skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One can hate Ticketmaster for their consumer experience. From the business perspective though, the company does (or has done) a remarkable amount of right things. Most important takeaways from this article:

* Gawda and Leffler are obviously hackers. Pretty good ones: Out-program the competition and get more performance (transactions) out of a smaller computer system than their larger competitor who has a much larger (and more expensive) system.

* CEO Rosen has realized that "ticketing isn't about the bands or the fans, it's about the venues". Thus, they have protected the essence of their business, their customer - the venues - by signing long term contracts with them. Bands and fans come and go, venues are here to stay (and be served).

* They have installed right CEOs throughout the decades: In the beginning the already mentioned Rosen who has set the right agenda, "cutthroat" Azoff who has led them thru the major merger and DOJ negotiations and Hubbard who says that he "can't turn on a dime like a startup" but is willing to change when major change is necessary.

* Never change the running system. Yes it isn't the system that fans (and bands) want but it is able to stand their rush like no other. Great quote from Andrew Dreskin, Ticketfly’s CEO and cofounder "A large-scale concert on sale is, in essence, a denial-of-service attack".

* I, once again, am reminded of the following principle: It's not the innovation that wins, it's the leverage. If the innovation IS the leverage then innovate. If it's not, what is it? In the beginning, Ticketmaster was innovative with (ironically) their computer system. While they still use it as leverage, they in the mean time have another, much bigger one: Ties with major venues.
There's too much pressure these days to know what you want to do with your life. How can a 15 year old know anything about his future, when he's just trying to get through the next midterm? I'm not excusing mediocrity and laziness. For as the saying goes, if you don't know where you are going, any road can take you there. But, in the grand scheme of things, not enough attention is placed on discovery and growth. And, too much is place on fitting into some category.
I think it's more subtle than that. For the micro to supplant the mini (mainframes are alive and well, thankyouverymuch) it had to become one. A contemporary PC running Linux or NT is not only faster than a VAX, it is actually more complicated under the hood. This should be easy to prove: do whatever you need to do to get a complete process listing of your preferred system. How much do you, probably an "expert" if you're even reading HN, know about each and every process? Try the same thing on a CP/M box if you have one...

The real lesson is, it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex thing more simple.
Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs
When is OOP better suited for?
Britain poised for third phase of industrial revolution
Vendors highly optimize for your case, and you find that their solutions work for you. Not a surprise. Different constraints and different requirements produce different solutions. Nobody is saying you are doing financial services storage and processing wrong. Why are you so insistent experts in a totally different field are doing their jobs wrong?
That is a very interesting interpretation, and very charitable; but it could just as easily be explained by malice because justly or not, the revelation has pretty much destroyed his reputation with a very, very small potential of successful redemptory action.

I think that she did it without really thinking it through because she is personally involved. People do not always make the best decisions under those circumstances, which is why we have the legal framework.

I must stress that I cannot really blame her, I do not know how I would have acted in similar circumstances. I just wish she had not done it because when naming names becomes precedent, something bad will happen to someone undeserving of it.
Is that article a sufficient summary of the innovator's dilemma, or is it still worth reading the book?
Agreed, out of all the usesthis interviews that have been put up, I believe this is the shortest and least interesting.

The good ones include historical context and explanation of the setup decisions, this is just a list.
It would be interesting to know what would happen if one person had all the SNPs.

Would the person be able to cure HIV, or is there a reason there are only combinations present and not the full set (IE does the whole set destroy some other part of immune function)?
I'm not. I'm insistent that the assertions that RDBMSs don't scale and that RDBMSs are too inflexible for rapid, iterative development are false.
Regarding the mainframes, I changed it now from "extinct" to "almost extinct".
I have the small version of the happy hacker keyboard, and I almost never press either of the Alt keys because it has a Meta key. I also seem to only use the left side Meta and Fn keys, so the right side keys are pretty underused.
Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock. See my blog post here: http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/
I apologize if this is a silly question, but I pre-ordered a WakeMate two jobs ago, before my son started Pre-K and before I switched to Android, so I'm fuzzy on the details---plus all that's happened since then, including the $5 refund.

Were the pre-orders final? I'm assuming not but I don't want to run into any surprises of course. Once it's ready to ship, will I have the option to cancel my order?
This is nice, too bad I hadn't heard of it before. A feature I'm really missing is a page with all new items (eventually sorted by "goodness").
> I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. [...]

> I'd like it if the HD display was bigger and much lighter and didn't have such a massive octopus of cables attached to it.

