skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the problems I have seen with queries (other than DBA issues) is the conflict between application developers and report writers. A lot of databases are designed for transactions and resources are not often available to do a proper reporting database or at least summary data.

I have a very simple rule for myself - "if a user of the application is concerned about a certain attribute or state an element (e.g. person, truck, plane) is in, then a report will be required showing all elements with that attribute or state."

If your database design cannot support that rule, then trouble will happen and you will have serious performance problems.

To give a simple example, suppose you are running a group of storage garages. You have a table with all your customers, a table with all your storage units, an assoc table joining customer and units with active flag + date of start, and a table with all your payments. Good enough to do transactions and figure out for a unit if they are payed up.

On the other hand, writing the report to tell who hasn't paid is going to be kind of a pain. It is a simple example, but not much different from what you find in large systems.
Aussie Airdrop Harvests Water From Air, Wins Prize
Asthma symptoms in children
The true pushers of the PATRIOT Act were the guys in the DoJ who wrote the thing; it was all written up and prepared far in advance of an anticipated wartime condition which would allow them to get it passed without trouble.
What will Microsoft do for 3D on the web, then? They've said the won't implement WebGL and Silverlight 5 + XNA was supposedly their solution.
Can people list what they use for screen sharing when doing remote work? This is my first job where I am having to work with people remotely and I am noticing that iteration times are much higher because its inefficient to describe concepts remotely. Online whiteboards would be appreciated too.
The problem is these people are only thinking about themselves, and not considering the affects of their actions on coworkers. They need to understand how to be a member of the team first, and after that they'll understand how much flexibility in terms of devices, working hours, and location is appropriate.

My office lets people have too much flexibility when choosing their work hours and location. --It's not that people don't work hard, but when you have inexperienced people coming in at noon, that ends up being several hours of time that they're working in the evening without being able to get help from more experienced people. If I had a dollar for every time I found out a coworker struggled for hours on an issue only to have me or another more experienced person provide an answer in 5 minutes, well, I'd have a much healthier retirement account.

Working remotely is also difficult as it can be much harder to properly explain things when you're not able to sit next to each other, point things out, and even grab a piece of paper to sketch stuff out in order to clarify things.
love it. keep up the great work, cole. let me know when it can automatically prompt me to mail for my friend/family's birthdays.
> Scala macros might be a solution to a problem nobody has

Pls read slide 10 of this document - http://scalamacros.org/talks/2011-10-18-WhatsUp.pdf

--Proposed Code snippet with macro ---

class Queryable[T, Repr](query: Query) {
macro def filter(p: T => Boolean): Repr = <[
val b = $this.newBuilder
b.query = Filter($this.query, $reify(p))
b.result
]>
}
val products = db.products
products.filter(p => p.startsWith("foo")).toList
--

My takeaways :
1. adding LINQ support to Scala via macros
2. macros virtualize XXX, where XXX = vals, vars, defs, types, classes, traits. So macro XXX can be used in place of XXX.

The author also says "We can tailor macros to fit your particular use case". He mentions OR-mapping, and a Scala-to-javascript compiler that might end up using these macro invocations, among other things.
Unexpected, ey? :) I follow your newsletter and I was curious to see the website, but it times out.
It's also a few years of having real responsibilities and bills to pay.
Exactly, the relationship between the RIAA and the Feds is symbiotic. In this regard, it mirrors many other relationships where"support" for private interests offers people in government with a way to exceed their properly limited power. The folks on the other side of this trade benefit from a business that is probably less challenging to manage that it would be without participation in this corruption.

Total dependence on private election finance, rampant gerrymandering (which further compromises the vote through the engineering of 'safe' seats), and the unfettered ability to spend one's career oscillating between public and private offices form the structural underpinnings of American-style corruption.

The good news (if you can call it that) is that problems with precise structural causes can be remedied with surgical precision, but only if you can get the patient on the operating table. So far, the things that have permitted the cancer to grow are a lack of awareness about its exact location and effect, and a lack of concern given its apparent lack of malignancy. The last three years have ended the latter problem, and as more people take an interest in exactly what's gone wrong with America, more attention will fall on the former.

The other bit of good news is that these fundamentally corrupt arrangements depend on security through obscurity. Thanks to an utterly pliant national press, this obscurity has thrived for decades. But this, too, is changing. Not because the press has suddenly decided to start doing its job, but because others now have the means to do it for them. Unlike the established players, they also have the will.
Isn't rewriting a stored procedure into multiple queries plus Java code sort of the opposite of what most DB best-practices advocate? Now your query logic is in a mixture of SQL and Java, rather than all in SQL, and you've hidden some of the logic from the database's query planner by moving it into application code.

