skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take this as uninformed speculation (read: I'm not willing to spend the 6 hours pulling together the citations I need for this argument), but it seems to me that some of this bubble is a response to current investing conditions.

Everyone is concerned that we're moving into a second dip, possibly worldwide depression. With the problems with the Euro, Europe isn't an appealing place to invest. the BRIC countries are often risky investments due to government interference, and would be hit extremely hard with a worldwide depression. The American stock market is volatile, and seems maxed out right now.

Yet people are worried about gold and other inflation hedges as well. It has exploded, but is risky as a primary investment vehicle. Real Estate is a bad hedge because its values are still above what seems to be market value. Bonds aren't safe if there are a series of defaults.

Thus, there are no "safe" vehicles for money. However, these social tech companies grew in a recession, so seem less risky than their objective risk profiles would indicate. The bubble, then, may be relative to other investments, not because of their own inherent value.

In short, when safe (relatively) investments look risky, risky investments look less risky in comparison.
You can prevent it from rolling by just sticking something out of the cylinder.
Anyone out there who can apply kirchoff's rules and find the current & voltage?
Setup is a breeze. Launching a new instance takes 10-15 minutes, and from there it's well, the same old story of installing recent OS updates and your own stuff.

I split this in two parts - "provisioning", that is installing generic stuff (IIS, SQL Server, python for scripts etc), and "setup", that is installing my own databases, scripts, and ASP.NET apps.

So, I have created an instance, did "provisioning" on it, and then created a "pre-canned provisioned image". Now I can create as many EC2 instances from it as I need, and only thing that is left is deploying my own stuff - that takes one-click and however many minutes it takes to copy the data. Actually, the data does not always have to be copied - if you are tearing down old machine you simply reattach the EBS volume and it takes zero seconds. If you are creating a copy of older production machine, you can create an EBS volume from a production snapshot, but that volume is available immediately, populated from the snapshot in the background, prioritizing parts of the volume you're trying to access. Hence the volume is immediately online, but is very slow at first.

Re cost, please have a look at this blog post of mine, in particular the TCO columns of the spreadsheet:

http://blog.altudov.com/2010/11/03/amazon-ec2-reserved-insta...
I am still wondering why there is no explanation for this. It's been a couple months since it left the market.
From the referenced article:

Can the complex branches of C be condensed into a series
of objects which can be strung together using natural
language? I think so, but for the moment it’s far beyond
my ability.

There we have someone who doesn't understand how hard things really are saying: "How hard can it be?"

It's almost like he thinks people aren't working on these things.
But then it's already sorted...
As a Vim user, I lol'd (and upvoted you).
Oh, this article is about Groupon and Livingsocial.

I thought it was going to be about DealNews et al.
Every major announcement Nintendo makes is met with this type of cynicism. The truth is that Nintendo is the only company who has the balls to try something new, and is willing to fail in order to bring gamers fun new experiences they couldn't have before. The fact that the Wii caused the competitors to react by incorporating motion controls into their games makes it pretty clear that we should expect to hear about Sony and Microsoft's amazing new touch-screen based controllers sometime in 2014.
Cracking the Q.R. Code
By not using them
This has to be one of the biggest misconceptions about Clojure. Clojure is first and foremost about managing state - the concurrency benefits fall out of that. Most software could benefit from managed state.

EDIT: though I don't agree with your viewpoint (why limit state management to your db and webserver, don't you want the same guarantees for your app logic as well?), I did not downvote you.
You are seriously conflating "social anxiety disorder" and "introversion."

This is actually LOL because when Jung coined the terms, he meant them to refer to ones relationship with the outside world. A person who explores the world alone is an extrovert, because he looks at the world outside himself. A person who is always surrounded by friends but always worries what they think is an introvert; he's looking inwards.
Welcome to Libertopia. If the government can't tax a property, then the government can't protect it either. There is a reason why we invented and continue to use this whole coercive government thing...
Scala Quickstart for Oracle DBAs
Sometimes 'good enough' really is good enough.