Looks like Apple agreed. The more recent Apple displays are bigger and have mostly eliminated the “octopus of cables” (when LightPeak hits this should even further improve), and the new Air is substantially smaller.
Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock the door. See my blog post here: http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/
Volcano Music
Nevermind, found the answer:

http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/17/timing-update/
"it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex thing more simple"

And unfortunately, that's why today's toys will be tomorrow's dinosaurs. That said, this is exactly why mobile is winning now. It's so much simpler. There's no reason it's so complicated to do something on a PC, other than that the simple thing from then has now become more complex
Indeed. You could build a relational database like

create table nosql (id number primary key, stuff blob);

Hey presto, generic key-value store. The point of a RDBMS is that you can do this and lots more too.
I'm going to nitpick a little bit about the Arduino. Just to be clear, I won an Arduino and love it, but the article misrepresents it a little bit.

It states that the Arduino is a microcontroller. This is false. From the Arduino website:

> Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

The Arduino is an entire prototyping platform. It includes software which makes it easy to use, and it includes a lot of extra peripherals that make it more expensive. In the professional realm, Arduinos are not that popular. They're just too expensive. The microcontroller that the Arduino uses costs a few dollars, which is a tiny fraction of $30 for the whole board. Any professional will be comfortable enough to just program a basic microcontroller and build the small amount of circuitry to power it.
Bridesmaid Dress Rentals – a good idea?  | Planning Your Wedding Online
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I don't know what this article is really trying to say, if it's saying that a zero cost labour force will drive a third industrial revolution, then I'd disagree. The economy here in the UK is on the brink of collapse, as is our government. While the coalition looks solid on the outside the two parties involved are both undergoing an internal identity crisis, with some members of the lib dems leaning to the right and some tories leaning towards the centre. It's not really a radical government in any other concept than it's doing what is the only option left - to stop spending money.

I don't see this revolution in the UK. There's a fair old bit of unemployment, nobody wants to spend money and interest rates are so low that any savings are being pretty much destroyed. Add rising prices for common things like food and petrol and you're not really creating the conditions for an industrial revolution.
I don't have advice necessarily but I have thoughts :)

Here's what others aren't telling you: you did not provide us with enough info to give you anything beyond superficial. You did a great job explaining your job history and that you are technically capable but you in no way explained your strengths, your goals, and your aspirations. Without those things, how can you expect random strangers on the internet to give you meaningful advice?

Not to pick on anyone else who has responded but how about this response: "Jumping between platforms and languages is good. People who spend ten years working only on one platform and one language get boxed in that platform and they can't think or do anything outside it."

This response assumes that you want to be a career developer. Do you? I don't know because you haven't provided us with what you want your career to be.

I'd be motivated to answer in detail if I didn't have to preface every single suggestion with, "If you want to be a ... then do this. If you want to be a ... then do that."

Tell us what you want out of your career and I bet you'll find we can give more specific advice/thoughts.
"conveniently controversial" aka link/flame bait
Dell to Ditch 25,000 BlackBerrys in Bid to Promote Own Service
One common thing in all usesthis.com interviews is, no one uses Windows OS as their main operating system and Mac is used most. Only person I found using Windows is Mitch Altman so far.
> I'm using IE8 on WinXP

I don't know how to answer this without being harsh, but, what else did you expect? I mean, Windows XP is hardly the typophile's platform of choice, is it?
Most coaches are full of crap. So are most parents, teachers, therapists, doctors, lawyers...

I believe the point being made is that "life coaches" are exceptionally good at disguising that they are full of crap.

If you force yourself to do the hard work of understanding a dry technical text, filling in the missing details yourself, BS will stand out. If you smile and nod to a charismatic speaker, it wont.
You should see what the whole internet looks like to those of us not in the US :-)
On my Mac Mini - the volume keys on my wireless keyboard (My Mac Mini is plugged into my home theatre setup via an optical link).

On my laptop, probably the right alt gr key.
"Much like human voicings are defined by the combination of air flow through the vocal chords, tract, and mouth shapes, this harmonic tremor sound is shaped by the interaction of volcanic gases as they are released and flow through open conduits."

Delicately put, what can they have been trying not to say?
WP7 currently support these policies "Require Password, Password Strength, Remote Wipe and Reset to Factory Settings with multiple failed unlock attempts." Does anyone remember the exact count of possible policies on a Blackberry? (50+?)
Another Windows sighting!

http://jakob.nielsen.usesthis.com/
Exporting Our Way to Stability (by Barack Obama)
I think I'm the opposite of edw519 - I'm going the conference to hang out, absorb as much as I can, and have fun. Nothing about edw519's advice appeals to me - makes it like work. A conference should be fun and yes, crashing is part of it. You can't absorb everything and if you go into a conference thinking that you must "prepare" or your will forever "wonder what could have been if you had planned properly", you will get depressed/upset when you find your brain has turned to mush at 4:15 on day three.

