skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If all you need is a persistent key/value store then why do you need more than one table and one each of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements?

I'm all for using the most appropriate tools, but sometimes path of least resistance is worth considering too. Android bundles SQLite as a basic service, while many/most organisations will have existing RDBMS SQL servers as part of their infrastructure which are well understood and maintained. In either of those scenarios SQL may well have more power than is required, but it's also already in place and well understood and on the principle of minimal deviation from the known standards, I'd probably still use it.
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Mou - Markdown editor for web developers
A key employee as in he is putting about 1-5 hours of coding per week but we needed a good backend dev and he was the best I knew. He's a college friend and I don't know how best to deal with the situation of him not communicating.

I came to ask this question on HN because I wanted devs opinions, I know non-tech founders get bad reps here - and I understand if you want to attach that bias to me.

I put my life savings into this project, I didn't ask for favors. He makes us feel uncomfortable in our office, and cancels everytime I ask him to come in. We only work on Saturday/weeknights, because I have to have a job to pay for this startup endeavor.

I don't assume we are worth $1 million or anything. I don't mean to take a defense stance, but I thought giving a portion of the founders equity made sense since he was taking a pay cut from normal hours. If he would've worked for free (like we are) he would've got founder's equity, but we still need a frontend dev which we had to pay for because he frankly said "I can do it, but I don't want to".
http://www.google-watch-watch.org/
I can tell you what the problem is: overzealous postmortems.

The head of engineering wants to be able to say what went wrong and how to fix it next time. That's probably fine, if the solution is better automation and failure detection. But once you go into postmorteming a situation where you dropped a few requests to a minor service, the whole process turns into a pile of shit where the engineers and operations team are scared, management feels in control, and the product managers are left screwed because engineering and operations no longer take risks and everything takes forever.

Engineering management doesn't stop and look at the cost of what they're doing and when software takes forever to release, they don't look in the mirror for the blame. I received a weekly technical email once containing info that 10 requests were "throttled" during a deployment. That's great! We don't need any "next steps", our failover worked fine.
Just a lone voice in the wind, but on the other side of the Earth Australia is in desperate need of rescue too!
Github's Gist and Gnome Keyring
One function of this group is to turn guilt into shame. :)
Some people can manage it without constant meds - some only need meds some of the time - BUT with managing the things that throws that person in a tail spin. (i.e. not sleeping, chaotic relationships, travel in some cases). When it's mostly mania the person experiences - life is probably pretty good, but for those who mainly experience the depressive side (like a friend of mine) - it cripples his life and he can barely function. Each case is different. I really think the key is having someone close to the person who can make sure they're doing all the things they need to - like sleeping, eating regularly etc.
I just went to a talk last weekend where the speakers advocated storing business logic in the db.
About a year ago now I finished writing some cheap code that implemented basically what he details in the blog. (My blog links the code on github: http://pro-graham.com/) I wrote it for a small AI class project building on something a friend and I did two years previously. You can play the Java Applet here: http://pro-graham.com/Battleship/Battleship.html

Essentially it weighs the board and creates what I called a Probability Map to determine where ships lie. My tests gave the computer ~48% win rate against myself and ~60% against random friends. Its accuracy is double that of a random shooting AI.

I can go into more details about the advantages and disadvantages of the algorithm here if there's any interest. I'd have posted it a couple months ago when I published it had I known there was interest in such a project...
It does. You just have to start your own company to prove (and get) what you are really worth.
Doctors Protest Too Much
I don't find it to be all that surprising. I remember when Ruby on Rails was just starting to gain in popularity around the same timeframe. One of the big arguments against it was that it pushed you to put all of your business logic in the application. "How will you write another application to use the same database?" they would cry.

The answer turned out to be write one application tier that provides a web API to the database for all other applications to use. Interestingly, that turned out to be a pretty popular solution and is now probably the most prevailing method to get data to your user-facing applications. Looking back, it seems pretty obvious especially with the rise of mobile apps using that technology. It wasn't clear to most people in 2005, however.
The answer to that is simple, even with the little information given: Flikr used MySQL, the CTO driving the changes at Etsy came from Flikr, therefore, Etsy now uses Flikr.

Given their existing investment in Postgresql, I can't imagine they suddenly had more experience internally with MySQL, though the CTO may have been the only person with any horizontal DB scaling experience since Etsy didn't scale before.

I've seen the pattern of "CTO changes tech to something he/she is familiar with" many times. Sometimes that's good; mostly, it annoys the teams who are now less efficient. We certainly don't have enough info here to know. The scaling argument (his knowledge thereof, not Postgresql's "inability") is pretty compelling.
Recycling can help you sell used cell phones for cash
As an integral part of modern telecommunications, mobile phones have grown rapidly on over half of the population of the world. Mobile phones are the only phones available or are the most reliable phones in some parts of the world. Developing countries/regions such as Africa, Brazil, India, Latin America and China have registered bombastic cell phone growth in recent years.
Facebook's Browser is Google's Worst Nightmare
Phone Gap moves to open beta.
Are you saying that management should want to build a superstar team to support the DB?

