skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That blog post says nothing about frequency of memory leaks, but shows that there are good tools to help you in your effort to solve them. One thing to keep in mind is that there are memory issues with every language. I just debugged one in Ruby yesterday, and there wasn't a good tool readily available for that effort. Do you know what the memory consumption of your programs are in other languages are before running them?

As a contradictory anecdote, I have never once had a memory consumption issue with Haskell code. Haskell is actually in a nice position w/respect to memory now that enumerators (which always use constant memory) are taking hold. I have no doubt you encountered many memory leaks, but I don't think your experience completely generalises to modern Haskell.
Is Postgres ready for web-scale dynamic web apps yet?
Postgres seems to be having quite a surge of adoption & awareness recently. At MySQL Conference this year, tons of hands went up for people using or investigating Postgres, and I know their recent releases have seriously moved the ball forward. It's clearly killing it in the data warehousing space, etc.

My question: Is it ready for web-scale deployments? Let me define what I mean since that's such an amorphous term: Could it be (or, better yet, is it) the main datastore for a highly dynamic web-based application that stores terabytes of data and is in the Top 250 (see: https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/3) US websites or some similar metric. Think Facebook- or Flickr-like MySQL installations, but using Postgres instead. I'm not talking about large-but-most-static sites (maybe news organization), etc - a real dynamic web app.

Is there such a beast? If not, why not? Are there pieces still missing? (I understand replication has come a long way, for example, but is it there yet?)

If it is possible, love some concrete examples. Who's done it?
The difference is that BitBucket pricing is based on the number of collaborators. Their pricing page makes it seem like you even have to pay to have more than 5 collaborators on a public repo, whereas with github you don't. If I'm reading it right, then Github is still really good for Open Source projects that intend to have more than a handful of collaborators. While BitBucket is a good place to stick your private repos where you have few (or no) contributors.
And false advertising is just as illegal as trespassing, but that doesn't mean we should conflate them.

What's abusive is the punishment. Would it be abusive if a first offense of jaywalking was given a warning and the second punished by permanently stripping you of a drivers license?
Sorry, that did come across as a bit defensive. However, I think if you read the whole article carefully it explains that after doing a git pull, and git refusing to merge because of outstanding changes you then have a chance to either 'revert, commit, or stash'.

That is exactly the behaviour I expect from git, and exactly what broke down in this case.
Ah, you youngsters. Trust me, it is FAR easier now to get started than any time in computing history. Before GitHub, you installed SVN or CVS on your own. Before that you accidentally overwrote your software once a month. Before Cloudant you installed MySQL on your own. Before that you wrote your own storage system. Before Amazon you bought a server and installed Linux on it. Before that you wrote customer databases using an Apple II with 48KB of memory and floppy drives with 120KB of space. Before even my time, programmers used the spin rate of storage drums to calculate where to place blocks of data so they could be read as fast as possible (hint: sequential block placement was not optimal). No whining - you've got it good. Go do great things.
Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research
> Depending on how much trouble this might cause, you probably shouldn't
> upload it anywhere. Even a "private" repository on GitHub/BitBucket might
> be too risky.

I don't think that he was talking about using BitBucket to host your malware
repo. Probably more along the lines of projects that aid in the downloading of
possibly copyrighted music/videos (for example). It's a legal grey area because
you really don't know if your are on the wrong side of a law until a court
makes a decision since there is no clear-cut way to know.

Some other examples:

1. You want to keep track of your dotfiles that you use at work. In general,
this may be ok to put public, but it may contain work-specific stuff
(hostnames, configurations, etc) that might get you in trouble for publishing
publicly. For example, my work shell config has aliases that include connection
information (sans password) to internal databases.

2. Resumes and/or cover letters. If you update your resume to say that you're
looking for work, or looking for work in another area, this could give info to
your current employer that you don't want to hand out. You might also want to
keep your cover letters in version control if you use something like LaTeX or
have specfic parts that you want to be boilerplate (e.g. description of
yourself and/or your exerience). If you keep this in public, then everyone
knows when/where you are applying for work, which may not be desirable even if
your employer doesn't care.
"Internal Server Error". Cache anyone?
This is what we're doing with "the best and the brightest"? Expert MS Office users?

Maybe it's time to stop thinking of top-tier schools as producing the best and brightest.

After all, Google was started by a couple of state school undergrads.
Not sure how being a blogger qualifies one to become a VC, but I'm guessing this is to keep him "in the techcrunch mix". TC doesn't risk losing a solid contributor, and MG gets to potentially make a good amount of cash.
Trendspotter, Visionary, Pundit. All quite relevant to picking which companies to invest in, I'd say.
What Design School Didn't Teach Me - How To Land a Job in the Current Economy
"We have received your scam report and will only be back in touch if our investigation team needs further information."