For christ's sake, there's a zillion ways to mitigate ORM related performance hits. One of those zillion is 'stop using an ORM' but it's not likely to be your first choice.
And Adobe's
Tools written "for other people" are almost universally terrible. The only language I can think of that was successfully made to be "easy" is LOGO.
Samsung is combining the true openness of Android with Apple-grade hardware, and keeping it affordable. No one else can compete currently at this level.

The Software Advantage:

Samsung sent a Galaxy S II and sources to the CyanogenMod developers. They are learning very fast -- the home mod community made very significant improvements to the original Galaxy S, and in direct contrast to Apple (and Apple's hate-and-steal technique of 'innovation': denying feature importance and then stealing said feature from jailbreak devs), Samsung is involving those talented devs directly, at practically no cost to Samsung.

With this move they have cemented sales among several thousand android devs/enthusiasts -- a small percentage of total sales, but more importantly Samsung is gaining invaluable software improvements and beta testers at the cost of a device or two. It also means they're avoiding the bad press that many Android handset manufacturers (HTC, Motorola in particular) have gotten in the past for staying locked-down and not releasing sources.

The Hardware Advantage

There is a very important detail the article skims over:

"We’ll bring the chips, thank you. Unlike Nokia, Samsung
designs its own smartphone processors, just as Apple began
to do with the A4 chip it brought to the iPhone 3GS."

Samsung manufactures that A4 iPhone core chip and the Galaxy's Cortex-A8 is its brother. If anything, the A4 is a stripped-down version of Samsung's S5 [1]. Samsung again gets to learn and implement tech improvements (this time from Apple) at little or no cost. The Galaxy Tab shares tech with the iPad, and the Series 9 (Macbook Air competitor) mentioned in another comment here [2] is the next example.

Also not mentioned is the breadth of Samsung's display advantages. Now that the screen is the most obvious selling (or dick-measuring) point for smartphones, imho their AMOLED is the one to beat. They have such a long advantage in this field [3] it is almost impossible for competitors to compete on price for display tech.

They have solid worldwide distribution and can basically sell the same handset in every market. My hope right now is this continues as long as possible! I'm already lamenting the sale of Samsung's HDD division to Seagate.

[1] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4200451/Apple-s-A4-d...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2656958

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_light-emitting_diode#Sa...
I don't like this question. Comparison- or value-based? Worst in the average or the best case? What's to stop me from mapping the inputs into, say, busy beaver space?
Unfortunately yes. It was 9350 lines of string concatenation that called sp_executesql at the end (T-SQL/SQL2005). I had to remove all the injection attacks...
I'm guessing the former as I've never heard of the latter.

Is it time for a Central Registry for TLA's? (CRT! Damn. It's taken...)
Women 2.0 x Startup Quote: Rebecca Woodcock, co-founder, Cake Health
Is someone making a remake of the film Hackers?
DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
Good observation. Anyone writing a blog article on ORM should probably read the c2 wiki entry with the huge feature comparison chart of ORMs first.
Google live streams lunar eclipse
We replaced 15,000-odd stored procedures with NHibernate. It's the same turd in a different coat.
Instead of the "War Between the 'Verts", it would be useful to hear some comments about successfully interfacing with the other type. Seems to me the two types complement each other well in business as long as there is mutual respect.
As Microsoft's monopoly crumbles, its mobile future is crucial
Wrongful Convictions: How many innocent Americans are behind bars?
Finding out about the competition was the best thing to happen to us since it forced us to lean forward, accelerating our launch.

- Rebecca Woodcock (@rebeccawoodcock)

http://startupquote.com/post/6561670722
That's awesome. Balsamiq with YNAB are the only applications I use (that requiere Adobe Air that is).
I don't think so. Clojure is about using more verbs and less nouns (that store state). It's designed to manage LESS state, if any at all.
Why does your copyright say 2010?
I agree with you about planning, but "test driven development" isn't haphazard; it's not just clicking around to see what happens. It's a way of formally specifying your design that simultaneously confirms that your code does what it should.

