skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"whey would I want to deal with separate steps of setting up the relational database tables"

Really? What if you accidentally use 'createDate' instead of 'created' in one spot of your system. You'll get crap data and you won't even know! Or what if some other part of the system relies on a 'post' having a 'pageId' but there's no way to enforce it in your DB? It's called DATA CONSISTENCY and if you don't see the value in stuff like that then you've never worked on a system of significant size.

You NoSQL fans don't seem to realize that these 'separate steps' you don't want to 'deal with' arised from many decades of data storage experience in the real world. Ignore them at your peril.
I for one think this is a brilliant concept. As mentioned previously it taps into the feeling of exclusivity and being part of the 'elite few' eligible for such a thing, going much farther than just a monetary reward. Surely that in itself is enough to keep hackers interested and producing results, which ultimately is what the program aims to do.
> Engineers that I consider "good" or better not only must be on site most of the time, but they WANT to be on site most of the time. It's the only way to maximally impact whatever it is you're working on, and any good engineer wants that.

I know a lot of excellent programmers and have never heard anything expressed other than the precise opposite of this sentiment. None of them want to be on site if it can be helped, and they pretty much universally believe that physically transporting one's self to a real office on a daily basis is an outmoded practice.

I don't doubt that there are good people out there who like coming in to work in an office, but in my experience there are a lot who do not.

You say that you've been unable to get consistent high output without forcing people to be on site. I've seen lots of people produce consistently over a period of years without ever once setting foot in any office (frequently when there is no office to set foot in at all). Perhaps the problem there is not with remote work in general....
It's funny because this is the antithesis of my experience. A few of my best friends I met through remote teams. One of them I knew for years, and we finally met in person, in Raleigh at the IBM campus. IT was funny because it was a little awkward at first and then we fell into old conversations just like we did on Skype. For every project we have a group chat on Skype and we encourage tech talk and friendly banter. Some of my best friends in the world I have never met in person and I know a good bit of personal detail about them. I have found the experience to be exactly the same as being in a collocated area.
While I can't comment on your personal experience, what you're implying here is really offensive: the idea that only clock-punchers aren't willing to relocate for a job. Most of the best people in any field care about more than just their work and have a whole life outside their job. Relocating means impact on many things, like leaving your community, uprooting your family, impact on spouse's career, pulling kids out of school, moving away from family, etc.

My guess is that most of the people who are willing to easily drop everything and relocate for a job don't have much to drop in the first place, because they're single twenty-somethings.
ok, details on the criticism:

1. Look at their BSON format specification: http://bsonspec.org/#/specification
They name it a new "standard", and at the same time they have things like "\x11" -> Timestamp, a special internal MongoDB data for replication. It's like the IP protocol specification would have vendor-specific parts.

2. The BSON format is not word-aligned, which makes it quite inefficient to process in memory. Besides, the current Mongo server accesses it with word-unaligned pointers, which is only possible on x86 architecture.

to me, it just tells that the database engine design was given to the wrong people.
OOP is a good idea some of the time, and Java's OOP is good enough a lot of the time. The problem I have with Java is that the programmer must use OOP in all sorts of situations in which it isn't really the right thing to do to make up for deficiencies in the language. Particularly, the language does not have first-class functions or closures, and the boilerplate necessary to fake these features is so big that I would seriously consider solving a problem in a worse way.

The danger is that a person may think that the way things must be done in Java is actually a worthwhile way of doing things in general. Such a person would be in a state of permanent confusion in which the meaning of the question "How will I solve the problem?" has become "How will I partition the behaviors and data involved in a solution to the problem?" This second question is a good thing to think about, but not before the first one, and certainly not instead of the first one.

I don't think it was a dumb question. I didn't actually encounter any people like this for a long time.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't really agree that you can't build a company culture remotely. As usual, this all depends on the team.

I'm part of a small company and we generally work remotely with occasional meet-ups. This is, of course, just my anecdote, but I feel that we're building a great company culture. Part of this may be the fact that most of us have been using IRC for 10+ years; we grew up on it. Communicating that way is as natural to us as face-to-face. In fact, we often talk on IRC even if we're in the same building. It's easier to paste links, reference documentation, and avoid constant interruption. We're generally signed in 24/7 and talk at all hours.

