skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He took some at a party I was at and freaked out. I nursed him for a few hours, he babbled the same phrase over and over until his housemates came and picked him up. I've been told since that he had freaked out before and had been fine once he came down so they treated this incident the same. Took him home and sat with him till he calmed down and put him to bed.

The next morning he was still acting strangely, not making sense etc. They kept an eye on him that day figuring he was just tired and worn out. But the next day he was worse so they got him into a psych hospital after some difficulty (he wouldn't go at first). He was put on anti-psychotics and stayed there for a couple of months.

He was released back into his parent's care, he is from the UK and this happened in Australia. So he went back to the UK and reportedly has found god and is doing fine. (apart from the religion thing ;)
In most cases the pages, which arrive about two or three
times during a 24-hour on-call period, require the engineer
to take down the problematic instance and restart it.

I've never held a position that required a pager, but I always assumed that pages to on-call support people were for emergencies only. This seems like they're paging for non-emergency things that need to get looked at; wouldn't an email work just as well?
Holy god. The post mentions "We evaluated a few different NoSQL solutions, but (...)".

I couldn't even imagine having to _think_ about this sort of thing; CouchDB makes this an absolute no-brainer. I mean, the act of creating a document assigns it a UUID in the database _by_ _default_.

Or, do you want to fetch a UUID before assigning it to any data? localhost:5984/_uuids
Want to fetch 10? localhost:5984/_uuids?count=10
Want to fetch a million? localhost:5984/_uuids?count=1000000

Instagram seems like the absolutely perfect candidate for CouchDB -- unstructured data, speed, HTTP querying, big data, attachments...
Cool technology, good explanation. Legitimate questions below.

What you're describing (uploading photos + storing metadata) sounds like something which Facebook has tech talked at length about at multiple venues. Their solution was to use distributed FS for images (such as HDFS, though FB uses their internal "Haystack") and then use HBase for the metadata. To be honest, your solution while it works now, looks like a weak home-grown HBase, but leveraging PL/PGSQL for unique IDs. Why not go the snowflake+hbase route? While it may add Ops complexity, it is a fairly battle-proven stack, and JVM ops is pretty well documented.

Or, if you insist on using an RDBMS for metadata, why not just throw money (and not that much) at the problem and buy an SSD for your DB? Increase your iops from 100 or 200 up to 30,000 or 40,000 with a cheap drive, and call it a day. Surely this would be less expensive than the engineering effort that went into (and will continue to go into) this project. This has the added benefit of having no impact on Ops complexity and should scale to quite a staggering number of QPS.

Thanks!
It is? According to whom? One good rainstorm can knock phone lines out for long enough to mess up five nines for a LONG time.
Interesting article. It seems like a pretty good solution the problem, especially when judged on the ease of maintenance.

One thing that bothered me was, "Let’s walk through an example: let’s say it’s September 9th, 2011, at 5:00pm and our ‘epoch’ begins on January 1st, 2011. There have been 1387263000 milliseconds since the beginning of our epoch..."

The number of seconds between 5pm one day and midnight another obviously doesn't end in 3, so I looked into it. It looks like that number is taken from the epoch that is used later in the SQL which starts on Aug 24th.
Headline is sensationalized and doesn't properly capture the flaw: it's a bug in the lock screen, not a remote exploit. Lock screens are, as I hope everyone knows, very weak "security". They protect vs. casual snooping, not a determined attacker with physical access to the device.
TED talk by Sunni Brown on the same thing:
http://blog.ted.com/2011/09/23/doodlers-unite-sunni-brown-on...
Curso de Apicultura
Ram is pretty cheap these days...
Sharing code back isn't the only way to assist the ecosystem. As long as compatibility is good, the Fire will encourage more app development. It will also encourage app developmet at its form factor, which might finally start opening up the Android tablet market.
I definitely noticed myself becoming more open (as mentioned in the article), much more laid back and less neurotic (though the article mentioned this not being affected), and just a calmer, more rational, loving person in general. I also noticed a deeper appreciation of nature and art that stemmed from experiences while on hallucinogens. I also like to think I've grown in creativity, but that may be the result of other experiences and goals in my life. As a previous commenter mentioned, the drugs help you start to explore the ideas of how everything is related, how people all have the same experiences of consciousness, etc and you begin to appreciate how tied together our world and ecosystem is. Those are just a few things I've noticed on my part. I really believe more people thinking in this manner would be highly beneficial to humankind, though I'm biased :)
I've looked at flask briefly, but it strikes me that a bare-bones django project is every bit as lightweight as a bare-bones flask project(i.e. use what you need). That said, if a flask project grows beyond a trivial app, don't you necessarily need to rebuild(or seek out) much of the great functionality that django already provides?
From what I gather, the Pythonic way to write that would be:

some_object.do_something().do_something()\
.do_something().last_thing()

Basically, go to the end of the line and wrap with an indent. That's the way that I see most function calls with a long list of arguments in Python. In Perl, you might see something like:

GetOptions(
'h|help' => \my $help
);

Whereas in Python you would see:

parser.add_option('-h','--help',meta="HELP",target="HELP",
help="Print help message",action="store_true",default=False)
CouchDB did not merge with membase. You are thinking of Couch One, the company. CouchDB remains an Apache project.
Requirement number one was that IDs be sortable by time. CouchDB UUIDs are random.
I think you can make the case though that Greeks with savings in euro are quite glad that the government can't just devalue the currency when they see fit.

