skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The meta-point for me is that SQL is just broken, as are its many implementations. We'd never tolerate a scripting language that made you learn all the implementation details before you were effective with it. And yet we tolerate this from database engines and the languages we use to interact with them.

The opposite end of the spectrum is modern compilers. C/C++ compilers are generally so good that most attempts at nuanced optimization are just pointless; The compiler saw you coming and optimized your code behind your back before you got there. Why can't storage engines be like this? Why do you have to think not only about the type of your data, but how you want it implemented as well? Are there technical reasons why a db can't take generic data declarations ('string' instead of 'varchar(255)') and do the right thing with it when you populate your db? Or treat the use of a transaction as a hint that you'd like a storage engine that supports transactions?

I realize there comes a point where the db design has to be clamped down for production, but in the design stages there's a lot of optimization that a 'SQL compiler' could do behind your back. It currently seems like database product designers have taken the lazy way out and decided that optimization should live in the developers' heads rather than in the engine.

It just seems like SQL is this awful holdover from the days of COBOL and that we seriously need a modern product that let's us think about our programming problems rather than SQL's hangups. Am I missing something really basic, here?

Let me emphasize that, afaik, ronaldbradford knows his stuff, and I'm glad for him if he can make a living off of his MySQL knowledge. I just wish that that knowledge was embedded in the products themselves.
Have you thought about using http://disqus.com ?
Libertarianism cannot be killed any more than Catholicism could. The market crash is a "test of faith." Every failure can be attributed to an insufficiently libertarian government.
I thought the same thing initially, but there are other successful examples, like Olympus or Canopus.
Spam won't get voted up or commented on. People are clearly interested in this particular product, at least this time.
Clonedroid - Google Android running on Chinese iPhone clones
This was filmed in 1991 and probably distributed on VHS. It was also probably cost much more then it would today.

Also, the audience was most likely not the same as VCs today whose attention span lasts about 60 seconds during a pitch.
Sharing The Idea. Here's One.
Ridiculous. First the article says how startups depending on ad revenue will all fail and go out of business, then it says it predicts ad revenue will fall 10%.

Even if ad revenue falls 10% there is a ton of money out there.

10% != "sharply"
I don't think there are many if any applications that I'd pay for to use on the Facebook network.
Ask HN: What's up with web based blog readers?
What's up with the lack of many web based blog readers?

Currently there are Google reader and Bloglines (I am using it) and Wikipedia says Rojo is still around. That's it. Why?

Is the reason for this because Google Reader just works, can scale, is fast and is free?

Marshall Kirkpatrick thinks this is awful (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bloglines_is_back.php).So do I. You?
I think you mean a web app to generate names and squat them. :-)
NewsGator Online?

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NewsGatorOnline/Default...
Anatomy ads: a new way to monetize your brand
No, because cats won't stay around long enough to see what happens.
It looks as if Kramnik blundered at 29. ... Nxd4 based on analysis (some of which can be seen at: http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/files/kramnik_anand_2008_5.h... ) but I agree that their wasn't much advantage either way until then. Of course, I'm pretty crappy chess player.
Sound too corporate for me. Even the link states this.
Apparently he didn't bath for long periods at a time.
Twitter and Yammer Test Dot-com Business Models
Hey guys. I recently submitted an application for this Winter's Y Combinator, and I just wanted to introduce myself here and get some feedback. I've been a lurker here for a while and thought I might chime in.

Feel free to have a look at the site. Right now it's sort of a rough prototype of the idea we've been playing with. What we wanted to do is create a network that allows people to promote their own ad network by combining all of their web spaces together. A new way to create a personal brand, promote a cause, or fund an event. It's a portable ad widget that works through fixed sponsorships.

I'd like to know what questions you guys might have, and what you think. Feel free to rip it apart and leave nasty comments too. Your feedback is most welcome.

Thanks!
I don't think Apple went for or took that market. The right-hand side of the workstations diagram was mostly replaced by Windows NT - some exceptions in artsy professions which use macs (probably by a similar proportion to those that did before 1996). A combination of Windows and free unix have replaced the other side.

Apple's focus and new success has been at and among home users, and things like iTunes and iWork. If they had been focussed on what was once the 'workstation' area we'd have seen far more emphasis on their proven development technologies and collaborative workplace technologies. WebObjects has survived, but it was looking dubious for years. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was still more OpenStep deployed on traders' desks than OSX.
If game programming is your interest, you might want to also look at Scott Bilas presentation for a "data-driven object system": http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/game-objects.ppt

They implemented pretty much what Steve is describing for Dungeon Siege. (Presentation was in 2002, so they started on it probably around 2000. Take that for "no earlier references", Steve ;)

I vaguely recall that Thief used a similar system, too. There's also at least on "NextGen" game that uses that system that I'm aware of. It's pretty powerful (and makes it incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot)

As for the "Chieftain" example - it's usually solved by providing multiple prototypes for an object. With all the ensuing uglyness.
From my understanding (and the graphs don't disprove it, aside from the Doubleclick bounce), Google has been in "slow hire" mode for over a year. The feeling I get from folks within is that GOOG got a bit bloated in the middle management tier, had gotten uncomfortably hierarchical, and they would not be hiring to replace a large number of positions (no layoffs...just fewer hires to fill "holes" left by people leaving).

