skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me add another database that's "underestimated" (by mainstream corporate America): SQLite3.

SQLite is fast, small, portable, easy & simple to maintain and backup, AND reliable. And unless you are running a high traffic site (or application) it could handle everything a small (even medium) business would need.

Why small companies get talked into running MSQL or Oracle or MySQL is beyond me. And even if (and that's a big IF) they needed more "power", there's Postgres.

PS: Sorry for hijacking this thread. I'm a big fan boy of both SQLite and Postgres.
Thanks Kabuks! I am glad the team is being transparent with the numbers and that you clarified the rise in tuition.

At 11K this still provides a lot of value. Does the team do any exit interviews for the graduates? I would also love to know what percentage of the class went from 0 programming experience to junior developer (I am assuming these types of people would be very rare like an overnight success).
Performance is subjective, but let's dig into the performance optimization this patch includes. The update addresses an issue where to do a llseek (read) of the database, the linux kernel would lock the read, causing it to have only one output at a time. The patch removes the lock because it was unnecessary and thus the performance scales concurrently without a lock creating contention.

This kind of performance optimization isn't new, concurrency is the name of the game. Erlang is a language built around concurrency and it has some databases written in it (couchdb) that scale with more cores due to erlangs inherent capabilities. So has this kind of performance increase been seen before, yes.
EDIT - for some weird reason this cross-posted from another news.y topic. Please ignore it here.
Hmm, I remember it being very hard, but it seems I've lost the specifics. My bad. In any case, Ada is not a language I'm excited to work with, but Go could be one.
The notion of putting the phrase "x+ years of technology y" on a job description always makes me roll my eyes. Some people have 2 years experience with say RoR, and could be lightyears ahead of another RoR dev who has 6 years experience. Is it so hard to say what you want: "we want a developer who is in the top 10% or top 40% in solving x kinds of problems?

The reason why this bone headed measure is used is because even the most elite coder on the planet does not have the required number of years experience, it helps managers keep salaries low. X years experience in Y is an HR trick.
What you search, I believe, is called "semantic clustering" : grouping textual content with related concepts.

You may be interested in the algorithms used in Apache Mahout ( https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Algorithm... )
Apps bar users from Internet, Facebook—and prove surprisingly popular
CCleaner Slim 3.17.1689 on Downloads App
My impression was that the photos accurately reflect how the team felt during the outage. We'd all feel pretty awful during that sort of event, and it was a quick and effective way to get across that these guys did too.
Facebook threatens to sue techcrunch commenter
Your first point is subjective, your second point is confusing (pull to refresh is the only way refreshing works?) and your third point implies that people are already familiar with it (on Android you're mostly not, I've only ever seen it on lazy iOS ports).

http://android.cyrilmottier.com/?p=598 is a really nice blog about why it's an anti pattern on android (and no, it's not to be different from iOS).
Android users, welcome to Instagram on the Web
I just picture Facebook execs in the scarface tone of voice, "you wanna fuck with me, huh?"

Although two wrongs don't make a right, I'm glad that Facebook took this line of action. Taking a counter-attack/offensive stance and putting Yahoo on the defensive will hopefully wake them up to the stupidity of their actions.
I did as well. His story seemed a bit far fetched, but not outside the realm of possibility. I did a quick search to see if he did quit his company before I realized what he was really saying. That really hit home with me about how easily it would be for a company to institute this kind of policy and how it might backfire.
Yes and no. I've been used as a GLG expert a number of times. The only people who seemed to use their service (read willing to pony up for the very high per hour rates) were institutional finance research groups doing due diligence for M&A or similar transactions. That's a pretty specific market with very deep pockets.
In order for ML to be effective you first have to provide the correct inputs as discrete, coded data that the software can accurately parse. We have a number of different coding systems for observations of patient symptoms such as SNOMED-CT. But you would still need an experienced healthcare provider to figure out what observations to make, and then turn those into specific codes. That's very much a subjective process in many cases, and there are often multiple valid ways to code the same observation.

All of that data entry would take time that physicians don't have. It would only be potentially worth doing for complex cases. Unless you can find a way to pay providers for doing the extra coding and data entry. Insurance generally won't pay extra for data entry beyond what they need for billing, and billing data isn't sufficiently detailed for diagnosis.

ML also doesn't account for human intuition and tacit knowledge. There are many subtle cues which experienced physicians can pick up on to make a diagnosis. It's impossible to codify them all; some are probably only noticed subconsciously.
Why does it require access to my contacts?
You can fire your customer; employer not so much.
I have seen programs to help with this digitization of graphs[1]. At times some data sets (the graphs) have no other raw data shown or available, so the only way to do further analysis is to reverse engineer the only data set you are given. Low tech is awesome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converting_scanned_graphs_to_d...
Developers: One simple tip to make your designs rock
Read the 5 points again, except now imagine he is talking about writing code.

