skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work with PL/SQL daily and I believe several points in the article are... debatable, if not misleading.

1. Yes, you can store your packages in SVN or whatnot, but two developers cannot work on the same package on the same database at the same time without stomping on each other's work.

2. Managing database changes: yes, you can analyze explicit dependencies for a given object, except that EXECUTE IMMEDIATE statements are not tracked. Nor, of course, are any queries done by your java webapps or whatnot.

3. "And PL/SQL has object oriented features too." We've moved away from most of the object oriented features because either we encountered bugs (in 10g) or because performance was abysmal.

4. EXECUTE IMMEDIATE -- I love the idea of execute immediate, but in practice, it's has problems. Performance tends to be poor (queries often need to be re-parsed) and as noted above, they break dependency tracking. If over-leveraged, they can also result in highly unreadable code.

5. Unit testing -- I've looked at several PL/SQL unit testing packages and they've always seemed to me to be fairly half baked. Unit testing procedures with side effects is also often inherently difficult because they rely on database state. I'm not against it, but it certainly isn't as easy as using jUnit. That said, if anyone has successfully used a PL/SQL unit testing package, I'd be curious to hear it.

5. Portability -- Irrelevant if you're using oracle specific features (which, you probably should if you're using Oracle).

None of this is to say that I'm against stored procedures. On the contrary, they provide some level of encapsulation, and I've generally found PL/SQL to be fairly transparent to understand. If I'm doing some complicated joins and/or several sequential DML statements with exception handling in a transaction, I'd much rather do it in PL/SQL than from an external language. I just think the article paints a picture that's a little to rosy.
Here is my corresponding blog post: http://hagyma.posterous.com/entering

We are totally working on something else by the way... As you see in my blog post, I saw one of my ideas appear on another site... so we came up with this concept to save my ass on the first place. :)

And using the generous offer from dotcloud for beta users, this with the ssl is hosted for free.
London (in Clerkenwell near Old Street and Farringdon tube stations)

Lokku Ltd, we run property search engine Nestoria.

Several full-time roles
- UX/frontendand
- online marketing

also some part-time/internship roles (paid)

we're a small, fun team of internet veterans with a profitable business serving millions of users every month. Join us.

http://www.lokku.com/jobs/
What a wonderful approach to development.

Skip the ideological critiquing and start shipping some awesome products..

I guess that is really what separates the great developer from the good developer.
Debt service (a large and growing part of the budget) can't be cut, period.

Existing entitlements can't really be cut, the best you can hope for in a practical sense is giving a different deal to younger people, which doesn't change the budget outlook immediately.

You're right that the math does not add up. It doesn't add up because we insist on living in a fantasyland where revenues are off the table.
Introducing Brom.ly a Personal Concierge Mobile App
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that most Americans don't know anything about the man, Geronimo.

Soldiers generally know more history than you expect. If they used Geronimo it's likely a top o' the hat to the warrior, not a call back to a hokey movie.

Especially because real soldiers never cry 'Geronimo' when they fall out of airplanes - they're counting the seconds until the chute deploys.

Also - the army especially has taken the Indian warrior thing to heart: helicopters are named after tribes, call signs and etc.
Athens, Ga - EuPathDB

EuPathDB is looking for a front-end web developer to help scientists perform dynamic computational experiments on genomic-scale datasets. You'll get to work on innovative interfaces like our strategies system (description: http://bit.ly/ko0Y4b , source code: http://bit.ly/mUyL3D).
You'll need detailed knowledge of Javascript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, Java, JSP, Struts and web services. Knowledge of SQL, Perl, Tomcat and Apache are also desirable. An interest in bioinfomatics and genomics applications is highly desirable and experience a strong plus.

View the full job description and apply on our university's website at http://www.ugajobsearch.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=573...
Making Atoms instead of polygons in games in "Unlimited Detail"- Euclideon
I can't upvote this enough.

From what I can see you started this as a concept which is why it doesn't have advanced features like saving etc. I think saving is probably the most important one.
I tried it on chromebook and works great, saves to local storage. Some other persistence, like on your site would be great.
Well actually since I am complaining, and this is open source :) (silly right?!) I am used to closed ones where you have to ask dev to implement feature.

Great work, thanks.
The Science Behind Disgust
You say the DBA "showed" that SPs were faster. It's hard to argue against actual timings. Why shouldn't he have had his say?
I would second "cloud based" (cringe) saving and sharing. Whilst I'm personally not bothered about collaboration, I would love to be able to work on maps across multiple computers (with no Dropbox for local storage).

