skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC/HN: Database Resources and Help
Hey all, I am recently getting in to web development on my own and am struggling to find good resources on the organization of databases. I am currently in college right now but cannot take the database class for another two semesters because the required prerequisites.

The issue that troubles me is appropriately organizing tables and efficiently organizing the information. I am familiar with normalization and some of the basic concepts involved with such but I feel as though I am missing some possible rules of thumb or methods that individuals go about when designing the databases.

For example, take a site like HN or Digg, what would be the appropriate way to organize user accounts, profiles, each submitted site, the comments for each site, etc. Logically, I would think that if a user made a comment, it would be appropriate to insert that comment into both the table for the user as well as the table for the site be commented on, but that may be an extremely naive approach to handling such a task. I understand that to most here this seems as though it is most likely an obvious question but if I had definitive knowledge to make an educated decision, I would do so.

Ideally I would love some quality online resources or a simple explanation over the way you hackers go about the design phase. Good books would be appreciated but I am tight on cash so nothing too pricey.

Thanks for any responses you guys give. I understand this is quite a noob question and there might be a more appropriate forum out there for such a query, but I really value the analysis from most of this community. Cheers!
"Just because you've been a developer for 10 years doesn't make you a senior developer."

That was exactly my point. It makes you senior, but not a developer.
yes that was like 10 years ago
Published: February 8, 1999 11:25 AM PST

I think things have gotten out of hand since then.
Mild autism is too harsh of a term for most shy, geeky people I think. Things like this in psychology are a bell curved spectrum. Being a little to the left or right doesn't mean you are autistic, it just means you have more characteristics that are associated with one side of the spectrum or another.
In keeping with the adage there's no honor among hackers, Rigano called t0t0 a thief.

Does it count as an adage if you make it up yourself?
I guess that news.yc is 1-indexed :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=0 , DNE
Turns out in FullText search In boolean mode, there are many stop words, "it's" "I'M" are just 2 of them. Seems I have hit a limitation there on the tech. It will have to be as good as it gets I'm afraid. Short of putting in a custom search engine, that's as fas as the tech allows for them moment, unless I build in a workaround to change all single quotes something else then change back. I will sleep on that...
Notes from Erlang Exchange
Reminds me of the 'self-quote':

"I think I said it best when I said 'X'"

Oddly enough the perpetrator was a college professor... color me surprised.
Mozilla sets Guinness World Record with Firefox 3 launch
Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive
Where are they now: AllAdvantage.com
Especially since it turned out to be a DoS attack vector rather than outright hacking, they really had nothing to hide.
Quartz's model is compatible, there is even a 1:1 mapping of many PDF concepts to quartz, but it isn't really PDF.

There is a PDF renderer in a higher layer which makes PDF convenient for content, and I there is a "to PDF" capture mechanism to reuse drawing code for PDF generation.

I think Quartz did a look around to see what graphic models were surviving the test of time and chose one rather than inventing their own. Rumor was they wanted to use Display Postscript, but Adobe wanted royalties so they made an API mapped to the concepts of PDF instead.
If they don't open up, experience says a new open standard will eat their lunch. Might as well push ahead of the wave (or whatever the proper idiom is).
Let me know when these things start footing the bill for SMS texting.
It depends on the site. A non-malevolent site that has malware injected into its HTML will still be caught. The content won't get a chance to see the identification.

A malevolent site can just track their mechanism and work around it, like not showing malware to IE6 users unless they ask for the content a second time in quick succession. (Might not work, I don't know if the AVG copy gets cached. One would hope it doesn't for the sake of sites that do browser sniffing.)
items: comments || posts...
they're also arranged in a hierarchy...
Descartes - I think, therefore I am.
Berkeley - To be is to be perceived (his version is prettied up in fancy words with religion thrown in).
Kierkegaard - To exist is to have the ability to feel angst.

Craig A. Eddy - I am, therefore I think, I am perceived, and I have the ability to feel angst. One should always start with what one knows.

Craig A. Eddy, B.A. Philosophy (which is to say a Bachelor of Arts degree in BS)
Baseball Boss: If You Don’t Love Baseball Yet, You Will Now
If you're working 80-100 hours/week, what are you maximizing apart from time spent "working"? Even if you're trying to maximize productivity (and I'm not sure that's the right thing in life to maximize), I bet 80+ work-weeks are supra-optimal.
MBA or Startup?
I'm 23 and recently graduated a good college with a degree in computer science. I have a standard 9-5 day job, which pays the bills, but my true passion is when I get home and hack.

I'm currently looking at a few options for what to do with my free time:
- Play it safe: Go for an online Entrepreneurship MBA or
- Risk it: Try founding a startup.

Or maybe the solution is to do both? I just worry that both the startup and the studies would suffer as a result of trying to do both with the little free time I have.

