skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Points to ponder while designing/building the MySql DB 
I am the only one working on my idea. Java based web application and it has other components as well which needs to be integrated. What worries me is preparing MySQL database for this project. I am using ORM and it is taking some of my worries by not worrying about writing SQL but I want to design it properly even for the alpha release.

Please share any tips or the points I need to remember focus on while I am designing. Any links/resources would be appreciated as well.

Thanks
Mapping
They've slipped for a year? GTFO. You're getting robbed as a tech lead and you now have a ton of professional experience where before you got interviews that went nowhere.

Just start shopping yourself around and find something else. You don't need to make a big deal about it. You have no basis for loyalty except inertia. If you don't know what the business is like and they've slipped for a year, they don't have business. They would be bragging left and right if there was anything coming in.

The only thing "early stage" about it is that they haven't launched, and really, from what you describe, there is no launch forthcoming. Interview on your lunch hour or in the early evening (people hiring know how it is) and change boats like a good businessperson. If your absence would be so catastrophic, then that's additional evidence they don't even prioritize the business's interests.
I am curious how you are checking, and what your service is: you must have some kind of correlation. (Also, please read my above response, which you will not get a notification of from HN.)
Which still brings us back to the fundamental flaw of bitcoin: it is a fiat currency without a fiat.

If bitcoin transactions are only trustworthy in jurisdictions with laws governing such transactions (i.e., none), it is safer and more convenient to simply use the local currency. And of course, governments will not voluntarily protect transactions in competing currencies.

Bad checks are an enormous problem. One of the reasons that merchants favor credit cards, despite the high transaction fees, is that the incidence of non-payment fraud is both lower and less costly. If Bitcoin is susceptable to nonpayment fraud, it is a non-starter as far as widespread adoption is concerned.
Seconded on health insurance -- getting some kind of HSA compatible high deductible plan SHOULD be fairly inexpensive (I'm 32, in good health, and $5k deductible coverage is $81/mo). That covers the insurance-against-huge-risk aspect of health care; you can still pay for smaller expenses out of cash.

Having an employee go bankrupt (or worse, not have health care) after a surprise illness or injury is a major risk to a team; it seems prudent for management or investors to want to mitigate this risk.
That's a very good question. I think the starting point is seeing a series made about their lives and realities, though perhaps this isn't enough. The way the Kickstarter project itself is structured, of course, is that contributing gets you tshirts, movie credits, dinner with the cast, and so on - there are tons of rewards. But as for why someone would like or retweet it/spread the word...I'll have to give it some thought. Perhaps have some rewards based on retweeting? Something like a random draw of people who retweet and the person gets a role in the production?
It is actually possible to run full interactive debuggers inside vim. Personally I think Netbeans is a little easier on the eyes when doing this, but being the nerd I am I had to give it a go once I found out it was possible. Here's screenshot of me doing a debugging session of a PHP file using vim/Xdebug on OSX :-)

http://morganpyne.com/img/hacks/debugging-php-with-vim-and-x...

There are several articles out there on using vim as a fully-fledged IDE and setting up interactive debugging:
http://www.koch.ro/blog/index.php?/archives/63-VIM-an-a-PHP-...
http://tech.blog.box.net/2007/06/20/how-to-debug-php-with-vi...
http://colonelpanic.net/2010/08/debugging-php-in-vim-using-v...

Note that these are for PHP development, but I'm sure some rummaging would uncover suport for whatever langugages you work in.
What's really sad about that article is the failure to mention the origin of the ideas: Philip K. Dick.
Sure, but if the government is indifferent or actively hostile, good luck getting restitution.
Development is epigenetic
Clever? Yes. Epic? No.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=epic

Pardon the title.
> There is no reason there couldn't be a law that says "it is illegal to attempt to defraud merchants by trying to double spend bitcoin."

There's a big reason - government hostility to bitcoin.
What's good about print statements is that they don't require me to do anything more than once. When you run code in a debugger, there is a lot of manual interaction involved. continue, break, see where you are, think about that, poke around, repeat. With print statements, you run your test, analyze the output, and make the changes. It's all automated except for the analysis step, which is all the human should be doing.

If you need breakpoints, watchpoints, and a GUI to click around in, your code is too complicated and unmaintainable, which is probably why you need a debugger in the first place.
Why Filter Bubbles are Good
How good is Google’s Instant Mix?
This is rarely a problem when using tools like darcs, magit, or git-add --patch.
Totally agree with earl.

