skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read tons of documents, articles, and how-tos on schema-free non-RDBMS DBs like SimpleDB, CouchDB, BigTable, DBSlayer etc. by now and I agree they seem very interesting and powerful. However, I just don't see how having each document (e.g. invoice) have it's own field structure would be a good thing. Every database I've ever worked on is structured and every new document has almost always the same data as every other document. That is not because of the limitations of the database but rather the nature of the business. Every invoice should have the same exact fields as every other invoice because employees are trained to fill and understand the implications of the data in each field. This has a lot more to do with business process efficiency and nothing to do with computers. RDBMS just facilitate that business rigidity more naturally. Of course, nobody's saying I can't do this in CouchDB but then why use CouchDB if I don't need the fluid document structure?

Also, the biggest question I have is, how powerful are the dynamic views? I have tables with 10m rows and often serve 100+ select queries per second with joins/where/having/order/group-by/full-text-search functions. The business goal is not to make group-by queries but to summarize data in real-time as the analysts want e.g. sales by product per day or shipments by employee per week. How fast would a view that performs an equivalent function work on CouchDB? Can I optimize it somehow because I don't see much mention of index colums anywhere?

What bugs me most is that when dealing with databases like CouchDB and SimpleDB, the "best practice" advice I hear is to just write summary data and search indexes on my own. That is every time a new invoice is generated, add +1 to the summary.count.invoice record, add +300 to the balance.customer.acme-corp record and -5 to inventory.widget record. And don't forget to add every unique word in the document to the search index table. While that would be great if I knew the exact business needs ahead of the time but in reality, first you capture all the data you can capture and then generate reports based on the needs of the user.

I fully understand all the wonderful things that CouchDB and SimpleDB provide like statelessness, replication, caching, and scalability. I know they are not SQL databases and will not offer drop-in replacements. However, I just don't see how I can use them for any of the hundreds of database projects I've been involved in over past decade and a half as easily as any decent SQL server.

Here's an article I want to read someday. "How CouchDB will be a better solution when you try to do X" where X is something real-world database folks do on a regular basis and X is not a blog engine, recipe manager, or address book. I have tens of GB of data that I'd rather store in SimpleDB than host myself on MySQL or Postgres. However, what I make from all of these document-oriented databases is that they're wonderful, they will solve all of my scalability and concurrency problems, and they will require me to reimplement all of the necessary grouping and indexing features of a typical RDBMS myself.
The frustration is all of the chording for things that seem to merit their own key in my world. Fn-up, down, left, right could better handle screen and keyboard lighting, and put page up/down/left/right up there instead. I mean, the freaking computer controls the brightness anyway, why even bother with single touch? And play/pause and fast forward/reverse?

Home and end don't bother me as much as page up/down, really. I hate finding my place again after scrolling up and down, and option-up/down is annoying to me.
"Dire market conditions have forced virtually all social-networking firms to scale back."

Dire market conditions have forced virtually all firms to scale back.
Same is true with FF3 on OS X.
Yeah, my cousin taught me HTML too, it's not that hard.
Most likely a geek at heart. Test Pilots are basically hackers anyway.
Or Wine, if the apps you want work on it - the only Windows app I use is IE, and that just for testing.
Funny you mention it, a reasonably normal person beat Jordan one-on-one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B7U74Dg04k

And a reasonably normal person also beat LeBron in horse too:

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/09/18/video-of-lebron-james-lo...
Good programmers can learn any language they want to.
A couple people tried to make bulleted lists (maybe a Windows user thing), which News interpreted as code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I should figure out how to catch these.
You can still block the number I believe. The phone company can do it without you needing to know the number. Especially if she phones.
i think that could be a separate issue from the tactics of the actual game. if an opponent blunders such that you have 2 moves that seal the game for you, one which gives a large point victory and one which gives a small one, it is considered polite to take the small one as a show of respect for your opponents skills.
that's the way I've heard it at least. Go etiquette reflects japanese culture and not having grown up in it I'm sure none of us truly appreciate all the subtleties.
That's a great article. I will attempt to use more precise terms in the future.

