skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hypothetical: So, you have 26 companies using Basecamp (Company A-Company Z). Your single database server can't handle all 26 companies so you decide to shard them.

Your previous setup:
Webhead1-|- Database1
Webhead2/

So, you have two webheads reading from one database. You need to shard and have a second database:
Webhead1--Database1 (Companies A-M)
Webhead2--Database2 (Companies N-Z)

Easy! Think of it this way: because a person at Company A is never accessing Company Z's data, there doesn't need to be any communication between the databases. So, it shards in the same way that Wordpress shards: different sites are on different servers.

With Basecamp, you don't need every company to be on the same server because you don't move data between companies. But you don't need a separate server for every company either. So, you can put a bunch of companies on the same server and a bunch on another server and you're done. There's nothing magic or RoR specific.
Capital spending, contributes just as much to the economy as consumer spending. More so in fact, as capital can be used to produce more goods an consumer goods cannot. This fellow spends a hell of a lot more than most of us, and on goods which will contribute to the economy in more substantial ways than anyone purchasing a television would.
---
That said, I totally disagree with the tone of the letter, which betrays a level of pride and arrogance. The fact that he's threatening his employees rather than attempting to earn their loyalty, says a lot about the man.
Only some do. My schooling certainly didn't, and my folks weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination.
Umm... How do you think you get funding? This is the primary difference between the technically-minded and the business-minded. The technical think wealth is who you know or what you're born to -- it's firmly outside their domain. The business-savvy create wealth. That's their job.
Is this still true after the recent bailouts? (honest question)
And the hilariously invalid intranet app I built in 1997 doesn't have any problems in current browsers either. What's your point?

I'm not saying it's impossible to write valid code that works (duh). But having code that validates doesn't exempt you from browser bugs and quirks. And sometimes it makes life quite a bit harder.
And what about when there are too many events for a single shard? And maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like the friends data would be the biggest issue.

Eventually, you get into some decently ugly stuff if you get big enough. Most people never have to worry about sharding (even 37signals doesn't), but there aren't just easy answers.
I don't get your comment. You mean mission critical systems should not use open source software?. Google runs on free software, what's wrong with using free software?
It seems like the three main strategies are locking the account, blocking the IP, or forcing a password reset. What if instead, the account login name automatically got changed after a few missed attempts but the password remained the same. That would get around the DoS problem and also the corporate IP / AOL problem.
I was home schooled and I feel the public school system is horrible.

However, I still think the public education system is one of the few things keeping chaos from breaking out. Consider the 80/20 rule the first 20% of public school money provides the vast majority of the benefit after that it's far more expensive the keep things moving. School could be year round with 3 cycles of children, and each child going every other year and we would spend far less money and still get most of the benefit from teaching reading, writing, basic arithmetic, basic heath etc. Or we could have vouchers and mandatory testing etc. But, removing any from of public school system would be a bad idea.

PS: The real question is always what point do diminishing returns kill the gain. I think we could double the amount of money we spend on education and still come out ahead.
Allegedly Socrates, attributed to Plato:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

(the source of the quote may be contentious, but with a little cursory searching I was able to find it being attributed to Socrates (via Plato) as far back as the late 1800s, so... it's still surely not new.)
I meant SAP, but that or SAS is about 'business intelligence', which means running an organisation - staffing, payroll, etc, but certainly not jet engines. My Aunt programs in SAP for a University. So SAP determines how businesses are run, and are paid for the privelege.
I ran into a project where I needed a cross platform GUI kit (needed Windows and Mac) and settled on wxWidgets after talking to a few developers. It's been great to work with, although some of the other libraries that are compatible with it don't work as well as the core.

The really wonderful part of the experience is that even after not programming in C++ for about 10+ years I was able to get things working pretty quickly and I'm productive with it. A lot of that is due to the wxWidgets documentation and it's well developed structure.

My only real problem is when I have to switch back and forth between Erlang and C++. Those days suck :-)
The easy answer is to avoid the db wherever possible. For example, when people decide to write a chatroom, they often decide to put each message in a database. Which is sort of a ridiculous thing to do.

Using in memory tables, flat files, etc where possible beats databases.
Currently, 51% of every tax dollar spent ends up in the hands of the DoD, supporting the war.

I'm curious, what's your source on that. I've heard dozens of statistics on that, all very different, all skewing the data in some way. Some of them only measure discretionary spending, some exclude it, etc.
I agree that alternative schooling systems produce students that are on par, if not better than their public counterparts, particularly at the lower grades.

