skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's say you have a 10,000 logged-in users on your website, of which 1000 are concurrently active. That's very difficult to do with a RDBMS, because (most) RDBMSs do a lot of work to start a session, and maintain an awful lot of session state (for example, Oracle pre-allocates a chunk of memory private to each session to do sorting in).

So you put something in the middle, that multiplexes those sessions down into say 100 session on the database, checking connections in and out of a pool as necessary, queueing requests asynchronously if there are no free connections in the pool. You avoid the expensive creation/destruction of database sessions, as you start the sessions when the middle tier starts and keep them, and you keep the session state the database has to maintain at an optimal level. Cleverer architectures add effectively another layer between the middle tier and the database to cache query results (because you the developer can know what data you can cache like that, but the database can only make a best guess).

In "sharding" I suppose the middle tier also has to do some logic to figure out which "shard" to direct the query to. Note that this logic must be done, whether you do it yourself in your code, or you let Oracle do it for you in the query optimizer, picking the right partition(s) to actually execute the SQL on.
Prepared text here, started talking on my own and just using it for reference toward the end.

http://nielsolson.us/MilitaryFOSS/
Laptops provide them more opportunities for them (via understanind/access to tech), but being poor, I dare to say they will find more innovative uses.
I have seen first hand how being poor forces you to innovate in such countries. Hence, I agree with pg and the like that startups should be poor at the begining stages too.
Normalization/denormalization is like creating/dropping indexes - it changes physical data layout without changing data model.

Either one of the four can and does in some circumstances increase or hinder performance.

For exmample: if you drop all indexes, queries that depend on it become slow. If you create an index on every column it will take longer for optimizer to consider all possible strategies, and it will take longer to maintain indexes.

If you copletely denormalize your data you may see increased read performance since there will be less need to do joins. Or you may see decreased read performance because now your data tkaes more space on disk and you do more IO.

So, yes normalization/denormalizarion is a valid performance optimization technique. It also happens to carry with it the risk of violating data integrity which must be guarded against.
Wow this is pure grossness. Crawl back under your rock nazi.
In initial stages there will be a slow down until they learn to use the tech.

Grades etc. may fall as there are only so many hours in a day and if you spend time away from books/study to spend it learning to use a computer by yourself or with little tutition, then you should expect to see a grade drop.

However, in a few cyles we should see the opposite occurring i.e. grades improving with the aid of tech and people with proficiency teaching each other to the benefit of all.
Yes, and could well be proposing the exact things that the staff engineers already proposed, but were rejected by management!
I wish there was someone around who has had a chance to look at some of his code. Something I've noticed from years of doing code reviews and consulting is that people who are that verbose in their writing tend to be very verbose in their coding. I wonder if Steve generates massive classes when they could be done much smaller.

Again, it's totally unfounded, I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence.
Because no-one wants to work at a place that uses terms like "People 2.0" with no apparent sense of irony?
PAP has no stake in the outcome, he does not own the place, his stock options are worthless and the only way to climb up the ladder is to show accomplishment to his own name. Other PAPs have the same motivation.

In other words, PAP is not interested in having consultant succeed. Entirely rational behavior. That's how you get to having to call in consultants in the first place, so this goes with the territory.
Twitter has a better name.
Yeah, i agree. Bulgaria isn't as bad as it used to be when i was a kid in the nineties and early 2000-s. I mean we have two new playgrounds where kids can play football near my school, almost everybody can afford a mobile phone and the people living in extreme poverty are allot less than what i remember it the nineties(im born 1990). We need better education. Bulgaria had very good education, but it's declining. The teachers have miserable salaries, the students are not motivated. Basically we need some cool after class activities, because now most of the kids are just getting stoned, because of the boredom. In my home town there used to be a free government funded air modeling club. Kids just learned and had a hobby for after school. Now its private and its too expensive for me. There were allot of stuff like that that either disappeared or got really expensive because of privatization. And the only alternatives are sport and drugs. I see improvements in the sport part. There are allot of programs and stuff, but it's not enough and its not only sport thats important. In school computer education is broken. BROKEN. We all just surf the net or chat or in my case show off my cool little scripts that i made home. So we don't need better anti mafia and anti drugs squads, we need better teachers and more after school activities that are free(or relatively cheap). Of course thats only for the region. In Africa they need doctors and teachers and farm equipment and stuff.
yes one of gupshup's main tasks is akin to something like SMS multicast, but gupshup also saves these SMSs where people can browse them... the main difference is that I don't see the 'following' feature...