For instance, you write a test that says the user should get a "not authorized" if they try to access another user's account. You run the test, and it fails. You change your code to make it pass. And every time you update your app from then on, you re-run the test and make sure you didn't make that test fail.

Having a design on paper isn't as useful as having one that you can PROVE your code conforms to.
While we may drink less the beer and wines we drink are twice as strong.
Another problem is 80legs will only crawl pages <100kb with the free/contest plan. This means it is useless for all but the smallest pages.
Great to see they're still hard.
I think a lot of the difference ends up being more a matter of expressiveness than speed of simple operations. I'm pretty good in vim, but if I wanted to highlight some arbitrary region of text I'm pretty sure I'd be faster at using the mouse than I would with normal vim navigation.

However, I almost never want to highlight an arbitrary region, but instead a sentence, a paragraph, a line, the text in some quotes, the text until the next semi-colon, or something similar. And vi gives me easily expressed intrinsics to do all of those very quickly.

On the other hand, I can use a mouse just fine with a soda or cup of tea in my other hand, something I can't do with a keyboard. :)
Have you seen a Spring/Hibernate Java app go pop on top of Glassfish? The STACK TRACE takes more memory than the address space of a 8-bit processor.

That's TOO MUCH abstraction demonstrated.
You might find you're interested in this article called "Geographic Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits"
http://www.toddkshackelford.com/downloads/Schmitt-JCCP-2007....

It's a scientific paper so the reading is going to be 'heavy' but if you skip down to page 198 (it's out of a larger journal, actually closer to about 5 or 10 pages in) you'll see that they graph some of the major traits.

- East Asians are generally introverted while everyone else is pretty much 'flat'

- East Asia is also the least "Agreeable" while Africa is the most.

- EA is the least Consientious, while Africa is the most.

- South America is the most open to new experiences while East Asia is the most conservative and resistant to change.

- EA is the most Neurotic, while Africa is the least.

It's possible that the outstanding nature of the results indicate that something might have been lost in translation when adapting the test to the East Asian market - but who knows? These things are usually quite heavily tested.

I'm sure there's a lot more in there that's neat in there, but I only did a quick glance.

For a more 'high level' explanation of what the aspects of the big five are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits is a fine overview, and you can actually do your very own personality inventory online http://www.personalitytest.org.uk/ seems good with a 41 item test, but you can also try some larger ones out there - I've done some 100 item tests online.
In high quality RDBMSes like Oracle and SQL Server, there is not a whole lot you can do to tune your queries and the majority of your bottleneck is likely to be in how you are using your data. If you have inefficiencies, you either have a poorly designed schema or out of date statistics/indices.

The story is slightly different for open source RDBMSes which have inferior cost-based optimizers and multi-version concurrency control implementations that fail on a wider range of corner cases like:

select count(*) from Billing_And_Accounts_Receivable.Transaction

which is slow in PostgreSQL for reasons I'd rather not take the time to teach about here.
I'm English, yes.
This is hilarious. I particularly would like to attend the eating swords and watering fake plants.
It looks like someone's private blog. Nowhere does it say anything about MSDN. In the subtitle it says the author works for MS. The article itself does not state the technology limitations at all but does call it "heterogeneous", which is misleading.
Their whole argument seems to be about the use of simple hotkeys (cmd-p) vs menu items (File->Print).

Text editors are a completely different application of the same input devices. I also think that studying the efficiency and speed of typing complex text is much harder than measuring the speed at which a user can activate a simple command.
Are you just looking for a way to measure? A couple ideas:

Printable coupons redeemable only in-store

Promo code that people say at the register

Reply cards that ask how did you hear about us
How the Daily Deals Business Actually Works
the generation's top titles either pass you buy

Or get better editing.
Phone names are getting confusing. I have a Nexus S 4G, which is significantly inferior to this Nexus 4G. O_o
That was written in Mail on an iPad using an Apple bluetooth keyboard, then emailed to posterous.com. This is the reason for the horrible line breaks, but I left things that way deliberately. Certain "simplistic" tools force me to concentrate on writing and not on formatting, and that helps me write more often. I'm a big fan of markdown for this reason, and tools like Github, Byword, or Textastic that embrace markdown are my preference.

