skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish the homeowner had been allowed to seize and keep the cash from their bank.
Solr can be run without a schema quite easily, or use the very common trope of the dynamicField typed schema (string_, text_, int_ or whatever)

We're using solr dynamic fields in our current implementation of ThriftDB. ThriftDB adds a layer on top though so you can change attribute names on the fly.

This is true at real scale (EN has 500m docs in our bigger solrs and we have to back it w/ TT) but for 15m docs, no way. Stored data in lucene/solr is certainly fast enough at that level. Think <50ms including data even on AWS.

In our experience, stored data in lucene/solr doesn't scale well.

This I don't get. Surely you have a web app layer that talks to your services? That is, you don't have a text field in HTML hitting solr on port 8983, you call your web app's search which then hits solr's HTTP API?

It sound like we're saying the same thing. If you use solr you're responsible for the web app layer. With ThriftDB you get a JSON REST API out of the box for every collection you create.
Being denied entry is enough to be excluded from the Visa Weaver program. He needs to get at a minimum a 6 month multiple entry tourist visa in order to enter the U.S. now. They will still take him for extra questioning each time he enters. It will take hours each time.
> when SF had essentially a monopoly on open source project storage, they chose to milk it and rest on their laurels rather than improve themselves

Exactly. They are, like it or not, the Internet Explorer 6 of the open source hosting world.
I did a 6 month internship in the US (with a Visa) and arrived at Philadelphia airport without the letter from my internship place detailing what I was going to do: the US Embassy in The Netherlands had it, I only had one copy of said letter.

After explaining my story, what I was going to do where, how long I was to stay, which loophole I exploited (volunteers for religious non-profits get a B1 visa), who was going to pay (my parents) and what their occupations were, and that the non-profit was not paying me in any way I was free to go. Easy if you ask me: that could've been quite a struggle to get myself out of that one.
Contents pasted here for convenience with clickable links:

--

It's a bittersweet situation as we rejoice pg adding a search bar to Hacker News [1] while mourning the sudden loss of SearchYC [2].

One service SearchYC provided that remains a need unfulfilled even with the new feature is search for Arc Forum, pg’s other news.arc forum [3]. This had been an extremely valuable resource to the Arc language community as SearchYC had been to the Hacker News community. It kept the old gem posts and comments which tend to get buried in the forum accessible to new readers.

How can we address the problem of lost search to Arc Forum and the other Hacker News sister forums in the wake of SearchYC’s shutdown?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605959

[3] http://arclanguage.org/forum

--

I think UseTheSource (yet another news.arc forum) had built-in search, but they're no longer operating either. From http://usethesource.com/ : "UseTheSource has been shutdown. It wasn't getting enough traffic to justify fighting the spammers." :(
Castle.so - Seeking consultants. Remote is fine - although we're based in London, so would be nice to say hello properly!

We're a boutique file hosting site, just under a month old with hundreds of thousands of hits and terabytes of data. Please note we are NOT a syncing platform like Dropbox or Box.net - that is not what we do. We are a means to get a file from point A to point B. We try to make the process simple and beautiful.

Looking for anyone who has experience within this domain as we really want to ramp up over the summer with more 'pro' and even enterprise solutions.

If you can help please hit us up at hey@castle.so

Thanks!
I have no problem with hellbanning and am particularly glad to have 'pg and the HN illuminati managing it without community input. It's kind of horrifying to think about the level of drama that would come with transparency and "accountability" over who's hellbanned.

We have no inherent right to participate here.

There is, I think, a large extent to which this community survives because it's not an open, transparent democracy.
I never thought of that, very good idea and I'll give this some testing. Thanks for the feedback!
Now is the best time ever to be a security consultant.

Also, if there were a time that consumers learned to be wary of the information they hand out in public or private and how they protected it, now is the time.

