skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh, Hadoop is much older than MongoDB, is an offline system, and doesn't destroy your data. There is also not much in the way of alternatives. I'm skeptical we will see many "we're switching off of Hadoop" posts anytime soon. That said, there is an growing undercurrent in the Clojure community to roll your own map reduce system instead of using Hadoop.
If you count OLTP as "a system that places orders created by people", then you might be right.

As a VoltDB eng, we see lots of OLTP workloads that require much more throughput than legacy RDBMs can offer on a single system.

How many transactions do you think it requires to pick which ads to show you on a webpage?

How many updates to your Farmville-style game state are required per minute? How many concurrent users? What about MMOs?

Are financial exchange orders OLTP? If so, you have a six-figure TPS problem.

What about sensor data? Network packet monitoring? Call data record dashboards?
That's a good point. I guess I was more concerned that other companies (or unscrupulous app developers) might abuse the ability to place ads anywhere. As long as Google exerts strict control over ad policy and placement, it's a win-win like you said.
I implemented Conway's Game of Life in AppScript once: http://sigusr2.net/2010/Jun/25/google-spreadsheets-game-of-l...
If you'd turn down funding from legendary VC firms because they have a shitty website... well good luck with that.
I don't get it. Is this a replacement for Alien? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_%28software%29)

If it's supposed to make packages for random unpacked software i'm kind of lost. It could be I just really suck at reading Ruby (don't know the language) but I couldn't find any code that looks at autoconf/automake files or standard open-source developer conventions to generate a package from scratch using the values intended by the developer. I've written two very crappy tools that do this to automatically generate packages (mainly for Solaris, RedHat and Slackware).

To answer the guy above's question: you need to learn how to make basic Makefiles and after that it's all package-manager-specific stuff, which you can use something like Alien (or fpm) to convert to whatever format you wish.
They're not going up against the iPad directly, instead they're making a top-to-bottom system that makes more sense for schools than iPads do. http://jonathancarter.org/2012/05/10/edubuntu-preliminary-pl...
No, that's not what parent is doing. For example, he may prefer they didn't do the work at all. And "for you"? Where does that come from?

Personally, I have no problem with this - in fact, I'm paid to write FOSS - but some people feel uneasy with the commercialization of the work that traditionally belongs to communities of volunteers, and in certain situations I feel the same.
I'M Watch
I've just received a confirmation that I'M Watch watches will be sent from July 15th to September 15th
More clutter.
You're absolutely right in that the like is a metric which translates to views. However, for a small business such as a restaurant, they really should have been focusing on conversions. This also applies to any startup. So what if 10 million people visit your landing page? How many of those convert? Out of those who sign up for a free account, how many convert to a paid account?

One thing I definitely would have done differently is to add a hook with the like in the form of traditional marketing (a coupon or discount). Small businesses have used discounts for ages because it works.

I'm actually very interested in how the advertisement and marketing landscape will change over the next 5-10 years.
Sorry, didn't mean to be rude. I meant that it was obvious that it was up to the client to send read receipts or not (you could easily just take an open source XMPP client and comment out the line that sends read receipts), not that the relevant XMPP draft was obvious.
I wonder if [http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/05/find-facts-and-do-res...] is related. It looks similar, but I can't verify as docs is blocked at my workplace.
Great write up and timely for us as we are looking at setting up our stack. Please keep us posted with your progress and any ongoing operations issues.
I was Nearly Arrested at a Hackathon
Webview can be done quite well if it is done correctly. Did you know that most everything in individual messages in the Gmail app on Android is done with a webview?

The reason it is fast though, is it is not loading that webview from a website, but building it from data locally. That gives it a native app speed.

On the other hand, the original Google+ release for the iPhone was bad because it was pretty much a webview downloaded on demand too.

Facebook is just loading it on demand basically as a webpage.

So it's possible Twitter is using a webview, but downloading the data separately for speed.
PasteVault
A little site I put together for creating secure temporary links to bits of text. Useful for sending sensitive information into a support email, emailing a password to a coworker, etc.
GIMP 2.8 Review – was it worth the three year wait?
Backing a College Dropout Might Be Your Smartest Investment Strategy
I find that first intuition odd. What if we alter to situation to not involve the new parts? Simply disassemble the old car parts and reassemble them, is that a brand new old-car?

Or how about we make all the new parts plastic so that no functioning "car" is produced by the gradual part-for-part substitution. We end up with two cars, one an all-plastic car model, and one consisting of all the old parts assembled and functioning. Which has the better claim to being the old car?

