skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was reading this article with great interest, exactly up to the part where it claims MySQL is stupid. Maybe it's just me but I've had enough of articles that are written with the idea that the best way to promote your product is to bash your perceived competition and call it stupid, worthless, idiotic and broken. People, here's the news for you: people don't use your competition (or your beloved tool's competition) because they are stupid. They use it because of variety of reasons, but it almost never involves them being stupid, and calling their choice stupid is almost never a good way to get them to consider changing their preferences.

Even more disappointing, when the author proceeds from showing how stupid MySQL is (random collection of choices which can be plausibly decided in any way) to showing how much better Postgres it, he doesn't show anything useful. He just shows random collection of features that may be useful in some use case he probably encountered in his practice, but no compelling picture of a superior product. Nobody changes DB server because one has "tomorrow" keyword and another does not.

And when performance comparison is done - no numbers at all are quoted except for initial data size. Just bare claims "it performed well" - how well? Are these results comparable to what I can expect on my data with my setup? How much manual work (mentioned in passing as 2 experienced DBAs were working on it - but how complex was what they did?) would it require to make it perform? How much better would it perform if I hired a very good DBA? These are very important questions to consider when you choose the DB for your project, but completely omitted in the article.
While I certainly understand the frustration being felt (I purchased the app and was hoping for push notifications), I'm sure most people here would've accepted the offer. With all that's been written on how little developers are making on the App and Mac Stores, I highly doubt they were making enough to sustain a team of 5. I'm assuming they're an ambitious group and selling an email app would just have not provided them with the capital and resources to achieve what they want. So they perfect their app and then what? You've pretty much hit the end of that road.

Sparrow was up against the native OSX/iOS mail clients, the GMail native and web apps, with the App/Mac Stores as their main distribution channels, which make it nigh impossible to get your app any visibility save the smash hits.

All that considered, it makes perfect sense, to me, why they'd accept a Google offer.
> But in written communication all those other things must be conveyed by your words.

> That's what writing is.

So if I writing is just words, my grammatically correct words are as good as Orwell's, right? Writing isn't just about words - words are but a minor detail. Why did anyone read "A Clockwork Orange" when it butchered words in some very creative ways?

Do you have anything interesting to say, are you bringing anything new to the table, are you reporting facts, is this an opinion piece, and a thousand other things are what makes writing a powerful medium. How to use correct grammar is a very small variable in the scheme of things.
Thank you. That makes some sense. My kids have been taught "AMAP," or Attention-getter, Motivator, Assertion, and Preview. That has some merit, in that it allows you to appeal to the reader's curiosity, and develop interest in the topic before you spiral in to your thesis (the assertion and preview). I have to confess that when I write, by the time I get to the conclusion, I've usually run out of ways to restate what I've said twice already, so my essays usually end pretty weakly.
if there were developers who were good enough to have any confidence that they would be acquired for their talent, i suspect they wouldn't need to work for google to make their money.
Who was demanding a ceiling on the compensation? By expanding into a Windows userbase(size and subset of customers willing to pay presumed to be larger than the Apple userbase), the ceiling potentially could have been of cathedral proportions. If Sparrow lacked the desire or skill to expand to Windows, nothing limited them from creating other Appleland products. They already had a great reputation which would have lowered the hurdle for the potential success of product number two.

If my paying $9 for a widget is not good enough isn't it ok to tell me things are not going as well as expected and you're looking for solutions? If you leave me in the dust and come back next week as Parentco Widget Version 2 then at the very least you'll cause me to raise my eyebrows.
The word "men" also means humanity you idiot.
I'm not getting this hammer metaphor. OK, so a hammer is good for pounding nails and not good for fixing a watch. If we're having this whole discussion because people have noticed that PHP is the frequent common factor in buggy, poor-security web applications, then what is PHP actually good for?
Dude, it's actually rather simple. Value is subjective. You are worth whatever people are willing to give you. If an employer or client is willing to pay you $80k to watch Youtube videos all day then you watching Youtube videos all day is worth that to him.

What you need to do is not measure your worth in how hard you feel that you are working or how rare you feel that your knowledge is. You are probably a very poor judge of that anyway. You should try to measure it in terms of how much value you create for an employer. That's also hard to measure, but it's much closer to what you can legitimately ask for.

