skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
America remains the most meritocratic country in the world

This needs a citation. America-is-great chest pounding aside, the only reputable reference I remember seeing about this was from the Economist, who claimed that the correlation between your wealth and that of your parents is stronger in the US than in many European countries. So it seems that, at least measured in that way, the US is not a particularly good meritocracy but rather a class society.
How it all started
Percona builds should become the default install for MySQL (only half kidding).
Much as this is a fascinating story about a hot political subject... well, it's about a hot political subject. This is not the place for politics.
Depends on who owns it
We used verbose key names and paid for it. We even failed to override _id with a useful primary key. So... not great.

That being said, our data is not completely normalized in PostgreSQL, so it's not a totally unfair comparison.

It may be possible to simulate an apples to apples comparison (small keys in mongo + perfectly normalized pgsql tables), but I'm not sure that would be a useful indicator for real world use cases.

Suffice it to say: repeating your schema in every row/document is going to take more space than not repeating it.
4 CEOs who lost their jobs to iPhone
Well, even if you leave, if you've been present illegally in the US for more than a year, you're subject to the lifetime bar. So, no, they really don't have a statute of limitations.
Before FCPX launch: "I can't wait for all the new stuff in FCPX!"

After FCPX launch: "I can't believe they changed everything!"
Did you see the bit where I said 'legally providing opportunities'? And the bit where I mentioned a law professor? And the bit where I mentioned political capital? I feel that these should be sufficient to assure you that I am not in fact promoting a criminal enterprise.

I find your comment offensive. EDIT: I see that you have added some context to clarify below. Likewise, I would like to clarify that this effort is intended to be wholly within the law, and the aim is to put legal resources in place for lobbying and/or litigation. I'm not mentioning the academic persons in question because it's a large effort that will probably take several years and which has not yet been presented for discussion in a law review or as a public proposal, and I don't want to misspeak about what stage the project is at.
I've had a lot of friends try Kickstarter for various projects, most have chosen to start longer campaigns under the assumption that more time will increase the chance of funding the project.

Personally, I agree with Kickstarter's assessment that longer campaigns create less urgency. This seems to make sense. Often times, If I see a friend has a longer running campaign, I'll procrastinate and put off donating until later in the game. I'm sure other people do this too, and not all of them remember.

In the campaigns my friends have run, it's usually that first push out to their social network that gets the biggest response, after that the donations start slowing down. A few more people will kick in some extra dough at the end (like me), but by that time most people have moved on.
What kind of data are you storing in Riak? And is it write or read heavy usage?
According to Wikipedia this is called "focus stacking", combining depths of field to create a larger depth of field. The page lists a number of apps/plugins that blend photos to create this effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking
Apple -> MS -> Amazon. When we read about Amazon storing stuff on iCloud, then we'll know it's all just bit kiting.
Implications of the Nortel Patent Auction
Everyone seems to have a different idea about what's comfortable. I use an Apple keyboard because I like extremely short key travel. Every time I use a 'normal' keyboard now, it feels like I'm typing on an old manual typewriter.
Simply delete your username/email and password from the app preferences window.
Bing grabs market share from Google over past year
Anyone know if btrfs would be more like XFS or ext3/4 in this regard?
Given I'm at a PHP shop, MySQL is unfortunately all but unavoidable. Shucks.
Except he doesn't work for the post anymore, unless I missed something and he was hired there again recently.
You are correct, I forgot the french are much more reasonable.
unfortunately, graduating from a university makes you an alien for many of such xenophobes :) (and it isn't US only phenomena)
Good point, as the superuser creation bit does tend to get annoying. But you have to admit–there's something much more fun about getting to rm your db ;)
Last I heard JavaScript was the fastest dynamic language, don't remember but might be only factor 2 compared to Java.
Microsoft has reported that they fixed silver-light but haven't actually released the fix (for the latest report that I'm assuming you're referring to that was posted on HN yesterday).
The Ministry of Finance of the government of El Salvador, where I work, we use Oracle 11g
No, it's because immigration issues are civil and thus not easily amenable to 8th amendment challenges. Although some kinds of immigration violations are criminal acts, they're not considered ongoing criminal events for judicial purposes.

