skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you feel about the reported performance of "SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5;"? Is this something that needs to be improved there, or are you happy with that being one of the built-in anchors?

Additionally, I'm not sure that the implementation of the hard reliable case sounds very mature or even well thought-out. Having a syncer running at 20hz and waiting for it even in the synchronous path seems a bad idea. That's kind of like adding an anchor to your anchor so your speedboat can crawl while it crawls. Or was that a misrepresentation?

And who cares if the tone is serious? The criticisms seem to be valid, and ones that anyone releasing software making bold claims should expect. Statements about performance need to be qualified. Out-of-the-box behavior is not a reasonable point of comparison if (1) that's not what people do in the real world (2) the tests you use are ones that one piece of software is tuned for and the other is tuned against. Some kind of sorted index by field is necessary for some very common and desirable queries. Some of the performance gains come at an unacknowledged cost. The durability just isn't there (and for trivial reasons that could be fixed by making a few more parameters tunable, it sounds like), but is implicitly lauded by claiming to be ACID.

I don't know if you need to go looking for praise in that article. It really seems like there are some criticisms it would be beneficial to take seriously, even if you object to the author's tone or lack of praise. Even-handedness is not a marker of honesty, and honest criticism is worth the headaches it causes and the growth it spurs if you're willing to take it seriously.
How to think like a CUSTOMER
Interestingly, one thought is that "credentials" may not be as importsant in the future --it will be more about what you can demonstrate rather than what certification one has achieved.

Gates may have not finished his schooling and may not be an educator, but he does talk to educators and people who know education. I think that's where he's getting his foundation for his ideas from.
Feel the same way, and can't help but wonder why these articles keep getting upvoted.

Side note - reminds me of my first FOWA, where Ryan hogged a majority of the QA time from each presenter to ask questions about his own business. I admire his business success, but to me, he comes off as self-centered.
Carreon's reaction of ridiculous lawsuits and bizarre poetry reminds me of a study I read about a few years ago. IIRC the study brought in narcissists under the guise of a television interview. The "interviewer" would prod the narcissist verbally until he would explode in anger resulting in him yelling and screaming at the interviewer. When they allowed the narcissist to review the tape of the interview to have the final say on whether or not it airs on television, the narcissist would be believe that he performed well in the interview and allow it to air.

Unfortunately for Carreon, his display of narcissism is now well documented on the internet. When we live in an age where it is almost standard to google somebody before using their services, such a display does not put him in good light.
On this basis though, why develop a new database system when instead you could just develop a new default configuration for MySQL?
Statement 1: "Rocketr is a collaborative notetaking tool"
Statement 2: "this startup thing ain’t for the faint of heart"

Author is saying: "Making collaborative notetaking tool (and selling it) is not for the faint of heart"

It makes be depressed by this kind of blogs. People are assuming life to be full of comfort if they are not working on startups. Try 9 to 5. It also seems that the younger generation's threshold for pain is way lower. Somehow I don't think people who agree with the blog will ever attempt to goto the moon or build a bridge or build a dam or even do a marathon.
And how about https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation.
I’m with you. The most rewarding thing about diving into a large codebase is that you have many opportunities to refactor while you add features. At my current job I add only marginally more code than I delete. Feels good. :)
unless the files are in dropbox and you tunnel read/write access to them through dropbox API
I found that, but it cmd+r (I'm on a Mac) seems to only show you hits in the current file. The thing I'm interested in doing is clicking on a call to foo.bar() and have it bring up Foo.rb, right on the "def bar" method.

Also a lot of the time the thing I'm trying to navigate to is library code that's referenced via require, vs something that's actually in my codebase proper.
Interestingly, I think this model works best for 'software for developers'. Developers naturally empathize with the author of their software much more so than a 'typical user' would.
If you liked it check out the Transformer Prime page:

http://eee.asus.com/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/

It starts off with a typical terrible "people you would never see use an Asus product" photo and quickly gets very cool.
Congrats Sam. I think this is an important and super cool venture.
There are already builds available! The latest nightly runs nicely on my armv6 device: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/tinderbox-buil...
Under license that is...
I guess it's what you are used to – I've never really got into Vim, whereas Sublime looks like a normal text editor until you need more from it.
The TSA's Dumb Air-Security Rules Are Not Based on Science
So he reads The Secret? If so, I guess I don't need to read the post.
There is also the multi page plugin: http://www.drchip.org/astronaut/vim/index.html#MPAGE
I love how someone actually did this. drostie replied to my comment several months ago with some great analysis on my off-hand remark about potentially hiding your web traffic through sending lots of steg'd cat pictures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3575232
Some of my favorite quotes about programming ( http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/ ) make precisely this point:

"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson

"Deleted code is debugged code." — Jeff Sickel

And probably my favorite (because this doesn't apply only to lines of code):

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there." -- Gordon Bell
How to locate the source of a sound with your head
Question for Ryan: I know you said you work 4 days a week at Treehouse. How well do you respect that? Do you do any kind of work during the weekend or just errands, relaxing and family time?
It depends. If your opinion is that fascism is good, then it's a bad thing for you to have representation in the government where I live.
From MemSQL's home page: "MemSQL writes back to disk/SSD as soon as the transaction is acknowledged in memory."

