skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly what I was thinking. This is the third recent post to HN using "real-time" in this fashion. They're hijacking a term which already has widespread use and which, "doesn't mean what they think it does," to hijack a line from Princess Bride.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing
This article is an excellent articulation of the strengths and (fixable) issues with mongoDB.

I like MongoDB a lot, and the improvements suggested would really strengthen the product and could make me more comfortable to use it in more serious applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing
I had the same exact feelings so ... I resigned last week. I am certainly excited about the future :) !
This reminds me of a particular scene in the last season of Breaking Bad. Not to spoil it, but it resonated with me then.
because they've sold a large chunk of their equity for cash in the marketplace . . . but of course everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too.
I agree that those two girls were unfairly weeded out of math, and we need to prevent that.

My point was that that teacher either needs to take a different attitude towards life, or get weeded out of the system herself. Why? Because her attitude will get impressed not just on girls attempting to enter predominantly male spaces, but upon all students that she interacts with.
Similar/analogous (I believe these all have significant differences)to F# MailboxProcessor, akka actors, erlang/BEAM processes and userspace/green threads in e.g. GHC,
True, but it would have been nice/reassuring if Google had presented it as that and notified Analytics users of the change and the privacy rationale for it. As it is, it's just confusing and I had to search around to find out what's going on.

Also, note that Google is blatantly still serving you ads on the basis of what you're searching for, just no longer sharing that with Analytics users. So the privacy win is minimal.
Oh, man. I was in almost exact same situation last week!

I also quit, about a week later, and I am so much happier. I really had to think about whether this is something I want to do or this is the company where I really want to work. Now I am free to explore many different options, and plus, I can concentrate on finding what I want, rather than trying to complete the tasks at work and look at the same time. It helps that I was able to get small severance pay.

Kudos, though. It's certainly not easy to leave without anything lined up. It wasn't an easy decision for me, either, when you have families to feed. But, I am definitely happier with my decision.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything ~ Tyler Durden
omg.

Okay, wtf people. WTF. WTF.

Does no one remember the massive security concerns people were talking about yesterday? I mean how the hell do you have a business plan where the technology you are considering has a strong chance of improperly preventing users from editing/viewing/deleting all data you are collecting?

Seriously? Dude, all it takes is one competent js person who doesn't like you to potentially delete/modify your entire db.
Justpaste.it: Share texts, photos, videos with your friends.
I use "real-time" in this fashion because describing it as "soft real-time" seems weird.
What the hell? It worked! How did it work?
One of the main points is that Meteor supposedly seeks to build a community around their project, and that the GPL is a hindrance to this goal. Without a strong community, a tool such as this might not have much relevance in the future, relative to others which have successfully built a rich ecosystem around themselves.
It looks a lot like what I already do with Emacs.

Is Light Table also programmable in the language it's written in? I find extensibility and compose-ability far more important in an editor than any single feature alone.

Cool demo. I like the idea of alternate real-time visualizations of my code; especially in large and unfamiliar systems.
Thanks for the tip! Currently, I'm working on a startup I co-founded so I got my plate full. I wrote that article knowing that there are more people like me and because I just now found myself in a position to do what I love but spent some 10 years looking for it… :(
i think we have a disconnect.

what do you think an npv of a stock is?
If getting a raise or promotion does not motivate you anymore then you should plan your exit strategy soon. You were born to be an entrepreneur. Simple as that....
Did miss something? I thought Oracle was claiming copyright infringement on Java code related to APIs and for patent infringement on specific techniques. Are they seriously claiming that use of the Java language itself is subject to copyright? Or is the judge going off on a tangent?
Why not reach out to them and see if you can both collaborate? Perhaps they can use some of the tech you've build or you guys can find a way to work together...?
Meh, who knows that they are using 'secure' search just because they are signed into their Google account? Fair enough if people were explicitly choosing that, but it's just a side effect of being signed in.
and why would anyone want to do business with you knowing your goal is to take advantage of anything you can for your own end? . . . why wouldn't your business partners always be watching their backs. not an efficient way to interact with people, and an impossible way to create. creative endevours require trust, trust isn't compatible with opportunism.
Do you know if YC has ever or will ever have that position? I've always wondered if they would have an in house designer to help.
Good points, let's go to the bar and talk it out.
This is good advice, but I think no matter what, you will always have that risk of wasting your time building something people won't want.

But you should definitely use an approach that sorts the wheat from the chaff when it comes time to pick an idea to work on.
While I agree that you should definitely use your tools in the best way you're capable of, I think for most people there's a baseline expectation that if you save data in a database, that data will be safe (at the very least, recoverable) unless something happens like the server catching on fire.