If LastPass has an affiliate service, it's quite possible that some quick bucks could be made from this.
disclaimer: this is shameless self promotion for something i coded some time ago

well, is somebody hacks up something nice via node.js why not transform the whole hnsearch api into a nice npm package using

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker

basically you put some nice URLs in -> magic -> a wrapped API comes out.
There are two types of languages,
the ones everyone complains about,
and the ones nobody uses.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup
Frama-C Software Analyzers
Mono doesn't get close to .NET, even in versions and in implemented functionality, there's always missing something. Writing a serious web application in asp.net is not the same as writing a serious web application in mono.
I really dread what is going to happen, by the time Anonymous or someone else start setting their sights in Israel/Palestine. It can only be a matter of time before it happens.
For now, don't worry about rate limits.
Because there's a difference in purposely defrauding someone and unknowingly defrauding someone. Wallstreet kept just as much bad loans and dumb derivatives deals on their books that one was liquidated, several were taken over and some others had to change business models.
Both of my parents are physicians (pathologists). What you're saying isn't true at all -- they do diagnostic medicine all the time. This is in every way scientific. At the moment they're both doing research, but previously my mother was in private practice.
Spolsky's response to that was, to me, so authoritative that I found myself physically nodding my head. I am not always nice, but I find it hard to argue about the value of that norm. So I read your comment as a bit of a "thrown elbow". What you call "non-transparent heavy handedness", I think many reasonable people could call "active nurturing and cultivation of a functioning community". You don't have to like that community. Start your own.
Does this work?
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Saying this is the "only" EMSCAscript compatible c++ scripting language seems a rather debatable claim

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QtScript

Obviously, Qt script is designed for c++ plus Qt whereas this is designed for c++ plus Boost. I personally think Boost is over-complicated ridiculousness but maybe that's just me. Still, there is at least one alternative to Chaiscript, if not more.
Damnit, here I was, having completely forgotten about the fictitious horrors of Moregellons Disease, and now you had to remind me. For a fake disease, that shit still creeps me the fuck out.
I would be interested in knowing if the entity being foreclosed upon has the right to terminate the foreclosure by paying immediately. If not, I too would be sorely tempted to say "Sorry, too late for that now" and proceed with the foreclosure, selling off the assets at auction to recover costs.
I don't think it's ironic. C# directly addresses many of my concerns with Java.

C# does away with a lot of the boilerplate code necessary in Java (i.e. type inferencing, concise lambdas with true closure instead of anonymous single method classes, yield return for lazy enumerables). By baking this syntax sugar into the language, it removes the need for all of the enterprisey patterns needed in Java to accomplish the same things.
Browser notification when someone comments on your post. Would that be useful?
Why is it passive-aggressive? I see people here talking as if it was the responsibility of the community to engage with and resolve the problems of challenging and unproductive members. How many hours in the day are there? Why is it our expectation that everyone is owed attention, forbearance, and even satisfaction? These aren't social services we're talking about. There's no "due process" clause.

Is the problem that the community isn't telling the problem person that they're banned? There's a reason they don't: because by and large, when you tell someone they've been banned, they react (particularly in the heat of the moment) by throwing a temper tantrum with a new account. Again: why is it the obligation of the community to absorb that kind of abuse?
I agree with everything you say, but still believe that these sites are markets for lemons. The information asymmetries are still severe enough to compromise the overall utility of the market. (If they weren't, this thread would not exist.)
You seem to be reading an undertone into my comment that simply wasn't there.
This is a wonderful gain in functionality. Any chance pg and Octopart can implement search for pg's other forum? (Relevant HN thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297 .)
Why not model it after the submission page (submit or upvote)?
Very interesting! I'm up for H1B renewal in 2012, it might make sense for me to wait for that to get processed and then I can move the sponsorship from my current company to the startup.
Well, no offense but anecdotal evidence does not a large dataset make. I personally have the opposite experience. Since my parents are physicians I've grown up in and around hospitals all my life and met probably hundreds of physicians. In talking with them and talking with my parents about them I've found maybe two dozen that are either unscientific or incompetent. I completely agree that ~20% is way too high, but insulting all doctors based on your knowledge of maybe 3 or 4 of them is like saying all computer scientists are unscientific (although many are) just because you had a ten minute chat with three or four bottom-level PHP programmers.
"Hopefully it's just a coincidence" that SearchYC lost its Comcast connectivity right before Paul Graham announced HNSearch. No. I don't think I misread the undertone.

Regardless, we don't need to beat this to death. Have a good weekend.
This sounds like redirection to me.

I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter).

Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change.

you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations.

I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.
Frankly, you haven't received the money until the check has cleared. You would have been well within your right. Not petty at all.
I always have the option of going back to the EU and working from there, but as you can understand, most of us would rather be in the country where the majority of the company will be located.

