skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. No matter how you phrase it, there are people out there who will never see how that might be true. I've said before that using the file system or caching data in memory isn't an anti-database technique, it's simply a solution to a specific problem. It won't matter though - someone will have a fundamental issue with the approach, no matter how you present it. That's life.
I dont have any presentation scheduled - but you do!
(best wishes with it at YC).

publisher: ABC, BBC, CNN, youtube etc...

consumer: you, me, joe, jane, hari, harry.

By "powerful", I am talking about how it can ease problems first, and scale second.
But you haven't convinced me I have a problem--let alone Juwo can solve it. It could be that I'm not the primary audience which is why I asked you to define it AS specific as you can. You're still swimming in vagueness friend...
Perhaps this makes me just a programmer, and not a 'hacker', but I for one can write SQL queries and design a good DB schema in far less time than I could create something similar in RAM myself.
Isn't everyone...
As soon as you introduce an SQL layer to your app, your complexity goes to a higher order of magnitude, making it that much harder to debug and troubleshoot.
forgot to mention test and deploy
Overnight success
Experian Acquires HitWise for $240 Million
Very strange. I clicked your link and it took me correctly.

Anyway, I look forward to your feedback - if you can please use it.
I am thinking of doing a screencast for each of the demos and putting it by the demo.
wow! 240m is big.
I've been using rails a bit over the past month, month and half and just now getting a little comfortable with it. I still slightly prefer PHP because even though it comes out ugly and takes more work, I atleast know what every single line of code is doing. Rails has a lot of "magic" which makes things easier but at the same time hides a lot of things from a developer.
Well, there's the tao of minimal effort for maximal gain, and there's the tao of 'never do any hard work because it is always bad'

that is, one is a minimax problem, and the other is a complete prohibition on effort with no regard to reward :P

Sometimes, there are hard problems that, when solved, give great rewards. Ala google's pagerank.
Yeah, prevayler is handicapped by the fact that it's java. Happs is really cool, haven't worked with prevayler, but it's cited as an influence.
Not to mention that this has a 480x640 screen and the iPhone uses 320x480.
Business Cards: Do you have them and what do you put on them?
Excuse me? MySpace puts up a news aggregator and the top story is "Fishing for Fellatio"?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
So much for market research. Didn't someone here say release early, test, and improve? There goes a handful of millions.
I don't think so. Basically the idea is just to use whatever data structures you were already using (lists, arrays, hash tables, etc.) and just keep them around. Since you already have this in your code, you avoid doing anything with a DB. There are tools in a variety of languages and frameworks to help with the persistence aspects.

I don't see how that could take more time than doing both the normal program data structures and the DB.
Finally! Digg for even stupider people!
That's hardly true in all cases. Depending on the situation, the "layer of complexity" introduced by your having to build your own data structures is often far worse than whatever is introduced by using an sql database. If you're using a good ORM, it might not really be "complex" at all.

I don't mean this to argue that a db is always good, but I'd guess one of the reasons that people use a database even when it's inappropriate is precisely because it seems less complex.
I've been wondering if I should make some new business cards but there are so many possibilities.

1) What job title? Standard titles such as 'developer' or 'designer' may be too restrictive for the likes of us. If you've got a startup should you be CEO, Founder, Director etc? If you freelance or do a variety of jobs what do you put?

2) What contact information? Which contact information do you give? URL, email, mobile number, etc?

3) Design Are Moo cards acceptable? Can you print your own or should you go for high end thick card with spot gloss finish? Should you put a custom design on the back or leave it blank?

Heres some interesting ideas I've seen on cards recently: Tag cloud and blank fields. Put a tag cloud of all your abilities on the back of the card such as "ruby on rails" or "entrepeneur" and circle the relevant ones when you give your card away. Another card I've seen has blank fields eg "You met Dan W at ______ and talked about _____. You though he was ____" that can be filled in when handing it over.

So what are your business cards like? Do you even need any?
_molded to fit the problem_

Most problems I've worked on had to take scaling, concurrency, searching/lookup, report generation (joining), etc, into account...all of which a dbms gives you out of the box. Maybe we're dealing with _very_ different kinds of problems.
Funny - I'm exactly the opposite. Making something in memory can be as simple as creating a bunch of objects and stashing them in lists, vectors, hash-tables, etc. Retrieval is just traversing those lists, vectors or hash-tables. Whenever I use sql I find myself guessing at the correct almost-human syntax and getting it wrong. Keeping it all in lisp means I don't have to switch languages constantly while developing.