Edit: IANAL. You want to be very wary of any blanket statements on immigration law in particular, which is more complicated than almost any other field besides tax law. Like, I can show you decisions where the Chief Justice of the Supreme court simply makes inaccurate statements about the law by mistake. And others that seem to contradict what I've said above (but where the contradiction is in dicta rather than being part of the holding).
I know it's not really the point but the N9 has a Facebook / Twitter client built in. There's a few Spotify clients already for Maemo (what the N9 is based on) so I expect there to be at least one before the N9 launches.
BenQ designed by BMW. I bought mine for $4.99 new on Best Buy's clearance site, but they are probably hard to find now. Here's a link to an image:
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=15950
As a Canadian living in the US, I think you need to mention the snow.
That's exactly what we do :) Get in touch if you're interested.
Nokia N9 UX Guidelines
I find it very interesting how thoroughly they have mapped out the 3d physical reality behind the interface interactions, all the way down to the specified light source that should be reflected in all icons and 3d chrome. In many ways this is more thoughtful than the iOS interface guidelines.
Wondering the same thing, disappointed to see that I can't try it out :(

I know that Lion will be dropping support for us 32-bit Mac users, but it still sucks to see apps jumping on that bandwagon so quickly.
Correct. Silverlight 5 is still in beta. They said that they had fixed the issue and will be part of a future release -- of a product that is currently in beta. You typically don't rush out fixes for beta versions of products.
I worked on Profiles and Pulse so here are some answers.

1. Roadmaps. It wasn't high on Flickr's roadmap. Profiles integration provided little to no value to them. Plus the way Yahoo! works it would have taken months just to figure out what an "integration" meant. It was talked about (several times).

2. Probably similar reasons as above. This wasn't really talked about. Delicious was kind of a red headed step child internally. Not sure many execs realized it's value - hence the dwindling of the team and eventual selloff.

3. Roadmaps. Yahoo Groups! is huge and understaffed. Even if both sides wanted to do an integration it would take months to decide what that would look like. Given the rate of attrition the people involved might not even be around long enough to see it through.

Interesting blog post but Yahoo!s problems run real deep. You almost have to gut the company to salvage it. Makes me sad :(.
Looks like this guy is looking for a job at Yahoo and decided to augment his resume with this in hopes of impressing someone over there.

Doesn't look like he's even remotely qualified to be CEO of a startup, let alone a $20B publicly traded corporation. Never mind the 'strategy' he outlines, which sounds like something out of a Starbucks brainstorming session.
Running Perl and CGI files on Windows « The Writing Confederation
Wow....the boundary between mathematics and assembly code.
Maybe they do or maybe they don't. Of course Google would say this of their own product. I tell people my company does things better than others too but it's not the total truth. We only compare ourselves on the points we can beat our competitors on. I like App Engine as much as the next guy but when I'd prefer to invest in my own infrastructure every time.
Mark didn't mention this in his article, but writes to the inode are only serialized in jfs/ext(2|3|4) if you are using direct I/O (i.e O_DIRECT) which for performance reasons MySQL ibdata files often are. This is why this problem does not often show up on filesystem benchmarks.
Currently using MySQL, though I'm giving MongoDB a shot for part of the project.
The only valuable asset Yahoo! has doesn't call the shots. Amazing technology and engineers stifled by poor product folks and clueless executives.
National Call-In Day For Fair Farm Rules
Totally not shocked. BPI and pals are awful.
Loving Riak as well! Our balance is definitely on the write-heavy side of things.
You're looking for the search term "symbolic math". You can get specialized programs like Matlab, Octave, or Mathematica and hope their general purpose stuff will be enough to carry you through, or you can hook to them from your general-purpose language. You can also search for a "symbolic math library" for the language of your choice. Test anything you find very thoroughly for your needs.

Without more details, I doubt you'll get more than a search term. With more details, maybe somebody else can give you a more specific recommendation. (Not me, though, I've done little more than fiddle in this domain.)
> but some people don't consider anything not made by Microsoft worth using.

Also some people don't consider anything made by Microsoft worth using.

Perhaps your senior programmer did fall into the former category, I don't know. However, you should take care not to fall into the latter.
Not that this contributes much to the conversation but: YES on both counts.

I use GitHub's issue tracker in volume both for some fairly large projects (getcloak.com, walkscore.com, and wherebe.us) I've found that the Issues web interface leaves a lot to be desired. It's a fine v1 [v2 technically], but somewhat painful in practice once you have more than a handful of issues. The 280 North issues app was interesting but hasn't kept up with the latest GitHub features.

As for Growl: it would be great to have it built in. In the interim, there's this: https://github.com/miyagawa/github-growler/downloads
sounds like a strawman argument to me...
My comment was much too general and for that I apologize.

It all depends on which law or section of law specifically you end up breaking. A first offense for knowingly hiring an undocumented worker will be met with fines and the fines increase through the third offense. The government however has been increasingly using criminal penalties. Hiring more then ten will also much more often result in criminal penalties including prison time. Aiding and abetting, hiding from detection or encouraging aliens to enter the country is a felony unless I misunderstand the penalties in Title 8 and I know for a fact that's what one client we did an audit for is being charged with. Knowingly accepting fraudulent documents on the Form I-9 is punishable by up to five years in prison due to the certification statement in section two.