Can you expand on the concept of a country being business-friendly? Wouldn't I be able to work for an American company anywhere in the world, or would my country of residence be able to restrict that?
Those apple fans are susceptible to us-vs-them marketing. But we're not. We're better.
Indeed. I implemented a linked list in C the other day, and it's the most fun I've had programming in years.

as an aside, I feel old being able to talk about having programmed for years.
> They are every bit as meretricious and dedicated to building defect-free systems as engineers in any other discipline.

I think you may have meant "meticulous."

Meretricious: 1. alluring by a show of flashy or vulgar attractions; tawdry. 2. based on pretense, deception, or insincerity. 3. pertaining to or characteristic of a prostitute. [1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meretricious
I think to a certain extent that shows the problems with the 7-day-a-week mentality for anyone who is working on product direction, marketing, etc. If I've got someone working on keeping my servers up, or doing deep parallel algorithms work to solve a specific problem my company has, I want the person who has the tunnel vision required to focus for 14 hours.

But if I've got someone deciding which specific problems are most worthy of concern, I want someone who is going home at night and on the weekends and living life. Working on one thing for most of your waking hours makes it really difficult to understand how that thing is useful outside of your domain.
Jesus, you can't make an intelligent reference here without some judgemental unread dufus voting you down. This isn't the first time--I've had enough of this HN.
This post inspired me to try and create the mixin pattern in C# with interfaces, extension methods, and optional generics. Probably been done before, but meh, here's the result: http://pastebin.com/ZiddNDSi
8500 Startups vs Skype
All of the above, plus building an online presence in your area of choice. It is both a good way to make weak ties that turn into strong ties, and a good way for folks to find you when you're not actively networking.

Blogging and community participation (HN, etc) is my best source of consulting leads next to personal recommendations (and it is often a friendcatcher which caught the person doing the recommending).
Can we please not have spam from pyramid schemes on HN?
That's weird because a lack of SoC is probably my biggest pet peeve with 99% of the Ruby code available, including the Rails source.

Other than that, sure RoR can be a nice introduction to MVC. But Monorail was a much cleaner framework from an OOAD perspective. I won't even append "IMO" to that. :-)
Share it all under an umbrella LLC, if something starts getting big, hire a good lawyer.
E-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com with an example of your work. I know of a FT design/FED job that just opened up.
This one is interesting though.
Syrian government unplugs Internet for much of country
Do you have a guess for what "business activity" means and where you draw the line? And yes, YANAL.

Great link by the way, thanks. This guy has to jump through so many hoops just to stay in here, and seems like he was always a couple of weeks away from being kicked out.
<IANAL> so I would start by suggesting speaking with one.

But generally, when there is liability it makes sense to shield your assets, and therefore it makes sense to operate each asset within it's own LLC. Depending on the laws of your state, another LLC can own a portion of a second LLC, i.e. you might set up a holding entity to own the other entities. Keep in mind that there is some case law that an LLC with only one member may pass through liability </IANAL>

My observation over the years has been that setting up and running multiple entities is something many successful business people do without hesitation. Typically they use accountants to handle the messy details and bookkeepers to track them.
The point of the article - that kids have a bullshit detector - reminds me of a great article in The Age that I read years ago.

The writer was given a hard time for bullshitting his young nephew and his response was that "It's important to bullshit kids, so that they don't grow up trusting adults". He maintained that you had to tell kids stuff they would find out later was fake, so that they developed scepticism. Otherwise, they would swallow adult dogma as fact.

He was honest with kids once they pushed past the first barrier (Uncle Joe, you say you landed on the moon, but I checked and you are aren't on the list) and he said that was his duty to teach them to not accept things at face value, no matter what the authoritative source.
The fine structure constant is not axiomatic; its value and its contantness are experimentally testable.

Axioms are not "fine" in math or science except under very specific circumstances.
Great point. I'd have to find someone who's had tons of experience with both corporate and immigration law.
Steve Pavlina has one essay, in particular, which changed the way I thought about my business and directly contributed to my later success. (The five-second version: improvements in your funnel are multiplicatively effective. Does that sound obvious? It wasn't obvious to me, and it set me down the road of A/B testing and other hillclimbing, and I climbed my way right out of my day job.)

Yes, he later went seven flavors of kooky... but no amount of kooky retroactively disproves good ideas. That's also a level of discourse which I'd prefer to avoid on HN.
I've thought of the same thing. Thousands of "small" investments. Get 8500 tiny teams working on 8500 projects in a single building.

That'd be awesome!
I think it was nice they removed the TS 2008 because the story is not related to TS as much as the founder himself. This shows that YC does not want people to talk negatively about their competitors.

