skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of criticisms I read about the immutable limits of RDBMSes turn out, upon closer inspection, to be criticisms of MySQL. Oracle sort of sails past these limitations like a superliner: expensively and gracefully.

Not that I particularly like Oracle as a programmer. I have to check my calendar every time I hit the 32-character limit for names or once again have to write

some_field_expressing_truth varchar2(1);
constraint "y_or_n" check some_field_expressing_truth in ('Y','N');

But relational databases already scale to petabytes and millions of transactions per minute. Just not in the opensource world ... not yet, anyhow.
The efffort to save that money will be very different per country of origin, which is very unfair. A Brazilian engineer has 3X better wages than an equivalent Chinese engineer, due to different currency valuation and salary standards.

There's nothing stopping the creation of other paths to residency/citizenship. Everything suggested can be implemented without worsening anyone's situation.

I definitely wouldn't call it asinine because it doesn't help everyone equally.
I'm already past my one year mark, and somehow I have 917 karma.

I think I fell off the wagon somewhere.
Wow. I hadn't looked at Java 7 much; I've been under the assumption adoption would be reasonably slow so haven't really dug into it yet. Cool!
'Vocal fry' creeping into US speech
Introducing: Django-IDE
A web based IDE for django projects.
Sure, I am throwing a blanketed statements. That's why I opened my comment as "it is very very hard to find...".

Assholes will be assholes regardless whether they're smart or not. If their superiors like assholes, then that's the culture in there. It's up to you whether you want to work there or not.

Smart people that aren't assholes are hard to find. Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, Zed Shaw, DHH, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, should I go on with the list?

I'm not suggesting that smart people should be asshole. Or people should pretend to be asshole. But based on my tiny speck of observation, experienced, interviews, reading the tone of blog posts, smart people tend to be assholes.
I'm new to PHP, how many mistakes am I making?
With no prior experience writing code in PHP, please let me know how to improve and what to look into next. Live: http://api.inoads.com/snowstorm/
Type inference would've been nice. As would have been a const inference.
The book Steve Jobs read every year
I do this all the time. I spent a summer working in NYC and used to visit Strand Books pretty frequently (at least once a week). Stand has an interesting model because the downstairs is filled with used books. I'd regularly do a price comparison check on the used titles versus their Amazon counterparts.

What I found is that sometimes the brick and mortar bookstore actually had the price advantage with these used books. When you factor in the minimum $3.99 shipping cost on a lot of used Amazon non-prime titles, they came out to being slightly more expensive than the used books I looked at in the store. This wasn't always the case, but it happened at least 30-40% of the time.
Why are all of these pictures so disturbing?
If the difference between your karma and his concerns you, I suggest you not check the leader board.
If this were the business model for airbnb, how far would they have gotten with pg?
"True or not, it still doesn't change what's wrong with this stuff."

There's something missing here. What's wrong with this stuff?
I know I'll be downvoted for this, but the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution. $50K is more than enough to attract senior devs who will run circles around their American counterparts.
I think this is bad for WebOS myself. Look at Linux - I love it to bits, but it has terrible traction because there's KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc etc.
It's so customisable and fragmented that it's totally confusing for novice users. That's not even to mention Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS etc.
So much choice is great for the niche user, but has gone a long way (in my opinion, of course) to stopping widespread adoption of Linux as an OS.

I worry this'll happen to WebOS, each tablet maker will release their take on it, app stores will be different etc and it'll be relegated to that Tablet OS only nerds use.
Michael Lewis: Advice From the 1%: Lever Up, Drop Out
I was going to criticise you, but then I realised I don't know what criticize means.
i remember this from awhile back - there are more images here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathieus/what-would-a-childs-drawing...
Where were you when the COPPA law was introduce? Did you write a single letter to your legislators? Did you write a single blog post against COPPA?
Probably not a good idea to fly a UAV in lower Manhattan...
WebSockets RFC is now official
Living Forever by Uploading Your Brain into a Computer
Lawyers sort of have this stuff already. They tend to be fill-in-the-blank templates originally built around WordPerfect.

But the law is, dare I mention this, heinously complex. Why? Because the world is heinously complex. Law has to deal with everything and everyone; its subject domains cover all human activity.

One of the reasons lawyers stick to lawyerly gobbledigook is risk management. Various phrases and terms are embedded in lawyer-drafted documents because their meaning has been tested in court. They're known forms of words with known legal consequences.

If you turn law into a write-compile process (I once proposed this[1] and I was not the first), you run a series of new risks. The most dangerous being: which document is the "real" contract? Even if you include language saying "the generated document", too bad, the court might not agree.