I don't think the economy has a lot to do with it--Google still has tons of cash, revenues are strong, and growth is apparently still happening. I think it's just that they grew too fast to hire as carefully or selectively as prudence requires, they recognized the problem, and took steps to correct it. (I think some of the steps are probably counter-productive. A lot of the early hires that built Google into what it is, wouldn't be able to get an interview with Google today, because they didn't go to the right schools or have a 4.0 GPA.)
on schwag:

I was kindof thinking of distributing free T-shirts when I speak at LUGs and/or to customers who express interest. At $5-$10 each, well, it might be a dumb idea, I'm not sure. Average customer gets me $10/month or so in revenue.

See, I was thinking that my target market (cheap Linux hobbyists and cheap micro-businesses) might actually wear free shirts. I would think the value of the schwag as advertising directly correlates to how much it is used in public by the recipient.

The thing is, as I'm self funded, the credit crunch doesn't mean anything, so long as I keep my consulting gigs. I'm buying hardware right now like it was 1999. This next month, after I get my new capacity up, I am going to need to spend some money on advertising.

I do ok for the relevant google searches, and my target market is very technical (yes, I could vastly expand my market by making it easier. I'm working on it, but my core customer base is people like me- people who don't click on ads.) so I don't think buying 'sponsored results' from google will make much difference.
I'm quite certain that this isn't a recent discovery.
It would probably be pretty easy to kill the EM emanating from the keyboard. If all the circuitry was surrounded by tinfoil and the cable had better shielding, it'd probably cut the radiation a lot. If anything, i'd bet its the cable that does all the radiating? I'll have to think about that one a bit.

Its totally badass though. I kinda wanna go home and build something like that. Probably harder than it looks though.
Not really. Attacks against unintended emissions have been around for years, whats one more for the pile. The other thing I would question is wether or not this can actually capture and decode the signals at actual typing rates versus the hunt and peck speed demonstrated in the video...
looks like they used a USRP.
I didn't RTA, but reading keyboards (and monitors) from EMR is at least 30 years old in intelligence circles.

Source? Geesh. Seems like I read this in one of the biographical spy books I got into a decade or so ago. The amount of stuff you can pull out of the air with the right equipment is completely amazing.
Memo to Start-Up World: Money is available
The economic crisis doesn't mean that there is a complete drought in VC money pouring to start ups.
is 60 people really a statistically significant sample size?
No.

ZFS solves 1990s era problems - nobody has filesystems that large on local disk. We use clustered filesystems for that. On SAN, GFS works nicely.

DTrace is good, but in practice you don't often run into problems where kernel-level tracing is required. The recent example of 'look at MySQL running SQL queries by watching printfs' could be done with strace (or for that matter MySQL in the first place).

Everything else Solaris sucks as usual, except for the app situation, which sucks even more now that x64 is the flavor of the month and there are so few apps for Solaris x64.
Conversely, if the Fed sets a price for troubled assets, each bank will know where they stand, and they won't have to hoard cash any more. Those banks that made bad decisions will fail, as they should, and those that didn't will see confidence in them restored.

A direct capital injection offers blanket protection to all banks, good and bad, and does nothing to discourage this from happening in the future.
People starting companies now can choose ideas that lead to profitability rather than "exits" (IPOs and acquisitions). Ideas along the lines of what 37signals does. As long as they do that, one can argue that startups are not any less feasible now than they were last year, as follows. PG's essay of a few years ago on why you should take VC gave as one big reason, Well, you competitors are probably going to take VC (which allows them to progress faster than you can if you do not take VC). The credit crunch makes it harder for you to get VC, but it makes it harder for your competitors, too. Now, what would people do who decide not to found companies? Well, become employees. But the employment market really does get a whole lot more competitive during a big economic downturn, whereas if the analysis I just gave is right, the start-up sector does not (at least the part of the sector in which success is not dependent on an IPO or acquisition does not).

There is a hidden assumption in the above: it assumes that a startup's competitors are other startups, not established firms. Established firms have easier access to credit than startups. (They can fund new lines of business out of profits from existing lines of business, for example, which is a form of "access to credit" for the sake of this discussion, which is about starting new lines of business -- i.e., exploiting new markets.) This is a real disadvantage of startups relative to established firms, and the disadvantage gets bigger because of the economic downturn, but the disadvantage of being an employee of an established firm when lots of job hunters are in the market might get even bigger.

