skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you change your schema once every 2-3 days, something wrong with whomever leading the software project. That's like writing a software with zero planning or lack of knowledge for the problem domain.

I don't care if it is a startup or not. Come up with a very simple idea, draw the models in ER diagram, implement that stuff.

It's very hard to imagine that tomorrow suddenly all relationships need to be changed. Even if that is the case, scrap your Repository/Entity model and start from the beginning.

Nothing can help you much if the fundamentals are wrong.
I disagree that Gates made computers affordable. Computers were made affordable by Moore's Law. The increasing density of transistors in an integrated circuit made it feasible to simplify circuit boards without sacrificing performance.

Indeed, I can argue that Bill Gates made computing significantly less affordable to the international world. Today, the cost of a Windows license can be as much as the cost of the hardware. How many people are being shut out of computing because of the forced subsidies OEMs have to give Windows?
How To Create Killer Content Without Doing Any Work
It's interesting that couchdb gets little love (as evidenced by google trends), but it has document storage by index, easy enough to install, copy on write so has no global lock, sharding with bigcouch, and all client access is entirely REST... it may be couch is a little hard to grok, I dunno.
I realise these are quite hyperbolic, but you might be interested to watch this short profile of commodities giant Glencore, mentioned in the article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rSBifsvwg
Better than asking for big pile of money and give back crap and charge way more for fixes isn't it? :)
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Agreed. Not to mention you can make some seriously sweet profits selling merch at shows ($25 T-shirts, $0.25 stickers, and every price point in between). If you want to pay the rent as a musician, you HAVE to do it by playing a lot of shows and drawing a bunch of fans with you.

speaking from experience
Hm, you can only register as a developer if you have a Paypal account - and the Paypal page you are directed to does not work.
Well, perhaps it is for the best, given Paypal's history.
I don't know if this is it, but it's very similar:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

Linked from the OP
The operative word is "everywhere," which takes a while.
Ray Wenderlich has excellent tutorials. I've done a number of his tutorials just for fun.
No, I think it's still in the creative sense. Consider this question from the Y Combinator application:

> Please tell us about the time you, {name}, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Other than the allegations of misleading clients regarding CDOs -- which, if true, are criminal and utterly reprehensible -- pretty much everything else on that list fits this criterion. Amoral and mercenary, but about hacking the system to their advantage.

It's regulators' jobs to close loopholes, but we should hardly be surprised when capitalist enterprises exploit them until they're closed.
Hard Drive Shortage Looms Due to Thailand Flooding
Your observation about platforms is spot on IMO. This is something that I want to work on - making Common Lisp a platform.

Having libraries that provide system programming features and work across a wide range of implementations is the first step. CL is underspecified in terms of a lot of systems programming stuff.

The #1 priority in this space is integration with the Unix shell - scripting, having executables, stdin and out, command-line arguments. Not really any good libraries that combine all this into one thing that works well everywhere.

The second big thing is packaging and distribution - Quicklisp addresses that well. Next step beyond making Quicklisp better is a script for Linux that finds the Common Lisp implementation on your system (and installs one if not present), and loads whatever software you need - essentially a common installer for CL applications that bootstraps off of Quicklisp.

About other languages on Common Lisp, there is actually a large number:
http://www.cliki.net/programming%20language

A lot of languages have been ported to run on various Scheme (Racket and Gambit) implementations.
>Your major doesn't restrict what you can do later in life.

Up to a point. Few people are able to learn advanced math on their own, and if you pick a major that avoids math classes, you'll be restricted from any job that requires it.
I bless you from the bottom of my heart.
Medical language processing, information extraction from patient data, text classification, and clustering.

Yes, it would be great to get a list of hackers that do ML and the domain that they are working with.
Interesting in that Android uses some code from the Harmony project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Use_in_Android_S...
All I need is a schemaless version of postgres (with ACID-compliance and everything), does anyone know of one?
> engineers, doctors, lawyers or professionals

All of these typically require a graduate degree (depending on the engineer). How is spending time during undergrad studying the humanities an issue, so long as you have the appropriate prereq's for grad school?

> Why are we programmers forced to take courses in English when English majors aren't forced to take introduction to programming?

At my school non-science majors were required to take a science class or two as an elective, just like I was required to take classes in the humanities. You could still choose what to take, but I'm sure that some chose to take Programming 101.
Actually, Netscape was not derived per se. It was a complete re-write by people from the Mosaic team who had left to start Netscape.

Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass, who held the rights by virtue of a deal with the University of Illinois.
Cool, but you won't get anywhere without a formal grammar or, at the very least, a reference implementation...
But you might have passed though London by the time I hear your music. Or I might read the review of your new CD in a newspaper and look you up, unsuccessfully. By the time you're there, I've long since forgotten you.

