skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't see using MongoDB for any production project. It combines a limited replication/sharding model with a poor single-server durability, lack of tunable CAP constraints, and some surprising performance bottlenecks.

If you want integrity and SQL, use PostGres. If you want volatile speed, use Redis or Membase. If you want a rich data model and excellent durability with limited but highly configurable replication, experiment with Couch. If you want federation, predictable horizontal scaling, and HA, perhaps look at Voldemort, Cassandra, HBase, or Riak. There are a lot of good datastores out there, and chances are one of them fits your needs better.

Edit: I think http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durabil... basically sums it up. When the Mongo folks started telling me that kill -9 should never happen to any database, I stopped taking them seriously.
If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces.

That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
Lubricating oil sample analysis and testing
>an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable.

that would be bad. No need to evolve in any cardinal way. Only needed changes would be minor adjustments to fit humans most comfortably into the tecnological civilization cradle. Just like dinosaurs who evolved to fit most comfortably into their Earth dominating niche ... until the meteor stroke, super vulcanos erupted , etc...

Anyway, i don't agree that technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. The civilization has already established its exponential nature. Good thing about exponentially increasing speed is quickly hitting whatever natural limits are there, and that induces need for change. Yes, in many cases we naturally prognose (McCarty incl.) the response to be a new improved technology. Yet, artificially limiting human species response to a need for change only to technological type of responses seems ... artificial.
The Osborne effect. I would think Apple and all other current/successful tech companies have this in mind re: their products - especially given the rapid turnover.
It would be nice to learn about new compiler internals. I wonder though, how many of us would need to work day to day on a compiling language (as comparing to intercepted or JIT languages.)

BTW, why not getting that @ amazon? At least you get 20% of in the US (but only get the book by March)

(The worst plug here for my own amazon link, you are warned, please don't vote this down just for the link: http://amzn.to/fpNazO)
Social Media? Really? What Matters is Something Else
So a bit like http://talkerapp.com/? (the UI is along similar lines, though there are only so many ways to cut a chatroom, I guess!) Talker has some interesting Ruby-based plugin support as well, though I found it too expensive to use long-term.
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and relatively power hungry. Big color displays were expensive too, so because of the cost people expected a tablet to replace a laptop. This probably led in part to the decision to run a desktop OS on tablets rather than come up with a new UI model and start a new app ecosystem. Rather than going with the (expensive, crappy, or both) touchscreen technology of the time they mostly used Wacom digitizers. The tablet that so resulted was doomed to be basically a niche product.

I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago.

As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.
That only works as long as the console makers mostly lock out unlicensed applications from their platforms. Only AT&T and Apple seem to be willing to take this route.

Now, we have tons of carrier-subsidized phones that come with a service contract. (You get a cheap phone, but you have to pay $80/month for the next couple years.) That seems to be where the money is in phones.
HP should court Amazon to run a WebOS app-store.
"Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 at Macworld 2007. Apple was required to file for operating permits with the FCC, but since such filings are made available to the public, the announcement came months before the iPhone had received approval."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

I remember hearing this story at the time, as well.

For all we know, the rules could be different for iPhone 5, since it is an update of an existing product, rather than a new one.
AltDrive has secure versioned unlimited backup for $44.50/yr. (http://blog.altdrive.com/welcome-mozy-users)
Free two month trial. Giver it a try. (http://altdrive.com)
I'd also be interested to see what the people of HN think about this essay I wrote about long term energy needs:

http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/22-june-2008.html
Do you really not believe that humanity is overall better off due to technological progress? Or were you just looking for an argument?

While I agree with your Gibson comment, your outrage isn't really justified. It's not like he made a bold claim -- he just said that humans are, in general, better off.
You can’t imagine everyday people hearing advice not to drop hundreds of bucks on Christmas presents that will be obsolete in a month? Because if iPads & iPods were expected in Jan/Feb I can guaranteed a ton of nerds will be looking out for Mom and Dad.
It's also possible they simply didn't trust ATT employees to keep the secret, so they announced the phone publicly before showing it widely within the carrier. With later versions of the iPhone the network doesn't have to make as many changes (like visual voicemail) so they don't have to tell them about it so far in advance.
Check out this awesome tutorial: http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/file/filesystem/

The FileAPI is quite useful. I make use of it a lot in my app these days.
Isn't that a very temporary solution. How long until everything is based on genes, face recognition and so on? For all I know those governments taking my fingerprints might use them to extract my DNA, too.
Websense won't let me get through, but the analogy absolutely holds. Every job I've ever had, I've told people I'm happier trying to cram 10 hours of work into an 8 hour day than I am trying to stretch 4 hours of work to stay busy.