Have caffeine if you've found that it helps you stay alert or be perky/whatever. Eat junk food for the same reason. Lots of carbs and proteins both work for me.

I don't know - I guess I just don't think of a conference in the same way as a marathon (which is what edw519's advice would apply to).You should absorb what you can but you should meet lots of folks and hang out.

Brush your teeth and have good hygiene. No one enjoys smelling you from 10 feet away. Smile. Wear your nametag. Take pictures with people and connect afterwards.

Enjoy and congrats!
Thanks for the corrections, I edited the article a bit. (I'm still comfortable calling the Arduino a "microcontroller with some software included" since this is what Wikipedia is calling it.)
Absent a metric for "scale" it isn't false, it's meaningless. Here is some context to help you distinguish how things work for online services as opposed to financials:

As you are not printing money, you care about cost efficiency. This means you are biased towards using white box hardware, and having as little variation as possible. In the financial world, they use name brand hardware and whatever configurations make sense for a specific application, which is good, because Oracle and IBM are not interested in supporting their products on white boxes. You're Twitter, you have 15 billion edges in this database. Each one is conservatively 24 bytes. 360GB of raw data. Everything you do depends on that data being always available, extremely tolerant of component failures, accessible with very low latency, so assume it all has to be in RAM on a bunch of machines. The Oracle answer is a cluster of fat, named-brand servers (totally unlike all the rest of your hardware) with a dedicated interconnect, a lot of license fees, support contracts, and dedicated DBAs (plural, since you'll need them on-call). Special hardware, headcount, license and support costs. Hit a bug? Call Oracle. Need a feature? Call Oracle. Wish that precious headcount was filled by engineers writing code instead of DBAs carrying pagers? Too bad.

When scaling includes having to fit into the same model as all the rest of your infrastructure, and that model is not the Oracle model, then it becomes a bit clearer why engineers might dismiss Oracle. They are left with those inferior options like MySQL, which you've already agreed has various scaling issues (though Facebook somehow manages). So, they invest a few months of a few engineers and they have a purpose built system that does what they need, fits the rest of their model, for which they have the source, and for which the maintenance costs are likely to be far lower.

Like I said in the article: absent a specific problem for the business, SQL vs NoSQL is just noise. Something like FlockDB is far simpler and cheaper than throwing Oracle at the problem. That's not a technical argument, it's a business argument. If you want to argue that the big players don't know how to run their businesses, I will not try to stop you.
http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/

Another windows sighting. And the most fascinating of the interviews I've read.
I would just like to point out that Arch Linux with GNOME works just fine. I'm sure there are tons of other distros out there, too, that work just fine. If you don't like what's coming in Ubuntu, just switch. you probably won't notice much difference between ubuntu 10.10 and [insert distro] with GNOME.
I asked a pretty straightforward question in response to someone posting a paper. It's not my fault that they can't answer it.
Thanks for the great post. Came to know of vagrant for the first time reading this, and have instantly fell in love.
@ "Yes, I know it works for you. This is not because of your superior mental discipline; it is because you have different genes, sir."

This sounds like an excuse, since nobody mentioned "superior mental discipline" but you. How did you measure gain in muscle?
While I understand that the author is extremely upset, afraid (and right to be so), I think naming the guy on her blog is a bit of a dick move. If this happened and it affects her then she should report it to the police who will investigate and if sufficient evidence is found press charges.

If she isn't going to do that, then a guy gets accused of this without any opportunity to defend himself (regardless of whether or not she's telling the truth, if accused of something he should be called to account and should be able to defend himself). Instead anyone googling for his name is going to hit a ton of blogs accusing him of being the kind of guy that would commit sexual assault.

I sincerely hope that the girl in question gets all the support and help she needs, but if she believes that his activities constituted sexual assault she should call the cops, not just accuse someone of things on the Internet.
Redirect system sound to Airport Express
I'm getting downvoted, so I'll expand:

If you make ethical judgments directly from the license then Zed Shaw is right. But Martin hadn't really done much wrong. The book was free online, and it would be classed as fair use by many people if it had been made using music, film or tv. He also made sure to credit Zed for the text, and only an idiot would think that Zed was able to change his text to fit the code better so I don't think it would reflect back on Zed badly at all...

