skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It must be a MySQL thing then. At least when using InnoDB, it doesn't do column adds or deletes instantly. If your table is large enough it can take hours - we have several where this is the case. During this time writes to the table are blocked.
I still think it is amazing the the free SQL databases don't have materialized views yet.

MySQL's deficiencies aren't inherent to SQL databases. Other databases have faster query parsers and better query planners. It seems that with all the time and money invested into NoSQL solutions, Postgres could be improved to the level of Oracle or DB2.
A slight exaggeration, but he worked on the mass spectrography unit at UT Dallas, and that was part of the Phoenix mission.

If you'd like to point out that it ended up having some problems due to an electrical short circuit and have a giggle, please do so now. :)

He also ended up clearing out the entire building one day, because I think he left some chemicals on a hot plate. Every time after that, when the fire department would get called for whatever reason, if the fire chief saw him wandering around, he'd bellow, "STEIN, WHAT DID YOU DO THIS TIME!"

Fun times.
There are also too many inconsistent UI representations for common operations. Do you ever see the "up" and "down" call buttons for an elevator placed side-by-side? Or vertically, but with "up" below "down"? Yet often times it seems that UI designers do stuff like this, maybe for no other reason than to try to put a unique stamp on their designs.
There is definitely style of negative comment that attracts downvotes on HN. If you care about karma, it is usually easy to avoid as many comments in this thread point out.

Unfortunately there is always a temptation with karma systems to use them for "social proof". Social proof is implemented by downvoting opinions you disagree with and vice versa. The only ego-preserving way of dealing with this is to view your minority opinions as "ahead of your time" and resolve to politely keep up the thought leadership.

EDIT: I bit and looked at your comments. Suggestions on the thought leadership appear in another message.
Sleeve? It's damn near tattooed on his arm :)
up-up, down-down, left-right, left-right, b, a...
You've never plugged a USB cable into an Ethernet socket? Often it doesn't even take any force.
Sounds an awful lot like Harvey Mudd. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mudd_College#The_HMC_hon...

To the grandparent: having grown up in Claremont, I can tell you that the reason Harvey Mudd has less problems with alcohol than the other Claremont colleges is almost completely a result of which students it accepts rather than its honor code.
In that case, I apologize. I have seen people using the same argument to claim that MongoDB is unsuitable for use in ecommerce and assumed you were doing the same.
I think there are a couple barriers to entry for new people to watch out for (having tried to go down this path in a past venture):

1) Don't try and save time (or at least don't focus on that), lawyers charge by time spent, saving time looses them money.

2) Your product needs good OCR. Many times, documents, even electronic ones, are printed out on paper, delivered in boxes, then scanned back in...don't ask why, that's just the way the world works.

3) You'll need pretty robust searching, tagging and entity extraction and case management in your product.

4) Visualization doesn't hurt.

5) There's many kinds of law, pick one (patent law) and focus on it. While there's some crossover between different sub-disciplines, they're different enough that you kinda have to just support one to start with.

6) You'll want a very robust data index and retrieval system that can handle millions of documents at scale. "Lots of documents" is not in the 4 digit thousands, they have paralegals and newbie lawyers to go through that amount of stuff, "Lots of documents" is 20,000->2 or 3 million documents. It's at the larger number that you'll be providing real value. No matter how much time the firm wants to charge for this kind of research work, they can't charge infinity, so their coverage of the material will always just be some subset.

7) Learn about the kinds of pricing models that'll work for you clients. Surprisingly, most law firms don't want to buy software, they want to lease it for the length of the case.

8) Most lawyers have the computer skills of a 90 year old man. It can't be a super technical system.
This is very interesting. However, the OP's idea of "failure" is when something goes wrong with the system -- in this case, ext3 detected an error when trying to write to its journal. It's possible that silent data corruption occurred much earlier. If the OP reads this, I'd love to see the experiment repeated, with the added step of verifying the written data every time it's written.

That is, you would dd a random bit pattern to disk. Then you would read it back and XOR it with the pristine pattern you know you wrote. If you see any difference, you've got a much scarier kind of failure than the fail-stop behavior exhibited in the post.

Also, does the OP know whether any write buffering is going on? That could explain why some writes took much longer than others -- when the write actually goes to disk, it would take much longer than when it gets cached in memory. Use the "sync" command between each write to make everything go right to disk (I think?).
There is no official Oracle release for Mac OS X. Your options (right now) are Apple's official JDK (which comes preinstalled), or OpenJDK (http://openjdk.java.net/).
I second that...CodeIgniter is really nice with no fuss...Rails is nice too unless you get familiar with it...in the mean time CodeIgniter is your rescue. Simple framework that's quite flexible.
Of course, one way to get people to care about their job and feel like they can make a difference is to not hand them a 3-ring binder of rules, phrases, and duties that they are expected to follow, utter, and carry out like mindless automatons.
Reminds me of adhoc wifi gaming with Nintendo DS Lites in 2005.
Consider your question here

> Is HN only about saying nice things about everything?