But I usually write essays using TextMate or Byword on an iMac. I sometimes use Mail on a Mac, but the formatting when it reaches posterous.com is nicer.
"The whole point of an abstraction is that it is supposed to simplify"

No, it's supposed to abstract. A simplification is supposed to simplify. Often abstractions have the benefit of simplification, but it's not a requirement.

I migrated a project from MySQL to PostgreSQL last summer, and the project was built on Grails with GORM. I had to migrate the data by hand (mostly easy, save for a couple of edge cases like boolean columns), and I had to change the jdbc driver. That was pretty much it. No rewriting of SQL, no changing of escaping logic, etc. I tell a lie - the auto-sequence generation stuff of postgresql wasn't playing nice with some of the GORM identity stuff, and my code had made some assumptions that turned out not to be 100% true. Those likely would have shown up had I written my own stuff rather than relied on GORM, but it was a little bit of a pain to track those down.

All in all, using the ORM abstracted away the need to write against specific database commands and syntax. A byproduct of that was simplification of most use cases of the database, but the key use was abstraction.
Hmmm. How successful does the mom and pop have to be before you feel no obligation to tell them?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.286949,0.125136&spn=0....

Here's Cottenham. It's tiny. Try to fit 30 pubs evenly onto the map. Then try to cross it without passing one.

Impossible.

(plus a half of it is new builds - so a realistic density could be 50 pubs)
So does everyone else. :)
Fabrication: object generation for Ruby (fixtures alternative)
Wheels of Steel: JavaScript-powered Turntables
Of course this is one of the risks. It's balanced by the alleged rewards.

Think of it as cash - you can store your $500k worth of savings in a jar under your mattress and shop completely anonymously, but the risk is that someone will come into your house and take it.
Now there is two jackasses causing a disturbance in my movie. Some guy being noisy and another with a bright light from a phone. Sorry, I think your whole premise is flawed.
Jung didn't coin the word "introvert;" it's much older than that. He coined "extravert" as its opposite. Also, one of the ways Jung defined introversion and extraversion was in terms of the flow of "psychic energy": an introvert is someone whose energy is sapped by being around other people.
Clojure is about simplicity. It helps you get to the point. It helps you eliminate unnecessary state, and when necessary, helps you manage the state that is.
I hovered over the pause bar, and received a javascript alert that said "error". Chrome.

http://i.imgur.com/fK1Fl.png
I imagine it's being upvoted so highly because people identify with it, or find it's contents to be valuable.

Even if it is a "chain-mail style bullshit list", your condescending retorts don't give your point of view much credit.
Er.. not true, the contest plan (which is different from the free plan) allows up to 10 MB download. Registered contestants should have access to their plans within an hour of registering.

And if you don't have it, just contact us: http://www.80legs.com/contact.html.
Upvoted for pity, well, at least you got your point across :)
Two possible issues. As tmhedberg says (more or less), they're second-class citizens: they may contain one expression, and cannot contain any statements (e.g., 'print').

A more important issue: in LISP, ML, and other languages with a "proper" lambda, the value of a lambda expression is a lexical closure. Python's lambdas are dynamically scoped, which certainly qualifies as broken.

See, e.g., http://math.andrej.com/2009/04/09/pythons-lambda-is-broken/
(When did "this." become a sentence? It became cliche in, what, a week?) That said, I agree with the sentiment.
I inherited an incredibly hairy, large, mission-critical database at my current job. While we're slowly phasing in its replacement, we'll be interacting with the current mess for a long time to come.

