skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you've got someone who knows what they're
> doing in charge of it, the latter solution will often
> take quite a bit less time to write and debug, too."

Ah, therein lies the rub. Spot on.

My obversations:

The last decade has seen a gradual weening off of reliance on the database stack for processing any form of "logic". This has been a evolutionary disaster. When companies like Sun pushed out application platforms such as Java, Microsoft followed suite to remain in the game. That's where the action was and that's where their revenues came from for the good part of 1998-2008 (still does). As a result, the newcomer programmers find it unfathomable to position any amount of processing in the hands of RDBMSs. These newlings choke at the idea of stored procedures or triggers - citing that these constructs are a step in the WRONG direction. Set-based SQL operations remain an anathema for a large majority of the new programming stock.

This is a pity because the side-effect of this attention diversion has been poorer data modeling skills and gross underutilisation of new and often improved RDBMS concepts & tools.

In the end, these new-school graduates of denormalisers and NoSQLers will have to contend with the one and only critical challenge that RDBMSs set out to fix: data correctness.

Performance & scalability mean shyte if you can't guarantee correctness. Bring to the table ACID transactions and MVCC with your new concepts of scalability and performance - then we talk ... kinda thing.

AK
I agree with the fixed width thing. I whipped up a responsive turntable concept and sent it over to them, but heard nothing. Check it out here:

http://jacksonmohsenin.com/2012/04/14/3-day-project-turntabl...
Terminal emulator and stand-alone ssh client for Chrome Browser - App
> Shouldn't web search engines act like discovery tools?

If your business model is based on advertising that depends on masses of page views to generate value, then no. You want to be as generally useful as possible so that e.g. people use you as an (extremely inefficient) DNS service.

(Google Labs has a single optional feature available for search. Perhaps their arch doesn't make 20% or Labs projects a good fit for plugging in extra fancy search features?)
pip freeze works even without virtualenv. Expunge things you know don't matter, and send to third party/deploy, which then just has to run pip install -r requirements.txt.
plug dj is nice. If only I could understand why the heck the stuff in the chat is being translated into my language and put a stop to that it would be awesome.
IPad '4G' claims face scrutiny from UK regulator
Bollocks I say. It's all about latency and bandwidth. If I'd have fiber in my cabin in Montana, I might agree. Perfect connectivity all times is just a dream. Plus native will always have an edge. Sure my calendar is in the cloud, but everything.. nah, don't think so. For photos and videos the pipes ain't fat enough for anything but backup and sync.
I'd be interested to read the terms of the warranty. Transferability may have been limited to personal use rather than the bulk warranty claims undertaken by the OP.

That's with my lawyer hat on at least.

With non-lawyer hat on, nice work OP in servicing a need and creating a business opportunity for yourself.
MiniJS - An Index of Tiny Javascript Frameworks / Libraries
Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm (BRAD) [video]
مسلسل نبض الحياة الحلقة 9 
مسلسل نبض الحياة الحلقة 9

نبض ,الحياة, الحلقة, 9

http://video.qlbak.com/11476.html
It is like saying voters decides everything in democracy. We all know what happened to that.
Will you publish the data?
Intranet Case Studies
Plataforma educación, Weeras
Weeras es una plataforma y comunidad educativa multieditorial, modular y escalable que permite acceder a contenidos digitales, trabajar con comunidades educativas para compartir información, experiencias y recursos, y realizar tareas de gestión de centro de formacion a través de módulos específicos de administración.
Types of stationery services available online
You can look for stationery services on the internet in your locality and find out from the local yellow pages of the internet. This will give you a list of these companies that provide products like tally books and medical index tabs. Please visit at Spaceagebindery.com
If I don't quit vim, and do Ctrl+P, things got cached (which you force-refresh with F5) so it's instant.

If I quit and restart vim, the Ctrl-P cache is invalidated thus it's scanning again, but it's down to 3~5s since disk reads got cached by the OS.
If you click your name in the bottom right you can disable chat translations.
"and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment"

Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!
Last time I used windowmaker it required hand editing config files, thats a pretty long way from shit that just work for most people.
How To Integrate ClamAV Into PureFTPd For Virus Scanning On Debian Squeeze
And as Crockford said, if you want comments in your JSON, knock yourself out - just strip them out before handing it over to your parser.
I can indeed safely degrade myself to use pure-vim easily enough, but the only one that bites me when missing every now and then is vim-surround.
Hacked Skype IP address search launched
No.

You expose yourself to known and unknown risks for slight (if any) known benefits and unknown benefits.

