skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough. I'm reluctant to say too much since I actually work on Streams (hence my authoritarian corrections), but I'm a research staff member, not a marketing person.

I suppose I do feel comfortable giving my personal take on it, and why I find working on Streams exciting: we're designing a language and runtime system for a new programming model. Not just a new language (which we do have), but a new programming model. The way you write programs changes when you have essentially infinite streams of data coming through your system - you have to think in terms of operators that transform or filter individual pieces, and you have to keep in mind its inherent distributed nature. That is, you may write a chain of operators to process your data, but each operator can run in parallel with the others, even though you will probably design your application thinking of one particular piece of data marching through the system. The runtime system itself is, of course, distributed and fast.

To get an overview of this programming model, take a look at this paper: "SPADE: The System S Declarative Stream Processing Engine": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.160...

Just keep in mind two things: the newest iteration of the language is called Streams Processing Language (SPL), and that it is a complete rewrite of Spade.

I suppose I should put in the disclaimer that these are my views, and I do not represent IBM.
wait... $24,000 a year per server for the ability to do live backup? That's more than Oracle (Standard), even counting support. (This assumes a single processor, of course.)
Did you even read the article?

> Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

> Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.
You didn't read it all did you? It states a probably safe dose (40 pounds per year per person == ~25g per day of sugar added to what you'd get in a non-process diet), and gives both theoretical (metabolic), practical (controlled studies in animals and to some extent in humans) and historical (see below) compelling arguments.

Add to this that it has recently been demonstrated that junk food was addictive (demonstrated in rats, but it's quite obvious that it is also the case in humans) and you get the current metabolic syndrome epidemy.

FTA:

When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.

But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year.

That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it’s tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.
let's not get things confused - just because I am not a "maker" on HN does not mean I am not productive when I swivel my chair over to do my actual work. my god.
Learning Ruby via Rails seems like the hardest thing you listed. Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript can all be eased into gradually.
none. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/apples-stock-r...
"well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate"

I've noted your past fixation on English majors and their lack of financial success, and not sure why you single them out. Lit crit-saddled academia and coffeeshops aren't the only path for the English major. Writing is not only a noble pursuit but a lucrative[1] one (even if you skirt the legacy publishing industry), with as much a combination of hard work and dedication to craft (and luck) as, for example, selling bingo card generators for a living, or mobile phone games, or b2b CRUD apps, or facebook farming simulators.

Aside from fiction writing, there are ad copy and marketing writers, technical writers, screen and television writers, bloggers, journos, etc. Most of those are salaried positions, not necessarily part time/contract work.

It's really not that bad out there. For the record, I've never worked at a coffeeshop :D

[1]http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/will-write-e-po...
Implementing a LinqDataSource Control in ASP.NET
In this tutorial you will learn how to use a LinqDataSource control and apply it to a pre-existing database table.
You can do that now, with caveats:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#scripts
It might not play from SkyDrive(that's a failing with SkyDrive), but it will play from a shared folder I have on my fileserver here at home. So if I can store and access my files legally from one network attached drive, why not from another? Does it really matter who owns the drive or where it's located?
WA has good data on cost of living in the US, but I don't think it has comparable data for Canada. For example, if you take out a few of your terms there you'll see that for Toronto it's using the US national average, which is way off. If you try and check their sources, all they list is http://www.coli.org/, which has US data only.
Here's an "Elevator Pitch Builder" from the Harvard Business School: http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/

In addition to Mark's presentation grader, these things can really help.
I think the whole point is that if you need to send more than 2 or 3 e-mails, you launched your holding page too early and should reconsider even having it up.
This really sounds great. I can't wait to check it out.

I've been hoping for a Java-based framework that can compete with the Rails and Djangos for a while. I made the mistake of investing my time in Grails, and really regret it.

I've been wanting to use Scala for building web apps, but Lift reminds me of J2EE all over again. Hopefully Play! with Scala can get it right.
We're "launching" our LaunchRock page on Monday - http://www.onsidekick.com.

