skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very easy to see why that's a problem. But it should be equally easy to see the long-term results when we attempt to use the strength of government to ensure market outcomes. It doesn't take long for the regulatory agency to wind up working for the goals of the very entities they're intended to police. This is called Regulatory Capture, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture .

This isn't a problem of bad politicians or people not trying hard enough to solve the problems. It's fundamentally implied by the nature of the beast. We need to have experts in the role of regulators; but where do experts come from, except from experience as past workers in those industries? This is all basic public choice economic theory. No amount of voting for the right candidates, or carefully crafting the regulations is going to get around the problem.
He/she clearly states in the About page that he is from Nigeria.
Frequent and small deployments sound riskier, and tougher, at first.

Helping people re-think this perverse risk assessment has become a sort of personal mission for me. One of my most rewarding experiences was setting up automated testing and deployment from day one for a new startup.
Thanks for the comment and you make a good point. I guess what my main point was that you should pick one thing to focus on once you know what the optimal thing to focus on is.

Imagine the Odeo team split their efforts between Twitter and their first idea? I doubt Twitter would have became the site it is today if that happened.
Of course this would be an obvious demand and ironic. But I suggest one should only insist that he retreats from his policy aims: accept failure and/or step down.

Asking for his site to be taken down in accordance with his own misguided policy could give undue legitimacy to this policy.
Yo dou have a point but it goes beyond standard intelligence, I think: A big curiosity towards programming is more like it (although curiosity is a large part of intelligence). Most of the so called "elite" languages are not used in widely in corporations. So, if your goal is to just make money and move up (someday) you better put all your time in Java or C++, rather than learning Haskell or the like.

An analogy could be evolutionary explanation of the peacock's tail: it has no real purpose but shows females that this guy can afford this liability without a purpose. Similarly, when a coder knows, say, Forth (without being required to do so at work), I form immediately form a certain mental picture of him/her: this guy loves programming, definitely needs a further look.
The beauty of Molecular, Cell, and Microbiology
Site doesn't work.
Load balancing is often necessary, but the necessity can often mask other underlying technical debt.

Parallelism through multiple native processes can have a high cost from process overhead, effectiveness of IPC style chosen and separation of duties.
For some non-German examples, take toyota (japanese) or kia (korean) or ferrari (italy) or land rover (britain).

Also, daimler sells way more cars in europe, although they are really stripped down compared to the US equivalents (and they also have stuff like sprinter, which I've only started to see recently in the USA). Even though those cars are lower margin, they sell many more (and most of their revenue comes from those cars)
love this! now this is an awesome product/market validation.
Getting old while staring at a screen.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't want to disparage this guy too much but if I'm from Nigeria, I would bend over back backwards to appear legit. I wouldn't advertise gimmicks like "cheap money" or "Phd., MSc, etc."
Better living through fib functions
Why Yahoo and ABC News Made the Right Decision
"These companies hire top developers for their scalable (NoSQL) database implementations and to keep them running...Do you really want to build the superstar team required to make the NoSQL vision? You are not Google."

Wow - a salient remark about the state of enterprise software and what message Oracle sees resonating with management.
That is 1 reason - another reason is because competitor XYZ might have hired them a few years ago and they can get some inside info. They might say they don't share anything, but if Person A worked for a past company and he now is consulting for you - don't you think he'll spill some secrets...
New car models that will shake up the auto industry
Happiness is a choice. So choose it.
"very large" and "very loud" are two different things. I'm sure you'll take exception with any metric that shows Ruby to be a less common language but

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ruby 127 questions.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python 272 questions.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php 466
LAMP is better than .NET because I dont need to buy Windows Server licenses to get going.

A fair statement, but not exactly accurate :)

Even discounting the Mono stuff, there's always BizSpark or one of the cloud many providers that offer Windows/MSSQL hosting at a slightly increased price (essentially renting Windows Server licenses).
So how come you can do this and the others can't? How do you deal with the problems listed elsewhere in the thread?
Patrick from Stripe here. We know how important that is. I personally grew up in Europe (Ireland), and 5 of the 10 people at Stripe grew up outside of the US. It sucks that we're US-only right now.

We're actually working on supporting Europe right now. It's pretty complex, and won't happen overnight -- but it's one of our very highest priorities.

If you'd like to be notified when Stripe is available wherever you live, you can leave your name at https://stripe.com/help/global. We'll also announce news at twitter.com/stripe.
The old debate: MyISAM or Postgres?
A lot of this makes sense (DBAs gating features! shudder).

But I'm not totally clear on why a switch from Postgres to MySQL was warranted.

