skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Most importantly, there are no simultaneous transactions... but if everything is hot in RAM, then it's not a problem"

Uh, OK. So, you're happy with single-core boxes then, I take it?

Actually, you're regressing to even before that, when there was no pre-emptive multitasking. When the program is done doing something, it yields control to some other task.

Also, I'd like to point out that just because you aren't explicitly doing I/O doesn't mean that you aren't doing I/O. The OS might have paged out some stale data (quite likely, since you aren't managing I/O yourself), and you might be holding the giant lock while it's paging it in.

"I can't speak to all systems like this, but the Prevayler approach is pretty straightforward."

I just want to clarify: so when you encounter a problem, you do some rollback, which automatically moves the state to the last snapshot and rolls forward to the previous transaction, right? No manual steps?

I hope you have a recent snapshot or that will be a long wait (while holding the big lock, I might add).
The problem is that licensing is a lot more complicated than for music, as films themselves are subject to a large number of licences (from the music they use to individual actor contracts) trying to verify every licence involved in the movie allows for online distribution in a flat-fee manner is a non-trivial task. And that's if you can persuade all the movie studios that it's a good idea.
Great/scary quote
Believing Your Own Bullshit
I wonder about this concept. The reality is that having enough RAM to power NASDAQ, and then being able to accurately reproduce the state of the data following a crash based on input being kept in a durable store - which effectively is IO to the disk, which is the same as, well, just writing to a DB to begin with.

Of course, Fowler talks about 'snapshotting' the data, which, again, makes me wonder if playing with all of this resident memory and the systems needed to make that happen haven't already been solved by...um...databases.
I like to think about my commits as units of work that I can pull back or cherry pick if I want to. It doesn't always work out that way.

Make sure your commits are cohesive to the change you are making. I think that is a good rule of thumb.
Linkbait.

Really ? A Vista Moment? Microsoft puts ZERO innovation into it's products. They are boring and unimaginative. Stagnated metaphors and stale esthetics. Lion, on the other hand, is a natural progress for OS X, and form me, an amazing one.

It defiantly boosts my productivity. Not that Snow Leopard was bad, but I upgraded all of our computers while I was still beta testing Lion. It is simply a very useful upgrade,
I've spent regular time preparing for programming puzzle style interviews by working through several books. For whiteboard style interviews I've received puzzles that I've studied before or puzzles that are similar to something I've seen before. I feel that how well I do in this style interview is proportional to how many practice puzzles I've done.

But often the work I'd be doing has very little to do with the preparation I did for the interview. For this type of work I've found that a programing project is a much more honest assessment of my skills. And this is good for both the employer and I.
> How do you guarantee that all of the apps that touch that data use the current version of said code?

In a NoDB app? It's very easy: only one code base ever directly touches the data, because the data lives in the RAM allocated to the app. You give external access via an API, so integrity is very easy to enforce.
Have a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/poderosa/ , the latest beta is from June 2011. I have been running it daily and it is very stable for me.
> 3+ hours downtime after earthquake.

In DC, all the services were down for about that long.

T-Mobile's coverage in DC is indeed quite spotty: at GMU where I work it's quite good. But at my home in Alexandria, it's far from hot.

But for me, there is one reason I use T-Mobile. The Nexus S. An unlocked, no-provider-junk, Google-updated phone which is updated 6 months before other phones and which has 3G support in Europe. [The last bit knocks out AT&T and Sprint's version of the phone, and it's a big deal for me]. Just wish T-Mobile would permit UMA on the phone.
But that's exactly the point -- just manually update to firefox 4 and your problems will go away! Firefox 4 is only a few months old. Compared to previous firefox releases it's brand-new.
Madison ave ad exec here. They're talking about a specific kind of advertising, what we would call "brand awareness" advertising. The objective is, as they say, not to get you to do anything, but rather to shift your perception (implicitly or explicitly) about a product or brand. Alone, it doesn't do much of anything. Matched with direct-response, promotions, events, point-of-sale, etc ... it can be powerful. But this is a tool for mass market consumer packaged goods and the like, not your niche startup.

Since they have the picture of the Old Spice guy in the header, that's a perfect example to use. Those ridiculous commercials were not meant to send you running out to buy deodorant. Amongst other problems with that, deodorant is what we call a "low consideration" market - as in, you just don't really think about it. You came up with your go-to brand, then you just stuck with it because of inertia. You can't convince someone of the functional benefits of one brand versus another because they're all exactly the same thing.

Those Old Spice spots are meant to have a multi-year effect on your perception of the brand. How many of you remember that Old Spice used to be thought of as an old man sailor deodorant? They wanted to move away from that perception, and in a decade, no one will remember anything except how funky and hip they are.