This implies fault lies with HN. You make the assumption that you are right (despite your PS).

A better question is:

> I'd like to contribute; can anyone offer advice to improve my comments?

Humility, and no assumption.

Again, here:

> I don't know maybe it's me, maybe I have too radical opinions on stuff.

Again, this is conceited. It's not your 'radicalism.' It's your ego talking.

> I am not saying neither that I'm always right nor that I never deserved the downvote.

But your entire comment suggested that you weren't in the wrong.

> 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.

No, you aren't. You aren't "alone" in this. Rather, your ability to communicate effectively is lacking. Indeed, it's very egotistical. You're focused completely on "your opinion" and frankly, your opinion holds no value.

In all your comments, I see you place a lot of value on your opinion. Your opinion can't be wrong, and it's yours, and you'll share it. But who are you that we should care about your opinion?

This doesn't mean you can't offer opinion. It's just that you need to qualify you opinion with reasoning. You can't just state an opinion and expect everyone to see the wisdom.

Listen, you seem like your interested in providing value here. Disagree with whatever you want. But don't just disagree, explain why you disagree. With examples is best!

Be specific.

Do more than ask pointless questions (especially questions that are answered). Anyone can ask questions.

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

Provides no value.

> Vertical list of applications? I'm not sure this will grow well. As users add applications, it will make for a lot of scrolling.

Goes further and provides actual meaning. People might still disagree, but now you've explained your opinion.

You've generated discussion.

Hopefully all of this (thread) helps! =)
good idea, i just fixed it, thanks :)
I just mailed this post to my partners. We recently merged.

They sold individual accounts to teacher and students. I sold accounts to schools.

Their users are very web savvy and need no training. My users did not seek out the app online. They are being asked by their schools to use the application.

We are noticing now how things we took for granted in the UI are now being questioned. These new users are struggling with the same exact UI that the others picked up and ran with.

Although it is a much larger sale, we are finding ourselves having to "hide" most of our options behind an "advanced" button. We are giving the school admins control to set all of the options and therefore simplifying the app as much as possible. This will make our new users feel comfortable.

Great post.
No where did I bring communism or capitalism into the conversation.

And, mind you, I am not critical of the anonymous poster on my blog - everyone has a right to be critical. But it did make me think twice about whether Hacker News is the right place for me to invest my time.
Not sure if you saw it, but in Apple's 10.7 preview last week, they announced one of the new OS features as being 'auto-save'. Presumably, this means some kind of automatic saving infrastructure, rather than just telling developers they should be doing it.
What's so surprising about this? I don't get it. It's decades old news, unencrypted network traffic can be sniffed. And the solution is almost a decade old as well: use TOR (www.torproject.org) or JAP ( http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html ) to hide your traffic from your local network operator. Be it your favorite dictator, government, employer, husband/wife, girlfriend/boyfriend or mother.

Even if on a WPA encrypted network, the AP operator (or anyone between the AP and the internet provider) can steal your data. (Of course the internet provider could do this as well, they are just probably less of a problem than the next guy with firesheep or an open AP set up for logging your sessions and passwords.)
I'm hoping the new "Extreme" track brings out some great talks.

looks in Raymond Hettinger's direction
Bonus tip for users on Mac OS X: try pressing ctrl+option+command+8. I find that really handy if I'm using my laptop when it's dark and I hit a webpage that's blindingly white.
yeah i'm pretty happy with the homepage, but we're about to flip the switch on billing and need a sales page w/ a pricing matrix, etc.
Imagine if traffic laws were "use your own judgment" - no speeding signs, but the cops could still pull you over on a whim and ticket you for speeding.

Already possible. If you are going 65 on a road marked as 65 but there is 100 foot visibility and black ice on the road, you are going to be pulled over. The speed limit is a limit, not "if you go this speed, you can't get a ticket".
I use it for player levels and leaderboards - I have a set of fixed fields that all scores or levels have, and then developers can attach whatever additional data they need and filter by it, and it's just effortless.
Bravura really gets to the heart of the matter. A consulting business, or any business, can only survive as long as it has clients. Do you have any? If not, start finding them now, while you're still employed.