Also, the harsh measures which are necessary now could actually go some way to restoring the imbalances in the Greek public finances, whereas devaluation is just kicking the can down the road.
The Best that Midtown Manhattan luxury Condos have to offer
The point being that when the indentation gets screwed up via the copy/pasting, the if changes the meaning of the code vs just changing the aesthetics.
And how does using CouchDB make scaling any easier?
To be fair, there should be economic impacts to the instant creation of valued resources.
Certainly true, but I feel like you always know when you have some issues lurking in the back of your mind. I once did some hallucinogens after going through a breakup and a small bout of loneliness in which I wasn't entirely happy with myself. Needless to say, it wasn't a fun trip at all. I tried to convince myself I was fine and in a good place, but with any real introspection, I should have known I wasn't in the right mindset going into it.
I doubt it, as no single packet manager has delta updates, which is a crucial asset of their own solution.

More importantly, they have no control over what comes in and goes out of the repositories. I doubt Google would want to deal with every single distribution personally.
Does anyone have any more info on these government grants available in Canada that are mentioned ?
See also: http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

I'd recommend every applicant read it twice, parse out the 'rules', then iterate over each question in their application ensuring that each 'rule' is applied. And remember:

PG: I suspect for every group we invite to interviews, there are one or two more that are just as good but that we pass over because they don't manage to convey how good they are.
If you're as good as you say, then those engineers are incompetent. However, did you show online proof of your business knowledge? The reason is as you and author say, Hackers are wary and had been preyed on. So, hackers, like business people, rely on referrals but also online proof. For example blog posts, code commits, etc. Since you can't quite do code, have you made blog posts or similar, showing how much value you've added to their business?

Also, straight commissions do work from the anecdotal observations I'm told and seen (eg GroupOn). If you want to do more than sales and into relationships/contacts, then emphasise that straight commissions on long relationships is not good compensation. If they're reasonable, see that you're good at relationships and need it (funding, marketing, etc), they'll provide a different package.
Ah ok that's what I figured. We do a lot of the same things right now with various DBs (we just describe it as pre-sharding so we can avoid the actual re-sharding dilemma). We've had to do this with both PostgreSQL and Redis now.

The schemas are definitely a neat way to handle this though so you dont have to worry about table names.
When an instance is "degraded", they need to start another instance quickly, or else the apps hosted on that instance will be down for good. So it's an emergency.

I think they don't have enough confidence in their detection of "degraded" instances to do it automatically, so it requires human intervention.
Show HN: GeoAsk, Anonymous Q&A - My weekend project
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geoask/id457038083

This is my second side project on iOS. I started it because sometimes I got questions but hesitate to ask with my real identity.

I know it may look like to dump idea but I highly appreciate if you can give me some feedback on both the idea and the app.
Well, it might be cheaper to create a read-only mirror of all of the projects on BerliOS and host it for free for a while than to have to re-create some obscure bit of software you need for an old system (or to recover data from an old disk, etc.)
RAM is actually 512MB. Which is rather low by today's standards. But as long as they strip the Android OS to run only what is needed, not like the bloated crap that's coming from the major carriers, it should be enough for most cases.
It's 1024x600. Go to Kindle Fire page, scroll down to "Technical Details". "Battery life" is just a few paragraphs below.
Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that.

This is always the reply of web developers -- even on the desktop! "Yes, it's slow now, but it'll be faster with new hardware!".

Meanwhile, the native applications use that additional processor power to do more stuff, and the webapps fall further behind again.
You'll be pleased to know that I've flown in the US several times since making that post, and not only have I not been selected for "secondary screening", I haven't had the nude-o-scope either ;-)
I'm a cofounder at Couchbase. All the work we do is open source, and we contribute heavily back to the Apache CouchDB project.

Pardon our marketing dust... it's nothing compared to the actual engineering we've been doing, but that's a story for another day.

Congrats to Basho for reaching the 1.0 milestone!
An even better example would be game publishers.

(But as others have noted, it applies to many industries. Venture capitalists who invest in startups is another example.)
In hardware (Verilog), we use ?: all the time. Why not in JS?
This is a surprisingly often ignored limitation of the browsers. You need threads to achieve decent performance given any significant complexity, and mobile CPUs are going multi-core.
I can replicate this under certain conditions - and all to do with changing the text size as Josh suggested.