I'm looking for a little advice from people who have been faced with a similar decision. What did you do and if you could go back, would you still have done it?
Firefox now 19% market share, eating more of MSIE's lunch
Interesting. Apple specifically says it's "built on PDF"; in fact, Steve Jobs said so at Macworld San Francisco 2001.
Oh, bless his heart. He's "never had a problem with shyness" but still thinks remembering his one-line platitude is "sound advice" for the shy.

Extrovert bluster can be so cute!
I want their job pretty bad.
Michael Dell’s a believer: Makes a $100 million statement
I don't need seven hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff. I need seven hours of sleep to be able to convey the meaningful stuff to other people. I tend to talk a lot faster than people when I haven't gotten much sleep, and change subjects pretty quickly.
There's at least one advantage to such a future.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a great many of the techniques you use to scale to multiple cores in one machine can be used to scale to multiple machines. So you can practice your parallel processing skills and improve your tools in that area by just buying one computer instead of buying or leasing, say, 32. Programming for clusters won't be quite so arcane anymore.
Throughout most of my life I was an extrovert except I was frustrated that I didn't know how to bring new people into my life. And I also dealt with that nervousness of being a stranger in a room (bar, party, whatever)--then I discovered a few things that helped:

1) ask open ended questions

2) speak in the 'I' perspective... none of the "you know how it is when you do this"... "when I did this..."

3) take an interest in the other person; I made a goal to find out something special about the person in every conversation with someone new; taking an interest in the other person completely ignoring myself really made a difference.
I've read this before. But this is the first time I realized that it is written by Douglas Crockford, the Javascript advocate.
Everyone "eats, shits and dies" is similar to the "everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time". I think it's an effective saying, but won't resonate with everyone.

I think the best solution for some folks is to simply force yourself into the situation over and over, like going to a meetup and making yourself talk to everyone. Eventually, your brain will get the idea: okay, I can deal with meeting and talking to new people.

Here's my tip: learn how to ask great questions when you meet people. It takes the spotlight off of you and let's them "do the work". I can have entire conversations where I say very little if I'm feeling anxious at the moment.
I would personally suggest to you (and almost anyone else) that you do neither right now. Go out and get a job at an actual established mid-sized company (ie: not just some other startup). Do that for about 3-4 years (not too long, but more than a year).

It is extremely valuable (IMO) for both the MBA and the found-a-startup tracks to know what a "real" business is supposed to look like and work like.

Learn about all the socio-political stuff that goes on in a typical organization

Learn about sales, booking sales, recognizing revenue and other aspects of cash flow

Learn about product design, development, testing, etc.

Learn about manufacturing, shipping, operations, logistics.

Basically, you get the idea. This experience will, again IMO, give you a far better knowledge (and financial) basis upon which you can then launch into your next trajectory.

Trust me, you have more time than you are led to believe to found or participate in a startup.
Poking Holes In The Long Tail Theory
Working for 80+ hours a week may not be sustainable, but doing something interesting, challenging and enjoyable for 80 hours a week certainly is.

I consider working on my start-up to be something I do because I enjoy it, not because of external pressures. Building a tech business is just a very enjoyable way to pass the time. I'd be doing that even if I had $100m in the bank.
"my true passion is when I get home and hack"

You've answered your own question! Your true passion isn't going to school, or taking business classes online, so why do it?

I started a company out of college, made every mistake possible, and loved every minute of it.
I did that once and the company failed after 18 months. But well, the pay was still OK, I learned a lot in that time and the team consisted of people which loved programming and were motivated enough to work in a startup. I still have contact to many of them years later and it was worth it just for that.

So in my case I would say it worked out fine even though I didn't get rich.
Yes, but for anyone with any professional skills at all, that kind of arbitrage just isn't a good time investment compared to real work. I did the math once. WoW doesn't really permit economies of scale on this sort of thing -- there are no free markets, so you have to go through uniformly shady RMT ("Real Money Trading") brokers who will be quick to freeze you out if they sense you're making a mass profit over their channels.
IBM Research Partners With EU Consortium to Speed Up Mobile Web Design Time
> "everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time"

i put my pants into a device which holds them open, then i stand on a platform and jump into them.

BTW I'm thinking of starting a company to sell this device. Anyone interested in being a co-founder?
I sure wish I could vote for you. Instead, please take my comment here to mean that I would have upvoted you.

Maybe one day I'll be able to vote again =x
Not really. You can practice cluster programming on a single core and your OpenMP, TBB, and Cilk++ programs won't run on a cluster.
Simon, I like the work that you guys have been doing. I hope something comes of this. Part of what is disappointing is that until they don't release reasonable amount of data. Forget innovation, nothing will come of it.

Case in point is that I'm interested in finding out good schools that my daughter can go to.