Look at it like this: If you write a program that saves a boss an hour of work every day, and that boss makes $250k a year, that program is worth about $31,250 a year, even if it only took you three minutes to write it. If that same program saves dozens of people an hour of work every day, it's worth even more. If you write a program that does the work of three accountants, you are worth, three accountants. As a programmer, you probably produce a lot more value than you think you do.

Just keep that in mind next time you're at the bargaining table.
We used a combination of tracking concentrations and individual molecules. For specific macromolecules like DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase, ribosomes, etc we kept track of the position of each individual molecule. For other things like glucose, water, etc with very high copy number we just kept track of the copy number.

I agree modelling entire organisms will ultimately require large collaborations, potentially through projects like Open Worm.
There is also AARON - http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/
Soviet and American precursors to the gamification of work
Yes, F/OSS has that huge advantage... but even though I'm an F/OSS advocate, I think it's naive to ignore the economics of such projects. They have a much harder time getting off the ground, especially those aimed at a mass market to which you'll have trouble selling a support plan. There are business models, but they're more complicated and don't provide as much income.

I do wish companies that abandon projects would OSS them more often though.
The big issue I see is a bunch of men, most of whom have probably never actually worked with a woman in a STEM field, think they are experts on what such women would find offensive.
So what's the takeaway for us as users? Should we prefer free apps with IAP or advertising because that's a more sustainable business model?
The free market is a bitch.
Sure... 2, 3, maybe 4 times harder, but not hundreds or thousands of times. The fact that we have such huge gaps is cultural, and a testament to how well they've been able to sell themselves. The gap hasn't always been this wide, and it's not the same in every country.
I think a good trial lawyer would probably be able to get a jury to a level of at least rudimentary understanding of the technology over the course of a multi-day trial. But I agree with the spirit of what you're saying. Reliance on trial by lay jury is just one of the many, many ways the American patent system is broken.
Exactly. We can't even calculate the exact 3d shape of any large protein, much less exactly how it would interact with all other proteins inside a cell. This is an approximation. A great scientific success for sure, but not an exact simulation of all the parts of a single cell.
We used a combination of representing copy numbers of molecular species and representing individual molecules of a few specific types: DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase, ribosome, FtsZ
1. Yes, applications can set sql_mode themselves at the session level. An admin cannot prevent this. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/server-sql-mode.html
We don't need full organism simulation for this to be useful. We just need tissue and cell level interactions that are accurate to have this be useful in drug search. As we want to look at effects on metabolism etc a coarse grain approach could provide direction.

The computational complexity aspect could be side-stepped if quantum computers were invented before 80 years. One of the few things quantum computers can do exponentially better is simulate quantum mechanics. Biology is chemistry which is "just" a bunch of quantum many body problems. With a QC we can model Protein interactions, RNA, signaling, transport etc much more efficiently than a regular computer.
I will not hire people who use contractions.
I don't know. English is a second language here in India, and the grammar covered in schools is pretty basic, and still I would wager most of people would recognize it's passive voice.
I agree. I've written many home-grown ORMs as well as used a few well-known ones. It's definitely easier in some ways writing your own because you understand all of the details & it has nothing in it that is unneeded. The downside is that you don't have the community support maintaining the code and providing support resources. On the flip-side I've spent days researching and tweaking hibernate mapping files, occasionally making me want to throw my laptop out the window!

One thing is for sure, no matter what ORM or similar solution you use, if you don't know how to observe and understand the SQL that is generated then you won't be able to use it efficiently.
I know quite a few developers who only work on stuff that they hope will result in an acquihire. Can they guarantee it? Of course not, but I feel it's a pretty selfish approach to building something that's not just for your own use.

For example, in today's "the new digg" feedback survey, I told them I will not use the service until they have a sustainable revenue model (they happily tout their current lack of one), for this reason - the last thing I need is yet another service I like to be bought and then shut down. Granted, I don't believe they're starting out with the goal of being acquired, but this whole "useful stuff goes away because the people building it have no business sense" is pretty annoying to deal with.
Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/23/googles-david-lawee-one-thi...

So really, Google seems to be the place where 1/3 of acquisitions (in which not 100% are "good", per se) go to die.
Is the size of a diamond on a wedding ring a similar comparison?
Are talent acquisitions better with symmetric product acquisitions?
Today's talent acquisitions (and the death of some great apps) got me thinking - would it make sense to put out a standing offer to purchase and continue work on discontinued products who's teams are being acquired?
I disagree; it's very important to talk about complexity. Otherwise, we can't minimize it, and however you define it, it is a problem in software.

