skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To slightly rephrase the OP's question:

In what use cases does mongo kick postgres's ass?

To the two points you mentioned:

- semi-structured input can be saved as hstore type or as json type;

- and for flexible jobs, you can use pretty much any popular language - PL/R, PL/Python, even PL/C if performance is really critical.
I don't know about that. A universal annotation platform that reached its full potential could basically eat the entire Internet. You can see hints of that in the founders' public interviews, when they say they want all of Business Insider's articles annotated on Rap Genius, for instance. The area is fraught with copyright concerns, and who knows if Rap Genius is the company to pull it off, but anything with that sort of growth potential is worth watching.

[Edit] Here's the most interesting quote from the Business Insider interview:

"Some books are in the public domain, like Moby Dick. Then there are some books that aren't in the public domain. And when people start to annotate these things, they create something new so people aren't just coming for the book anymore. They come for the meaning."

That would be a huge expansion of fair use. If they can make this argument successfully in court, everything ever written would suddenly be on the table, and they would be well positioned to gobble it up.
Thanks so much. It has worked. I am using windows 7. May be developers of this application should consider simply including the full words.
AndroVM - faster Android emulation using VirtualBox
My number one reason for choosing MongoDB is replication that just works out of the box and doesn't require either a read lock or shutting down the master to set up a new slave.
More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4666686
The other top HN page article today doesn't add to my confidence in MongoDB so more persistence options will be interesting. But still, production ready or not, this can be an excellent MVP creator.
Does Riak support distributed transactions? If not, I don't see how they handle the possibility of a read occuring during the replicated write.
What am I supposed to learn from these numbers? They are interesting to look at, but I don't have enough information. Exactly what version of php is running, and how is it configured? What does the "Index" field signify? Where can I find the code?

While fun to look at and calculate, it also doesn't mean a lot for most applications. I would argue that data fetching from DBs or caches will be the majority of execution time.
I think there are legitimate reasons to use a "NoSQL" solution rather than MySQL. I'm more interested to know in what use cases Mongo kicks it's competitors asses? What are it's competitors, even? I'll admit that the NoSQL world is a slightly blurry mess to me, with different products seemingly optimised for different cases.
Ahh, that makes much more sense. I suppose passing policemen or something could close them, since bars probably aren't open early in the morning.
"which would reduce ticket rates"

Maybe, there's a possibility of increased ticket rates too due to the extra driving km done by people "going away for the long weekend", and by drivers being less experienced on the routes they're driving (compared to regular commuter traffic who know exactly where the speed/redlight cameras are, and are usually in heavy enough traffic to not be able to exceed the speed limit).

I wonder if there's local (NSW, Australia - for me) tickets-by-day day available to analyse?
and then get a hold of investors to see what is going on, then wait while they figure out what is going on and tell you, then meet with management to determine a proper statement.

theoretically, could it have happened way faster? yes, but who knows how hard it was to get a hold of everybody and make sure whatever information they had was accurate. 3 hours isnt that big of a deal.
What is his evidence for the claim in the title, other than that they have been raising increasingly large amounts of money (typically, all other things equal, a sign of health)?
Think about this in terms of a Nash Equilibrium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium The classic case being rules that adjust for Free rider problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

Basically, if you want to maximize the expected value of fish you catch your going to fish to the limit of your capabilities. It would also be perfectly rational to suggest instituting catch limits with vary large penalties. After the rule change you may be perfectly happy to obey them because they make you more money for less effort and breaking them is not worth the risk. Note, a lot of environmental preservation is rational it's voluntary environmentalism that's often irrational behavior.
Since we are a mysql shop, for this use-cases I serialize and store the form as xml in a CLOB column. For any field that needs to be searched on, I create an additional column.
Disadvantage of this is you can't run mysql queries against the data stored in the CLOB column.
fwiw, postgresql 9.2 supports a json datatype. you can efficiently access/query json fields using plv8 (http://code.google.com/p/plv8js/).

so you could have:

create table form_results (
id serial primary key,
data json
);

http://pgeu-plv8.herokuapp.com/ has more information.
It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations don't make a meaningful effort to accurately measure and focus on LTV.

This lack of focus means that opportunities are missed as those organizations fail to identify and address high-value segments, while also overpaying to acquire customers from low-value segments.

It's great to see some actionable tactical advice on using a specific tactic to increase LTV, not just because it's a good advice, but because it's a clear reminder about the importance of LTV as a key metric.
On the third hand, extreme examples might not be relevant to a more minor tweak of profits like suing or not suing over one-click. If it's a matter of degrees, degrees matter.
Send hand written greeting cards to anyone, anywhere without an address
It is not unheard of for businesses in both the public and private sector to not allow AGPL code or use of applications released under this license.

