skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a little surprised that 37signals hadn't sharded some of their applications. Sharding can be hard because you often don't have a logical way to separate out data. For example, on a site like this, you could shard articles based on year, but then if you wanted to get all the articles that a single user had submitted, you'd have to query several servers.

However, the inherent design of 37signals applications make sharding a lot easier. With 37signals apps, you're not dealing with all the users in the system or all of the data. You're dealing with one company's data and the users from that company. You could much more easily put data from companies with names A-I in DB1 and J-Z in DB2 and call it a day than most sites can shard. You wouldn't have to worry about things like losing cross database joins or having to lookup in multiple databases for certain reads.

In fact, with Basecamp, there's 6 possible domains that your site can be a subdomain of (projectpath.com, clientsecton.com. . .). Each one of those could point to a different set of app/DB servers. If you ran metrics on usage, you'd have to run it 6 times and aggregate the data, but in terms of user usage, each could be its own little separate system not even knowing the others existed.

Sharding becomes a problem when you can't fit all the data that will be used together on a single server. For example, Facbeook could shard by college, but you're allowed to have friends at different colleges from your own. So, you have to do things like cross shard lookups and that mess. With 37signals products (to my knowledge), everyone gets an account with your company's site and interacts with your company's stuff and if they want to interact with another company's stuff they log out and log back in with a different username/pass. So, everything can be neatly sharded by company since you don't have things that cross that boundary.
I didn't care for the tone of the letter, but the complaints were valid and your response doesn't correspond to them in any way. He's not showing any disdain for "hapless employees", but rather the government which seizes his wealth.
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"I recently met a first year PhD who would be very well o"ver the hill." Top-tier school. There's motivation for ya."

Hey Thanks!

"particularly if you aren't a monstrously strong candidate"

Good Point.

A "monstrously strong" candidate is what I am trying to be. Hey if we ask startup founders to be monstrously strong developers why not hold ourselves to the same standards as grad students. The journey is very interesting, forcing me to evaluate my deficiencies as a candidate and get better constantly.

A scientist I am working with on some research software said recently, "You'd make a great PhD student at Carnegie Mellon" (where he got his PhD) and has promised to write a reccomendation, so there's some progress. We'll see how it goes.
This guy is complaining about proposed new taxes, not old taxes. The proper items for you to list are what he would get from proposed new spending (e.g., bailouts for detroit and irresponsible state governments, marginal state construction projects).
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I've read his letter, I see nothing about any of the things you note. In fact, I see criticism of the financial bailout and people who lived beyond their means. Are you supporting that behavior?
If the New York Times dies, does the news die?
Actually, you pay payroll tax just for having employees and various business registration fees for continuing to exist and taxes on equipment just for continuing to own it. None of those are dependent on profit. Reality 101.
"So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't."

Here's a guy who respects his employees.
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001339.html

"Dear audio memoirs. Today I was racist by word substitution again. This -- this is the hardest racism not to be." - The T-Rex
". Phds are really good if: - you're young, have found a subject you're fascinated with and are willing to live and breathe every day"

That is exactly true for me, except obviously the "young" part :-). (But hey i feel young!)

I want to do a PhD for the experience of doing/learning to do research with top notch people and (corny as it sounds) advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. I don't really care about becoming a prof.

As for "productive", I've made enough money for me to live on comfortably, if not extravagantly , for the next twenty years. (India is a relatively cheap place to live if you have your own house and a good chunk of money saved). I am single and plan to stay that way so that obviously helps.

Research is just something I want to do (very well) before I die.
He could hire educated employees because they paid for education; it is a engineering company, not McDonalds.

And where did these engineers go to school? Did they attend a public or private university? Was the school subsidized by land grants from the government? Did the students benefit from government-guaranteed student loans? Was the school able to attract professors because of government-sponsored research? Etc., etc.
Then it's another Fail.
Especially since they managed to describe it without mentioning the price.
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Comparing print, tv and internet (levels of engagement, interactivity, practicality)
Currently, 51% of every tax dollar spent ends up in the hands of the DoD, supporting the war.

