skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Direct DB connections vs a web interface
We've developed an app (in C/C++ for specialized non-mainstream devices) and we're going to be moving a lot of data to/from the cloud. We have a SQL server hosting our relational database but are considering talking to this database through a web service. What are the pros/cons of this way of doing things?
Oracle and IBM do have clustered stuff and it's amazing, but it still tends to assume closely linked networks of high-reliability hardware and have trouble with very large, slowly linked networks of low-reliability hardware.

You might find Greenplum and VoltDB to be more interesting models to study.

The key question is: are you aiming at OLTP or OLAP? Because, as those boring mainframe-era guys have discovered, it's difficult to serve two very different purposes.
Would this eliminate the need for SSL caches? [0]

[0] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule
I'm in Canada and will gladly tell you that Fosters is crap here too. :-)
Apparently it's a false rumor. Tweets from Doug Seven (http://twitter.com/#!/dseven):

"The rumors of VB6 going open source are simply not true."

"@beckynagel I'm the Director of Product Management for Visual Studio Tools & Languages. There's no more solid source than me. Its not true."
Are you referring to the article linked here? It doesn't mention censorship once. Which is good since this has nothing to do with censorship, that is my point and why it's a cheap rhetoric trick. And then comparing it to China, well all I can say is, does Godwin's law apply to public statements?
> I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-)

Hah. well, you are the one talking about effort being more important than intelligence. I, on the other hand, have always been lazy. I was in the program through ability alone.[1]

I mean, clearly effort matters. But ability matters, too. Otherwise I'd be working at the 7-11 like my parents said I would if I didn't go to college.[2] Of course, if you can't do anything about innate ability and you can do something about effort, "praise effort not ability" makes sense, as you should try to improve the thing that can be improved, right?

On the other hand, I think effort has limitations, too. As a kid, I was pulled out of the "gifted" class one hour a day to work in the "special ed" room. Handwriting. My stepmother made me spend probably five hours a week practicing my handwriting at home on top of that. To this day I can't write a legible sentence.

I think key is to put effort in to areas where that effort makes a difference. Consume all the low hanging fruit before you start scaling a sequoia looking for pine nuts.

[1] the ability to do well on standardized tests, that is. I've never had to learn to work a cash register, so it's gotta correlate to something useful, but I'm first to say that I'm really not all that bright.

[2] Actually, considering my schedule variance, I wonder if I could hold down a job where the primary performance metric was "did the guy show up on time?"
> What on earth does systemd need that it can't get from solaris/bsd

Poettering.

In the long term this will be a competitive edge for *BSD over Linux.
What the hell, why is my post downvoted? I wrote a very informative post. If someone disagrees with me then come clean and give me a rational reason, not just clicking on the downvote button!

But to answer your question: no, it's not inetd. Inetd is very inefficient in terms of CPU and memory usage and has scalability issues thanks to the fact that it spawns a new process for every client. Systemd does not do that: it waits until someone connects to the socket, then starts the service and have the service handle all clients on the socket. Systemd then waits until the service has exited. The service can use I/O events or threads or whatever efficient mechanism to handle multiple clients on the server socket, all within a single process.

This in itself does not require Linux-specific features. However the GNOME discussion is about depending on systemd which happens to be Linux-specific at the time for other reasons, not about GNOME wanting to be Linux-only (which is sensationalist headline). One of the reasons systemd is Linux-only is because it uses cgroups, which I explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565801
What really surprised me is that VB was only really being actively developed for 7 years - introduced in 1991, VB6 released in 1998. That's pretty incredible considering how widely adopted it was.
I'm in Vancouver too... Stella is the beer that people who drank Corona when they were 19 drink when they are 25.

In other words, it isn't beer.

(Especially here in Vancouver where there are so many outstanding small breweries that everyone should recognize good beer)
(if it applies) you can use a lot of web scaling tricks with a web interface that wouldn't necessarily work connecting directly to a db (ie. put memcached on it, etc.)
$8 for a Stella? Ouch. That said, I paid £4.30 for a Carlsberg Export the other day. Goddamnit Islington Academy :/

And don't knock Stella, it's one of the best of the "mainstream" lagers.
Here's to hoping their version control is secure!
So does many other languages. The VB support of COM is so sweet, although they put a little bit too much magic into binary compatibility.
Virtually all of the people who write GNOME use Linux; why should they spend any effort porting GNOME to a platform they don't use?

If GNOME really wants some fancy Linux feature, they can ask BSD to implement it.

And the BSD developers don't have the manpower to do that.

Is there a history of such requests going unserved?

See Project Utopia, ALSA, DRM, KMS, cgroups, etc.