One of my spare-time projects, lispdoc.com, uses an in-memory approach (although to be fair it is only indexing a few hundred MB of static data, so it's no effort to keep it all in memory on a single box).
"Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black is a good choice if you're new to Ruby as well as Rails. It spends a lot of time on Ruby fundamentals and only brings in the Rails stuff after having explained the necessary bits of the language so that it actually makes sense. I read the Agile book first, and as a Ruby newbie, it gave me only a very vague understanding of the language. R4R did a much better job of that.
If you need to store to disk at all, use a DB. The exceptions being if you have very small amounts of data or it is not a big deal if its lost (like user preferences or similar). You could just serialize those to flat files.

DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O. At their very nature they are also designed with data integrity in mind. It would be a joke not to use one if you are handling important data where persistence is even remotely a factor.

As you grow you'll be glad you implemented the DB code as it will scale much better. You'll also be able to do Analysis easier which can be very important in learning about usage of your product.

But I'm definitely a fan of utilizing ram as much as is allowed in the interest of speed. Try to strike a good balance between data integrity and performance...
If I understand your question you're wondering how to deal with older flat files when your app expects a newer data structure.

If you're using s-exprs make your structure a list where the first element is a version identifier. If you aren't using s-exprs then use some other extensible format like XML.
I settle for nothing but the best. Metal business cards, about $5 each. I like to make an impression.

http://www.luckow.com/clients/woz/colbert.html
You Might be a Web Worker if...
I have to second this. "Ruby for Rails", I feel, is a great resource for learning not only the Ruby language, but how to program with it. It really did not need the Rails section. I've only flipped through "Beginning Ruby" (apress), but that looks like a good Ruby book too.
Nice. Apparently Woz has been using these for years.
Henrik Fisker: A three-part interview with a master car designer - (37signals)
Quite honestly, I don't care what people's biz cards look like. All I care about is the information on them. I transfer that into into Address Book and throw away/lose the card.

Worry more about the impression you leave when you meet those people and less about superficial stuff like biz card stock and font.
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It's a platitude. The full quotation and context is here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html

I read the "very senior Microsoft developer"'s point as something like: because if statements are so fundamental, most lowly MS programmers think in terms of them. Google, hires programmers who've taken a course in machine learning or something, and use statistical inference (a bunch of if statements, just with some abstraction) instead of lookup tables (a bunch of if statements.)

Yawn. This is just Google PR speak. The quotation doesn't really mean if statements will go away, it just means that you need to think at a "higher level." This is just someone saying "X is smarter than Y."
The nice thing about these web frameworks is that it makes rapid prototyping easy, and in doing so, it does things which may seem "magical". I would recommend that one should gain a certain level of understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. In doing so, it won't be as "magical" after all.
I hope this is not totally embarrassing, but with the file system I am always afraid of losing data. What if something happens to the server at the very moment you change the file? It seems to me the only solution is to keep two files and change them alternately, like the double buffering for graphics, and that would probably be slow.

How do you file-advocates solve that problem?

What would you use for firefox extensions? I suppose I can't connect to a database with Javascript.
Great success with plain old cards from vistaprint.com. Use a simple design with easy to read type. Do you already have a company name? Put that on there, your name, phone, email, only put a web address if it's something potential contacts need to see like your company website not a personal blog. Doesn't something generic like "web developer" work along with a list of your language skills if you are freelancer?
What about using Google Desktop to index your email? I use Gmail (brilliant search) but still download my email into Thunderbird every so often for a backup. Then Google Desktop indexes my Thunderbird mail nicely, and I can find it just by "hitting" Ctrl twice.

gibsonf1, as for importing Outlook email, Gmail can't do it directly, but here's a tool: http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/. Not sure I'd recommend importing "several gigs" though -- Gmail allows up to 2.8GB. I'd probably just switch but keep Outlook and index your old mail with Google Desktop. Gmail is brilliant (as long as you have broadband).
As of FF2, you can use the built in SQLite database for your Firefox extensions. And yes, it's accessible from Javascript. The interface is a lot like JDBC.
Ok, here's the obvious follow-up question:

What DB does news.YC use?
Google Earnings Are Out
Really cool business card designs (design studies, really)
Click on the little thumbnails above to see all the cards. My favorite is the one with the integrated blood sampler.
Mobispine.com - Free Mobile Feed Browser
If they didn't have search, they'd be in trouble. Looks like the competition is heating up for space on publishers' sites.

Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $1.98 billion, or 62% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2006. This represents an 80% increase over fourth quarter 2005 revenues of $1.10 billion and a 22% increase over third quarter 2006 revenues of $1.63 billion.

Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.20 billion, or 37% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2006. This is a 50% increase over network revenues of $799 million generated in the fourth quarter of 2005 and a 16% increase over third quarter 2006 revenues of $1.04 billion.
I just submitted my favorite web site on business cards here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14756

It's more an art project, though.