Remember: every software system grows progressively more complex as it a) grows the boundaries of its domain coverage to remedy impedance mismatches and b) discovers strange and nasty corner cases.

Well the law is analogous, with the difference that the law has been hacked on for (in common law countries) for nearly a thousand years, including some very large patches.

It's complex because it's essentially complex.

[1] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2007/08/25/programming-in-legal/
I see this advice every now and then and always feel like it's missing a critical addendum:

if you are only getting rejected for a long period of time, be sure to take a step back occasionally to spot any glaring mistakes you are making in your approach

Because as much as getting rejected can help you grow a pair, if you keep doing the same thing again and again without building on the feedback you receive, rejection can do more harm than good.
Copyright exists to satisfy (is justified by) consumers greed for content.

So losses from people sharing music are important if they affect the ability, and desire of content producers.
The name Amber dredges up some unfortunate memories for me :(
This article tries to make a point, and then double backs on itself and makes a totally unrelated point that has nothing to do with HP, WebOS, or anything remotely related.

Am I the only one who thinks this?
Python: Generic functions and real lambdas.

SBCL: tree shaker for creating executables.
Crap, I just fat-fingered a downvote. Sorry, that was totally accidental. ;-(
The old media has their business model. It's old and self-perpetuating. They just keep following their old model. Yes, in places the Internet is bringing some changes.

The model is based on that sure-fire method of getting and holding the attention of an audience discovered by the ancient Greeks and used so heavily in all of English literature -- formula fiction.

One special case, from early English literature, is a morality play where there is the trilogy, transgression, retribution, and redemption. The transgression is from human sin and, thus, immoral. The retribution is from an angry god. The morality plays were big in early English literture -- scare the heck out of the yahoos and get donations to the church. The two 'Rings', Wagner's and Tolkien's, along with that take-off on Wagner's 'Ring' 'Star Wars' were morality plays with the trilogy.

A big part of formula fiction is a protagonist the audience identifies with, has a problem, struggles with the problem, solves the problem, and gets the girl. A large fraction of movies, especially US westerns, are like this.

Altogether it's about 'drama', that is, 'art' as in 'communication, intrepretation of human experience, emotion'. There the goal is to create a case of vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment. So, it's all about emotion and entertainment.

'Writers' are trained in and basically use the tools of such 'drama'. Even people who try to 'write' about science. The article of this thread is an example -- its intention and techniques are just drama.

But according to the standards of information safety and efficacy of the 20th century from applied math, physical science, engineering, and medical science, drama does not qualify as solid information.

The freedom in technical writing you outlined is fine but is light years away from the drama of the article. The article was just not about the science; instead the article was just drama. For the science it made a mess, a total mess. Someone who wants to have an emotional experience about warming, ice melting, the land rising, likely the sea levels rising, etc. might enjoy the article.

If the drama stays as just light entertainment, fine. If sometimes drama is used to underline the intense emotions of human suffering, fine. But passing out drama instead of solid information about science is just sick-o; doing this for important subjects is self-destructive sick-o.

In the case of GW, CC, AGW, CO2, ..., the drama stands to be so irrational the results will be massive human suffering with 'drama' all its own. So this drama stuff for serious scientific subjects is a serious threat. So I called BS.

But some mods HATE what I wrote. What I wrote is fine, every word of it, just fine, fully justified, very thoroughly explained, and right on target, with nothing wrong at all. Sill some mods just HATE it. They won't respond and, instead, just downvote. If PG isn't doing this, then he needs to correct those who do. These mods are making HN be brain-dead. This isn't the first time: HN has a secret list of wacko PC criteria.
Totally agree with this. Feedback is the most important thing. I think the principle of this is simply to get out of your comfort zone, which may mean rejection (which may mean a learning opportunity).
It already is the Tablet OS only nerds use, so there's nowhere to go but up. If you look at the hugely popular DROID franchise, perhaps each vendor putting their own spin on the OS isn't a bad thing?
Such rich choice along with tinkerability will create the next generation of nerds :)
If you want to do the same without modifying the script (or if you have the script already running without the needed import for the remote debugging possibility), i.e. inject into a running process:

https://github.com/albertz/pydbattach
This looks very nice. From what I've seen, the only thing I'd change is the way it deals with exceptions.

Specifically, I'm not very happy with this way of throwing
exceptions (example taken from Gosu documentation on exceptions [1]):

throw "x does not equal zero"

and then later chatching them like this :

catch( e ) {
if( e == "x equals zero" ) { return( e + " handled
locally." ) }

I want to be able to specify the exact type of the exception, and catch them based on their type, instead of having to throw a generic error and then check using "if" statements whether it's expression is equal to a particular String or not. If I understood correctly, this is what Gosu is actually doing, right?