For example, I worked at a public library for years, and the policy was no AGPL, even if we had no intention of touching the source. Same for a local university.

[Edit to add anecdote]
When you are talking about mid to high level security, you assume that your adversary is not an average programmer, but rather a train security analasyst. A major part of that field is looking finding vulnurabilities in machine code. Based on the statement "Obfuscation is due entirely to conciseness" in the author's hint, it sound like he did not use any techniques that would have a significant effect on the generated machine code.
We launched last week and already we are sending cards all over the world.
I know these guys have good intentions, but they seem confused about the guarantees that SRP provides. It does allow the server to verify the user's password without receiving it, but it doesn't help in any was against offline attacks. If the "password" (in this case verifier) database is compromised, the attackers will still be able to brute force the passwords. If they implemented it correctly, they will be salted, but this only makes the attack slower. Furthermore, nothing can protect you if your password is password.

Also, I hope that they don't think this removes the need for SSL. It does not. In a web application the server sends the client the javascript to run. A man in the middle can modify it and defeat the whole point of SRP.
Sorry, as much I care about this piece of news (I am, after all, a TC patient in remission and I'm literally wearing a LiveStrong wristband as I write this), this doesn't belong in Hacker News. Flagging.
Albanian, my mother tongue, is such a language. In first grade it took me all of 4 months to learn how to read and write everything. But that didn't mean I was reading everything. In fact I read my first book when I was in second grade and was reading independently only in fourth grade. One needs to practice reading to be able to read.
Spelling also is not trivial. There is a one to one correspondence between sounds and letters, yes, but before you can write the word you need to figure out all the sounds that make up that word and that is not trivial at all. Again from my experience, we were taking dictations until second year of high schools and we were still making mistakes.
I think that grammar actually plays a more important role in writing ability, at least when comparing Albanian and English. A verb in Albanian can appear in more than 70 different forms depending on the tense and other grammatical categories that I can't even translate, while a verb in English can appear in a very limited number of forms. I think it is much easier in English to remember by heart how to write those few forms than in Albanian to figure out how to write each form by sounding it. Of course an Albanian can predict how a verb should be written from the context (there are rules) but that cannot be done before having studied Albanian grammar for a few years.
"Binary lambda calculus is a new idea introduced by John Tromp in 2008"

Apparently so. Wow.
Currently you have to hit tab three times to highlight the comments link, then press return. Not ideal, but should still be faster than having to use the mouse.
You are so right, it's not even funny :)
Looks great!

An alternative interface for navigating links with your keyboard in Chrome is DeadMouse: http://chetan51.github.com/deadmouse/

With it, you can simply start typing out the text of any link you see on the page to go to it.
Ask HN: What are some good educational apps and websites for second graders?
My little sister is in second grade. Can anyone recommend some good educational apps or websites that make it fun to learn? Thanks!
"Meteor 0.5.0, available today, allows you to write secure realtime client-server applications in pure JavaScript. It's the only system of its kind in the world."

That's an outright lie.
cf. http://opalang.org
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/twilio-is-crushing-it-150k-... :)
Micro-benchmarks are useless. A better approach:

http://www.slideshare.net/quipo/profile-your-php-application...

http://blip.tv/phpnw/phpnw10-lorenzo-alberton-profile-your-p...
Something like Namecoin, maybe?
An end of month bump doesn't really surprise me... for an ex-cop's viewpoint into how police officers operate, Dale Carson's book (Arrest-Proof Yourself) is an illustrative read.
EC2 I/O
From Patrick's course to articles like these, it's great to see the growth in interest in this. The challenge with LTV (as with all analysis) is making sure that you can translate it into action. For many companies, the barrier is just getting started.

On a broader note, it's great to see how many companies are tackling customer lifecycle management (though with very different approaches and different end markets). It's time people stopped building one-offs for this.

A few companies I know of (the first of which I'm a co-founder of):

- Klaviyo

- Vero

- Customer.io

- Reamaze

- Intercom

- Totango

- Mixpanel
But aren't Opa applications written in Opa, not pure JavaScript?
Not sure what Wu-Tang has to do with this, but....

Seriously though, is Mongo an ODB, or a document oriented database? ODBs/OODBs imply a much different use-case and functionality, and I think we ought not conflate the two.
Thanks for the advice. I didn't want people thinking I was just link baiting so that is why I included a description.
I also have doubts about the effectiveness of their security, so I'd like to challenge that part of the statement too.
I know a few large scale corporations that license Mongo from 10gen including their commercial support. I really don't see any issue here.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MongoDB+Commercial+Servi...
Meteor 0.5.0 Released: authentication, user accounts, new screencast
Hi Google Platform people. Very nice work. As you may know, Randall Monroe (of xkcd fame) has recently started a feature called "what if" on their site. I would like to post a question to you along those lines:

What if Google was tasked with building an orbiting datacenter? How about a Dyson ring, or sphere? How would you do it?

