so is charged with the rape of whats-her-name. Even if he's later found innocent, he still felt the repercussions. So, where do you draw the line?

More importantly: what's the problem with the data they are presenting? I see no problem ethically or legally, though I'm sure some might feel uncomfortable with the amount of information they've willingly, if unknowingly, shared.
I'm not following. I'm saying: Facebook certainly knew that if you logged in via a public wireless network that your session cookie could be stolen. They accepted the risk, like many, many other companies do. What do the fundamentals of web dev have to do with this?
Google: Exploring Computational Thinking
Free BlackBerry PlayBook for developers who have their app accepted on AppWorld
The Tablet Takeover
My ex did all the research on the legal end of it, I was very sick and left that up to him. So I don't know that I can help much.

FWIW: In the state we were in, he wasn't allowed to deliver the papers to me. He looked up the options and we basically drove to his place of work one morning, he took the papers in to a coworker and the two of them walked back out with the coworker holding the papers. I signed them on the trunk of the car, while the poor coworker looked incredibly awkward and uncomfortable.

After my husband moved out and went to another state, at some point, I left that state with my two kids in tow. At that point, it came up that if my ex wanted to be an ass, I could be in big trouble for taking the kids out of the state without his prior permission. Fortunately, he chose to not make an issue of it but it was something that was a bit of a heart-stopping, you-must-be-kidding-me moment.

Can't think of anything else in particular. Hope that helps.
Everytime I read a thread with a similar theme.. basically telling economy is picking up, hiring is picking up.. I always find people scrambling to post something which almost screams-"I am so smart,talented-I can't believe it-Be thankful I dont have YOUR job right now" .

This almost reeks of insecurity,and totally pisses me off.

And then the customary startup guy, who for the life of him, hasnt found his ideal employee yet.

Doesnt all this ever appear shallow to anyone? Anecdotally,I do know of a number of smart guys who got laid-off, and who did spend a lot of a time on the job search.

Come on, Hn'ers- show some maturity, and acknowledge a phenomenon called a "long job search"- you might have known through your colleagues,or friends go through one.
Thousands of Web Users Delete Profiles From RapLeaf
This is how my college worked, and I think it's a fabulous idea that promotes personal responsibility rather than CYA bullshit. During orientation, all the incoming freshmen (~200) were herded into a lecture hall, and a panel of five upperclassmen pontificated on the significance and nuances of the phrase "don't be a jackass." And that was basically it. We could drink as much alcohol as we wanted, we were just expected not to get into fights, break other people's stuff, get sent to the hospital, or otherwise do things that we or someone else would regret. We could burn quite a wide variety of things, in bulk, so long as no one got hurt. We were given unrestricted 24-hour access to computer labs, chemistry equipment, etc. Most of my exams were take-home, and we were expected to adhere to the rules (time limit, closed-book) because that was the cost of the privilege. We could pull all sorts of pranks against others students and even faculty, so long as we left contact information and any effects were reversible within 24 hours. We were expected to be responsible adults, and were treated like responsible adults, so we acted like responsible adults (well, we acted responsibly anyways). We actually had less alcohol-related incidents (assaults, property damage, alcohol poisoning) than any nearby college, despite (read: because of) their having significantly more restrictive policies.

Like Nordstrom's, we did have to make a few concessions to the outside world, though they were few and far between. For example, we were not allowed to have bonfires that were taller than the dorms, because then women's college across the street thinks the school is on fire. The administration is totally fine with 50 mildly inebriated college students milling around an open flame in the middle of a dorm courtyard with no "adult" supervision, but they still don't like explaining it to the local fire department.
...and kids walked uphill in the snow both ways to get to school?
https://www.rapleaf.com/opt_out
You could also decide you're going to say what you think on the topics where you feel you have something of value to add, say it as best you can, and not worry about the karma.

I'm not being snarky. It's a perfectly legitimate way to operate if you're clear that being able to dictate your own header color isn't why you're here. It's OK to opt out of the parts of the system that are not working for you.
Kinda depends on the use case. Let's say you have a caching layer and update a subtree in your RDBMS. Then you need to go find all values referencing that object and invalidate them. That's potentially a lot of complexity. Of course you could cache only parent objects and fetch the subtree on demand (cache or db). Hello slow.

So I prefer to not use words like "usually" as it truly depends on your application and use case.
HTML5 vs. Interactive Media: Impedance Mismatch
That was fun. Personally I wouldn't make it any harder as it would already weed out a huge portion of the candidates I have interviewed in the past. I would perhaps add something that required a little JavaScript or something written though.

I wonder how many applications you get from people that don't actually want the job.
This argument might be valid if they had done this from the get-go. But now you're creating confusion from 3.0 to 4.0.
The OP question was "during development". I obviously change the schema in production too: sometimes keeping null-values will work, sometimes a migration will be needed.

My point is that I only do the "production" migration when needed and once per release that requires it, while I can tweak the schema at ease while developing.

If you have a large-enough volume of data, you will meet the situation where just adding a single column takes ages, too.
I'm a very recent graduate and I enjoy using C. C was used in almost every class I took in college. Normally these days I use C++ but I still tend to default to Cesque solutions. It's nice having a language that you can fit in your head all at the same time (or pretty close). If you guys are desperate to hire C programmers I can give you a small tip that pretty much any CS undergrad from UChicago should have learned to like C by graduation.
"It isn't hard to find good software engineers."

I agree with this, even though I feel for the startups that are having a hard time finding people (because they're startups). When a company is struggling to find good developers it is usually because they fail to deliver on a number of fronts: quality job posting, good interviewing process, money, generous vacation time, good management, and then the actual work. On quality job postings... if you insist on looking for a rockstar, a ninja, or a samurai, you will miss out on talented people who are turned off by random displays of arrogance. This is especially true if you're not actually curing cancer or building a photorealistic renderer.
you can repost urls after a few weeks.

http://searchyc.com/f.lux
They _should_, and do for me typically using Chrome.
Flash message appears on yoursite.com and does not appear on the page that is loaded after the form is submitted. Oops.

Doesn't really seem like an oops to me.

State breaks the internet.

You submitted a form. That presumably changed the state of the resources at that url too.

The page should set the flash state when the state transition is done, not when it starts. It shouldn't matter if the user sees the message on the page after the form or from a different page altogether. What if every page had a history of all of the flash messages ever produced? You wouldn't call that "state" any more or less than the state of the objects you were trying to change in the form itself.

I think the part of this you actually don't like is that the following GET implicitly deletes the state (which is why we can optimize and store it in session rather than the db). But when the state is "messages unseen by the user" then it seems reasonable to me.

I think we can agree that any state where it matters what page they view the message on is probably not a good candidate for flash. I'm not even a rails programmer but I think there are better examples for the state-is-bad idea.
Which college did you go to? Going to college in Texas, I think even suggesting some of these ideas would have given my university's administrators a heart attack.
If you are getting downvoted continuesly, why don't you take it as a sign you are indeed say something wrong?

from your comments:

"I found the UI unappealing and the heavy use of rotation effects amateurish."

edit:
that is mean, although because it was about Microsoft/Windows Phone 7 as a whole, there is almost zero direct effect on the people who worked on it, and therefore may reduce it's meaness factor by 0.001%, but amateurish and unnapealing? come on, that reveals negative energy.
How much have they looked at Google and how much have this culture developed "on its own" in Moscow?
Probably the handbook is full of over-reactions to various things that happened one time, and were blown way out of proportion- just like every other company.
What college do you go to? I'm transferring this year and... inquiring minds want to know.