skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cassandra has it's own hurdles, but I think if we're talking about getting your mind in the right place, it might be a better answer. Cassandra definitely has a much more mature scalability implementation that isn't caveat-ridden like MongoDB is. It's operating at scale at both Twitter and Facebook.

Cassandra has online compaction, but still requires up to 2x space for compaction. However, Cassandra does not have to do a full scan of the entire database to do compaction, and almost never actually uses the 2x space. It's also much easier to maintain a Cassandra cluster, because each instance shares equal responsibility, and replication topology is handled for you.

Despite what their fans will say, these are both beta-quality products.
Google thrives on messy heuristics so it is perhaps unsurprising that they would view the problem from this perspective. I tend to agree with you that optimally all email should be read (and that this is realistically achievable in most cases), in which case the priority inbox feature is just a palliative and not a cure.
More myths of software outsourcing
There is still the need for digging in man pages and searching for the right switches in Linux/whatever this is just an echo to how you can't simply throw more switches at a problem without a hierarchy of some sort. An ideal structure would be function based and inter-operable between differing programs via standardized boxes (as in boxed values in programming to json, whatever), a stream of text is not structured data contrary to popular belief. This would require a new operating system which is beyond this already lengthly comment.
These statistics are normalized across countries and over time by purchasing power parity. I don’t know what the precise calculation is, but it is relatively sophisticated. I’m sure if you search around you could find the details. They are just reported in simpler terms to make the comparison easily comprehensible to the non-technical. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary-Khamis_dollar

(In other words, there are at least a few statisticians working for the UN and the World Bank, and they tend not to be “basically innumerate”.)
Thanks.

Follow up question. If someone built an extension for interacting with people outside of the wave say by email (yes what they tried to do away with) or maybe sms, then do you think things would have worked out with the school projects scenario?
You should really stop and think about what you are saying. Do you understand the business Twilio is in? The entire point of putting example code out there is to get people to use it or be inspired by it so that Twilio can make money from its use.

I recall at one point they were actively soliciting people that were interested in the service but didn't have ideas to contact them and they would provide you with ideas and/or brainstorm.

They want people to take their ideas/code so they can make money. They aren't in the appointment reminders business but would love for anyone in that business to use their service.
YouTube was thriving as a company when Google bought them. Sun was floundering. A hands-off approach works better when a thriving company buys another thriving company.
I am not defending Oracle. My point is that regardless of the jockeying in the mobile world, Java language and the JDK which you and I both use has no threat to its future. There are no technical issues that jeopardize the Java language's future or the JVM's future. Oracle understand the significance of the Java developer community. Sure it would have been nice to have Harmony but I am able to live with openJDK. Remember, IBM and Apple are both supporting OpenJDK -- Oracle is not the sole custodian of Java. There is no impact to JDK and JRE on servers ( which is where I suspect most of us Java programmers make our bread and butter). Sure the Mobile platform is being contested -- but so what ? Businesses always jockey for position .
Well that's pretty simple. There isn't really a suitable successor that does what Java really does. It was low-enough level to have decent performance and high enough level to be used to quickly do some complex stuff with some runtime protection.

I'm curious, the JCP didn't exist until quite a while after Java got going. There are tons of documents in various states of completion and with various levels of support. To me, JCP has sort of given java a terrible look to the non-java coder. It looks fat, bloated and incredibly Byzantine. I've actually heard developers have conversations about JCP<number>, that just seems like a bad thing to me. Meanwhile SpringSource has done some great and wonderful things. Even newer JCP specs, like JPA (if that's 'newer') were sort of done outside of it all and then backported in to the JCP process.

I don't know, C has been pretty much "dead" for decades, there is very measured and limited change in that language. Putting the Java language in a similar place, adding some dynamic support to the JVM and maybe focusing on cleaning up the class libraries and interop with higher level languages might be the best thing for it.

I don't know, it all looks bad, that's for sure but i can't say the JCP was the end all be all either.
Thank Daniel,

Follow up question. If you have seen the videos of real time editing, do you think working on the entire document's text within the wave would be a good way of making use of wave?
I think it would be very possible to take wikileaks and add a strong ethical code of conduct and things would be much different.

But this would require them to move to making a selective case for injustice instead of just trying to tear it all down, and I don't see them making that change any time soon.

