skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
600 Diggs and made fount page of Digg. Obviously an interesting topic for some people, albeit not you - rude bastard.

http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/10/facebook-under-massive-phis...
Yeah, this is disappointing. Mostly because Hadoop is, in fact, a pretty nifty piece of software. But it's a cluster thing, and individual hackers don't do clusters for some pretty fundamental economic reasons. So to Dziuba, that means that the Hadoop people at Yahoo and elsewhere are "grownups". Sigh.
A bigger market share and more capable API doesn't matter if you don't have the capital to make a business out of it. Sure, you can build a Blackberry app, but how would you sell it and get it in front of people without a lot of money spent on marketing and promotion? Blackberry apps don't usually make the front page of TechCrunch.

The capital requirements for making an iPhone app are lower. $99 to be exact, at the lowest. And you get your app in front of millions of people while not having to worry about building out a website, getting users to that website, and accepting credit cards.

If you're a established mobile company, sure, ignoring the Blackberry would be a bad move. But if you're a small shop or a programmer working in your spare time, the advantages of the iPhone platform are hard to ignore.

I'm not saying there isn't too much hype, but I think a lot of the hype is because developers sitting at home are saying to themselves "I can do that" when it comes to iPhone apps, but not when it comes to Blackberry apps.
Congratulations Apple, you made the iPhone less stable than Windows Mobile
Active Record via CodeIgniter for me!
Asynchronous Databases: DBSlayer and HTTP
my experience with them hasn't been great. They caused our site downtime on numerous occasions due to oversights on their part.
In their slides, the first bits are an unique id (it's also printed on my MTA card (from NYC) under the date). This doesn't make you personally identifiable if you paid cash for the card, but it's an unique to the card, so discrepancies could be caught pretty easily.
It's not just that users aren't good at expressing their desires. They're not good at knowing their desires.

Look at what users do, not what they say. Good metrics and a little cleverness is usually better than any sort of feature request form.

edit: Hackers are not exceptions to this rule.
I've seen this principle presented before (thanks paul), but I appreciate how a concrete example like the one in this article really makes it clear.
The question I had is whether Dziuba built something interesting. Zed has.
No, but I do.
They're right to worry. It's a headache. Having a new version of the framework every year is also a headache (for desktop development anyway).

I'm not sure what else they can do, though. .NET is their development platform. They've got to keep turning out new stuff. Where else is it going to go?
This guy is so annoying. You might think that the non-success of his own startup (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/19/pressflip-is-a-belly-fl...) would make him slightly more humble, but apparently not.
Someone should do a Wikipedia-like site based on the old Connections series on PBS. I think you could do a site like this based solely on the history of technology and its interconnections.

Great idea! I've been missing the insights that James Burke delivered with the original series.
Connect U twins lose in court, still alive in beijing olympics
Can someone define "killer app"?

This article claims that "Super Monkey Ball" might have sold $3 million worth of software in a month. But that's not "killer", I guess.

The classic definition of "killer app" is "the app that, by itself, makes you buy the platform". But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast as they can be made.

And, of course, the killer app on a Web-enabled phone will always tend to be making phone calls and using the web. If "more popular than MobileSafari" is the benchmark, it will be very, very hard to reach the benchmark.

Finally... one month? They say that good software takes ten years. One month is 0.83% of that time. Give the market some more months.
LOL... Thanks for the improvement on the analogy. From now on this is going to be my mental model for whether or not a "white hat" security guy is making the world better or worse.
agreed. the author doesn't sound like a programmer, even. i smell a fake.
I use a custom object wrapper around the mysql functions
Music to (Not) Code By
This is a great observation. Part of the reason for this behavior is almost all the people I've met who tout usability tests come from the old school market research/focus group approaches. Put people in a room and listen to what they talk. I've experienced this first hand. I've even put up mock print screens of the click flow and inevitably there is a disjoint. That does not work - the only reliable way is to put the actual working app out there and observe them use it. OBSERVE the users (with the UI guy in room) and correlate/validate what you see with objective page abandonment/scenario data on Google Analytics. Its a little bit of work but I think it totally completes the picture. Excellent observations.
Parts of the article made me laugh, especially the Twitter as drum major quip (me being an old band/drumcorps member). Not knowing much about hadoop or map reduce, I gather he doesn't really have a clue based on his dismissal of Twitter as a failure. Last time I checked, they're going strong.
I don't like that the author lumps in IP monopolies with property rights. They are fundamentally different concepts.

Some of the examples cited deal with actual property, such as power transmission lines or shared oil fields. But patents and copyright deal with IP, which has a whole different set of expectations and ramifications.