Our company is trying a new experiment for helping people find jobs at good startups who we know and respect http://nextdigest.com/vip. The process is blind for the company side and we only introduce you to companies you are interested in. Would love to have you as a early beta user if you are interested.
There are several comments here concerned that CMU might want to keep their startups rooted in Pittsburgh. However, they have a Silicon Valley campus http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/ which seems to demonstrate that they have some interest in supporting those who want to be in the valley.
The litmus test for a tablet to me is, "Why would I buy one of these when I could just buy an iPad?". As of yet, there is not a single competing tablet with a good answer to this question, and Mr. Kincaid is unable to provide one in this article, in spite of his desperate attempt. In fact, he pretty much just reiterates the problems that all of the reviews for non-iPad tablets have already presented: performance problems, "buggy as hell", not enough apps optimized for the form factor. Why do these guys think that out of the blue, Android tablets are going to just miraculously going to start being great?
The reason that it hasn't taken off isn't due to technical reasons, we've had the technology for some time. Human's just aren't comfortable using it.
Loyalty is a wonderful thing. You should demonstrate your loyalty by giving your company a full two weeks notice when you leave.

You're being taken advantage of, and you know it or you wouldn't have posted this. You're taking an under-market salary and no benefits, which means you're probably making about 50% of what you should be when you count health care, 401k and so forth. You have no equity, which is the traditional tradeoff at a startup: Accept a reduced salary for the possibility of a large payoff at the end.

Right now, your best case scenario is that the company is wildly successful, the founders go on to fame and fortune, and if you're very, very lucky, they might just decide to throw you a bone. Which they won't.

Leave.
I think I found my answer on this website
http://www.agiledata.org/essays/bestPractices.html
Zynga still earns more than facebook itself

Citation please? I think this was true in 2009, but hasn't been the case for quite a while.
They obey the name on the check, and yours isn't on it. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A
I'll settle for any credible estimate you can come up with.
Make no mistake, anyone who achieves an elected (or unelected for that matter) position has power as their number one motivation.

If you view any high ranking government official in any idealistic light, you have been tricked. These guys are marketers of the first order, and what they market is idealism.
Just last week I was about to start learning Vim, but after perusing the shortcut list I decided I could do better, so I rolled my own. Basically it's just a multi-modal keystroke catcher/dispatcher running transparently in the background. The upshot is that most of the commands work transparently in my IDE, in notepad, and even this little textbox I'm typing in right now!

Unfortunately, the original point was to increase my productivity, which I've failed at horribly... because I can't stop playing around with the code!
If you make the umbrella ribs more rigid you will tend to make them heavier. You could improve the leverage of the braces between the stem and the ribs by attaching the braces farther out on the ribs and lower down on the stem, but that will collide with the owner's head unless they hold the umbrella higher, which will cause more leakage and catch more wind and make it harder to brace the stem against your body in a wind.

I'd be very hesitant to claim that I could design a better umbrella. They've been evolving for a very long time. Maybe modern materials would help, but I for one wouldn't dare buy a carbon-fiber umbrella because I just know I'd leave it on a bus or something. Cheapness is a feature too.

Meanwhile, the hilarious invention at the link not only looks ridiculous, but I'd have to be convinced that it wouldn't drip all over my lower body. And how on earth do you carry it when it's folded up? A big feature of the standard umbrella design is that it's not that hard to carry or store while folded.

I have a nice waterproof hat from Outdoor Research and a Gore-Tex jacket. For serious swimming I've also got waterproof pants and even gaiters. That combination seems like it would be superior to the space helmet.
Is The FACTory a modern Eurisko?
One advantage I see of browsers doing more and more is that it encourages moving away from closed-source, proprietary technology. Like DirectX and Flash.

As to IE specifically, it has its own problems. Like the debugger being inconsistent when inspecting objects: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v686/Groxx/ieliar.png using "FireEvent" throws an exception.
I'm a full-time Vim user.

This was my problem when I started with Vim. But then I learned to love GDB and other command-line development tools. At first it seemed a bit archaic to me, a Visual Studio user at the time, but when I got a hang of it, I stopped missing IDE debugging. Now I'm at the point where I feel crippled trying to develop in an IDE (no split windows, to vim-style macros, inefficient use of screen space, constantly have to switch between mouse and keyboard).

For example, GDB can be scripted, so you can repeat debugging sessions, your entire debugging session is printed, so you can always go back and see the history of changed values. It supports pretty-printing STL containers and you can add your own pretty-printers in python.

