skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently reading "Mastering Relational Database Querying and Analysis" by John Carlis, which posits that SQL is inherently flawed for several reasons. To paraphrase from the text:

First, both the syntax and the way querying is generally presented in textbooks, lead you to think that your task when querying is to display one unnamed table. The author objects to each of those four words.

Second, many people have found querying with SQL terribly difficult. Even experts find SQL hard to create and read. Do not be surprised if an analyst struggles to understand his/her own SQL. It is impossible for users to understand any but the simplest SQL.

Third, SQL practice suffers from the notion of a "correlated query" -- which has a monolithic subquery that is executed repeatedly via looping, once for each value of a candidate row picked by an outside SELECT.

The book has much more to say on the topic of SQL before going on offer relational algebra (built on top of SQL) as a n alternative.
Adobe Illustrator, most likely.
Go and read J.K. Galbraith's The Great Crash: 1929. It's a short book, an easy read, and quite informative. Particularly interesting is his examination of causes and ramifications. If you buy a recent edition, these have been updated through the 1960s and 70s, with a foreward by his son in 2009 (the book was first published in 1955).

Though the situation of the 2008-2011+ crash/depression isn't an exact reflection of 1929, there are very strong rhymes.
I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice.

EDIT:
I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.
I hope Maciej is not going soft on the trademark "brevity is for the weak" style, which I've been appreciating since idlewords.com days.

I believe he spared the spelling out of the LOAF acronym, and scanning the very interesting http://loaf.cantbedone.org/about.htm did not clear that up. "List of a friend"?
Well said. The ideal "social graph" is just an advertiser's wet dream, and they forget to consider whether it would be useful to the user. Or even possible.
Building a NASCAR Engine in a Room with Swirly Carpet
The regions aren't really that close to each other -- it's over 1000 km to the other West region down in the bay area.
Concerning power consumption. As you already figured out, it's not an issue with Ubuntu, it's an issue with drivers and hardware compatibility. I too run an ASUS laptop, and initially I got very bad mileage. However, after some tweaks (enable a feature in the graphics driver, disable secondary graphics card, work-around buggy BIOS, etc) I got pretty much the promised 8 h.
Animatable: One property, two values, endless possiblities
Brehaut.net: Simple L-System Generation
Wow, these names are pure gold! I've added about 30 new terms including classics such as 'Advisor', 'Filter and 'Generic'.
Quickbooks. Integrating an online store with quickbooks can be a nightmare. And their pay structure (single user, multi user) is extremely frustrating. I really wish someone could make a good web solution with a nice API that destroys this massive headache.
I work in a huge multi-national corporation. Some of the people I interact with are co-located with me, however, most are not. I've even worked with people who are 100% remote. What does it matter to them where I'm sitting? Now, I agree there is something to be said about team building & sheer convenience, depending on the nature of your work, but as long as you are getting the job done, who cares if you are sitting behind your desk 40 hrs/wk?

This should also be a no-brainer for employers. Flex schedules/working from home is an excellent perk, and is low hanging fruit in terms of a company "going green", since there are less people driving to work and offices supporting fewer people produce a smaller carbon footprint.
As noted, housing bubble, the bubble was started by lack of investment opportunities when people start to amass wealth in cash, housing is pretty much the default choice. Bond and other safe investment do not yield enough to cover high inflation.

It is then further furled by a combination of speculative investment and local government/bank/construction industry collusion. This is quite similar to what happened to the States in post-2000 housing bubble, but in greater scale due to stronger government control and growing economy.
I've never understood the typical programmers aversion to query writing. Writing SQL is in general pretty easy (basic set theory).

I'm guessing it's all about what people have experienced. I have been coding against RDBMSes since my first job while still in college. I have even read Celko for fun at one point :)

IMHO, learning the hard parts of SQL only come from experience with particular RDMSes and dealing with large datasets. For example, knowing that the only way to get a query to run against a large Teradata table without running out of spool space is to create and use temp tables only comes as a result from trying to run the query.
Systems like that don't even have to be particularly old. I used to work on a system that started out as an Access database, and rather than doing things properly, the developers basically just translated everything into SQL statements and used ASP and COM+ on top of it.

It was a load of crap, but it still ran about 10x faster than what customers were used to, so they weren't complaining. Last I knew they were still running the same basic setup, and it's been 5 years since I worked there.
Git: A Tale of Three Trees by Scott Chacon
I'm less interested in what college students think about office work than I would be to see what changes they may have (or not) after 3 years of experience.