(On the other hand, I've rarely found query planners, even for Oracle, to be as magical at optimizing as one might hope, so maybe that's why.)
I found the layout of the website extremely obtrusive. I'd have preferred a much more basic layout, without so much fixed text/graphics.
The cynic in me wonders how many of these warnings and one-star reviews are from authors/supporters of competing apps.

Down-vote bots are becoming quite common in other forms of media (Reddit, etc). I wish there were some way of computing the number of players 'gaming' the system.
I think both the Kindle line and the iPad will continue to be profitable because they address slightly different markets. It's not always a zero-sum game.
There's about as much reason to use a right join as there is to use a left join.
You should check out the book The Myth of the Paperless Office. They report research where they gave folks tasks like writing a summary of several magazine articles and one group did it all on a computer and the other did it on paper and they watched how people actually worked. There was a lot of subtle physical interactions in the paper group, such as moving different articles closer and farther away on the table that the computer group tried to do analogues of and failed because of the limitations of the medium. So it's not just the eyes and ears.
Well, under certain circumstances you can swap to a compressed ramdisk. There are ways that that can be helpful.
Direct link: http://mozillapopcorn.org/
The Social Graph: An Imperfect Abstraction or an Evolutionary Dead End?
I want to see someone use a language model for SQL to reconstruct the query just from that photograph, and then debug it.
Apple customers are responsible for environment at least as much as Apple or more. If you don't like how Apple treats environment, you don't buy their products. If you think it's not good for environment to upgrade every year or two, don't buy new phone. Apple's care of environment does not matter if you decide to buy another device. They can only minimize the damage customers will cause.
github link? Some radical ideas in this framework! Quite close to what I've predicted in the merging of frontend and backend frameworks (think Brunch with backend DOM awareness).
EDIT: [github link](https://github.com/flatiron/flatiron)
https://github.com/flatiron
They already have a HTML5 client, created for the PS3:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-...
Let the Cloud Support Your Business Growth
>dunning-kruger

This does not mean exactly what you think it means.
Still did not understand what good it is for. To put tweets and google map on a page?
T-Mobile Announces The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus
Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo strike ad alliance
The Real Value of a College Degree
Looks like the OP is just trying to plug his "blog." Very lame.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rajeshvaya
I work in a very heavy database environment, and it's interesting. Nobody here ever talks about "left" vs. "right" joins. We also don't use ansi syntax (oracle), so for a typical outer join, we'll do either:

select *
from foo f, bar b
where f.baz = b.baz (+)

or

select *
from foo f, bar b
where f.baz (+) = b.baz

But we don't call one a "left" and the other a "right" join. Just bringing this up to note that the right vs. left outer join distinction might be unclear to even relatively experienced engineers coming from such an environment.
Actually, IntelliJ's tools do pretty good autocompletion for javascript. Not perfect, but much better than you'd expect.
Thanks. To be honest, one of the things i liked most about HN was the lack of downvoting (I never realised it was possible...i thought the grey posts were caused by mods or something). I know in effect there's no real difference...but the whole place felt more 'community' like. Ah well.
Proof That Google AdWords Ranking Is Optimal
Thanks for the reply! Let us hope they document it soon! =)
Did you ever actually time qsort? It's variability is nowhere near "it goes quadratic 50% of the time". Timings from http://www.joachimschipper.nl/posts/20111109/qsort_timing.c (portable C, note the appended non-introspective qsort() implementation):

qsort: 39
mergesort: 39
qsort: 38
mergesort: 40
qsort: 37
mergesort: 39
qsort: 38
mergesort: 40
qsort: 38
mergesort: 40
qsort: 38
mergesort: 40
qsort: 38
mergesort: 39
What Zach fails miserably to understand, among other things in this post, is that any arbitrary system can be made needlessly complicated by the actor. Try putting those smarts to better use. Just another facebook fanboi
Looks like an "authoring environment for making interactive video".
I agree, but why stop there?

Turn all the annoying things in a city/turn into a friendly, fun activity: directions, restaurant reviews, hard to find places with no signs, etc.

Let's say you just moved to a city and find it someone dumped their dead pet (eg boa constrictor) on the street. You type in, "Who do I call to get rid of it?", someone posts the answer, and you both get a reward for improving the city (and the world).

The idea is to turn life's annoying problems into a fun puzzle to solve with a group of people spread around the world.

I doubt Yelp, Foursquare, or I would have the imagination to refine it. But you do. "Every problem becomes an opportunity for fun."