From the article: "See, MemSQL also has “transaction-buffer” setting, which, in default “full durability mode” will asynchronously return “ok” until 128M buffer is full (or background log flusher thread writes it out)."

So which is it?
Developers are typically very bad software customers. As much as they could empathize, more often than not, they think they could do it themselves in a couple of weekends.
So you've basically critizised their tone, and repeated your original claims, without really addressing what they said.
What type of applications are you looking to build? I have the same frustration, only for me, it has to deal with a lack of time to do both. Given the time, I feel I can excel in both areas.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=743264506
What ones do you like? The Django ORM makes me want to vomit every day or so.
There's optimisations for repeated execution of the same commands at probably every level, from the interpreter down to the hardware on the server side, and the browser on the client side will cache and preload things smartly in the background.

Usually pressing reload (F5) only downloads modified content though, to ignore the cache you have to do a force reload (ctrl+F5 I think!)
I'll answer for myself. I don't want a democracy, but if we have one, I certainly don't want the slightest bit of fascist representation in it.
Plus the license allows me use it on all of my machines (Linux, OSX, Windows), at home or at work, for commercial or non-profit purposes.

That right there sold me- no issues at all getting purchase orders at work and regardless of the OS I'm using I still have the same editor.
To be fair, Dropbox doesn't allow upload of any type of knife.
I'm fairly sure he's made really quite a large chunk of dollar out of it already. Especially after he started forcing people to pay up if they wanted the very latest builds. That was a stroke of genius.
> "credentials" may not be as importsant in the future

He still has no experience in education. Trust me it's not something you learn from talking to educators and people who know education. I have spent years of my early career developing educational software and would not dare to imply I am as qualified as the educators and psychologists who worked with me.
While we're at it, most fire investigation isnt either. We should change that since it often leads to imprisonment.
DJing, circa 1910 with a compressed-air, dual turntable system
Worth noting that this will only work in Chrome, since the Web Audio API isn't supported in any other browser at the moment.
Cloud 9 IDE is Down
On a side note: If any startups are looking for part-time designers, I am now available.

This coming at the end of the rant, may not push another potential client over the threshold of decision after all that came before it.
I'm not sure what you mean by fit poorly in the relational model.

ORDER BY, LIMIT/OFFSET have to do with presentation of data. So, although it's highly desired that a language based on the relational model supports them, they have nothing to do with the model per se.

As for opaque keys, I thought the old debate about surrogate/artificial and natural keys was over years ago. The relational model has nothing to say about it, that would be like trying to make a model understand if facts are true in the real world or not. A key is a key.

Moreover, last time I've checked transitive closure operators were defined for the relation model (people should not stop ad Codd papers, Date and Darwen wrote a lot of books, e.g. The Third Manifesto, extending on the original ideas).

NULL is a completely different beast and this is the only real thing one can consider problematic.

In some cases NULL just means the predicate for the relation is different because values for an attribute don't apply, so this is not really a problem, in some other cases we simply don't know the value when we are collecting information, and this is indeed a problem.

Date follows Wittgestein that said we should remain silent about things we can't speak about i.e. we shouldn't collect incomplete information, Codd came up with I-marks, A-marks and n-valued logic, SQL collapsed everything into NULLs and 3-valued logic.
I wouldn't say "hate" programming, people who hate programming tend to write the worst overcomplicated code because their idea of re-use is copy-pasting the same bit of code they found online into every place they think it will fit and changing it around in various ways in different places so it becomes very hard to abstract later. They also like to stick with the same set of now deprecated APIs they learned 10+ years ago which means that it becomes hard to take advantage of newer libraries which were not built with these in mind, meaning that you will do a lot of wheel re-invention or shimming. They tend to think of economizing on effort and brain usage right now rather than economizing on technical debt in the long run.

There is also sometimes a trade off between saving time for the programmer and saving time for others. For example a manager might want a feature that saves them 10 minutes of time once a month when they want to produce a particular report but may cost programmers several hours a month just keeping this feature up to date. In this case it comes down to who's time is more valuable.