I've had a look at EduBase. I can't tell if a school is any good or not. Or if they would admit my child or not. I can get more information from http://www.dcsf.gov.uk or go to the local council website and download the admissions criteria.

Every school has a different admission criteria. Some care about how close you live to the school, some about where you worship or how christian you are. So if you have a child who is close to school going age and you want to work out what is the best school to send him/her to, you need to do lots of leg work. I thought about building such an app.

I don't understand what you can do with the address, name of school, pupil age and head teacher name. Isn't it easier to write a crawler for http://www.dcsf.gov.uk
Could Social Media See the End of Google’s PageRank?
"Everyone is equal" is not a solution to shyness. People are often shy to speak to someone they consider worse than themselves; shyness empirically does not function as implied.
Besides what iron_ball said, in-game loans are usually unregulated and thus unreliable.
Working on a startup will be very valuable experience for once you decide to get your MBA (if ever). I also find that a lot of business schools tend to prefer students who have a couple years of work experience, as opposed to students fresh out of college.
I am also not sure if I was really that much faster, because I often had to look up stuff like how to skip a word and so on.

But that is the reason that I love it in vim. Because of the lack of mouse support and the powerful ways to move around in Normal mode, learning the different movement commands is a must. Then, when you go to build macros, you're using the same commands you always do.
I thought the 37signals affiliate program was a pretty clever piece of marketing:
https://affiliate.37signals.com/

I'm not sure if you could replicate it without having the reputation that they do.
> That's the long tail, and YouTube is successful precisely because it exploits the long tail of video.

Considering how much money they lose everyday, I would argue that's why they are not successful (without the all mighty Google to pay the bills, of course).
Myself, I want to "retire" early so I can start working more exclusively on what I love without having to worry when and how I can monetize my work. I'd rather have 500k in bank and complete independence than 100 millions and having to report to someone.
The problem with people who are shy is that we are swamped with advices from people who are not. Seriously. Stop.

EDIT: That being said I can give one piece of advice to guys who are shy. Work out. Work out. Work out. You will be amazed how much NATURALLY produced testosterones can affect your behavior.
The magic of readline
I find a good way is just to introduce yourself to people.

"Hi, my name is Dennis"

.. works for me. :D
9 ways Google is discovering the invisible web
i user www.projectpier.org. a BaseCamp clone that installed in your server
Top Ten Reasons You Don't Need a Requirements Document
Why Javascript Creeps Me Out
Intel says to prepare for 'thousands of cores'
Pencil Project - Sketching and Prototyping with Firefox 3
Ask YC: Who would you recommend for an Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting Company?
I am about to make the switch from shared hosting to a dedicated server and would love to hear any recommendations before making the jump.
And you think this doesn't influence the price you pay?
About that "greatest swordfighter in the world" part - there is a real good explanation for that one. He was the guy who wrote the software for the swordfighting simulation.

To my knowledge I might still be the best racer in the world in some racing game I wrote last year, so I can absolutely relate to that ;-)
I rarely up/down vote but I did upvoted him just for you.
A lot of schools don't wish for you to have experience they REQUIRE it. The MBA should come after you've worked full-time for a couple of year. And online doesn't sound that great. A lot of the value of the MBA coursework is learning and discussing material in-class and analyzing problems and cases with other students. Most MBA courses are more interactive than undergrad, so I think you're better off in a standard classroom environment.

Also, many companies hiring MBA grads are looking for people who also have good domain knowledge or past full-time experience. Big companies will hire fresh MBAs with no work experience but they are heavily recruited and if you're not coming from a top tier school, you're going to have a harder time...and you probably don't want to work for a big company anyway!
A while back I wanted to make a train trip planner app for my local public transport system in Melbourne.

Rather than scrape their website I decided to do the right thing and ask permission to use their data. It turns out I needed to get written approval from the state public transport minister to get access to the data.

I thought it would be a good idea if they offered an API or web service, so that they can maintain ownership of their data. But also, so that people like me can still access it to make cool apps.

Anyway.. I'm getting off topic... I think making this kind of data available could lead to all kinds of cool stuff.
congrats, dude. see you in london soon.
You get the exact same name-resolution funniness in other languages, too. Like python, for example:

>>> message = "Hello"
>>> def f(): print message
...
>>> message = "World"
>>> def g(): print message
...
>>> f()
World
>>> g()
World

This post is a nice example of misunderstanding scoping and/or closures (but probably both).
One near where you live?
Well then why don't you spill it already, what are you trying to imply Mr. Mysterious?
19% of dial-up users say nothing could persuade them to upgrade to broadband
The more _____ in the room, the less comfortable I feel. For me, the operative word would be suits.

Suits are what make me uncomfortable. Any events that encourage wearing of clothes that require dry cleaning, formalities, pretentious things of that nature are right up there.