I don't feel that it's completely different from twitter, then again I could have missed something

UPDATE: I'm wrong - people with only cell phones aren't going to browse SMS update histories often if at all. You're right; though their solution isn't that far off given the existence of Jruby + Rails
i dont understand why mike, icahn and other narrow minded people cant see the whole picture —- i remember michael dell once made similar comments about apple …. look what happened, today apple is much more valuable than dell … if micahel dell (who was an entrepreneur himself) can go wrong then who are these people who have never created anything as big as yahoo …. people should give yahoo and jerry&co. a break and let them run the company the way they want and if you’re not comfy then sell your stocks and run (like a mice) , u will still profit as stock prices has gone up in last 6 months.
What i understand is Yahoo has too many money making properties and it can still make more prop and money out of it … following is my questions to all greedy people:

1. please explain me why cant yahoo make money from the text based ad (where they are not that strong) by temporarily leasing it to google - isn’t it a smart move where you make money from both kind of ads (text and display) from the 2 best ad systems?

2. why did yahoo made deal only for north-american market and not for other markets which are much bigger than NA? do you think that jerry is stupid that he is keeping other lucrative market i.e BRIC (brazil, russia, china, india) with him? - cant u see how intelligent he is that he is may be trying to roll out his strategy in these markets and eventually make a strong position?

3. do you think that the whole board of directors of yahoo is stupid to support jerry?

4. dont you know that the biggest loser (monetarily) is jerry himself, and if he is taking risk and let go millions $$ (for short term) then there has to be something in his kitty (the strategy) that he dont want to disclose it right now?, and may be this is the reason why the board of directors are supporting him because they know this internal confidential strategy ... there is always something called trade-secret that you shouldn’t give away no matter how much pressure builds on you by stupid shareholders …

I think if anyone who disagrees with Jerry then they should either sell their stock (and run) OR buy more stock (get the majority) and kick him out - if u dont want to do either then stop making foolish judgments ... everyone is not greedy - there is something like loyalty and integrity and that counts at the end of the day and i think Jerry's loyalty and integrity towards Yahoo is unquestionable.
Are we aliens?
How about trying the recently-discovered "fasting" method?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394
Venture Capital, Angels or Bootstrap?
They know who you are and they know what interests you have. This is fertile ground for targeted (i.e. profitable) advertising. Similarly google knows what you are looking for, so they can advertise effectively.
Porting legacy databases to Google App Engine
Playing Devil's Advocate here, but perhaps you're a "lousy" team player?

Technical ability is important, but so is being sociable and getting along with your peers. In fact, being sociable can often bond teams and elevate everybody's performance just through their willingness to work together.

An extreme example of a "lousy" team player: I know a very smart teen, who recently emigrated from Europe, who's got more raw programming talent than I've ever seen in anyone. He's currently working for a friend's startup, and he comes in after-hours to do his programming.

It's a small team, two or three programmers inclusive, and the other programmers are no slouches. However, he doesn't take direction, rarely interacts with fellow programmers and has no concept of business requirements. Experience will educate him with some of the business requirements (e.g., code reuse as opposed to writing from scratch), but if he doesn't think it's important, he simply won't play ball.

You can't build a solid team with that kind of personality.

Clearly, you're not so neurotic that you need to come in after-hours to code, but the tendencies are within most able programmers. Instead of locking yourself away, use your downtime to observe and educate your fellow programmers (and encourage them to do the same). No matter how able you think they are, they'll teach you something of worth.
I am sure I read exactly the same article about a week ago?!?
To suppress melatonin production you need to be exposed to the sunlight, not the darkness before the sunlight.
Really cool idea. You've inspired me to do a similar thing for a project idea I've had for about a month now. Going to start early July once I move into my new place.

Thanks for sharing this!
TechCrunch50 to launch 50 companies over three days
tl; dr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

LE: Ok, read the conclusion. It's more out of fasion then sick. Wonder how it got on the first page...
Yes, you have a point, but apparently they're discarding that option.

From the article:
"They've definitely had talks about how to monetize and start bringing in money, but if you thought they were about to start with advertising, you'd be wrong. Disqus will not always be a zero-revenue company, but Daniel says advertising's not in the plans."
I have found myself that I often reuse functional stuff(I write functions to do stuff and continously add fucntions in different programs that kind of belong together and then I realize I have a library) but I rarely reuse class-oriented stuff.
Sure sometimes you have a class that can be used in many programs but I dont find it happening that often.

Seems logical as well, you reuse your hammers and screwdrivers, not your house.
This is not what is usually meant by a third tier. Personally I take database connection pooling for granted.

What I mean when I talk about a 'data-tier' is the code that deals with accessing data without knowing in whatever datastore it is contained.