Should you, as a relatively healthy 31 year old male, eat better, get more exercise, stop smoking, drink alcohol sensibly, drive safer, etc? I have no idea about you personally, but most people could make reasonably simple lifestyle choices and dramatically reduce their risks of a bunch of stuff and increase their quality of life.

(As always, I'm not a doctor, I have no medical training, etc etc. Disclaimers aren't needed for HN, are they?)
Convert an image to html table (For Newsletters)
That specific point stuck out as incorrect to me as well. And given that it's one of the only technical points in the article, doesn't really inspire confidence in the author. That said, however, I do tend to agree with the overall hypothesis that the value add of "big data" is very marginal for most established industries, for exactly the reason he mentions: they've all been doing this for 20 years now. It's just become cheaper and easier recently. There are certain domains where modern data techniques can have a transformative effect, he mentions one (law). I don't think the data analytics solutions and companies that are being talked about are capable of generating these kind of transformative innovations though; so, I think the author is absolutely correct to say that the big data hype is overblown. There _will_ be big opportunities for big data, but they will come from disruptive startups finding new ways of doing old jobs. Not from crunching a few more GB of your data for a few less bucks.
Note: There's a few NSFW clips in that video (audio and video).

Also I note the irony of the Youtu.be URL shortcode ending with a swear word. (What are the chances of that?)
We all know the company could have brought up a ton of charges if they didn't like him abusing warranty. I think as a kid, he was smart to agree and walk away with the money he made so far, rather than risk a costly legal battle.
It's even harder to VERIFY correctness inside the DBMS with respect to keeping it managable and debuggable. That's why we pull it out into code behind an ORM. We can run a fully automated test suite in 30 minutes which will verify that the application will function as expected from the domain model.

Believe me, we still need ACID/MVCC and by no means do I want to break the consistency part of CAP theorem if possible.

Also set operations break down under the following conditions:

1. when you have to aggregate a LOT of data together they don't scale. If it scaled well we wouldn't need OLAP solutions and could do everything with live, perfectly normalised data. That is just not the way it is.

2. They really don't work for temporal or complex non-uniformly structured data at all well.
Similar to vim-nox, if you're on a Mac, you can install MacVim with homebrew like so:

brew install macvim --override-system-vim

which creates a /usr/local/bin/vim symlink, spawning a real terminal vim, not a GUI MacVim. And contrary to /usr/bin/vim this one will be built with the (system-provided) python and ruby support.
In fact they tend to optimise per engine.

If you look at NHibernate for example, if you do paging on SQL 2005+ it will use CTE yet on MySQL it will use LIMIT clauses underneath.

Some enterprise products have a really crappy schema with an ORM thrown over the top - that's where the pain is.
Another layer of irony: the wright brothers at the time used a different government bureaucracy (namely patents) to stop other people from building planes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
UK ISPs ordered to block Pirate Bay
Those two just say that it's easy to get fake awards. That's completely orthogonal to how much (if any) attention people pay to them.
One thing I didn't like after a quick look at Lua is that all variables are global by default.

j = 10 -- global variable
local i = 1 -- local variable

( from http://www.lua.org/pil/4.2.html )

Same with functions. To declare a function that is restricted to the local scope, you must explicitly use "local":

local f = function (...)
...
end

Can any Lua aficionados explain why this is the case? Surely a better design would be for variables to have local scope by default, and to require an explicit "global" prefix to be globally visible? Does this ever cause problems in real-world code?
> At peak hours as of 2007 the database handles around 2-2.5k transactions per second, which generate roughly 40,000 input/output operations per second on the disks.

That's not much...
There's explicit provision in the law allowing for people without a pilot's license to fly an experimental aircraft. I'm sure you can still get in massive trouble for flying through the upside-down layercake above airports, but it's not flat-out forbidden everywhere.
I think the problem is because when you used it the Python community probably still hadn't decided on a one true dependency system like Gems / rvm for Ruby, and Maven for Java. It's been about four years since I've heavily used Python, but hopefully this has been fixed by now.

I don't have this problem on either Ruby or Java.
The understated comment in his post that really caught my eye was this:

"Today it decided to update itself to the new chrome version with the Aura window manager."

This will be a boon to the average user, as they'll have constantly up-to-date software, and security holes can get patched as quickly as they're found. That said, I would be concerned with things changing like that without my control, but I expect I'm in the minority.
>One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity.

This is interesting, because I see things from the totally opposite perspective. I think a period of war is coming and that people in America will look back astonished that they didn't realize the value of what they had, including reliable electrical service.

Of course, the internet is far too fragile to successfully operate in a real war zone so I expect the internet as we know it will change rather dramatically too.
It is robust and amazing. I agree but if you push it to the limits it will bite you on the arse.