Then again, in my opinion, what is important is that there are more beginning code examples to read in Ruby. Bullshit over rights or hatred of whole programming communities be damned.
I agree: the site accomplished its only stated goal. As someone who was approached by usesthis to be on their site (just last week: I have not said "no" yet) I can say that the guy who runs it specifically seems to have not cared much about how to optimize for generating insight into the /why/ behind what people are using.

Personally, however, I found that quite disappointing. :( Reading through the list of people and what they had to say I'm thinking, "man, I wonder if that was a random choice, or something that person spent a lot of time thinking about". Maybe I'm weird, but just knowing that someone who's work I admire has a Compaq Concerto isn't interesting if I don't understand the tradeoffs that went into its purchase.

Another complaint I have is that the site attempts what I believe to be a strong and artificial separation between hardware and software, and even requires a fixed ordering: hardware first, software second.

In my experience, software and hardware are really two different physical manifestations of the same underlying concepts (maybe I've spent way too much time on projects that involved writing software to accomplish the same goal as a previous generation's fixed function hardware), and end up having dependency relationships that criss-cross the supposed boundary.

As an example, many people interviewed on the site mentioned that they own a MacBook only because they were recently doing a lot of iPhone development and needed to use Apple's iOS SDK. However, it led to awkward phrasing to do that in the hardware section (before they had a chance to go more in depth into the software later), so the comment is stilted at the top and then short changed later (as it was already mentioned earlier).

It is also quite common, however, for people to first look at physical device properties like form factor, screen size, or input subsystem, leading them to make decisions that sound like "once I decided I had to have a netbook, I started evaluating whether to run Debian or Windows 7: either would be fine as I really only needed to run Chrome and a terminal".

I therefore look at this website as a giant list of missed opportunities to learn something really interesting and important about a number of really awesome people, and while I again agree: the site accomplished its stated goal, I think it is appropriate to judge a site on whether the underlying concept was appropriate in addition to whether they succeeded at their implementation.
Wordpress WordCamp Netherlands is streaming live today:
2 GB free code hosting for all developer projects
Like say, The Four Hour Work Week? It got so much buzz I'm glad I was able to borrow a copy and see what it was all about. Just as glad I didn't buy it too. His best example is to write a book that may provide insight into shortcuts.
All the Lonely People (Roger Ebert)
You can, right now, go to Dell's website and buy, off the shelf, a server with 144G of RAM. Stick Red Hat on it and Oracle considers it fully supported. The days of "vanity" brands that you'd stick behind a glass partition and take your investors on a tour of the datacentre to see are loooong gone.

And the reason you need devs and DBAs to be separate isn't one of different skills at all, both speak PL/SQL fluently. It's just if the regulator of your industry requires that the code be developed and deployed by different people. If not, it's normal for the two camps to have significant overlap.
Android Market and Taxes
How to Build a Better Smart-Phone App
"I'll probably get downvoted for asking, but I'm curious, would everyone be as upset over this had it been a drunken female guest inappropriately grabbing a guy's package?"

Your analogy is flawed. It ignores a fundamental biological difference twixt men and women; that in general, men are bigger and significantly stronger (I won't look up the exact numbers, but a much larger proportion of a man's body is muscle).

Here's a more accurate analogy that carries with it the psychological overtones your analogy missed.

Imagine you are a man, at some party, and some big guy approaches. He's way bigger than you, maybe as much as a foot taller, and he's clearly much stronger. Even if he's not sporting his muscles visibly, it's clear. He's bigger than you, stronger than you, and ultimately if he wanted to force you to do something, the advantage would definitely be with him. He looks an you in such a way that it's clear he wants to have sex with you, and then forces a kiss upon you, and then rams his hands into your underwear.

You can struggle, but he's bigger and stronger and really your only option is to push free and go somewhere with other people who will protect you if he tries it again.

You'll be thinking about this for days, wondering what would have happened if there was nobody there to protect you. You'll probably feel weak and vulnerable and violated. You'll think of this every time you go to a party for the next year. Every party you go to that you should be able to enjoy, you'll be thinking about this; afraid that someone bigger and stronger might decide to sexually assault you. It's a fucking horrible way to live.
The book's good reputation makes it unlikely that there is only 4-pages of meat for this to be an accurate summary.
The Little Book of Procrastination Remedies
Oracle doesn't do fremium.

All their evil aside, you gotta respect their "FU, pay me" attitude.
This could have been an article in The Onion. If we keep up this strategy, it will be impossible to travel with anything.