You're right, though, the definition is sprawling, so I think it makes sense to use smaller more precise words. The good news is we have some of these: Referential transparency, pure functions, immutability, and neologisms such as "complection". These are very useful, meaningful terms.
Well, you'll be getting closer to looking like you're discriminating based on race, and that likely isn't worth it from a legal or PR perspective.
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Or Instapaper v2? Paid upgrades have been around since the dawn of software, and there are plenty of companies that have been around long enough to show it works quite well. Adobe is a great example, and Microsoft as well although they've obviously diversified a lot in the past decade.
This is a series of nonstatements. Obviously, Sparrow did not get so much support that Google's offer was unattractive. Post as many gold stars as you want: if Google is outbidding the user base, it's hard to blame the developer for accepting their offer.
Great point.
I guess we can draw parallels to other purchases we make. When I purchase a car, I get the car I paid for in that current state, they wont 'update' it for free, nor do we as consumers expect that.
The app industry has created a covenant of sorts that says, pay for the software, and we will update it for x period of time going forward. Which is great for consumers but to be frank, kind of a bad deal for developers (considering most apps we buy are relatively inexpensive).
Either developers have to adapt the more common pay for updates model (Sparrow 1 = 4.99, Sparrow 2 = 8.99) or it will be a pure 'create the best x' keep adding features so they can amass more and more users.
It also gets the developers thinking more about how customers will be using new features, rather than just making it work. That's a very good thing.
مسلسل فرقة ناجي عطا الله الحلقة 2 
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http://tube.sbayaa.com/948
How is this any different than, for instance, Steve Jobs taking only $1 per year in CEO salary?
Microsoft Kinect, Mac, and Windows used to make Massive Virtual Instrument
You are, when you say "hey big companies, stop waving money at these guys". However much you think you're offering to Sparrow's developers, it's presumably less than Google was offering.
Naturally, when choosing his own jeans, Dorsey prefers pants that reflect that heritage. He is an aficionado of those made by fashion designer Scott Morrison. Dorsey notes that he plans to make a pilgrimage to Morrison’s shop in New York City’s SoHo district, where they sell jeans made from cotton handpicked in Zimbabwe and woven by craftspeople in Japan. Once, Dorsey says with quiet awe, Morrison provided rigid, unwashed jeans to dishwashers at a New York City restaurant. They wore them constantly in the filthy steaming kitchens, creating a bewitching pattern of wear that was painstakingly replicated by Morrison’s jeansmiths. It’s an elaborate process, all in the pursuit of wabi-sabi.

I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.
An alternate perspective is that they knew the product was going to be mothballed, or maybe even removed from the store entirely. For the late-adopters with bad timing they didn't want to charge full price for an app that wasn't going to see continued enhancements.

Either way, we're not talking about major dollars here. I'll bet most people purchased it with a credit card, and could file a claim for a refund with their card if they really felt so financially raped over the price of a beer.
It seems like it would help the team to monetize a soon-to-be defunct product, and help their user base by providing continuity and updates beyond maintenance. I'd assume that any team geting acqui-hired probably has some traction in their product. Thoughts?
> And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something cool, so give me cash".

I fully agree. Honestly, I hope both that this campaign fails and that the guys at Pixate are able to develop and launch their product successfully. The point of Kickstarter is to enable creative endeavours that would have trouble succeeding in a market environment -- a talented friend of mine financed his first short film via a similar site, which will hopefully get him a foot in the door of filmmaking. In his case, the Kickstarter idea is a great thing: It guarantees artistic independence and audience involvement.

This app, however, already has backing and will easily make plenty of money on the market. It's not a catastrophe in the long haul, but I sincerely hope this doesn't catch on: That's not audience involvement, that's a commercial transaction. You give me money, I give you product. On a larger scale, it's abusing opportunities for people who have few, which is particularly nefarious if it comes from people who have no need to beg.
> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)

Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)

Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical http://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)
I got a similar vibe. Also I DID support sparrow. I told absolutely every person I know with a mac that they should use sparrow. Every computer I setup at work and for friends I installed sparrow by default. I have tweeted about loving sparrow. I'm really not sure what more I could have done other than wear a sandwich board around with their logo on it. That STILL didn't stop them from being bought out...
At $10 a license I'm going to guess that the Sparrow guys weren't rolling in Ferrarri's and Brazillian models.

