skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are great examples towards the fact that the relational model isn't always the best way to go. Especially with regards to an evolving model.
In object oriented models, polymorphism can be employed to extend an existing model with rather minimal impact. Introducing, for instance, a subtype for an address in a relational model isn't easily done.
I'd rather model in OO land and use the DB as dumb object store.
I haven't implemented a serious project based on an real OO database. Any experiences you guys would want to share with regards to model flexibility with an OODB?
I don't know if I agree with this. While I agree Ebay needs to do something, I don't think Amazon gains enough for the merger/acquisition. While I think gaining half.com would be a big benefit and remove a marquee competitor for Amazon's handling of second hand sales, I think that Ebay itself is too different a property and it doesn't exactly gel with the rest of the Amazon properties.

I don't know really, I'll need to think more about it.
Why we can't stop birds downing aircraft
That breaks as soon as you realise apps:databases isn't 1:1 but n:1 and you can't scale without having core logic implemented in one place and one place only.
Impossible. This is pure theory and has no ground on reality.

I have apps still running well after 15 years that would beg to differ.

You example is clearly an extreme outlier.

I never said that the business requirements don't change. That would be silly. I simply said that a rigorously designed data base structure should easily handle the changes you expect in your apps.

Did you build in audits? Transactions? Date effectivity? Sequentially numbered keys? Multi-part keys? I can go on and on, but you get the idea. I've made a career rewriting data base applications where the original designer failed to anticipate the simplest of new requirements.

Your English is fine. And you don't sound obnoxious. I just found your "no ground on reality" a bit at odds with my opinion a millions lines of code later.
Why not just use the shopping cart that is offered? Think the site is simple, clean and straight. Have you ever seen a PHP flash site about firewood? dont think it will work.
No worries. HN does a case insensitive search at the time of registration. ( guess how I know ;) ) Long back it wasn't doing that, I think.
No, just Evolution.
The Cultural Gulf Between Lawyers And Technologists On Patent Law
The gist of the article is this:

1) The author loves Amazon and eBay.

2) Amazon is the best at cataloging items and eBay is still trying to solve this problem with user-generated items.

3) eBay is the auction monster and Amazon has an interest in bolstering their store with an auction marketplace.

So they should merge? What's wrong with competition?

I tend to think this is just some pipe dream from a guy who really likes Amazon and eBay, and not much thought has gone into how the new company will be a greater success than the separate parts or how it could be positive for consumers.

I'm also not seeing what Amazon gets out of this. I understand eBay gets better cataloging technology. I don't think the value of that is anywhere near enough to justify a multi-billion dollar merger but that's beside the point. Amazon has user-generated items already and they often fetch prices at least as high as the same items on eBay. They already have as much visibility as they want for user-generated items. (See the article from yesterday about the Amazon shopping cart. They increased visibility for user items and then refocused on Amazon items.) If they wanted auctions they could add them. My guess is the reason they haven't is because they're not interested.

I think the author should read up on the AOL Time Warner merger. That one was supposed to result in some super company that would rule the media world and we know how well that turned out.
Ask HN - Recommend a Django/Postgres Web host?
Hi we are working on a startup camp in sydney, we need a low cost Django/Postgres Web host?

Can you recommend?
now thats impressive.
I find that NewEgg is more than adequate for any sort of tech purchase. I guess that if people are going to be spending a lot on expensive tech equipment (and nearly all of it is expensive) then they'd probably like to see it in person first.
Actually, Lukewarm Touch is tremendously powerful. For example, it could be used to stop nuclear meltdowns. You could use that person to power cooling mechanisms of basically unlimited power. If the volume of liquid affected is unlimited, this person could single-handedly throw the climate into disarray or, with the help of some inexpensive mass-produced hardware, power entire geographical regions.
You know, after seeing over and over how the supposedly worse ways actually worked better - perhaps it's time to re-decide what is actually good and bad in a language?
Bookmarklet fix for overwide News.YC PREs
Fine, here's the US data for 2005 from the CDC. I don't think you can ascribe deaths from heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's to doctor error. Most come from lifestyle choices. Cigarettes, junk food, and no exercise make Homer something something (DIE EARLY).