I scoff at the idea that "in America you're limited by you and you alone". It's an idealized extrapolation of our less regimented society, true, but if you grow up as a poor black boy or girl in the ghetto, the forces that are going to keep you there far outweigh the forces that will allow you to leave. See Hurricane Katrina: most of the poor folk that didn't evacuate were too ridiculously poor to even afford to evacuate. The same goes with someone who grows up in a rural town; if they want to leave town and go to college or otherwise make something of themselves, all of the factors in their environment are working constantly against them. I'm tired of people born into privlege (me included) feeling that growing up in an environment where the only barrier to success is your own motivation somehow applies to everyone else.

I mentioned in another submission about how one of the greatest misconceptions of the past 50 years is that our environment is somehow completely unrelated to our well-being and the choices we feel we have. I'm not about to say people can start blaming their bad judgement on their environment, but the other extreme is no better a way of understanding our country.
Ninety-five percent of pianos are sold to people who don't play

Sad but very believable, and I find it interesting to hear from a piano maker. I've seen several (fairly rich) people buy a piano to learn it but then drop out after a month, or outright buy it just for the chic aspect. I can't help but feel a little tinge when I see a beautiful grand sitting unused in a living room, when the kids at school have to do with a decaying, out of tune upright.
you'll know you're truly living the high life when you replace those starbucks beans. also, congrats on taking the leap.
I suppose you're right. I'm still young and only have college loans to pay but they're at a higher rate than my savings account so I pay them off.

I understand having a mortgage that you aren't paying off but credit cards have a greater than 20% interest rate whereas a mortgage would be under 10%.

Credit card debt tends to be smaller than a mortgage though so I would seriously consider paying that off to be a higher priority.
You all can debate the merits of the keynote goodies but let me tell you why the answer to the question "Did Steve Jobs just sacrifice Phil Schiller?" is "Uhhh, no."

When the original clamshell iBook was introduced, Jobs did the keynote. And Phil Schiller's role in all this was to jump off a ladder into a stunt bag, holding the candy orange purse-looking thing, to show its sturdiness.

Do you think Steve Jobs would ever do such an undignified thing himself?

And this was what... 8, 9, 10 years ago?

Schiller is considered a joke. He always has been considered a joke. He looks and sounds more like he should be a cast member on Full House than a presentation guru.

Jobs claimed they were pulling out of MacWorld years ago, but went back on the idea for whatever reason. He doesn't have to "sacrifice" anyone. He's Steve Jobs, for crissakes.

Y'all don't have historical perspective on the man and the company. You can't make these kinds of assertions without it.

Note: Schiller has a tough row to hoe and he clearly works very hard to do a good job. I don't personally think he's a joke, but he's treated like one. "He's no Jobs" is hardly a damning statement.
There's no shortage for GUI frameworks:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/7184/guitool.ht...
>You completely misunderstand the nature of the paradox.

You are right - I did, but then it was not said anywhere, and this is the first I'm hearing of this.

I understand that it's a mathematical/game theory paradox, but it's listed as a real world paradox - and it's not.

> Your complaint about the T/constant formula is downright silly; I'm convinced that an equivalent paradox can be created for every reasonable formula you agree to. (Actually, I think I can prove that.) The only thing that would change is that the "lines" on the equilibrium diagram would become "curves".

I think you can't. If you modeled real traffic congestion for this the paradox would not exist. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

The "real world" examples listed on the page were not because of this type of paradox, but rather because in the real world it takes time to merge, so removing a merge point makes things faster.

But a road paradox structured like this one? I don't think you can. The whole paradox is because the T/x does nutty things as T changes (nutty as compared to the real world).

At the minimum I want to see f()+c. And f() should be an s curve.
It truly doesn't matter!
Then why didn't doesn't he start the company in a country with lower taxes? Last I checked, Russia has a significantly lower corporate tax than the US, and yet you don't see businesses thriving there as they do in the US...

"The spirit" of his letter is a naive oversimplification - the idea that "lower taxes always increase innovation" is simple to justify, but has little evidence in the real world.
Indie dev suggests peers should support OS X, Linux gaming
I’m like a Hypochondriac, but with Programming
Unlike some corporate jobs where you might be looking for something to do (or not), there was no shortage of work to be done on my first day.

This is what is so fun about a startup - never an empty to-do list - and they're always new challenges.

I envy your full-time position and dream of that day myself - keep up the good work!
Does anyone know if PostgreSQL has this similar multicore bottleneck?
Stacey's Bookstore closing down in S.F.
So Basecamp runs on a single database server?!
Ive heard so many variations of this story ever since school
One explanation: http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

Measuring discretionary spending isn't skewing the results.
I wasn't saying it was justified because google does it too, I was saying it doesn't dictate quality. Many think google has a lot of quality (which is probably most important), and the same for HN.

