skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm getting pretty tired of these "siri is our new savior" articles.
Siri is a lobotomized brain dead service outside of the states.

In canada?
"siri, where can I buy a candy bar?"
> I'm sorry, I can't search for locations in canada
"siri, where is the Tacoma dome"
> I'm sorry, I cant search for locations in canada

Pull out my ancient google phone, hit the voice command button
"where is the tacoma dome"
> loads a google map centered on the tacoma dome

Google has had voice command for a long time now, they just didn't anthropomorphize it, they didn't give it a name and some sarcasm.... they just made it work... everywhere.
Your "criticism" of PCRE doesn't sound like real criticism, it sounds like a confused and frustrated beginner, which is why you're getting beginner lectures.

PCRE is taking an extremely powerful and completely non-standard DSL out of the context of a parent language to which it is inextricably intertwined and reimplementing it for general-purpose use in other languages.

Between that, and the long history of outwardly-bizarre compatibility problems between different regex engines, even those that are supposed to be compatible, you should not have expected the level of compatibility you did.

PCRE's quality is essentially orthogonal to these issues.
Paul, can you share a link please?
Sure after they've bought them, but buying them, no.
JRuby uses the JVM. Java is the language. Same point: language != implementation. Not always, but nowadays we have many mature vms, so it is more common.
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How about if the rocket blows up on launch? Wouldn't the launch pad area be covered it aerosolized plutonium?
In my opinion, there is but one feature that a database really must have: whatever data I write into it, if I don't delete it, I want to read it back - unaltered (preferably without needing at least three machines, but I'm willing to compromise)

Software that cannot provide this single feature just isn't something I would call database.

If it's unsafe default configurations or just bugs. I don't care.

Between these two articles over the weekend and some from earlier, personally, I don't trust MongoDB to still have that feature and as such, it needs much more than one article with a strongly worded title to convince me otherwise.
Um go me!

Some errors in my previous comments:

I meant "call you in on weekends", not "weekdays", and I meant "at your performance review", not "at your employment review".
I'm curious.... if productivity increases rapidly in all sectors then how are wages supposed to increase as well?

The theory is that employees should be paid more for producing more value per head. However if everyone produces more then wages can't go up without a corresponding increase in prices.

The alternative is reduced prices, new improved goods and services, and a steady wage giving the misleading sentiment of "everything is getting better, but I'm still being paid the same".
i'm glad he went back and corrected his wrong assumptions.

the ending of the article even made it seem like a tech happily ever after...more efficient application and making the coder think. how novel.
Your replies so far are excellent. You're pointing out things I've overlooked, thanks.

> However, because there is no way to set constraints across joins, in practice, the dependencies of data constraints are as important as the dependencies of data values.

I don't follow your argument here. Could you restate it?

> As far as recursive queries, I am not 100% sure this is ideal either from a read performance perspective. There are times when recursive queries are helpful from a performance perspective, but I don't see a good way to index, for example, path to a node.

Poking around the Oracle documentation and Ask Tom articles, it seems to be more art than science; mostly based on creating compound indices over the relevant fields. Oracle is smart enough to use an index if it's there for a recursive field, but will struggle unless there's a compound index for other fields. I don't see an obvious way to create what you might call 'recursive indices', short of having an MV.

> Certainly most databases don't do this well enough to be ideal for hierarchical directories.

It'll never perform as well as a specialised system. But relational never will. An RDBMS won't outperform a K/V store on K/V problems, won't outperform a file system for blob handling and so on. This is just another example of the No Free Lunch theorem in action.

My contention is that we, as a profession of people who Like Cool Things, tend to discount the value of ACID early and then painfully rediscover its value later on. The business value of ACID is not revealable in a benchmark, so nobody writes breathless blog posts where DrongoDB is 10,000x more atomic than MetaspasmCache.
The media can't do math, they'd try to compare it to some other thing (like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Hiroshima) and probably get it wrong by a factor of 1,000 one way or another.
I'm not sure how hosting a video for Gawker builds a lot of credibility for having field tested a database; perhaps there are more details he can provide about how that is a particularly interesting trial for a database. Among other things, that seems like "lots and lots of reads, very few writes" and a "very consistent access pattern regardless" kind of situation.
Which parts of Siri are so original that Apple deserves a monopoly on them for 20 years? Just take a second and think about how long 20 years is in software. Do you really think that no one else would have invented a similar product given 20 years?
Heh, been predicting this for a while. In the short-term a select few companies will know the intricacies of the functions in social groups, how any individual responds given certain inputs, who the social influencers are, and how to spread a message rapidly through any given social network using all this information.