There are ways in which startups have been able to neutralize the funding advantage held by established firms. One big way is to be more agile. "Agility" means adopting new technologies and entering new market more quickly. Changes in technology and changes in markets and potential markets continue to occur during economic downturns.
Hahah yeah definitely a sign and not proof. It'll be fun to see how things have changed two years from now.
can anyone here actually visualize the chess notation? I always have to set up a board <feeling dumb>
3 Reasons Why New Facebook Is Better For Apps
I like your strategy. Would you mind my pinging you for your thoughts in the future?

Your profile didn't have your email listed - if you could shoot me an email at gupta[at]ididwork.com I'd really appreciate it!
Are the coupons always publicly available to everyone?
I actually would argue that the new Facebook platform is better for developers because it takes a strong stand to increase user engagement by forcing developers to provide actual value, instead of relying on spam. And although user growth has decreased because the new users and existing users are using applications with higher value, they are more willing to become paying users.

I go into a lot more detail on my recent blog post:
http://www.charlesju.com/2008/10/3-reasons-why-new-facebook-...
If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it
Fine. You could say it obviously has something to do with domain names. But, what exactly? Why should I bother using Domainr instead of searching using my preferred registrar? Surely, there must be something compelling enough to warrant such a site in the first place. It's pretty thin if it has to be sold with only a lame, cliche name. Is it too much to ask for at least a descriptive sentence fragment?
I have a 7'' Asus EEE and I have to say that the small keyboard and small screen really kills the experience.

I think that I'd much rather get the Asus S101 even though it's more than double the price.

http://www.slashgear.com/asus-s101-luxury-fashion-netbook-of...

It's a 10'' screen and thin like the Mac Air. But at $700, that's still quite the steal.

As a caveat, I just bought the new Macbook and I'm loving it. I think that this thing is really portable enough for me to take anywhere, and yet powerful enough for me to use as a desktop replacement. It's really the best value for the price. (Plus, for lack of a better way to describe it, OS X = ownage)
Go to a college and look at all the kids. They're using macs. That means, in the future, the people who make decisions will lean more towards mac.

I don't at all think that mac's polish is a gimmick. We know that using 2 monitors increases productivity. This is a general case of the fact that how you connect to your computer directly alters how your brain has to work in order to use the computer. It seems to me that a better user interface and a more clean design are important ways to decrease the cognitive friction with the computer. You know those little logos they put on pc laptops palmrests? Each of those, just by being in your visual field, causes a cascade of preconscious neurological activity as your brain triggers all the things it associates with the logos. Thus, just by sitting down to work in that environment, your are decreasing the brain power you can spend working. The superior mac UI generates much less cognitive friction, allowing me to focus more of my cognitive processes to thinking about what I'm working on. You may think this is a gimmick, I think it's essential to being maximally productive.

It's like the band velvet underground. Sure, there were more popular bands, but fans of velvet underground largely created later progress in subsequent waves of musical progress.
Dear Netbook makers:

Just. Use. Ubuntu.

Signed, everyone.
I thought they would be talking about a cut in options or something , slow hiring doesn't end gravy. Better title "google hiring slows"
Icitydata
Sports is the wrong metaphor.

It's more like being in a science class and watching an argument between a creationist and a real scientist.

"Evolution is good. Things should evolve and get better and we shouldn't be afraid of it."

"I did not come from a monkey. God made the Supermall 6,000 years ago, and it's always bad when things change, which means I'm afraid of anything ever getting better. Can I have that banana?"

Motoko: "Yawn. It's like watching sports."
s/SQL/MySQL

Other dbs like oracle, db2, postgres, and sql server are indeed much better about this. Ie. they only require optimizations on statistics like resident memory, etc... The actual queries do not need to be optimized except in extreme cases.
Cannot agree more. Let the Crisis prevail while cleansing the markets! :)
At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out.

At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.

One of my favorite examples by Edwards Deming is a factory that has three production lines, each manned by an employee, each producing the same product on the same equipment. Furthermore, assume that there are no defects in the equipment, the manufacturing processes are under statistical control (negligible products appearing 2 standard deviations from the mean in any measured variable, iirc), and that the employees are equally skilled at their jobs. The company has a policy to promote top performers and dismiss low performers.

Every year, at the annual review, the company policy demands that they promote one average worker, keep another average worker in production, and fire the other average worker, simply because even a statistically controlled process produces some variation. This is a random process in that all three candidates have been defined as equally qualified.

