skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "give everybody a 10% raise" case can be looked upon either as a bug or a feature. Sometimes it's nice that anybody can do anything; sometimes it isn't.

As to creating the infrastructure and worries about reliability, there are a number of frameworks for this. E.g., Prevayler. It gives you all the ACID guarantees, but has about three orders of magnitude less code than a modern database.

Supporting it could definitely be a problem. That's true for anything novel, so I'd only do this where the (major) performance benefits outweigh the support cost.

Some kinds of statistics are easier with this. For example, if you want to keep a bunch of up-to-date stats on stocks (latest price, highs, lows, and moving averages for last hour, day, and week) it is almost trivially easy in a NoDB system, and much, much faster than with a typical SQL system.

For other stats and reporting, though, dumping to an SQL database is great. For many systems you don't want to use your main database for statistics anyhow, so a NoDB approach mainly means you start using some sort of data warehouse a little earlier.
I do, as does everyone in the office. Our parent company is one of the "Big 5", and I know people in all of the others, some of which are explicitly named in the show. Everyone in the industry is obsessed with the show because it is spot on, minus the womanizing and (mid-day) alcohol consumption.

Everything from the inspirational speeches to the insane personalities is accurate.
I just want to say.. this is 1 of the most insightful, and meaningful posts I've read in my entire life. Thank you so much for sharing this. I resonated with every single bit. Thanks for not making feel alone in my thoughts.
Yeah, you're probably right here. At $200-250 though, they would still be priced lower than any big brand names making tablets, regardless of OS. That alone would have sparked demand. Would it have been as explosive as it was? No, but they also wouldn't have lost as much money and might have avoided the potential doom to the platform.

Consider this as well:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hp-single-handedly-destro...

HP has set the bar pretty low for tablet pricing. All these new Touchpad owners now have $99 in their head, and when it comes time to upgrade, they will probably walk away from the more expensive options.

Personally, I don't think there is a tablet market, just an iPad market, and a big part of that has been price. Only Apple is Apple, and nobody else can demand that kind of money for what is essentially a toy and get away with it on the scale they can, for various reasons. Had HP set the bar at $200-250, they could have made the sales they were hoping to make, lost less money and still potentially make money on future, cheaper to produce hardware; or at least left that door open for another company to license their OS and do so. Nobody can make money at $99 without some huge profit margins from something else, and I don't think the tablet market has that something else (yet). Now, a lot of tablet consumers have that $99 price in their head, and it's going to be a hard sell getting them to spend more in the future.
AT&T is confident enough that they agreed to a breakup fee that is roughly 7.5% of total purchase price -- this is more than double the typical 3% breakup fee on M&A deals.
A lot of good points, but one I didn't see is what will T-mobile do if the deal falls through?
$7bn IS chump change compared to what T and VZ spend annually on infrastructure.
Unless DT wants to step up their game, T-mob will muddle along as #3 or #4 until a merger with someone goes through.
And if the DOJ blocks T, they'll (probably) VZ, which leaves Sprint. Good luck with that...
You wouldn't download a frigate.
Thing I Have Learned About Software Testing
People cling to clicks because it is the easiest thing to measure (clicks and then conversions) - and also because Google has trained them to do so with AdWords.

There is a movement to more multiple attribution style reporting - so when you get a sale you would see not only the click that generated it but the display ad that person saw that caused them to search on Google and finally click on your ad there.
Just curious - when does it do its first check? Immediately upon launch, or after 30 minutes of wait?
Im in Chicago with T-mobile. Crazy HSPA speeds, no dropped calls, and cheaper than AT&T. Just the thought of being forced to endure AT&T would send me off to Verizon.

Not to mention, having only one GSM carrier in the US is stupid.
Mobile optimization fail. Their ipad-optimized version cuts off part of the content, and the well-hidden link to go to the desktop version doesn't work. And that's even sidestepping the whole issue that the interaction model of their ipad version is worse than that of a regular website.

But it's nice to see that the race is still on, with each browser leapfrogging the others every once in a while.
Good point. Also worth comparing startups to regular SMBs, who don't do national TV advertising but rather focus on local listings, niche magazines and outdoor. There is a tool for every marketing job, which for a startup might mean sponsoring a meetup of early adopters, then releasing some shwag, doing PR or advertorials, and ending in harvesting demand via search. Otherwise, when you perceive advertising as a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
In a small web agency, mainly creating sites for clients, we find a mix of "git-flow"-style and continious deployment works best.

In the weeks before a new site is launched, we work to our own feature branches and merge into master when a feature is complete. In the run up to the site launch, when there's just CSS tweaks and the odd bug fix, people start working on directly master and deploying straight to staging servers.

When a site has been launched we normally keep working just on master, though occasionally creating feature branches for bigger changes.