BSD and Solaris cannot afford to keep up with Linux. They just can't. So the question is whether Linux people should subsidize OSes that they don't use or just let them fail.
Thanks for the expert input. This is exactly why we don't have a SLA at FathomDB, because I don't think that they're worth the paper they're written on. It seems like you almost agree (?)

Most cloud providers (including FathomDB) charge by the hour anyway, so you have termination rights for any reason, and there are no prepayments to refund.

We think that 'doing the right thing' is the only workable policy, and it shouldn't require an outcry from a vocal userbase. We should have handled the outage better, and we're making a big payment to demonstrate that. We're not going to let any new customers use a system where we can't be confident in its uptime (MySQL on AWS); we're building a new system in which we can be confident.
Angry members of generation Y acting like angry members of generation Y?
Speaking of scheduling, the author of systemd suggested something to improve this [1] and if I remember correctly it will be available by default on systems with systemd.

[1] http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kern...
I believe VBA for Excel predated its use within visual studio, if I'm correctly understanding Spolsky's telling of VBA's beginnings.

I cut my teeth on VBA in Excel, and for all of its weaknesses (and the fact that it just. won't. die), it was still a very powerful platform.
While we're on the topic of annoyances that get in the way of worthwhile activities, how about websites that publish interesting articles and then stick eye-catching auto-scrolling displays right next to them? It never ceases to amaze me how rarely it seems to occur to web-based publishers that someone might actually want to read their stuff.

Well, thank goodness for Readable.

Hey, maybe I should patent auto-scrolling ads, and then sue sites like this one. That would be patent trolling with positive social impact as the goal.
Interesting. Are you trying to compete with Slideshare? (I've been wondering for a long time why nobody does.)
Being limited to only one operating system would make it more closed.

P.S. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Open systems are computer systems that provide some combination of interoperability, _portability_, and open software standards." [1]

Also the name GNOME is an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment. It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft's OLE. [2] If GNOME is considered an open system despite working only on Linux, the same could be said about OLE, but I doubt many would agree with this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_%28computing%29

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#Name
Thanks for your input. I'm in favor of the web interface mainly because of this very reason. We're not at the point where this is needed but will soon.
It is like the masters say, there has never been one who has sought and not found.
The talk is very amusing especially the use of Jason Fried in one of the slides.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPG4sK_glls
Ask HN: Am I getting screwed? RSUs in dollars vs shares
I've got an offer for employment from a startup that is issuing restricted stock units in a dollar amount. From the research I've done, they can be expressed in a dollar amount or number of shares with a price. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, accepting dollars vs shares+price seems like an easy way to screw over your employees. Let me illustrate with an example:

Scenario 1:
$10,000 in RSU that vests over 4 years.
At the end of 4 years, I'll have benefitted $10k regardless of how well the company does (assuming it has IPO'ed)

Scenario 2:
1,000 shares of RSUs priced at $10/share that vests over 4 years.
At the end of 4 years I'll have 1,000 shares of public stock regardless of the price (whether it is a penny stock or something like $50/share). Assuming it is $50/share in 4 years, thats $50k (don't know how the original share price works into this formula).

What am I missing? It seems like RSUs in dollar amounts are a bust (almost identical to the cash equivalent) and not tied to how well the company does post-IPO (don't care about the tax implications, I'm sure thats a whole nother topic).

Can anyone shed some light on the dollars vs shares RSU scenarios?
Mayan Calendar - Most Precise Manner Of Time-Keeping
Best case you have to do three RTs for a full SSL handshake (without false start anyway), so a RTT of 300ms will bring you pretty close to that 1000ms. We (github.com) certainly have average 1000ms SSL handshakes in Asia -- we're 5 RTs for an SSL handshake presently. It's extremely annoying.
Port knocking can be automated. Hopefully everyone that needs ssh access is either experienced enough to install the port knocking script themselves, or under IT's supervision so they don't even have to know the port knocking script exists.
OLTP. I personally believe Hadoop has got the OLAP problem-space covered.
Speaking as a "convert"... Apple deserves a union.
Download torrents to the cloud with Fetch.io then stream to your mobile device
The site is great, but ironically a bit slow.
Would this mean a feature freeze on HTML5?
That was for a single day when many users began using the devices for the first time at the same time.

What we're seeing here is a day after day pattern.
"Zombie Apocalypse" campaign crashes website
Google's been doing a lot of work on SSL performance for a while now:

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.ht...

SSL everywhere!
Yes but the cars dont weave enough to actually go on the rubber debris, besides the debris is only that bad on the corners.
US Centre for Disease Control advises public on Zombie Apocalypse Survival Tips
BIOS Protection Guidelines
Most hedge funds use a bank as their primary broker.
It's a browser configuration thing, but I think you're right about the default.