DB operation is overhead. I can see wanting a superstar team to provide things that customers value, but no customer cares about SQL vs NoSQL.
SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement - Increase Conversions & Lower Churn
I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software).

Let me ask a simple question here, how does one possibly remember all the vi commands or emacs commands for that matter? The answer is no one sits down with sheet of paper and memorizes these sort of things. A person sits down and understands how to use a particular tool, and then later on he just looks up to some form of a reference. Over time this becomes just muscle memory.

This where tools like Perl/Awk/Sed and other Unix text processing tools win over Python. You have to spend some learning how to use them initially after which you get very productive with them. For most people who don't have exposure to how much one can push the combination of pipes and Unix text processing utilities its a little difficult to explain it in words. You have to just use it to feel how power full they are.

Often you can save days of effort writing lengthy programs and testing them. All you need to be is familiar with the Unix text processing utilities and know how sew them using pipes and you can amazing lot of work without writing any code at all.

Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind.

They didn't call Perl the swiss army knife and duct tape of the internet just like that. I don't think any other programming language has come to adapting practical software realities as much as Perl has.

Every other programming language forces you think in one way or tries to force its paradigm you. On the other hand, Perl bends towards your paradigm. That to me is more than sufficient reason to use and go back to Perl again, because adaptability ensures survival on the longer run.

A painter is never happy when the brush dictates his art. A painter is happy when the brush paints the way he wishes to dictate his art.
Brain-dead simple way to add API limits to your rack-based app
I believe their point is that deploying, for example, four types of NoSQL database creates four, separate sets of hardware etc.

i.e. it is not that NoSQL systems are inefficient individually, it's that it is not efficient to maintain four separate resource pools.

(This is still possibly FUD nonsense: Oracle has to exist as an independent resource pool only because their virtualization licensing requires all potential CPUs to be licensed. Are any/all of the commercial NoSQL implementations licensed this way?)
I wrote the title so I could get programmers to help me understand. I used to program years ago and I respect programmers and understand they are the lifeblood to any project.

I've asked only 1-5 hours per week from this individual. I've managed our frontend dev from an outsourced team in Poland and based on my same "can't program knows how many hours it takes" effectively hit the deadline/hours budget with only about 10-20 hours over.

It's not half the work. At the end of the day I have to sell it. In order to put more features and offer more we need to sell it. We need clients, programmers don't care about that. Which I understand, why should they it's not their job.

I wanted to offer equal equity the same as my partner and I, but due to personality differences I don't believe we can. My partner and I invested $30k into the startup including paying him on a contractual basis, how do you give someone equal equity after this?
Dallas / Austin / REMOTE / Relocate possible

projekt202

Job Title: Full time consultant - Senior .NET Developer / Architect

projekt202 is a small but growing full-service consulting company that combines deep design expertise, a focus on user experience, and a proven technology focus. We integrate applications, human processes, and secure, scalable technology platforms for emotionally rich and intuitive user solutions.

We are looking for senior level .NET consultants who are interested in collaborating with our design and user experience experts to deliver compelling applications. We have worked for clients you have heard of and on products you probably own. The ideal candidate would conscientiously apply their mastery of .NET to ensure our clients receive applications that are both beautiful and functional inside and out.

Things we like: MVC, LINQ, IoC / DI, Agile, Continuous Integration

Though we're looking for C# / .NET experts, we also do work in other languages (Ruby, Python, Java for Android, ObjectiveC for iOS), so interest or familiarity with any of those is appreciated.

Remote work is a possibility, as is relocation to Dallas or Austin (where are main offices are). Unlike many other consulting companies, we try to work from our offices rather than the client site so we get an opportunity to actually interact with each other. We provide small benefits like snacks and drinks and larger ones like really good health insurance that is mostly company paid. If you are interested, email your resume to join@capturaonline.com (Captura and projekt202 recently merged and we're working on the technology migration)
Great idea to be able to compute what the sky looked like at a given time as seen from a given place! Plus you are helping a charity at the same time - a great concept in itself. Really nicely done - congrats to the author(s)!
If you read the comments that preceded yours in responding to my question, you'll see that there are perfectly apolitical reasons for them to have done this move; they wanted a scale-out less DBA-controlled database, and at the time there wasn't a built-in Postgres way to do that.

Also, knowing how to scale DB X and not knowing how to scale DB Y often means scaling DB Y is a science project.