If you get those people that sign on to skype 20 minutes a day and you never hear from them otherwise, then yes, I completely agree that it just won't work as well.
>In the end it is merely a question of data normalization

Can you elaborate?

I understand any JSON can be shredded into a third normal form (minus the ordering problem, but let's leave that aside for now), is this what you refer to?
A summit once a year doesn't change the fact that the default mode of working is still remote and distributed.

An equivalent would be someone working 9 to 5 in an office and doing two days of "work from home" in a year.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I just punched in an arbitrary roundtrip from Columbus, OH to NYC and got several options at $355 including all taxes and fees.
Happy New Year from New York City!
> You think a lot of supercomputers are going to be running Web-targeted NoSQL datastores?

if they succeed in building a powerful architecture which beats Intel in performance per kilowatt, they will start selling commodity servers with it.

besides, come on, it's a database engine. What difference does it make if I have an enterprise or a web application?
Try searching for the title on http://scholar.google.com ― I've found quite a few papers that were behind pay walls using it.

[EDIT] I've not found the papers listed by the OP but other papers in the past.

[EDIT 2] Oops the OP in fact has linked to Google Scholar. My bad. :)
In general, you can toss any set of numbers into a clustering algorithm, and it's kind of interesting to puzzle over the structures that come out. The more you know about the domain, the more interesting it tends to be.

PCA can be the same way. You toss images or whatever in, and out come either eigenvectors or principal components of the images. Either way it's often interesting to domain experts.
I'm not sure how a developer-driven team might handle HR issues though

There is a nuance here that is being missed, there is management and there is administration, management is authority and administration is coordination among contributors to keep the production line running. Many organizations mistake the two for the same roles as such they give to many administrators authority and make them managers. When many organizations could flatten their management hierarchy and create more administrative roles. HR is a good example of a business function that can be done via administration and not authority. The funny part is when you make people administrators they see themselves more like contributors and become less threatened by efficiency.
Is that MZ in the reflection?
Happy New Year from Armenia!
I can say that driving was vastly cooler 40 years ago, where I lived then, than it is here and now. There were limited access highways and even side roads where one could drive recklessly (usually) without fatal consequences. Some of the things I saw done during the commute to and from high school would lead to a wreck in a block or two under the conditions of traffic now.

But really it is pointless to compare the US to Denmark. Does New Jersey have a population density comparable to Denmark's? New Jersey north of the Raritan, even?
concise: remote/untethered people can deliver great work and as long as you're happy with it thats what matters. also, alot of people find they are happier not being tethered to a Dilbert-like existance. some of those folks are highly and broadly talented who have lots and lots of paying alternative opportunities, so you as an employer will be competing against them whether you like it or not.
Being included (even if only peripherally) in this post makes me feel like an impostor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
"
'The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,' Mr. Obama said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where he is on vacation. 'I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.'
"

I don't think that saying you disapprove of something cuts you any slack when just a few minutes later you sign it into law anyway. This is just as bad as the people on Youtube who say "I don't own the rights to this video" and think it exempts them from copyright infringement.
While I agree every start-up should be able to summarise their business in a single sentence, this isn't always possible. As the article points out it can encourage the use of vague buzzwords tip-toeing around the actual workings of the company and leaving people still without a clue as to what the company actually does.

And sometimes a business simply can't be summarised to such a short length, after all you want the listener to gain a quick, yet good understanding of what your start-up does. Keeping it short could lead to leaving out critical information though.

That said, I'll certainly work on single sentence descriptions for my projects, it can only be a credit to your business if you can have the listener instantly know what you do in a matter of seconds.
Happy New Year from DC!
What was Datalog used for?
In 3 hours
Happy new year from Boston, but we celebrated in UTC because all our friends have babies and don't want to stay up past 9!
nice spin in the submission title
AUMF was signed into law on September 18th, 7 days after 9/11. I don't think anyone was expecting Bush to have lied out his ass the way he did, especially after the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor.

Bush used this opportunity to finish what his father started, and it cost lives, money, and for the most part, the American way.
Linux takes CPU-specific patches all the time, and has numerous modules to take advantage of CPU features. As long as the patch gives it a clean interface and meets the Linux kernel's standards, I don't see any major roadblock.