Yeah, part exchanges quickly leave me with even less salient intuitions about the proper use of old identity terms than these more "splitting" oriented cases. What should we say if a lion talked and all that.
You know who else has a horrible website? Berkshire Hathaway http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ . Lets think about this for a minute. Do VC firms want people to go to their website and email them about a cool investment? How do people actually interact with VC firms is that its usually a one on one with the company that they are trying to invest in. Therefore, they don't really need a expensive website to be successful.
All this back and forth makes me want to write a blog post called "Please learn"
IPhone, Google, Facebook: Which Would You Give Up?
Awesome info! Would you be interested in being part of a case study about IPv6 migration? (or if not you directly, perhaps someone at your company?) I'm working on IPv6 case studies for our Deploy360 site at the Internet Society. Please contact me at york@isoc.org if interested.
It seems like ranters against MongoDB often don't really understand how it works and thus what it is good for.

My simple mental model for MongoDB is: indices (should!) fit in memory and documents are stored contiguously on disk. That is it in a nutshell. A query involves in-memory lookups and maybe only one disk seek. Writes in place are usually possible.

I have been happiest with MongoDB in two different scenarios:

The first is in developing small web applications where there is no scaling issue, and the fact is that MongoDB is so easy to develop against and simply provides a great developer experience. As needed, I use a cron job to do a mongodump a few times a day; or, if I really need high availability (which, frankly, often I don't: if a system is unavailable one or twice a year for an hour it is no big deal) then replica sets are OK.

The second scenario where I have really liked using MongoDB was doing analytics on a modestly large stream of social media data. A single Mongo master on a large EC2 instance was adequate to handle writes and slaves on other large EC2 instances each fed a different analytics application. This setup of apps reading from a slave on the same server worked really well for me. This was a low hassle experience.

I do have one customer with really large MongoDB setups on multiple data centers, and I am working around right now on some hassles, but we haven't found anything else as cost effective for the customer's applications.

All that said, when I can use it, just using a single (no horizontal scaling) PostgreSQL server is for me the most hassle free developer experience, but I have always used PostgreSQL for small or medium sized applications - nothing that needed to scale.
Neither my router nor my ISP supports IPv6.
Hey, it's a start! :-)
Oh dear. Have all the proofreaders at the Rolling Stone been locked up in a similar entrapment case?

> "[...] the indictments of Animal Liberal Front activists who burned down [...]"

> "In the Harrisburg 7 trial of in 1972 [...]"

> "They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government."
Indeed, I expect we'll see that kind of thing happening as IPv4 exhaustion increases.
Say hello to the real real-time Web
I'm (primarily) a coder and I've started writing a short weekly newsletter for the users of the application I'm supporting and extending. The basic format is "what happened this week" and "what may happen next week" as well as a "please communicate with us if you have concerns or ideas". I'm now 14 weeks into this experiment, and I've found a things worth sharing.

1. Explaining to your entire user base what you're up to helps you focus your efforts on meaningful demonstrable progress instead of gold-plating.

2. It has been said a hundred times before, but the way to get better at writing is to write.

3. People prefer incremental changes over disruptive redesigns, especially if they are given a heads-up before the incremental changes happen.

4. People care about the quality of writing. I've gotten a bunch of comments about how they actually enjoy reading the newsletter. That was totally unexpected.

5. Tone matters. I've found a good conversational tone that incorporates just a touch of humor and self-deprecation without being too casual. My userbase is non-technical, so I can't leak jargon on them. Metaphors help.

6. Cadence matters. Writing a weekly update is much easier than writing an update "just whenever".

7. Having an editor helps. I generally write the entire message, but pass it along to comrade to send it out to see if anything is confusing, I've made any typos, or forgot to finish one of my sentenc
Data doesn't answer why
I do a lot of the clothes shopping for my wife, so this could be a very useful tool.

Seems potentially very interesting. I have no interest in pinterest, but the inversion concept here seems very unique and could potentially be a lot of fun.
good stuff. always good to hear other app success stories.
Thanks! It was an interesting project to work on, glad you like the result. KPCB has a very good person that was previously at Hulu to help them with marketing (Christina Lee) and she was the driving force behind them getting it done the right way - rather than having an intern do it.
Yes, what I was saying is that Node makes that really simple, and PHP, Python, Ruby, etc don't.
That's more of a side effect of having everything be asynchronous though.
I hadn't considered the coding situation, but you're right: coding is something where you need a visual reference to make sure that you're both on the right page.

But what about this compromise: Skype voice conversation + skype text-chat for showing each other code snippets.
I've done a lot of research and testing with Riak (not had the pleasure of using it in production yet), and although some of the things that are easy in other DBs are backwards (like listing all records, for instance), I have a secret love affair with it. MongoDB claims to have simple scalability, but I've worked with it on a large project at Aol and found this to not be true at all. We basically had to implement our own sharding on top of it since its auto-sharding was so poor, and only needed to shard in the first place because of the global write lock. Riak, on the other hand, is an operations dream, and if you're a dev and ops guy in one (like me) I stay up at night thinking about using it for every project.