It's a dream to use, congrats on putting something so impressive together.
CSS3 is hardware accelerated on iDevices. AFAIK, it's the only way to get smooth animations on paltry hardware like this 3G iPhone. And those demos sure look smooth here.
Upssucks.com domain belongs to UPS
A nice proof without words: Sum_n=2^oo(1/n^2)
Watch Free Online Documentaries
'Cosmic Journeys,' comes “The Largest Black Holes in the Universe. Want to feel small? Watch this cosmic journey documentary and you shall have your wish! How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected?
I launched http://www.annotat.in, a site for annotating and sharing links in early July.
That seems to be the same number Kevin Kelly provides for TV: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/03/your_attentio...
How long before you were profitable? Have you managed to maintain growth since then?
Fastdev makes the Android Emulator usable: http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2011/05/titanium-mobi...

After you suffer the initial emulator load, changes appear in the app by simply bouncing the app. It's one big win for Titanium.
I like the execution of your idea, but I'm not so sure about the idea itself.

It seems the source code for any tool is not shown. I can't check it to make sure it works correctly, and I can't modify it or extend it. What if there's a bug?
There is also a very long and interesting interview with him at http://www.webofstories.com/play/17060
I know a lot of people that have jobs with requirements to stand almost all the time. All of them prefer and would like to have a job where they would be allowed to sit. And a bunch of them have a problems with veins in legs after years spent in standing positions.

Of course it can't be healthy to sit 8 hours straight without some pause for walking or stretching. Combine that with some exercises 2-3 times a week and you would eliminate almost all of the health problems related with sitting.
Thanks!

For ID generation, take a look at the source: https://github.com/drichard/mindmaps/blob/master/src/js/Util...
Launched Tutkiun Beta List (http://beta.tutkiun.com/) in start of July and over 100+ beta sites are already listed there!
Thanks! Will be fixed in a minute! dotcloud push :)
The issue is credit ratings. The agencies which set them may view this as a selective default.

I too doubt they'll miss a debt payment (our debt payments aren't hard at all, they were worse in the 90's), but I am fearful of the SS cutoff that might happen being considered as a Selective Default.
Traceview but you run out of stack frame capture space in about 30 seconds (even if you write to SD)

Instruments has no competition from traceview.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/10/traceview-war...
This post is a day old now, so I'm guessing this won't be getting too much visibility, but AtomicEmbedded (my employer) is hiring experienced embedded software developers.

http://www.atomicobject.com/pages/Embedded+Developer+Applica...

If the Embedded group doesn't look like your thing, you can also submit an application to our parent company, AtomicObject. They are also hiring.

http://www.atomicobject.com/pages/Working+at+Atomic+Object

AtomicObject normally hires generalists (which it sounds like you are), so experience with many languages and programming concepts is a huge plus. AtomicEmbedded needs a more specific developer who can get their hands messy with microcontrollers, oscilloscopes, and low level C code while still playing in the land of ponies and fairies (Ruby/Rails/Python/C#).

If any of this sounds like your thing, don't hesitate to submit a resume. We're always looking for the right people.
I partially launched Syncomatic http://www.SyncomaticApp.com its only partially launched as wanted a small number of users to make sure it was all OK before making a big deal of it and marketing it everywhere. (And I always find things i wish I had done after launch :-) )

Its a iPhone app that syncs/transfers your camera rolls Photo's and Movie's to you mac over WiFi whilst in the background so you don't have to remember to sync etc.
I have an update waiting for approval that fixes a small bug and changes some small UI elements then I'm going to start submitting it to review sites / blogs etc.
I don't think AirBnB's involvement is that peripheral. Unlike Craigslist, they don't just operate a site that facilitates finding people; they're active participants in every transaction, and are the ones on record charging credit cards for the rentals.
Global AWS Start-Up Challenge 2011
Apple Store: A Lesson on Self-Service And How To Take People’s Money
حلقات مسلسل ادم 
حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم حلقات مسلسل ادم
http://bgyc.blogspot.com/2011/08/adam-serial.html
Jolly. I suppose if this bill passes it will provide further incentive for me to shop locally or, indeed, exclusively--especially as Portland _has_ shops in which it is a joy to purchase goods. I dislike the further record-keeping burden it places on each citizen, though that's somewhat par for the course in the US tax code.
SEEKING WORK - Remote work. (I am based in Chiclayo, Perú.)
Freelance Web Developer
I'm work with PHP, CodeIgniter,WordPress, Joomla...and more.
Fast and good job.
Personal Site: http://bit.ly/lDHkgG
> Another smaller issue would be that the Android emulator is basically running "ARM hardware" on top of x86

Uh... no shit? That's exactly what the "emulator" part of "ARM emulator" means.

> it's not just a fake simulator like the one for iOS

It's not a fake simulator, it's a simulator period. There's nothing fake about it.
>That said, Eclipse and the Android SDK is a pain to install even if you are a java wizard.