I felt they deserved their own submission - actually the studies are quite old, I think, but your post made me search and find them again.
By the way you formulated that question it seems obvious that you don't want him?
I'd rather have a room full of really smart people with the same values and the same thinking than risk hiring even a quarter of a room of people who are just a little behind.
Aren't strongly & statically typed languages an evolutionary improvement over dynamic & loosely typed languages that let you shoot yourself in the foot all the time?

A Java IDE in a sense "knows" what you're writing and helps you avoid making mistakes while you're coding.

People complain about too much boilerplate code in java - that's true, but it can actually be a good thing in the same way comments can be a good thing, and IDEs generate all the boilerplate for you with just a couple of keystrokes (whereas comments don't write themselves).

I'm curious whether the Java bashers out there have ever used a good IDE like Eclipse or IDEA for any extended period of time. Because if you're using a text editor like emacs, programming in Java can seem ridiculously difficult. Conversely it might seem ridiculously difficult for a person accustomed to an IDE to use a text editor for a scripting language.

Coding Java without an IDE is like trying to control the space shuttle with a steering wheel. Once you've mastered all the features of an IDE, however, (which can take years, but then again so does learning emacs) programming in Java becomes a breeze and you get all the benefits of static typing (with the safety and tools it enables) and the vast Java libraries with no extra difficulty coding compared to a simpler language.
The only thing I wish Java had is closures, but they are actually under consideration for a future Java release!

Right now you can get similar behavior with anonymous inner classes, but it leads to more clutter than necessary.

This demonstrates another good argument in favor of java - it is always evolving to make programming in it more enjoyable. It was difficult to use collection classes at first, but version 1.5 introduced generics. It sucked to use the iterator pattern with collections, but now java has a "for each" loop. It sucked not having enums, but now Java has them too, etc. Not to mention that every new Java release brings a ton of new library classes and enhancements.
Linden open-sourcing Second Life "backend" (Mitch Kapor gets his wish?)
A room full of people that are really smart in exactly the same way isn't much smarter than just a few of those same people. A room full of pretty smart people with diverse experience and knowledge is WAY smarter than any smaller group. Read Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds.
Textdrive
email me - ak (at) semigeek dot com

Fellow Cleveland'er, Poker Player, Vegas Junkie (will be there next weekend), etc.
Among our startup friends there are only a few Outlook users. Among our friends in the population at large, nearly everyone uses Outlook for their work email. Most of the big sneezers in the valley also use Outlook.
That's a good idea on backups. It's nice to have an offline repository for your email. I use a Mac but I could do the same thing with Thunderbird/Mail and Spotlight.
Doomed.
Would the real Steve Jobs would have put that in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter: "You must have the key tools of today: BASIC, soldering, subtracting chips from designs, Intel 4004, sugar cereal prize whistles, etc..."
I'm all for it. I'm in the SF area until Sunday.

During the day is the best time, probably Friday or Saturday. Lets make it then. I have no idea where a good meet up place is, so someone familiar with the area should choose.

also, email me at zkinion@gmail.com if anybody wants to have a cup of coffee/hang out with me during the day.
Ok, thanks for the answer. Do you have any plans for non-Outlook users? GMail for example?
I'd kill to actually have those business cards. It'll be a while. But I can dream, right?
This and the other business card thread reminds me of an idea for a business card I once had. I don't even know how it is called, but there is this kind of plastic coating for paper that consists of stripes of lenses, so that you see something different on the paper depending on the angle you look at it from (usually this is used on cheap gadgets for children). It turns out you can create pictures for that at home, at least a popular computer magazine claimed so some time ago and explained how to do it.

Being into games design at the time, I dreamed about showing an animation on my business card (a flying space ship, or space invaders perhaps?). In the end I was unable to find that plastic coating anywhere (I gave up too soon), and abandoned the idea.

Maybe I should pick it up again, but then again business cards seem also a bit yesterday. My second favorite design from ideo is the device that scans the business card and then burns it on the spot ( ;-) http://www.ideo.com/identity/cardpyre.htm )
Darmesh puts some things into perspective that I was very unclear about.
On further thought I think you're right. The need for joins can be alleviated with pointers, and sorting and grouping can be done in the application.

The tricky part would be the synchronization and transactional aspects, and if the system became sufficiently distributed that part could get fairly nasty.
Oops - this looks like the thing I applied with to YC
Just found this page when I was googling for the business cards. I guess it won't interest many people, but anyway, I applied to YC with a similar idea (I think, from the superficial looks of it). Rejected, but my application was not put together very well (last minute thing), and besides, it might just not be YCs area of interest.
The law suit filing is here
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34365/Amazons-Law-Suit-Against-Statsaholic
Good cites. I second them. Mackay and Jaynes are excellent but can get out of hand quickly. Duda, Hart and Stork is another good hardcore option. When I need the book "for dummies," which is pretty often, the Weka book and Mitchell's Machine Learning are helpful.
Amazon Sues Alexaholic for Using Alexa API
Hey thanks, that is really good to know. I am just toying around with the idea of writing an extension, and every now and then I collect new information. So far it seems a bit scary to me, but there are so many cool things one could make as extensions.
And yes, I think I will probably go through with it anyway, so comments are welcome.