To clarify my previous post: I intended "strong" typing to mean increasing restriction of what you can do in order to provide more guarantees about runtime behavior, and "weak" typing, the opposite.
Which books, if you don't mind?
Fluff. Just what we need, another Smashing Magazine-style article. One site doing that was plenty.
I think that a startups Core Values are pretty important and say quite a bit about that particular company. Whether these values are stated or a given is a direct extension of the "company culture" thats at that particular startup. Core Values can vary widely, but I think it's pretty universal that most hackers are looking for a fun place to work and interesting/challenging things to work on. If a startup isn't offering at least that, then no list of positive character traits paraded as "Core Values" can save them
You can use Expose with your arrow keys instead of the mouse.
"If you're an entrepreneur, you should fight like hell to avoid bridge loans, venture debt, convertible debt or any other form of leverage. "

This is wrong. While debt funding is usually bad for startups, there is a type of convertible debt round that is really a de facto equity round, structured as debt because it makes the paperwork easier.
Clearly either Moore's Law has been broken or you're mistaken.
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2008041719053...

According to one entry in that thread it is possible to expose anonymous callerIDs by forwarding to an 800# and then gathering the number from there.
Rediscovered this, quite useful. Available for Windows as well.
If it's de facto equity, then it skirts around my warning...
I prefer the idea of a future where improvements can be built upon all previous knowledge

pretty much nailed it on the head there. A lot of developers really miss the point while getting sucked into these flamewars..

almost as annoying as the vim vs emacs bickering.
I don't understand why you're so bothered about things being open that you'd never change anyway.

you completely misunderstand open source. go back to watching tv
The way to Lisp
I remember participating in that game -- I was in New York when Kasparov opened the game by playing 1. e4, I voted on a lot of the moves, posted my analysis (1350 USCF analysis, but still) to the forum there, and was greatly disappointed when the World realized it had blown a drawn endgame. This brings back the memories, and it was indeed a great game of chess.
it wasn't yet capable to do things like make phone calls

This is overstated, but close to the truth.

I care about technological freedom and openness, and I'm willing to endure some early-adopter pain in order to get it. So I tried the Freerunner a few months ago.

Unfortunately, the device I received had no practical use as a day-to-day phone. And, yes, I tried many different software images. The Qtopia image came the closest to providing something usable, but still never came close to the functionality or usability of my 3+ year old Motorola RAZR. I ended up returning the phone, minus a 20% restocking fee. Ouch.

I support Openmoko. I hope they succeed. I will continue to monitor their progress, and may buy their next device. But I wanted to warn those looking at purchasing the current Freerunner to set your expectations appropriately. In my opinion, this is not yet a phone that can serve as your everyday communication device; it is rather a cool prototype that freedom-loving mobile hackers may enjoy experimenting with while keeping some other device on hand for everyday use.
Would svnX fit your needs? Does wonderful for me.
You know what a turtle is?
oh no, all this time I have been putting many classes in one file. I guess I should have compiled more often.
hacker-centric?
why don't you want to involve the cops? the whole harassing thing really isn't that big of a deal, the dude will just get a stern talking to, and at least the cops will have the complaint on file in case you need to get a restraining order etc.
I do cross-platform development -- I use frontpage AND dreamweaver.
Interesting talk. Lomborg is not just a skeptic, he accepts warming as true and probably caused by humans, but his talk focuses on solving problem rather than wasting effort on carbon reductions. For example, if people are dying in heat waves and your goal is to actually save lives, cutting carbon will do next to nothing, but things like trees and water in cities (or air conditioning) would save many lives and be vastly less expensive. It makes you wonder what people's real goals are.
In two years of owning a Mac, I have made more progress in improving my personal productivity than I made in the ten years prior to owning a Mac. If that sounds worth it to you, then yes, it's worth it.