If we were to use all matter in the solar system for commodity linux hardware, how much gmail storage would I get? How many flops? And what sorts of computation could you do on this monster?

Please answer! This should be fun...
Ask HN: Is subscription good model good (news reader HS speech events.)
I'm primarily wondering if using news articles in my app might qualify as fair use, or at least not be a very attractive target for news outlets' legal teams.
I've looked at newscred.com, but they don't disclose pricing, so I don't know if I can be profitable if I use them.
Based on (http://www.nationalforensicleague.org/aspx/nav.aspx?navid=37) there are ~3000 schools that do speech and debate, probably around 2/3 do the event that could necessitate my app (extemporaneous speech). I should not expect to be able to collect payments from students. Based on what schools already pay for paper publications, and similar competing services, I expect to charge anywhere from $40 to $100 per school per year. This translates to a potential market of ~80 to 120k.
My current plan is to respond to cease and desist letters by remove the respective feed from my articles database.
Given the above, does that seem like a reasonable plan? Particularly, for anyone involved in the education sector, is yearly subscription an acceptable business model?

(www.extempengine.com if you're wondering)
From the linked page:

client function client_function(x, y) { ... }

This seems at least slightly different from "pure javascript". There are more examples on the page, particularly the neat sugar for database stuff.

I don't think it's accurate to say that this is an outright lie.
you're totally right, industrial data centers are the same as entertainment venues and should be combined.
I thought that it was odd that he dislikes "user" because it is impersonal (he wouldn't call his mom one), but then he chose replacements that are nearly as impersonal (I'm sure he wouldn't call his mom a buyer or a seller either). "Customer" is going to get very confusing if they start using it for people who aren't actually paying for anything. So while I see his point, I don't think he's improved the situation.
Some Advice From Authors on Avoiding Online Distractions
Just tried it out. This extension "highlights" the links in the most annoying way possible I've seen since the introduction of the blink tag :). Looks like it also could conflict with many sites if they use shortcuts. Are you using this extension on a regular basis?
Why? Unless he's arguing on the basis of authority ("I say so!"), reasoning is reasoning, regardless of whose mouth it comes from. If his reasoning holds up, what basis is there for giving it less "weight"?

If you think the arguer is biased against the position being argued for, that's maybe grounds for suspicion that the reasoning is flawed in some (perhaps subtle) way—but suspicion when listening to arguments is always a good thing.

Anyway, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, his position isn't actually inconsistent: it's perfectly rational for him to think that a system where all parties are equally prohibited from certain abusive actions is better for him than the system where they aren't, even if he's participated in the abuse in the past. He may very well have come to the conclusion that he loses more from the abuses of others than he gains from abuses of his own. [The "hockey-helmet" example someone gave is a good illustration, I think.]
I suspect that it is easier to teach people tor than to teach them how to change the host file. Not that we need to, there are plenty of anti-censor browser plugins nowdays.
Just curious, as I don't know enough about the two, what makes Opa similar enough to Meteor that the claim "[Meteor is] the only system of its kind in the world" is an outright lie?
Steam Greenlight now accepts software submissions
There is Derby, http://derbyjs.com
I'm a regular Instacart user, averaging 2x deliveries per week. It's awesome that I don't have to make the trek to Safeway anymore and the prices are reasonable. I find the Instacart design to be fine as is. The main problem with the app is search. The facelift looks nice, but making the app prettier ignores the bigger problem that I have of not being to find what I want.
I'd love to see a benchmark of:

for ($i = 0; $i < count($users); $i++)

vs

foreach($users as $user)
This is called semi-synchronous replication

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/replication-semisync....
Eventually consistant replication is not unique to MongoDB, most DBs have an async replication option. Using "not Mongo" won't really solve it.
Usually if it's something I have only very basic knowledge of, that's what I'll say. It's not always saying "I don't know" if you really mean "I'm not certain".

It's more about being honest about your level of knowledge. Sometimes that means grey are or saying "I don't know, but I will find out." OR "I don't know, but let's get a hold of someone that does."

That would happen in more of a professional environment than a conversational one :o)
>I would argue that data fetching from DBs or caches will be the majority of execution time.

People keep saying that, and I would like to see some numbers for that also.

The DB dataset could be already cached in memory, for example.
You can set it to the total number of slaves you have and ensure data is on all of them. Normally that slows writes down enough that it's undesirable, though.
I've felt this way about being called a "consumer" for a long time and have avoided businesses that label me as such. I say this is a good call.
Does anyone know if the server code is being exposed to the client?
As far as I can tell, Riak blows mongo away for this particular criteria.
True, enough. There are plenty of company's like IBM where giving up patent revenue without changes to the patent system would heavily impact there profits. However, IBM has donated a fair number of patents in the past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/technology/11soft.html

Along massive quantities of data. http://depth-first.com/articles/2011/12/15/ibm-donates-large...
Not all people trying to use meteor have the money for commercial licensing / support.
Hidden Twitter Cards Potential
No, Riak is nontransactional. But neither is mongo if it's important here. Riak is apparently getting some kind of strong consistency though. Calvin looks interesting for a nosql with distributed transactions.
That's pretty cool. How have you worked around issues such as breaking keyboard shortcuts for Gmail?