This seems to work well for us as our DVCS needs change over time. I'd be interested to hear how other web agencies manage the different stages of developing clients' websites.
Advice for those thinking about their first startup
To be fair, you have to do the same for PTVS, and we dont' have such a nice UI to tell you the index processes are running.
Carnegie Mellon can use your FB photo to find the first five digits of your SSN
Understood. But you misunderstand me. I read that section of his About page, but it's not succinct enough.

If I were to walk into a crowded room and say, "For my business to succeed, I need an %X", what would be the value of X for it to apply to Sebastian's role? I can't just say "consultant".
The problem is, as an AT&T customer (a company I loathe BTW... in another tab I'm about to pay a $450 bill from them) I cannot use a Verizon tower. (There has been limited benefit to pursuing both the CDMA and GSM technology paths towards a wireless broadband network.) I assume I can't use a T-mobile tower either (there ought to be a Coase equilibrium between GSM carriers, but it would involve billing costs that a true merger could avoid). Thus, I have to pay AT&T, and you T-mobile, for coverage in the same area.

Now, coverage in some highly-populated areas is bandwidth-limited. In other words, there are often enough customers of each carrier in a place to saturate the corresponding antennas. But any time the T-mobile antenna is not saturated and the AT&T antenna is over capacity, there is waste. This waste shows up on both our bills (forgive me for assuming you're a T-mobile customer for the sake of argument).

Obviously, competition is a good thing, but its benefits are easily overwhelmed by infrastructure costs. Electric utilities generally operate very efficiently with government-sanctioned monopolies (and subsidies). The trading requirements enacted in the late '90s to promote "competition" on the grid are widely considered to have failed to improve utility service, and are implicated in things like the 2001 California energy crisis. Since colonial times, the Crown granted molopolies for expensive things like colonizing India...
A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.
If all the dollars spent on these sorts of advertisements end up causing me to spend more dollars on those brands and products, is that a net gain or loss for me? What about for society as a whole?

If it's a loss for me, what can I do to defend against it?
SublimeText's minimap is not as feature rich as metal scroll, but its pretty useful in general as a nav tool. I often find myself wishing Chrome had a scrollable minimap.
YouTube was tiny in comparison when Google bought them. They did an admirable job scaling to where they did, but it wasn't easy and it was still jut the beginning. They served ~100M videos a day and today serve over 3B videos a day (many in HD, which wasn't supported in 2006, the videos then were much lower quality). The amount of incoming video has also grown exponentially.

The YouTube we know today is because of Google and their technical chops.
This sounds like a feature branch strategy, which I've only used in 1 or 2 person teams, never on projects that big.

There have been some articles recently on the downsides of feature branching that my experience agrees with (http://continuousdelivery.com/2011/07/on-dvcs-continuous-int...). I'm curious if the GitHub people have hit the same issues.

So if 2 people are working on the same feature, they're probably working off the same named branch.

Are there any race conditions with merging to master? I'm assuming that only one head is allowed in master, correct? So that before a pull request is accepted and merged into master, the latest master must first be merged into the feature branch and have CI run all tests successfully on it before the pull request can go. Does GitHub stop you from merging into master if someone else just merged into master and you're about to create a new head?

Then you have to merge the latest master into your feature branch, run CI on it again and then merge to master after CI is successful (assuming someone else didn't beat you to merging to master again).

(I've got a lot more experience with Mercurial than Git so my mental model could be a little off)
Sounds like this is becoming The New Reality for web devs.
Shelly Starzz
I am so scared that this mythical new tablet will use a glossy screen, just like almost every other color tablet out there.

I say soft prayers at night that Amazon will build on the readability of the Kindle's screen and make their new device have that same soft matte finish.
Apparently, seeing an attractive person look at an object automatically makes you like it more [http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/subconscious-sta...]. I guess this is part of the reason ads tend to feature good-looking people.

This makes me want to avoid looking at ads as much as possible -- we are vulnerable to manipulation in ways which are completely impossible to defend against.
This is the tail wagging the dog. The plugins are going to be broken whether the update from 3 to 4 happens manually or automatically (and, if anything, discourages manual updating despite all the popups).

Windows has had binary compatibility for decades. Why not just version the internal browser API? (Extension XYZ was built against FireFox 3.6).
If you can make this hiring process work, that's probably a good sign about your code base. It can be difficult to find a meaningful and reasonably self-contained project in a large code base, but if your code is very well organized, it's possible.

The thing I really don't want to experience, ever again, is to be dropped into a horrendous project that nobody else wants to deal with, usually with an assignment along the lines of "nobody ever wrote tests for this - writing tests is a great way to learn a code base, so write some unit tests for this monstrosity", usually followed by a chirpy "Ping me on IM if you get stuck!"

If I were able to contribute meaningfully to a code base during my interview, that would give me a lot of confidence that I'd be able to succeed on the job and enjoy my work day.