Nearly every other major database has this as the default -- MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, and Berkeley DB to name a few. (Redis doesn't, but it's also very upfront about it, and does provide this kind of durability as an option from early on.) So when MongoDB breaks this expectation, and when asked to support it as an option, just says, "That's what more hardware is for," it's a pretty big turnoff.
Ooops.. I can't believe I missed it. Thanks!
One of the best novels I have read in the last 5 years. It’s great sci-fi, with a lot of ideas I never dreamt of beforehand.
It really should be Assert.that(6, Is.greaterThan(7)), shouldn't it? Best of both worlds!
Really? iOS has very effectively abstracted away the filesystem at a consumer level. I don't see it as much of a jump to see that occurring at the programming level, at least for application-level coding.

Obviously, there will always be a need for a class of programmers who are intimately familiar with the lowest levels, but that set of programmers will always be vastly smaller than the numbers of those who code line-of-business applications, etc...
I could see RMS using that all the time.
Felix Salmon has a much better write up of why it's bad:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/13/googles-evi...

Quoting at length:

Dual-class voting shares were illegal for most of the 20th Century, but came back in 1986. James Sterngold’s NYT story on their reintroduction is well worth a read, featuring as it does comments against the new rules from both Felix Rohatyn (”The one-share, one-vote rule is pretty fundamental to the market”) and T Boone Pickens (”Let’s face it, managements want this because they want to entrench themselves. They went to Congress to get protection and they didn’t get it. So they went to the exchange to get protection, and they got it.”)

Even then, however, there were safeguards, including the crucial one that a majority of independent shareholders — excluding management and some directors — had to approve the move... Google has, now, clearly violated the spirit of the NYSE rules, if not their letter. It took 15 months for the independent directors on the board to be persuaded of this, in long and secret deliberations
LolSOAP - A library for dealing with SOAP requests and responses
Heh, we've had this discussion before, I actually just had it this morning again too. Thanks for chiming in, I think we'll actually make it happen now.
Why did this get voted up on HN?
That's what I though - weekend is coming so don't sample too many different of these newly scientifically proven creativity enhancers to find out when creativity for your weekend project(s) will peak. (otherwise the sample might become non-random and you might have to repeat the test next weekend).

Science is fun!
You're right that MongoDB is designed from the start for horizontal scaling, and the author could have better articulated his reluctance to add machines.

However, his suggestions would improve mongodb performance in all configurations, not limited to single node.

The mongodb guys did a great job simplfying the internal architecture and focusing on a great API to get the product out quickly. I'm confident they can make these sorts of internal improvements to broaden the use of mongodb.
I have an IAQ of my own:

Why is it that Java VMs seem to have such different interactive latency when compared to other memory-managed language VMs? Is the performance of eg, eclipse or Android or the Java browser plugin something to with the GC kicking in too aggressively?

Over the last decade I've heard different explanations re: SWT/swing/AWT toolkits, and server-side optimizations being default in desktop VMs, but I'm fairly sure both issues should be resolved now. Nevertheless, my general experience seems to be if it's Java based, it seems to handle touch/mouse events noticeably worse than otherwise.

Maybe .net and Python and the rest are doing more of their UI work in C?
My Aussie relatives' caps don't differentiate between international and domestic traffic, it's just one number. They're with the major telecom Telstra, I believe.
Your last sentence really hit the nail on the head. Start-up or corp, you'll have plenty of shitty times along with the good.

It's an attitude issue. The right attitude towards the bad (and good) things will make all the difference to your happiness in life.

What people often forget is that they are completely in control of their own attitude towards life too. The way you react to situations around you can be a positive influence instead of negative if you want it to be.
Ben and The Impressive Panhandler
I can hear the chorus of HNer's working at startups saying "yeah, but just wait until we go IPO or get bought or go viral then you'll see why we worked so hard so late so often for so long..."
Forex Trading Signals- One Unfailing Forex Trading Signal
Microsoft will trade Bing to Facebook for shares
You're correct, and the reason I say this particular tyranny of the majority is not evil is because Google has always explicitly stated that they never intend to let their outside shareholders have any power over corporate decisions. Same with Facebook...in fact, these companies have basically stated that if they weren't legally required to have an IPO, they wouldn't.

If Google had ever claimed that they would listen to outside shareholders, or even if they hadn't gone out of their way to state that they wouldn't, then the power grab would be deceptive and evil.
I would change the tagline at the top. "Welcome to the future." is way too generic. Maybe try "Wave hi to the future." or something like that. It makes the graphic to the left look like a giant hand wanting to give an iMac a high-five. Some specificity would be helpful.

Also, the CTA should give some indication of what will be expected out of you on the next page. I would say something about it being in alpha and how it's free.
Damn, and here I was thinking Google had top-notch password security, even with vendors.
I really enjoyed that speech too, in particular this quote.