[1] http://gosu-lang.org/doc/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#h...
This post hit me with a serious case of deja vu.

And then I dug this up: http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2011/07/03/google-made-my-...
In the area of music, digital technology introduces a lot of deflation in the costs of both production and distribution.

Over this period, how big is inflation relative to noise?
Testing shows proposed 4G network interferes with 75% of GPS devices
Anders isn't a huge fan of events, apparently (http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Anders-Hejlsberg-Q..., around 56:00). I always just initialize events with an empty delegate in personal projects, which is very much the wrong thing to do but it saves me the null ref headache.

I would personally like to see `var` available in private and internal class members (properties, fields, and methods). There's a lot of pointless repetition that could be eliminated. (Obviously, you want to be explicit about the interface defined by a class' public members).

I also consider Tuple<> a missed opportunity, I'd like to see another whack taken at it that veers closer to structural typing. The existing tuple type is very unwieldy once you start returning or storing it, and I feel a pretty good alternative could be built on the principles of `var` and anonymous types.

Picturing something like:

static tuple SomeMethod(){
return new tuple { SomeNumber = 1, SomeString = "hello" };
}

static void Main(){
var t = SomeMethod();

Console.WriteLine(t.SomeNumber + " "+t.SomeString);
}

Whereas Tuple<> forces you to write that with ItemX scattered around.
I'm a Javascript user. The list of things I'd change is enormous. A few of the biggest things though, is making better object looping; it's annoying having to check each property to see if it's on the object itself or it's prototype. It'd also be nice to have a build in extend/include system, rather than having all these different custom ones people use. Put jQuery and Underscore on the same page and you have two different implementations of object extension. Seems like kind of a waste of code.
But since Google can't collect data to target ad to the children, Google doesn't make any money from them. Google don't need children that can't pay money. Case closed.
Yup. This article does more harm than good.

TC is grasping at straws trying to stay relevant.
PG - What is the median valuation of those fundraising rounds? Averages are not a great metric because the few big valuation winners (Dropbox, Airbnb) skew the average big time and bring up the "normals" a ton.

If Airbnb is valued at $1B and if there are 200 YC alums who've raised, that adds $5M to the "average valuation" of each YC startup. (I know those #s are not right but just for purposes of the example).

Those median valuation figures available?
How exactly is intellisense a feature of a language?
> This is an interesting (though incredibly dated study) from an academic standpoint because both languages are supersets of C

Technically, C++ is not a superset of C. And each new release of either language has them get more incompatible with one another.
> I think if you spend more than ten years in the business and you still are in love with a particular tool, you probably haven't really done anything big, or you haven't ever looked around to see how other people do things.

Overgeneralization. It's like nice looking cars. Just because you love a classic Shelby Mustang doesn't mean you can't acknowledge there are other good tools out there.

After years of programming professionally in C++ and occasionally Python, there is still something about the design of Common Lisp that I love. It's like using a Mac--the attention to detail evidences an obvious good taste that I rarely see in other languages or their libraries.
Well PostgreSQL does scale to millions of simple read-only transactions per minute, at least in some benchmarks. And in PostgreSQL 9.2 it will scale much better, in the synthetic benchmark it reached about 13 million per minute at high concurrency (compared to about 2.5 million for 9.1).

http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2011/09/scalability-in-graphical-f...
Codd emphasised the relational model as being able to change the underlying storage representation without breaking apps.

Will this eventually be a problem for NoSQL? Or, is the scalability worth the sacrifice?

Or, does NoSQL typically have only one (main) app, so making it work with a specific storage representation is not a big deal? The relational use-case was many different apps, with different versions, needing different access paths to the data. But if you just have one known set of access paths (like a REST URI), you can just design the DB for that. Hierarchical databases worked well when just one DB, one app; they just weren't very flexible.

Hierarchical databases are fast and simple but inflexible as the relationship is restricted to one-to-many, only allowing for one parent segment per child. http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Hierarchical_Database
Because crayon doodles by children are both unrealistic and fantastic (in the unusual sense), while the professional renderings surpass (some of) the lack of realism.

Plus the artist took a few liberties adding their own touch, and said artist seems to have a dark flair.
> RAII is convenient and it allows you to write code that is smaller and more solid than it would otherwise be (with or without a "finally").

You don't know what `unwind-protect` is now do you?
The Linux example in particular is awful. Linux was not a product released as open source, it was an open source project from the beginning. Project, not product. Products are open sourced either as a principle or as an admission.