If you properly hide for example Twitter#getRecentMessagesForUserById(userId) behind a (Java) interface then you can easily change from an implementation where you do direct database calls to a sharded solution or a cached solution.

Other tiers that use this API will simply work because the interface has not changed. One day your app could be talking directly to a single MySQL database and the other day your app could be talking to a 60 node PostgreSQL cluster. It would never know since the details are hidden.

This is totally against what you see in every Rails book or example app where the first thing that is done is direct ActiveRecord queries.

Yes it is more work, but it pays off in the long term. It also greatly reduces local hacks for caching. All that is done in the right place. And automatically for all users of that tier.

S.
Paul, I definitely feel this pain and realize I waste a good chunk of time. With all my programs moving into the cloud however, it's impossible to make this separation.
1) This article ONLY makes claims about scholastic performance, it makes no claims about intelligence, quality of life or the (personal and societal) benefits of a more robust technical aptitude.

2) These probably were not laptops that were brought to school and used together as a class. They were probably windows machines sitting at home.
It's important to know that people think these things.

It's also important to know just how fucking wrong they are.
Yes, a week ago http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/06/angel-vc-or-boots...
Me, too -- or Firewire. Unfortunately, the USB physical connection in practice is really only universal on one end. I have 5 different "USB A to something else" cables here.
Talk about an echo chamber. Sheesh.
Best line from the article after describing the direction Yahoo! is taking:

"Well, good luck with that."
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is the "tax" the upfront cost of writing code that uses static typing? If so, I most strongly disagree.

Static typing is not a silver bullet. The claim that not using a static typed language for anything complex will result in a "scratch rewrite" is absurd.
This argument about the hierarchy of needs is tired. Every time I see it posted it is almost always met with convincing rebuttals, and I'm surprised it got modded up on HN.

For all the OLPC's faults, it would not be better to for MIT's media lab to organize a way to give away food or medicine, nor would it have been better for the governments buying the computers to buy this food or medicine instead of the laptops. Both because this is what MIT's media lab and nerds are GOOD AT, and because you can't simply solve a countries nutritional or health problems for them; it's not sustainable and often makes things worse.

Another point: the countries that are spending their educational budget on these are not full of staving kids and poor teachers. They are not recovering from tsunamis or civil wars. The idea is that they can save money on the books they would have (or should have) bought instead. You can argue this point, I don't actually know the specifics in each country, but at least start here instead of with the "oh lets buy them food instead" angle.

The idea is that the laptops should allows the children to learn abilities which will raise the production of the country in the long run, which is the only sustainable way to lift people out of poverty. You started to argue this point with your cash register comment, but I don't think it was very effective. ( A. it implies we should ban calculators from school B. what everyday tasks are these laptops doing for the kids that the kids will never fully learn now?)

Lastly, I reject the 'feel good' comment. First of all, solving the "real problems of the world" (whatever that means) is just as much of a 'feel good' program as OLPC. That's that charity is, get over it. This just happens to be how a subset of people think they can help. If you disagree, find some convincing arguments against it. Like I implied earlier, there are plenty.
It's refreshing (if its true) as Google lately hasn't been high on my list of ethical corporations.
Even if it currently would cost $1000/barrel, it's still worthwhile to pursue as an alternative to drilling.

Greater efficiency can come in later iterations. Immediately, at any price, it's more carbon-responsible and less politically volatile.

This is exciting stuff!
Comment ranking seems to be according to freshness and quality of the top-level comment, but a good comment responding to a crappy top-level comment sinks with it. I find that sometimes good discussions are deep on the page with their +0 to +2 initial comments, which makes it less likely that I will discover them.

I suggest that you use the freshness and quality of the whole comment subtree (normalized by the number of comments in the subtree, eg mean) to get those gems higher. Something like the square of points (negatives counting as zeroes) would raise the effect of good comments and lower the effect of bad comments and low-point side discussions.
Question: Do you need to file a patent for ideas that you want to develop? 
I have read some articles in Forbes regarding patents and how to file them. Now, I'm just interested if such websites needed to be patented also. Did digg.com patented its development before? Did Facebook patented its development?

Friendster have one "Copyright 2002-2008 Friendster, Inc. All rights reserved. U.S. Patent No. 7,069,308, 7,117,254 & 7,188,153"

But Facebook is also a social network, then why can facebook and myspace develop the same social network while Friendster have a patent on it?
Anyone with good links for existing (free as in free) Network Monitoring/Health/Stat software? I'm striking out on the Goog.
(LoTR > Harry Potter) x infinity
All that just to say "I want to forcibly sterilize the retards and the blacks"

This is not the sort of thing we need here, really.