It can be hard to live by that quote though, especially when you have a lot of responsibilities.
Excel + VBA solves a lot of that. The spreadsheet part just becomes a view.

Somebody should really build a web app version of that, there are millions of custom Excel+VBA spreadsheets spread throughout businesses across the world.

The only way they will migrate online is either through custom web apps (I used to do a lot of those) or with a generic solution which doesn't exist yet.
And it's not like this is some coup where they come in and deprive the existing shareholders of their voting rights -- or, for that matter, of anything whatsoever. The status quo distribution of voting rights remains.

It seems like they're doing this for exactly the reason they say they are: They want to be able to grant employees an equity stake in the company without diluting the voting rights of existing shareholders. No one would have any right to complain if they chose instead to maintain the existing distribution of voting rights by paying employees in cash rather issuing new shares. Which makes the only thing you can legitimately complain about that this will cause them to tend to issue more stock as employee compensation rather than paying in cash -- and that's just a business decision. (And generally a pretty good one for the shareholders, since employees with an equity interest in the company have a direct financial interest in ensuring the company's success.)
[Note: I wrote the blog post]

I'm not at all against horizontally scaling. However, I don't believe that horizontally scaling should be necessary doing a mere 200 updates to per second to a data store that isn't even fsyncing writes to disk.

Think of it in terms of cost per ops. Let's just say 200 update ops per second is the point at which you need to shard (not scientific, but let's just use that as a benchmark since that is what we saw at Kiip). MongoDB likes memory, so let's use high-memory AWS instances as a cost benchmark. I think this is fair since MongoDB advertises itself as a DB built for the cloud. The cheapest high-memory instance is around $330/month.

That gives you a cost per op of 6.37e-5 cents per update operation.

Let's compare this to PostgreSQL, which we've had in production for a couple months at Kiip now. Our PostgreSQL master server has peaked at around 1000 updates per second without issue, and also with the bonus that it doesn't block reads for no reason. The cost per op for PostgreSQL is 1.27e-5 cents.

Therefore, if you're swimming in money, then MongoDB seems like a great way to scale. However, we try to be more efficient with our infrastructure expenditures.

EDIT: Updated numbers, math is hard.
In most cases there's little reason to have the code in monospaced font either. People really just need their blocks (and their continuation lines) to be properly left-aligned, and that works fine, because even in proportional fonts, a tab at the beginning of the line is always the same width.

Just don't mix spaces and tabs.

Sometimes you want columns of figures to be aligned throughout, but fortunately most fonts respect the rule that all digits should be the same width (for exactly this reason).

My emacs is set for Dejavu Sans semicondensed bold at 6pt ... I find that for code, bold or demibold works a lot better than regular weight.
I think the article is a fair criticism, and I think your response is likewise fair.

Mongo was built with horizontal scaling in mind, and to that end, it tends to suffer noticeably when you overload a single node. Things like the global write lock and single-threaded map/reduce are definitely problems, and shouldn't be pooh-pooh'd away as "oh, just scale horizontally". Uncompacted key names are a real problem, and a consequence of it is that Mongo tends to take more disk/RAM for the same data (+indexes) than a comparable RDBMS does. Maintenance is clunky - you end up having to repair or compact each slave individually, then step down your master and repair or compact it, then step it back up (which does work decently, but is time consuming!)

None of these are showstoppers, but they are pain points, especially if you're riding the "Mongo is magical scaling sauce" hype train. It takes a lot of work to really get it humming, and once you do, it's pretty damn good at the things it's good at, but there are gotchas and they will bite you if you aren't looking out for them.
Just featured on Young Upstarts, see what Entreprneur Stories is all about
I like the previous/next idea -- for me, it's often much easier to understand what a chunk of code does when you can see its behavior on multiple inputs.
Sure, anything using the Internet as a conduit, and having to scale to an unpredictable number of users, is incapable of a realtime-guarantee in the technical sense but in terms of user perception it will be real-time in normal conditions. Realtime-y. ;)
I don't think drones would be any more helpful than well placed static sensors* (say, atop existing lightpoles). Or a tethered mylar baloon w/ a wireless camera.

The total time of flight is limited by battery capacity - and adding video transfer [and/or basic CV] is going to obliterate whats left of the charge.

I think for survey, emergency services, and short distance deliveries [burritos] are easier targets for drones.

*our startup is firmly in the 'ubiquitous, cheap sensor' camp of traffic monitoring.
> It's awful for usability

The scaling behaviour can be just as bad for usability on a site that's been well optimized already for mobile display.

As an example, iOS zooms when you select a text input field. If I've already adjusted the design to work nicely at 320px wide, the zooming is unnecessary, makes the page look odd, and the user has to manually zoom back out when they dismiss the keyboard. Another problem example is where the "zoom" multi-touch events conflict with something like Google Maps - should the browser zoom the page, or the map div?