51% of our society's problems (which, rightly or wrongly, we look towards our government for solutions and leadership) cannot be solved by the DoD.

If you want "smaller government", you're going to have to demand a smaller standing army. And a spending cap for the DoD. His wealth isn't just being seized, but squandered.
Cool! Thanks for this.
It's probably not legitimate, and while there are lot of objections to some of the premises, it's an interesting read. If you read "Atlas Shrugged" and were an anarcho-capitalist like myself, you'd be able to appreciate it more. :)
The Startup Road
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Maybe he should open-source some of his ground-breaking inventions, and earn fame (if not money) that way...
One of R's big benefits is the huge amount of statistical functionality, for example numerous different quantilization algorithms.

If you are working with a lot of heterogeneous data in R it becomes a real headache. Merging data frames seems like it should work like you think it should but if one of your sets of keys (strings) are 'factors' (what I am calling 'legacy S+ functionality', I'm sure they're useful for many algorithms), you'll end up with garbage. There's a hack you can put in your code ('options(stringsAsFactors=FALSE)') which alleviates some of this but in general aligning data I found to be a huge pain. If you're running regressions this is pretty important

haven't tried sage but have heard good things. NumPy is a good alternative because it's extremely well implemented and has consistent behavior across the board. Extensibility (with Fortran, Cython/Pyrex, C/C++) is clean and easy. Never thought I'd write Fortran 77 code being born quite a few years after '77 but it's an easy way to speed up simple procedural algorithms 50x or more.
At StartupSchool '08 Peter Norvig answered a question about Google's take on the Semantic Web. The question was accusatory in the sense of "Hey, why aren't you playing nice?" Norvig disparaged the need for structured data on the web, presumably because his natural language lab is good enough that Google doesn't need explicit annotations to grab semantics.

I think this technology is the same as Direct Answers from three years back. It could do capitols and geography facts back then. It seems there is a new module for genealogical relationships.
i interpreted kirsh's claim as:

"in spite of the theoretical procedural differences in assigning faith, both camps are substantially influenced by culture and tradition.
Connection - A film noir about hackers
Thanks so much for posting this. Very cool.

RSS Talker is sweet. Matt, if you're reading this, and if you don't mind, here are a couple critiques:

The title of this page should really be the info in that bubble: "Track Amazon Price Changes With an RSS Feed". This should be the biggest, boldest font on the page.

I don't think the average web user is very familiar with the terms ASIN and ISBN. It could be as simple as "Enter your email to track a specific product on Amazon." The How It Works section can explain more.

Can you make it just an email service for people without RSS feeds?

This site has a ton of potential. It's a shame that Amazon's commission rate is so low. It would be awesome to open it up to any web retailer that is signed up through a service like Commission Junction. Some of them offer 15% commission. I'm sure you've thought through all of this.

Good luck!
Interesting to note that two "amazing" apps written with Java are to help Java programmers ...
Google explicitly believes in pulling semantics without explicit structure. It's what people do, and Google's getting really good at it. Peter Norvig claims to have the best natural language processing lab in the world and I'm inclined to believe him.
i like this hack. the brilliant part is the remote learns the code for all possible devices by using the IR to voice converter. that excludes the traditional IR controller system that have an extensive and periodically update database for incomplete list of IR codes of devices.
Ask HN: Review my app
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My girlfriend was using Stata. She's an epidemiologist.
His major complaint, to quote the article is this:

"Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check?"

What he apparently doesn't know is that 75% of the (American) economy falls under "Consumer Spending". That is, if you and I don't blow our paycheck buying clothes and cars, we don't have an economy.

So really, the government is doing The Right Thing(tm) by stimulating the economy. It just upsets this guy because he feels that "Trickle Down" is better, because then the economy is sitting around waiting for this guy to buy/lease another Mercedes.
This is why Javascript is such a worry.

I've seen (and helped develop) some proof of concept hacks to get all sorts of data from a users computer.

So far the best is compromising a users Myspace page.