(Sorry for always posting twice in my own threads - I didn't even want to open news.YCombinator right now, so I am too hectic).
See the law suit filing here http://www.scribd.com/doc/34365/Amazons-Law-Suit-Against-Statsaholic
Sorry, post 3, but actually it IS a bit disappointing ;-) I wasn't so disappointed about the YC rejection because of my shoddy application (sorry for that, YC, btw). But this sf0 thing really seems to implement many of my ideas, especially the community implementing the tasks.

Nevertheless I think it would still be fun to work on something like this, perhaps with a different angle. Or what do you think, should I just admit defeat?
New GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative
All you "must be stupid not to use rdbms" people need to pry open your minds a little.

There are all sorts of apps that use mem/fs for storage. Like mail servers, news servers, squid servers, static http servers, log files, and sql servers (discounting direct io)

rdbms are (usually) just another layer ontop of fs. A very usefull layer if you need what they offer. But if not just a layer of complexity and wasted mem/cpu.

Modern fs have journaling and smart buffering/caching. They kind of rock and discounting them out of hand is a mistake.
Thanks for that -- the Penguin computing 1Us look promising -- 16 slots!

It's cool theplanet has high-end options -- though I recently read an article that gave me the impression they had some serious support problems related to the EV1 merger.
Your relationship with your co-founder is EXACTLY like being married. Think how high your bar would be for marriage and set it at the same level (namely very high - you're going to go through stupidly stressful times with his person so make sure your relationship can cope)
Don't sweat these guys. Who can figure out what they're doing?
3 words for you: Google Web Toolkit
How To Submit Your Blog To "MySpace News"
Competition proves (at least at some level) the validity of your idea. Do it in a different city. Join their team. Build something that complements what they do. Or just do it better.
I thought Vista has stricter ways of preventing and checking for piracy?
I only give them to hot chicks
American Idol and Venture Capital
Hmm... if A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers, how could B players ever get hired?

Do the people who think up these simplistic axioms ever bother to think them through?

Far33d's comment about the "echo chamber" effect is well-stated. Look into why IBM missed the minicomputer boom, and why DEC missed the microcomputer boom.

Sam_Odio also has a valid point. Selecting the choice that offends the fewest people is what gives us so many buildings with walls and carpet that are a bland beige/white/gray color.

The real issue here is distinguishing between Joe 1, who's controversial because he's a bloody genius, and Joe 2, who's controversial because he's an asshole. This is further complicated by the fact that legitimate geniuses aren't always the easiest people with whom to get along. If you take this guy's advice, you'll wind up with Joe 3, who may be a good worker bee, but probably isn't ever going to do anything great.
Isn't a Myrinet cluster just a rack of machines with Myrinet cards? I am under the impression that 10gigE with TCP/UDP offload is pretty similar to 10gb Myrinet.

Lots of calculation and data, hence the request for lots of CPU and RAM. Storage is RAM binary-dumped to flat files (snapshots), so standard hard drives are fine. Intra-cluster: preferably 10gigE but multiple 1gigE might work. Net connectivity would probably be okay with 1gigE (total).

I can probably do some lower-end testing on Sun's compute grid, but real-world testing needs real-world hardware. It might seem like overkill at first, but every successful service seems to hit scaling issues sooner than they think!
I agree totally. Coding in eclipse with all of its type safety tools is a dream. I also wonder if Java bashers have overcome learning curve to see what Eclipse offers.

Its unfortunate few of the web hacker types see Java as anything but an "Enterprise" language. Admittedly, JSP (and even JSF) sucks. So the negative wrap that Java gets as a web development language is understandable.

But I think GWT will change that eventually... Build and build, Unit test, and never worry about browsers or the nasty stuff typically related with Ajax-centric development. To me that is worth its weight in gold.
How can you build an application without data structures anyway? If you ever load data from a database, it's loaded into a data structure of some kind.

Of course, if you're using a bunch of elaborate ORM stuff, I suppose it might build your data structures without you ever really seeing them. Is that what you meant?
Sorry -- duplicate.
35 Designers x 5 Questions - Interesting
Because it is so rare among VCs, Simon-like feedback would be refreshing, almost welcome.

Then again, unlike judging singing ability, the chances of being correct as often as Simon is are low.

Which probably explains why there are so many Randys among the VC crowd.
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Use this: http://www.bugmenot.com/
Get vested for time served
100 million OpenIDs in service
I guess thats a critical mass. Enough to make you think hard about allowing people to log into your app with open id.