Just because Postgres can do stored procedures well doesn't mean that it's effectively a stored procedure server. It also happens to handle SQL pretty well too. :)
Just checked in Aurora again. It is now v.9. And DuckDuckGo is in the default list.
Isn't updating a counter in SQL just: update counters set amount = amount + 1 where id = something?
No, really I'd rather hear. We're about to launch a product in Japan and all the advice I've been given from folks in Japan so far is that my standard credit card payment processing will be fine for our target user base. So, seeing a comment like the one in the parent post definitely caught my attention. If I'm going to be missing the mark, I'd rather find out now.
T-Mobile’s $30 monthly plan favors data over voice minutes
So... you can get up to 50 points for the fastest code, and 20 points for the smallest code. And you only lose up to 20 points for code that doesn't work.

I think I just detected a wonderful loophole in this scoring method.
It's a horrible waste of time to design something around a Cassandra cluster that will be hit once every second.

While I would probably agree that Cassandra was designed for scalability, there are hundreds of other NoSQL databases designed for completely different problems that have nothing to do with scaling. CouchDB, for instance, is really good at synchronizing data between separate disjoint databases (think temporary offline use); a problem some have with databases both big and small.

Every NoSQL database was born out of the need to solve a problem that was not well solved using existing technologies. Some of those problems are related to scaling, but scaling problems are just the cusp of what is now available to you to use. Definitely use SQL when it is the right tool for the job, but don't try to shoehorn it into the wrong job. There are other tools that just might be a better fit no matter how big your database is or how many people are going to be using it.
No, this just means it was a bad place to start :). We will definitely come to Europe.
Branding & Text Messaging?
Well, by your own logic, they would have become perhaps an even better site, right? That they were less "distracted" by the sub-optimal Odeo?

No one could ever disagree with the assertion that you shouldn't devote time to sub-optimal outcomes - it's strictly irrational. "Distractions" arise not from founders making irrational decisions, they come from misjudgements about the expected future value of these "distractions." I'm not sure the solution is to ignore altogether things which have uncertain future value (which I believe is what you're proposing?) because our judgement about these issues is often so wrong.

"Hell yeah or no" and the like make for great rhetoric and catchy blog posts, but they assume our off-the-cuff intuition on such matters is correct. In my experience, it usually isn't.
To be clear, the policy in question that he has been pushing for is not a law, and it looks like it was pretty unlikely that it was ever going to become law.

He isn't receiving special treatment by the authorities in this case; currently no one would have their page aggressively taken down for this.
This trend of laws which attempt to take away a person's Internet access is very scary. How is this to be enforced? By what logic is it considered a proportional or effective punishment?
django-social-auth is the best for doing Facebook authentication/account-creation.

I don't deal with the Graph API much so I can't comment on that aspect.
El Ingrediente Secreto - Negocios Por Internet
VIP Contests Let Founder Pitch Top VCs, Angels (And Win A Meeting)
Tizen: Linux Smartphone Platform Backed By Intel, Samsung
I wonder why the developers couldn't write the stored procedures.

I'm hoping that the postgresql projects for easier master-master replication get done soon!
I disagree, but I think the real motivation may share a common root (again, talking about "most people" here, not the actual people doing the development). The common root is the invasiveness that governments have turned into standard operating procedure, much at the behest of big copyright holders (but not all; in the USA, the "war on terror" has been a huge motivator as well).

If you are going to throw a straw man out, do it right: child porn is the driving motivation for alternate Internets. Think of the children and don't let that happen!
Why would you want a cell phone with e-ink? It wouldn't improve the standby time at all since that's determined by the radio, not the screen. Sunlight readability would be nice but there are LCDs that are pretty good and anything interactive would be painful on a slow e-ink display.
Generally good, though short, advice. I think the author slightly misunderstands the point about smalltalk, though. The point isn't to "talk about the other person," the point is to ask questions. That doesn't preclude you from talking about yourself, it actually makes it easier. Ask questions until you find something in common or that you can relate to.

The cold email advice at the bottom is spot on too. In the last couple months, I've had lunch with two rather well-known people in my field who I have tons of respect for. In both cases, I cold emailed them and asked to get together.
T-Mobile and Walmart Offer 4G With No Contract
That's a good point, true. But I never really liked content injection, via CSS or Javascript, anyway. :)
The Oracle NoSQL Database 11g
> 7) Hire young blood. A research staff’s average age must not increase even one year per annum. In a high-tech lab, a nice average is under 35.

Oh man, that needs some updating.
I'm not familiar with it, but that would make sense. GUI systems are often built around event loops.
MeeGo hackers start a new open project: Mer
Didn't Microsoft with ASP.NET Pet shop still advocate stored procedures around that time?
There's a lot that can be said about this, so I'm just going to focus on what I think is the nub of the disconnect here.