I don't, however, think that the magic early-boot changes to prompt for a passphrase almost immediately after boot would have much chance. And I don't really see the point of that compared to the usual mechanism of prompting for a passphrase from the initramfs before mounting encrypted partitions. Either way means that you have key material very briefly in memory before ending up in CPU registers, and thus that you must very carefully wipe that key material from memory before proceeding.

Looking at their patch, it would need a major overhaul to become suitable for acceptance into the Linux kernel. They've also re-implemented sha256 themselves rather than using the kernel's existing implementation, and they've used that sha256 implementation for a very simplistic key derivation function (2000 iterations of sha256 directly on the passphrase itself).
"Computers and electrical products - ~100b"

I wonder if they count iPads and iPhones as exports or imports. If exports, that means a massive chunk of America's consumer electronics exports are due solely to apple.
It is ironic that the chief reason trumpeted by proponents of government action turns out to be a relatively part of their operations. It does the opposite of support their intention and presents a juxtaposition of what they think is a really good argument and what it actually amounts to.

It would be like if I claimed male authors were better than female authors, then cited George Eliot as my first example of a great male author. That would be ironic.
If you embark on your own, remember: It's all fun hacking until your 18 sided mirror sticks and you dump that laser beam into a single spot and burn a blind spot on someone's retina.

Make half the fun be the redundant safety systems.
I actually feel that it is pretty simple to set up a good remote structure and is as simple as good old fashion people skills. When I set up a project and on-board remote developers, the first thing I do is tell everyone, no video conferencing for a week. I do this to play a game, I then get the team together after a week and we play a game of describe your coworker. Of course hilarity ensues, as everyone build these crazy visualizations of what their other remote development counterparts look like, sometimes we will have the artists among the team sketch out the visualization on a shared screen. I also open a group chat on Skype for the project, where I kick of casual office conversation, I will usually post some interesting tech articles and kick up a discussion. From there the team dynamics tend to start growing organically. Sure these things may start organically in an office setting with no effort at all, but it does not take that much effort to seed it among an all remote team. Further some of the more introverted members of the team have expressed that they really like it because they feel more comfortable with the introductory exchanges not being face to face. I am a big proponent of remote teams, I can't say that I always was. I used to believe that they would never work because the team dynamic would not form. I was wrong and don't mind admitting that after being part of many teams that have resoundingly proved that my assumptions where wrong. Some of the most efficient teams that I have been on where all remote.
He meant that pedantically posting the link to a previous empty discussion adds nothing to this new discussion.
Creating a Notification System with iKnode
While I agree that good engineers should be able to do all of the things on your list, I don't agree that a distributed team is necessarily a huge barrier to all those things.

I work with such a team, and we're in constant contact. I teach, learn, coordinate, discuss design, and communicate insights via IRC and Skype. We're signed in and talking at pretty much all hours. We talk about the piece of code we're working on at the moment, we talk about what we're about to do, we ask for design feedback, we bitch about terrible dependencies, everything.

If you're talking about the kind of remote workers who fire off a couple e-mails and maybe jump on skype for 20 minutes a day, then I agree. That just isn't conducive to good, cohesive work. It also wouldn't fly on our team.

I think it needs to be recognized that (especially with the right team) distributed work and throwing development over the wall to a random offshore company are _nowhere_ near the same thing. If they are, then the team clearly isn't good at remoting and, as you say, probably need to be physically present.

Good engineers should be able to do either well, not just one or the other; and a good team should be able to do everything on your list with either work arrangement.
> The Object/Relational impedance mismatch stays right there where you leave it.

Somewhat umbrella...but I do think that document-based storage does make a difference. It certainly doesn't erase it and, as you say, it varies based on the use-case at hand, but I think most people would consider the development experience to have less friction (and that's certainly been the overwhelming anecdotal evidence I've heard (and can give)).
I also work at Airbnb and would like to follow up on what Nate just said. Our review system is actually stronger than all the aforementioned sites because it is transaction based, i.e., only people who complete the transaction through Airbnb can leave a review.

Non-transaction based review sites like Yelp, VRBO, etc., are plagued with fake reviews by owners, guests, and competitors. On sites like that, how do you know that those glowing reviews you just read weren't written by the owners, their staff, or their friends? You don't.

By tying our double-sided review system to actual transactions you can have almost complete confidence that the reviews you are reading are the result of someone staying with, or hosting, another member of our community.

We have reached out to the author of the article to articulate this, but rest assured, had he booked through Airbnb he would have been able to write the review he wanted.