I wrote about this campaign when it broke in July of 2010 here: http://www.joshklein.net/is-old-spices-viral-campaign-a-fail...

As an interesting anecdote, Tide has 70% of the detergent market despite literally being exactly the same box of chemicals as any other detergent. Except their box is a different color, and they advertised for 50 years so that your mother would tell you which brand to use when you went to college.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that this kind of advertising is getting harder because of something you need to achieve called "share of voice". There used to be 4 TV stations that the whole country watched, so you could spend enough money to blast your message into the head of every American. This is obviously not how the world works anymore - you simply can't reach everyone, and even if you could, there's almost always a better way to segment your audience and only speak to the people who care. That's why I work in digital advertising, and think the TV/Print people don't have great long term prospects for their industry.
Well, I can't edit this anymore but I decided to give it a shorter URL so it's more convenient (I had one free anyway):

http://finderr.org

Hope someome finds it useful!
I believe Jenkins can be set to pick up the latest commit, regardless of branch. Either they've got a plugin to handle it or they just look over the builds manually.
I'd be curious as to what 'damage' you needed to have undone. I've written in just about every IDE available (including vim) and quite frankly my opinion is that, well, tools can make things easier but they won't make anyone a good programmer.
Define "manually update".
I love Sublime.

If you're like me and prefers TextMate's simple cycling autocompletion (usually bound to the escape key) to Sublime's weird snippets-and-best-match tab completion, I made a Sublime Text plugin that gives you just that: https://github.com/alexstaubo/sublime_text_alternative_autoc...
Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind.

I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product.

DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.
How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck
GOOD SEO FOR RENOVATION PARIS
Interactive Map: The United States of Venture Capital - WSJ
Hey, sorry registration wasn't good. What was the problem? Did you run into an error, or was it just that setting up an account was a hassle?
Just moved to socket.io-0.8.2, which fixes the issue.
The rootkit debacle was six years ago, and was perpetrated by a business unit that is effectively siloed from the one that manufactures consumer electronics.

I'm not saying your apparently indefinite boycott is unjustified; what happened under the Sony name in 2005 happened on the same watch that everything else in all its myriad corporate structures happens. What I am saying is that corporately, Sony is a complex beast, and one business unit's missteps are not necessarily representative of another.
Where's Scala?
Why Kiva’s Co-founder Struggled to Find Her Great Idea
For reasons decided long ago, the company I'm at uses Mercurial, and I don't think we're in a position to retrain everyone and move to a private GitHub repo.

Anyone know of ideas for doing code reviews for the whole pull request, commit, or a single line like GitHub? This is probably the most beneficial part for us.
That's one of the ideas presented, and one that I agree with. That's part of why I think it's important to have people around you who are supportive in general, but also people who have similar goals and dreams. No matter how abnormal you are, there are probably many out there who can relate.

But that's only part of the post, and Sebastian seems to indicate that "being different" means not living the idyllic suburban family life. And not because he doesn't want it, but because he's driven and wants to succeed (like where he talks about $40m as being his number). And this is what I disagree with; you can be driven and successful and still have a happy family life. You can even live in suburbia! There are literally millions of millionaires in the world. There are almost a million households in the US with net worth of more than $5m. Most of those people live normal family lives. They don't all float around continents writing blog posts and attempting to win the lottery by trying to start a bank one month and sell a $2m government contract the next.

In fact, now that I'm thinking through this, I think what bums me out about this post is the idea that it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you get rich. I doubt Sebastian has any real interest in starting a bank or fulfilling a huge government contract. He just wants money, and it's not even clear why. I don't think that's a healthy way to live, that's all.
The Fashion Industry Wants Tumblr to Get its Fucking Act Together
Honest question: Is it that they aren't capable of precision, or aren't capable of precision cheaply? I mean, look at flexpickers, those are pretty precise, as are the robots that attach trace wires to chips in an IC package. Plenty of other precision tasks are done by robots as well such as screwing things together and various other tasks.