A semi-related question to this that we're struggling is: how much should we bother incentivizing those who invite the most with cash, an iPad, or even a contribution to their favorite charity? At the end of the day, this sign-up isn't really directly for people who are going to purchase our service in the future. It's really just a way for people to say "hey, I'm curious - let me know more". We're struggling to determine how much that is really worth.
Trendn is also cool. How do yo determine what is trending?
http://www.goodreads.com/ already exists. It simply lacks a strong HN-focused community. As others pointed out, we also have hn-books.com.
I am not super techy (obviously since I don't even really know what you call a person who is tech savvy) but this looks like a really cool way to have an electronic business card. It makes me want to create an infostripe and then start using all the other application you can link up to on your infostripe. I am just starting to think about ways to market my husband's business more and this seems like a user-friendly way to start out. Thanks for developing it. Now if I can just conquer my fear of the internet. Spoooooky.

I also really love the design of the site. Love how it is so sleek and centered.
Not going to happen. All these students who are after money will change majors within 2 years. CS is one of the hardest majors, there's a lot of math. I don't know about your school, but at the college I went to the CS dropout rates by the 4th year were like 80-90%. We had 4 people in some senior level classes.
This is where databases that support row values can be helpful. The original query:

SELECT count()
FROM scale_data
WHERE section = ?
AND id2 = ?

would be re-written with row values as:

SELECT count()
FROM scale_data
WHERE (section,id2) = (?,?)

In such a case, the database will revert to a table scan if it can't find an index that matches all of the columns (in left-to-right order) in the row value on the left-hand side of the expression, which would be immediately apparent in the actual performance of the query and the query execution plan.
Did you file a bug on github? Because it sounds like one.
Ask HN: What weekend projects actually make money
Every day I see someone post a weekend project. Does any of them actually turn into a real company or they all join the deadpool at the end?
How To Model A Palm Tree
Hmmmm. You're right. That is pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now.

I tend to be on a bit of a hair trigger over the use of words like toxic by nutritionists, because so often they turn out to be graduates of degree mills, pedalling patent medicines via press release reprinting churnalists.

This guy seems to check out however, even if he is a bit absolutist.
A rise in diabetes and other ailments is not conclusive evidence that sugar is toxic, and that you think it might be does a pretty good job of demonstrating my point (that this stuff should be kept in journals, to be read by people who understand how science works, and only thrown into newspapers when we have proof).
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic and pointing out that anything is "toxic" in high quantities. In case you aren't, or for people that did not catch it, 29g/kg is about 2.4kg of sugar for the average 80kg male, which comes out to about 12.5 cups or 3 liters. It should be obvious to most people that filling a two-liter bottle with pure granulated sugar and consuming it in one sitting would have severe health consequences (if you can even manage to get it all down).

What's probably toxic about it at this dosage is that it cannot be eliminated by your kidneys or stored in your liver quickly enough, so it accumulates in the blood and shifts the osmolality causing neurological symptoms, osmotic diuresis and cardiac arrhythmia.
A Crack Dealer on The Economics and Entrepreneurship of Drug Dealing
ARM Assembler for iOS: Part 2 - First Steps
Stephen Fry (also BBC) on Twitter this morning: "On way to meet Mike Lazarides of Blackberry. Excited: he was an absolute pioneer. Interested to know what's in the pipeline. Playbook etc."

I don't really understand, why would Fry tag along to someone else's interview?
I've seen that, but I wonder why it says "not recommended for serious use". If it's just slower, I'd be ok using it for simple things, but if it's buggy I'll just use BistroCar.
Facebook to be 'biggest bank' by 2015
I think you need to enable cookies. That fixed the error for me.
Nice summary! I enjoy the Play Framework as well.
A Review of Eric Ries' New Book - The Lean Startup
Are you UK based? If not I could probably redo it next month as a webex if there's enough people interested.
Yes, per how I was using the phrase. My high school had an AP and non-AP version.
If you don't explicitly pass the objects referenced in TLS to outside or to other threads, I don't see it breaks the concurrency isolation.