Thus far, employers take me seriously roughly 0% of the time.
What would have changed if the Microsoft Courier was real? I thought this a pretty good start, but then it disappeared.
I thought the most common ones (JDAMs) still had an inertial navigation system cause GPS/INS is used nearly everywhere. It'll probably have horrible accuracy (I guess that depends on how the coordinates sent to the bomb are handled... if it can be calculated as an offset of what the INS thinks it is, then it wouldn't be that bad). But still better then unguided bombs.
AltDrive has secure versioned unlimited backup for $44.50/yr. (http://blog.altdrive.com/welcome-mozy-users)
Free two month trial. Giver her a try. (http://altdrive.com)
Good idea. You should make that.
C for C++ Programmers
Ask HN: How to deal with being idea rich, but time poor?
I really struggle with having a lot of ideas, and while I'm very grateful that I have this problem it can be pretty frustrating. They certainly aren't all good ideas, but some probably are (there's a couple that I think are crackers).

The question is, how do you deal with the situation of having many ideas but only so much time (and/or money) to invest in exploring the potential of those ideas?
“A plethora of apps that are easy to port”? Windows compatibility implies a terribly inadequate offering, just like every previous Windows Tablet PC to date. How is that competing? Metro/Win Phone 7 doesn’t have a “plethora of apps” ready to be tweaked for tablet size, so I’m baffled by your reasoning.
Are you looking for feedback, or is this a marketing post? :)
Social sites, lessons learned
It will undoubtably have a camera, so now start making all those camera apps use the bigger screen. Same with skype, etc... I will add the ability for users of my iPad apps to use photos, take photos, etc... This was limited to the iPhone version.

More memory means will be able to do more things, load up bigger files into mem.
Hi Selena, how about an course on optimization, configuration and advanced features of PostgreSQL ? I know at least 3-4 people from my extended group who will be interested.
No credit until it ships. Everything looks great in a demo.
Thank you for the reply, it has cleared a lot of doubts.

I was really concerned about being able to reuse the code in a proprietary release, since my possible clients are limited and you sometimes you have to accept their conditions.

I will look at the GPL right now. The question I still have is whether a possible competitor might (even under the GPL) do a release, open source it to their clients but not make it publicly accessible, meaning I wouldn't have access to their changes. If that is still possible, then I would stick to Apache 2, cause I want the technology to be used.

Again thank you for your reply.
Would love to! Thanks for the feedback. I've started an outline for another class.
What matters is can I slip it into the credit card slot of my purse or not.
Ding ding ding.

MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air.

The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology takes the lead in marketshare, or when it starts eating into the marketshare of the old guard significantly. Rather, it's the inflection points of growth that are important. When a big company is past its knee (still growing but growing at a smaller and smaller pace over time) while the little guy is growing at a faster and faster pace, that's when to pay attention, because lots of things happen quickly and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast.
Random Startup Generator Pokes Fun at Tech Trends - DesignTAXI.com
One of the biggest problem with Microsoft's tablet strategy to date has been the assumption that porting apps from a mouse-based window environment to a tablet works.

Rather than reworking the UI to be suitable to touch interaction, they wanted to force you to use a stylus and pretend you're using a mouse.
I would pay for a performant web-based text editor with vim bindings.
No problem regarding your own amazon link, it's convenient. But there is no ebook option on Amazon though. The article link has an ebook version which is while why I will buy it there.
Ask HN: Is Facebook doing "Theater View" as beta for random users?
I am getting a weird new look on Facebook every time I click on a photo on my news feed. A light-box pops up instead of th normal redirect to the album page. The only difference in URLS I see is the appended "&theater" to the URL. Is this a bug or are they just doing it for random users?
Rules Have Been Rewritten: 21st Century Entrepreneurs are Different
GNU Octave 3.4 has just been released
Isn't much of the engineering of a compiler the same, regardless if machine code or intermediate VM code is emitted?
This article is a bit pithy but true. Ideas aren't worth that much.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/08/ideas_are_just...

My advice is do something that you would like your mother or father to excitedly tell their friends about (assuming they are still around).
> Once I hire a person, I expect them to approach me with their career aspirations and ideas.

You may consider that under this strategy, your work force will self select amongst the extrovert go-getters. This may be exactly what you want, or the complete opposite. It all depends to what degree your business relies on typically introvert traits such as creativity or lateral thinking.