In the long-term, there is the possibility that a group/company could manipulate and in-essence, "program", a human being to think and do whatever they desire. I'm talking here, the ability to dramatically alter an individual's deepest, strongest beliefs, anonymously and automatically. The target individual wouldn't have a clue that they were being slowly and incrementally re-programmed. It could be a global, anonymous propaganda/conditioning system. Brilliant if it were a decentralized system, but I think that would rare.

I think I know how to do this, but I'm definitely not in a position to do anything about it (yet). You'd need huge content distribution channels and access to huge amounts of user data - Facebook could do it. The other option would be to develop a recommendation algorithm system where you encourage companies with existing content platforms to use your algorithms to route recommended content to individuals (now this one is more accessible, and I'm gradually working on it).

I posted a vidcast on the possible implications of the DARPA social media initiative back in September: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrlHVDAjOSU
I agree with you in part, capitalism has brought billions out of poverty and backbreaking labour. When you compare serfdom to pretty much any alternative is better. You will also notice if you read the data correctly that individual wealth has risen across the board. Everyone has more than they would have otherwise had in the 1950s. That's great but it doesn't mean that economic discussion is now over because all arguments have been won and lost.

What I was wondering about in my post was what happens when capital no longer requires much labour. This is happening now, hedgefunds are a great examples of this. They are amazingly efficient and produce very large sums of capital for the amount of labour required (revenue per employee). I'm not saying all labour is equal, I am saying capital is producing more in industries with less labour. Potentially, a financial model could get so good (or so stable) that it requires only minor updates to the system in order continue deriving a profit. You then have a situation where capital creates capital with only a statistically insignificant amount of labour. Efficiency pushes the system forward and delivers much to people while people have a valuable product to sell, their labour. When their labour is not valuable, they are unemployed. If their labour cannot generate enough value, why would they ever be employed in an ultimately efficient system?

My argument still stands, if you would like to respond to it. Why would capitalism suddenly change to give accumulated wealth back? Will the masses just rely on philanthropic whims?
Seriously, how is this not part of the OS yet? Half a dozen different ways to switch between apps, but no built in notification system to tell that I should.
The author would have us believe that it's unfair to pick on any piece of software because it "all sucks." They'd also have us believe that complaining about your data disappearing in MongoDB is an unfair criticism, and then takes the logical leap that judging the destruction of data and buggy software somehow has something to do with your own ability to create backups. Generally speaking the people who have been burned by MongoDB have survived by the fact that they had backups. This has nothing to do with the fact that their database nuked their data and that this is unacceptable if it happens due to careless engineering or poor defaults.

Edit: To be fair, if MongoDB was advertised as a "fault-intolerate, ephemeral database that is fast as heck but subject to failure and data loss, so do not put mission critical information in it" then all bets would be off. But we know that's never going to happen.
Excuse my english, 5 in the morning, writing from a phone. Will try to rephrase that later.
>Even as a beginner you can tackle small snippets of code using the basic control structures.

Sadly, this is how programming books used to be written. Case in point: about a decade ago in high school we learned programming from a book called C by example. It had a handful of well thought out programming exercises after every section. A few years later I went looking for the book to give to a friend who was starting out. Lo and behold, in an updated version the exercises were all removed! It's mind-boggling that somehow the publisher thought removing the exercises was adding value to the book. Perhaps your average reader feels exercises makes a book seem too technical, so they skip it for the Learn X in Y hours style books? Nowadays you can't find good programming exercises outside of a dry textbook.
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Sorry, maybe I didn't phrase my point correctly.

Since Apple controls the iPhone they can make it favorable for people to avoid visiting google.com and typing in their query (of course they can dictate that query too).

That's a very powerful position to be in.

Apple has demonstrated this by making Wolfram Alpha available for answering some queries.

I see Apple continuing on this road and maybe aggregating results from various search engines (including Google even) and presenting them outside of Google's format.
It's tempting for us, as programmers, to consider Python an easier language to learn than C. I'm not so sure. Python is simple for programmers to learn because it uses a large number of common programmery things: lists, hash tables, classes, modules, etc. Things that beginners won't have a clue about. C doesn't have any of these.

Sure, it takes a while for you to wrap your head around pointers. But it also takes a while for you to wrap your head around inheritance. By virtue of being a smaller language, C has less of these things to wrap your head around.

If you need a dynamic array, you have to build it yourself from what you already know. Instead of having to learn yet another opaque concept, you're reinforcing your knowledge of pointers and dynamic memory allocation. Double benefit!