A lot of it makes sense...In fact, I say Tim Peters lifted half of the Zen of Python from Lewis :)
This is what GLG does: http://www.glgresearch.com/

I did a lot of interviews via GLG (and similar services) as a consultant, with rates ranging from $200-700 per hour. The $700 range was for C-suite interviews at $5-10B revenue companies. I imagine a senior person at Apple or Boeing would be well in the thousands per hour for a similar service.

The people who are paying for these services aren't small start-ups trying to grow -- it is private equity and consulting firms with really deep pockets making multi-million/billion dollar decisions. They'll pay what it takes.
ha - I admit, it did make me laugh.
Facebook “Use App Now” Prompt is Really Interesting, Potentially Important
Foo Fighters Becoming Christian Gospel Band
Interesting Google Search feature - [founders of songkick]
I don't use iOS, so I'm not familiar with its sharing capabilities. Does Instagram solves any problem with the sharing there?
Thanks man! If you haven't encouraged us on Friday I would have just gone home ;)
awesome app and fun challenges!
We held off submitting for W12 as we would have submitted late and instead submitted early for S12 hopefully we make it this round...
Hello,

I'm Vitalie Cherpec, the founder of the Luadns project. :)

@relix It's a design choice, Lua code is used only to generate records. Executing user code on each lookup it's just too dangerous.

We wanted fast lookups and security. User code is executed in a restricted Lua environment in background.

If we'll have enough requests we'll add special functions to handle geo-aware DNS load balancing.
Discussions from earlier submissions are also interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1218951 <- 31 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478632 <- 56 comments

Further, I hope JoshTriplett (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JoshTriplett) isn't too disappointed that when he submitted this exact same item 2 days ago it got one upvote and no discussion. In submitting to HN, as with comedy, timing is everything.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784912
Full Show 4/2/12: What is a "Conservative?"
As Ted Ullyot said recently at an event I attended, 'it is hard for even Facebook employees to know what is going on' :-)

http://www.fedsocblog.com/blog/peter_thiel_and_ted_ullyot_di...
The term "computer" encompasses a wide variety of components. Had I purchased a PC from some specific company, such as Dell, stating that I have a "Dell computer" would indeed be accurate (stating "I have a Dell" is not technically correct; Dell is a company, not a computer). In a similar since, saying I use "Gentoo", "Trisquel", "Ubuntu", "Arch", etc is accurate.

I built my PC using hardware I purchased separately. I do see your argument - if someone asks me "what type of computer do you own", I would not list each hardware component individually. The problem is - that question is terribly vague. What type of computer do I own? Well, it's classified as a PC. Generally, when someone asks that question, they are looking for a specific company name. When I respond that I built my own, that answers their question.

If someone asks "what type of processor", I would then respond "I use an AMD-based system". In that sense, if someone asked what kernel I use, I would respond "I use a Linux-based system" --- they were specific enough to inquire about a specific component, so I would respond in such a way that answers their question.

"What operating system do you use?" Technically, I use GNU, and to those who understand what GNU is, I respond just like that --- "GNU". For those who may be unfamiliar with GNU, I will state "GNU with Linux" --- the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel. If I used GNU with another kernel, it is still GNU. Linux is one component of my operating system.

That said my display server, window manager, text editor, etc are also all useful components of my operating system. I would not say I use "GNU/X/Xmonad/Vim", simply because that is not a distinction commonly requested. Perhaps one day, if Wayland becomes popular, "GNU/Linux/X" would be useful/necessary.
57 Small Programs that Crash Compilers
Law Could Hamper Drug Tourism in the Netherlands
In America, attacked for walking in the wrong neighborhood (video)
Ditto what Jason said. I was similarly a little dissapointed with the early numbers on AR before I realized that $100 in one-off sales means $100 of booked revenue for the year but $100 of subscription revenue means ~$1,000 for this year and almost as much next year, too.

The graph for the first year of AR and BCC turned out to prove this out in a very dramatic fashion. Recurring revenue: the best kind of revenue.

P.S. Charge more. I just got a very uneventuful email about a particular customer hitting their 30 day mark w/o canceling including my system's guesstimate of their likelihood to stay a customer and their LTV. Probabilistically counting my chickens before they hatch, they're worth like a whole month of bingo cards and we've never even exchanged an email.
I am always interested, I will shoot you an email.
They'll only have to field those questions if they display the plain averages despite not sorting on them. If we've established that average rating is the wrong metric, why would you even show it to the user/merchant/whoever? Display the same metric that you sort by, and then the merchants will be perfectly happy with higher-rated items showing up higher on the list, and Big Boss will be happy that you've chosen the #1-recommended option.
Win-win indeed! Thanks. I'm on the advisory board of donorschoose.org, so I'm super biased, but they're indeed awesome (also, use my matching code! 'breadpig')

http://donorschoose.org/alexisonCNN
MySQL is not just some toy database. It's used by a lot of big installations that need a lot of performance, massive replication etc.