When I wanted to quit my job, I told the boss I could only work 30 hours a week for them. I was so valuable to them that they didn't protest at all. I set my schedule as 1pm to 7pm; and then spent the mornings getting my business going. About a year later, I knew I could do it and quit my job.
So we'll be going back to AOL keywords?
a booking calendar is something a hair stylist / massage therapist / esthetician / etc can use to let their customers book appointments online instead of phoning / emailing / texting them.
Google for "godaddy ssl" and click the $12.99 ad to get that price.
Yes. That is how I got my current job, and exactly how freelance hirers decide they want to work with me.

My theory is that for a developer, a LinkedIn profile is less useful because it basically just states who you know and what you focus on. Twitter accounts show nothing other than that you exist. You likely want to hide your Facebook - my boss was not my friend until after he hired me ;)

A github account is so much more than a blog. A great one need not have many repositories, nor many followers. It just needs to show that you:

- Can Program

- Document your code

- Use version control well (or at all)

- Love to program

A github account is an easy way for non-designers and non-frontend developers to have a portfolio of their past work. It's also a great way to exercise your mind outside of work.

Nota bene: Make sure you legally can write open source. YMMV, but state law might actually back that silly form you signed when you were hired. It helps when your open source code has nothing to do with your actual job.
A software program having a bug is news?
UGG Broome Boots
If you have a lot of small vectors those three pointers can be expensive. On a 64 bit machine they're 8 bytes apiece.

If you know the vector isn't going to be enormous you can swap two of those pointers for unsigned integers, cutting overhead down to 16 bytes total. If you know more about your data and usage patterns you can probably get it further. For very small vectors of largely static data you might trade one of the integers for linear-time insertion and deletion. If capacity is known at compile-time you can make it part of the type. If you know that size() will always equal capacity() you can get rid of the size int.

It's also worth noting that you don't have to double your storage on every reallocation to avoid linear-time insertions - you just have to multiply it by some constant that's greater than one. If you don't know how many reallocs you're going to do, but you know that it isn't many, you might want to just multiply your capacity by 1.1 every time to avoid a lot of wasted space. Assuming, of course, that you're happy with bringing floating point computation in, and that you've thought about how you're going to increase the capacity of a vector of size 1...
Really? I'm seeing something very different. Not only is it not timing out, but I can't even lock it again manually. Neither the home button nor lock button do anything (except take a photo if I press them both, which I just now discovered).

EDIT: I can re-lock it by holding Home to get to voice control, then cancelling that and pressing Home or Lock.

EDIT2: It takes a screenshot, not a photo. Damn, photo would be way more useful.
It's actually worse than the article suggests; from the phone app, you can get to Mail and SMS (Share Contact); from SMS, you can get to the phone's camera roll; I'd be surprised if URL expansion didn't get you to Safari via Mail or SMS.

On the other hand, it's not like the keypad lock was Fort Knox. I don't even bother with it normally.
Relativity is a more modern alternative to Concordance.

http://www.kcura.com
I interviewed with a pretty big company awhile back, and they told me that 50% of the people they talked to couldn't pass a basic phone screen - the technical portion of which basically consisted of making sure I knew what the modulo operator was, what it did, and some practical applications thereof.

How were y'all's percentages in that regard? How many applicants flat-out couldn't write code to save their life?
A keypad lock bypass is going to give away the privacy of millions of people? No it won't. Most people don't even use the silly thing; it isn't on by default.
OK, I bit and looked at your comments. You did grab some upvotes when it was snarky-but-clever, or simultaneously raised a good question. Most other comments are not getting upvotes due to unfiltered venting. Maybe apply a filter. A lot of knee-jerk anti-MS in there. I have similar gut reactions to the keywords MS and Ballmer but I noticed a long time ago that many people (even tech professionals!) did not relate (what are they smoking!?). Maybe try some other topics that allow you to share more concrete knowledge with HN readers.
(Note: this is a pretty technical post.)

The iPhone's passcode is pretty superficial. Only the UI code actually enforces it, and this is one of the results of that distinction. In fact, when you unlock, you are still viewing the same process as you were before it was unlocked. It just called the "_unlockWithSound" method and set an internal state to unlocked.

Edit: as pointed out to me on IRC by comex (author of JailbreakMe), there is lower level protection in the "lockdownd" service, but since the UI controls that, it doesn't really provide any additional security except it blocks iTunes syncing and such).

However, with this "hack", you are still locked, so you can't do anything like opening apps (again, the UI process locks opening apps, as part of their "security"). But, I did some experimentation, and here's what I found for impact:

- You can read and edit contacts, of course.
- I am not sure if phone calls work, but they didn't appear to.
- While clicking an email address does nothing, clicking the "send contact"
lets you send an email to whoever you want, custom address and all.
- You can view all the photos by pressing the "add photo" on a contact you edit.
You can also take new ones saved to there.
- You can send SMS and MMS using the same method as for email, but selecting MMS.
- You /cannot/ enter Safari or go to the homescreen: unless someone finds another
similar "hack" to exit the app, as then you could see the icons
(but, as the "is locked" flag is still "true", it won't let you launch apps).
- FaceTime doesn't seem possible.