I feel bad for baiting people into psychoanalyzing Etsy's team.
Seriously! I kept reading, but when the first line gets it SO wrong (and then doesn't even mention the Fire in the text under that heading) you can be skeptical from then on.
Very interesting. It's clear that Missouri (where I used to live) doesn't have open enrollment. A huge amount of resources are spent on ensuring students do NOT cross district lines. As a personal example, certain ESL students in my mother's class are visited at home very often to validate that they truly do live where they say they do.

When schools have to serve students that they're not getting paid for, the incentive to keep those students out is surprisingly strong.

tokenadult, Are you aware of any downsides/negatives to the open enrollment system?
New iPhone Models Appear in Retail Systems Ahead of Apple Event
I have never met anyone who pays Oracle's list prices. It sure seems like every Oracle deal is a one-off.
The constraint may have been knowledge. They may have made a very reasonable tradeoff to forego learning "best practices" and "proper architecture" to just get something out the door. The original developer may have just graduated with his philosophy degree and never have written more than a bash script. Hard to say.

Given the size of the company, the architecture didn't grow along org charts (that is a very real phenomenon in large companies!). Rather, the org chart grew along architectural lines. Regardless of cause, it is a pretty significant smell and can tell you something is (or will be) wrong.
It wouldn't improve the standby time at all since
that's determined by the radio, not the screen.

In smartphones the display is the biggest consumer of battery.

For instance, I rarely use my Android smartphone, other than for making calls / reading emails (and I really don't do that frequently), and the display is usually eating up ~ 30% of my battery, even though I always keep my data connection + sync ON. And there's nothing that drains my battery faster than doing Internet browsing, with the stats on my Android showing the display taking more than 50% of battery life. And if I'm outside, in the sun, browsing the web ; to make the screen readable I have to increase luminosity, and so my phone drops dead in 2-3 hours.

Another example - I also have an old Nokia 1100 - it's absolutely insane how the battery lasts for a whole week. If you can make your smartphone last for 6-7 days with whatever you want turned off, let me know ;)

I would also like an e-Ink smartphone, since it would be perfect for reading emails, in direct sunlight and also increase the battery life to more than 1 day - yeah, that would be awesome.
Samsung Ready to Strip Galaxy Tab Features in Australia
Having been long curious about the "free Kindle" prediction (we still haven't reached November '11 yet!), I smiled at this point:

"4. One Special Offer Can Pay for the Cost of a Kindle.
Amazon knows customers don’t necessarily want ads on their Kindle but they’ve worked hard to line up some very attractive offers. '[S]pending $114 on the Kindle saved me 20 percent on buying a new Apple MacBook Air', reported one finance columnist, 'a savings of $200." He notes there’s been other discounts which exceed the original price of a Kindle with Special Offers, including a 20% discount on new LCD television screens.'"

Anyone got more info on that MBA discount? Might just have to get me a Kindle, being in the market for an Air...
Yes, this document is FUD. Frankly, I'm surprised they released this... The tone is: desperation.

That said, the NOSQL movement is so full of hype... It really annoys me that whenever anything new comes around, a large amount of people want to use it for EVERYTHING! NoSQL is inconvenient for a lot of what it is getting used for today... In 5 years, we'll be past that and we'll see it used more appropriately.
To be clear, the title is intended to point out how absurd the original title was (node.js is a cancer). I strongly suspect the author agrees with you on using this kind of language when describing a language/framework, which is exactly why he did include it in the title.
The simple thing he didn't mention as the cause of his headaches -- other than alluding to it -- is eyestrain. As programmers we are consistently straining our eyes. I'm always in the doghouse with my optometrist because I am always breaking her rules. She understands programmers and what they do to their bodies (fingers, wrists, eyes, posture), but obviously her bias is the eyes so she has a few rules that I should live by:

- don't strain the eyes reading small text. Smartphones are especially bad at this.

- don't always look at the same distance. It strains the muscles. We were meant to look at short and far distances, but monitors are always 2-3 ft from our face.

- Take A LOT of eye breaks. Every 10-15 minutes just look somewhere else. That's all.

- Blink. When people read screens, they blink less. If you don't blink, your eyes don't lubricate themselevs and you can develop sores under your eyelids (especially so with contact lenses).

- Get more sleep.

- Wash around your eyes every night. This is good advice for women as well as men. If you mistreat your eyes, you can get protein build-up around the eyelids and follicles. Make sure you gently clean all of it away with a warm compress.

Basically, treat your eyes like precious little jewels. Pamper them and they'll last a long time.
The Five Security Improvements Apple Needs To Make in iPhone 5
Assessing the Intangibles of Apple's Success
Anyone that has tried it knows just how hard it is for pan-european payments across the 'single-market'. For some reason since we've been able to define common european legislation for the curvature of bananas(1), but not for stuff like payment transactions.