But, it gets better! You also get to compete against Craigslist and AirBnB. Maybe it would be fun to compete against 4 major competitors who have TONS more resources than you. People would be expecting you to fail majorly. Now that sounds like fun.
Apple is going to face some stiff competition in 2012 from the Kindle Fire and the new Nook. There is no iPad Killer but these are real players in this space and I don't see them going away anytime soon. Both will have access to an incredible digital library similar to Apple's eco system. This will be a good year for consumers looking to buy tablets.
MacTech 2011: TMO Interviews Boinx’s Florian Albrecht
How To Make A Mobile Charger In Five Minutes
For a project I'm working on right now, we're using HighCharts[0] which makes use of SVG. There's a ton of examples of how it works, so I won't delve into that, but I'm thinking you could probably do this by making use of HighCharts like you normally would, but using output buffering [1] and headers [2]

[0] - http://www.highcharts.com

[1] - http://php.net/manual/en/function.ob-start.php

[2] - http://devzone.zend.com/article/1269
Sure, you're laughing now. But somebody you work with is going to find this site and use it in earnest, and before you know it you'll be setting your Eclipse window to automatically open across four monitors in horizontal series just to be able to edit one file at a time.

No parody is so foolish that no fool will ever take it seriously. Take care who you show this to.
The buying public sees $19/month first and foremost, and the majority of consumers will look no further. Cheap sells, but it's a short term play.

Once the consumer gets the product home, they start using it. I've done a lot of telecom work, including rolling out large scale VoIP deployments for publicly traded companies. VoIP is great when it's well engineered. When you slap it on "any old network", it sucks. Horribly.

Users of this phone are going to experience horrible call quality at some point. VoIP calls over a home wireless network with zero QoS makes this a question of "when", not "if". The first time someone sends an email with a large attachment or Dropbox uploads a large file while someone is on their Republic phone, the house of cards will come crashing down. Don't believe me? Run a continuous ping to google.com and upload a large file on cable or DSL.

So, the message to entrepreneurs, executives, and investors is that consumers want a cheaper cell phone plan...

I can think of only one response: duh!

This is a prime example of an "execution counts" scenario. If Republic is successful, it will be because they solved some very difficult technical problems like automatically switching to the cellular network when network conditions degrade. I don't know of anyone doing that though. It would seem they have to solve this problem somehow. What happens if you're on a WiFi call and you leave the network area? If they pull it off, major kudos to them.

Other VoIP companies with large deployments face similar issues. Vonage (last time I used them) prefers that you use their router as your primary, because it has QoS rules built in. Comcast's VoIP solution works fantastically because their network is really well engineered for VoIP.

If Republic's plan is to simply hand a phone to users and hop on to their WiFi network, I'd anticipate catastrophic return rates and customer dissatisfaction.

Then again, people are cheap. Republic may find that there is a viable community of cost conscious consumers who will tolerate the occasional bad call in exchange for a low, low price.
Hackers can get into anything
Lean Startup Video
Everyone I know that has read "Lean Startup" won't shut up about it..so now I'm fueling the fire by sharing this video.haha
Remember: you're more invested in your application than your users. Even if it's possible for them to have a dialog with you to fix their problem, they may not care to.

Posting a negative review is not part of that investment - it's just a cathartic release, and after that, they move on. If you're selling a relatively cheap application that your users don't need (such as a comic-viewing app), you may only have one chance with your users.
The market for top talent remains competitive - particularly for top engineering and consulting roles. Companies that pay attention to shifts in workforce values and evolve accordingly will always have a competitive advantage.
Apple Ordered to Show Samsung Australia Carrier Contracts
You should be good, even at 22K per day. I didn't dig into your js, but there is a 25K per day threshold for using the Street View Image API.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#usagelimits (scroll down a bit further to the table)

Your project is one great example of why I think Google needs to reexamine the pricing of their maps API. With the threat of being charged more than adsense would payout, great sites like yours might not be created in the future.
Agreed. I'd prefer to discuss the pros/cons of the framework, but honestly the content on the left was enough to make me stop reading. It's unfortunately very common to miss out on interesting content because of UI pickiness.
This dress seems like something straight out of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. It's almost a cross of the 'onion-skin' jeans and the apparats that everyone wears.

If you haven't read the book (you should):
Apparats: It’s a wonderful invention that ranks everybody. When I enter a bar in downtown Manhattan, my entire history is broadcast to everybody, and immediately everyone knows I’m the eighteenth ugliest man in the room but I have the fourth-best credit rating.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162097/gary-shteyngart-intervi...

The onion skins: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN...

Or just check page 89 http://books.google.com/books?id=ZKk8w8buCxYC&lpg=PA83&#...
Apple ceases development on native apps, refocuses efforts on HTML5
Coming soon, right?
How to stop geeks becoming the next bankers
Here's a practical example using Khan Academy's library and Wikipedia articles to teach about the scale of the Solar System with Popcorn.js: http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1309
MLM Prospecting? Why You Must Get FRESH Blood
I've used Skype and found it more-or-less acceptable.
Microsoft fails to patch Duqu, but fixes critical hole in Windows TCP/IP stack
The ~$200 price point is indeed a huge differentiator. The main lesson from the HP TouchPad fire sale is that people are interested in tablets but $400+ is too expensive.