This is a serious issue, and with the publicity it already has, I would only expect Apple to fix it (with a 4.1.1 firmware release, of course, I don't expect them to care about their iPhone 2G owners back on 3.1.3) within two weeks. However, if they want to fix this, they need to redesign the workings of the lock screen. The current way it works is incredibly simple to circumvent.

Finally, on an unrelated note, the same exploits used in the jailbreak tools like "greenpois0n" and "PwnageTool" can be used to get around the passcode and get full filesystem access, or just remove it altogether. But you do need a computer for that, which you don't with this.
You didn't get it. SSH can be used for tunneling (encrypting) TCP connections between two machines and it can be set up so that the SSH client acts as a SOCKS proxy. Client apps connect to the SSH client, it tunnels the traffic trough the encrypted SSH connection to the other side where the SSH server decrypts it and connects to the target host. The traffic is thus encrypted between your machine and the SSH server, can't be sniffed from the air (unless the server is also connected to an insecure WIFI ;) ).
Also depends on the degree to which your state has "at will" employment.
Along the same lines, check out the Netflix "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture": http://www.netflix.com/Jobs

I found it quite an interesting read. Seems like a thoroughly enlightened way to run a company.
The first step being actually accessing the back-end? That took me about 30 seconds, but I got bored as soon as I got there, mostly because I'm just taking a break from working on a personal project.

I actually applied with SeatGeek awhile back, and I guess my resume was tossed in the fluff pile. I sort of wish they'd had this at the time, since I'm sure I could figure it out based on the other replies in this thread. But fuck it, I've gotten a job since then with what seems like a pretty cool company, so I can't complain. :)
Ars Technica story on the same topic: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/10/no-base-station-...
When you're on the contacts screen, hold down the power button until the power-off screen comes up, then press cancel. That should stop it from going back to the lock screen.
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I couldn't agree more with https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=147321#p147321; one of the greatest opinions on programming. Some of the things he mentioned might be extreme; but his concerns are damn right.
Example thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829049 - the open source campfire submission. People thrashed the UI in this thread but for the best part weren't negative or offensive.

People on HN are happy to pull something apart if it's incorrect, they just do it in an even tempered manner.

Additionally: This isn't reddit or slashdot, a lot of people here are looking to gain funding or contacts, therefore HN has much lower anonymity. Therefore more likely to be civil and appropriate.
How I learned to stop worrying and love Apache
Went and did a search on my email, the first time I recommenced it to someone else was the 13th Oct 2007. So yeah 2007 it is!
Adobe previews Edge, a prototype HTML 5 animation IDE
The situation is probably much worse if you're in Montana, where there's a statute that makes employers liable for wrongful discharge.

Meanwhile, in the majority of US states, at-will employment is subject to "implied contracts", meaning that one very important purpose of an employee handbook is to eliminate any "implied contract" that a terminated employee could claim to exist.
What effect does a regular CFC-powered lamp have? Is it all light?
check out external links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_%28programming_language%29
My observation over a couple of years is that HN is consistently - sometimes boringly - critical. The top comment often is in disagreement with the submission, sometimes focusing on an incidental point, and it can seem that people actually compete to criticise on HN.

Since this is HN, you might consider reading pg's essay how to disagree, and apply it to your comments before adding them: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Note that articulate, dispassionate criticism is one of the most difficult skills to master - so don't be discouraged if it takes a while to make progress. It's a valuable skill, and well worth the effort.

tl;dr HN upvotes intellectual disagreement.
StoreCrowd – $0 to $1M+ in Affiliate Sales in 12 Months
Startup Quote: Charles F. Kettering, Inventor
I might be missing the point but I think the issue is that the WSJ (and others) are able to extract 'sensitive data' from sites like Rapleaf.

So that might be contrary to Rapleaf's policy but in reality their business model enables the dissemination of so-called sensitive data.

I read another blog post on Rapleaf's site about how they are solving the problem of personal information being moved around the internet mistakenly. Are they not simply devising a solution for a problem they are helping to create?

Again, I might be missing the point...?
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

- Charles F. Kettering
They might be referring to Mongo writing data into memory rather than requiring that it be written to disk before responding success (in its default configuration) or that Mongo uses memory mapped files (and tries to uses as much memory as it can) to hold the active records in memory.