And once you know C, it can give you a boost towards learning other languages - most of them are implemented using C! If I don't understand something, I can always look at the source to see how it works. Since they're implemented in C, many languages tend to map easily to C concepts.

The same cannot be said about going the other way. A Ruby programmer learning C has to unlearn all the assumptions and niceties Ruby has spoiled them with. How much of Ruby is going to be applicable to C?
Well it is a beta product.

I too couldn't get it to answer all my questions but I was still amazed by what it could answer, even at this early stage.
Are you willing to reveal your and your company's identity once you're completely off of Mongo?
This article is pretty weak, basically shows how you can make money running targeted pages, and then use that to buy books?

On topic of actually getting a free book, I'm a top 2,000 reviewer, so because of that, and I have my site linked from my amazon profile, so I'll occasionally get emails for books to review. Unfortunately all the books I want to read, the companies don't seem to do this. It seems to be mostly junk.
If you're going to choose one of these high performance NoSQL DBs you are trading ACID for that performance. How hard is this to understand guys? If that doesn't suit your purposes, don't use it.
It's true, Google did made it work everywhere.

But I think Google should anthropomorphize theirs too. After all, people are used to talking to people.
You can restore burnt paper. eg: http://creativegame.blogspot.com/2008/05/burned-documents.ht...
The difference between MongoDB and many of the other popular persistent data stores (relational or not) is one of degree, not of kind.

MongoDB isn't a fundamentally flawed system. It's just that the distance between what 10gen (and many of its defenders) claim and what it delivers is much greater than most other data storage systems. This is a subtle thing.

Many people have attempted to use MongoDB for serious, production applications. The first few times they encounter problems, they assume it's their fault and go RTFM, ask for help, and exercise their support contract if they're lucky enough to have one. Eventually it dawns on them that they shouldn't have to be jumping through these hoops, and that somewhere along the way they have been misled.

So it's not like anyone is misinterpreting the purpose and/or problem domain of MongoDB. It's more that they are exploring the available options, reading what's out there about MongoDB, and thinking, "Gosh, that sounds awfully cool. It fits what I'm trying to build, and it doesn't seem to have many obvious drawbacks. I think I'll give that a try." And then they get burned miles further down the road.

If MongoDB were presented as more of an experimental direction in rearranging the priorities for a persistent data store, then that would be fine. That's what it is, and that's great! We should have more of those. But when it's marketed by 10gen (and others) as a one-size-fits-all, this-should-be-the-new-default-for-everything drop-in replacement for relational databases, then it's going to fall short. Far short.
The point is that those items make more money than they cost and that explains why everyone has them.

It's not because they are so fun or make life worth living. It's because they give you access to a job.

Same reason a homeless guy buys a suit instead of his last dinner. The suit is an investment: it makes him money. He doesn't enjoy the suit.
I could not agree more with Joel. To be a good/proper programmer you need to know C inside out. I would never, ever hire anyone who doesn't understand pointers.
Definitely interesting, since I hear many people suggest moving to another country would yield bounties of startup ideas.

That said, certainly there must be tech startup opportunities beyond pure content and software plays. Aren't there some other pain-points that could be solved?
> If you write code you're a programmer. End of story.

If you do arithmetic, does that make you a mathematician? Some things are a matter of degree.
I'd expect discrimination against transexuals to be much stronger than anything else, so I'm not sure that proves anything about how women in general are treated.

One of the things I notice is that the satisfaction levels of men and women I know working at google, even normalizing for skill level, is vastly different.

You don't sound particularly happy; why are you still there? my impression is that there are other places with cultures that are better at least in that regard.
"The problem is: NoSQL is not a solution at all. It's a trade-off."

Bingo, that is precisely what NotOnlySQL is all about. For example you trade some consistency guarantees for the ability to scale out.

Uninformed (has the author heard about the CAP theorem?), either-or diatribes like this article don't really serve any purpose other than sowing discord.

This is just like "C++ is better than Java is better than..." type flames wars. :)

We use Oracle and we use HBase. We would never replace Oracle with HBase for all of our data needs. At the same time we have need for a store that scales beyond what even Oracle can provide (and yes, we use RAC with multi TB caches across a database instance).

For the same reason we use Java, C++, Scala, Perl, Closure, Bash, JavaScript, etc... The right tool for the right job.

Personally what I would like to see is:

* secondary indexes

* snapshot isolation (in leu of global transactions, which will never scale).