I'll try to get around to fixing it this weekend.

Thanks for noticing :-)
It takes some nerve to actually be proud of that patent.

Luckily for the rest of us, there is not just one way to do sharding (which in the original version of your post you assertively referred to as "how to do sharding right").

It depends on the individual architecture and the tradeoffs people consider important. That means you don't get to have an undeserved but legal monopoly holding the entire scalable web hostage, just a part of it. Nevertheless: you should be ashamed of yourself.
I will say that the person I know with the most visceral reaction to Python's indentation rules writes code like this:

sub func { shift->func1(shift)->func2(@_) }

sub things_with_attr { grep { $_[0]->is_attr_true($_) } $_[0]->things }

Only the function names have been obscured.
Video: Python Training - Working with Files: File I/O
"if a new feature pops up that they like, nothing would stop them from cherry-picking it and putting it in to their fork."

You mean nothing except the feature being a Google service or not open sourced (cf Honeycomb).
20 Reasons Why Millions Of Young Americans Are Furious About The Economy
When boarding an aircraft the information is still used to mark you as boarded in the airline's system.

This information is then checked when the flight closes to make sure that everyone who has checked in has actually boarded.

The scanners at TSA entry points might be a different story. I'm not sure if they're linked into the airline reservation's system, or if they just check the barcode to see if you have a valid flight for that day listed. I'm certainly not going to test this theory though!

Fortunately the country I live in (AU) allows anyone through domestic security check-points, so it's a non issue.
Ask PG: What is the patent status of Common Lisp?
I'm curious to know if software patents could be used against Common Lisp itself, either in terms of language features, or in compiler technology used in implementations.

Common Lisp itself was funded by the US taxpayer through DARPA, but unfortunately that doesn't necessarily make it public property.

Through funding programs like SBIR, you can get the taxpayer to fund development of your software and software patents for your private corporation, and exploit them as if you'd paid for the research out of pocket---even sell the whole company (patents and all) to offshore buyers.

For all we know, Common Lisp compilers could be vulnerable to patent holders in other countries. What would be interesting is to chart what happens to the all the public-funded technology SBIR has cranked out in its several decades, and see how much of it goes overseas.

It would also be interesting to know if the public funded various parts of CL implementations (especially in university environments), and under what terms.

(A note: I do not yet know if any of the funding for Common Lisp specifically came through SBIR, nor whether the Bayh-Dole act applies to it. But I'm considering a research article on the subject.)

A few relevant links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

http://www.economist.com/node/5327661?story_id=5327661&no_na_tran=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Innovation_Research
Code for America celebrates its second birthday
Frontend developers, compile this in your JVM to get hired by Mashape
The serious one: http://blog.mashape.com/become-a-mashaper-were-looking-for-a-frontend

// FIXME: Fix statement at line 2, too many submissions we can't handle all that
if (me.girlfriends > 2)) System.out.println("Submit one to Mashape, Inc.");

List<Language> languages = me.getLanguages();
Iterator<Language> iterator = languages.iterator();

List<PlusType> plus = new ArrayList<PlusType>();

if (me.learnFast) plus.add(PlusType.CAN_LEARN_FAST);

boolean knowsLanguages = true;
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
Language language = iterator.next();
switch (language) {
case ProgrammingLanguage.JAVA:
knowsLanguages = knowsLanguages && (language.getLevel() == LanguageLevel.MONSTER);
break;
case ProgrammingLanguage.JAVASCRIPT:
knowsLanguages = knowsLanguages && (language.getLevel() == LanguageLevel.OBI_WAN_KENOBI);
break;
case ProgrammingLanguage.SCALA:
plus.add(PlusType.SCALA);
break;
case ProgrammingLanguage.GROOVY:
plus.add(PlusType.GROOVY);
break;
default:
plus.add(PlusType.CAN_SWITCH_TO_OTHER_LANGUAGES);
}
}

return (knowsLanguages && me.getPassions() == Passion.HTML5 + Passion.CSS3 + Passion.JQUERY
&& plus.size() > 1 && me.existLove(Love.CONTINUOUS_DEPLOYMENT)
&& me.existLove(Love.FAST)
&& me.existLove(Love.PASSION_BREAKING_RULES);

http://www.mashape.com
Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?
If yes, Can you give some tips/examples on what you did to make it work?
There are two big reasons as to why it's so painful elsewhere. One is underwriting: people want to know a lot about your business so they can figure out if you're likely to be fraudulent (or expensively incompetent). They typically do this by taking a shotgun approach to information requirements.

The second reason is that it's "standard", and everybody copies the "standard" without much consideration. The companies providing merchant accounts are usually not technology companies, and historically haven't had thought much about product.