That said, a lot of people have started to use Riak for a general purpose tool. There are some development growing pains associated with this (and you have to think very carefully about your keys and data structure) but it's only getting easier with things like secondary indexes and Riak search. If there was a non-expensive way to enumerate all the data in a bucket, I think that'd be the one last item on the checklist before I jumped on it.
When you said infinite scrolling, I assume you mean content that keeps getting added as you go further down the page (Facebook-style)?

In that case I agree with you, but when it comes to articles the whole article could just as well be loaded instantly, in my opinion.
And then the next day, we'll be surrounded by posts about the first time a person used the word 'please', and why another person continues to use please, and another post encouraging the use of please more often...

And HackerNews will have been successfully trolled again.
I agree - you need to fake some data... it sounds kind of shady but it's common and necessary for a service like this.
I would do it myself, but you can outsource on amazon mechanical turk (if it's dead easy), or use something like elance.
Home-built "Bio Computer" runs Linux, grows wheatgrass
If the general population programs as much as it applies math and sciences, Atwood's worries about "more bad code" would be completely moot.
I bet a lot of other VC funds copy this.
Google+'s 170m+ users and how to increase their engagement?
This article is funny that it points out the fact that the websites for the venture capital firms are lacking and quite horrible. You would think they would want a better looking site but then again, they are the ones who are being sought out so why care?
Just gave up my iPhone yesterday. Switched to an HTC One X (Dual core 1.5Ghz, Android Ice Cream Sammich, 4.7" screen.. UNREAL).

Buh bye Apple.
Where is this knowledge graph, how do I try it out?
Obviously everyone has different shaped hands - but for me, the pinky doesn't need to be entirely flat to reach the underscore. I also don't have to shift my whole wrist.

Either way, reaching the + key on QWERTY-102 is objectively more difficult than the underscore [uses the pinky, is farther away than the underscore from homerow], and also requires a shift-modifier. I use + far more than _ while I'm coding. (And I'm currently writing most of my code in Go, so I use _ quite a bit since it's a blank identifier.)

Maybe I just have big hands, but it honestly doesn't impede my typing at all to add an underscore to the text.
"Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his Elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties." - Ben Jonson via Richard Mitchell

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/
Remote work is bad for startups? Oh, please
My comment wasn't directed at you in the sense that you should know, rather I was pointing out that writing call options is not for someone looking for a way to short Facebook who is not a sophisticated investor since writing a call option has a theoretical unlimited risk.

Any regular stock broker could help you set up an account and advise you on how to “bet against” companies being actively traded as long as you are allowed to in your specific country.

GS and other investment banks are required for much more complext trades than betting against companies. Usually trades involving illiquid markets.
Come to think of it, I do know some editors that support HTML rendering inside comment blocks.

How would you use it for coding, though? Unless you stripped it before the compile phase I would think any formatting in a rich-text format would choke up almost any interpreter or compiler.
I apologize for not expanding a bit.

I meant to say that this is my target market even though it is one of the oldest problems in business. It is not fancy or the latest fad. But it impacts everything directly. Marketing powers the economy. Jobs. Startups. Software.

My choice was to design a solution with software that would allow businesses to attack this problem effectively and efficiently.

The size of the pie available allows for others to join in. Innovation is greatly needed in this area. I encourage fellow engineers to take a deep look at the problem.
Hi debacle, it makes sense, if you already do select clothes for your wife. Of course, you can always also just aggregate links in an email, but the game mechanics at Flair do make it fun indeed :)
While HN brings eyeballs it does not really bring profits unless you are innovating in the "productivity / programming / business" product space.

What it CAN do is give you decent SEO via reposts that helps diversify your inbound links resulting in better pageranking. My month of blogging has brought me from ~90th for "android dj app" to ~9th in google search.
Pentest Market Magazine May Issue Released
Love it. I think Node is the hot shit right now, and Rails is starting to get into the hate-period.

It's really just hipsters and music. We are all really just hipsters.
Introducing the Knowledge Graph
My question as well.
Looking forward to it! Not sure for your subject, as I am computer vision guy. In fact, I work on large scale image recognition and there is something about this which I love...there's a lot of potential for image analysis here.
Blame yourself before blaming MongoDB. If you've been around the software industry you should always be mindful of fads and vaporwares. When you make a decision to use MongoDB you better have done your homework first or do some testing yourself. Given the low cost of renting bunch of EC2 machines for a few hours, it's idiotic to build a business around MongoDB or any other system that has not been fully proven without doing bunch of stress testing yourself. Yes, and don't trust software vendors, get independent advice or test it yourself.
Is CGI Software Poised to Kill Photography? It's Close
Similar to a degree, but I can't tell from Google's publicly shown designs if they are even going for the eye-tap paradigm. So far the camera and display are spatially separated and one has to look up from a scene to see the display.