I'm not disputing the results... I've just noticed that a few years of experience tends to temper attitude a bit, once people learn the reasons behind various policies.
I'm not really that kind of person, but I find that I'm able to get things done from home when there is a clear definition of the work and a firm deadline. I think that's a difference between running a company and working from home - you can still be managed while working from home.
From Tape to the Cloud: Data Recovery Best Practices
A year ago, I thought that 7" would be good, then I got an iPad and got insight.

On an upright iPad I can just read/browse A4 documents, most web sites and 80 chars wide code.

I've asked others that liked 7". For reading literature, 7" is be equally good. Maybe for video, too. (Really young (/near sighted) people can probably read documents, too...)

Anyway, more competition is good here.
What would be cool is if you could (optionally) smell the chemicals you're learning about to further cement them in your memory.
Reading the comments below, I get the impression that all the "good" DB people hang out on HN, not like those "other" incompetent nits out there who don't know what a join is. Hubris, people.
Thanks you. Please post here if you get an answer from them.
I've seen this in an Access application. I've also noticed a strange character that constantly shows up: the accountant that has acquired a taste for programming. Luckily, there never seems to be more than one per institution.
Red Hat tests giving software for free to startups
Can someone explain more about butter.js? On the project page there is no README.

PS: Popcorn looks really good!
But it doesn't -- there are many Android headsets that were obsolete when released (OS-wise) and then never updated. The situation with Android devices (at the high end) is getting better but it's too early to see what the situation will be like in 3 years.
Scientists Find Antarctica Meteorites Contain Essential Building Block of DNA
Applogia
Hugh Grant Alleged Mistress Tinglan Hong Steamy Hot Pics
So when iPhone 5 comes out, and it has its own new features to sell itself, do you think they'll enable siri on everything they can?
World's first 'earth scraper' proposed
Oh... You mean using Silverlight for intranet applications without a browser...

That's an interesting idea. Allow me not to take part on it.
I assume non-Francophone English speakers would pronounce Julien like the English "Julian".

My first name is the same as my username. In both email messages and phone calls, I am inevitably called Marty, Martin, or something else that is close to my name but still wrong. I like to think that it helps people remember me, and that in this globalized age (where small software companies can sell to people in 40 countries), it is not preventing me from getting or keeping clients.

edit: I guess I have not really responded to your comment, since you are talking about having people understand how to pronounce your name when you tell them. I am not sure that was applicable to the author's situation, since his company was selling in 40 countries, all of which might have different ideas about how to pronounce "Alla". For example, Alla is not a common name in the United States, while Daniel is.
NASA creates groundbreaking super black light absorbing material
Agreden a Avril Lavigne
You are completely right that what I was trying to talk about was the purchasing power of money - I did try to imply that there are reasons why money can be created and destroyed (this is true for the numerical case as well). It is a valid point that things can depreciate in value with improvement in e.g. manufacturing process, but I think that is quite independent of people making money - Bill Gates is an interesting example because Microsoft have changed the world in that way. A lot of the very rich do not make such contributions so I do not see how their amassing wealth can do anything other than to take away from others.

It seems very fundamental - maybe I miss something, but if you get money (spending power, whatever) it comes from other people. Therefore people can't get richer without making other people poorer.
Microsoft has been doing this for awhile now.

see: webspark and bizspark programs. You can get all Microsoft software for free for 3 years.
Use Angel List for customer development...and then raise money.
The problem is the normal response to their questions. Most companies, or even just people, will respond negatively to bug reports, especially if they aren't good reports. This has trained the users that they shouldn't bother asking.

Instead, they do what gets them results: They complain publicly. See, you can't ignore them if they're speaking publicly. Everyone else gets to see the problem and response, or lack thereof. In this situation, they either get a fix for the problem, or the developer loses future sales.

Here's an example from my life: I bought a mousepad on eBay for like $10. Ridiculously cheap, compared to what others were asking. When it arrived, it wasn't the right one. Now, I had 2 choices. I could contact the seller, and they'd probably tell me to ship it back at my expense, which would cost me more than the product was worth and waste my time, which was even more valuable.

Or I could just give them a low-star rating and explanation, and be done with it. I wasn't about to waste my valuable time, so I chose the bad rating.

The seller contacted me, upset. "Why didn't you contact us?" And I explained the above, and said that there was nothing they could do because I wasn't willing to spend the time and money to send the item back.