The downside to this is that even very a very well organized code base often runs into a glitch that takes a couple hours to debug, and if this happens, you have a new candidate sitting next to a programmer muttering to himself as he messes around with config files trying to figure out out why the paths are all broken.
Where the Germans Live
Just a note. Result will be skewed for the HN crowd. Know the audience and context for bias.
Microsoft Patents Infinite Hybrid Cloud Data Storage
Aye, 64-bit hotspot with implicit -server switch, but going on your astonishment I took a look and it seems the 0.5s time is only achieved with fsc running from previous runs of the REPL. So from cold, i.e. no fsc running it takes about 3 seconds. 2.9.0-1 was taking 7-8 seconds to get the REPL prompt regardless of whether fsc was running already, so this is still like night and day for me :-)

Amongst other things it looks like Paul Phillips (a.k.a extempore) has done a lot of optimisation work. This looks like a pretty important one:

https://codereview.scala-lang.org/fisheye/changelog/scala-sv...
They just resell Sprint and Verizon service with shittier phones. A reseller isn't really competition. Spring and Verizon can shut them down whenever they please.
What.

A prolix.

Douchebag.
Note that it says "Unbuntu", not "Ubuntu"...
Beat me to the punch! Needs updating.
Lies, damn lies and data mining algorithms
True. And I'd agree that GSM is probably more valuable than CDMA as it is what most of the rest of the world uses, as has been pointed out too. Thanks for that.

I wonder now if people would be equally as upset by a Verizon/Sprint merger as it would effectively reduce the CDMA ownership to one company in the same way.
Google seems to be doing pretty well anyway though. I've tried several of their products and they seem pretty decent. I have a hard time imagining that stuff I found like google search and google maps were built by developers without any skills. Therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that they must be able to hire good people with their current methods, despite the skepticism.
Advertising absolutely affects me.

But the thing is, it does it both ways.

Old Spice was mentioned here. They came up with interesting, catchy new commercials. That immediately endeared me to their product.

Other commercials are often (at best) noise or (at worst) insulting of their own customers. I can't count how many times I've seen what was supposed to be a funny commercial, and the idiot in the commercial used the product. Your customers are idiots? Really!? I have never yet bought one of those products.

Not that I bought Old Spice, because I like my current solution. But I did seriously consider it.
Yes, which has led to countless other problems because users are running insecure browsers. Admins always want control, but it's not always better for anybody but the admins who justify their existence. I'm currently deploying a project in a business environment and we're requiring Chrome because of its auto-updating feature.
I think you are confusing committing with pushing? But even then, I do not see any harm in pushing often, you can always amend your commits before final merge or pull request.
It's also missing Palau (became independent from US trusteeship in 1994).
I think the point is that Lion and iOS are two different products specializing in two different UIs, whereas Windows 8 is one product trying to provide both UI styles. This means Windows 8 will have trade offs that are not present in a more specialized OS.
It's especially strange since Ubuntu is not an operating system (though it includes GNU/Linux, which is).

Pretty sure the whole survey is a joke/satire.

Edit: Now 100% sure that it's satire, since it's actually spelled "Unbuntu".
You have Win mobile, WebOS and no Blackberry? :)

Or does Blackberry just go into Java-based application?
That description was meant for those who don't understand programming, weak & strong typing, & type inference. It is a good enough description for those who don't know and will never care to know more.

I understand the importance of defining thing correctly, but does the average person need to care or worry about the difference between strongly/weakly typed & statically/dynamically typed?
Python Dictionary Implementation Optimization Notes
If it can be shown that you can show that you have a history of reading patents, then it can be argued that you wilfully infringed. It certainly makes defense much harder. Patent lawyers generally recommend that engineers NOT read patents for that reason.
Could you use a private BitBucket repo for this? BitBucket has the same kind of pull request functionality that I'd think you could use to emulate this continuous delivery style.
Ads didn't use to affect me, I use adblock and I rarely watch TV. But lately it seems they find all kind of new ways to send you ads, and I start to remember ads more. My personal policy has always been the same, if I need something, and there's more than one choice, if I recall ever seeing an ad about one company I'll always, always go for the other one. It seems like a natural thing to do, and I bet I'm not alone in that.

The other day I went to buy a lamp and the store had tons of one particular brand that advertises all the time. Of course I went right by those and bought another name I had never heard about, and it turned out to work just fine, and cost less.

So I guess that's why companies that advertise always puzzled me. I mean what's the point? Everyone gets annoyed at watching ads, so why would you want your brand name to be associated with annoying?

I guess I just don't get it.
Thanks for the informative response. Just a couple more questions:

> - The startup times can be a problem if you have a lot of data. Modern disks are pretty fast for streaming reads, though, and you can split the deserialization load across multiple processors.