Studying philosophy, art, history, religion, science and the classics (that is, education as opposed to mere training) is supposed to bring people in touch with their humanity and, more relevantly, their mortality-- the fact that we'll all die and that it can happen at any time.

The first 5 to 15+ years in the professional and corporate life (and not just in the demonized investment banks and consulting firms, because this is a common trait of human organizations and every bit as entrenched in academia and mainstream corporations) are about denying said mortality. You're expected to focus on a far-off distant future that may never come and, in the mean time, "pay your dues"-- that is, work in conditions that no one would accept unless harboring a delusion of infinite time, a misguided belief that the present doesn't matter because the future will be flush with riches, prestige, and make all those present-time sacrifices irrelevant.

I don't support war or conscription in general, but it's no coincidence that the "yuppie" phenomenon was born after the abolition of The Draft. Once kids lost awareness of death (not that it exists, but that it will happen to them at an inconvenient time; it's always "inconvenient") they could treat their own time as limitless and without value, so they relaxed their demands for autonomy, rewarding work, and mentorship in exchange for a 10 or 20 percent bump in immediate prosperity.

I would call this a failure of the educational system, but I don't think it is. We have a deeply deluded culture focused on the transient and on seduction and I don't think (even if individual professors do a great job) this is something that schools can fix.
Xskndzniniq
It'd be nice if the author of the story would point out how Instapaper is different than Business Insider, in that the content it "harvests" is content that the user must first see by going to the actual website where the content exists, and save the page for later viewing, meaning that the original site still gets credit for at least 1 page view. Instapaper also does not pretend or try to trick the reader into thinking that the content belongs to or is generated by Instapaper staff. Henry Blodget knows that his actions are dubious, and is grasping at straws with his comparison.
My headache solutions:

1. Don't forget to breath. When I'm coding sometime I'll concentrate on the problem so much that my breathing slows down and becomes extremely shallow.

2. Don't let the code/problem take you away. Practice self-awareness.

This will prevent the tension for building up.
They say they use master-master replication with mysql so they have no single points of failures. Back then, I think the only option with postgres was to use slony.
Right, the free flow of information scares some people. The lack of it scares others.
Yes, but now you're making the skeptic's point: management consulting works by using the shock-and-awe of lots of Ivy League degrees to provide cover for management. In other words, a complete waste of shareholder money and employee time.
I meant my own personal credibility! :-)
Frequent, smaller releases take more work upfront. You have to build the process first - lots of automated testing, a way to deploy automatically, etc.
Based on the zero information I have I'm going to assume that there was probably more knowledge on the team about how to make MySQL do what they needed than Postgres. That's usually all the reason anyone really needs.
"The twinkle in their eye" I think that is exactly right and I can't expect him to share the vision.

I feel the only way I can tell he is working is that the Github repo is updated. He's an amazing programmer and back in college we were good friends (maybe associates), he has a tendency to have "short" responses which we understand.

I think I am looking for a "firing on all pistons" type of programmer.
Is he really an asshole to you guys personally, or are you calling him an asshole because he is missing deadlines? I've worked with a bunch of asshole programmers, they all usually have a god complex and think they are the best in the field regardless of what happens.

It's hard for a programmer to stay motivated in the long run when things pop in his head like "I get paid $25/hr less than I could get somewhere else, shit this company may not even survive."

It's not too late, but honestly you need to step up and be a boss. You can't let your employee continue to act this way for multiple reasons. First, if this isn't/wasn't his normal work ethic, something has changed. You need to act like a leader and just ask him. If you really want him to be a founder, and he needs something that isn't asking for the world than give it to him! It sounds like you owe a lot of your projects current state to him. If he's worked like this all along, and you haven't said anything than that is your problem and you need to deal with it. A poor employee like that can bring a company down if you just like it sit and fester.

As far as he's the "only one that knows the backend", any programmer that's proficient in the language of your application can get in there and get to work. It may take a little bit of time to get used to your current programmers style and quirks, but it shouldn't be an issue.

It really boils down to the fact you need to sit him down and talk to him. Be up front and honest, voice your concerns. If there are troubles in his life, he'll let you know and you can work with him. If you get attitude and apathy from him than figure out IF you can even make him happy. If so, try. If you can't than it really sounds like you need to find another programmer. Not every programmer has the passion of a founder, especially if there is a family at home that isn't being taken care of as much as they could be.

Good luck with your situation. I hope you get it resolved cleanly.

- Brandon
Upcoming tour of Southern Tech Startups
Virtually every request made to the server is blocking. The point of a server request is to retrieve/store data, process it, and respond. That's a blocking operation by definition. I can't respond before processing the data. I can't process it before retrieving it. You get the picture.