The best way to explain this to people is in terms of "tax" (since everyone hates that). I was once asked by a management type "I used to get all my changes turned around same day, now I seem to wait weeks or even months. What's going on?"

Of course the simple answer to this question is that a year ago the program was about 10Kloc , now it's more like 200Kloc. It's also much more "mission critical" than it was. A year ago the program was small enough that I could easily imagine all the consequences of making a change in my brain so I could do basic testing and push to production, now a small change can have many consequences so it has to be thoroughly tested first.

So the analogy to make would be the government building infrastructure for say the road network. The upfront cost of building is $x , but when doing that you commit to $y spending per year (in terms of cost+time) to keeping that going.

Persuading people not to add functionality they don't need is a good idea of course, but this isn't always going to be practical.
Firstly it assumes that the developer understands every aspect of the business well enough to evaluate this, in which case they really may as well just put the developer in charge of the whole thing.

It's also partly a political issue, I've spent months adding features to codebases that I know for a fact are not required because somebody with enough influence simply insists that it will be important. There is only a certain level of argument you can get into before you get to "do as you are told", that level will of course depend on many non-technical factors.

Another interesting point is that I find sometimes people will request feature X because they are perusing a line of though that will eventually lead them to conclude that they actually need feature Y. In many cases feature Y may be easier to implement (or maintain) than feature X but they simply haven't reasoned that far ahead yet so will insist that they want feature X now but acknowledge that they may change to feature Y a few months down the line.
This is great. Keep up the fantastic work! The FF mobile team deserves a lot of kudos for the way they've been able to fight their way back onto Android. I remember it was kludgy beyond belief as much as 6 months ago. But since then, it has improved massively with each release.
I learned ST2 from my coworkers, who were all using it. Now I'm learning vim much the same way. I've switched to vim fulltime from ST2, and here are the features of ST2 that I miss:

1. Multiple cursors. This is the only reason I ever use ST2 now. They're sort of like vim's visual block mode, except on steroids. For example, if you have multiple cursors, you can start typing and each cursor will behave as in insert point. Each cursor can also move independently, which means you can do things like moving word-wise or line-wise over lines which are not heterogeneous. Using Cmd + D, you can add selections, and then they're multiple cursors. This ends up replacing things like find-replace for me, because it's so fast and easy.

I should make a video of me using multiple cursors, because I feel I'm not explaining it well at all.

2. Cmd+p/goto-anything. Suppose I want to go to the getUser method of the auth class. All I have to do is hit Cmd + p, then type “Au@getUser”. As I type, a window appears with filenames, so first I type, “Au”, and then seeing that “Auth.php” is at the top, I type an @, which tells ST2 I'm now looking for a method, it then starts searching for methods within Auth.php.

Now, with vim I use Cmd-T, but that only gets me to the file, and it's kind of a bitch to get it working. It also has a thing to navigate methods, but I have to use something called tags, which means a) I have to figure out what the hell that is and b) I have to fiddle with getting it all setup. All that time could be spent programming. Mmmm, programming. I understand ctrlp makes some of this better, but I haven't tried it yet.

3. Better platform integration. With vim, there's a bunch of weird shit I have to do to get the clipboard working properly (including recompiling vim o_O), and the mouse seems janky. I mostly never use the mouse anyway, but the clipboard issues are annoying.

4. Python API vs vimscript. I wrote a couple of small plugins for ST2, which was nice and easy, because everybody knows python, and the API is modern and well thought out. With vim, I feel like it's a whole different matter, starting with learning a new programming language.
Given viable replacements for Dropbox, this is not a huge blow. I'd expect more legal trouble on their torrent end.
I think I'd change editors before I changed to a different OS. These days, pretty much everything can be done from one machine.

From where I sit, I can work with 6 different OS'es (yeah, it's a jungle) all from the comfort of OS X.

I get that this is a programmer's editor and so maybe a certain amount of "roughness" in design is appropriate. But I'd rather spend my time customizing my own apps than trying to figure out how to change one setting in my editor.

I can also understand if ST just isn't there yet as far as preferences go. Each OS or flavor thereof has it's own convoluted methods of writing that piece of the UI, but it's an important piece as far as OS X goes. Without it, ST will always feel like an incomplete product (in the half-baked sense, not the future development sense).

Sorry, but first impressions matter. Up against BBEdit and even old Textmate, ST seems to only have one thing going for it (the visual navigator) and that's not nearly enough to make me even more than momentarily interested.

This looks and feels very much like an alpha product or charitably, even a beta. But it definitely doesn't feel like something that should be a version 2 and charging $60 for the privilege of using it.
Relational algebra or Datalog.
A Look at Tesla's Economics
> I generally find myself writing functions to automate the trivial ones: get_single_field_by_primary_key(), get_row_by_primary_key(), get_values_by_field(), etc. There are maybe 4 or 5 of these. An entire ORM is total overkill.