Sure it has its issues, but the objections people have against it mainly seem to be prejudice from the MyISAM days along with not appreciating how it shines on the workloads it's optimized for.

It sucks at reporting queries, but it shines when you have a large cluster of machines, multi-level replication chains, and mostly do queries that end up being primary key lookups or primary key range lookups with relatively simple constraints. That's the sort of thing you're likely to do for most of your traffic with any database once you scale up.

PostgreSQL also didn't have some of the features that made MySQL really fast until relatively recently, e.g. being able to entirely resolve a query on indexes without ever looking up the actual data rows.

I'd say the biggest problem MySQL has at scale is that replicated changes are applied in a single thread whereas updates on master servers are multi-threaded.

I'm very excited by recent improvements in PostgreSQL, and I wish it were the database I worked with professionally, but don't be so quick to dismiss MySQL.
Access to clean drinking water remains a surprisingly big problem even today. Today, you probably paid more for your bottle of water than you did for your gasoline (do the math)[1].

The part I like about this technology is that it uses moisture in the air and can be instaleled anywhere, with no further infrastructure needed (wells, etc).

Unfortunately, as others already pointed out in the comments at the main article is that RO - reverse osmosis applied to contaminated ground water is way more cost effective and accessible.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/TalkingRain-Spring-Water-16-9-Ounce-Bo...
Tell us how to be successful
I'm aware, which makes the phrase technically incorrect in its intent. But I think it's still serviceable.
Instagram for Android, Mobile Fusion + Lumia 900 as Windows Phone saviour
I usually try to look for practical solutions for real problems instead of trying to figure out "who to blame". Technically, both lawyers and congress are guilty. But in practice, from our point of view, it's easier to change congress by trying to elect better candidates and calling your representative, than it is to try to convince every lawyer that exists to abandon greed.

So I don't disagree with you, that lawyers are also to blame. But I'd argue that our energy is better spent focused on congress.
So use the Dropbox as the golden copy/SHA reference, and fetch the file from peers over Bittorrent.

DB is always going to be able to be used like a resilient tracker/datasource, and DB devs can only put so many walls in the way of using it like that before it starts to hinder your "average" user.

Example: Get magnet hash, get data from Bittorrent swarm, and then fetch from both swarm and public copies available via Dropbox. Verify against Dropbox copy if necessary.
Ask HN: Can H1b holder apply for DevBootcamp?
For H1b holder, quitting current job means out of status immediately. I guess somewhere like DBC cannot sponsor h1b. So is there a way to work around this?
Unicode is probably the closest we are today to world peace. If we can get all this somewhat right, including the flags, the noodles and the 'person with blond hair', I think there is hope...
Radical~
The argument is not about equality; Linux is by far much larger in nearly every regard than GNU is. The argument is toward correctness. No matter how small GNU is, "GNU" describes an entire operating system, which is comprised of many components, some maintained by GNU/FSF, others not.

Let's say that I released an operating system called "Mike OS", which used Linux, portions of GNU, etc. My only contribution to the operating system, aside from packaging, was a simple script to handle package management/configuration. Well, it's still "Mike OS".

I think much of the confusion comes from people thinking of GNU in terms of projects that the FSF personally maintains. As stated by http://www.gnu.org/: "GNU is a Unix-like operating system that is free software—it respects your freedom. You can install Linux-based versions of GNU which are entirely free software."
Advanced Timesheet Reports (advancedtimereports.com)
Advanced Time Reports is an intuitive project tracking & time management solution that will help you increase your billable hours by better managing all your projects, clients and working hours. Used by professionals and project-oriented businesses worldwide to perform essential functions such as timesheet reporting and project management. Plus, ATR implementation is very fast - it typically takes just a few minutes to setup. Get started with a free trial today, from creating time cards to using a work hours timer-And much more. Everything you're looking for in a project software at one stop!

www.advancedtimereports.com
"SQLite usually will work great as the database engine for low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, 99.9% of all websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends, of course, on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic."

http://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html
I am a huge advocate for the Django web framework, yet I always tell people that web frameworks (Django|Rails|etc) are not for beginners. Like many have mentioned, it's easy for experienced web programmers that have been mucking around things done "the old fashioned way" and without any true MVC structure.
I assume it would be difficult for novice programmers to really understand what the advantages and best practices of MVC web frameworks are for, when they have little experience of having worked in anything else.
SQLite even provides real MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) with decent read/write concurrency if you run it in WAL mode. Ran in WAL mode SQLite is a very competent database.

http://www.sqlite.org/wal.html
Tweet Heat – The hottest Tweets of the Month [March 2012]
my intention wasn't to be terse - more a meta commentary as every one of my points contradicts the respective point in OP
> Yes, there is, when they aren't being creative.