There are a lot more to these tools than you can discover by poking and trying things like you would with an IDE, they have a steeper learning curve, but I wouldn't dismiss them immediately as a waste of time.
I don't know why this should come as a surprise. All the arguments that I've seen that somehow the iPad will avoid the same fate as the (still highly successful but not market leader in OS) iPhone have been weak, pushed mostly by people who have a stake in its success. It is extremely hard to beat a competent and good platform so willing to allow any company to succeed and do what they will with the platform. It comes down to the simple fact it is essentially Apple vs. the rest of industry (minus a few outliers). Not even Apple can do that. They came close with MP3 players, but tablets are much more dangerous; they are a PC market disruptor, not a Walkman disruptor. So far it seems all of those companies are willing to bet on Android. And considering Android is lead by a software team willing to iterate furiously and have some sort of quality, I have little doubt they will take the lead in the tablet space.
I have an account on joindiaspora.com, but last time I checked (perhaps a month ago, before what you would probably call finals) their login page was broken. The only way I could log in was through the password reset feature, which got old pretty fast. If they've fixed that I can send you an invite.

Edit: It's pretty good by the way, I would use it all the time if I could log in.

Edit2: I just checked and they fixed their login process, so if you give me an email address I can invite you.
Should first employee at YC funded company work for free?
To make your own, go here: http://www.telescopictext.org
MIT media lab invents the junkyard jumbotron
A useful trick we've had at previous workplaces which solves this (and related accidental-debug-code-checkin) problems is to put a precommit hook that denies a checkin with a certain string in the text (we used "DNCI" for Do Not Check In)

So you get in the habit of annotating test tweaks & debug prints with:

printf("DNCI x is %d\n", x);

I use gdb as well, but sometimes dumping data directly is all you really need.
Where are you located!? $5k HSA deductible here is $280(!) - I'm a bit older than you, but not that much older (and married, but no kids). Blue Cross NC.
We have big companies just chomping at the bit to pay us - their words, "when can we pay you?" and our beta testers are ecstatic. We have 2000 people on our advance notice list. I think it's safe to say that it is going to go very well for us indeed.

(That's not to say we won't have technical or growing pains. I'm sure we will. That's part of the reason we haven't launched yet -- that, and my chronic fatigue making me useless for weeks on end without warning.)
I have no idea what you need to be offering. Just hoped to get you thinking strategically on "what's my motivation?" (from their perspective). FWIW: A scene from "Take the Lead" comes to mind where he has his Aha! moment about how to sell underprivileged kids on learning ballroom dancing. If you haven't seen the movie and have no idea what I am talking about, here is a 10.5 minute clip that should cover the gist of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGrnv-FnWxA&feature=relat...
You only owe your employer your loyalty insofar as they're fulfilling their end of the bargain.

If what you've said is true, they're not.

There is no startup out there who gives zero equity for any developer, let alone a lead developer. Salary varies widely depending on company stage and location.

I'd be careful comparing the salary at an early stage startup to the median salary at a place like Google or Facebook -- you get more cash when equity is expensive for a startup, and vice versa -- but even at those companies you'd get some equity.

Quit now, or if you don't have the cash, as soon as you find a job. There is no point in negotiating -- the kind of company that takes advantage of you when you're ignorant isn't the kind of company you want to work for even after you're fully-informed and can renegotiate a better deal.

Feel free to email me at jesse@everlane.com. No need to de-anonymize yourself, but if you give me some details I'll be happy to help you decide what companies to be looking at.
I had a similar issue using Django+PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 11. Running the test suite was taking 10s of seconds in that combination which wasn't too bad but hurt my test->fix->test cycle when debugging PostgreSQL related issues (during normal dev I run the test suite in a in memory SQLite database).

Took a little time to work it out as I am new to PostgreSQL but it was worth it to avoid a pause in the problem solving cycle.

Problem and solution explained on my blog: http://www.roryhart.net/code/slow-create-database-with-postg...
"Constitutional" monarchies should loose points just on the simple merit of being a theocracy by definition. Yet, they are the most "democratic" on this list. Meh.
I believe the clinical definition is when the benefits outweigh the negative consequences, but you continue using it anyways.
why would this lead to prosecution by world governments? well, ok, maybe it will for a while, but if the tech really were to take off, it would just end up being taxed in the end anyway. Taxing it isn't harder than taxing cash transfers.

this is all very cryptonomicon to me.
Myths and Misunderstandings of Chromebooks
These are good points. (And indeed, I intended to write 'Firesheep' and not 'Firecookie').
All right, I believe (believe!) I fixed the "401: Unauthorized" error. Would really appreciate it if someone could try again.
Are you saying that you think a court would dismiss a civil suit over a bitcoin transaction, or did you just fail include the scare quotes around "the government"?
Can you try again? I was using an outdated version of an OAuth script.
Don't walk, run.
Abstractions at Scale, Our Experiences at Twitter (presentation by marius)
The fully expanded text is:

Yawning, and smearing my eyes with my fingers, I walked bleary eyed into the kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water from the tap, checking with my hands to make sure it was cold enough (The best tea comes from the coldest water). I glanced outside for a minute at the city mist. I could almost taste the grey. I plugged the kettle in and switched it on. As the kettle began to hiss, I looked for biscuits. Anything above loose crumbs would do. Thankfully I found some fusty digestives. For some reason, biscuits are always nicer when they've gone a bit dry and stale. I took the milk out of the fridge and poured some into a cup that I'd left out from having used earlier. The kettle began grumbling fiercely so I took it from the cord, threw a teabag into my cup and poured boiling water onto it. I watched brown swirls rise up through the muted white of milky water. A few minutes passed. I removed and squeezed the teabag, then flicked it into the bin. I picked up my mug and left the kitchen with a nice, hot cup of strong tea.
Using Backbone.js with Rails 3 (screencast)
I don't think that there's anything strange about posting an article like this. It's clearly not written by him, and most founders are hyper-aware of everything written about them or their competitors.
Will Nintendo's Next Wii Game Console Be the Last of Its Kind?
This reads like it was written by someone who saw the film swordfish and thought it was accurate. I particularly found the breathless 'he could break in to almost any on-line bank at any time' stuff a bit hard to swallow. There was nothing terribly chilling about the story.
Examples of the logo design process
Theocracy?
Thank you for the TLDR. I wondered whether the text would just keep expanding forever... In some ways I am sad that it did not.
Open source it and we can all waste time playing with the code!
A theocracy "by definition" involves God (or, more broadly, a religion). Constitutional monarchies do not, necessarily. Furthermore, at one end of the constitutional monarchy spectrum you have the monarch who is purely figurehead with only ceremonial and/or social responsibilities, and the monarchies with high scores in that list are fairly close to that end of the spectrum. (There are also some monarchies right down in the authoritarian end....)
Sure, if you're running JavaScript on a CPU with a beefy FPU there's no reason now, but you're still going against decades of ingrained behavior and potentially affecting performance on embedded systems.
"Which is why I said about sharing the URL: 'Again, not all cases [should be illegal], but some cases.'"

But if you took the time to properly expand that, you would probably discover that those "some cases" are already illegal. Conspiracy is already illegal. Racketeering is already illegal. A number of other such things are already illegal. If you can't come up with an example of something not already illegal that should be illegal that this law would make illegal, then you're not actually arguing in favor of it.

I'm really unconvinced there's some massive hole in the current system as is. The current legal code is already so massive that the government can pretty much imprison anybody they want for as long as they want. What legit social purpose does this law actually serve?
Don't worry too much. You don't need to get it "right" the first time.

Just create a table as needed for each of your domain entities (eg like Customer, Product, ...) and iterate as necessary until you feel comfortable.
This would be a great way to supplement dense text for comprehension purposes and for learning new vocabulary. Learning moments are different for different people, this makes it one-size-fits-all.
First, your job is 'CEO/Founder' of 'ME Inc' manage and watch your career accordingly. Things you will need to do to advance your career, happiness, and earnings are often not in alignment with what your employer needs. They are not your Mom, and are only thinking of you as a resource or factor of production. Some employers are very thoughtful and truly do watch out for their employees. Many do not. Its not hard to tell the difference between the two groups as the way they do some things is the way they do everything. Things like no equity, no benefits, empty promises, no business exposure do not bode well.

Second, you get what you negotiate. Over time you will learn that you have more control over your 'rate' than you realize (pay, equity, etc), it's based on what you accept, not what you are offered. Also at the early part of your career you need to balance experience and exposure to things you enjoy vs maximizing compensation. Trade cash compensation for exposure, mentoring, and of course equity.

Lastly don't worry about business continuity if you leave, that's not your job, it's the CEO's/CTO's. As long as you are ethical, don't destroy anything, and give two weeks, you are following accepted practices. If tasks take longer than two weeks to transition (not your problem), as your discretion you can make yourself available after two weeks - maybe after hours or on-demand consulting at 3x your current hourly rate:-) They may also make an offer you 'can't refuse' at which point you may be able to negotiate to stay at the pay rate you think is appropriate, and with equity.
I never thought expanding something would be so fun. Brings a new meaning to story telling if you do it right. :)
There were things he could just do that no other kids– let alone adults– could understand.

I don't know if I am just misreading this, but it sounds odd to me (like they are saying the kids would more readily understand it than any adults could).
We all are trapped in "filter bubbles"
I used to use Dvorak at home and QWERTY at work (as to not annoy my co-workers) and switching between them was a non-issue.
For such a law to be operative, you would have to give up the anonymity that bitcoin transactions allow.
That's very true. But at least they won't be in the situation of having their wife look stuff up for them[1]. I don't think it's a far stretch to expect that today's facebook-ites have an intuitive idea of what a 'link' is.

[1] http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/13/john_mccain_tec...
what they market is idealism

I am so going to steal that phrase every chance I get.