skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, came here to say that as well. I hear people saying 'Oracle can scale as well'; that could be true, or not. I don't know: I don't have a lot of experience with Oracle on large scale projects (I did a lot of J2EE projects using Oracle, but those really could've just as well worked on SQLite, and I mean that... Complete overkill.). I know my database theory and I don't understand how Oracle can scale like a NoSQL database while preserving their RDBMS nature; as I understand that's not possible right?

So how is there no room for NoSQL databases? I understand that most sites running NoSQL at the moment could just as well (or even better) run on Postgresql, even with 'biggish data', but is for 'enormous' data and near real time analysis of it, NoSQL not a proper solution over 'traditional' RDBMSs. Not trolling; really curious what people have to say.

Do I understand it correctly that Oracle 'Exadata' just uses fiber cables and such to threat the entire rack as 'one node' or does it work differently? How does Oracle scale? Any information about that (tech information, not opinions/interpretations of reality as OP posted)?
Woah, we've been talking past each other in a big way. Let me try to clarify:

1. The setup in the bandit problem is identical to the setup in standard A/B testing as applied to web content optimisation. The only difference is that in the bandit problem you are allowed make decisions as data arrives; in A/B testing you have to wait till your experiment completes (otherwise, see "early stopping" which in fact is how the bandit problem came to be). Algorithms for the bandit problem are strictly superior to A/B testing in this setup.

2. The case you seem to be interested in is where you have n possible items to display and you display k <= n simultaneously. In A/B testing land this is known as multivariate testing. The problem comes from dependencies between the items, otherwise it just reduces to k bandit problems. Typical MVT setups assume linear relationships between items. You can do the same in a bandit setup, and this what (I think from a quick read) the arxiv paper I linked above does.

3. NHST (null hypothesis statistical testing, right?) is not more powerful than a bandit algorithm. Consider this: in your hypothesis test you have a probability of making a mistake (determined by the p-value and probability of a type II error which you only indirectly control). The expected regret is thus Pr(error) * Cost(error) * forever (once you make your decision you're stuck with it). Thus the expected regret is infinite (due to that "forever" term). If you decide instead to continue making decisions the probability of making an error rises rapidly. If you decide to control for this you're reinventing sequential design of experiments / the bandit problem.

4. I blogged about the bandit problem because it's the direct analogue of A/B testing. That doesn't mean there aren't more powerful algorithms available in the field of decision theory. If you display your k items in sequence you're doing reinforcement learning, for which there are algorithms with optimal regret bounds. I've discussed k items simultaneously above. No doubt this is a hard problem. The key idea to take away is that you have to control for your uncertainty in the correct action, something that hypothesis testing doesn't do.

That was long; I hope it sheds some light. Oh, and drop me an email -- I've love to at least ask you more questions about the kind of product you'd use.
Moose is a great OO system, period. I'm sorry that it's too late for you, but it's not too late for me :)
It's hard to say what Steve meant by "laptop sales". I'm assuming that your interpretation (unit sales) is probably correct and Apple is definitely not that large. Their growth is certainly outpacing the industry, so maybe Steve is off in timing, but Apple doesn't keep on the low end which makes it harder to build up unit volume.

Even by revenue metrics, I doubt that Apple is bigger than all of those brands combined.

The thing is that Apple seems to maximize on profit (silly folks, they should know that market share is what you're going for). I couldn't find the figures, but I'd be curious to see what percentage of laptop profits belong to Apple. In the case of mobile phones, Apple now gets 60% of the profit in the industry.
What about H1B?
"I'm surprised you're making such accusations, and without knowing the facts."

The reason why I'm asking for the facts is because I don't know the facts. That's the whole point. If I already knew the facts then I wouldn't be asking for them.
Super Glossy Text Effect
Ask HN: Help me be a better CEO - I need to learn the tech.
I've read repeatedly on HN that a CEO must at least be familiar with every aspect of his or her business and I thoroughly agree.