In a typical software organization, where there is hardly such a thing as a controlled process, performance reviews are pure fiction if they purport to say anything about the individual. It's simply amazing hubris to think that you can attribute any given success or failure to a quality of the individual employee when your processes are not under statistical control. It is therefore amazing naivete to think that promotions in an organization of any size are handed out based on merit. They are handed out based on, at best, a record of performance, which is subject to the vagaries of chance.

Note that I'm not advocating for any particular Utopic solution. I'm just acknowledging that local reviews of system components (employees, in this case) will never produce a globally optimum solution.
Anyone that has already decided to use Vista is unlikely to change their mind because of the Mac ads. IMHO someone considering an upgrade to Vista is much more likely to be influenced.
Though, the lower stock price of late means that options have been "cut"
Here are a couple more links with good discussion about prototype-based programming:

* http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrototypeBasedProgramming
* http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClassesPrototypesComparison

SY is mostly talking about prototype-based programming in terms of Javascript, but it is also well-supported in some other languages, especially Lua (The chapter on OO in _Programming in Lua_ is IMHO the clearest explanation of prototypes I've found.), and it's probably possible to implement an inefficient-but-good-enough-for-brainstorming version in most languages.
There are other platforms to build on than just Facebook
I used the tool to make the name markovable, got the domain and made this: http://www.markovable.net
My relatively small, non-spammy application took a 20% hit from its perfectly linear growth, but I'm already back to July's levels. Things never halved and are certainly not dead.
Dr. Flakenstein and Microsoft's Perpetual Startup
Something tells me they aren't in it for a big pay day.
How difficult/practical would it be to create a software filter that replaces these colors at the user's screen with other, more easily discernible?
This is my favorite line:

If you want a recipe for restless sleep, I can give you one. Add one part “what will my wife think” with 3,000 parts Benjamin Franklin; stir in a “beer anytime you damn well please” and top with a chance at financial independence.
Annals of Technology: Hello, Hal
Generating domain names using Markov Chains, now as a webservice
At the bottom of the page there is a chess player that lets you step through the game.
Tassie devils renew contagious cancer fear
Checkout these free solutions (PHP/MySQL):
- www.magentocommerce.com
- www.zencart.com
- www.cubecart.com

You can host these on your servers and many hosting companies are making it easier to install by offering Simplescripts or Fantastico scripts bundles.

Of course, there are tons of other options (including paid ones).
The military and VA could really use a GPL'd browser-based server-side electronic medical records interface, complete with order entry, pharmacy, and radiology.

If anyone is in the DC area between now and Friday and want's a demo of the insanity we deal with, I'd be happy to talk with you. There are a couple of other people I can put you contact with as well. The current client-side programs (eg, AHLTA) are at the tune of $20 billion, so there's a ton of money to be made.
Rodney Harrison, Corey Dillon, Randy Moss, and some others have been team superstars that were proven on other teams, but chose to join the Patriots to win a Super Bowl ring at a fair price. Rodney, who was known as, and was recently voted again, the most dirtiest player in the league, first had a serious conversation with Bill Belichick, the coach of the Patriots, at the 1999 Pro Bowl, where Belichick was head coach of the AFC team. Harrison was released from the Chargers even though he had won a couple of Pro Bowl honors in the previous years.

Corey Dillon wanted out of the Bengals. Like Harrison, he had a terrible reputation, probably of any running back. He had won three Pro Bowl honors in the previous years.

Randy Moss wanted out of the Vikings. He also had the worst reputation, probably of any wide receiver. He had won five Pro Bowl honors (!) in the previous years.

So all of these players, considered to be the whiniest or dirtiest superstars in the league in their position by their own teammates and other teams, each agreed to join the Patriots for a fair price--and have not caused problems once they were on a team that valued winning.

The Patriots did draft a lot of their players, but that just proves my point that they did not waste money on the top college players in the draft, but traded their top picks to other teams for multiple picks. When they wanted proven talent, they got it via players who wanted out of their current situation in other teams, like those three.

I guess the startup lesson here is to focus the entire team on winning over customers and fixing problems, and super stars who make a lot of money but are discontent with their peers at their current endeavors will want to join you, for less money, to help create something amazing together. Oh, and make sure you also have Tom Brady, apparently.

My goal was to provide some football-related (article-related) motivation. You guys are right about what I said regarding the Patriots being the smartest team--I haven't been able to find any article to confirm what I had thought I read at one point. Thanks for replying!
That was a great post.

My shitbag insurance company denied me on several necessary medical services, leaving me with serious (but fortunately, payable) medical bills.

Apparently you get bailed out of these sorts of things if you fuck up, but not if others fuck up for you.
Here's a nice screencast showing how to use Interface Builder and NSTables with MacRuby: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/rubycocoa-and-nstables-...
And now JavaScript: http://inexdo.com/JSCocoa