With the ~$200 price point and the Kindle and Amazon brand, this could be real competition for the iPad.
What kind of things are you doing that you need to share a screen? If it's mostly document based can using Google Docs be used? Skype also has some screen sharing abilities I think.
Show HN: A strength training Android app for beginners (my first app)
don't use gradients, since they kill performance.
Oh, and don't use opacity either, since that also
kills performance. Seriously?

The problem with the Flash player is that by design it assumes all applications have such needs, like opacity, gradients and animations, when this is not the case. Even with the drawbacks you mention, an interface built with jQTouch for example is pretty snappy on the iPhone. See the demo: http://jqtouch.com/

Android in particular is indeed having problems and I wasn't at all pleased with the results I got from jQuery Mobile. On the other hand Android has this problem with the UI in general, as hardware-accelerated graphics has been its weak point.

But you're comparing here the performance of browsers on mobile phones with the performance of Flash on the desktop. Adobe has yet to come up with a decent alternative for mobiles. I have Flash on my Android browser and I'm really not impressed. In fact, I deactivated it.

Things that Flash used to laugh at will bring Chrome to its knees.

That goes both ways too ... try loading 5000 thumbnails in a Flash UI and compare it with Chrome. I do that whenever I organize my Flickr account.

Also in Chrome special effects may not be so snappy, but animations and games are doable. And they only added accelerated graphics support recently (I'm not even sure if it's enabled on my computer). Example: http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

Angry Birds is indeed not representative of what normal people will do with HTML/JS, as Rovio engineers are pretty talented. But I know dozens of games created in Flash that are less impressive and more sluggish than this Angry Birds version ... the truth is, good developers will make snappy and cool things using any technology. Bad developers won't.

And this may be an anecdote, but I never, ever used a Flash interface that I liked using. I even hate it whenever I'm viewing a YouTube video because it blocks my browser's normal shortcuts.
I hope, for the wearer's sake, that the dress' firmware has been thoroughly checked for exploitable bugs
Hi there. I'm kinda new to programming, I changed majors and have only been working at it for a couple of years. I've been very inspired by some of the posts I've seen here. They kept me going to finish this project, so I wanted to share it with you.

I made a strength training app because I wasn't really satisfied with the user experience of the few that were already in the market. I started doing strength training about 3 years ago, and as a (previously) skinny nerd, it really changed my life. The confidence, energy, and overall feeling of health I've gained are incredible. I really believe that if you're someone who has let their health go, the biggest thing you can do to improve your programming, your startup, or your life is to get fit.

Now I'm not going to say that it isn't hard. It really is. Doing a set of heavy squats is definitely the hardest part of my day. But it doesn't have to take much time (1 - 1.5 hours, 3 times per week).

What I'm trying to do with Strength is make it simple for someone who's never weightlifted or done a squat before to get started. It helps you set up a program, and then tells you what lifts to do, how long to rest for, reminds you when it's time for a workout, etc.

Any feedback (or feature requests, or bug reports) is appreciated. You can email me: matt (at) airlocksoftware (dot) com

Thanks!
Videos Chistosos
Test and Benchmark Servers
A macro is a kind of function which is executed sometime before runtime, like at compile-time.

Observe (aaa bbb ccc). If you just look at it as a datastructure, it's a list of 3 elements. If you look at it as executable code, then aaa is the operator, which operates on bbb and ccc.

If aaa is that special kind of operator which is a macro, it can rearrange (aaa bbb ccc) to be something different, which is then executed. Anything. It replaces itself with something else. If you programmed in a language like that, you'd never have to wait for some language designer to create a new for() loop. Because you could easily write a loop which is then transformed into the usual for(i=0;...) loop.
Google scores most effective TV ad with Dear Sophie
I think a big distinction is that the Fire can be a pretty crappy device with a focus on content (which is Amazon's strongest offering), as evidenced by the general cheapness of the Kindles, while the iPad's offering is obviously the quality of the device itself.
So since you know, what is that party line? I've found that anything said in a civil manner here with a minimum of snark is usually safe regardless of the opinion expressed by the content.
Developer traction report
That's' theory, not evidence.
There was a link posted on reddit about this framework, however it linked to a nodejitsu blog post, and iirc, nodejitsu links cannot be submitted to hackernews.
Guide to Buying a Cordless Combo Kit
Modern Warfare 3, day 1: More energy used than a nuclear power station generates
What New Information says about paying down your debt
The Sync API is documented, and Mozilla encourages development of outside server and client implementations. Sync is available for tablets and smartphones.
Five Things you Should Know about Software Free Trials
Coach's Eye Sells Sports Video Analysis App for $0.99, Others Sell for $3K
The occasional work-from-home won't hurt most offices, and is really great for the occasional appointment and the like. But there's a lot to be said for having everybody in the same room as the norm.

I've worked with 100% remote people, and have seen the difference.