It's quite possible that this was actually a way for them to continue doing something they love (coding) without financial stress hanging over their heads.
While there are performance issues in Webkit vs Native, for the trivial example the issue is usually the default delay in generating a 'click' event. Browsers wait 300ms to see if you're attempting a doubletap. You want to use a framework, or write some code to detect 'touchstart' for clicks to register with a minimum of delay.

See https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons
Ask HN: Is low-level programming dead?
...For startups, that is?

To be completely honest, I don't like web programming and most of the higher-level programming at all. I do dislike design, when I build something I want it to look good - I simply prefer working on the deepest levels of a technical problem. The part with grinding gears.

Basically, I'm mostly working on low-level software (assembly and C), and on interesting hardware. With that being said: do you think there is room in the startup world for these kind of projects? The initial investment appears to be higher, manufacturing hardware is a lot more trouble and low-level programming isn't done that much anymore. What do you think?

EDIT: I should note that for something to be interesting to me (a hardware startup), it doesn't even necessarily have to involve much programming.
That's pretty useful, do you think I could get a copy of that"?
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http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting is a similiar resource for php, perl, python and ruby only.
Java Arrays tutorial
Can you point to me where I said that? My posts have been to the effect of "hey little companies, if you're open to being waved to by big companies then let me know before I buy into your company's offerings."
...And does anyone have a link to Larry Wall's talk? ("state of the onion").I'd like to know why there was a steaming toy penguin on the stage.
https://twitter.com/merlyn/statuses/226149752440500227
> where people don't give a damn about quality.

Similarly, nobody has fine tapestries on the walls of their server rooms. Nobody cares about the insulation properties, apparently, but worst of all, nobody cares about the attention to detail and quality a fine tapestry represents. Thus we live in a terrible world with no appreciation of the finer things, because if you don't mind the lack of tapestries, how can you possibly care about a lack of code quality?
You don't think a message of "support developers or they'll sell out" is a bit tone deaf today?
I can't tell if Rhodes creates 100% native apps or some kind of web/native hybrids, but it doesn't like it uses Apple's iOS SDK. RubyMotion lets you use the same APIs and classes as normal Objective-C apps, so all existing literature is totally useable.

And something I didn't mention in the tutorial: you can even use existing Objective-C frameworks and code in RubyMotion apps using CocoaPods[1].

[1]: http://cocoapods.org/
The URL should be http://versastudio.com/articles/when-web-sites-fail-dont-thr...
The project I'm working on now is at a point where it's either spend a HUGE amount of time refactoring and fixing everything or just start over. We can't just continue adding on features with the state the code is in.

The question is, which will be faster?

Right now, it's written to run on an old OS, with old versions of old languages. We absolutely HAVE to update this stuff as it's just stupid to continue programming in the dark ages (no code completion, no jump to definition, printf debugging).

But is it better to refactor the code and rewrite it slowly, or just scrap it, lose all of the old terrible design decisions, and move on.

You ask the question "Why do you think you'd make the design decisions correctly this time around?" Well, we didn't write the first version. It was given to a vendor that totally botched the job and it's our responsibility to fix it.
Could be I misread the tone of the article. Perhaps I was reading it through the lens of everyone being upset about the current state of acquihires on the "Sparrow acquired by Google" thread.

Even so, if you take his advice and do what you can to support software you love to keep it alive, in the long run it may not be enough. Either way, my comment about why these things happen still stands.
Love this attitude, and I also checked out your app.. Good job! Beautiful and looks awesome. Makes me wish I was more of an Instagram user than I am.
If I think you are inclined to accept a talent acquisition if offered, I _will not use your product_. Why would I? It's insane for me to trust my data to someone who's going to throw it away to make a buck.

If you accept a talent acquisition, you will -- and should -- have a devil of a time getting customers at your next venture, having thrown away the customers from your previous one. Tread lightly.
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This is a really interesting idea, but I'm curious about how the transaction fees would affect things. Does the process of paying the fee reveal a match to an attacker? Regardless, it was an excellent read.
My big takeaway is that Ruby generally does things the "most-popular" way, and that maybe a lot of those obscure languages are obscure for a reason (object["method"](params) to invoke a method?!?)
While Rails has been a massive success the ruby language hasn't been particularly popular much beyond that.

I'd say python has a more even distribution in terms of use in varied fields for instance.