I'm not in the music business, so this is only based on readings and hear-say and should be taken with a massive grain of salt: Perhaps you'd be better off forgetting about making money off of your debut album. You can focus on getting maximum reach and energise your fans and then, if you don't make any money, it's not disappointing.
A "counting bits" vs. "counting bytes" bug. Isn't crypto fun?
The Limits of Continuous Deployment
Goldman is good but not THAT good. If Goldman knew everything why would anyone take their iBanking elsewhere?
> compiles to readable Java code

[insert your favorite Ratfor joke here]
This is nowhere remotely nearly as bad as Debian's bug, which broke the underlying library underpinning most of the crypto on Linux, and broke the most universally sensitive component of that library.
The joke is now on Dominus and da Silva - awk runs in Common Lisp: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/lisp/clawk/

da Silva does have a completely valid point. CL needs a library to make it easy to run your favorite implementation with your software as a Unix shell script. And more reader macros. I use so many my code is starting to look like Perl. I don't think that's a bad thing. Adding an APL reader macro for array processing would IMO be a wonderful thing for a lot of the Common Lisp graphics libraries.
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I'm not sure you read the article fully, because relationships were never described in the article. Instead, it was high read/update load which caused problems.

Mongo, on paper, should be an ideal candidate for this job; but, due to complications with the locking model and with its inability to do online compactions, it's failing.
Couch doesn't have great documentation, and doesn't have official native client drivers. Oh, and it's slow (though you can tune it, and it doesn't crumble under load).
There's a film maker who went straight in without protection 'Chernobyl The Lost Film': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkjAAzkrXSA

Then again, so did many other people there as you can see.
The data loss was not confirmed either: "There appears to be some data loss occurring"

Oh, this mystery is a failure all right, and even the most charitable interpretation would call it a misfeature.
Traffic Crashes More Expensive Than Congestion Costs
If you don't know the requirements to the point that you can't even design a data structure for your project... A schemaless database is NOT going to save you.
Supervision Trees for the Go language
If you knew the gov't would bail you out for any bad market moves made, why WOULDN'T you do exactly what Goldman is doing?

Regulators set stupid rules, Goldman makes money. The US gov't offers insurance via the Federal Reserve, there's nothing immoral about taking advantage of someone else's stupid offer.

If the government opened an Apple store selling 17" MacBook Pros for $200 why would you not buy as many as you could, and resell them for $1500? I don't give a shit if it eventually put every Apple store employee out of business. Oh you have a one laptop per person rule? Ok, I'll pay people to stand in line. Problem sovled.

As for market manipulation of wheat prices, Goldman is only following suit in the official policy of the United States gov't. Exactly why do you think FDR ordered wheat to be burned while people were starving?

As for metal price manipulation you may also want to look at FDR and devaluing the dollar and making holding gold illegal to force the sale.
Very uncommon, even amongst the most progressive developers. Trunk is notoriously over the place (as it should be IMHO).
There are assholes in every walk of life. Please do not think that they speak for everyone with whom they have something in common.
It is a common justification for some of the science core curriculum, such as why computer scientists should have to take two semesters of physics, while it'd probably be more useful for future employment to just take more CS courses. General well-roundedness / being an educated person is the usual argument.
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There's metadata and there's metadata. Sure, EXIF, IPTC and XMP data is usually entirely useless for web images. But colour profile information actually has the information needed to correctly render the colours in the image.

You could argue that small thumbnails don't matter. I would agree for small sizes, but as the size increases, it becomes important to preserve the ICC profile data. With bandwidth having become cheap, and processing power having become abundant, these days it's often appropriate to downscale images in the browser; so instead of storing thumbnail as 40x40, 60x60, 100x100 etc. depending on the use cases, just store a flexible version (say, 150x150) and let the browser scale. At that resolution, I would keep the ICC data.
He's arguing that you can replace (a formal education AND a $30k student loan) with (library books/the internet AND $0 student loan).

If you have the cash to pay for it, then go ahead and get any education you want.

If you already have the skills you need to get a job and pay off your loan, then go ahead and get any education you want.

If you don't already have a marketable skill and the education you are going into debt for isn't going to increase your employability, then you might want to reconsider your options.

If you think of yourself as a start-up, you should get your MVP first (a skill someone will pay you for). Then when you have a paying customer (a job or a nest egg) add all the cool, extra features (a well rounded, liberal arts background)
I see you guys are looking for speakers, I would love to be one. I have spoken at plenty of web events in the past. I think my experience is relevant (VC, designer, developer) and I have a perfect talk for a hackathon (tshirts are the new suits) and would even love to participate if possible!
The type of people that Goldman employs aren't stupid, or ignorant. I've known a few - they are perfectly aware of what the company does, and the moral minefield they are in.