But this is what makes your offering from being a nice friendly API and "payments that don't suck" (which are largely just nice-to-haves) to something that is completely compelling and truly-enabling and revenue generating (e.g. opens up new markets)

The competitive landscape in Europe is also from the previous era. Anyone that had integrated with something like RBS Worldpay will which looks like it was hacked together in a bit of Perl(2) in 2000 and never changed.

Footnotes:
(1) Commission Regulation (EC) rule 2257/94 states bananas must be "free from malformation or abnormal curvature

(2) I have nothing (that major!) against Perl, but it kinda summarises the kinda person and era that it was written in.
The history of Mac malware - 1982 to present day
San Francisco- Wikia is Hiring!

Sr. Front-End Engineer (JavaScript) and Med and Sr. Web Application Engineer (LAMP).

http://www.wikia.com/Hiring
A Tab Manager system form Prototype js and scriptaculous
A Tab Manager system form Prototype js and scriptaculous
I burned myself in that time frame, trying to implement SPs, because some people advocated for them.

Like Etsy, I discovered you needed a lot of them, and worse, they weren't very easy to debug or version control. I think I decided to pull them back into the application layer in the face of those problems, and I probably would have avoided the SP path entirely if I'd known about sharding back then.
I wouldn't give up my 15" MBP. But if you are in the market for 13", the Air + TB display/dock looks better than the Pro.
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This is correct, master-master is necessary to shard as we have implemented it.
You are absolutely right. Two points, though: (i) As you see from my comments, my judgments were based on the site, the Nigerian thing is an afterthought and (ii) unfortunately, people do have Bayesian prior probabilities, commonly referred to as prejudices. You cannot avoid them and they need to be addressed sometime. What I said was that if I were from Nigeria, I would be work more on my site to erase any spammish connotations. This is probably true of your boss, too.
nice service with a frictionless signup. very cool.
Think I get it but would like to see a shorter intro making it obvious what it does. Maybe a couple of links to demo sites.
That's not a good enough reason for immunity from the law. While we're playing "maybe/possibly/couldhappen," certainly the media would be watching something like that closely enough that the truth shouldn't be difficult to find.
Redmine tips e-book launched
The weird slip in mobile web browsing in September
which way are you thinking? down or up?
The Hacker League guys are awesome. They pushed beta fixes to the system live as the hackathon was ongoing. The idea of saving/capturing these weekend hacks is a good one. The hackathon itself was a ton of fun. Here is a pic of me when I fell asleep coding at 4am. http://bit.ly/oVbyuf
> So, the 2.5% Canadian "black" population is a substantially more diverse population than the 12.6% U.S. "black" population, which is primarily descended from black slaves.

Maybe half of the US black population is descended from slaves. The rest, which is about 6% (from your numbers) comes from the same places Canada gets its 2.5%.

And then there are all of the different groups under the hispanic label.
Many Postgres folks seem to think putting you rules in your database layer is a good idea, because you (1) get to deploy them automagically, (2) the commit logic is easier when there is no round trip, and (3) the PL/PGSQL language is actually pretty good.

I don't work on things big enough to think about this, and I would be curious if there were a summary of why/ why-not to put business logic in the DB, and where it SHOULD go.
Stripe is really awesome. I started using it yesterday on i.crowdfunded.it and I have never had such an easy time w/ CC processing etc...
Directory Traversal via PHP Multi-File Uploads
I love all the opinions and please, hearing from devs and founders alike is amazing. I'd like to some comments that I didn't detail:

1) Total hours dev worked so far: 100, hours likely left 50-100.
2) Partner and I invested $30k so far
3) We have experience in software team management so we had a pretty good idea of what we needed from a backend dev for phase 1.
4) He is not full-time or even part-time, more like contractual basis as per his convenience.
5) We always ask for his input/suggestions, but doesn't really show it.
6) We work on Saturdays/weeknights, because my partner and I have to get money to put into the startup (and pay our devs).
7) Not expecting free work or sympathy, just expecting fair work at a fair price.
8) Dev has stated that once we get funding he'll be "more into the project"
9) Everyone has vesting options, so he'll still get something if we part ways.

I know non-tech founders get bad reps on HN and I understand each dev likely has a horror story that has developed a bias that we ask for too much in return for too little - I can't change that about HN.

I'm merely asking for two questions:
1) What would you do in my shoes?
2) How do you add another key employee/founder if we transition? As in, you've put all this time it's hard to gives the keys to the castle to a newcomer.
Instagram's Impressive Traction and Strategy to Sustain Growth
You can - or could - get cell phones with E-ink displays. Like the Motorola Fone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FONE

...it just happened to be rather basic. Perhaps that was the point.
It goes beyond that. Process is rules that stop people from being able to do things they shouldn't; bureaucracy is process that stops people from being able to do their jobs.