I've been running my startup for over a year now and handling everything but the tech aspect pretty well (hired a developer). Now I'd like to gain an understanding of the technical aspect of things to the point where I can at least understand how much work a feature request translates to.

The web app is built on Rails, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Sorry if any part of that was redundant.

I'd like thoughts from hackers on where to start with learning how to code for a web application. I know there's a lot of languages and options out there depending on what I want to do so I hope I've made my end goals clear. I'd also like to understand the interplay between Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Javascript, etc. I literally know next to nothing about the technical aspect of it and I want to change that.

What language should I start with, knowing my goals?
What specific resources would you suggest for this (paid, free, anything)?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Google will buy them out.
I would venture to say that the people who make the laws don't understand technology in the least. Think about your average parent or grandparent who equates AOL (or the Internet Explorer icon) to being "the internet". Now try to get them to understand a concept like jailbreaking, it's a daunting prospect, technology is emerging and changing at a rate faster than they can possibly comprehend. Society is asking them to make judgement calls about something they're not the least bit qualified to...and yet they're doing it anyways.
I believe I speak for all Linux users who need to keep Windows around just for Netflix when I say "shhhhh....."
Yes, it was. I did get an external display quite soon after the picture was taken. I now look only about 10-15 degrees (guesstimate) downwards from the level horizontal angle; a slight nod. No hurting.
Apple Forces Amazon Appstore to Close Its Doors on Android Developers in Germany
Soooo... a proprietary client that nobody but a few hackers at Netflix care about. Sounds like something to get the FSF all stirred up.
Probably, but the Twilio call is only two lines of code :)

I may look into other backends, but Twilio was by far the easiest to get going. Currently checking out Tropo and Teleku.
Unfortunately the Delicious Generation (including some of its adherents inside Apple) threw out the HIG. And now we have the weird iOS-OS X hybrid that is Lion.
> EDIT: And the downvotes are because...?

Ok, I'll bite. I downvoted you for not knowing who Steve Yegge is.
do you do h1b?
Basically you want the source to the site? I somewhat mockingly say good luck, but I would like it as well.
What kind of graphics?
- for charts on android, http://code.google.com/p/afreechart/
- for maths calculations, http://commons.apache.org/math/
- for opengl graphics on android, it's already a pain with all the fragmentation here. There's OpenglES10 (but no longer implemented on Xoom), OpenglES20 (2.2/2.3 and up, but no VBO support on 2.2), Renderscript (3.0 and up), JNI (if you want to program in C), MonoAndroid (for mono, you need to pay for that though)...
- otherwise, just go with the official Canvas API http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/index.htm...
Tangentially related to this story, are there any legal requirements that Kickstarter projects have to adhere to? What is to stop someone from pitching an awesome project idea, obtain funding and just walk away with the cash?
Another +1 for Yammer. Best company I've ever worked for.
How about this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCmkoaPIJC0

For me it's really not important at all because that's how the world evolves...
Then they're not really solar cells anymore. "Thermal cells?"
Or you could buy a Roku for $50 and be done with windows.

Edit: $60, my bad.
http://hg-git.github.com/

That is a plugin for Mercurial, written by the Github people, to support targeting git repositories.
Should Entrepreneurs Only Meet VCs When Pitching Start-Ups?
There has always been consumer level competition for Autodesk products. The reasons they have not been successful are:

1. When you are designing things like bridges, little software bugs have big consequences and among the things Autodesk does well is software testing.

2. Autodesk started out with really stinking good software engineers and they have always kept up that tradition. It's no accident that they chose LISP as their first programming interface - the founders knew how to code and how to architect a piece of software.

3. They made an incredibly bold move almost twenty years ago when they rewrote the entire AutoCAD code base to be object oriented - and they took the heat then never looked back. It's what has allowed them to extend their flagship product to stay cutting edge.