To accept employment there requires a conscious relinquishing of moral culpability - i.e., these people have decided that, yes, what the company does is fundamentally wrong, but for whatever reason (money, fame, power, the thrill of the hack, satisfaction of working on the winning team, etc) they don't care.

I'm not sure what use it would be to preach to people like this.
This did well on Hacker News yesterday too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196555
Eclipse crashes on me or freezes up frequently despite using a quad-core brand-new laptop with 8gb memory. The UI frequently becomes unresponsive. Anything to do with IO such as opening files, having maven pull in a bunch of files, etc is horribly slow and usually causes the app to freeze.

As far as I know it doesn't offer variable suggestion, in IntelliJ you just type the first letter or 2 and it immediately suggests any variables you have in scope, I find this invaluable as it really speeds up writing code sometimes. Overall, I find it simpler whereas Eclipse is just kind of a free-for all where you need to make use of a patchwork of plugins to be successful. IntelliJ is written by one company so I just always get the feeling it has a better "engine" underneath it.

Half the developers on my team curse Eclipse and say they hate it but none have switched to using another IDE except me, the others are too set in their ways, I get the feeling its firmly embedded amongst a certain generation of Java dev's but if you're just starting out (I'm also pretty young relatively speaking) I'd recommend considering using another IDE.
Everything else in a software project changes frequently, especially during the early days. "Fundamentals" don't help you know more ahead of time and it's really nice to be able to quickly adjust when you come across something you hadn't anticipated.

I tried building a small side project with Postgres about 8 months ago (after not really doing rdbms stuff for 18 months before) and was amazed at how inflexible it felt, and how much frustration used to seem normal.
It's not just colour profile metadata. JPEG images are often loaded with EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that is mostly useless for serving as part of web pages. Our users kept uploading images where the metadata were in the order of megabytes, exceeding the sizes of the JPEGs themselves, so we started stripping it. Not sure what was in them, possibly garbage generated by faulty software.
Not all data is important enough that small losses are unacceptable. Analytics data that can be inferred from other sources, for example. Furthermore MongoDB supports autosharding while most (all?) SQL databases do not.
There are lots of jobs (good ones) whose job description is little more than "don't be an idiot". I'd go so far as to say that for most non-technical jobs, it doesn't matter what your degree was in. If you need a programmer, you'll look for someone with some experience or training in programming, but for most jobs, the major just isn't as important.

HN in general is a pretty specialized group of people that skews heavily towards engineering and technical jobs. And those aren't the other jobs out there.

Just as the GP could have been a journalist, copywriter, etc... they just as easily could have been a doctor, or a lawyer, or gotten an MBA.
step one: merge chrome and the android browser.
They should recast the program to send out the tablets as loaners, then forgive the debt for the developers who make actually decent apps. A curated giveaway.
Hey BankSimple, you guys should launch very soon.
I don't mean to be argumentative, but I still think you're making it sound a lot easier than it is. For example, I know more about iPhone dev than most people who aren't full-time iPhone devs, but I have no idea what is a "known winner" category or even how I'd go about guessing. AFAIK, Apple doesn't release the kind of numbers I'd need to figure out what categories are profitable. With a web app, we can use analytics, keyword tools, A/B testing, etc.

This feeling — that releasing for the iPhone is a crapshoot and that anything I release would probably be crowded out by the absolute flood of junk in the App Store — is why I've never bothered with the iPhone, despite having done Cocoa development since the early days of OS X.
Apple was the last-chance for BeOS. They were actually gaining ground with PC channels, until Microsoft declared that anyone selling a non-pure-windows system (including dual boots that default to windows) will lose their discount on the Windows OEM license.

Guess how many PCs were sold with BeOS after that happened? At that point, it was Apple or bust. And then it was bust.
Does any web browsers actually use that information?
As
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This is like a combination of the Voyager message and the math/logic primer from Contact. It's fairly easy to eyeball what is going on: mathematical and geometric equivalents are laid out while introducing new symbols which are deduced based on the mathematical properties, such as the use of a symbol representing pi in combination with the circumference and area of a circle on page 5.
I'm going to take massive downvotes on this but...

You can't preach to people like that, they're fully rational and immune to patriotic emotional dulce et decorum est bullshit.

They don't care that their going to hell for their actions because they know hell doesn't exist.

The world isn't some retarded star wars black and white fantasy, it's black and black pretending to be white. Stop naming shadows in platos cave and get out into the sunshine.