But then, I got my Mac for the solid "just works" UNIX implementation, not for the nice UI. From that standpoint, Windows pushed me onto the Mac platform, and Mac OS X pulled me. Carrot (Mac UNIX) and stick (Windows, um, Cygwin? Cough). You didn't mention what your impetus for switching would be, so YMMV.
Thanks! Really awesome!
Yes I could see how someone might try to do that.
I need to coin something - any ideas?
I was going to go into a rant here, but I don't feed trolls anymore, I'm too old for this shit.

1. Map control to caps lock, like you should be doing on any keyboard you have.

2. Use the 'enter' or 'return' key to make paragraphs.

3. Use your left thumb for the command key.

4. Stop pretending that this is an Ubuntu box. It's a mac, treat it like one & give the mac versions of software a look first, before running back into RMS's hands. That's the rational thing to do on any platform.

5. You'll notice you'll be paying for software. You'll also notice that you're a crap-ton more productive.

6. Apple doesn't sell low-end hardware, get over it. Then again, hackers usually need more machine than the low-end crap.
I wonder if this is a fact or a fiction.

The legend of the Simple Google Interface.

Not saying it's not true. But are we sure we have a cause-effect here? Sure it worked, it was liked. Bu if they had a different UI, would they be nowhere now?
it appears that evolutionary dead ends are possible, which is cool
USANA Health Sciences
I too run different platforms between work and home. Linux at work (Since id prefer to use linux over windows and I have the choice where I work) and a Macbook Pro at home.

I found my biggest annoyance was the keyboard shortcuts, and i solved that problem by remapping my Control Key on my linux work machine to be the alt key (next to the space bar), in the same place as the mac, and it is SO much easier to switch between platforms reguarly. It also makes emacs less painful as an added bonus
>Also his JRuby startup time is inaccurate.

That comment is inaccurate ;)
So you really meant "static" and "dynamic", referring to type-checkers, which are completely independent of "strength" (which is commonly used to imply soundness).

Ironically, all dynamic type-checkers are more sound (by definition, they check all types at runtime) than most ancient static type-checkers that just do naive structural compile-time checks, allow casts, and mainly exist to specify size.
Err no.

Slashdot had karma-points long before they shifted to simply "Good" or "Excellent" and stuff like that.
Ask HN: Startup/coding podcast recommendations?
Only podcast I'm regularly listening to is the Stack Overflow podcast. I haven't really found any other good ones. Any goodies you want to share?
Mitnick showed a way but it's pretty complex: http://voipsa.org/blog/2008/07/23/asterisk-hack-to-show-bloc...
Ask YC: Good distance graduate certificate/masters programs in C.S.?
I'm going to be working full-time next year and I'm looking for a way to continue my CS education by doing something like a graduate certificate or part-time distance masters.
I'm going to be in the states [namely Seattle,WA] , but as an alien (meaning wildly varying tuition).
I'm wondering: What are some good schools with distance graduate-certificate or masters programs in C.S.?
Also what are the type of undergrad marks/ GRE scores required for most programs?
Are there other tests besides the GRE I should look into doing for international distance programs?
I'm very fond of this book. I think anyone that works in dynamic languages (particularly Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.) should give it a read. If you don't have a lot of functional programming experience, it does a fantastic job introducing a lot of great concepts.

I checked it out from the library first (after a long wait), and then after returning it, I went out and bought a copy. I don't buy many books these days, since I have a fantastic public library a few blocks away, but this was one that I simply didn't want to be without.
I predict that in 2 to 3 years, there will be several accessible web frameworks in erlang, scala, and maybe even haskell. Yes, there are frameworks for them now, but they are not "accessible" to the masses yet. This will change and good programmers will have all the readability they need for quick web dev as well as the power and safety of more advanced language features.