I'll point out that CAD is significantly more mature than video editing was 10 years ago - actually it was more mature ten years ago than video editing is today. It's a market with no real consumer space - people will make and edit many videos, they will only draw up their dream house once or maybe twice - and if they are serious about it they will be using a bootleg version of AutoCad any way.
Chain-link can be taken down and moved quicker than a standard wall.

This used to be an important factor when you didn't want 'stuff' to be seen by satellites, needed to setup and take things down quickly.

I don't know if it's still a factor today.
Thanks! Missed that little tidbit.
Previous submissions and discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378847

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857464
Freshplum has hard problems (that you can solve with a Google search or 2)
Just increasing energy, raw material, food, etc. costs increasing can produce net inflation, even if everything else gets progressively cheaper due to automation, scale, and computers.
I think for other country. local.
I don't see how this isn't a bigger issue or hasn't been brought to light. As I understand it, large corporations (or anyone with the money, really) can simply file patents for future products they predict will come to market and then sue startups and entrepreneurs when they create the actual product.

Someone please tell me I'm misunderstanding this.
The Debt Ceiling: Mutually Assured Destruction
San Francisco, CA

Heroku is hiring infrastructure engineers across all of our platform teams.

We develop a large distributed system that runs and manages thousands of applications in the cloud. We're looking for engineers who are exited about working on challenging systems at scale.

Some specific things we work on:

- Dynamic HTTP and Syslog routing: Erlang, Redis

- Cloud-wide distributed process management: Ruby, PostgreSQL, AMQP

- Containerized process execution: Linux, LXC

- Platform substrate management: Ruby, EC2/ELB/S3

- Real-time event processing: Clojure

If you're interested in learning more, email me directly: mark@heroku.com.
You are actively ignoring evidence that might not support what you already take to be true. This is bad science.

This isn't science. It's politics and it's extension, war.
Wish there were similar ones for all the other languages - PHP / Python etc. I always thought that most programmers and web developers experienced in one language can quickly pick up the major features of another lanaguage, if there was a quick overview of this sort. Know of any sites that do this? Maybe this is a great opportunity for someone to put together a site like that?
I haven't used Lion yet, but from what I've seen, it's still far more consistent than Windows.
Brain scanning devices that will be used to navigate web browsers. ETA 5 years.
Sunnyvale, CA

Looking for kick-ass co-founders for Amahi (profitable early stage) with either:

- a strong business development background, current marketing skillz, hopefully with OEM and VAR contacts to boot

- a demonstrated strong technical background, with emphasis on Linux, software distribution, servers, web apps, ruby, and RoR

- a multi-talented current marketing background

Amahi is a profitable early-stage startup making the coolest way to deploy and configure a media and app server
Whatever you can do in one Turing complete language you can also do in all other Turing complete languages. The point isn't what you can do, the point is what tasks are easier, simpler or faster to do in one language compared to another language, while also respecting how hard the language is to learn to get to the point where can can do what you want (easily).

I would prefer to use Perl over bash/awk/sed since Perl is good at the same things and more and has alot more libraries.
I was about to write some vanilla response, and then I saw this comment. Kudos for making me laugh and for most likely being correct.
"[...] surely we can build a simple app that everybody can use that does even one useful thing, like, say, mitigate the Erroneous Priorities Effect when you're attending a meeting."

This, I believe is a good old engineering problem. The hard (maybe not wicked) problem is getting people to use it. Ah yes, and if you really want to help solve the wicked problems, it can't just be any people but rather those who make/influence important decisions.
UFO in the Ocean?
>> Ahhh and in bonus: you know the "People you may know" section displayed at the right of your profile. Guess what? This section should be renamed "People who are not your friends but who attempted to visit your profile recently" ;)

This exert from the post would suggest otherwise, don't you think?
Purmerend, The Netherlands (~30 min from Amsterdam)

Online Touch is building the next digital publishing platform.