Another good one I have seen (not worked on this one tbh, just seen the demo) is a combination attack on Facebook and the users email address. It works for Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo... so pretty much everyone. If your logged into Facebook and into your mail provider it can reset your password, change your mail and lock you out in under a minute.. all from YOUR computer.

I imagine Twitter would be fairly similar to effect as well.
Statistics and Lisp have a long, long history together. Before R took off, many academic statisticians were using Lisp-Stat, Luke Tierney's tool from UMN. Luke has now been spending time helping R, and it shows in how it is starting to adopt more of a Lisp mentality. The referenced paper also shows the Lisp background from R (and S) history. R syntax can be confusing enough; Lisp really has a learning effort such that most analysts just don't have the time to invest in it unless they were trained in it early on.
In the case of Facebook, instead you would shard by feature. Every database server has replicateds of the user/friends data, but there'd be a separate server for the events or for groups.
I am thinking of using wxWidgets as well for my current project, although it doesn't require much of a GUI. All the guts of my app are in cross-platform C++ (by cross-platform I mean Linux, Mac, and Windows). I have connected a small GUI to it in Windows using WTL, but could easily change it to wxWdigets so I have one GUI to maintain and not three.
Sorry, I forgot to mention one of my assumptions...

There are tremendous diseconomies of scale if: you're buying the storage through traditional storage vendors. When your storage needs get really big, you'll realize that stuff is 1) a waste of money, and 2) not meeting your needs (you shape your needs to fit the available products, not vice versa). At that point, it makes enough sense to roll your own storage solution (write your own S3), tailored to your very specific needs.
http://www.smallparty.org/yoram/quantum/

Quantam Microeconomics by Yoram Bauman

"The basic text, Quantum Microeconomics, is intended for use in introductory classes. A calculus-based version (unimaginatively titled Quantum Microeconomics with Calculus) is available for intermediate courses or math-intensive introductory courses, but it is much less polished. Both versions are covered by a Creative Commons license that establishes simple guidelines under which you (or anyone else) can freely use and/or modify the text for non-commercial purposes."
That's assuming things that aren't fair. There's many people in the US educated by alternative schooling systems. Homeschooling produces excellent students as do private schools. Not everybody needs the government to help them succeed. Indeed, in America you're limited by you and you alone.
At least it's a functional language, and you can do things like manipulating code symbolically, showing its lisp heritage.

The tooling, library integration, and debuggers aren't as good as, say, Python, though.
Except that he states he'd use the tax money to hire more employees - who would be both consumers and producers.
back in uni, i used matlab everyday couple years ago, it was that function is file, so if i have 100 functions, i must have 100 files in a directory

i find that too limiting, found python+numarray+matplotlib and never looked at matlab ever since ... never regret

ironically i got a phone interview request from matlab at the end that year (i was on vacation, never got to that)
Specs without corresponding test-suites are problematic at best. Joel Spolsky put it rather well: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
Agreed. I've used this logic in several political discussions:

Either get a smarter foreign policy, or raise taxes to fund our policies

It's amazing how the meaning behind "Supporting the Troops" would change.
"The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job.

What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country...

Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who didn't."

Umm news alert, both Obama and McCain supported the flawed '700 billion' (in reality unlimited) bailout for the bankers. What's even better is that a Republican administration made the initial proposal for and has lead the largest bailout in US history.

I may lean to the right... but this letter (if real) just reads as a veiled threat to employees and not to mention it's really short on details... nor does it address the real problem: politicians on both sides of the aisle spend money like drunken sailors
If you want "smaller government", you're going to have to demand a smaller standing army.

That's simply not true. The DoD's money doesn't go on salaries for Infantrymen. It doesn't even go on rifles and boots and jeeps.

I'll give you a clue, how many planes do the Taliban have in their Airforce? How much does an F22 cost and how many of them is the USAF buying? What about the Al-Queda Navy, how many aircraft carriers they got? What does a Seawolf-class submarine cost? That's where your taxpayer dollars end up. Soldiers (and Marines) are cheap and if anything we need more of them.
Don't trivialize his viewpoint like that. What's wrong with being an atheist and observing the positive effects that religion has on some people? If he hadn't mentionned that he's an atheist, it could easily have come off as religious preaching.