Detection rates of undocumented workers are mostly low due to employers not caring or not understanding what their requirements are under the law and lax enforcement by ICE/DHS. ICE however is stepping up investigations and just sent out another 1000 notices of intent to businesses of all sizes. We specialize in Form I-9 compliance and we constantly detect undocumented workers as part of that work. Companies that are enrolled in E-Verify are preventing many undocumented workers from even applying for jobs. Both the Senate and House are looking at bills that would make E-Verify mandatory for all employers which would make the detection rates a lot higher than they are now. Rumor has it that Senate Dems will kill these types of bills unless the Dream act passes but we'll see how long Reid can keep that up.
Good to hear this issue raised. In The Netherlands where I live this has been an issue several times: the immigration process is so long (can take 8-10 years) that kids grow up here, and for instance girls would be rejected by everyone if returned to their native Afghanistan. Several high profile cases were handled and several have been allowed to stay, or atleast finish high school / college.

The issue is just getting bigger however: I find it scary that policies have gone so far that a Dutch citizen has to go live in Belgium or Spain once married so that their spouse can get a work permit and eventually gain EU citizenship...
How HTML5 support makes its way into Internet Explorer
I'm not sure that's true. But if you look at certain industries, like web startups, death marches are almost the complete culture.

Try to be employee #1 of a YC startup while being upfront that you work 40 hours a week, period. Not going to happen in many cases. The death march starts on day one in this industry.
A nice distinction would be SQL Server and SQL Server Express. Express being free, it would be interesting to see how many people are using SQL Server Express as a free alternative to MySQL and how many are using SQL Server as the paid alternative
EXACTLY!!! There are so many people who are trying to come and contribute to the US society through legal means. They run into all kinds of obstacles and barriers. Meanwhile it's OK to get a citizenship through fake passports?
You're not describing a bubble, "making something I want" isn't some outlandish absurd thing for developers and designers do. Bubble is rapidly outpacing pivot for most misused word.
> However, there is more more to this then verifying it renders.

How do you mean?
Das keyboard is right, but that's for my next upgrade.

I bought a Razer Tarantula when I was still into video games. I outgrew (not really) the games but the keyboard still holds. The keys, halfway in between a full keyboard and notebook keyboard, are laid out perfectly.

Even though I do say the Das Keyboard, I've been with the Tarantula enough to recommend it as well.

I code now, all I ever do with it.
I've been using this app for a few hours now, and I have no idea how people can complain about it. It's freakin' amazing! I love it. Thank you!
Overseas Tech Firms Ramp Up Hiring in Silicon Valley
IBM are too, from what I have read.
Network Troubleshooting Solutions -- Top Considerations Before Investing
I've voted MySQL because it's the one I personally choose where possible, but applications I write interact with various kinds of datastore including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. (We probably have more of those.) One application I made has its canonical datastore inside a series of SharePoint lists, which gets sent to me in CSV via Microsoft Access. Well-meaning but technically incompetent users will find all sorts of ways to store their data!
that doesn't log you out - all the data is still visible in the app.
He is right though in his analysis that the users won't care. The browsers that let you play shiny games will win, security
be damned.

So market pressure will force everybody to do WebGL.
Women 2.0 x Startup Quote: Arianna Huffington, co-founder, The Huffington Post
FYI, as the N9 is based on Debian, most of the programs you mentioned should run on it. I use OpenOffice.org and The Gimp occasionally on my phone if I really need to (the 3.5" screen is not ideal but it works).
I for one would be glad if my wife would be interested in android enough to do anything but complain that it's sometimes slow, or has bugs.
Yes, sadly FoxPro died when it was acquired by Microsoft.
We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.

- Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff)

http://startupquote.com/post/6802999673
Reminds of that other saying about most users using only 10% of features in Microsoft Excel......it's just that every one uses a different 10% of features (or apps in this case) :)
Simple and useful. Good idea.
I've been using it since this morning, and for once it actually seems snappy. I never thought I'd say that about eclipse.
I think GNOME Tracker and Zeitgeist are going in this direction.
Because they might want to run some of the applications that Oracle sells that run on top of their database - the example that I am most familiar with being Oracle Hyperion HFM which is by far the leading financial consolidation application for large corporations. Even Google uses Hyperion:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view...

[If 12 dimensional hierarchical databases with complex logic are your thing then Hyperion is really rather cool in a perverse kind of way].

BTW If anyone here is interested in this kind of space I have had some interesting experiences in building extensions to HFM...
true clustering (Oracle RAC)
multi platform
support
Because Thailand or Indonesia isn't the future, China is.