But if you are ok with that, I am ok with that.
It's the wrong time in the upgrade cycle for home TVs to do that - everyone just bought a new flatscreen LCD HDTV during the past two years and sales are flat in that sector. Introducing an AppleTV with screen would be an uphill battle to convince people to replace a device they're still pretty happy with (and still paying off.)
I have just been reading that MongoDB is much more scalable and faster and I looked into it and saw that its queries were very similar to SQL. There are a lot of DB choices out there, and just trying to find one that I should either stick to or learn based of trends, benefits, and level of user-support out on the web.
I think Bastiat beat him to it.
Ask HN: Resources to Learn Web Development
I am a (cash poor) student and I have programed in java and C++ but I haven't done anything related to web development yet. I want to try and start to teach myself some basic stuff but I have no idea where to start. Anybody have any tips?
We’re creating a “Startup toolbox”. What apps should go in it?
Aside from semantic arguments about what "balance" means, it's true that nature is a state of constant change.

When people talk about sustainability, they're acknowledging that humans can have an impact on nature, or more to the point, on our ability to sustain our own species. It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"... it'll simply be drastically different.

So, given that we can be agents of change in nature, it's not unreasonable to consider not only whether we can simply survive as a species, but whether we can or should show restraint with respect to the effects we have on the rest of the natural world.

McCarthy seems to be of the opinion that efforts thus far have been not just ineffective, but actually harmful to ourselves. That is to say, we're better off allowing progress to happen naturally without "artificially" trying to mitigate it. Others would appear to disagree, or at least still consider the pursuit of sustainability, in the popular sense, worthwhile.
No, it means that in the next 10 tosses, you still expect to get a 5/5 split, so over these 20 tosses, you'll probably have 15 heads, which is closer to the mean.

I've seen this analysis in sports. In baseball, for example, you generally expect teams to win one-run games as often as they win games in general (that is, there's no "great closer" effect). So if you see a team winning 80% of their one-run games in the first half of the season, you can expect their record to be worse in the second half.
Ideas are cheap. Don't give up. There's always room to compete. It's all about execution. Remember both Friendster and MySpace were riding high long before Facebook. Look at where things stand now.
What if Windows Phone apps also ran on Windows proper?
I'd really like to see a laptop with two touch screens: one replacing the regular screen and another replacing the keyboard and trackpad. This tablet/laptop hybrid would have some awesome benefits. For example one could comfortably use the device while seated at a table (display and input area can be at about 90 deg relative to each other... something that's not possible w/ the iPad). Another awesome benefit would be replacing the on-screen keyboard with far-out stuff like a painter's palette, Scrabble tiles, dominoes or even two turn-tables like a DJ uses.

Imagine mixing digital paint with your fingers (on the touch screen that replaces the physical keyboard on current laptops) then actually painting on the other touch screen (the touch screen replacing the non-touch screens on current laptops).
My web app at poplytics.com helps website owners collect feedback. Would love for it to be included. Currently free
I used to work for immigration (IT dept) in my country - in South America.

There where always plans to start finger-printing foreigners, though nothing has been done to this day.

As far as I know, there's not a single country in South America that finger-prints tourists. I believe Brazil does finger print US citizens though, but that was only after the US started finger printing them.
Ask HN: My project died right after forming the company...
I spent a butt-load on a lawyer and created a Delaware C-Corp. Unfortunately, my money dried up and my developer quit the project...right after I signed all the papers for the company.

I just want to walk away from it now, as I can't move forward with the project. What should I do? Do I have to officially dissolve the corporation somehow? I'm really disinclined to ask a lawyer for anything, as I'm already totally broke.

Suggestions?
A river of news in JSON
This is of course a subjective opinion, but something doesn't quite feel right about HP making a tablet PC. They seem to put out quite a lot of things without much of an overall guiding principle. HP PCs, laptops, printers, servers, now tablets. I ask myself "Why HP?" and can't seem to come up with a very reasonable answer. Nothing jumps out at me as seeing this as the best thing ever.

With Apple they have the whole underlying principle of "Think Different" or something along the lines of changing the status quo. Apple didn't really do anything new with the iPhone and iPad in essence. Smartphones and tablet PCs were already out there. However because it went with their overall message, it made sense. People wanted to include it in their "Apple Lifestyle" so to speak.

Just my .00002 cents.
Strangely enough, I was talking to one of the sales guys at the $DAYJOB a couple of days ago, and we got on the subject of movies, and he brought up Boiler Room. I looked for the DVD at Barnes & Noble and they didn't have it... guess I'll go download it and see what the fuss is all about.