Why do you like this approach better than what vimium does? that was already to complicated for me.

Also: I love the way you demo the functionality on the site!
The form of the rule that I was told in school is: I before E, except after C, when the sound is "ee". This (1) is pretty simple, (2) has rather few exceptions, and (3) does correctly give the spelling of lots of words that some people would otherwise find tricky.

Note that "except after C" means "ignore the rule in this case" rather than "reverse the rule in this case". That is, it doesn't mean "E before I, after C".

Of the 9 words on your list: 5 (science, frequencies, vacancies, fallacies, society) are "after C" and therefore not covered by the rule; 2 (eider, feisty) are never pronounced with an "ee" sound and therefore not covered by the rule; 1 (either) is sometimes pronounced that way and sometimes not and therefore a kinda-half-exception; 1 (seize) is a definite genuine exception.

There are a few other exceptions, but the rule in this form correctly fixes the spelling of a whole lot of common words (a few examples: piece, frieze, grief, believe, retrieve) that would be easy to get wrong without it.
Map reduce across sharded servers comes to mind as an advantage. For that matter, horizontal scalability in general is a big advantage that many of the NoSQL data stores have over RDBMS databases.
This chart is also useful to find different ways to do the same thing, so you can choose to use what is more readable or functions you didn't know about.
My conclusion: Never use the ereg…() functions.

Well, duh. It's deprecated.
More surreal events in the Crypto Cold War - the BitCoin blockade of Iran
5 New Digital Services That Connect Events and Sponsors
Opa generates pure JS code, even though it's indeed a variant of JavaScript with some added features (the ones you mention) and some removed. But then, there's also Derby and probably others.
Twitter NYC Office Hours for Newsroom Developers Incensed Over API
Looks like they finally took the suicide joke off their homepage.
+1 for this book - I rarely see it mentioned when it comes to C books. Reminds me of van der Linden's C book in that it uses non-traditional examples to illustrate concepts.
The "only system of its kind" seemed broad enough to include Opa, which generates pure JS.
I must add my experience with this wonderful book. My daughter is 5.3 years old. She started with this book when she was 4.6 years old. Before that she only knew the names of the letters. She is now at lesson 95 (out of more than 250) and she can read very well (she is reading books like Frog and Toad etc.) I intend to finish the whole book before her sixth birthday by which time I am sure she will be an excellent reader.

The way we work with the book is that I will read the first 2 or 3 words on the page and then she tries to read the rest. I help when help is needed. In a good day she can read about 95% of the text without any help. The reason for this is because the text is organized in an excellent way. There is only one new rule introduced in a lesson and the child can figure it out the from the first few words and can take it from there. In fact I have found that quite often when my daughter cannot read a word, it is because she has lost focus and forgot how she read the words that came before. We go back a few words and reread them and suddenly the new word that she could not read, now is easy.

One characteristic of this book that I haven't seen other people mention is that the book is great for non-native speaker teachers like myself. Before I started with this book I got another book that used the phonetics method. But I couldn't start teaching my daughter with that book because I couldn't make the phonetic sounds correctly myself. With Bloomfield's book there is no worry for me because I do not need to make any sounds, just read a few words when my daughter cannot read them.
Apparently no one noticed that Derby.js has been able to integrate with Everyauth for over a month: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/derbyjs/7VWTclIBEw8/LsOiuvfz...

Derby vs. Meteor (by Derby): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842525

Full disclosure: I'm not a Derby contributor. I just played with it for some rapid prototyping.
If they pulled that off it would mean the government effectively repealed the notion of copyright (I could read any book I wanted to on rapgenius). I'm not sure how likely that is.
> I'm sure this has already crossed their minds, so I'm interested in seeing how they deal with the problem.

This is the really interesting thing here. There are already song explanation sites but they are pretty terrible. They've got a great interface and a vision, now they have lots of resources to really step their game up and offer deeper commentary, multiple commentaries, etc. I'd love to see some kind of interface to show multiple readings of a poem; all the feminist viewpoints, historical, all the different ways in to something really complex.
Please always include a link: https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric
Working Effectively With iTerm2
He actually first mentioned the idea as early as 2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040602202609/http://homepages.c...
Non-Invasive Security for Implantable Medical Devices
Err... why is this relevant now? This was written 6 years ago. This is like an archeological expedition.