Making silly analogies to justify standards compliance is just plain dumb if you want to play the name game.
CBS Kills WallStrip
Which would cost far more than $4 trillion so is not really an option, if you assume it would mean war with China.
These guys are not good at doing what they say, but they are VERY good at faking it.

Is it then any surprise that people who are very good at faking it can raise a lot of money?

Why do you think business guys wear suits, it's a costume, for theater.
Losses for Venture Fund Investors Who Want Out
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but this false statement discredits your argument:

ends up in the hands of the DoD, supporting the war

Not true. It also supports most of the research done in this country.
Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Then again, if I was gay and into S&M, then I'd be able to appreciate anal sex at a slaughterhouse.
May I suggest recursion?
I think rate limiting is a better option. If you only allow one log in attempt per X seconds, it becomes much harder to do a dictionary attack in a reasonable amount of time.
Whoshouldifollow? Twitter recommendation engine
It's good to see a de facto reply to the "Yet Another Macho Programming Article". I'm tired of the attitude programmers can sometimes have; you're either Smart, and Get Things Done or you're just a piece of human garbage that's getting in the way and would be better off if you were just taken out back and shot.

Also, I like the first comment on this post:
You will look back at what you’ve written in ten years and laugh at your naivety. Stop worrying so much about what other people might think, they’re all faking it anyway - even your ‘heroes’. Also, check your spelling.

We really shouldn't be caring so much, honestly.
I liked the Steorn guys better. I mean -- full page ads challenging scientists to disprove them! That took some chutzpah.
Why is that interesting? Emacs uses a lisp; does that mean anything about emacs or lisp? (Edit: I'm being serious, I guess I don't see why Java being used to write Java editors is a big deal.)
That's rather unfair I feel since being good at technical creation doesn't necessarily mean good at communication. How many novelists are going to write you a version of VOIP in 1987?? Come on, there's genuine discussion to be had here but it doesn't revolve around his rather flaky prose style - it's not as though we couldn't UNDERSTAND him!
Video in the first page is too small and don't have audio (is it me only?). So, I really could not tell what it's about. And while you're at it, you can drop quicktime control widget of video to make it look more professional.

nice page design and all, but without creating a user, I don't understand a lot from that front page. Maybe you can provide a demo user, so that people can see what they can get.
There is well known old honeypot trick. using webbugs in a juicy mail stored in the gmail. This e-mail can be stored with label such as "passwords". When the attacker looks at it, it will load a remote image, and now you know, someone from an IP address just seen your e-mail.
Wow that's really an amazing failure of auditing. It's not like with Enron where management had cooked up some really complex accounting schemes. Satyam was overstating CASH! Didn't the auditors go to the company's bankers and brokers to get independent account statements? Perhaps they were in on it, too.
over-taxation kills businesses.

You know what also kills innovation and business? Not investing in public education. Not providing health care to workers. Not providing a legal system to make laws, a judicial system to interpret laws and contracts, etc. Not investing in fundamental research. Not regulating the money supply... one could go on for tomes.

If business taxes "hurt" business, then what you get for them "helps" business. In this trade-off neither extreme is desirable.
I somewhat agree, but I'm frustrated that that's required. I get more and more disappointed in where our society is at as a whole as I get older. People shouldn't need a professional brown-noser to flatter them continuously for weeks until they recognize the verity and feasibility of a product and decide to purchase it. It's really sad that that's where we're at, I think, sad that people don't just instantly see through that crap and choose not to waste time on companies that aren't straight shooters.

I think I have good executive and business sense, but I don't play with most of these social "norms" that involve constant BS and ass-kissing so it makes some parts of business hard for me. In fact, I'm in the interview process for a job right now, and I sent the company letters about why they're having trouble securing good candidates, and whether I'll get hired anyway is iffy, but only possible because of the open-mindedness of the owner; if this was corporate drone company, like another company I applied with and had to provide programmer-recruitment advice to, I would just be summarily ignored thereafter. How can people be so vacant, so self-absorbed and oblivious to basic and sensical things, like being a normal human instead of living to suck up after your boss and/or potential buyers? It's really upsetting.

This probably doesn't make much sense. My frustration has been pent-up. I have so much frustration that there's still a lot of it pent now. Thanks for the outlet though dudes, outlet appreciated.
Know what's even more ironic?

"Satyam was the 2008 winner of the coveted Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Governance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyam_Computer_Services
No, you have to be certified by a professional society to be considered an engineer. You can't just dub yourself a "Software Engineer" because you self-taught yourself visual basic.

Likewise, there are certain legal penalties attached to performing the duties of an engineer without certification. Its like architects in the U.S. -- they put a final "seal" on their blueprints. Its their name/career/license on the hook if the building falls down and kills people.
Use the Mac's accelerometer in the iPhone Simulator
PostgreSQL is much better at using multiple cores, but it doesn't matter (at least not for web applications).