Glengarry Glen Ross is another fun movie about sales and life in the world of business. ABC!
How did you come with the concept?

Future update idea, if you could collate pages you've created. Instead of it getting lost in the void if you forget the IRL and need it months from now.
This is true over a very wide range of public policies.
The best measure of success (if you're a shareholder at least) is this:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/31/apple-rakes-in-over-half...

50% of the mobile industry profits. Much better metric than units shipped. Doesn't seem to include the iPad either.
No need to waste working televisions and monitors.
I went through a similar thing a couple months ago. I had actually started building something had about 3 weeks of personal time into it. Then I discovered someone with money from big name angels, the founders were people with a lot of connections, and the site already had good traction. I was heartbroken. Not only because I'd spent time coding but because I thought I had a great idea and apparently I did. On one hand, your idea is now validated. One the other hand you have major catching up to do and need to find something they are doing wrong and solve it along with the original problem. If you are really committed and can do better than your new competitor you should start building and build fast.
You can remove Kindle DRM with Calibre? News to me.

(Also, it still doesn't address the principle of the matter: digital music has gone DRM-free, it's time for eBooks to do the same.)
As a seasoned Max vet, and an avid Maya user (tempting to make an "avid Softimage" joke, but I digress), I find the UI to be similar to look at, but the similarity breaks down as soon as you start touching it.

Working with blender is fundamentally different at the most base, intuition-sensitive level. Not better or worse, but different.

It will be worse if you're coming to it already familiar with Max and Maya. You'll rub against the grain of the program. Of course, the same is true of moving between any programs that are cosmetically similar but based on different interaction models.
"everyone" didn't. I know a number of holdouts (myself included) who are still waiting. When the next big thing comes along, another portion of us will take the plunge.
Cloud IaaS providers; Survey Results. 
Votes and answers about IaaS cloud providers. Who is most popular, who is most inglorious, who looses customers, whom do customer love and why, who will have best valuations
Microsoft actually jumped the shark on tablets with the whole XP Tablet edition years ago. The hardware just wasn't ready and interacting with Windows XP and it's app via a stylus is just not compelling. XP Tablet is Microsoft's Newton, an idea ahead of it's time.

I think there is an anti-tablet culture at MS stemming from the failure of the early laptop-based tablets.

Once MS has a solid hold with Win Phone 7 you'll see that interface transition to tablets.
Wow, this looks really great. Sounds like there is currently a 50 year limit on copyright. I found a bunch of works I haven't read by Akutagawa Ryunosuke that are public domain.

Thank you so much!
Well ask yourself why you have so little time. Are you passionate enough about your ideas that you feel what you're doing instead isn't exciting/worth it?

If you have ideas but you feel your time is better spent doing your work/school/whatever, then get one super-compelling idea and follow through!
Why did my comment get marked as dead? Please advise.
Tell HN: What's next on Patriot Act renewal
Following up on the earlier discussion ...

The House will once again be voting on HR 514. in a "closed vote" (that is, no amendments can be offered), this time setting aside an entire hour for debate. The House will vote on the rule tomorrow, and vote on the bill sometime next week. Meanwhile in the Senate, the Republicans are positioning Feinstein's S.289 (also known as S.149) as a compromise betweeen Leahy's S.193 (also known as S.290) and Grassley's S.291. Confusingly, none of those match HR 514's timeline, so it's quite possible we'll see another Senate bill as well.

http://bit.ly/feb9notes has more about what's happening on the activism side.

Julian Sanchez has a good overview of the specific clauses up for renewal at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/patriot-reauthorization-vote-fails-now-what/
http://getsatisfaction.com is a great way to get feedback from users on your startup. Easy to manage and free for the feedback widget. I have not tried to pay for features yet.
Only if there's evidence that you destroyed the chip on purpose.
Great feedback - thanks!

One of the ways we wanted to approach this space was to address the pain point of status reports; people spend time putting them together, then waste a lot of time sitting in meetings reviewing them. I still feel it's a space, though it may not appeal to everyone. Rather than be one of N "project management" tools, we were hoping to become synonymous with helping eliminate the status report / meeting mindset.
Would be really nice to see some actual code right up front. It's hard to grok exactly what this is right off the bat.
"...[tablets] are the future of the entire computing industry..."

That's more than a little hard to swallow...
Why are my comments automatically going dead?
Can someone tell me what I've done wrong?
Nokia Is Said to Be Near Software Partnership With Microsoft