Probably about the same as you on just SQL Server and half as much again on Oracle...
+1 great article
Digg is one of those websites i used to use on a daily basis, it was my main source of news every day, now i forget it even exists until a story like this pops up.

The one thing that this teaches me is that if you have a web property with a decently sized user base, if you want to change things, do it incrementally and get feedback from users as you do it, rather than carpet bomb them with design and feature changes.
That bit is cheap.

How much does the storage subsystem cost?

You know the whole stack of fully redundant iSCSI/FC kit behind it?
Off-Path Attacking the Web
Here's the image at a higher resolution (1000x5565) : http://i.imgur.com/U2pRx.jpg
Hard to say at this point, but I'm not the least bit optimistic. At the rate B&N is burning through cash, Microsoft simply extended their runway an extra three quarters. The fundamental problems with Nook and B&N still exist, so until they announce some compelling change in business direction (other than an app for Win8) I'm not betting on that horse.
On the contrary, the vast majority of the time, when one is using SSL, they're using it because they want encryption, rather than identification.

The certificate system surrounding SSL is a complete mess. It does virtually nothing other than trigger false positives for people who who haven't paid the appropriate "security partner."

The very rare person who is actually using SSL for identification rather than just to establish an encrypted TCP connection, and therefore cares about certificates, can change the default.

PS: I know the standard response to this, that encryption without identification is useless, because without identification your counter-party might be Eve. In reality, in the real world, that doesn't happen. MITM attacks are extremely rare. And the real Eves on the net (phishers) can easily obtain signed certificates that will fool pretty much any end user.
> * like the ability to spend an hour a day reading any eBook on your Nook while physically inside a Barnes and Noble location.*

Oh, that's really cool. I didn't know that! I bet they could set up some pretty great partnerships with, e.g., Starbucks, too. If they did that, and I could go hang out at a coffee shop, sip a drink, and read anything I want for an hour... I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Most frustrations I've had with Perl/Ruby/Python have been down to inconsistent, incomplete or out-of-date packaging by the software distribution.

I've found I can mitigate most of this by using perlbrew/cpanminus, pythonbrew/pip and rvm/gem.

This adds complications when it comes to deployment - you've added additional maintenance dependencies to your servers if you don't stick with what the package manager provides... Nothing insurmountable, but keeping an eye on updates (would usually use email to notify on dated versions) and maybe having your CI system always use the latest versions of everything are possible methods. I'd like to hear better ideas, to be honest.

My background is both sysadmin and development, I think there should be no reason we can't make this all simpler for everyone.
There is no replication of features at all (backup/restore is fundamentally different - it exports the domain to disk, not the schema).

Well we could shift a deployment to Amazon RDS (Oracle or MySQL) quite happily in a couple of hours without having to rewrite everything because we used all the postgresql features...
Good point. Also in most situations data collection goes far beyond 1,000 customers at little to no additional cost. This doesn't necessarily break the author's point though since if there was tremendous value to this data, programs like Google Analytics wouldn't be free. The fact is that most of this data is worthless. You get most of your value from one or two data points that you chose to quantify a qualitative goal.

My perspective comes from my first market research job where I was hired to "make sense" of Nielsen's data for a TV series. It was a cop-out on the company's part - a trained high schooler could have done what I did, organizing thousands of numbers to recognize the 4-5 key takeaways to present back to them. I think the intimidation of large sets of data often tricks people into thinking they're more valuable then they are, and as data collection intensifies, so does this fallacy.
I guess that is because pip is not part of the official Python. Maybe best described as a front-end to distutils (which is what your link documents and is part of official Python).

edit: Python docs front-page[1] also notes following:

A new documentation project, which will be merged into the Python documentation soon, covers creating, installing and distributing Python packages: http://guide.python-distribute.org/

[1] http://www.python.org/doc/

So I guess that they have acknowledged that the docs are suboptimal currently in this part.
Those stats are waaay inaccurate. http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html
If I were Amazon right now, I'd start giving away a Kindle for free to Prime subscribers. B&N has to generate revenue from the hardware they sell, otherwise they're in deep trouble financially...Amazon can easily beat them in the race to the bottom and still make it up selling content.
>A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.

The breakdown that is going to happen when Facebook and/or Gmail's database gets dumped and uploaded to The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks is going to be mind-blowingly tremendous.