It's difficult to tell which side WebOS falls on, as parts of it were open source all along, and Palm/HP has always embraced the hacker community since the Pre came along (allowing booting from USB, custom kernels, Preware, root access without jumping through hoops, etc). This could be a natural progression, or it could be a last-hurrah. It will be decided in the marketplace, not in the media, and it won't take long to find out. The next 6 months will define WebOS' future, if other companies jump on board or not. A system doesn't often get three chances at success, and WebOS has used up two of them already.
There's very little I'd change about Common Lisp as a language, but I'd kill for a modern OS X IDE for it.
So many things wrong here. In particular,

> But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version.

No, that isn't true at all. Many very successful open source projects were "contributed" after commercial development, for example OpenOffice and Netscape/Mozilla. And we might as well list Android there too, it's developed behind closed doors and contributed periodically as open source - and it seems to be doing quite well.

It's true that sometimes projects are "contributed" in the sense of donating them and forgetting about them. But that doesn't mean all contributions of previously closed-source code are unsuccessful.

Furthermore, the author seems to only value huge amounts of revenue as a marker of success. The only FOSS project they consider to be "a success" is apparently Red Hat with $10B market cap. It's a success, to be sure, but to say all other open source projects are not (including ones with hundreds of millions of users!) is just funny.

Given the situation HP is in, open sourcing WebOS makes the most sense. There is no other good option. Some good analysis, which is spot on as opposed to the article here, can be found at

http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/2011/2168
Indeed, and for a visualization, the XKCD map of the internet is the definitive reference: http://xkcd.com/195/.

I've always wondered how GE got 3.0.0.0/8, ahead of BB&N (which got three /8 assignments! - 4, 8, 46), Army (6), Xerox (13), Bell Labs (12), IBM (9), DEC (16), DoD Intel (11), US DoD (214, 215), etc.
Ah...

The post reminded that Ruby is interesting language having many merits.

But your about "rubyspec" reminded that ZS is correct that Ruby is also chock-full of BS artists. Rubyspec is a test suite - Lol. Whatever the merits of test suites, they aren't formal specifications, they shouldn't pretend to be test specifications and the people who pretend they are such are, uh ... BSing.

"Test Driven Development", meaning writing your tests as some kind of specification, is total crap. Tests aren't abstractions that get you anywhere. They are just tests and writing tests first only in systems so simple they probably don't need much testing or design anyway...

Also, Ruby expressions may not be ugly but "Ruby Syntax", as a BNF expression is super-ugly even compared to other mainstream languages.
It indicates you're not using the disclaimed marks to indicate origin of goods and services you are offering.

If the marks are shown alongside a notice disclaiming ownership then a registered trademark owner can't (mitigating circumstances excepting) claim that you're attempting to pass-off using their mark.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't implemented to avoid claims that mere presentation of marks were uses of the trademark. Of course if the language works then there may not be caselaw to support this as litigants could have been put off suing in cases using such a disclaimer.

Are you working in TM law in some form in some jurisdiction?

IANA(IP)L (nor working in IP presently).

As a related aside the UKIPO practice on RTM in patent specifications is of interest [to me]. Generally the examiner would [I'm a little out of date], IIRC, attempt to [get the applicant to] excise all registered trademarks that weren't essential to the understanding of the piece. Any remaining marks were to be labelled in the spec with "RTM" (for Registered TradeMark). So far as I could ascertain there was no legal requirement to do this it was just pushed as best practice. Note RTM in the UK was the legal manner and not use of ®.

Labelling a mark as "ExampleTrademark RTM" is pretty much the short-hand equivalent of saying "this trademark belongs to it's owner [and not us]".
> I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. For most people, who have (or would have) interest in a lot of different areas, there are probably already several lifetimes' worth of new ideas out there if they can only find and enjoy them. Such is the power of connecting billions of people in a global network.

On the other hand, while that solves the breadth problem for those who want to develop themselves as rounded individuals, it doesn't attack the depth problem for those who want to advance a particular field of art or science that they really care about. I think we might do best at that by adopting something like academic practices of ongoing sharing and collaboration, but done on a global scale by anyone who cares, and with something way better than journals as the means of peer review and promoting the best new ideas to the top so others can expand and build on them. Of course, it needn't necessarily be an academic subject either, it could be anything from sports coaching to cookery.
I wanted something like this back in the day to be able to poke around in the EVE Online client. Nice job!
Compiler writing is easy? No. (I've built compilers for large subsets of C and Java, as well as my own languages)

Lord help you if you try to write a perfectly conforming compiler for C++ (has it ever been done?), and the U.S. legal system is at least an order of magnitude more complex than that.