The neat thing about node.js isn't that it's "non-blocking" ... every major HTTP server out there is "non-blocking" in the same way. The neat thing is that it's JavaScript. I can use the same language on the server side as on the client side. I can use the same libraries, etc. reducing my code footprint. Reduced code footprint = less maintenance, fewer bugs, easier coding.
3 Reasons VoIP Phones Make Sense for Small Businesses
Of course it's completely irrelevant to the actual debate at hand.
Show HN: Personalized star chart PDF with a contribution to charity
>the argument could be made that Palm invented the smartphone

Didn't Qualcomm beat them to it? I remember reading about a Qualcomm phone which was a PalmOS device, around 2000 or 2001. At that time, I don't think Palm had any smartphones of their own; the closest they had was the Palm V, which had wireless data, but was not a phone.
In a basic application yes this is true. But if you have a large cluster and data is spread out it becomes more difficult not to mention time consuming to run that query. With redis and other nosql solutions they are designed with this in mind so they are much faster and easier.
Also, everyone should install F.lux

http://stereopsis.com/flux/

This is another migraine-stopper.
An argument of why they won't buy webOS from HP -- IMO, Amazon shows its focus on recent launch. They didn't release an Android phone, but just an Android tablet to build their empire of content. Hence they don't need differentiations on hardware/OS level, instead they want a hardware/OS which they can: push their cost way down; cheap enough to get people on board; and sell their content.
RWS - a RESTful approach to providing Whois services
I've learned to never ever badmouth a weird architecture in a working and profitable company.

Simply - the people that threw it together probably had significant restraints: Lack of money, lack of knowledge, lake of time. To then come in and poo-poo their work (that is paying the bills) is bad form.

...

We all can sit back as say it sucks, but I don't necessarily think that sticking business logic in DB stored procedures is always the wrong thing: If you think of the DB storage system as separate from the DB procedure system then there's the split right there - it just happens to be running in the same process and you just have to be extra careful.
The corollary to that theorem is to make changes when you identify thaas what you are doing isn't working anymore as that pain grows exponentially.
It doesn't feel like this applies here. 6-7 years ago a decision was made to go with stored procedures over using an orm or at least implementing db logic in the application code.

Along with this, they also chose to split the responsibility for code and sql across two teams.

6-7 years ago, plenty of other options were available. In fact, the sharded MySQL solution that they use now was already possible back then.

It sounds more like they made some architectural decisions based on the companies org chart and it came back to bite them in the ass hard.

edit:typos
As someone who works for a Nigerian boss, I get very tired of this kind of racism. I see it frequently. I see people refuse to do business with us because of his origin. I also see people try aggressively to scam us because of his origin, assuming we are naive.

But you cannot judge an entire country based on some highly visible scammers from there. Not all Nigerians are trying to scam you. And many Americans ARE trying to scam you. Many Nigerians have left their country, gotten educations, and become highly successful businessmen throughout the world.

This specific guy who runs this site? I have no idea. But I will judge him on his own merits, not his country of origin.
What the hell? First, they dissed NoSQL, and then make their own implementation?.

What is this marketing sorcery?.
The real mistake is that the founder of Pinboard does run a wrong business. I'm saying this as a Delicious user who uses it for 6 years and lost some bookmarks during the recent retooling. It's bad for running a bookmark website for several years and keeping emphasizing that "we're unsocial and will not be."

maciej, I hope you'll read this; bookmarking has a bright future because it's social and has the enough potential to replace all search engines.

an unsocial bookmarking service is a real example of waste. to me, people who buys your unsocial archiving bookmarking service are not able to type 6 lines of bash scripts to keep their bookmarks in a plain text file. this is what I will do when avos kills delicious. I'll not pay for just archiving website who thinks I'm an idiot enough to buy a poor clone of delicious of 2005.

How can you be proud of selling a clone of an old version of a popular website? Come on!
It's a cluster version of Berkeley DB Java Edition.
Because their advertising overpriced? Surely it's easy enough for advertisers to monitor results. Curious why there's this perception.
I've used http://hackatopia.com/ before when I've been up to Chicago for hackathons. I like that Hacker League is more centered on each developer and the projects they've built.

I'd be interested to see if this can get any traction beyond the hackNY events.
Maldives Dive Travel
In a website for programming challenges, the market status of a language should be the least regarded metric to decide whether to include it or not.

Just check this out: http://projecteuler.net/languages
Indeed. I think that's a big part of the actual reason for its popularity. This "ultra scalable" stuff has helped to draw attention to it, though.
>The backend shouldn't be more than about 150 hours of true programming...

Someone who can't program knows how many hours it takes.

I can't wait for opportunity to do half the work and get 3-5%, where do I sigh up?