Disabling zooming just makes it function more like a dedicated app - they don't zoom either. If you want to take away people's programming qualifications for making positive steps towards usability, I'm glad you're not in charge of the professional standards.
Cry me a freakin’ river. People are right to be grossed out and offended that this was being fed to their kids across the nation. And we’re supposed to ignore any potential concerns over quality just because some poor, rich “innovator” is struggling now that the truth is out?

Please.

This article reeks of PR — even using much of the same language that BPI does on its own website, pinkslimeisamyth.com / beefisbeef.com. For example, “puffs of ammonia hydroxide.” Puffs? Does that sound like a very technical or descriptive term an actual journalist would independently come up with?
Not only that, but Australian ISPs usually pay 100% of the cost of their links to international peering points, and these costs get passed on in the form of quotas and tiered plans, sometimes with separate quotas for international traffic.
AARNET, the Australian Academic network definitely included differential pricing for international traffic that it passed onto universities when I was in college.
Came here to voice this. It's not just that there ought to be a link there, it's the blog should be a "child" of your site. Instead, this makes it independent of the site and makes it feels disconnected.

Further, I have absolutely no idea what hall.com is, and I'm even more confused after trying to figure out why they wanted mobile notifications over desktop notifications. The blog post doesn't even link to hall.com either.
Reminder: Google Code Jam 2012 Starts Today At 23:00 UTC
Good Luck to all who participate!
http://code.google.com/codejam
It looks nice. It doesn't matter.

I'm not convinced that redesigns done in isolation are useful. As the AA designer's reply to dcurtis indicated [1]--in the prototypical example of this kind of stunt--the design can't operate in isolation from the structure and goals of the organization (even if those are dysfunctional).

These "blank page" redesigns disrespect the hard work these YC companies are doing A/B testing and talking to users to improve what really matters: conversions.

But they are great for self-promotion.

[1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
(not provided) is #1 for one of our sites with ~51% (~8,000,000 visits) and again #1 on another site with 35% (~7,000,000 visits).
How We Defeated the Evil Permanent Marker
This was awesome... made me remember every single facepalm I experienced while learning jquery. :)

With the caveats from the previous comments, I'd recommend this to every web developer-in-training. Thanks for putting this together; this could save many people many hours.
I agree his designs are lovely. Flutter needs a redesign a bit less than Exec does, but his is an improvement nonetheless.

Main concerns with the current Flutter site: The video is front and center. I get why companies do that, and it's smart to make the video and have it there. But I almost never watch product videos until I'm already intrigued. Videos take waaaaay longer than reading, so a focus on intriguing me in a sentence or two first goes a long way to getting me to watch the video at all.

The second is that annoying little popup at the bottom. I can't stand those things, they're very distracting. Irrational level of turnoff for me.

On his redesign, one minor comment about copy. Probably can't make "Jedi" part of your official copy without triggering the Lucas machine. Having it in a testimonial is probably acceptable.

As a final thought, the name Flutter and the product are one of those rare natural matches. That's good stuff.
Learning Python 3 - Recommend a Good Book for a PHP Guy
Calling all HN'ers: My goal is to learn Python. What book do you recommend for getting started with Python 3? (Note: I've never used Python 2)
That's certainly true, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. Kickstarter will get you the funds to go out and build a cool product, but it won't tell you how to generate a model that's sustainable, teach you how to go to market, or even tell you if there's an available market at all.
Do you know of any good testing guides, checklists, or suites for ensuring your site, js or not, works with screenreaders? I'd like to do a more thorough job of supporting people with disabilities (blind, colorblind, etc.), and am compiling a list of resources.
"Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, whose state is home to a BPI plant, is seeking a congressional investigation of what he calls a “smear campaign” against BPI."

Look, it's a lot simpler than that. It had nothing to do with the idea of mechanically separated meat (wait until they learn about McNuggets!)

A lot of parents quickly got exposed to the concept of beef being treated with ammonia. All the science reports in the world can prove it's effective and safe, but you can't erase that mental image in their heads that (food + poison) = bad. The mindset of a parent is just different from that of a food processing executive.
Here's the actual text of the bill, which of course doesn't say any of that:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3523/text

Boing Boing, the EFF, and Demand Progress have seized upon the words "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information", claiming that they betray an intent for CISPA to be used as a tool for antipiracy. But, of course, "DVD rips" are just one of a zillion kinds of "intellectual property", most of which is obviously worth protecting.

The real problem with this bill is that it doesn't do anything that private industry already does. ISPs already share information about attacks between themselves. The ECPA already allows potentially private information to be shared as part of good-faith investigations of computer misuse.

I am personally much more cynical about the motives of major anti-CISPA activists.