They ended up refunding my money and letting me keep the product. (Which probably sits in my closet somewhere, unused and unwanted.) I allowed them to nullify the rating.

tl;dr - So why do users take that route? It's quicker, easier, and works better.
Interview with Andrew Langtree: Carl Bruner in Ghost The Musical
Cracking the Y Combinator Code - Garry Tan profile
From mozillapopcorn.org: "butter.js, an API supporting our Popcorn Maker app and any other apps that use popcorn".
No one claimed it was reasonable. But it happens.
I don't know what Silverlight does under the covers, but the event handling language in Flash is Actionscript, which is a dialect of Javascript. So in that sense we're already there.
A related blast from the past: Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" blog post:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...
I see a list of libraries, but no links.
Where's the source, the docs, etc?
They do, Tegra 2, 3 and OMAP4 decode VP8 in hardware.
Would it be okay if we waited for them to appear in the wild before we start comparisons about whether it's a "threat"?

(Also, never mind the surveys show differences of 1%, which is likely around one-third of its margin of error.)
> Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6.

It will be much easier to move away from Silverlight than it is from VB6. VB6 will haunt us for generations.
I disagree with the readability part. I do heavy use of "WITH" to name my intermediate steps and comment the tricky parts (as I would do with any other programming language) and my colleagues find them pretty readable(or that's what I'm told). That's how I "reverse engineer" such monster queries, refactoring them in intermediate relations with names. Pretty often the same subselect is used more than once.

In fact, due the lack of side effects it's much easier to do than with procedural code.
China's had little to do with communism for decades now.

Your statement is both true and unfitting to the thread here. The truth is that the current governing policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are not doctrinaire communism, in the Marxist-Leninist sense, but rather "socialism with Chinese characteristics," as that party officially labels those policies. But the key political point, and the key motivation for many people wanting to leave China, is that the CPC is the sole ruling party and has been since 1949. Ideology bounces around, but the grip of the CPC on political power on all levels, and on all the major means of gaining economic power, is never relaxed. Mass media in China are subject to prepublication review by censors who are staff members ("cadres") of the CPC. The most crucial distinction between crimes that are punished and crimes that are left unpunished is whether or not the crimes threaten the rule of the CPC. And many activities that are perfectly legal here and in all civilized countries of the world, such as political dissent, are illegal in China solely because they threaten the CPC's grip on power.

I speak Chinese. From time to time I have had the opportunity to participate in seminars with Chinese journalists in the United States, out of earshot of Chinese censors. Even today, I cannot reveal the name of one journalist who once expressed a frank opinion in the hearing of several Americans who are familiar with the situation in China. He said that if the common people of China had full access to uncensored news, the Communist Party of China would fall within a week. The huge efforts that the CPC-controlled government in China makes to set up a "Great Firewall of China" to control Internet access is a sign that the government greatly fears uncensored access to news for the Chinese populace.
Can you explain why a dress that is meant to become more transparent for people you are intimate with could possibly be objectifying? Unless you become intimate with strangers, I don't see how that is possible.
This question gets asked here a lot - although on few occasions for a prospective 2 year old programmer.

This Google search covers the history http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=first+programming+language+... but the very best of luck with the lessons.
There was a source control system whose code I had the pleasure of reading several months ago whose favorite way to store data was as a SQLite3 database, with a single table, with a single column, with a single row, containing JSON. Words failed me.

Based on what you're describing, I now believe those developers were poached from Adobe.
I've found that most of these complex class names are found in the very frameworks which exist to simplify Java development (Spring being the big one), therefore I find myself never having to create a class with a name like this.
> Nobody should ever invent a competing technology

As long as this technology is easy and free for everyone to implement in compatible ways, yes, you can.
Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars probe stranded in Earth orbit
Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well.

I hope that someday the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a true bytecode VM-in-browser.
A lot of it stays in China. Officials may have a large unofficial income source (or two), which they spend on wine, women, and Karaoke (none of which officially existed, just like the money they used to pay for it, so there's no explaining to do); or food (you'll never meet a Chinese who won't think a good $500 meal isn't worth it). Or they channel some to their spouse.

A few big fish will grab a staggeringly huge amount, then run. We are talking huge amounts here, though, not a Chinese millionaire looking for a house for their kids. There's a total of $120 billion missing, taken by an estimated 16,000 officials. Only the poorer ones will be buying what you would describe as a "house".

I'd think most of the Chinese buying houses for their kids are essentially legit businessmen. They probably use cash because Chinese just hate debt. They also see it as an investment, because houses are some of the only things Chinese trust - they see shares as giving a total stranger your money to play with, in the hopes that he gives you more back (I mean, have you seen what US CEOs get paid?).
Before the big redesign a while back, Mozilla's "memshrink" effort used Techcrunch as a metric because of how much memory it used. Between the buttons, the ads, and the other embeds, techcrunch was a massive massive memory hog on Firefox.
I seriously wonder what this means for Flash on the desktop.