As for the rest of your comment, please see my other replies.
Brad Wallen compares the websites for the Nexus S and the iPhone 4
I've always found it funny that those who are innocent, or at least know they're going to be proved innocent, will generally walk into court with their heads held high. While the low down scumbags cover their faces and cower like people aren't going to know who they are.
The issue is not whether the claim is plausible or not, but that in fact it is virtually impossible to verify. We know that statistics like this are not true on aggregate, otherwise we would be many times happier, more productive and more intelligent than a generation ago.
Will 3D TV lead to 3D Websites?
Ask HN: Just how bad was the Google Wave failure?
Out of morbid curiosity, does anyone know how many active users Google Wave had at it's death?
My favorite opinion on the handling of this event is, by far, this one:

http://twitter.com/b6n/status/11877355945463808
> Sun agreed to license the TCK to Apache under non-discriminatory terms an Agreement that Oracle is not, has not and will not living up to

If Oracle is in breach of an agreement, can Apache take them to court of force them to comply?

Alternately, are there any legal obstacles preventing Apache from writing their own TCK and saying in future they'll develop against that?
Yeah, I would really like to know how big the sample was.

It's scary to think a checkbox could have such a huge impact on my income next year. Are people really so fickle?
People who don't use Tumblr will interpret this blog post differently from people who use Tumblr all the time.
If you use + love Tumblr (as I do http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973546) you're really less disappointed in this specific 24 hour failure (these things happen), and more disappointed about what's not being talked about. This would have been a great time to start opening up about some specific chronic issues, including communication style that is more close-lipped than Apple.

Still rooting for Tumblr like crazy, but bummed out :(
In the screenshot, the checkbox is actually checked off. Was that the default setting? If so, I could see that being off-putting to users -- whenever I see that, I assume they're trying to trick me into opting in for something.
8 [Startup] Things I’m Better At Now That I’m 30
Don't forget, most aid is actively harmful.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/z2/another_call_to_end_aid_to_africa...
They connect when you press a button, but pairing is a more involved operation.
Everyone learns quickly after a major outage (they happen) that they need to have a game plan moving forward for communicating to users and customers. I hope tumblr took note of this lesson.
significant whitespace

Many years ago, this delayed me looking seriously into Python. But when its powerful data structures finally convinced me to start using it, I quickly became accustomed to significant whitespace: I always indented my code correctly anyway, whatever language I'd use. So it was just a case of dropping the { and }.
After a few hours I was accustomed to it.

The funny thing is, I still program a lot in C++ and PHP (and Java sometimes). When I write these languages, I fall back on using { and } like I did before, without even noticing it.

Getting proficient in a new language doesn't make you forget your old languages.
To me, this looks like the sort of thing a university develops in-house [and maybe hopes to license]. See:
http://www.uga.edu/housing/prosstudents/roommate.html

>"a product that will help colleges cut down their levels of roommate conflicts"

Can you really substantiate that claim and quantify a cost savings associated with it?

If not, there's too much blowback potential for a college administrator to gamble on it.

.
A Rare Gem
Single software licence shared 774,651 times | Security | News | PC Pro
You not too familiar with Ellison's frequent ramblings on this subject are you? Take a look at the link below I think it will open your eyes to how Ellison views Open Source, he sees very little value in it and will not buy Open Source companies because he feels that he cannot monetize them. To the potential that he would want to. It is natural to draw the conclusion that he sees Suns free offerings in the same light as he has never changes position on the subject. It is no big secret that the only kind of customer Oracle has is the paying kind.

http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061...

As well as this one where they pretty much say yep we are going to monetize the JVM.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/

We see in China and India, all that stuff is freely available and Red Hat is just cut completely out of the market. I'm not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map. They take all the Red Hat code, have their own equivalent of the Red Hat network, and Red Hat gets zero.

So its all very interesting. You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just can't charge a lot for it. There's brand value – there's real brand – there's people, and that's it.
Watanabe's Theorem of the Ugly Duckling
came across this while studying statistics.
>I think .Net is poised to capture much of Java's current market.

Anyone leaving Java because of Oracle is not going to .Net.

> The C# developers I know really do seem to enjoy the language and associated tooling, and it's very well established in the enterprise.

Doesn't matter. If you are leaving Java because of Oracle, then you don't care about the tooling. Moving to .Net will just move you to another vendor those guys have spendt the last years moving away from.
We had thousands of visitors and hundreds of conversions (I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head). We let it run long enough that the confidence intervals for the results fell below .1%, for this particular test, we would have let it run longer, but the results let us know we didn't actually need to for the email test. Since it was likely to be worse, we just shut it down.