We're focused on development now, going to launch a new product with a big splash when we're ready. Our current (somewhat neglected) website hardly does our team justice - http://onlinetouch.eu

The publishing backend is built using a mix of Scala and Clojure, while frontend web development is done using Clojure and some Ruby. Our database of choice is MongoDB.
The viewer and editor applications are written in haXe: targeting javascript, iOS and flash >10.

Our office is light and roomy, which we'd like to fill up a bit more. Currently we're a small team of 4 bright hackers, of which 2 work remotely most of the week.

There's much interesting stuff to do. Talk to us :-)
While the dude who invents the drug that saves my life is doing far greater work than the dude who makes it possible for me to buy that drug at the pharmacy two blocks away, they're both doing good work, and both a net gain to the world. Why disrespect either?

There are genuinely useless, parasitic, and net-negative people out there, but none of the proposed examples (bankers, pharmacists, Google) falls into this category.
Just like how Microsoft bought out Google and IBM bought out Microsoft.
Twilio Client Contest & mobile SDK availability?
Hey guys, my partner and I at BugSense want to participate at the Twilio Client Contest that is closing on Aug 7th. We applied for access for the mobile SDK's when the competition opened but still nobody came back to us. Is it supposed to be only for web apps or they give access only to trusted users?
Animatable | Create HTML5 / CSS3 animations and advertising
10 essential MySQL tools
Non-technical? How to Join a Startup in 7 Steps
Personally, I'd rather sell ads than make things that kill people.
Nodejitsu Takes on Heroku and Joyent as Node.js Goes Mainstream
Taazr: Optimize and Monitor your Javascript
Of course it's possible - the giants of today aren't always the giants of tomorrow.

But like the other giant corps their demise will be a very slow process with plenty of time and capital to find their next big thing.
Interesting -- I didn't know they were that cheap. (BTW the cheapest one is $60 + shipping).
True, Status bar, no. Status label on the bottom bar, yes.
How is it too late? Ten years ago, significant pieces of Moose did not exist anywhere.

You can make the argument that if Perl 5 had had a better OO system not borrowed from Python, Moose might not exist now. That may be true in part, but I suspect significant pieces of Moose would still have to exist.
> I'd like to gain an understanding of the technical aspect of things to the point where I can at least understand how much work a feature request translates to.

First, you should read "The Mythical Man Month" and then start learning about the specifics of coding. Doing it in the reverse order is the path of painful and expensive mistakes.

EDIT:
I would suggest the expanded anniversary edition, rather than the original edition of the book. Also, having a minimal understanding of ancient systems (pre hard drive main frames) is helpful but not required. You can always ask here on HN about the difficult, odd and adventuresome aspects of old hardware.
Just to take one of your points farther, I think the beefiness of the escape plan illustrates how little Obama values the Pakistani relationship. And how much he wanted OBL, and how much he trusted DEVGRU.
There's a link to a subpage of http://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com/ in the article.
Show HN: Chrome Extension: Share Google reader links to Google+
While Google doesn't release an API of Google+, I developed this extension that adds a "Share to Google+" link in Google Reader.

And of course, it's open source: https://github.com/felipeelias/reader_to_plus
Google Code now supports git
My own experience is that when I try to poke holes in my own ideas, I can rationalize my way out of any objection. In that sense thinking hard about the product is almost counterproductive.

I think a good test of any idea is to build a small version of it and see if can break even or make a small profit. That way you don't fool yourself with any made-up metrics like how many people signed up on your fake homepage.
It might not be such an issue either, because with a subscription-based game like WoW, item rarity has more value to Blizzard because the longer it takes to get an item the more subscription revenue they get.

With Diablo III being a one-time purchase, item duping would devalue items on the player side and may or may not result in increased commission revenue for Blizzard (depending on how many players will actually purchase the item on the auction house).
It's not so much for the HN audience, but the next generation of article down the chain will use that paragraph as a basis for their headline. It is by far the catchiest and I don't think they will be explicit about conservation of energy with their readers.