Web applications don't have a problem handling one person. They have a problem handling 1,000 people who all want to load a page at the same time. That means that you're not worried about using all your server resources for one query. You're going to have 1,000 queries and so 250 go to each core in a quad-core box and you don't care that MySQL (InnoDB really) doesn't do the multi-core thing because it's not like PostgreSQL would benefit from it since it's just easier to do different queries using a different core.

Multi-core capabilities could help when you are running fewer concurrent queries than you have processor cores. However, once you get to 4-8 concurrent users, you don't need to worry about it so much because you'll saturate all the cores through the different queries and when you're below 4-8 concurrent users you don't need to worry about it because it's easy to serve few users.

Now, for data warehousing and other applications, multi-core capabilities can be the difference between a query taking 1 hour and a query taking 4 hours. But that's not a web application. In fact, using MySQL for data warehousing is just a bad idea.

The author is totally right that you shouldn't just expect technology to save you (and I personally think DHH is taking the "wait until it is a problem. if becomes a problem and new hardware can solve it, do that. if not, then deal with it" approach rather than simply expecting a solution). However, web applications are about running many things at once, not running one big thing.

P.S. Databases usually aren't CPU constrained. It's almost always memory or disk that slows you down. Spend the money on more RAM or better disks and don't worry about the CPU so much.

P.P.S. Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are wonderful databases for web applications so let's not turn this into some silly flame war, please?
I can't for the life of me figure out what planbookedu.com does, even after watching the screencast.

It's a calendar? With only all-day events allowed? And with TinyMCE?

What am I missing?
Berry Compound Reduces Aging Effect
And maybe france and so on... OK, sorry ;-) I only use Amazon.de
thanks rob! you still in ATL or in Palo Alto? I can't remember.
Hah! What's hilarious about this one is how obviously illegal that would be.

sigh It's sad that the people that reaffirm their political beliefs using this crap have such primitive understandings of business, law, etc.
No, it wasn't. "Happiness" was the password for the account of a user who happened to be on the support staff.
Apple unveils software updates, new laptop
This subject line reminds me of the Onion article from a few years back: "I'm like a choco-holic ... except for alcohol!"
Looks like the link in the script tag doesn't work anymore. Disabled proactively perhaps?

Either way, being able to see "online" or "offline" is a nice thing to offer imo, but perhaps they shouldn't offer access to the user's login name (to prevent phishing effectiveness).
Flow of venture capital for green tech slows
Single sign out - surely we can do better.
http://github.com/fiveruns/data_fabric/tree/master

Or monkey-patch activerecord yourself to use a shard-index.
There's no sound in the video yet. Trying to find someone with a nice voice :) I'll do a demo account for HN.
Hint: "The other would use a batch operation, in which some catalyst is successively retrieved, recycled, and reinserted for a new cycle."

You don't need to recycle catalyst's. One off bursts of energy are easy to fudge so it seems like something interesting is happening when it's not.
IIRC, that was a scene in the British version of The Office.
So as long as Moore’s law can give us capacity jumps like that, we can keep the entire working set in memory and all will be good.

I'm not going to say "this guy does not know what he is talking about", but what kind of shitty database are you running if you need to have the entire database cached in memory?

Isn't the point of having a proper RDBMS that it should be able to handle data more efficiently than what would be "logically" possible?

I've run databases with 100s of gigs of content on a 2-node cluster where each node "only" had 8GBs of RAM and performance nor memory usage wasn't an issue at all.

One point of real pain we’ve suffered, though, is that migrating a database schema in MySQL on a huge table takes forever and a day.

Oh right. MySQL. That explains it.
Maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) is a nice CAS, sort of similar to Maple, IIRC. It is written in Lisp but hides that from the interface layer.
Actually CNN mentions Twitter quite often and especially during the elections a lot of people started hearing of Twitter way outside of the valley. If my parents learned about Twitter from watching TV I assume it's a safe bet that many other people have as well.
I had the same reaction. I think if he just spent some time in creating a clear message and then putting that message on the front page he might see an increase in users. If you think about the average user they need to have the selling point made a clear as possible, more so if we're talking about the average teacher ;^).
PowerShell ABC's - M is for Matching
If a weather reporter dies, does the weather stop? Who writes these stupid headlines? There is no logical person who would answer that question with a "yes." So really, the title should be: "If the New York Times dies, will we be left with bloggers who write idiot headlines?"
Yes.
Yes, it takes more effort to not use tables, but since tables are not meant for page layout it makes sense to avoid them.

If CSS is meant for layout, and tables aren't meant for layout, wouldn't you expect CSS to be easier to use?