We are (unfortunately) well aware of how statistically significant things look with too little data and on the flip side, how to optimize for the wrong conversion goal (see my other post: http://georgesaines.com/2010/09/28/how-we-increased-conversi...) We use Visual Website Optimizer so we have to set a test, agree on a number of conversions we have to see before making our first judgment, and the adjust our expectations based on the number of times we peak.
Thanks...

The structure is something I've struggled with. There is certainly a battle in my mind between a chronological presentation of "the methodology" and building sufficient background context.

This is the first structure that made sense but your comments of poor navigation and too much summarization are right on. I will try and find a better flow for the next iteration.

Parts 2 and 3 are still being written. I wanted to put out what I had so far and really appreciate the detailed markup you did on crocdoc.
Knox: Amazon S3 library for Node.js
Apple Prepping Mac App Store for Dec. 13: Rumors
Top enterprise products of the year 2010
That's a great point aresant, and we certainly didn't test the wording, which I admit would probably be a good idea. As I mentioned in the post, we actually thought very little of the wording or the styling or anything else, we were just thinking "let's get this email tips thing underway, oh yeah, just hook something up to give everyone the option."

Point definitely taken about the learning curve. I'll see if we can't make a few more variants of this to test whether that box could actually work for us.
For the even lazier:

main(void)

Though I vaguely recall something about this being deprecated in C99.
It's been more than a month since we took the test down, but I do think we had it defaulted to checked ... never thought about it being sleazy, but that's a good point.
Diabetes on the March: An interactive map
> You also complained about customer service (in the airline industry, no less). That's like complaining about the weather.

You should try Southwest. I started flying with them because of their rates. Now I'll stay with them forever because of their customer service.
What did it quadruple from? One to four? Two to eight? I'm being serious; isn't all of tumblr numbered at around 20 people, or am I mistaken? Their About page says "we've grown from a team of two, to more than ten people."
Yeah, that's also a good idea. I with the comment above about the wording, I'm wondering know if I couldn't iterate that checkbox to for the better. Thanks for the idea.
It sounds to me like their biggest problem was growing too slowly.
I guess I don't grok the value added by Tumblr. What exactly do they offer that offers a better value proposition than Wordpress or Posterous?
I would say Google is an advertising company instead of media company, but the sentiment is the same.
That was my immediate reaction as well: "Oh, they want to spam me. What else am I inadvertently agreeing to if I sign up?"
Right, but they are a company thinking in terms of years going forward. Gotta get people hired at some point.
Which Test Won?
Thanks jefflinwood.

The book isn't a lead-in to LeanCanvas and I was/am conscious about not making the example in the book self-promotional. I wanted to pick a "real" example to which readers could relate and one that I had recently built. The software would most likely be bundled with the book. As a standalone it wouldn't cost $49/mo but more like $14/mo (still early to tell).

Thanks for the SEO tip.
Ha ha. I grew up and live in Sheepshead Bay.

I'm serious.
Yes there is some validity to what you are saying, for a while we can go on as if nothing is wrong. The problem is that Oracle has a track record of trying to monetize anything that has significant leverage. Look what they just did with mySQL, pretty much doubled the prices. I fear that more and more items will become additional paid features as time goes on.
The borker borked.
Google Should Acquire Kickstarter Otherwise Amazon Will
Why is this an exciting phone? Genuinely curious. The specs seem the same as (CPU) or lower than (display resolution) than N1.

EDIT: My bad. Looks like the screen resolution is identical.
I'm surprised that this has so many upvotes. Are you all net this simplistic?
Again, replying to a deeper comment.

I sure don't disagree with everything you are saying.

As for adding transactions to get a balance, yes, this is how the basics work and it doesn't look like ACID at all. However, what you're describing isn't eventual-consistency (per Dynamo), it's eventual-completeness. You can't lose a log entry. All of these messages are two-phase committed between systems.

So as I said before, you could build this kind of system using quorum writes on a Dynamo system, but it wouldn't be a solid engineering choice.

Also, yes, BerkelyDB has multi-key transactions. Dynamo on top of BDB does not expose this functionality or use it (as described in the paper). Publicly available systems that implement Dynamo like Cassandra, Riak or SimpleDB do not have native transactions either.