There are seemingly endless little insanities, like "this column references upper(substr(othertable.column,5))". Instead of trying to remember all such idiosyncracies, I defined them all in SQLAlchemy and added a _lot_ of unit tests to make sure I don't accidentally break one later. Now I can use programmer-friendly ORM joins in production code and not have to worry about getting all the weird rules right each time.

I'm perfectly comfortable working in SQL. I don't want to write it directly all the time, though, any more than I want to have to write assembler all the time.
Ask HN: Supporting my startup with side gig - need advice
Fellow HNers,

You've walked the walk and I am trying to do the same. I started off as the proverbial idea guy, then got sucked into the awesomeness that is building a service.

But now I need to do some freelancing work.

I pitched a few folks and got a gig, but now I need to put together a proposal and include a work-for-hire contract and maintenance agreement.

So the ask should be obvious by now: Can direct me to, or allow me to use these materials? I am sure you know what should be in there but for clarity sake, it should include the following activities:

1. Work-for-hire to build website, including hosting
2. Maintenance Agreement which enables me to specify the activities and the the spec. period

A mock template for a website proposal that looked professional would be extremely helpful!

Cheers folks!
Of course there are trade-offs to being introverted: No backpacking trip, but also no needing to be around people you don't care about.

You can also say that the preference of introversion is inconvenient - the fact that you don't like hanging out with these semi-arbitrary people "prevents" you from having fun. To take that to the extreme, it would be pretty convenient to always be unconditionally happy.
What fails more frequently: hardware buttons rated at a hundred million presses, or software written in Java?
I admit to using phrases loosely, and making things up on the go. For example if you say in a free market people consent to respect their property rights, I would say these people form a "government" and have thus defined government rules.

I am not sure if your definition of free market is really workable in practice (no coercion, people just respect each other etc.). So let me just ask again what I asked in another comment: are there cases in history where free markets have resolved a tragedy of the commons situation?

That was the original claim as I understood it: just let the markets run their course, and they'll fix the world's problems.

I think in the original example of a tragedy of the commons, villagers letting their sheep ruin the common grazing grounds. The solution was to set up fences, that is change the property rules - in my view a government intervention, not an achievement of the market. In that light it seems to me that things like CO2 certificates, as specified by governments, are worth a try.
Facebook photo sharing app
It looks like something I would want to use -- but I can't tell whether it's priced in a range I can afford. I mentally equate the lack of a price list with a hard-sell, high-price sales approach.
Senators Franken and Blumenthal introduce location privacy bill
Which article are you talking about? The Soma blog, which is hosted on MSDN, or the Daniel Moth blog, which isn't?

If the Daniel Moth blog. I'm not sure how you can argue that the Daniel Moth blog misrepresents anything.
what's wrong with a 3000 line js file? if the code is organized well, a good editor with an outline view makes jumping around 3000 lines no problem. actually I would prefer it over multiple files if I feel the code I wrote belongs to that "module".
I had a lot of problems working with ORMs when I was 1-2 years into programming. However, I also felt a lot of resistance to learning to use a framework vs. straightforward, procedural code for web apps.

It's a matter of wanting to take the time to learn another system, API, DSL, what-have-you just in order to work with something you already know - SQL. The dislike of HQL resonates with me - I was wondering why I would ever work with PHP Doctrine's DQL. Building SQL queries out of a sequence of OO method calls seems absurd, too. As the article and comments note, you shouldn't have to know SQL well to use an ORM.

There are definitely issues with the ORM/Framework working against you, too. I love the organization and features in Rails or Django, but I hate when I spend hours working out how to do something that would take 5 minutes in plain PHP. Same with ORMs. Getting them to do the right type of join, not make unnecessary calls, etc. can be a pain. Sometimes it's that I don't know the software well enough, which could either be my own problem or just a reasonable lack of desire to devote my brain to it. Other times it's that the given ORM really does have shortcomings, conceptually and at level of development.

The one ORM I've had the most luck with is Django's. It's straightforward, does what I want, is well documented, and doesn't have too many features.