I'd love it if they followed up.
I don't use Ruby at all, personally. I use Python and Bash almost exclusively. I use Puppet but am not a huge fan, and I certainly have no plans to switch to ruby. I mostly agree with your original point.

However, the CLI thing is a legitimate advantage in favor of Ruby and Perl. Python is just really annoying to use for system administration one-liners. A number of fundamental design choices that have a minimal impact on even the smallest .py files make 'python -c' cumbersome.

Specifically:

A number of common tasks available as syntax in Perl and Ruby are in libraries in python. In particular, you often need to import sys, os, re, and subprocess. Not a real issue writing scripts, but adds a lot of overhead to a single line.

You can't pass a DEDENT token to '-c', at least I haven't figured it out, meaning you can't use more than one loop or control structure. You can work around this to some extent using list comprehensions.

Python's string literal syntax is more limited. I have never had an issue with this writing scripts, however from the command line it can be annoyingly tricky to keep track of which quote characters are needed. Ruby and Perl both have non-conflicting options for notating string literals. In shell scripts, strings are the default literal and you only need to worry about keywords and special characters.

Another advantage of shell are list literals. (I don't have enough practice to know how Ruby and Perl fare in this regard).

Bash also has some extremely convenient list expansion syntax.

for fqdn in {www,news}.ycombinator.com ; do echo $fqdn ; done

python -c "import sys; [sys.stdout.write('%s\n' % fqdn) for fqdn in ['%s.ycombinator.com' % sd for sd in ['www', 'news']]]"

Obviously this particular example could technically be shorter, since I could use for-loop syntax (and in python 3+ print is a function). But I would have to arrange it like this if I needed another nested loop. If you wanted to perform some additional action on the names you might have to import yet another library.

Incidentally, C can be a useful admin tool if you know how to use it, but usually the compile-execute cycle makes it more cumbersome than it's worth for one-offs. A C compiler might not even be available on your production system.
Given that I can't even get them to update the street address on a client's (successfully claimed) Google Places listing, I have my doubts.

To the extent it allows Google users to interact directly, perhaps. To the extent it demands any (non-development) support from Google staff, "forgetaboutit".

(To clarify, I can sign in and update the listing all I want. It shows correctly on that page. Access the Places listing while not signed in, however, and they are, months later, STILL listed as being at their old address.)
In a word, yes. But keep in mind scaling MySQL at those levels isn't automatic or easy and neither would getting PostgreSQL there.
New Eco-Friendly Design For Computers
Ralph Merkle: Publishing a new idea
Linode.com Fremont nodes are down
Just in case any of you host on linode, their Fremont located virtual hosts are down, due to DOS attack.

Would have appreciated an email from linode before discovering this myself.

Their issue status page - http://status.linode.com/2011/10/network-issue-in-fremont.html
Actually, sensible groupon offerings DO have to make money (in the long term, or short term if you don't have credit).

The amount of money a rational organization should spend on negative ROI activities is exactly zero. It's just as stupid to spend your money on a -25% ROI as it is on a -50% ROI, you'd be better off putting the money in a GIC.
List of some big Datasets open to the public
Try cold emailing people. Really, it helps. Find a list of people doing like-minded things and just shoot off a bunch of emails. You can ask them a question, or comment on something they did or wrote. Some won't reply, but most do.
Cynicism is rarely proven wrong in cases like this.
The investors of a VC fund are known as "Limited Partners" or LPs. They put up the money but do not select the investments, sit on the boards of portfolio companies, or generally do anything except collect their money at the end of the fund.

The managers of the VC fund are known as "General Partners" or GPs. They are the ones who decide on what to invest in, take an active role in advising those portfolio companies, and are paid a management fee as well as a percentage of the positive returns (the "carry").

So "Partner" doesn't mean anything, unless prefixed with "Limited" or "General".
This show has enabled me to pretend that I'm shooting the shit and drinking beer with like minded individuals and not actually at work or at the gym for years. This was the point of the show. At least for me.
Intellectual property and patents are not the problem, the problem is the broken system around them that allows these types of abuses.
How popular are cellphones in Africa?
Yes. It is an answer to the criticism made, and I acknowledge that.

It's an answer that says: "You're using the wrong tool for the job."

Which is particularly weird given that Fibonoacci itself is probably the most overused example of algorithm-to-promote-paradigm in computer science. Except it's for a different paradigm: recursion, not asynchronous IO.