Maybe a more intelligent approach would be to use "don't cache" if the server doesn't specify any caching headers. Otherwise, follow the server's recommendation.
Not really, slideshare has its own market and solve different customer needs.

We do definitely complement what SlideShare offers today.
Sugared LaTeX would be great. Has anyone done this?
Given the context of the paragraph, I think its more likely the author is coming from a PR standpoint. I think they probably meant: the public isn't really behind unions because they've been demonized and are shrinking, and that problem is exacerbated because the economy is stalling.

"It's certainly not an optimum time for unionizing. The economy is stalling, and the percentage of private-industry, non-farm workers belonging to unions was slightly less than 7 percent in 2010 (versus 34 percent in the late 1940s), according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, of course, unions have been demonized ever since the Reagan Administration.

Still, I'm a big believer in the rights of workers to attempt to form unions, so good luck to the folks behind the ARWU. They're going to need it."
Go + AppScale
Apparently Roy Osherove who started this rumor intentionally misquoted MS. Moral of the story... a rumor is not "confirmed" by a tweet from a 3rd party.
One of the problems you will encounter is that web apps don't usually log in as separate database users. Rather, all security is held in the business logic in the web app. How are you going to prevent users from accessing data that they don't have permission to.

In addition, you need to prevent users from updating data without permission, or breaking your database consistency.

Usually, it is safer to put the db access code as business logic on the server instead of the client. It is roughly the same amount of code, but you don't have to worry about out of date clients etc.
Foster's is fine in India. Not one of the best brands, but it sure is good enough.
Gilt Taste a online purveyor of seafood some believe best eaten here
Good on them. I think the demonising of unions has been one of the stupidest things to come out of the neo-liberal era.

EDIT: Knew I'd get downvoted. Seriously though, why is it a bad thing for employees to bargain collectively in order to get the best deal? To me it just demonstrates the market working. i.e. people achieving "economies of scale" (to bastardise the term) in negotiations with powerful employers.
Certainly it is possible to engineer a hot standby solution for MySQL databases using DRBD, or synchronous replication etc. There's a choice between engineering an endless series of fixes like that, or re-examining the problem space and building a new database. After years of doing the former, we chose to examine the latter, and we're seeing good indications from that approach.
After Johnny Mnemonic, I'm kinda shocked that he'd allow this. Granted film effects have come a long way, but it'll take a hell of a screen writer and director to bring that to the screen.

Edit: Guess the point is, even if it is really good, I'm not sure it could live up to expectations.
Note to self: must blog more :-)
You're assuming that there are enough buyers at $80 to take 100% of the offered stock.
What are your most important non-functional requirements?

In particular, how do you see the tradeoff between durability and performance?
As an indie musician I've found that a lot of the skills I developed over the years in rehearsing, getting ready to record, deciding which songs were best for the recording (your product) and promoting shows through any outlet available have proved invaluable in building my startup.
Or learn how to homebrew.
Not directly related to this, but I made my first ever visit to an Apple Store last Sunday.

For some reason I was expecting a quiet boutique shop, but ended up wading through a sea of people. The vast majority were waiting around to fidget with demo units and kill time, while the few store employees were literally working non-stop.

I'm not a crowd person, just walking around for a few minutes was stressful enough for me - I can't even imagine what it's like to actually work there all day while wearing a smile.
Its not something that could be changed from the current "default" without high risk of big impact.

There would be need to introduce a new header to trigger SSL based caching, and migrate towards simply not sending the old/normal cache header.
Paralysed baseball star steps into medical history
> Let me elaborate. Good Programmers write Portable Code.

Lets not forget, the programmer in question we are talking about here is the author of the 'masterpiece' that is PulseAudio.
Service Pack 6 for VB6 was release in 2004. Not exactly active development, but it wasn't abandoned until around then.
I agree that it reads poorly. If I was a tinier bit more motivated to finish my HN session more quickly, I would've assumed that FathomDB did lose some of their customers' data. That's what I thought when I read the headline, and only when I started reading the article did I see that they didn't lose any of their customers' data.
> I'm not sure it could live up to expectations.