As much as I like merb, I would like it _much_ better if it was in erlang or scala. lift, erlyweb, mochiweb, etc are still not at the ease of use level of the ruby frameworks. There will be a tipping point, I hope ;).
DOS/Windows for a long time was a gaming platform. By which I mean that the only reason to have it installed around was because some very good games worked only on it.

Suddendly, I noticed that I'm keeping an OSX box around the house for the same reason. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Pointless anecdotes aside: map your requirements. If you absolutely need an application or a game that works best on platform X, choose platform X. Otherwise, it's Linux. Then you only have the tiny problem of choosing a distro :P

(oh and the emulators on Linux are pretty good these days)
I'm Mario. That bitch stole my ho.
Mismanagement at the Big Three
Gas making bugs.
Oh, they compile now. They're just ugly.

http://functionaljava.org/examples/1.5
anyone know of anything (web, software-based, whatever), that does timesheets really, ridiculously, well?

I feel like this space is underexploited- and I can't figure out if it's because every company's requirements are so different, that it become hard to create a good product, or if there's really no target market segment for this.

any thoughts?
Live video takes off on sites like Justin.tv and Ustream.tv
I was really impressed with the polar bear example. Some scientists believe that by mid-century, 1 polar bear will die every year because of warming. At the same time, we are killing 300-400 bears a year by shooting them. Wouldn't the better solution to spending 180bil a year be to shoot fewer bears? :)
And yet, very useful.

However, here's the Smashing Magazine equivalent, if you're interested...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/21/40-professional-i...
The best place for ASP.NET support right now is stackoverflow.com. Outside of that, you'll find ASP.NET to be much more valuable and productive once you get away from doing it the Microsoft way. Close the designer, learn the page lifecycle if you must use Webforms, try ASP.NET MVC, don't use ASP.NET AJAX, turn off ViewState and avoid any of the *View controls. The built-in controls were designed Winforms developers so they could easily get started developing with Webforms. Once you get over that (it took me a long time), the framework becomes really enjoyable and powerful to work with.
Heh, I am comparing the two things I actually have :-)
Quick, call CSI!
Heh, I was actually thinking of writing a followup when your site came to mind (really).

The difference so far though is that this tea site at the moment only has adsense, whereas you and the tumbleweed guys actually sell something.

How the heck did you come up with the bingo card idea anyway?
you know, you might have a point. perhaps amazon should open up their mobile apis. but the language you used in your blog entry isn't helping your cause any! you are not likely to get people to change their minds by using inflammatory words like "hypocrisy."
How to Make Lots of Money During a Recession
If you have 5 minutes, you can learn the rules from http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/go.html -- a much neater explanation than most. It takes a little practice to get good, of course. Just a few years of full-time playing.

The best general resource online is http://senseis.xmp.net/ .
Software's one of the last good black arts left. Everyone gets some basic introduction to physics, chemistry[1], etc. through school and Hollywood.

But software's utterly opaque in this department.

[1] Chemistry's always been the one that I didn't get.
What's with all the glossy gradients? Can we, as a species, move on?
The No-Bull-Shiitake Investor Wishlist
Well... I haven't touched any JVM-based software in a few days on my 2.4ghz MBP with 4GB of RAM. Caches got cleared and pre-fetch "forgot" about it, I guess it figured that the heavy Adobe software I've been running needed it more.

So I just timed hello world (in Java) and it gave me 1.89sec.

That's pretty lame if you ask me. In fact, that's incredibly lame. Imagine if it wasn't just "hello world", but an actual piece of usable code! In fact I can even tell you how long it takes for my Excel parsing tool (Java, command-line based, uses Apache POI) takes to start up on a 100% "cold" machine: about 4 seconds.