Still, it's interesting in a recursive sort of way.
Other efforts similar in spirit but dramatically different in execution are Intentional Software and Jetbrains MPS. I really need to find a weekend to try to parse through VRI's work. Has anyone tried to make a digestable survey of the work they have done? I've glanced through their documentation but it seems quite sparse and their stuff is a moving target.
Appears to be missing. Here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
From a historical perspective, this certainly feels like a logical, organic acquisition for both Typekit and Adobe. But it's disappointing that they didn't exit into the arms of Google. Google Web Fonts could have used the help and passion. They apparently danced, but unfortunately didn't leave the ball together:

http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.htm...

http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/

It's unlikely this will result in the kind of innovation or even disruption that a Google/Typekit union could have provided.

Edit: Removed unnecessarily negative language.
By the way, you can replay the official announcement and see live broadcast of tomorrow's keynote at the Adobe MAX conference here:

http://www.max.adobe.com/online/
> GitHub's repo restrictions

You're talking about the number limit?
Random sidenote: I haven't downloaded but if this is a community version of Oracle Coherence (nee Tangasol) it might be reasonably badass. As an ex-oracle employee, I've heard the insider view from friends that unlike most oracle in-house or acquired software, Coherence is the real deal, scales as advertised, and except for the $100k per enterprise box price-tag, should have taken the storage world by storm.
From https://bitbucket.org/plans :

What is a user?

Someone with read or write access to one of your private repositories.
This might be too business sensitive to answer, but what did you replace BDB with as your disk backend? Build your own, LevelDB, or other...?

BDB certainly has its problems, but I still haven't found a better alternative.
I'm actually quite impression with the 5000 requests/second ab result. I can't get more than 1000 requests/second on my pony laptop. What hardware are you using?
Morocco Begins Work on Africa's First High-Speed Rail
as a non-tech person trying to learn how to do this stuff - all i can say is, thank you.
"military-grade encryption" works in the same way.
I'm not following you on the pain of setup. I'm finding it easier to setup things these days than I could 10 years ago.

- Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go.

- Need to learn how to program something that you can then deploy to Heroku? Easy, just follow these 13 steps and you're on your way:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html

WTF is so painful about this?
Those are important skills for being a VC, I agree. Did reading MG's articles convey to you that he had those skills?

I really thought everything he wrote was a combination of PR-feed and opinion. Maybe I didn't follow him as much as you, but it just felt like he had early access to stuff and was able to formulate opinion (correctly/incorrectly) that most of us could have. He certainly didn't come across as a visionary or a pundit to me.
the implications I was making when I said there can be more than one group of "elite".

Uh. Where did you say that?
Oops, missed that part. Thanks.
Really? I've almost never seen node.js pitched to anyone other than newbies (although not in the enterprise trenches for sure).

Rarely the pitch involves being able to share libraries between the server side and browser side (wonderful benefit of node.js)

Most of the time it's being sold as "you already know javascript" or "it's super fast, because non-blocking is magic sauce!"

I haven't used Node.js for anything serious but the hype and especially the discussion around the now infamous node is cancer post sure makes it seem like Biilmann was correct when he said "For better or worse, Node is like the PHP of concurrency and ever so often worse is better"

Even if that's not true, if that demographic is the dominant users of and contributors to Node then that's what Node will become.
A good, if not great, rant. I think the one point I'd like to make is I think the iPad represents the first opportunity in a long time to really fundamentally re-think computing. Yes, it comes with a lot of legacy garbage, and it's shackled by Apple itself, but it's different enough that it might just be the thing we need to have some fresh thinking.

The tragedy will be if we are so blinded by the past that we do nothing more than project the status quo onto it. If we can get back to our roots and remember what computing is fundamentally about, extending the capability of humanity, I think we can expect to see some amazing things over the next decade.
Outsource it: 30 bloggers in your niche for $5
Oak House Kiba, by chance?
A good complement to our other post last week, How to Rock an Algorithms Interview - http://blog.palantir.com/2011/09/26/how-to-rock-an-algorithm...
Instinct - The easiest way to learn a musical instrument
How would what you did be impossible a few years ago? The specific services and products that you listed might not have been available, but they are hardly required for something so simple. Any competent Perl developer could have done the same thing in a couple days a decade ago.
Another case of wanting proof by authority?
In Canada the BBB logo is often displayed on the biggest rip-off services available.

I'm not kidding. Over time I've learned that when I see the BBB logo I need to be really careful, because scuzzy businesses use it as a cloak. A good example is the "Vancouver Rental Guide" ("Edmonton Rental Guide", etc) which literally sells you the information from craigslist. They cite their BBB credentials over and over to get you to fall for their scam.
How do you arrive at valuations for acquisitions like these?
Well, for a long time, "database" was synonymous with "SQL," with a few exceptions such as DBM-type systems, largely because there were a lot of them out there and they could do a lot of stuff. Two of the reasons the whole "NoSQL movement" got started are:

- RDBMSes were being used to do a lot of things that the relational algebra-based data model wasn't really designed for, like storing objects.