Fun chatting. I'm off to bed.
Shiny and plasticky is the signature Samsung look. Great hardware, great screen, but the handset itself ends up looking cheap. This is one reason I returned my Galaxy S, and now Samsung have done it again.

Edit: okay, the actual images don't look that bad.
but it works for me!
Like Twitter, Tumblr has some socialness that makes it quite easy to have a conversation larger than yourself. Visible Liking, Reblogging, and Following are implemented in really nice ways.
Wordpress and Posterous are great, but you're pretty much by yourself. (Posterous has some basic socialness, but not like Tumblr)
With Tumblr it's easy to discover stuff you're interested in, and have people find your stuff w/out having to rely on hustling your work. From the outside it's hard to tell (and just looks like a blog) but from the inside view of a user, it's really quite like Twitter not in format, but in experience.*

* I make many comparisons to Twitter here. They are extremely different. But they are both social and function like places, so I reference Twitter to make it easy for outsiders to grok.
There is no problem as long as those investing know what they are doing, spend cash they don't need and have valuable skills they can leverage after 50. Chicken Littles like me simply don't want to be quoted by “an idea guy” who wants to “make the new Facebook” in a pitch to a retired plumber.

Because anyone know of to use the web and most can sketch a couple of revenue models, a fraction feel like they can invest - that is to say, way too many people. If you say to external investors that high valuation for such or such company is reasonable, they won't be able to make the difference with another project that look very similar to them (both would be bunch of geeks in a garage). I worked for a dishonest guy, helping him pitch: fascination for the billion-dollar idea was alive and well a year ago, and thanks to Sorkin's movie and Groupon financial revelations, they are getting worst.

Quick test: if you were not shocked that, in my last sentence I mentioned an “idea” that was worth a lot because ideas are nothing, execution is everything, do not invest (and think hard before working in a start-up).

The economic specifics of Silicon Valley (namely signaling, Schelling-type salience) change the assumptions that you need to have a bubble: if a company raises a lot of cash, it gets attention — and that's usually what is decisive to attract talent & revenues. Some have failed, but rarely against all predictions.
Not a single statement on their website on IP. Touch screens in general is a patent mine field and it would be interesting to understand how TeslaTouch's product can differentiate or secure themselves
I think that for a lot of A/B testing software (if not all) the statistics is not done correctly.

Here is what people do:
They keep running the test till they feel that results are statistically meaningful. That is that they do not fix the N apriori.

But that is wrong.

Put another way if you wanted to test if a coin was biased you should not stop the test after 10 tosses if you got 9 heads and say the coin is biased. you should decide before hand how many tosses (N) and then conduct the test.

And if results are inconclusive you need to flush the data and start again
So what does the HN community think of Vala (http://live.gnome.org/Vala)? C# like syntax. Compiles down to C. Reference counting for memory management. Appears to work with clang as well.

More example syntax here: http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Tutorial
Pivotal Tracker has a new look
That was exactly my response. "If their default action is to send me five separate emails immediately after paying, am I going to be getting emails for the rest of my life for trying this thing out?"

I'm touchy about my inbox. I let DailyBurn email me for as long as I had a paid account there, and I still let OKCupid email me, years later. But they both had to earn my trust with a combination of a slow start and relevant emails. Pretty much everyone else annoyed me immediately.
None of these features took one day to finish, they just happened to launch on the same day :)
:) Point is that it's on an internet overlay that's not exactly just right on the internet with an IP address that takes you to a server that The Man can easily just shut down.
I used to live in that area, and I haven't heard a single person call it little Odessa. Granted we moved from the area when I turned 16, and we didn't live on Brighton Beach...but that just doesn't sound true.
The power of Java is not the VM, or even the system runtime, but the open source libraries available for it. It is time to create a "new language" whose compiler will accept Java, and whose VM implementation is unencumbered by legitimate patents. Hm. If Dalvik isn't it, then something similar will be created. I, for one, would like to help. Anyone else up for it?
I wanted to give you a non-anonymous +1 on this. Your point about the level playing field is a great one.

My preference is obviously to just avoid the black boxes where I can, but it's not particularly surprising to think that the true color of the box is the inverse of the color of the hat.
Why don't you filter those messages out into a label and auto-archive?
YouPorn sued for sniffing browser history
Your attitude may be appropriate for software development, but if we're talking about the number of IT people watching the server farm, more is probably better.
Help Desk Software Developer Zendesk Raises $19 Million