Really? I don't remember it being too bad, and I didn't start learning java until I had them installed! Although this was just a year ago, so perhaps older versions were less friendly.
I launched TV Show Tracker (http://www.tvshowtracker.co.uk) at the start of July, it began as a personal app just for me but expanded it for multiple users as an experiment.

Built using CakePHP & the Skeleton CSS boilerplate. Any feedback would be great.
Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.
>I partially launched

I think it's called a soft launch, FYI :)

And about all the things you want to do before launch: don't worry about them, that's what subsequent revisions are for. You can add value at any time, not only at launch!
The point isn't that taxes are good or bad. It's that people who shop at Internet companies are effectively getting a tax break relative to people who shop at physical stores. And that doesn't really make sense.
What we need is a common database for cities, counties, and states to add their taxes for different things to so the burden of tracking isn't on retailers. A site could pull the appropriate tax amount with a single API.

I think it's good to let the individual places set their own tax rates as long as there's a way to take the burden off web retailers. For example, a city might have a tax on tire sales to help fund road upgrades. Online tire retailers shouldn't be able to skip out on the tax since the tires are going to be used on the roads the city is upgrading.
Thanks, PayPal has been fine so far, most people have a PayPal account these days.

I would like to move to an on-site, or at least branded, solution at some point though.

I've been talking to a start-up for payment processing without a merchant account, which looks promising, but testing/implementing it isn't very high on the to do list as I'm already processing payments ok...
Are you funded? Where are you based? How many employees?
You're basically correct in your assessment. The time to converge to the optimal action is formalised as the accumulated regret. This is the sum of the error made over time. If you assume the landscape is static -- called stationary in the literature -- you can achieve within a constant factor of optimal regret. Good algorithms only differ in their constant factors.

If the landscape is not static it is called non-stationary. Amazingly you can still be optimal (for a slightly different definition of optimal) in the non-stationary case! This is called the nonstochastic bandit in the literature.

Finally, are websites static or not? It depends :) However it seems that most are static. At least the one where we're applying our tech. are. Something like Amazon probably wouldn't be, but the non-stationary bits of their problem are probably best viewed as a product recommendation problem. UI tweaks might still be reasonably modelled as stationary.
One of my favorite parts...

Looking forwards, what do you perceive are the biggest issues / challenges computer science faces, now and in the near future?

The challenge of how can we go to sleep at night when there are so many things left to be done! (....) but I think so much more could be done by having better health care records and better ways of describing and visualising combinations of symptoms and combining statistical methods as well as visual methods, this would help doctors to understand things more clearly and quickly.

Not to mention the ways in which computers can help biologists to design better drugs. Everywhere you look there’s something to be done which needs a good programmer to help achieve it. There’s no shortage of challenges and little chance of ever running out of them.

It gets me a little personal validation that we still have many exiting challenges ahead.
We launched an Android version of our iPhone app (~8M downloads on iPhone). Currently holding steady at #11 in the Health and Fitness category of the marketplace.

http://blog.loseit.com/2011/07/25/lose-it-for-android/
:-) Thanks
CA has building codes that address the probability of large earthquakes.

For a single story house, wood (if I understand) is a safer choice than other heavy materials which would crush you. In SF, there are different building codes as the buildings tend to be more vertical.
The future Firefox UI
My opinion is that it's best to just keep running the bandit algorithm. There is no need to stop it -- you can add and remove options as it is running.

As for the type of algorithm, I've referenced various bits of the literature elsewhere in the comments. I can't give details on our precise approach unfortunately.
>But Sen. Welch also noted that brick-and-mortar shops are also being used as display cases for products later bought online. "When a consumer can walk into a store, try out a product and then go home and buy it online without paying sales tax, Main Street businesses and downtowns lose," he said in a statement.

In my experience, sales tax does not account for the price difference, in most stuff I buy. What does account for it is the insane markup. Try buying an HDMI cable at bestbuy, then compare to the $1.50 at monoprice.com
Because it was also shown in several project's before and the current one that writing these custom SP's and using autogenerated SP's added huge amounts complexity and development time to our application.

Which again was still being built and had no need to be a high performance machine. In fact none of the products that the company served up needed to be high performance. These guys were smart and bored and built huge monolithic systems full of complicated approaches to simple problems.

Edit: Further more nobody wanted to work with this guy on the team. He was an "expert" on everything and ran every single conversation about anything, including areas he had no experience in, into the ground because nobody's opinions were valid because he clearly knew everything. /rant
I think this is a pretty common domain grab for trademark holders. For example, see aolsucks.com: http://www.whois.net/whois/aolsucks.com
I completely agree, technology is a lot like time & money. Throw enough of it at any problem and you'll likely solve it.

When dealing with scale problems, the biggest asset is flexibility as you will likely need more than one kind of "database" and your logic layer will be the glue that holds it all together.