You might strengthen your argument for me if you talk about proximate vs underlying causes of death. We're all going to die.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm

Quote:

(Data are for U.S. for year indicated)
Number of deaths for leading causes of death

Heart disease: 652,091
Cancer: 559,312
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 143,579
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 117,809
Diabetes: 75,119
Alzheimer's disease: 71,599
Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
Septicemia: 34,136

Source: Deaths: Final Data for 2005, Table C
Yahoo Becomes More FriendFeed-like, Adds Updates From 20 Outside Sites
Something a little like this happens on our elections app: politicians have a name and party, but sometimes run in an election under a different name (eg. "Robert" runs as "Bob") and party (eg. Joe Lieberman lost his primary but won in the general as an independent). And sometimes they're doing this in multiple elections at once.
Yes, but not everybody in the world has to sell directly to consumers...
If you find the other recommendations here a bit more than you were looking for, have a look at Wink:

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Patent troll seeks to ban Nokia, RIM, Palm from importing devices to the U.S.
The solution to this is a multi-tier architecture. Only one application that implements the domain model talks to the DB and all other apps talk to that application. This doesn't give you the raw performance of a model living purely in the DB but may be a viable design decision. You trade flexibility for performance.
PHP is the language that got me to where I am now. In the last 2 months, I've started diving into server-side javascript and have been working with a couple of small projects that are working to bring out widely usable solution. Its really only been in the last year that I've started sniffing when I have to work in PHP. Its been my bread and butter for 4 years, but I've gotten to the point where the inconsistencies in the overall naming schema are annoying (is it "(x,y) or (y,x)" for this string method?). Deployment is super easy with PHP.
I think one thing the author missed is that Java is (unfortunately) the primary language taught to most beginning programmers in college. This fundamentally shapes their budding programmer mentalities. PHP has served a similar role as a way for a lot of people like me to get into programming that didn't do much college and are completely self-taught.
Meh. The amazing thing is that Fry's with a kickback scheme running is cheaper than Circuit City with a sale running.
I think total revenue is a poor way to measure the demand for music. The delivery of music recently became a lot more efficient now that songs can be downloaded online. It only makes sense that revenues would decline because a lot of the overhead that was built into the price has disappeared. It also doesn't help that for years the music industry conspired to keep the price of CDs artificially high.
And you really lose a lot of altitude in the stall you induce in that turn, or trying to extend a glide by back pressure, engine(s) out.

When in doubt, land straight out.
According to wikipedia, homeopathy and acupuncture are taught at all six accredited naturopathic schools in North America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturopathy#Modalities

Incidentally, the effect of plants is the result of the interaction of the chemicals inside the plants with the chemicals in the body. Willow bark reduces pain because it has aspirin in it.

If, as you say, naturopaths are just practicing scientific medicine but using plants rather than chemicals, all they are doing is adding a new source of errors to traditional medicine. Rather than giving a patient 200mg of aspirin, you give them a plant which is likely to have about 200mg of aspirin in it (more or less).
Never underestimate the power of unintended consequences and faulty assumptions. Setting minimum size on fish caught, for example, is intended to protect the young and, hopefully, still virile individuals so that they can sustain the population.

Did you catch the faulty assumption? Small != Young (at least, not necessarily...)
Leading-edge "tribes" is also the best of cultural New York.
Mail.app vs Entourage
I hope it doesn't attain AI, bootstrap itself onto the internet and take over the world.
I expected this: http://tumbler.sourceforge.net/
oh man, so close! i agree with most of that, and was just about to vote you up, until i read "try using your head next time."

i know we've got a lot of new people lately, so: no insults on hacker news, folks.
I can still round down to 20.... Thank god. I will be rounding up though this year..

Can you guess how old I am. lol
Hey robg, are you familiar with the general landscape of cognitive modeling/simulation implementations?

Although Emergent claims to help creating models of cognitive processes, it still seems like one of the "low-level" NN libraries (evidently, it is listed alongside FANN and Matlab NNT). I have very superficial exposure to this stuff, but they seem quite a bit removed from creating complex simulations, unless you already have a detailed, theoretical model of particular cognitive processes, which would probably also be isolated models.

On the other hand there's ACT-R and SOAR, which seem to fit the description better. Or am I mistaken?

By the way, for those interested, ACT-R is aimed at providing a comprehensive whole-brain simulator, and runs on common lisp-based NN.
Yes, but did it MapReduce the department?
Can someone summarize the video for those of us without speakers and/or at work?
This is awesome... Incredible potential.
I had to get a part time job to support myself in grad school. The first offer I got was a local Circuit City. I worked at that location for about 6 months, and then moved to the 3rd largest store in the chain when I transfered schools.

I was a customer service associate and, yes CSA's, as they called us, were the lowest paid position. Never underestimate the value of quality customer service! On top of that, lazy managers always had me do tasks they didn't feel like working on...by the time I left that store, I had the access codes for every manager except the Store Director! I could move inventory, receive shipments, alter time-cards, etc...and I was getting paid $9/hr.

Can't say I'm particularly sad to see them go...
In my opinion the notion of implementing business logic outside of the database and acknowledging the longevity of the data are not necessarily in conflict. You need to have a well defined model and you can choose whether the database is a full implementation of that model or just a representation of the state of that model.