Though I suppose they may be thinking that common use-cases will involve rotating one's head down a bit while maintaining one's line of sight, similar to "looking over one's glasses", which would bring their screen between the user's eye and what one is looking at.
Congrats, in my humble opinion this looks like a game changing idea. I don't see any reason why this can't become a legitimate news source or the visual version of reddit where upvotes come from density ratings.

I'm pretty sure you've thought of this but if not here is some algorithm advice: you should start recording baseline density referenced by time (maybe use Fourier to detect time patterns?) so you can start filtering out the noise. That way you can filter out the few thousand pictures of the Empire State Building everyday unless something happens at the ESB in which case density would dramatically increase relative to time.

Also, this would be great to see visually on a map where when you zoom farther and farther in the clusters get redrawn so I can see micro events happening within the major event.

Great job!
If for some reason I had to make this choice? Facebook.
I wouldn't even blink.
Clutter?! How could you call that clutter! Just because they're shoving more information down our throats that we don't want doesn't mean it's clutter!

Sure, you still have to find the source of the "summary" to understand it and determine how they got that information so it will make sense to you. But it's better than just giving you the search results which already have the summary! Right?

And yeah, the search results already have links to all the different kinds of [taj mahal]. Now you can filter down the top pages to a specific type instead of clicking on the link that matches what you want! It's so easy it takes an extra click!

You just don't understand, man. Google knows what you want, even if it isn't what you want. And you'll take it and like it. Psht... clutter.
Quick, everybody download a copy of the freebase dataset before they kill it!

On the other hand, I'm glad something is coming out of the metaweb acquisition.
This pathology is NOT caught from eating pork. It can come from any food prepared by someone atypically shedding eggs (most likely someone from Latin America.) In fact you are more likely to get it from eating raw salad than cooked pork.

"But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat."
More relevant results.
I last reread Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago not long after 9/11. What was particularly salient is how many of the people he describes had been charged with terrorism by Stalin's organs.

There's nothing particularly shocking in the rolling stone article. Terrorists are so designated for political ends.

That's not to say that they're never criminals, just that conspiracy to blow up a bridge is already a crime.
Facebook would be the first one, of course. And iPhones don't interest me anymore.
MapBox adds gorgeous retina maps
I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, allow me to add my own data point. I was the typical bored-at-BigCo guy but was afraid to completely jump into startups full time (I have a family). I decided to bootstrap my startup (mobile app) at the beginning of 2010, while working full time for 6 months. 6 months after that I quit my job full time as the income from the startup surpassed my SV engineering salary (made 75K in 6 months). In 2011, I traveled the world for 7 months with my wife while making my 2nd app, and my income went up to 340K. This year, I'm pretty much working ~20 hrs a week and I'm on track to hit at least 600K (already did 300K YTD). No full time employees, no VCs, no board, minimal expenses (macbook + iphone), no hassle.

I have friends and relatives who have done YC, gone the whole fundraising route, etc. Some who are fairly successful, but I wouldn't trade places with them in a second. I'm not saying bootstrapping is better, but if you are like me (risk averse and lazy) then it is definitely a legitimate option.
To boldly go where Node man has gone before
If I had reason to believe that programs I want to use would be written with this code, I would be happy to back it. I don't have a lot of hope for that though.
It is, surely, difficult to create a product that is better than Oracle/DB2 in every dimension. These systems have thousands of engineer-years of work baked into them.

On the other hand, it's pretty easy to beat these systems by specializing. Take some part of what they do and do it better. [Insert sports car / minivan / mack truck analogy here]

The interesting question is whether the pain of using the new system is less than the pain of using the old system. New system pain often comes from having fewer features or a less robust implementation. Legacy pain often comes from managing software that has to maintain compatibility with 20 year old apps and scaling workloads on software designed when 8mb of ram was a lot and clusters weren't practical.

I will also say from experience, if you take a copy of Oracle and the same hardware from the TPC-C leader board, you will have a hell of a time replicating their results. They use every trick in the book and spend huge sums of money tuning for these benchmarks (n.b. I don't fault them). In practice getting throughput close to what they claim on actual real-world apps is not realistic.

Now, you should take all benchmarks with a grain of salt (even mine). Ask a vendor how fast the system will run on a real workload that you understand with the configuration you plan to deploy with. If their number is attractive, build a POC and check for yourself.