Stored procedures are simply too focused a tool and often tied to a particular database to offer any comprehensive solutions.
Why do you "have to kiss that silky smooth scrolling goodbye" if you setup your UITableViewCells in Interface Builder?

I've used it for all of my apps and the scrolling is just as fast as any of Apple's native apps. Interface Builder just packages up all that initial layout code and then it is executed when the nib when it is unpackaged. After that there is no difference.
I do believe the 2004 video is real. However, there are two problems here. First, a video from 2004 inherently cannot be used as a reason for why we should have invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Second, if the December 2001 video was fake, that makes any further statements from OBL very suspect even if they are authentic. That is, any later statements made be OBL should be given much less weight as evidence against him. (In fact, in any trial that was actually fair the charges would be dropped if it was in fact determined that the U.S. had falsified evidence against him.)

edit: rewritten for clarity.
Another take on moving logic to the DB server: thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com
Wow, thank you so much for that information about the new UI builder... it looks awesome. Do we have anything more specific than just "fall" about the release date?
The company was profitable pretty much from day one. We don't have a free tier, so all of our customers are paying customers. We made sure that our initial pricing structure ensured that, in almost all cases, the users at least covered their own costs. We've added four pricing tiers since launching and this still pretty much holds true (except for the lowest tier).

To maintain growth, we've mostly marketed our site using PPC though AdWords. So far, even without much optimization, it seems to be working fairly well. When I have more time to devote to it, I'll be able to spend more time optimizing our ad campaign and explore other methods of marketing.
Hum, I have never used a magic mouse. Can you explain what the problem is?
This is was really "interesting". To summarize it: I will never work for Google, Facebook or Twitter, because they want to make profit. Jeez...these are not ONG's or some sort of humanitarian enterprises! How does he think that these companies pay developer salaries? And saying that all of those companies are focused in platforms for advertisement is clearly an understatement. I never cared too much for the add's that Facebook has and neither was offended by them. It's all business at the end of the day and a legit way of making money.
Jeff Bezos on what he's learned from Amazon and Zappos
The company is bootstrapped, based in New York City, NY and I'm currently the only employee.
San Francisco, CA - Rackspace

Rackspace acquired Cloudkick (YC Winter '09) in December, and we're hiring at our San Francisco office. Openings include Javascript, Python/Django, and Node.js developers.

The full list of openings is here: http://rackertalent.com/san-francisco/
SEEKING WORK -- Atlanta, GA, USA or remote (willing to relocate)

Strong in Perl, C, C++ with a decent background HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some experience in Python and PHP.

http://github.com/simcop2387/ -- code samples

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21322452/resume.pdf

contact at Ryan@Voots.org or at (Six Seven Eight) 551-2387
What a great comparison. Admittedly I haven't researched this but I was surprised to read that the UI components in iOS were based on OpenGL. That's pretty cool! Hats off to Android for their layout manager. I like when I use an app on Honeycomb that scales well as opposed to blowing up the pixels to fill the screen.
As far as I know, before agricultural and industrial revolution, people in hunter gatherer societies spend a majority of their time resting. They spent maybe 4-5 hours a day on hunting, gathering and other stuff. The rest of the day is spent with family and napping/lying/resting.

To answer your question I think that sitting 8 hours every day is not very healthy, but it's far better than standing 8 hours. Break long period of sitting with some walking, stretching or some light exercise, and you would eliminate almost all negative effects of prolonged sitting.
Thanks for describing your experience. This site really was some kind of a hackathlon for us. Not to mention the need for it.

Sometimes I was in the need to secure a document, sealed at a lawyer. My clients wanted to be sure that the information won't change in case we have to say good bye. :)

Anyway... This is our very first public product made for anyone. I hope you guys like the idea. We can take it to any level if needed. :)
What is the annoyance with declaring properties? How is it worse than other languages?

You have a single line that specifies a property and then a single line to synthesize the accessors if you don't need to do anything unique inside them.
Agreed, the attitude is refreshing. Nice quote:

Java is a high level programming language. It’s unproductive to have an opinion about it.
Less interested in a smartphone that can project, and more interested in advances in glass and lenses that make smartphone cameras better.
You do raise an interesting point. There are certaintly problems with splitting the country into different constituency areas. For example, an MP representing a constituency with a small number of residents has the same voting ability in the commons as an MP representing a constituency with a larger population.

Your solution is problematic too though. If we simply voted for a party then we would no longer be electing local representatives which would mean that local issues would not have representation in the house of commons. It also creates the difficulty of deciding who would actually compose government - if we just voted for a party then does the party decide itself which individuals form government?

It's also important to keep in mind that the government and our elected MP's are two different things. MP's are elected to the house of commons, not to government. Whilst all members of the government are MP's the vast majority of MP's are not members of the government. Although they are constrained in voting by the whip system they do frequently address issues relating to their constituencies in the commons.
I need an "Arrange" feature.