I also am very curious to find out what people do at foxconn that can't be automated rather than can't be automated cheaply.
It is precisely for this reason that I'm largely confused by Internet advertising payments. A lot of companies only want to pay out based on the number of clicks an ad gets. If what this article says is true (and I've come to this conclusion myself before), then the direct clicks as soon as someone sees an ad on a web page is largely irrelevant. What should matter are the impressions over time, allowing that product or service to grow in the consumer's mind.
Paul Reed Smith Howard Leese Limited Private Stock
Price: $470.00. $20 off Back to School Sale. Free Shipping. Hurry Buy now!
What I really like about OS X is that almost all text controls in system use old Unix shortcuts for moving around text (same as Emacs is using), so you might just learn them:
⌃a, ⌃e, ⌘<, ⌘> for line/document begin/end respectively. There are more of them, you can go through Emacs tutorial to learn them.
That only cycles between currently open tabs, so that's not quite the same. The genius of TextMate's go-to-file pane was that before you started typing, it would list your recently closed files, so the go-to-file pane had two functions in one, both servicing the need to open something that is not currently open.
To be fair, I can take an ancient 512mb memory stick and it still fits into most sony devices I have now. Sometimes proprietariness leads to consistency.
At least on the *nix side, virtualenv and pip do almost everything you'd need. If you're using easy_install to install anything other than pip, you're likely doing it wrong.
Ah, I somehow missed the most active repository then. Sorry.
http://pen.io
Often times they are stuck using insecure browsers because some archaic piece of in house software depends on obsolete features only present in dated versions of browsers. They choose to skip updates because they don't want to spend the cash rebuilding the timekeeping system to work with anything other than IE <= 7.
Hiding in Plain Site: post-breach
The tablet version is horrible on the desktop, I don't understand why the interface had to change just to cache the email messages.
It's unprofessional for the detective to pass moral judgment on the accused. His job is to find likely suspects and pass them on to the court for legal judgment.
Apparently so does music industry - from comments on story:

"I run a music blog on Tumblr and I've been saying this for a long time. I'd LOVE to see an analytics dashboard, simply for the fun of knowing exactly how deep the engagement goes, but also for a business standpoint... this gap prevents me from knowing and selling my blog's true reach."
Off-topic, but do you watch Mad Men? If so, what is your opinion of it, as an ad exec?
Opinion: Is Google the Walmart of Tech?
I've been enjoying Subjot's the private beta for a few months now. A few of my friends are on as well. I'm very happy to not have to listen to them drone on about a couple of topics that usually dominate their twitter feeds.
How to get your ex boyfriend to want your back
The newest build has "Open Folder…" in the File menu.
What about South Sudan?
It is amazing how technical his talk is it`s really intressting if you have a progamming background.

And it just so different to any other keynote for a game i have ever seen.

edit: 5 mins to the end he talks about the doom3 opensource
So you want to write a security book?
IBM acquires i2,a company providing intel and investigation management software
I've just signed up (henry.oswald) your drop down on the pay now in chrome crops off the cents in the price.
easy_install / setuptools works pretty well for me.

Installing trac is non-trivial no matter what operating system you're using.
Err, you're not new here, not sure why you said that.
Spectrum is a sparse and valuable asset that isn't easy to acquire control of - you generally never want one company in complete control of such assets, especially when it can be used for anti-competitive means. I believe having ATT control all GSM spectrum (control is loosely equivalent to 'own' here -- technically ATT doesn't 'own' it but for all practical purposes it does) would be disastrous if other wish to acquire/use spectrum for services related to what ATT offers.
> I'm pretty sure the last time I read that article it said that there is no generally accepted definition of weak typing. This discussion seems to echo that.

Agreed. There ARE definitions but they aren't terribly specific, useful, or even very consistent. Funnily enough, the wikipedia article on strong typing includes C and C++ as an example of strong typing.

In this case anyway, I think it's clear that the author was really talking about the static vs dynamic distinction, and should have used those terms instead:

> Some languages are strongly typed, which means that the programmer must define the type of every class, function, and variable that he uses; tiresome, but it can have big pay-offs in terms of overall speed. Other languages, like JavaScript, are weakly typed, which means that the programmer doesn’t have to worry about such piffling minutiae; you can just write some code and let the compiler do the heavy lifting.
Yet another project rewritten in GWT. Interesting, how they decide what UI technology to use in new products - GWT or Closure?
Are there any alternatives? I can't think of any companies off hand who aren't morally bankrupt in at least one regard.
You see, enterprise PCs are centrally managed and admins don't want something breaking because of the smallest of updates. They want to test their updates for a long time before they are pushed down to users. Auto-updating is exactly the opposite of what the enterprise wants, IMO.
What about ROLLBACK? And no, going back in time by replaying logs is no substitute, because you lose other transactions that you want to keep (and perhaps already reported to the user as completed).

What about transaction isolation? How do you keep one transaction from seeing partial results from a concurrent transaction? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of subtle bugs.

And all of the assumptions you need to make for this no-DB approach to be feasible (e.g. fits easily in memory) might hold at the start of the project, but might not remain valid in a few months or years. Then what? You have the wrong architecture and no path to fix it.