For some JVM implementation that use a shared global heap, that may just impact the performance due to lock. The concurrency isolation contract is not broken. The app still has full confidence that its TLS values are not changed in other threads. OT: if performance comes into picture, one can claim excessive copying of immutable objects cause performance problem as well.
This was changed after I posted my comment.
Fad social science? Sure, that sucks, but even "forensic science" evidence is often questionable (http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Unreliable-Limite...). Even worse, even if the test really does work (e.g. DNA testing), we get abuse of statistics like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy - "the probability of a random guy having this weight of evidence against him is 1/1 000 000, so this guy must be guilty!" (of course, there are 300 Americans you could convict of any one crime under this standard...)

Let's just say that modern justice systems are not without their faults.
I didn't downvote, nor do I think your comment deserved to be, but I'll point out one thing. Instead of asking a question about the language used, you made a statement. In effect, you asserted that I was wrong. You don't need to know someone's full background to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially if your own knowledge is limited. I admit to being guilty for doing the same, it's quite easy to dismiss faceless handles.
WebSocket support added - outstanding
There doesn't seem to be a way of looking at the responses without entering a value, which makes it difficult for students, job seekers, etc., to look at the results without entering meaningless data to get there. Am I missing something?
HN isn't really the place for this kind of question. Check out the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) for the kinds of things that belong here. Specifically, the first paragraph:

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Can you be more specific about what Java libraries you're missing? Is it just the payment gateway? I think the following is his question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2242653/java-payment-gate...
I would imagine simplified / clear-cut would skew as much (or more) towards non-parole than to a favourable parole decision.
NaTcl: Tcl over Google's native client for chrome
IMHO, this smells like a marketing move -- in the same way that merging Rails and Merb was a (brilliant) marketing move. If Rails wants to stay "cool" (and if you believe that "cool" is a zero sum game), then Rails has to stay buzzword compliant. Yes, Rails has a lot of support but the Rails team isn't stupid and they know, by definition, that it's just a matter of years before Rails itself becomes something of a relic -- one kids know of only because their daddies and mommies used to use it.
Rails has always been optimized for people who use it all day, every day, rather than those using it for the first time.
It's hard to grow when you have +95% of market share.
I see benefits on a few lists, but am surprised that health insurance has not specifically been called out.
Speaking from experience of years as a software architect and now a development manager at a very large technology company, unless you've got a HIGHLY impressive track record of experience, no job worth a crap is going to hire you to work remotely. If you're dead set on it, then as others have pointed out, the freelancing approach (Elance, Guru, oDesk, etc.) does work, to a point. On those sites, you'll always be competing against some insanely low-cost (and low-quality) offshore workers but that's not as big an issue. Again, even on those sites, the issue will be a demonstrated track record of excellence. So, best advice would be to take 3-5 projects on those sites of any size doing anything you feel comfortable doing and don't worry about the $$. Hit home runs on those projects and two things will happen:

(1) There's a very good chance those who hire you will hire you again or extend the projects out

(2) You now have ammo to get other better/more lucrative online freelance projects.

Do the online freelance thing for maybe two years and have tons of good real-world experience under your belt and then you have a shot at landing a full-time remote work position.

Just my two cents worth...
Parametric sculpture generator for Minecraft - using Three.js
The main feature (software-wise) in Neo4j Enterprise is High Availability clustering support, which gives you fault tolerance and read scalability. On top of that Neo4j Enterprise also comes with 24/7 enterprise-grade commercial support. You can run it on one core, or 768 cores all for the same price.
Yeah, thanks, already too late :/
A breadth-first search can be easily handled with recursion (in fact, I'd argue the specification is almost as simple):

def bfs(search_node, nodes_to_visit):
node = nodes_to_visit.pop()
if node == search_node:
return node
else:
nodes_to_visit.extend(node.neighbors)
return bfs(search_node, nodes_to_visit)

bfs(search_node, [root_node])
The 25 Most Provocative Questions in Science
IPhone 5 Delay Speculation Continues: Don't Buy It
I'm not sure I follow. If you have root access on a machine that runs PHP web apps that connect to a MySQL server, you have, at a minimum, access to the databases those web apps relied upon. The web app MySQL credentials have to be supplied somewhere in the code.
Here's a simple check you should make before opening your mouth to talk about human rights.