Oh, it's almost guaranteed not to. But who cares? Even if it's only half as good as the book, it'll be a great movie, particularly when you compare it to the bilge that permeates cinemas these days.
Pandoc is a great swiss army chainsaw for this sort of thing - I use it for Markdown into LaTeX (then PDF) and to ePub

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
RIAA v. the cloud: Box.net faces subpoena over prerelease music
On top of that, can you imagine how tiresome the repeated "what a Matrix rip-off" claims are going to be?
You can see the direct result of that: lots of ajax'y functionality, and the reduction of full page refreshes.
Glad to see somebody finally put to words what's been knocking around my head for quite some time now. Although it's not a state that's exclusive to either musicians or entrepreneurs (as others in this thread have noted), I think it's an analogy that seems to resonate more deeply with people in general. I know I've seen it mentioned here that startups are the new 'rock bands' (in the sense that success/fame-thirsty people are now forming companies instead of bands to fulfill their dreams), and that's a comparison that everyone understands, because who hasn't fantasized about being in a wildly famous rock band at one point?

In fact, I'm not sure why this is even an analogy; in my mind, musicians ARE entrepreneurs. I'm currently in the process of recording my first album as a solo musician, and founding a music related startup at the same time (http://www.tabrat.com/), and can already see the similarity of the hurdles I will have to face on both frontiers. I would imagine this connection to be painfully obvious to any musician working on a startup though. To elaborate on this perspective, you could say record labels are analogous to investors in the startup world (major labels being like larger VCs, and independent labels being like Angels), where they could potentially approach you, but most likely you'll end up pitching your product/music to a lot of them with marginal success, if not deciding to just completely bootstrap as an 'indie' artist. And there are plenty more 'connections' like that to be made, so I really think musicians are a subset of entrepreneurs, not just merely their analogs.
And conclusion : turn off the network as well. You never know.
Can you name a webframework or database?

There's many benchmarks available (I'm not familiar with Python):

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/benchmark.html

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/profiling.html
Not everyone lives within a few hundred miles of the web server they're using.
You're being downvoted for redefining "open", which in this case is understood to mean open source. http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
Ad hominem is not a good counter argument. I haven't had as bad of an experience with PulseAudio as apparently many other people do but surely he has learned from whatever mistakes he made. Surely you weren't a rock star programmer the day you were born?
the ssl handshake latency isn't why sysadmins don't want to implement everything over https. the reason (or at least 5 years ago when sysadmin was my primary role) is because the additional cpu power it takes to encrypt all the data is huge.
Will LinkedIn’s IPO Create Secondary-Market Hysteria?
Tiger doesn't seems ready yet.

"This same tool has now been resurrected and there is ongoing development in order to make it useful for newer versions of the UNIX operating systems it supported."
I have misgivings because you are not the first to try and re-examine the problem space. A lot of the endless series of fixes have arisen from just such attempts.

I want you to succeed, but you're dealing with seriously hairy deep magic issues that the best minds in the industry and academia have been chipping away at for decades.
I've only seen the clouds in Hefeweizen. But you can leave the yeast in in any beer.
Question 2 is unanswerable. I think you've made a mistake.
Have you ever lost your photos or videos?
How a Seattle Startup Failed
Can you actually tell us a bit about the new DB you're building? (What is it designed to run on, what kind of failures are you aiming to tolerate, and so on.)
That's not really true now. CPUs have gotten faster, the speed of light has remained the same, and actually with users on crappy wireless/cell connections (and, increasingly, international), network latency is even more of an issue now.
Sad. My wife visited the office during a brief stint consulting for MS last year. She said the space was beautiful and the people and environment were vibrant and exciting.

It looked like a new hope for MS, a fresh division with new blood, and set apart from the corporate politicking, introducing new ideas like Courier and Kin[1]. Instead, it looks like the ultimate confirmation of how bad it really is there.

[1]: I think Kin was more a failure of marketing and market execution than of product design. It could've done fine as a low-end teen-targeted phone with a cheaper data plan, and maybe a bit more attention to the software.
FWIW, you've cut yourself out of 1/3 of the available market in the meantime: http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php
You've totally hit the nail on the head there. Up until a month ago, it was a fairly obsessive compulsion around performance. Durability and reliability are features of the design, so it was about getting performance under the design.

However, the AWS outage has (we hope) put reliability back on the map. So maybe now we don't have to be the fastest database, if we're the fastest reliable database. That's a liberating change of perspective, which has been behind many of the recent advances.
Sensationalistic headline.
In addition to that, take what Ed Bott is saying with a boulder of salt. After all Bott makes his living covering Microsoft.
"Proprietary crapware." Yeah, that's the sign of a really well-balanced, competent developer.
don't underestimate how involved in all parts of the linux stack gnome developers are.
While I agree with the sentiment, unions breed enormous inefficiencies -- modern unions are worthy of scorn.

I'm not convinced that there's anything a union does that a co-operative corporation couldn't do better. Instead of battering your head against Management, you can align your interests with Management.

See also:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
Does this quickly bounced traffic on port 22 affect that much the server ?
Structuring Large-Scale SproutCore Project Teams