Disclaimer: HBase committer here.
If you want to hit me up directly I can probably help you out. I have a rails app I'm about to beta that will create epub and mobi files (valid ones) from markdown. Let me know if you are interested.
I was about to say this. Also, in Scandinavia the salaries _have_ indeed kept pace with increases in productivity. In Norway, you can earn a decent living as a checkout clerk. It seems as if the business owners here have actually passed on most of the savings to their workers. I'm pretty sure this is exclusively a cultural phenomenon - a sense of solidarity and cooperation which the larger part of US culture does not have. (I'm not meaning to bash the United States here, but this view is compounded by the fact that American employee-employer relationships seem a lot more antagonistic and imbalanced).

There are also less super-rich people here since people are overall taxed more. The oil industry also adds to the general income level, but this doesn't explain the entire effect. I'm pretty sure the same can be observed, in Sweden and Finland.
I would say however that a significant subset of NoSQL deployments (perhaps even a large majority) are by definition lacking in sound architectural decisions. I'd argue the same goes for ORM-based database access too.....

The failure exists because many developers don't ask a few key questions up front:

1) What exactly can the database do for us?
2) Which of these do we need? For example, is the database going to be a point of integration?
3) What failsafe or security measures do we want to count on in the database?>

These don't always have objectively right/wrong answers but failure to ask the questions leads to poor use of databases regardless of what technologies are chosen.
You guys need to fix your font so that increasing font size in Chrome doesn't shrink it to unreadable levels.
Yes, patent lengths are rather absurd in this day and age. It should be on the order of 3 years. While it's easy for Apple to catapult new software into the market place, it can take several years for a small entrepreneur to market his technology.
The masses will end up relying on some sort of a welfare system, and would riot otherwise.

Food and wellbeing are the main things keeping civilization together. Wealthy regions are also stable regions, so it is necessary for the poor to be supported.
Probably the optimal plan would be to engage the investor and let them draw the idea out of you by asking questions. Not just because this is less aggressive, but because it's more efficient. Preformulated pitches are usually so bad that it makes my head ache trying to figure out what the company does. If I could just ask questions I could probably narrow it down pretty rapidly.
Well, most people around here seem to think that throwing around invectives lowers the quality of discourse, so yes, you probably got downvoted for that. But actually, and, yes, I may be stupid and slow, but I actually thought the author was a non-native English speaker who didn't appreciate blocks of English in his code. I made that jump after considering his statement in light of other large blocks of natural language that often exist in code -- comments.
I doubt they've devised some fundamentally new algorithm. Like you said, it'll probably be some aspect of the UI. I think the Siri "way of doing things" is pretty radically new and I think Apple will be rewarded for that with some patent protection.
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This is going to be an incredible use to a lot of different places that could use the ipad in place of a pc. I love it, you can have the ease of travel and use, and still get all the functionality you would get from a pc. I love the fact you can pledge to be a part of it too.
I did this. It's not for everyone, but for a highly motivated person it's not that hard either.

A friend who's in Med School wanted better working conditions than working at crappy call centers. I gave him a high-level overview of what programming is about and threw him the Django tutorial and made myself available for questions. As I gave him practical requests for useful web code, I delved into the details of Python and web programming in general, while slowly introducing him to tools of the trade like the shell, debuggers, and data structures, trying to make every step of the way easier for him.

Six months later he got a job at a biomedical NGO. He began by documenting and testing existing code, but now does quite a bit of coding by himself.

I've found that teaching theory along with the tools that utilize it to be a very good strategy.
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Nope, sorry. Just thinking out loud.

Their UI is pretty radically new and it's reasonable to assume aspects of it are patented. I don't know of a competing product that works the same way.
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Thankfully we're nowhere near where intelligence itself is being displaced, only small subsets of work that were previously the domain of highly specialized experts [sidenote: Mathematica has been doing this for a while]. Nor will advances in statistical machine learning and computing hardware get us there. "AI" is a field we still have to make any real progress in.

I think what the current trend means though is that we're going to have to teach people to learn and re-work education to maximize the ability to adapt.

I feel a little sorry for the radiologist whose effective supply is apparently rapidly expanding, but there is still a long way to fall from a $350,000 annual income. :)

I'm scared that as we optimize test-prep and narrowly focus on passing children through school, we're potentially decreasing the likelihood that people learn on their own. We're decreasing the amount of effort it takes for a kid to learn some [probably useless] skill, like drawing force diagrams on pulley systems, where the point of the exercise [imo] in the first place was to stretch the mind and force the kid to fill in the gaps and think for himself. That same kind of stretching that might come in handy when he finds himself displaced for whatever reason, be it technology or something else.