I don't find databases well suited for expressing complex behavior - programming languages are far better at that.
Zumodrive Takes Cloud Storage And Syncing Up A Notch (YC S07)
How Failure Is Viewed in the Innovation Community: Seattle Startups and VCs Weigh In
I agree, I would rather enjoy my work than get paid a lot of money to do something that was uninteresting and not challenging.

I have been thinking about this for the past few days after seeing a job advertisement that's billed as the best job in the world. Basically, Australia is offering to pay someone 100k to go to an island for 6 months, do a a little yardwork, do some interviews, and play for 6 months. While it would be nice to take a vacation, I am enjoying going to school and studying engineering. So it really wouldn't be worth it for me to get behind a year just for a six month vacation. Sure, I would enjoy it for a month or two, but after that I would want to get back into some actual work. And once that happens, the only thing that would keep me interested in staying would be the money that I was getting.
data can't "live" very long locked in an airtight cage...
Item 2 should not really be a problem unless you are using cheap shared hosting. You should test your stuff on your workstation, not on the server. If you do not test on the server, the whole restart apache after you upload something becomes moot. Also, if you happen to change many files, what will users see in your application when half of the site uses new logic and half of it used the previous one? This is a nasty habit.

Loose typing is the cause of many, many very difficult to find bugs. Nobody should ever be exposed to that.

As for the code already written being sub-par, it comes with the low entry barrier. The easier it is, the more people who shouldn't program will program in it.
I will hire you for free.

Ill give you experience to work in the real world and work with you.

A few months down the road after the projects we have worked on together start making money, you will then become a paid programmer.

If this is a serious inquiry, get in contact with me. We can work something out. I only work in asp.net and C# and will accept vb.net so you have to want to learn...

I am a one man team with the help of one other guy working on a few websites ideas I have.
Oh wow. I never expected this many replies...
But anyways, thank you for the advice. I guess I am expecting people to be like me, which I realize is a bit ridiculous, now that you point it out.
I think I've been doing a little bit of what you said about trying to find people... I took up an internship at a public radio station because I thought the people there would be interesting, and the people there are great, but the age difference between me and everyone can be a bit awkward at times. I guess I need to repeat that kind of scenario where I put myself out there to meet new people.

You're absolutely right about doing stuff as a good cure for mental blocks. I got a road bike and started going for daily rides, and that helped a bit.
Amazing. Instantly reminded me of Dean Kamen's robotic arm.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob.html
If you look at the board ( http://investor.circuitcity.com/directors.cfm ), there doesn't seem to be much direct retail or electronics experience. Most of the individuals seem to come from finance or service industry backgrounds. Perhaps the board was attempting to be responsible but simply did not have the background necessary for evaluating the business.
The ecosystem a piece of software is attached to is tremendously important. PHP did a great job with fitting into the existing one. It's not that PHP is better. It did a better job in the most critical ways. (It was also decently fast.)
the argument against this is usually performance and code maintenance. writing something in a strict but clearly articulated language means there's a better chance the next person looking at the code will be able to figure it out. that said, php in many ways better reflects the opportunists in us all and is more familiar because of it. by using a hodgepodge of conventions all abstracted away from their parent languages into the same compiler, php lets us pick from a much wider palette of metaphors when we're conceptualizing how we approach solving a problem. which can be pretty damn useful for those of us who don't know all the answers. it feels as though it's designed for us (messy) humans.
depending on the size of your model, right? If your dataset is huge, your domain model app can shard the data and provide a nice entry point to tune performance without touching any of the n apps who are dependent on the data. I'm not sure i've ever seen a database that lets you plug in memcached to speed up certain queries.
In "fairness", the first couple chapters of the book was a disclaimer about how the companies were already great, but Collins' couldn't be blamed if they because crappy after the book was published. It looks like most of what went wrong with Circuit City went wrong in the last 8 years.
Generational change via selection is not the same thing as evolution.
Metaplace Readies Virtual World Platform
It's commendable that you post this in the open. That takes a lot of guts. You aren't alone, in fact like you mentioned... this is why Catcher In the Rye is so popular, so identifiable.

1. Take others advice with a grain of salt. 2. Dig down and get tough otherwise this beat you up. 3. Standards are worth having.

Not the best advice, but in reality you'll ultimately do whatever you decide and not what we tell you. Good luck.
Blue SnowBall (usb mic) + Audacity + Camtasia.

Start with the written dialogue, record it meticulously then do the visual.