Still, the author's conclusion seems sound to me:

the next time we start handing out new ownership rights—whether via patents or copyright or privatization schemes—we’d better try to weigh all the good things that won’t happen as a result.
The regular mysql functions, except I made a wrapper for mysql_query to abort on an error, so I don't have to type that every time. But my wrapper explicitly allows you to use the regular mysql_query function if you want. I hate wrappers that hide the underlying system.

I don't wrap the mysql_fetch* functions because that slows them down (lots of string copying). Plus, they don't need it.

I also like:

function ms($string) {
return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string($string) . "'";
}

Very helpful for preventing sql injections, it's so short to type that I always remember to use it. And by including the quote marks right in it I don't have to go nuts escaping the quotes in the outer query.

If you use mysqli you don't need this - use bind variables instead.
mysql/mysqli calls inside my model classes.

I would say it does depend on the size of the project, so far I've only written small/medium projects built from scratch. I haven't had any reason to regret that decision yet, the code is simple, easy to read, maintain, and optimize.
The Register: When children do journalism.

He may have some points in there, but any real content is drowned by the noise of the baseless insults, ad-hominem attacks, and poor writing. The angry rant style can be made to work, but it needs to be backed up by actual skill at writing, and it definitely doesn't substitute for content.

This article makes me sad.
Is Facebook the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Service on the Web?
Georgia Clings to the 'Net
To be fair: it's one month from launch. The SDKs were in developers' hands much earlier. And the general details of the platform architecture were in public hands (via the work of the jailbreak folks) much earlier still.

To some extent, MobiltSafari is already the iPhone's killer app. Nothing else it does is really all that shockingly great. But a web browser isn't going to be killer for more than a smallish handful of people. It's not "killer" in the way that SMS texting was, for example. Will there be another? The jury hasn't come back yet.
Wow. That might be the most unprofessional thing I've ever read.
True-- but that takes oversight and communication.

Contra the article earlier today, where someone thought he had vanquished The Mythical Man-Month-- the reality is still n(n-1)/2, and there's no silver bullet for that one.
When is it bad luck? Sometimes it's obvious you're making mistakes, not working on the right thing in the right way. Sometimes it's not. It would be nice to know.
Not just adhearsion. It seems like Ruby is becoming the defacto sheepdog for shepherding the unwieldy Asterisk. I think its great news speaking as one who has lost one too many dialplans thanks to asterisks wonderful handling of "minor" upgrades.
I honestly think the OLPC project is extremely naive and quite stupid. I cannot say that owning a computer has contributed to my overall academic performance. Sure it has enabled me to chase links for hours about marginally important information on wikipedia, or read the latest blogs about the OLPC, but it certainly hasn't helped me to get better grades or learn more of what is academically valuable.

Think about PG's essay "disconnecting distraction" and the copycat essays that followed. These clearly show that a computer to most is more of a distraction than a resource when it comes to learning. The only reason many on this forum can't part with a computer is because that is their source of income.

The internet is wonderful resources, and many Americans were thankful to be some of the first in the world to have access to it from its very inception. How did our early exposure to the internet help us acamdemically? We are still quite a ways behind European and East Asian countries in quality of education and sheer intelligence.

I just don't see the connection between academic success and owning a laptop. Not owning a laptop right now is probably doing more to better my grades and peformance in school than anything.
Wow - over 100 people. Hopefully other big cities (and small ones too) can put on Hacker News events like this.

Using anyvite, of course.
You will regret that decision when you have to move your app to a different database. The only reason that PDO, ADO, etc. stuff exists is because the built-in database functions are platform-specific and totally inconsistent with one another.
And the FiveRuns TuneUp Contest winner is... (our own luccastera)
Yeah, we're pretty excited for the turnout tonight. Should be a good time meeting everyone in the Boston area. Speakers should be excellent as well!
PoolExpert acquired by Rogers
Creating the GoogleApps Notifier: Sohail Amjad
I think we'll just keep doing it for free. It's not like I'm forcing people to follow us:

twitter.com/ticketstumbler
In recent projects, PDO.

Prior, used a custom object wrapper around the mysql functions — and it would be really simple change to swap out a different DB platform as all DB calls are abstracted and located in one class file...
There are some interesting numbers in there, but it does seem a little like a plug for one of the author's reports. The message seems to be that when buying a server, consider the running and housing costs when calculating the TCO. Just like you should with a car...
Awkward Rap
Pedro Teixeira
I'm using CakePHP's ORM.
I'm pretty much done with that e-rag.
When you look back and can honestly say that if you had it to do over again you wouldn't do anything differently, then it's bad luck.
I went and saw him in Minneapolis in June and I was incredibly disappointed. His books have good info, but I thought is talk was bad. He talked a lot about presentations which I wasn't really there for, I wanted info on how to make my informational graphics better. It seemed like the majority of the people there where managerial types, not developers/designers so I think he skewed his topic for their needs.