Google didn't succeed because open source is some miracle of business, they succeeded because they created a platform for clicking ads and open source software makes that platform cheaper. Gmail isn't a gift to the internet community, it's more ads. If they didn't make money from it, they'd shut it down.
It's trivial to use a proxy to modify the referral headers.
Google and Microsoft are among 70 companies saying DOMA hurts business
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/hstore.html
Seems to me they used the wrong setup they should have looked at a replicaset setup with secondaries for read and sharding if they needed more write performance and nonblocking reads. That said version 2 has less locking problems and I understand they are working on finer grained locking.
I'm not sure what you mean about 'all this funding for file sharing sites', but I haven't been following the sector closely.

What you will often find is a gang mentality within sectors. Investors won't get in on one-deal, but they may think the sector is going to experience huge growth, so they invest in the next best company. We saw it with Foursquare, gowalla, etc.etc, as well as groupon, livingsocial...

It seems the distribution is normally a big dog, an also ran, and then everybody else fighting for scraps.

With respect to why Dropbox is interesting, it is my understanding that the interesting parts aren't that you as a user can store and share your files. I think the long-term potential is for applications you interact with to access your data through services like dropbox. This could mean that you don't end up paying for it directly, but rather it would be built into the costs of other services you use.

Think of it like iCloud, but for all platforms and open to any developer. That's my understanding of where Dropbox is going, but like I said, I don't follow that segment.
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I think that most people love the idea of finding opportunities which others haven't discovered. Some take it in their own hands to leverage this advantage by products (e.g. app developers) others take a more collective approach (e.g. open source developers).

From how I understand the article Goldman has rediscovered a valid business opportunity that has been around for centuries. People always stockpiled supplies for later times and Goldman is doing it on a large scale. Even if they would be able to dominate the world market by this strategy, this situation would only sustain to the point when other material can be used as a substitute. So I personally don't see there a problem with this as long as they do not influence the market on the legislative side.

If there is a consensus among society that this is wrong, than it will be regulated. I personally condemn this increasingly popular idea that business should conduct self-infliction by neglecting opportunities just because certain parts of society disagree with perfectly legal practices.
> "they just as easily could have been a doctor, or a lawyer"

No, he/she really couldn't have. You just listed two heavily regulated professions where not having the right degree means complete disqualification from holding a job. There is no way for GP to be a doctor or a lawyer without going to medical school, or law school, respectively.

At least here in the tech industry you're not legally mandated to have the right degree for the job.

This seems to support the notion that one ought to look at a degree's employment ramifications before jumping into one.
Yep. Safari (since 2.0), Chrome (since 15, I believe), Firefox (supported since 3.0, but only enabled in 3.5 and later) and IE (since 9.0) all use embedded ICC metadata. No idea about other browsers.
Sorry, this is a pretty poorly written blog post. We're definitely using sharding+replica sets.

Replication of any kind won't help you with a high write load as secondaries have to apply the same number of writes as primaries.
>Any DVD purchaser can lend them, just as any book purchaser can lend them. This has been litigated.

He means that the DVD wears out after 100 or so views, so Netflix must buy a new one. In other words, the DVD is not an infinite good.
I was wondering the same thing as Eric when he asked about "everything is already on the cloud". Not sure if I'm really convinced that Dropbox can thrive in a post-filesystem world, but Drew's awesome so I'm sure they have some secret-sauce plan.

(reposting from TC article)
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because the trend appears to be (as an outsider) that what matters is not revenue or chance of profit, it's the amount of users a site can acquire. File sharing is easy to do (arguably hard to perfect) and a good file sharing site will get a lot of users. Maybe they're funded in the hopes of a buyout? Dropbox validated the idea that file sharing can get high valuations...
The thing that makes me hesitant about this is that it requires a paypal account.
Opportunity cost is IMO a poor way of looking at this. Four years of my life to make myself a more well-rounded, learned person with greater perspective on life?

Seems like time well spent.

I wouldn't go into crushing debt for it, but if the only outlay was time, sign me the hell up.

> "If going to school isn't going to help you earn more, then why focus on it full time?"

Because life isn't just about money.

> "You could do continuing studies throughout your life to broaden your horizons"

Because juggling full-time work with part-time studies is very, very difficult, and inevitably involves compromises in both. Because some subjects require tremendous time commitment to master.

> "and focus your youthful studies on apprenticeship, internship, networking or a major that will actually help you earn more."

But why? I already earn plenty. If I can take a break from work and pursue a something that I feel makes me a better person, without going into debt for it... why wouldn't I?

I'm not particularly old, but if there's one thing I've learned by observing older folk, is that using earning power as your core optimization metric is a really fast path to a wasted, unhappy life.
Ya, I hope it doesn't take that long for them to implement. Keep in mind that the interview started out with Erick asking Drew:

What do you need to do in the next 18 months months, to not squander this opportunity.

So Drew may have just been responding to this later question in the same context.