Making a homebrew data layer isn't avoiding an ORM, it's building one.

> If you find yourself writing the same query structure 20 times, then create a function for it.

What do you think ORM's do? That is what they do, they provide a standard API for all the common queries.
Google mocks the human brain with 1000 machines,16000 cores and a love of cats
Google's Artificial Brain Recognizes Cats & Humans
Do you find that it slows down only the first time you use it within an editing session, or everytime you use it? If only the first time, I've got a fork which caches the files to disk, so that you don't hit that slowdown very often. The downside is that when you add new files, you have to bust that cache.
Note: The homepage is up, but the actual IDE is down.

I really like their platform and I invested in a premium account yesterday so I'm hoping that they pull through today's service outage successfully and remain viable going forward.

I do believe that cloud IDE's will all but replace locally installed ones over the next few years and C9 has a great head-start.
I think, in these days, it is not too much to ask for the intelligent completion, e.g. when you type dot or arrow, to get corresponding members of class/struct - the information is just there and the editor has enough power to parse it...

Same goes for a very simple word completion - when the editor already encountered the word in the previous line.

These are just _very_ basic things.
If the problem was that he wasn't as good as the other employee, the boss could say that. (The boss could say it even if it wasn't true.) The boss pretends on one hand to be locked in by bureaucracy when he doesn't want to do something, but they aren't really stopping him.

Anyway, it seems he is negotiating a better salary. The boss refused to deal so he walked. Good.
Poor areas have more urgent problems. I believe machine-assisted education has its place, but cannot replace an educator. Keep in mind the educator is someone who understands education, not necessarily math or history. Machines can act as multipliers for teachers, as Udacity exemplifies so well.
> When I'm joining multiple tables and looking for specific rows/objects that match multiple restrictions, ORM turns into a migrane of epic proportions.

Perhaps you're doing it wrong. Put the complex query in a proc or view, and use the ORM to map the result set into memory. Using an ORM doesn't mean not using SQL when it works better.
Reminds me of spreeder.com (which is now apparently a "Reported Attack Site")
Problems with growth or monetization? May be I can help you.
As someone who has benefitted a lot from HN, I thought I'd do my part to give something (hopefully valuable) in return.

I'm a Product guy (SF/Bay area) in social games and have scaled/monetized products to the tune of millions. When I see some of your products (or even job descriptions mentioning you need a growth or monetization hacker/someone with gamification experience), I feel like there's a lot that can be done without handwaving or implementing dark design. Now if you're a 10-men startup, your founders are typically the Product people. They may or not have the "growth hacking" experience. Or you as founders may not be able to afford or see a need in hiring a Product guy with that kind of experience during the early stages. Well, whatever the case may be, I might be able to offer you some over-a-cup-of-coffee free "advice"/feedback on virality and monetization.

I also see this as a way to network with some of you smart people and I hope the feeling is mutual :)

It doesn't matter if you're working on a app based on FB platform or mobile game. If you're interested, drop me a line at: freegrowthadvice@gmail.com
He didn't "whine and bitch". He quit.
Here's a nice demo of a similar library called Scrollorama: http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama/

Skrollr is noteworthy because it's significantly smaller (5.5kb vs. 94kb+jQuery), and makes use of HTML5 data attributes for notation.
FTC: Wyndham Hotels Failed to Protect Consumers' Personal Information
Sent you a message regarding this. Cool idea man, I like the tracks.
"If you want to throw an anchor behind a speed boat, you can do it, though we don't recommend it."

There's a weird implication here that once you need disk persistence, you might as well give up. Group commit and well tuned, append-focused IO can do wonders if leveraged correctly. For example, we've benchmarked VoltDB using synchronous disk writes (group commit every 2ms) at half a million SQL statements/sec and 100k txns/sec on a single box using a magnetic media and disk controller with a BBU. This same config on EC2/EBS will run dramatically slower, but would still be considered respectable compared to MySQL.
seriously?... that seems a bit extreme

Thats not the impression I got from the tech team who have told me I've gone past the average wait time.

I wish these things are communicated better...and a month and a half to release an app is pretty ridiculous.
Congrats to jps. A serious piece of software, and a development style that we can all aspire to.

Allow me to recommend the SublimeLinter plugin. Its name should be self explanatory.

https://github.com/SublimeLinter/SublimeLinter

Also, for those asking about discovering functionality, have a browse of the default key binding definition files, it is enlightening.
Possibly to speed up opening large files. There is a plugin that does this for files above a configured size.
Sentinel and slaves in INFO output
Caching and memoization. Caching and memoization everywhere.