He also did a poor job at backing up his points, thats not to say they weren't true, its just that he would make an assertion and count on dogma to validate it. It was too cargo-cult for me. The other three developers/BA's I went with thought the same. (Especially when Tufte started showing pictures of his bizarre metal sculptures that had nothing to do with visualizing information).

If you're a developer and you want specific details in how to make your applications better, I'd highly recommend Ben Fry's Dissertation. (http://benfry.com/phd/) Its 150 pages, but the text is pretty light and he is very detailed in how you can use color, space, animation, spatial relations to make your data easier to understand. The dissertation doesn't fail to impress, plus its 100% free. Ben is the guy behind the Processing language, which is essentially a DSL for info graphics, really cool stuff, even if it is a wrapper around Java.
Think about PG's essay "disconnecting distraction" and the copycat essays that followed. These clearly show that a computer to most is more of a distraction than a resource when it comes to learning. The only reason many on this forum can't part with a computer is because that is their source of income.

PG also mentioned having a work computer and an internet computer. His point was there are distractions and they must be dealt with. Not that the computer is a distraction.

On top of this, an essay from PG along with some copycats is not proof. Anecdotes is not plural for data.

I just don't see the connection between academic success and owning a laptop.

A fair point but this depends on the field of study.
Everyone loves a good telecom rant, and we've all had to use our best calming techniques after hearing the dreaded "between 9 and 5" (and then again when they don't show up), and we're all a bit sick of the "does this belong on Hacker News" replies, but really, does this belong on Hacker News?
The above blog post is now #5 on google for "visicalc lisp". If Visicalc was written in Lisp, it's the best-kept secret of the 1980's.
It wouldn't open links in a new window (FF2, linux); and I could find no way to extract the URL of a found page.

Cool design though. Expectation management: I felt delight at the effect, then disappointment that it didn't animate the it fully (maybe it's my low-power subnotebook though).
The Paradox Of Power
Since when do you ever look back and say that you wouldn't do anything differently? That indicates you haven't learned anything, not that it was bad luck.

I usually go by "If I look back and can honestly say I wouldn't do anything differently given the information I had at the time, then it's bad luck." That doesn't mean that I made the right choices, or that I'd make the same choices in the future. But it means that I did the best I could with the information I had available to me, and didn't have any rational basis for choosing differently.
> I am ready to pay Twitter a dollar for each of my tweets that starts with $$

This could get very expensive very fast, but still looks like great ROI considering people on twitter are still early adopters (and hence have money and are willing to spend it) and if they do mention one of the keywords listed, they will probably want the product.

To be really effective you will need to quickly scan the tweet (NLP or just look at the users profile) to filter results, but considering the current signal-to-noise on twitter, even brute-force is worth it.

Other startups have been doing this for a while e.g. FreshBooks, but no one has offered money yet.

Twitters revenue model solved. ;)
Why do people always assume that you will move your application to a different DBMS at some point?
I thought that was an odd distinction. For some reason, he equates open-source with the Web 2.0, Ruby crowd. The first things that come to my mind are Linux and gcc, which are two of the most important software projects on the planet.
I am aware that I might regret that decision IF I have to move my app to a different database.

Even so, I don't think such a move would be that painful. I've taken great care to isolate all SQL queries from the rest of the code, and to keep them all in one place. I also have queries which I've had to optimize for the specific database I'm using (MySQL). I doubt an out-of-the-box DAL would be able to help with those in the current incarnation, or eliminate the need to rewrite them if the database changes.

The biggest challenge I can foresee is if they grow to the point where I need multiple databases in order to scale. I don't have enough experience yet to know whether existing frameworks would help in such a scenario, or just get in the way. But changing from MySQL to PostgreSQL? I'm fairly confident I can live with that.

But first and foremost, they're small-to-medium projects (in terms of code size), with relatively simple data models, and a single developer. I wouldn't advocate this approach for large projects.
I'm not sure why you think the price of an OS vs. the price of a web/graphics development suite is even a valid comparison to make... We're talking apples and oranges here.

My car cost more than I pay for rent every month, but that doesn't make my landlord any less of a douchebag.
The plan is to hijack a subway train and drive it into a building.
Jesse Ezell has a good blog post about this here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight...
50 Free Internet Tools for Tin-Foil Hat Wearers
Whether you want to protect yourself from Internet snoopers, want to spy on those out to get you, or want to be able to track trends that you know will lead to something big, then these tools will help you get the job done.
FTA:

The problem is that dreaded dynamic request which cuts through the cache and requires a blocking database query, which has an unfortunate side effect of locking up the resources on your application server as well.

Come again? I'm not aware of any database technology where a synchronous request on one socket locks up the whole application server. What on earth are they talking about here? Sockets are cheap. Thread stacks are cheap. Just make the call and let the database sort out the locking and synchronization.