1. Creativity is a man made concept and so by default is subjective. Who is to judge what's "creative" and what's not?

2. If filters - which could just be an analogy for a technology tool - has no place in "creativity", where do you draw the line? Pulled to the extreme, how about when I use photoshop, or a korg synthesizer, or an elaborate framework to make art, music, or programs?

3. It's a consumer entertainment app after all. People have fun with it. What gives?
RDFa and microformats are often used, need to know more about what your particular usecase is
It wouldn't have been the same, for those of us who thought it was real (I won't lie, I'm one of them.) Whether it was due to not getting that Fizz Buzz is small and wouldn't need a team or that the letter was meant to emphasize the fiction and not hammer home the message (as I thought.) It does no one any good to go and blame the man making the posts for something we failed at (like fact checking, or reading the rest of the comments before commenting myself.)

Yeah it's embarrassing when it happens, take this as a lesson to self improve. Not attempt to call out fake activism.

Edit: Spelled Buzz wrong earlier.
Is it a Wordpress blog? I recently installed Wordpress and noticed the same problem but I haven't figured out where to change it yet.
I'm actually realizing that now.

I'm also finding hard to motivate myself to make something for people that are very different from me (I have a file sharing solution catered to small businesses in France). I imagine it's easier when you care naturally more about your end users.

When all my friends think this market is super-saturated, what I find out is that most of these small business people are just happy to use emails and the occasional FTP.
An Ice Cream Maker for Grandma-Quality Scoops of Deliciousness [Daily Desired]
It has been a long time since I've read that letter, but it still gives me chills.
Today was day 2 of being full-time for me and my cofounder. We make it easy to build automated emails and measure whether users do the thing you want them to. You can imagine my heart skipped a beat this morning when a prospective customer emailed saying Intercom rolled out (part of) what we do.

I figured it was coming, but I didn't know when. Day 2 was sooner than I had expected. I don't know who else this has happened to (I'd love to hear about it) but it definitely makes you pause to think. Intercom is doing a phenomenal job both on their blog and their product. Ultimately, on Day 2 with this feature release, I learned what is best summed up in this blog post by David Cancel http://davidcancel.com/true-startup-competition/:

"a startup only has one real competitor, indifference"

This one event could flip our plan on it's head. Instead, I'm taking it as great validation. We were right about what we're building.
We upgraded from 2.6 to 3.2 recently and our Postgres has been flying ever since. The scheduler changes (and presumably the lseek changes) make a huge difference in load. We have not done any performance timings, though, so we don't know if the changes translate to better performance.

To be specific, the change reduced read I/O (http://i.imgur.com/L8NWO.png) and load average (http://i.imgur.com/7793A.png) both by an order of magnitude, and the variance is much tighter than before. (The system is a dual Xeon quad-core X5355/2.66GHz with 32GB RAM and RAID5.)

That improvement was fairly miraculous — a factor of 10x just by upgrading a kernel is not something that happens every day. Still, I would not be surprised if Postgres 9.2 pushes performance even higher.
Notch's next game is an MMO
Advanced ID Creator (advancedidcreator.com)
Advanced ID Creator allows you to create professional and smart-looking photo ID cards on any Windows compatible card printer.

Advanced ID Creator is a powerful software solution that allows you to instantly create a wide variety of cards and personal identification items - including security access cards, badges, membership and loyalty cards, and more.

With Advanced ID Creator, you can easily design and produce fully-customized, professional cards - in just minutes!

Advanced ID Creator provides powerful features that allow you to create the highest quality cards:

•Enhanced graphic capabilities. Advanced ID Creator offers an unlimited number of design possibilities. You can add text, change colors, or incorporate objects and effects such as logos, images, shapes, shadows, and more.
•Flexible layout options. Create cards instantly by using existing layouts, or rapidly and simply create your own customized layout.
•Support for all card sizes. Choose from a variety of standard stock options, or define your own card size.
I think it would be helpful to explain a bit about the language of HTTP between the browser and server.

Perhaps that can help a lot to understand what the client is doing and what the server is doing. And it's pretty simple and straight forward.
Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.

FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.
Top government cost cutter resigns over $820,000 conference
Philippines has a chain of hamburger joints called "Burger Machine" whose branches are often open 24x7; their song includes the phrase "the burger that never sleeps".