- A lot of the things that people were using RDBMSes for could be done more efficiently in a more specialized, somewhat lower-level product.

You can kind of compare "NoSQL" to using public and shared transportation instead of personal automobiles. Boats, buses, trains, and planes can't all do everything (at least, not efficiently), but the things they do well, they can do more efficiently than a car can.

So, basically NoSQL is about "relational databases aren't always the best choice, so use something that works well with your particular use-case." Though I usually prefer the term "non-relational" - the way "NoSQL" is used now suggests that they are some united front against relational DBs, but that's really not the case at all.
Linode stays with HE because HE offers incredibly cheap rates for bulk purchases. I didn't host with Linode for this very reason, if bottom line matters more than reliability then my money will go elsewhere ( I didn't make this up, many many hosts have moved from HE to other datacenters due to reliability ).
I don't think very highly of either although both can commit journalism occasionally. Dan Lyons was an SCO shill for years. MG Siegler's writing style can best be described as a borderline parody of tech journalism meets pro wrestling.
Were you at all involved with Amicima acquisition few years back?
Totally agree, I still remember the pain I had almost a decade ago install something as simple as a Borland C++ IDE. What a nightmare that was for a newb like me, zero resources online to dig through. Today, you want setup and IDE or get iPad development going? There are TON's of resources with thousands of examples. Hitting an error when setting it up? Copy, paste that error into Google. 9.9 times out of 10 you get someone who hit that error before and has already solved it.

I'm just not buying into this "oh, life is so hard to set stuff up nowadays" routine...
NMA on Grouper founder Jerry Guo and Y Combinator
thanks to our repo count

I guess this answers your question. I'm a happy Github customer myself (both personally as well as with my company), but it is interesting to see Bitbucket compete with them head-on. I can see quite a lot of small/medium companies move over.
http://www.quora.com/How-do-large-tech-companies-like-Google...
I still use an installation of Gitosis on my VPS to host my small private git projects. As long as you have a unix-ey box then it's very easy to set it up. Though I would definitely upload public projects to Github, for the community and visibility aspect of it.
IIRC, you could argue in court that the patent-holder knew that infringement was happening, yet only decided to come out of the woodwork in the 11th hour. I think that this defense has worked in the past, but you would need to spend a bunch of money to get to that point though.
My guess would be that they use different pieces of each software program. Asterisk is good for some things but FreeSwitch can be used as a SBC (session border controller) and from there, you can do load balancing across multiple machines. etc. as an example.
Awesome! Who's done it?
Nevermind then. Apparently I'm blind.
Higashi-jujo in Kita-ku.
Scripts to increase your productivity with Omnigraffle
Oh. HN/AMA, long time coming I'd say.

Q: Say I have a product or a service that I think might be a very good fit for Adobe, including a realistic, well thought out business side of things. Is there a way to pitch it to the people of your position if I have absolutely no connections in Adobe?

This is a hypothetical question, just trying to understand options for seeding initial acquisition interest. Thanks.
This is where iMessage and FaceTime, GoogleVoice (via unlimited data), MagicJack and other such services step in to forge the link.
Honestly, I wish he would charge more. I've gained so much value from this over the years that I would gladly pay a much higher monthly fee.
> mental effort is a resource of our physical environment.

One of the more intriguing comments I've seen on HN. Care to elucidate?
"Go do great things".

I'm with you.

Go build a new computer architecture, Zachary Morris. It seems you have the knowledge and the support. Put it on kickstarter and I'll give you money. Godspeed.
I think these stories get up-voted because they're actually interesting to other mobile developers, not because the Parse guys are somehow using YC to game the system.
Perhaps Arrington trusts his judgement and expects that he would be nice to have around as "another set of eyes" when brainstorming, making decisions, etc. Even if their skillsets and networks are pretty similar, it's often better to have two people than one.
Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go.

That's a different path entirely, though not necessarily a bad one. The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.
The customers on AT&T & Verizon would still get an iPhone 4S with many of the iPhone5 features.
Do the descendants of Joseph Guillotin still hold the patent on his invention? I fancy a scenario unfolding in today's environment that might vastly enrich his heirs.
Johnny has it right -- to reconnect with people you haven't seen in awhile. It provides a good venue to meet with multiple such people. In fact, I wasn't going to go until an old friend asked me to and a couple of other people I wanted to see were going.

It doesn't hurt to get out and be social now and then, even if the overall group is not one you really care to see.
How iPhone 5 will change the game. Again.
Although exclusivity is hard to believe, the only thing that makes this plausible is that it makes sense for Apple to want multiple carriers for their products, each with lesser influence, than one or two major carriers with major influence.