Also: why did this get killed? I hope we don't lose the ability to discuss the effects of religion, independent of one's religious preferences.
It takes two, baby.
I'm reserving judgement--if it doesn't get a lot of publicity and garner a large following of believers, it might still be true (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when-however-the_lay_public_...)
and if the attacking client is someone sitting on the corporate internet? way to block the entire corp from logging in ...
No. The first thing that I noticed about him was that he had bad grammar, even for Slashdot. The poster responded to a questioner and blamed it on learning disabilities.

Chances are, if this guy is unable to present himself in an articulate manner on Slashdot, he can't in front of a VC either.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that can prevent success. As can dressing badly. As can being short and fat. Or ugly, if you're a woman. Fair? No. But intelligence isn't distributed fairly either.

If you want to sell yourself, then you have to fix as many of these problems as you can. There's no way around that. If you can't spell, then use Microsoft Word and its grammar checker on everything you ever write. Go on a diet. Get someone else to pick out your clothes. Etc.
I'm reminded of the story that one of our VPs told, of a manager who had received far more applications for a certain job than he had time to look through. So he took half of the resumes that had piled up on his desk and said: "These people are unlucky. We do not want to hire unlucky people." And he threw those resumes in the trash, unread.
If you don't see his disdain you must be blind...

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't. There is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden -- the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations... you never realize the back story and the sacrifices I've made.

-1, Condescending prick

Then he goes on to:

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check?

-1, self-centered "I'm the navel of the universe" prick

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I fire you. I fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's future.

-1, disdain for hapless employees.
Apple won't be missed at Macworld Expo
I don't think patents should protect people when the solution is obvious. Take a DVR 20,000+ people probably thought up the idea of using HDD to store tv programs it was just a question of when a cheep HDD would become large enough. Push / Pull email to hand held devices is a stupid patent.

What should be protected is novel solutions to problems. Take a product that's in production and make it better by changing it's shape slightly so you get more leverage and that's worthy of a patent.
Who cares?!!?!
Not sure how one would shard the data based on a RoR app.
If you use the underlying FPS APIs, I believe you can set up recurring payments with no logins (I'm only going on docs, I haven't had direct coding experience with FPS yet).

Quoting from http://aws.amazon.com/fps/faqs/#What_can_I_do_with_Amazon_FP...

"Use tokens to execute one-time or multiple payments or recurring payments on behalf of customers."

-----

And from http://aws.amazon.com/fps/faqs/#What_payment_methods_does_Am...

"Amazon FPS supports the following payment methods:

- Bank Account debits

- Amazon Payments balance

- Credit Cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, and JCB).

-----

It looks like the "Amazon Payments" option is what this Simple Pay subscription is employing, right?
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"The American dream is that if the average American invents something novel and worthy of patenting, he'll find someone to license it. However for most contemporary inventors, it hasn't worked out that way. The independent inventor today had an extremely difficult time convincing corporations."

Not timing per se but maybe not the stomach and/or resources for litigation.

For example, Jerome Lemelson, who was arguably the most successful American inventor (in terms of money received, not brilliance - some of his 600 patents are questionable) in decades, was a patent-holder of many key patents relating to magnetic recording. And stuff like the flexible track used by Mattel's Matchbox cars.

He spent years in court sueing the big players like Sony to pay him licensing fees. He ultimately prevailed in many cases and now his foundation helps support patent rights for inventors and helps bootstrap and reward promising inventors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson

"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel." -J. Lemelson
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If your family could have afforded to send you to college, It is reasonable to presuppose that they could have afforded a private school, the one is generally far more expensive than the other. If there were no public school system, then they would cost even less. - not to say we shouldn't have schools.
I feel bad for all those employees that are going to lose their jobs when the runway is over.
Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass
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What you is say is probably true, but I also absolutely agree with the original poster.

Having access to resources, that mostly means funding, is a HUGE deal.

And often that access is a function of seemingly random things like your physical location and who your friends/business associates are.
You think private schools don't get government funding?