And what's the benefit to all of this? It's not like DBMS do disk accesses just for fun. If your database fits easily in memory, a DBMS won't do I/O, either. They do I/O because either the database doesn't fit in memory or there is some better use for the memory (virtual memory doesn't necessarily solve this for you with the no-DB approach; you need to use structures which avoid unnecessary random access, like a DBMS does).

I think it makes more sense to work with the DBMS rather than constantly against it. Try making simple web apps without an ORM. You might be surprised at how simple things become, particularly changing requirements. Schema changes are easy unless you have a lot of data or a lot of varied applications accessing it (and even then, often not as bad as you might think) -- and if either of those things are true, no-DB doesn't look like a solution, either.
Hey developers - remember, we plan to sue you for using technology Apple provides to you. We realize everyone was thrilled that we won't do that, but we will try our best to do that.

Patents are supposed to be a compromise in order to facilitate new technology disclosure to the public. Does anyone realistically think that without Lodsys, in-app purchasing would have never appeared? Rather, only the negative side of the compromise is invoked: we must pay Lodsys because it acted quickly and submitted a patent for something that is obvious.
Open Up, the new blog for Open Source startups
Reasonable expectation of privacy is a legal term. It has nothing to do with the ability of the communication to be intercepted by a criminal.

You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your home, but that doesn't stop a criminal from breaking in and setting up hidden cameras.
> The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems.

Tell that to the generic-brand pharmaceutical companies. ;)

> Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway.

In the old way, where you had to actually present an implementation of the patented idea, I imagine this would have encouraged inventors to innovate more rapidly. The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. (I'd try to provide a link, but engineers shouldn't be looking at patents.)

"Oh, you're trying to genuinely improve our lives? Too bad I already came up with the idea in the shower one day and wrote it down before you did! But I'm willing to let you go ahead and try for $40 million."
Typographic portraits generated from social feeds.
I'm totally looking forward to using Metro. I want it on my laptop when I'm in consume mode on the couch. But when I go to the Office, back to WinLegacy mode.
Ask HN: How do you hire an app development firm?
A college friend based in LA asked me how he can find a firm to totally redesign and rebuild his company's web app. They're running on 90s design and technology and need a complete overhaul.

How can he figure out what good app development shops are out there? I suggested he attend some local dev meetups and ask them. But, I also wanted to check here.

Know of any good app dev firms or places to find them?
I tend to commit the first set of written tests, the first code & test fixes that passes them, etc. It's very organic though; if you do a "write one test pass one test" workflow that'd be a lot, but since I tend to work on multiple tests at once, it works fine.
The fact that it lists Minix as an OS choice but not (say) Fedora makes me wonder if it's supposed to be a joke, but if so it's way too subtle for me.
Fantastic insight that people tend to say "no" when offered a chance to pursue their dreams. But I disagree about the reason. I don't think it's that they don't want to be different; having an interesting dream is already being a bit different. I think it's that once you can have something, it's no longer a dream.
Having to complete something like this: http://www.newsmild.com/wp-content/uploads/upgrade-offer-boo...

Unfortunately, I think years of popup dialog fatigue leads lots of people to just close the window.
I wonder if this gloriously epic lawyer-fail had anything to do with the DOJ's call? http://bit.ly/oGKw2x [Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger]
I was with T-Mobile from 2003-2009 and have been with AT&T since, and the biggest reasons I gave in to switching over were the iPhone, T-Mobile's spotty coverage and the fact that a large portion of my friends(and girlfriend) were on AT&T.

I had a great deal while on T-Mobile and it was very hard to quit them. Personally, I believe that competition equals innovation which is better for consumers, and we need more of it. The situation for mobile service is quite sad here in the States with the collusion of the big two(not counting T-Mobile and Sprint, I suppose) on pricing and such, and having AT&T get even bigger wouldn't help the situation.
I used to think the same way, but after letting the stable version do its thing for a while on several computers, mine and my relatives', with no issue whatsoever, I stopped worrying.
Since you asked, I live in Chicago and coverage is wonderful here: very few dropped calls and great 3g service. When I leave town, admittedly, it gets more spotty. Coverage is a YMMV thing with any carrier.

T-Mobile also has great customer support and serves my unlocked Nexus S without a contract and with free tethering, something I'm sure AT&T will refuse to do.

PS: I used to have AT&T (actually cingular back then). Service in Chicago was atrocious. Any phone call over a few minutes would drop at least once, I'd have to stand in the window of my apartment to make phone calls, etc. Once again, YMMV.