I don't even see how the linked library fixes the problem anyway. It just moves the blocking socket out of the web/app server and into a chunk of middleware that manages its own database connections.
Seedcamp video pitch or popularity contest?
ADODB. I've used PDO as well (which is slightly faster), but I found ADO to be a little more robust. Also supports memchached out of the box.
Memoranda (a contrast of Jobs's and Ballmer's styles)
The best articles on competing with Google are from Rich Skrenta:

http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.htm...

http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...
... poorly understood - and sloppily formulated - ideas
This is my favorite part of programming :)

You have an idea and attempt to codify it.
During the process, your code starts to get uglier and uglier.
Refactoring the code leads you to re-examine your conceptualization of the problem, leading to new insights outside the domain of programming.
If your code does not lend well to abstraction, it's a good indicator that perhaps your idea has missed the mark.
See the structure of the code, compare it to the structure of the idea and you have a whole new platform for creativity.
Think. Write. Refactor.
Rinse and repeat.

Turning bad ideas into good ideas.

Perhaps the reason why so many successful startups are famous for inventions resulting from other than their original ideas.
Personally, I'm all for MS bundling Silverlight with Windows. The difference between this and the IE/Netscape debacle is that the internet browser decision is a choice made by the user, and by bundling IE with Windows, MS essentially made the choice for 90% of its non-tech-savvy users who didn't know they could download a different browser. (Not to mention, I seem to recall IE was actually a better browser than Netscape. despite its awfulness today).

By bundling Silverlight with Windows, they are contributing towards making the technology a standard, allowing developers to make the choice to write Silverlight apps rather than Flash apps without having to worry about how many of their users have it installed / will install it. There will never be more computers with Silverlight installed than Flash, unless Adobe makes some huge mistakes, but by trying to make the numbers more equal, MS is giving developers the power to write apps for the technology which best fits their needs. Whether or not Silverlight is that technology for a majority of developers remains to be seen.
From the last paragraph:

I just have to keep remembering this is the early days of the iPhone and I suppose it is similar to the early days of the Pocket PC when stability was also an issue. I did cut Microsoft and Nokia a break back then when they were starting out and I’ll keep using my original iPhone...

If I only had a nickel for every news article that would be dramatically improved if the last paragraph -- the one where the author apologizes for the linkbait headline -- were moved to the top.

Windows Mobile is somewhere between 5 and 8 years old. The release version of the iPhone OS is all of one year old and version 2.0 is only a month old. If you don't want to be burned like an early adopter, don't be an early adopter.

Incidentally, the rate at which MobileSafari crashes dropped a lot, for me, when I installed iPhone OS 2.0.1. This article doesn't say whether or not the author has done the same. And I agree that 3G and GPS may not be worth the additional monthly fees and the reduced battery life... which is why I bought a 2G iPhone on eBay.
DBSlayer Helps You Get Parallel
Author notes he has postponed showing the soccer game, in favor of developing the ai engine first.

I highly suggest getting the visual feedback component in place first. There's nothing as motivating as quickly seeing the effects of your latest changes.
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2195

Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur
Writing your first Domain Specific Language, Part 1 of 2
Thread stacks in your web stack are not necessarily cheap.
The first rule of Apple products is you don't talk about bugs or issues with Apple products.
It's related to a startup, and should be relevant to someone purchasing internet access in that area or with that company.
The China factor - What role does China play in your business?
For Windows: SharedView http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94
You mean because they don't consider combinators for parsing?

That's the only example I can think of for higher order functions used in compilers. Combinators are much more powerful (though less efficient) than the construction of automata (which the Dragon book covers). I'm implementing parser combinators with some unusual properties at the moment, and then (hope to!) prove some things about them. I wish the Dragon book had covered this approach in the first place. So your comment is relevant to me.
ajross: Ruby / Python doesn't have a great threading model (GIL in both cases is the culprit). Hence, if you have an app-server which is single threaded (event loop), or have other locks around servicing requests (like Rails Dispatcher), when the server makes the DB call, it effectively becomes unresponsive until the data is fetched.

You're absolutely right, sockets are cheap (if you can defer to kernel's select()) which is exactly what we're doing here. Instead of doing blocking IO, we convert the DB call into an asynchronous call.
Maybe he decided to focus on his most sellable skill.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
We're using the Symfony Framework, and connect using the Propel ORM. To be frank, I'm no longer happy with the Propel ORM - I find it quite inefficient. Sigh.

Anyone else using Propel?
PDO is good.
That's a good point. In 10 years I've only had to do that once.

Still, I like using an abstraction layer because they tend to hide the quirks of the particular database - I use MySQL, Postgres and SQLite all fairly often, and by using PHP's PDO I can not worry about the differences as much as if I were using the database-specific drivers.