Is the thing I'm talking about created, made, or maintained by the work of others? Yes? Then it's not a human right.
I was being sarcastic. But I also wanted to post to point to the fact that scientists believe that 50% of the people who ate this much sugar would in fact survive!
Here's a simple check you should make before opening your mouth to talk about human rights.

Is the thing I'm talking about created, made, or maintained by the work of others? Then it's not a human right.
Clearly the solution is to eat nothing and never go outside. You might damage yourself otherwise.
WordPress Hacked, Source Code Stolen
Perhaps that's true. The opportunity to generate a profit is a significant motivator for a lot of people though. That's not true for everyone and those people will write and release regardless. But for those that it is true, they will spend time on something they wouldn't otherwise and likely be more productive doing it.

I don't mind people using the software I write to generate a private profit. I think there's a greater net benefit in allowing more opportunities for people to make a living.
These articles are a bit old, but they held up well. I submitted this because someone else submitted a list of unsolved problems on Wikipedia -- which I thought would be interesting, but actually turned out to be too domain specific for me in anything other than Computer Science. I think this list is better for a general audience and tackles bigger problems.
Greplin opensources Lucene Utils and Bloom Filters
Aggregating Tweets with Play and Elastic Search Module
"the evidence isn't conclusive" also doesn't mean "there's no evidence". Watch the video lecture on youtube (already linked in the comments and the article)
Isn't sodium hypochlorite not particularly toxic to humans anyway?

I think cyanide would have been a better example. Eat one microgram, you're fine. Eat one gram, bye bye.
In general, you don't learn a lot asking people (in positions of power) questions that they will have to respond to with an uninteresting, transparent evasion or lie.
Have you actually looked at SCSS? This is a good start: http://sass-lang.com/. It's a superset of CSS. Very easy to learn.

Also, this "huge problem" you talk about is the same that people used to argue against Ruby/Rails with. Hey, everyone knows Java/Struts -- let's just keep it simple for hiring drone purposes!
To be a bit blunt, that article with a heavily misleading title totally disappointed me. I was expecting to glean some insights there on how they applied certain kind of technologies into a vertical market -- nothing but a few marketing pitch.

Your post got me even more confused: what exactly new programming models? I understand there may be an influx of sensor data coming in and your apps have to be able to cope with them --- do specific data analysis, maybe some kinds of expert systems, and generate possible suggestions. But how is that different from existing systems, say, nuclear station operation system, high-frequency trading systems, to name a few.
Who wants to extort money from whom?..

...beside the food industry, which thrives by having people overeat?
companiesmadesimple.com was one of the options I was looking into. Let's keep in touch.
Who is paid for working on their passion project and whats it worth?
During my first internship working on a niche B2B product I asked the senior developers if they envisioned themselves working on this project when they got their first job.

They answered that when they started work they had aspirations to be on projects that they were personally interested in or develop things that would have a profound effect on the public.
Then they went on to say that you get over it quickly, programming is programming and you only hope to get to solve interesting tech problems even if they are on boring products and ultimately the pay check is king.

This bugs me and even with my own side projects, I find losing 60 hours a week to something I am not passionate about disheartening.

My question is: what are you will to trade to get a job working on a project you like?
Thank you very much for the answers.
"improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on"

I'm intrigued. Do you have specific ideas in mind? Do you mean like self-driving cars? Or in home helper robots? All of the above?
Is Apple looking to take on Netflix?
Journalist who hasn't done any research on sugar agrees with doctor who hasn't done any research on sugar. And this happens to be great linkbait.

Tell me why I should pay for the New York Times, again?