On top of that, I wouldn't expect any slowdown after "a major privacy event". I fully believe that we are in a world where very few organizational secrets can be kept. Virtually no one, including major corporations and governments, has a correct concept of what is necessary to protect digital data. In the early days of the war, when everyone is still able to use the internet, the intelligence leakage is just going to be astonishing.
Ask HN: What keeps you up at night?
I just found this question on the application form of Techstars. I have no idea what they want to see through this question...
I've been using this handy graphical tool called WPrefs that ships with WindowMaker (since at least 1998). The only time I hand-edited a config or menu was to enable functionality which nobody ever used (hiding all dock items but keeping icons small and visible and preserving both global and virtual desktop-specific icons/windows depending on context).
That's a bit of a broad question to ask: It would depend on what your personal relationship is with the other co-founder -- and that can mean anything from a spouse/childhood best friend to someone you never knew before last week. On the business side it would depend on what your agreement was with your other partner, and what you've put into it. I guess my best bit of meta advice would be to not burn your bridges behind you, and since you're the one abandoning ship that you make it as easy as you can on the other partner.
You're joking right? The fact that it even mentions the terms randomized and observational puts it in the 99th percentile of medical science reporting.

And why can't you combine results from observational studies and controlled studies? Surely they both provide evidence (albiet very weak evidence in the former's case) of the effect.
Awesome - I've been wondering why a service like this doesn't exist for a while. I recon their a quite a lot of people who don't have the technical skills to built their own stuff but need something less finished that a full commercial product - this could be a great outlet for something like that.
Spread of Health Information Technology in the US
For over a year now, the health IT devices have been witnessing a sudden spurt with several new devices entering theU.S.market. Several analysts believe that smartphones, tablet computers and personal digital assistants have given a new direction to the healthcare IT market.
There have always been dependencies outside the standard library, and those have had dependencies -- which more often than not, are incompatible with whatever version of Python my environment is set up for.

Create a virtual environment for the Python version you want to use, and install the package with pip (pip will install all the dependencies in your project's local environment)...

$ mkdir myproj
$ cd myproj
$ virtualenv --python=python2.7 env
$ source env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip install somepackage
Yeah, but at the same time, there is an added value provided by the TPB: it indirectly promotes creators through their distribution channel, thus raising their awareness and popularity, just like Radio. It's not a zero sum game. That's why there are also a number of artists in favor of P2P networks, because they clearly see a way to increase their exposure and therefore grow their audience.
RFID Business Applications
Not to pick on you per se, but this reasoning is often seen in relation to SSL (or encryption in general) and is dangerously wrong.

Encryption without identification and authentication of your communication partners is useless. You may very well end up with a very secure link with the wrong communication partner (google 'man-in-the-middle-attack').

I agree that the (public) CA system is a mess, however especially with machine-to-machine communication it is very easy to generate, sign and use your own certificates. And contrary to popular belief, self-signed certificates are not any less secure than public CA signed ones. Both have their own use-case though.

If someone cares I'll be happy to explain the above points in more detail.
My pet cat.
It is not harder to verify correctness inside the RDBMS. Rather, it is easier because RDBMSs are highly engineering and extensively tested.

You say you still need ACID, but you advocate manually writing joins on top of an ORM layer which does not give you ACID and introduces massive latency. Using an ORM on top of an a key value store doesn't absolve you of ACID or having joins. You still do joins and transactions, but you need to write them manually and test correctness manually. Both are very expensive to do correctly and running some unit tests is not sufficient to show correctness at this level. You are writing these things without recognizing what they are.

The whole NoSQL movement is fundamentally about trading correctness for performance, and usually read performance at that. There is nothing else new about NoSQL databases and ironically many even use a variant of SQL for queries! SQL is just a language, not an implementation.

As for aggregates, yes they are hard. By doing it yourself you are not making the problem less hard. Rather, you are possibly implementing solutions that RDBMS's can't yet do. I suspect that with a reasonable relational design you could probably do whatever aggregates you need to in a high performance manner while still taking advantage of the work done in an RDBMS.

It sounds like you don't understand the requirements of your application. If you need full ACID, your solution with nosql + ORM + manually written joins and queries is failing you. Unless, of course, if you are also writing your own global lock or using some form of lock-free algorithm.
Envy...I wanna have a cat.
I think the question may be asking what do you despise (you despise this thing so much it keeps you up at night.)
Hehe. Joking aside, I do not see the Linux desktop losing "share" in the near future. It may be a very long time before it reaches significant market size, but the latest major distributions are very solid (OpenSuse 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Mint), drivers support is better than ever (while not perfect), and "app stores" are becoming more and more common. There are signs of progress, and if the rumours of a Linux client for Steam are real, there is no way it cannot grow further.
IMHO, the complexity that this would introduce just highlights why it's a good idea not to have them.

> "but I think it would be legal to reject JSON with duplicate keys."

No it would not. `SHOULD` has a very specific meaning:

SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

An object with duplicate keys must be parsed, but the exactly result will be implementation specific (undefined).
Plink by DinahMoe