The responsive design movement keeps throwing these Morgan Stanley and other reports out there that predict that by 2015, people will be using mobile devices more than desktop devices. What incentive does Adobe have to continue develppig Flash for the browser?

Their statement eludes to nearly ubiquitous support for HTML5 on mobile devices. When IE10 comes out, will that level out the desktop market?

I always hear Flash developers saying that Flash does so many things better than HTML5. But if nobody's able to view the content because nobody wants to develop a Flash player for the target platforms, what does it matter?

I'm not saying I think Flash on the desktop is dead, but I could certainly see Adobe moving that direction. They're turning Flash into a platform like Titanium or PhoneGap, where it generates mobile apps, mobile web apps, or desktop apps. They're already doing that now. If that works, and I suspect it will work quite nicely, then I'd see even less incentive for them to support building "applets".
> I have been considering a Kindle for some time and the Fire does indeed look interesting to me.

Keep in mind that eInk Kindles are very different from LCD tablets. The former are fantastic for reading, and not that good at much else. The latter are more general purpose, but have much shorter battery life, and are probably not so good for reading, depending on how well you like reading an LCD screen.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of places where this question has been asked.

Here's just one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1663784

With things like Scratch, Alice and Logo, are you really contemplating teaching a young child Scheme? Or Smalltalk?

Most children I've met can't balance parentheses correctly, the syntax requirements are horrendous.

There must be a better way.
I can appreciate the idea of starting with a more functional language like scheme, although maybe not something as far out of the modern lime-light as smalltalk - despite how historically important it is.

In my, heavily inexperienced, opinion, you'd need to start a child off something more concrete they could immediately the see the benefits of. Children typically have shorter attention spans, and need something that they can run with quickly. They are usually not of the mind frame that says "This is difficult now, but some day i'll be glad I know it!". More often, it's "This is fun to play around with, I wonder how far I can take things?". You'd also want to start her off with something she doesn't need a lot of hard work to hit the ground running with.

Take for example Javascript. You could teach programming basics, such as variables and basic algebra, string manipulation including the need to escape certain text, etc. in an environment she could immediately begin to grasp the changes of. Just pop open a javascript console on any webpage in any modern browser, and she has an interactive environment where she can play, learn, and begin to see the effects of her work right away, in a very concrete fashion. Sure, she'll most likely just be breaking a webpage at first, but she'll get to see immediate results. She also wont need to struggle to learn a convoluted IDE, nor the more arcane facets of linking libraries and external resources - but she would begin to understand what they are, and be given a simple example of how they're used and why (external scripts libraries, ajax requests to load json)

Then once shes grasped how these things work, consider moving her onto something more abstract like Scheme. I would definitely say I wish I had more exposure to functional languages when I was learning programming, but my main issue was no one ever showed me real world examples of why you'd use them - it was always a boring, droll, academic venture into the subject. It lost me quickly, and only recently have I begun to try to get back into it. But this is only after I've spent many years developing in more OO languages, and begun to see others using functional approaches in real world ways.

Please keep us posted on what you ultimately decide to go with, and how it turns out (although I'm sure she has a few more years before you begin to introduce her to the wonderful world of development).
Can't tell. It won't run on my computer.

Which is the whole point. Gmail runs on my Mac, on my Linux machines, on my OpenSolaris server (actually, it runs OpenIndiana these days) and on my tablet. It would probably run just fine on my AIX boxes if I compiled Firefox or Chromium for them. If Google abandons it (but keep the servers running) it will continue to operate on newer computers and newer browsers until Google pulls the plug.
This is a good point, supply and demand affects prices, but I /think/ you have made the assumption that the goods bought by the wealthy do not overlap the good bought by the poor.

Housing is the classic example, where the rich have pushed the pricing up so high that even moderately wealthy people can't afford to buy houses outright without multiple years worth of salary. The result is a shift towards renting rather than mortgaging, which mostly gives even more money to those people who drove the prices up to begin with...
Rule #1 never underscale. Warming up some extra juice on aws. Sorry about that.
Make it Bluetooth to uplink to the smartphone so it can tweet your arousal levels based on time and map GPS coordinate. Also id like to track 50 other metrics about my body and wetware without me thinking about it.

I should get this, write an Android app and modify a Bluetooth headset to plug into it. Wire it up. Realtime Biofeedback apparel, ill be rich!
that first one looks like a jail to me, not a datacenter (note the "Two Rivers Correction Institute" label) Or is it somewhere else nearby?
There will be no HTML6, etc. Just HTML

HTML is the new HTML5

http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5