The Blue Snowball referral came from Scott Chacon at GitCasts.
Great piece of equipment. Thanks Scott.
No industry could survive with this kind of decline. This is untenable. Something revolutionary needs to happen, and it can't come from within because they're too busy protecting the current, failing system.
This article is totally barking up the wrong tree. PHP's growth had little to do with its appeal to programmers, and lots to do with its appeal to shared hosting providers. Safe mode is what I'm talking about.
Yeah, people usually want to pay for services they think are valuable. Right now, I'm getting tutoring in one of my classes. My tutor was nice enough to offer to do it for free, but I definitely wanted to pay him. He was doing something for me that I considered valuable, and even though I'm a college student who does not have a whole lot of money, I wanted to compensate him for the tutoring.
I already ranted about this on my tumblelog: I'm not at all a fan of this release. Ugly, cluttered design, new features that aren't entirely necessary, and a lot of wasted space. I joined Tumblr for its simplicity, for how every feature added something. Most of this stuff is redundant crap.

EDIT: the rant is at http://unalone.tumblr.com/post/70951166/is-it-just-me-or-is-...
You're right on track (though I've barely done anything in this area). The common complaint against ACT-R was that it could never be reducible to a biological level. Since it started to introduce those NN components it's much further along in the last few years.

That said, I think there's a way to come at multiple higher-level functions in one complex NN model if you respected anatomical localization of function (and perhaps quasi-modularity). Randy O'Reilly (http://psych.colorado.edu/~oreilly/), part of the lead group that put this package together, has done some great work along these lines.
When I was in this situation, I somewhat wanted advice, but really I wanted someone to just take the time to talk to me.

If you feel that way, I'm free to talk - send me an email or aim me - Spyckie (at) gmail or Spyckie on aim.
> Where are the truly interesting people in life?

www.curi.us
This is a very thoughtful piece about the culture of a region, and how supportive it is when entrepreneurs fail.I'm guessing regional economic boosters outside of San Francisco and Boston might want to read this and learn some lessons they can apply at home.
Wider interface, more methods of exploring things - map, trendfollowing - more emphasis on your multiple blogs, directory of things you liked, sitewide search, "theme garden" for everybody to upload themes.
link to advertisement, please.
What do Wal-Mart and open-source software have in common?
200 million app store downloads in the past month
I've read this comment about ten times now and I still can't quite understand who was doing what to who. Am I going crazy?

Edit: I think I see now. The master's student was the distressed one.
ActiveRecord.js
Large mergers pretty much fail or under perform. Disney-ABC, ATT and its cable acquisitions, on and on.
People != "Business Model".

Just like "Success != Failure + Excuses".
Yeah. Until it runs out of money without a business plan. Then it will stop...rather suddenly.
Growth in the M1 index. http://www.shadowstats.com/
Ask HN: Any tips for using Python Interactively?
I'm SSH'ing into a Ubuntu box using Putty.

I need to run Python in interactive mode and am finding it pretty frustrating.

How do I get the last command? (like using the up arrow at the command line, or in IDLE on Windows Alt-P)

Any other tips?

I'm trying to get IPython going right now but am having some difficulties.

Thanks!
Agree.

"First who, then what" is still my favorite from the book. I think the "who's" changed at CC and that is "what."
"The platforms that win on the web are those that mirror its fundamental structure, not those that try to morph it into a more traditional "elegant" shape."

This reminds me of why C succeeded, because it mirrors Unix so well, that C and Unix succeeded hand in hand. So this part about PHP mirroring the shape of the web made the most sense to me, as someone who doesn't know any PHP.
I read her blog once. She didnt sound honest at all - assuming that she wrote her blog herself.
Tumblr is sick, unreal and sexy as hell.
I don't mind being down modded, I stand by what I said.

But I am honestly curious who here is a fan of Dowd's and Kristol's writing?
Good firewall suggestions (for windows xp)?
Can anyone recommend a high quality firewall? I am looking for something light, which works well with games and other performance-intensive applications.

I have tested many firewalls, eventually sticking with Sygate for the past few years. However, the product has been discontinued and I was wondering if perhaps there is something better out there.
This just proves that AI would not be soon here! The pilot did an amazing job, no AI can't beat theat.
Thanks. I suppose you have read this: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/shadowstats_deb....
That sounds reasonable.

The impression I gained from your blog post was that of willy-nilly denormalization and data duplication to accommodate edge-cases (which often become anything but) as they're discovered to make problems quickly go away. After working on a few development, refactoring and data conversion projects, I was astounded to discover how often those sorts of kludges crop up and how costly they become.

Perhaps you could write a sequel pointing out the pitfalls of what appear to be easy database fixes to design errors but turn out in the long-run to be anything but.
Oh gee, you're right. It wasn't posted last week, so it must be irrelevant and worthless, right?