Reading data, at even a GB/second from disk (which is currently not possible) is going to mean a second spent of a GB of data, just to read, let alone deserialize. That's with reading a snapshot, not replaying old transactions.

> - Mirroring state is easy; you just pipe the serialized commands to multiple boxes.

That's not distributing the load. I'm talking about having more data than fits in an reasonable amount of RAM (say 1TB). Also mirroring is nice for when you want read-only access to your data. You'll have the same problem as any other data store when you want multiple writers. Also, is replication synchronous or asynchronous (which end of CAP do you fall on)?

>- It's very fault tolerant. Because every change is logged before being applied, you just load the last snapshot and replay the log.

So it's going to at the speed of the disk then (http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2009/07/l1-l2-ram-and...). Don't get me wrong, this is still faster than writing to the network, but then writes are way slower than reads.

My other question is how much of a pain in the ass is it to debug such a system? I suppose if you have a nice offline API to look at your data, change something, revert back, etc, it would work well, but if it's deep within your normal application, it could become nightmarish.
Package Control is very cool, thanks for creating it. As an author of a Sublime plugin (https://github.com/alexstaubo/sublime_text_alternative_autoc...), how do I submit that package to the list fetched with "Discover Packages"? Do I add the binary package file to my Github repo, and then ask you to add it to the official package repository?
Thanks for the clarification. For niche players (like me), it's difficult to separate out a lot of the Fortune 500 advice on advertising. Creating "engagement" and "brand awareness" is all well and good, but if my total ad budget is $5,000 for a year, then it's tough for me to say, "Oh well, people have a slightly improved vision of my product and/or brand. Money well spent."

We've found that ads that just come out and say what we do perform much, much better. Simply bring up the pain point we solve and how we address it. Couple that with a call to action. Sure, it's pushy and unsexy, but it's easy to understand and it translates directly into user action.
What's wrong with WLM? I actually find it really usable. Maybe its the features more than the UI, but I find it simple to use.
Almost every millionaire I know is married with kids and living in the suburbs. Unless you win the lottery or are a professional skateboarder, becoming rich is more like boring suburban reality than being an international flaneur. (Interestingly, the rich pro skaters I know all live in the suburbs with their kids, too)

As someone who has also floated around a lot, even through Japan, it's an interesting lifestyle but sort of the opposite of how to get rich.
> they are the solution to many of most onerous problems with wireless service today

As far as I can tell, the most onerous problems with wireless service today are terrible customer service, high prices, ridiculous contracts, telco-limited innovation, and jerking customers around through pricing that ratchets ever more in favor of the vendor.

All of those are symptoms of insufficient competition, something a merger will make worse.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying you dont want people to know the music you have listened to when they have full access to your phone?

To be honest, if someone has my phone unlocked I would be more worried about them reading my emails and messing with my facebook account than them knowing how many hours I played Angry Bird.

Also, you can set the background of your photo app so it should not be showing random pictures.
For a 3-mon system managing 25TB of data, I think explorer is what you'll use. I'll be shocked if there isn't a way to make explorer your default. If there isn't at lauch, someone will fix it.
Except were you get wrong results but not errors. If the JS engine doesn't see an error, it doesn't know to fallback.
Where augmented reality and architecture collide[video]
In this case the benefit far outweighs the cost, if a bug is introduced in an update I want Google to be able to patch it and my browser to receive it asap.
Google App Engine, random stuff I write, and system scripting when PowerShell is annoying me. It works well on Windows.
This is a real concern. Industry does not publish their algorithms. If they are bad we wouldn't know. We would act based on their erroneous recommendations. Unless there will be something like PCI just for data mining quality.
Its interesting that they abandoned CI Joe. I wouldn't say, I saw this coming. But, unless they wanted to maintain/write a full blown CI server themselves, it would have got harder for multiple projects.
How often did they rap about Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter?
It's so good to know I'm not the only one still boycotting them! I was actually starting to reconsider it when the GeoHot thing happened and renewed my resolve.
In this case, I don't think we're missing out on anything: if their Android tablets are anything like their Android phones they're going to be locked down to the point of uselessness and crammed to the rafters with proprietary rubbish.
I don't think much time was spent putting this survey together...

Unbuntu - Like Ubuntu but... less so.

"Which technologies" has a blank option after MySQL, maybe that is for NoSQL ;)

Probably someone's school work. They are going to be excited about the number of participants.
Homo erectus forgot to pack its best tools when it left Africa
I didn't wear them because they were in style. I wore them because that was the only way to save my favorite pairs of jeans from the massive rip in both knees.
> Sometimes I wonder how some people's configurations get so wonky

Warez. Many expensive applications (especially audio/3d editing software) comes with a dongle. To "crack" the apps people write kernel extensions that simulate such dongles.

Mix that with a new kernel and you get the perfect disaster.
Gründerportal - 4startup
I can't fill this out without an F# option.