I wonder how this simple tool would fare on Linux-based netbooks with total 512MB of RAM and slow CPUs... or something like iPhone.
I use a Mac, and it's quite tough to get used to it. Here is the setup I've built, so I can keep my development in windows: http://www.essien.org/blog/2008/12/02/setting-up-your-develo...
I switched a few years back. first with my laptop via a macbook g4 runnin tiger. that whetted my appetite for mac and allowed me to realize the potential of the platform as a development environment. ultimately i moved my entire development operation over to a mac pro tower loaded up with 16gb ram and a few tb of space specifically so i could develop on whatever platform i wanted through the use of virtual machines.

for most of us that are doing web oriented software development, the ability to run multiple versions of client side browsers not to mention multiple versions of server installation through a virtualized environment is a major boon to productivity. if as a developer you are researching a platform to use as your main development you should really take that into account. if you are a device driver developer or working closer to the hardware thats another story.

also, ask yourself: are there any developers contemplating switching to windows?
Some of those specific terms aren't the most commonly used for the associated concept, which can lead to confusion and frustration.

Furthermore, some of the definitions are either too restrictive, not restrictive enough, or don't seem to match the exactly term they are describing.

I'll withhold specific examples, so those who still want to take the test don't feel that I've spoiled it for them.
I force myself to use the fisher price os they call osx

The thing about OSX is that it may look simple, but when you tell it to do something, it does it. I've lost count of the time I've left my Windows PC to do some long running task only to come back and find it's actually done nothing, it's waiting for me to confirm that I'm really, really sure. Or it's simply ignored me or failed silently. That is worth paying the "apple tax" for. It's paid me back many times over.

You can buy alternative keyboards, you know...
I don't get it, all of these things are simple to do in Java. Ugly, yes, but still simple.
Even if you have to do look at scraps of it in your cupped hands while The Master yells at you for not working, functional programming is a wonderful little Eden of direct expression and general well-thought-outedness.

FWIW, Real World Haskell's a great, readable book. The first FP-language book[1] where I can really just lie down with it and read a chapter before going to sleep.

[1] with all due respect to PG's Ansi Common Lisp, RWH takes a more verbose and guiding style.
You know, what I would love and use right away on some of my blogs is a similar widget but that allows me to include voting badges - particularly one that uses that script that came out a while ago to detect whether the user is logged in those voting sites and displays them only if they are.

That would be one heckuva handy widget!... does it exist anywhere?
What a timesink :)

I've created a number of variations on this, including a black&white one which does a good job of Darwin.

The biggest improvement I've made is in limiting the size of the mutation. Now I have a 1 in 50 chance of executing your mutation code, else the changes are limited to within about 10% of their existing value. This gave me a very nice Velociraptor.

I'm also playing with triangles instead of polygons, but I'm impatient and trying to run them all simultaneously. Time to upgrade...
Well, Java has Comparator classes. You can simply have first class functions by making a generic-d class (generic types for input and output), and a single member like "public T apply(F arg)". Its not that out of the ordinary.

So the paradigm is easily replicated, but yes, the syntax is totally ugly though ;) I think the real difficulty is in explaining how say lots of Comparators and Function classes are better or worse than a first-class function. Java at least affords type-safety on the wrapped functions whereas Ruby and Python don't (though, they don't really have any Java-style type safety to begin with).
To a windwos DEVELOPER?
Man, this is sad.
The efforts of most environmentalists become a lot easier to comprehend if you think of environmentalism and global warming as a religion.
Made the switch earlier in the year; though I'm a poor student, so ended up downgrading from a decent Windows machine to a 2006 CoreDuo 1.83Ghz Macbook Pro — but even then, its defiantly been worth it!

I'd never switch back to Windows, and I prefer to run Adobe products natively, so I don't want to use Linux (however I like the unix enviroment). So really its just a good compromise between both — the commercial side from Windows, and the open source and unix side from Linux. Perfect! :-)
For tortoisesvn there is scplugin. Last time I tried it was not as good as tortoisesvn. I just learned the command line commands and now I don't miss tortoisesvn.
http://scplugin.tigris.org/

For SQLog you can run it on OS X using Wine. I have a written a guide on how to do that
http://www.manu-j.com/blog/run-sqlyog-mac-os-x-wine/148/
Yahoo To Close Brickhouse By End Of Year