Thus says the MBA geek: It's actually possible to have an MBA and to still be a geek. It's not a cure-all or indication of social aptness. I don't know why some people insist upon their stereotypes about that particular degree of education.
My cat annoys me while I'm trying to work. She wants to tip over my mug of coffee or walk on the keys. When I put her on my lap she wants to crawl up on the desk and play with my headphone cord.

I try to do most of my work while the cat is asleep ;)
That's not sad.
If all you're doing is working and sleeping, you're neither making good decisions nor thinking hard. You're just faking it and making up for your burnout by getting less done.

That extra long hours speed the time to market is an illusion. It doesn't work. In the vast majority of projects, burnout hours are a direct result of a failure you can't admit to.

I'm not saying this only because I don't like sweatshops, it's because I have yet to see quality code from a sweatshop. When I've worked in sweatshops, I've found that the most productive people were never the ones working the longest hours; on the contrary, those of us who were smart enough to do our jobs and go home and get some rest ended up picking up the pieces from the all-night crew every morning.
nice. I had never questioned the value of catching the errors early.

thanks
i'm a noob about these things. could you explain what you mean?
He'll have to get in line. [http://secamlocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/zeta/RHproo...]

If you peruse the Number Theory papers on the arXiv, you'll see that there is a purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis every few weeks. So far, none of them have been vetted by a professional journal. I'd be very surprised (but happy) if this turned out to contain a correct proof.

A more interesting question would be "Why is this particular proof by this otherwise unknown author getting so much attention?"
Wallace has prior art on this one. Grommit filed the patent.
firefox 3. nothing gets put down on the black page. no buttons or text areas, must be something in configuration. possibly web developer extension or adblock. any ideas?

thanks

------------------

never mind. i see now that you have to drag the object from the panel on the the canvas and then resizing it. as opposed to selecting it and then dragging the selector rectangle on the canvas..
Totally agree with the ROWE sentiment - I'm reading the book now and the stories from employees at Best Buy's corporate headquarters is just as inspiring as the ideas themselves. If you're in a small enough team to set work culture, then get rid of tracking hours, measure only results and milestones instead.
This basically marks the transition from software engineering transforming into hardware engineering. No longer is it about sequential algorithms, it's not about linearity. It's about destroying sequential algorithms; breaking down large sequential algorithms into smaller algorithms manipulating the same data at the same time. This requires a great amount of brain power and essentially helps us understand algorithms in greater detail, and make them run faster, but in no way would I agree that it helps software functionality.

EDIT: It provides more power to the programmer. Power that is useless for a programmer that wants to develop functional software. This is why new languages and more CS/EE research will be involved. More power == more levels of abstraction. It depends on the level of abstraction that you're working with to decide whether you're going to benefit from performance or expressiveness (code expressiveness, which I like to directly correlate to software functionality independent of code performance).

I love shitting my brains out on this type of stuff; Could be right, could be wrong. All I know is that the future is undef... and I enjoy it...
As I recall, in the end he also turns out to be a great swordfighter in real life though.

Something about single-handedly assaulting an aircraft carrier using only his katana? That was pretty much where the book lost me.
Agreed. True for Ruby too. Its important to remember how closures work, and what variables in the environment are being "closed" over.

> message = 'test'

> a = lambda { puts message }

> message = 'test1'

> b = lambda { puts message }

> a.call

test1

> b.call

test1
I can attest to this. I have been working out heavily for a few months and the change in how I feel is drastic. Definitely a recommend thing to do. Its actually fun, and this coming from a guy who's spent many a year hating exercise.
I take it you don't appreciate my tongue-in-cheek advice -- I thought the Scarlett reference, profanity, and this-one-sentence-is-all-you-need simplicity would have been a dead giveaway.
email pg
I am confused by the credibility ranking. Here is Instapundit:

http://www.newscred.com/source/show/name/instapundit

This guy is a _pundit_ with an agenda (conservative hawk that calls himself libertarian). Allowing users to give him cred simply validates the fact that they agree with him. His resulting credibility score doesn't help the newcomer to your site that has never heard of Instapundit. Based on his NewsCred score, he is one of the most credible authors in all the media. Seriously?
I'm vouching for kartik too -- I've been in tons of technical convos with him. He's a great guy personally and really thoughtful as a tech guy and is definately someone you want to have on your team.
I'm not planning on writing a book about this revelation ;) so I wasn't aiming to be novel.

That said, I think you're right on about habituation combating the anxiety of meeting and talking to new people. I'm a rather ambivalent about the value of all these web 2.0 meetups (yes, even drankkit) but I envisioned this kind of scenario:

Startup founder is waiting in line at SFO, looks up to see Ron Conway (or the like) standing in front of him and looking equally as bored. It's probably not the time to go into the pitch, but it shouldn't be how many startups he's funded/sold/acquired that stops you from talking to him (or anyone).

Maybe you'll even score his phone number.
He also had the help of a railgun called Reason.