We like to think that we can do much better than traditional companies on both counts.
Interview with videogame developer, David Shute
The call to default _uuids API call generates random UUIds, however you could override the call in the _config to have a different algorithm field, one that potentially could call "utc_random" still while appending a timestamp in the string to sort by later. Was this thought about when CouchDB was potentially considered?
Concept art / abandoned projects snaps from videogame developer, David Shute
High end photovoltaic solar cells are over 40% efficiency for a while. Consumer solar cells are a little over 10% but comparing the best sample in lab conditions with a consumer level product is somewhat misleading.
Chinese TV clip of rocket launch: Music is "America the Beautiful"
Does it come down to the same conclusions?
The "split browser" is not something new though. Microsoft had deepfish, Opera does that for its mobile browser I think. How do they address these concerns?
Hat tip: James Fallows [1]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/how...
I have to say this is a big one for me. It gives a lot more freedom and it's one less thing to stress about.
I will note that when copying the text out of the interpreter, the prompt (>) doesn't copy (I assume that you may be using a CSS :after or :before decorator, though I didn't look). Sometimes even the newline itself didn't copy. For that post I had to cleanup all of the text so that it would display properly. This may be an issue you want to look at if you want to support people copy/pasting stuff that they are working on out of the console (or you may just want to add a button that generates a Github gist or pastebin entry and displays a link to it).
A Guide To atlas travel insurance
Why would you use Silk over other browsers? It seems like the real benefit of precaching content does not really apply in the desktop case. You don't have near the restrictions on bandwidth, or computing power that you have on a tablet.

Also wasn't there some speculation that there might be serious issues with performance of Javascript throught the Silk system. While agree that it is a large amount of data being aggregated I would be suprised to see this anywhere other than the mobile space.
Condominium Pattaya -- Monthly Newsletter
The free Siphon website, will send a fresh surge of visitors to you very quickly!
That's funny, I did the exact same thing with my kindle dx until all the bubblewrap deflated. It fit perfectly.
(Usual caveats: I'm not a YC partner and I'm just generalizing based on my limited observation.)

The "things the partners generally look for" seems very big VC and doesn't actually match up with what I've seen.

When YC says they prefer to back smart founders they mean it. You should either be demonstrably smart (winning-the-putnam, twice, smart), or have amazing traction, or both.

Since you've probably had a lot of time to prove you're smart the best advice you can follow now is this: start hustling to build your business.

(Incidentally "gets shit done" is probably the most common trait I've noticed across YC founders.)

If you're thinking of quitting your job to do a startup, you should probably quit. If you don't have a cofounder, finding one should become your fulltime job. Etc. Generally find what's going wrong and work around it.

YC alum are amazingly responsive and willing to help (keep in mind they're really busy). You should definitely seek them out during the process.
I'm curious, what UI frameworks are coming?
Heh fair. To be honest, though, I don't see what all the fuss/anger about TextMate not being updated often enough is about - it works really well as it is, what updates does it need?
Great, that's fine for my purposes. Thanks!
I work at Flickr and I see they mentioned Flickr's ticket server idea, (ab)using MySQL's autoincrement and "REPLACE INTO" trick and mentioned that a con was the write bottleneck.

We're generating more GUIDs than ever with this system and those boxes are more or less idle on every metric. They're right in that we don't meet their time-ordered requirement, but I just wanted to say that writing (or reading) is not a bottleneck.
My philosophy teacher was nice enough to allow me to doodle in her classes. She believed it was a positive thing. But - and I never told her - the doodling actually distracted me from the class. I was always lost when I emerged and tried to listen to her, leaving me to put the pieces of the puzzle back together during homework. (I still kept doodling, listening to monologues has always been a problem with me, and I was not much of a responsible person back then).

Maybe we could say I was not doodling, but actually drawing? Or maybe the problem was that the drawings subjects were not related to the class? Now it occurs to me that if I had set a challenge to myself where I had to illustrate what she was saying, it could have solved my boredom and at the same time helped me focusing on her teaching.
> Wealth ultimately boils down to the most finite resource we all have -- our time -- and we are able to accomplish a whole lot more with our time today than we were in the past.

If you want to go that route then boil it down even further and you'll get "well-being" and/or "self-validation".

> wouldn't you say that even today's poor Americans are wealthier than the richest Sumerians

In my argument wealth has always been a relative term, never absolute.

It is about what you are trying to achieve for yourself/ego, which in the human psyche is always relative to the other person. This connection cannot be disputed, you can only dispute the first part...

So is wealth an extension of the ego, or is it a database entry?

I'm claiming that it is the former, since so many people experience it as such.

You are claiming it is the latter.
It would be interesting to see exactly what heuristics were responsible for marking Chrome as malware.

I'm guessing that it's based on something much simpler than what you describe since it's identified it specifically as Zbot.

Too bad MSE isn't open source :)