Nice article though.
No it isn't, both are equally necessary for your life to be improved. You may consider inventing more prestigious and you could argue that it improves more peoples lives but some hypothetical scientist who simply invented a bunch of stuff in his basement that was never distributed would have as little impact on the world as anyone.
In my personal experience most of this is true.

At Loopt we used MSSQL from the beginning. Things didn't start this way (because I was young and foolish), but in the end:

* Each developer had their own local instance of the DB(s) for development.

* All schema was kept under source control (now using RedGate SQL Source Control, a fantastic product, and earlier as simple sql scripts in Hg/Svn and database projects in Visual Studio).

* Unit tests of the DB were done in code (C#). They set up their own initial state, ran against the local DB instance, and cleaned up after themselves by rolling back transactions.

* Commits in source control triggered automatic SQL updates in dev using RedGate SQL Compare (though for a time we used the SQL tooling in Visual Studio, also command line scriptable, for this task).

* Debugging performance was easy with performance monitor, set statistics (profile|io|time) on, and built in management views. Right click -> "Show what's expensive" kind of easy.

* Debugging functionality was easy with step-in line by line debugging from the C# code calling it.

* In many cases 5-10 round trips were avoided by keeping data local. Lots of network bandwidth was saved as well by only returning final results.

* Used correctly, stored procedures encourage correct handling of parameters and can increase security -- Web server code didn't have read or write access to the raw data. It was constrained to calling the stored procedures (no way to dump all password hashes, for example). Think of it as another layer of defense.

We tried to keep most of the complexity out of the DB because T-SQL is a terrible language. You'd have to be insane to write anything you didn't have to in it. To get optimal performance we occasionally had to do complex optimizations (table hints, indexed views, etc.), but all of that was still far easier than proper cache invalidation. Loopt ran with no cache because the DB worked just fine when tuned correctly.
I've always thought of advertisers and advertising as "it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money".

If advertisers are freely willing to pay for the web services I use eventhough I don't bother with ads myself, it's more than ok.

If there are enough suckers who actually buy that stuff to keep the advertisers' budgets on black so that they can keep paying for the web services I use, it's more than ok, too.

In neither case, I'm not the sucker and I still benefit from the scheme despite the fact that I don't even do anything, except run adblock.
That has always sounded to me like a simple ritualistic/habitual intonation, rather than an honest appeal to the Lord in Heaven.

I could be wrong.
Of course this will likely happen when a decent alternative presents itself. This is not guarenteed to happen though. The same could have been said about 'search' when Google wasn't around. 'Yahoo will buy them'. They had the chance but did not see the potential Google had as a searchengine. Whith this in mind it could potentially happen that a new company comes up with a better idea and grows too big too fast for GOOG to buy them. But that's the whole idea behind investing in the stock market: past revenues are no guarantee for the future...
Anywhere (we're based in Montreal)

Bandzoogle is hiring an Interaction Designer.

We build tools that help musicians succeed online. Our app powers tens of thousands of artist websites and helps them make a living by selling their music and growing their fan base. We've been “bootstrapped, profitable, and proud” since 2003 and are growing fast.

As our design lead, you’ll own the visual Bandzoogle experience -- from the front end to emails to the UX of the app. We’ve recently revamped our entire codebase to Rails 3 -- now we need you to revamp the look of our app from the ground up.

Our 10-member team is spread across Canada, UK and USA; we work where we love to be. Remote work welcome!

More details: http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/9438
cheap social status is an oxymoron (social status is zero sum) unless the status is perceived instead of real.
You forgot one point, every application reinventing tabbed windows. I don't know if microsoft tried to solve this or not with the new superbar in windows 7 but if they did they failed big time. One important reason is that they forgot a standardized alt-tab-within-application hotkey.
Right. That has got to be configurable though... And I thought I read you could use the arrow keys too anyway.