At the same time I do not think just because this is a site ran by YC that we should not have titles with TS in them. You could promote TS companies here all day, it will not make a difference for YC.
I generally am not concerned with who said what but whole "wind-up" of OP kind of hinged on this "1-7-8" conceit and Steve Pavlina as the authority documenting it.
برنامج avast 5 Professional Edition للحماية من الفيروسات -
I turned this into a shell script. It works on a fresh Ubuntu Natty install. https://gist.github.com/1007940
Consider the fact that the only real enforcement of immigration laws happens at the borders here. Once you're in the country, people have (and still) overstay their visas for years at a time. It's very common and one of the most abused rules here.

It's so abused that there was literally an effort (to amend our Constitution) to deny citizenship to children born here from parents who were in the country illegally.

Skilled/unskilled migration/employment is a touchy topic here because many citizens feel like corporations and immigrants conspire to avoid the US employment laws.

I'm not saying it's right; that's just how things are here.

I used to work in London and did so via a student work exchange program. The visa/permit was limited to 6 months and I had to leave at the end, which I did. You may not agree with the laws of the country that you are heading to but you really cant fault them for enforcement. Given that a staggering amount of business is done with the US by foreign visitors it can't be /that/ much of a hassle.
Simulating visual artifacts with Fourier optics
That would make Michael Orias of Oakland, CA a very happy man.
A lot of immigration proceedings depends solely on the mood of the officer.

Consider yourself lucky, I can assure you that telecommuting is a violation of the VWP terms (you are producing work while staying in the US)
How about a ban that progressively hides the account from high karma users. In the first circle of hell, only 10k+ don't see the banned, second circle 5k+, etc
I'm not really a web/php programmer, but my (humble) experience really was like the cliche -- the limiting factor was the db and not the scripting language.

(I'm right now relearning css, javascript, dom etc. The present place is getting to be a bit non-challenging and boring. And I promised myself I'd work hard to do interesting things the rest of my life.)

Edit: I might add my 2c. I have no problem with Java, really. It is like a simplified C++. It is just boring.
OK, thanks I think I get what thriftDB is a little better. It's hosted (only) -- so instead of booting a solr on your own boxes, you just hit api.thriftdb.com to create indexes, add data and do queries. So thus my "API" confusion -- I was assuming this was software I run on my own box and I don't know what I would get from the API that I wouldn't get hitting solr direct. But a turnkey search service is a nice idea.

But do you guys have a lot of experience with solr / lucene scaling (I mean well beyond the 15m docs octopart has)? What happens when an API customer starts ingesting >100m docs? And then 10 do it at once? Are the indexes on different boxes? Are you on AWS? What's the disk backing it? Does each index fit in RAM? Does the user have any control over caches, tokenizers, stemming, triefields? Like... when I add a date, you're not indexing it with millisecond accuracy, are you?

After EN gets bought on accident by the norwegian fish cannery I plan to retire on giving speeches of 5 years of Solr scaling woes. Unless Otis G is running it there's no way I would trust a hosted solr solution that I didn't have full control over.
I agree with noonespecial about the technician statement, but sense that you regard that as an insult. Every good technician I know has an great understanding about the "item" they work on. I have a lot of respect for good technicians of all stripes. Doctors don't build new people, they repair, maintain, treat, and fix them.

As to a doctor being "done". Yeah, I have heard that in government provided (USA) health care settings. It happens, and it gets much worse the later in the budget year your are ("Don't get sick after June").
I think the difference here is that Sneider is in Colombia, where the article states that the average annual salary is only $8500. It does not mention what the expected salary for a nurse would be, so it is not clear how good or bad of a deal he is getting. Either way, if he graduates, he will be in much better shape still than if he were not able to go at all, which seems to be the alternative in this case.

As the article mentions, this kind of aid is aimed towards people who have no other options, particularly in countries such as Colombia where federal aid and grants are more scarce.
I'll save you guys some time. The answer is "Because you might one day want that data."

... Duh.

He completely neglects all the positives gained from looking to the future, instead of at the past. He doesn't even try to address any of them.
All I have to say after being almost in the same situation with my family is

Fuck YA! Sweet Justice.
Maybe it was a cashiers check, which gives you a bit more assurance.
It sounds like from the article this was a compromise negotiated at the last minute by the bank manager with the deputies. Personally, I would have made them carry out the court order to the letter of the law. Fuck 'em.