Fazil: I think you should probably fuck off and die if you don't mind.
Don't go dark
At my work (C++/Qt) we do a bunch of GUIs for a set of several customer applications that need the same look and feel. So we do end up reusing the team's custom widgets wherever they answer our requirements.

I find I often write something as helper functions for a GUI or library, then break it out when someone else needs to call it. It's definitely better from my perspective to leave it sitting in the old class until you come up with something more urgent than scenarios for how someone might use such a library someday.

Coding standards are also extremely important to ensure that someone will be able to look at your code and use it without deciding to rewrite it from scratch.
He's transcribing a speach. Speakings always more verbose than writing.
I wasn't playing the role of "investigative reporter" at dinner, so I didn't press here. One of the guesses I have is that the technology used for Disqus could be implemented across corporate intranets, white labeled and licensed?
It's a transcript of an hour long talk, so it's not that much as that and worse to read.
Find out where a Ruby method is defined with where_is_this_defined
But if something is too visible, or too scheduled, many big ideas will be shied away from, many projects won't even start. I suspect this is one major reason Google's 20% time is so productive (50% of new Google products started in it, and if you consider that a large proportion of other products are acquired, it starts to sound like a pretty big deal). In the earliest, nascent phases of project development, you don't always have good justifications for what you're doing, or much to show. Projects, like companies, are at their most fragile at this time and the random perturbations and throttling from following a fixed methodology may kill them.

Mostly, while we should recognize what we gain having teams more closely manged, scheduled, with greater visibility and contact, we should also recognize what we lose. Balance is important, but I think there's a different optimal point for every market, company, and project, and every executive or engineer.

One important, crucial example comes from PayPal. Max Levchin went dark for a year, and came up with the something that really mattered -- a way to fight fraud. But there were hypothesis galore. I'm not sure this work would have been done any other way.
He has actually talked about your question. Over the years he has come to believe that size is the enemy of code and verbosity is the portrait of n00b.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm...

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht...

Also, it's not exactly like he's verbose in his writing. He was verbose in his talking, which makes sense if you think about his forum.
I think we can all agree Twitter probably made some mistakes, however articles like these which attempt to further shame Twitter are absurd and wasteful of all our time.
That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise
New study: sea level exerts a driving influence on rates of extinction
The question is how to allay people's fear of showing off something that isn't polished or finished yet.

Part of the onus is on the rest of us -- to be good critics of other people's code. Constructive critism without the ego gives lots of introverted know-it-all hackers real trouble.
OK HN, its time to get off the pot and give us(community) the ability to bury stories. But do it better than digg and put buried stories into a different category that we can look through.
I see them as a sort of FriendFeed that is focused purely on blog comments. I, for one, would be interested in following some people's commenting activity around the web.

How could they make money besides advertising? The WordPress guys or the Six Apart guys might pay for spam-free comments.
Spore Leaked And Being Broadcast Live (Web 2 + Gaming)
he did indicate that the "open"-ness of the iphone platform is the main reason he is giving up/selling out/buying in. And as there is no reason to believe the new blackberry will be any more "open" than the last it is ruled out by that same logic.
Sure, but everything he writes is incredibly lengthy.
You actually can build very successful teams with the kinda of personality, but they're very different animals than most are used to. They feel less like a team playing a sport and more like an artists collective. And to make everyone walk in one direction, the bar is set much harder -- you need to explain well why you believe this is the right direction.

Many very good hackers mirror such statements. It's not always a matter of wanting to do something 'your way', often times, a hacker will bristle at management because he or she genuinely thinks (and has good reason) that it's to the company's benefit.
I did get a day job, and I force myself to sleep on a normal schedule. I still hate it. It's completely unnatural to me.
Why does it need to be distributed? ok, ok... I give in. It's a devilishly hard problem at the cutting edge of science.
Although my family was very poor, I was lucky to grow up in a school district where there were a few computers here and there. I spent countless hours neglecting boring schoolwork in order to get access to any kind of computer I could and I graduated from high school with poor grades in everything except math and physics. However I taught myself basic, pascal, fortran, cobol, ibm jcl, Z80 and 6502 assembler without ever owning a computer of my own. It doesn't surprise me at all that computers had the effect of distracting kids from academic goals because that's exactly what happened to me.

I can't imagine the school teachers and administrators took into account the possibility of the computer voucher program when they designed their curriculums. However my nascent computer skills got me the jobs I needed to earn the money to be the first in my family to graduate from college.
For me the trick to overcoming the constantly running thoughts was to take Rozerem, which is a drug designed to compensate for melatonin deficiencies. It works pretty well for me. I can usually fall asleep in under a half hour when I take it properly.