Your time and experiences as a whole will be more valuable in many aspects if they're spent in China.

Consider:

1) Exposure to the Chinese language -- Mandarin, the _most spoken_ in the world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

2) Shenzhen is the "technology hub" of China.

3) The biggest, most successful companies in China are headquartered there, or are planning to establish their headquarters in Shenzhen (Baidu, Skyworth, Hasee, Huawei, etc.)

4) Lots of emigrants there already -- more people in Shenzhen understand English than anywhere else in China

5) A bustling nightlife, and availability of 'luxury services' should you so desire them (as mentioned by someone else, it is the norm there for restaurants to be open until late)
still no need for caps in the headline
Spouse of first-generation immigrant to the United States here. And back in the 1990s I used to be an immigration lawyer for a small law firm on the west coast. Yes, the personal story of Jose Antonio Vargas is rough on him personally, but a better basis for setting the policy of immigration in the United States would be the stories of the many people who patiently wait in line to be admitted to the United States through legal channels. Look at their stories, and figure out what change of rules and incentives would bring in what subset of those people to become new Americans.

Every country on the planet appears to have restrictions on immigration. Most of the time we don't discuss the policies of countries other than the United States in new submissions to HN, even though HN is an international forum, because most countries are lousy enough to be entrepreneurs in and lousy enough to live in that no one on HN wants to immigrate to those countries. (Instead, most people on HN discuss how to get OUT of dozens of other countries around the world, and in many cases how to immigrate to the United States.) When we consider that the actual number of legally authorized immigrants to the United States each year is one of the highest such numbers in the world (does ANY country have more legal immigrants each year?), it's hard to make a case that the United States is missing out on immigrants by its current policies. Perhaps there are some policy changes to be made on the margins, and on my own part my policy preference would be to make immigration to the United States legally easier and much more commonplace, but the way to make the case for policy reform is to show law-abiding Americans that the policy changes help their lives. The Americans I know, including many law-abiding first-generation immigrants, want policy reform that makes like better in general for all people already in America, as well as for people intending to immigrate here.
You can also deposit checks at UPS stores... You give them a check and your debit card, it funds show up immediately (mobile deposit takes some business days).
I wouldn't say XFS is in maintenance mode, it received important enhancements in the recent past, and significant performance gains.
Cookies are a trivial problem that can be solved by educating users and installing extensions.
The GPL doesn't forbid charging for software licensed with it. The Free Software Foundation even encourages you to sell your GPL'ed software [1]. However, once you have the software, you can do whatever you like with it, and that includes giving it away for free.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
John Gruber ran a series of posts about this for awhile, about how iOS had significantly better 3rd party game selection, and especially from larger brands
Free data mining resource: 1 million videos with metadata and links
iMovie is still the product aimed at the consumer market.

But the cut-down Express edition is no longer; it was probably too much engineering effort to create two editions and get such a complex product out the door.

They lowered the price to make the product appear to a broader market, and to cover the Express-Pro spectrum. I'd say it's an aggressive move that makes it more accessible. Surely people are not complaining that it's more affordable?
Do they do at least two-factor authentification? Do they accept international wire transfers? Can they do online wire transfers? Is the transaction history accessible from some banking software? Do they not send me spam? Can I use their credit card abroad without a hassle? Does the credit card use the chip for authentification instead of the insecure magnetic strip? Do they transfer money instantly without holding back my money for days? Do they have 24/7 and helpful customer support? Can I call them without negotiating with some computerized voice for minutes? Can I call them without suffering through several minutes of elevator music? Can I call them for free? Can I withdraw money from every/enough ATMs without paying a fee? Can I manage account details at a bank franchise other than the one where I created it? Do they have a helpful, easy to use website? Do they have employees that are more than human computer interfaces and are actually helpful?

Now that would begin to sound like a bank that does not suck indeed... (Suckage assembled from several countries)
This is one of those legislative measures that some politicians thought up and are going to cause mass hysteria, confusion and annoyances for a wide spectrum of web-related businesses.

On a side note, not in the article, the same Telecomunications Law also includes articles on net neutrality and by law prevents providers from blocking services. Should make the Netherlands second after Chili to make such a law.
I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record around here, but:

1. I build products on Oracle at a startup.

2. Oracle has many compelling features that really don't have first-class open source alternatives: OLAP, encryption (wire and at-rest), VPD, materialized views with query rewriting, object and document storage, monitoring and tracing, among others...

3. Oracle got more compelling since being offered--license included!--on Amazon RDS.

There are a ton of responses for Microsoft; why doesn't anyone question that? Actually, I'm curious now. Is there a new incentive for SQL Server? Maybe something in BizSpark that makes it attractive?