In addition to that, he wouldn't have sent money blindly to someone. We would be holding it until after he checks in and reminding the owner via email of the booking to prevent exactly this kind of situation from happening. And in the rare occasions when it does, our 24/7 customer team would have stepped in and helped to find him a new place or issue a complete and fast refund.
Will China Outsmart the U.S.?
I notice there's some random guy on there named Paul Graham. He seems confused as to why so many people have added him to their circles...
May your CAC be low, your LTV be large, and your viral coefficient > 1.0 !

- from Silicon Valley
You can always jail break your iPad, which in America is legal, I think :)
"solving real problems"

I am not at all addressing MongoDB here to be clear -- just your comment regarding worthwhile "problems" to "solve".

It is not too difficult to foresee a future where energy costs will trump all other considerations, including development time, sys ops, etc. Specially for <X>aaS efforts, energy efficiency can clearly end up being a competitive edge.
New years greetings from the global Railo team
I also feel there is inherent conflict of interest when users post negative reviews at sites like Seamless, Grubhub, AirBnB, VRBO etc. As these companies receive revenues from their partners they might be biased against negative reviews. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis between reviews on Yelp and reviews on these sites on the same merchant (restaurant, property manager etc.).I would not be surprised if the analysis shows that some of these sites have an artificial upward bias in their reviews/ratings.
[EDIT 3] Ah in the search result, on the right there should be a link like "[PDF] from ethz.ch".
You Don’t Live in the World You Were Born Into
git, of course.

here I summarized some points which I needed to explain to my customers: http://txlab.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/moving-from-subversion...
>and your viral coefficient > 1.0 !

Unless you're an epidemiologist, and then let your R0 be < 1.
Happy new year and good luck for 2012 from Portugal
You can also try using Google's filetype operator, for example:

filetype:pdf "Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network"

And if it's not available online, many researchers will send you a copy of the pdf if you send them a nice email.
I would like to hear your tricks as well...
This build is part of, I think, C'T magazines "build stuff from your stock parts / junk bins" competition.

There have similar competitions recently; build stuff using 7400 series; build stuff using 555 timers.
I'm happy to agree to disagree. Maybe you're the most successful bastard on the Internet and you have a formula that always works. We're obviously looking for different things and drawing from different experiences.

But as much as it sucks, it almost doesn't matter if you're right. The perception is you're arrogant enough to tell a company or a team how it should be run and if they don't meet your terms, they're doing it wrong and you're going to go do your own thing (this is the royal "you"). I'm exhibiting a mentality you wouldn't want to work for, you're exhibiting a mentality of someone I wouldn't want to work with.

You don't have to agree with any of my rationale, but it may help you and other remoters to understand it. Perhaps it'd help to generate a more compromised view than the "you don't need" responses I usually see. And if it helps with context at all, I've experienced this as a remote employee, a local employee with remote colleagues, and an employer.
quite interesting, and I hope the user experience will improve with time.

At the moment, my wife, a totally nontechnical person, had a very negative feedback after she had to use a most fresh Ubuntu netbook instead of the oldy gnome desktop in ubuntu 10.10. So, I tend to believe that greaat thinking and technical design is put into Unity, but the current users are struggling a bit with the new UI
I'm getting that too...anybody get around this?
This is missing whole fields, like programming languages. Perhaps we can expand the list here?
I have to chuckle at this.

I was an admin in a freenode channel at the time reddit (the one page lisp version) launched.

It initially boomed as it was a great way to share IRC links . . .
Copyright covers the creative work, not the output of the creative work. So code, images protected. The pretty glowy lines produced when work is "executed", not protected.

Of course, everything (in U.S. legal system) is debatable and usually the party with most $$ (for lawyers) wins the debate.
In Microsoft SQL Server row/extent/table locks are of transactional semantics and often turned off with nolock option. What really matters for concurrency is page latch, which is per 8K page.

In SQLite readers actually do block writers by default. Writing transactions are committed with lock escalation steps. First shared lock is acquired, then reserved, then pending and finally exclusive. Pending blocks new shared locks and waits until all in-flight shared locks are released. Again this is default rollback journal behavior. As of 3.7 write-ahead log allows readers to be concurrent with writers, but AFAIK is still rarely used.
Or 1.5 Color's worth.
>PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.

Wasn't that what I said?