skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
mongo is easy to start with but it sure makes your project more complicated and painful as time goes on. it was to the point, i actually stopped enjoying work.

the power of sql is just too great to ignore, had gone through too many times where i wish i was on sql.

i will probably use mongo for those times where i absolutely need to store a schema-less data (custom attributes), but will only do so in conjunction with a sql database.

there is also that reliability and maintenance factor of securing it, making it redundant, and correcting problems when problem arises. all of which takes time off development.

and just like OP, i probably won't ever start another project with mongo from ground up. there are just too much things to worry about and problems come out from all different angles when you least expect it. but in sql, everything just works.
I'm surprised -- i registered for a company developer account a few years ago and they only required me to fax the articles of incorporation. Have the rules changed since then?
This app isn't meant to be used in the subway – it's meant to used before you go down into the station. All the lines supported in the app have signs in their stations with the same live schedule information.
I own it, and used it until I realized how much time I was wasting on unnecessary complications. Try "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman — it cuts out the cruft and the results are just as good.
I don’t know… and it’s okay.
I feel like I'm missing something.

Edit: I thought this said "Dear Hacker [News] Community"
Good call. I noticed they have a lot of the older Executioner (Mack Bolan) books (the original 1-50 series) which I'd like to check out.

I still have the first printings of the first five books in the series.
once you get into creating administrative/reports sections i think you'll quickly find out.
Try Strunk and White. Read it once a year, thinking about what you have written since the last time, and you will be ashamed and improved.
I read through Dave's blog and through all of the comments here and I find this very funny. Dave is right, Food is huge and is only getting bigger. I have worked with restaurants for 5+ years now, specifically in technology, and both restaurants and consumers want to see this industry evolve and there is not going to be just one solution that solves all of its problems. To people who are saying they do not want screens on their tables, then do not use them, but I will argue you are in the minority. The high-end restaurants that would go on for an anniversary dinner or take a big client out will probably not have that because you pay for attentive service. However, for the fast-casual restaurant space, which is the fast growing, people don't expect that level attention from servers and why it makes sense to integrate virtual order, user history, reviews, etc. This stuff is coming and it will be better for everyone, including restaurants, because they will receive more information about their customers and can start making better business decisions like what menu items to keep or get rid of.

The restaurant industry is just very slow to adapt, generally speaking, because the people that run them have not grown up in the age of technology and are focused on the operations. As more new restaurant owners come, this will change and the opportunities in food tech will grow larger.

Great article Dave.
I appreciate your graciously thorough response. Judging from this and other comments, are we all agreed then that the "programmatic" surveillance is quite concerning? Am I correct in understanding that even though it's not supposed to "intentionally" target US citizens, they can't even provide an estimate of how many citizens have been included, implying that perhaps many citizens in fact have been?
NFC makes no sense to me.

Walking up to a person to share things!? We have the Internet. You can already share things with people faster with less effort anywhere in the world. You want me to get someone else to pull out their phone and tap it?

Also pairing. You are pairing wireless devices. Which means you have a short range wireless network already. And you want to add another shorter range wireless network to pair? You can already leverage an existing technology.

I can see uses for payments, and sharing information on things like museum displays. But this is not wide spread enough that it matters yet. I guess this is a chicken and egg problem. But maybe you can leverage an existing tech more?

Completely agree with intents. Stupid that they don't have it yet.
I was just going to respond with the boom headshot kitty, but I figured this was HN and not reddit so I'll just say thanks for the detailed education on a topic I knew nothing about.
Another trick that I learned from my ski team was to do arm circles. The centripetal force forces blood into your extremities.
Internet access should be treated as an utility
Funny, if you actually sampled an entire trading day, you would hear the "drop" around 2PM.

There are some traders that use sound alerts when trading short term, either using alerts on the NYSE TICK, or aggregating when certain companies are being hit on the bid or ask.
impedance mismatch , that's why SQL is uber non sense in OOP architecture, especially when you end up using slow and buggy ORMs...
>>Imagine if the reddit homepage filled up with posts only from categories you explicitly followed and you might get something similar. <<

That's exactly how I use Reddit, and I was under the impression that pretty much all of the typical Reddit crowd does the same, no?

Reddit wasn't attractive to me unless I spent some time upfront to subscribe to bunch of sub-reddits and now I see only the categories I want to see (other than the top entry which is sort of what Reddit pushes as an Ad-posting).

Discussion at Reddit is indeed a problem, particularly for popular sub-reddit. I believe Branch is working on resolving some of the discussion issues apparent across the web.

Facebook connect for a new social service is counter intuitive. I will never sign up for a new service via FB or anything else.
Depends on what you do. The company I work for does outsourced datacenter operations and application monitoring. Our site and our blog absolutely must be up at all times, period. If one of our blog posts made it to the front page of HN or reddit and we weren't able to handle the load, or God forbid we went entirely offline, there would be some serious egg on our faces. Why should potential or current clients trust our advice about how they can stay online if we can't do it for ourselves?
Bessemer's anti-portfolio
It's about using the right tool for the job. Most developers never seem to understand that. Everyone seems to want the same magic bullet for everything.
This is a function of the way he writes the book. If you read four-hour work week he basically describes his process, which is that he develops the headline structure for the book and each chapter and then outsources the actual writing online via elance or equivalent. Presumably the writers read a bunch of stuff on the topic and essentially write crib notes. Quite a clever way for Ferris to make money, but not the highest quality product.
Boston's MBTA has had similar services available for years. About 3 years ago they rolled out tracking for the Orange, Red and Blue lines. Less than 2 years ago, they rolled out GPS tracking for buses. Recently, they started adding arrival time boards for the Orange, Red and Blue Lines as well.

* MBTA App Showcase: http://www.mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/

* MassDOT Developer Page: http://www.eot.state.ma.us/default.asp?pgid=content/develope...

Additionally, cellular service has been added to most subway lines and stations for at least the orange line (so you have decent signal while riding and in stations), plus WiFi available on most commuter rail trains.
There is something to be said about the ambivalence of using SQL or NoSQL for OLTP-esque applications (loosening the definition of a transaction, that is), but SQL is very useful when working with OLAP-esque applications, i.e. writing a SQL query and avoiding drafting a map-reduce job or building the logic into a custom script, and still using good stuff like secondary indexes, etc.
Google hasn't updated yet the design of it's internal tool
I don't think they're wrong if they're betting on tablets overtaking desktop/laptop computers in a not so distant future.

Sigh. Yes, when that future includes cerebral neuroimplants, tablets will replace desktop PCs. Until then, that's as ridiculous a notion as believing that tractors will replace steam shovels, or that motorcycles will replace cars.

Touchscreens, and by extension tablets, are not useful for desktop computing. It ranges from amusing to mildly annoying when people in online comment threads believe otherwise, but it's a cause for full-blown market panic when Microsoft executives believe otherwise.
Photonic Crystals & Plasmonics May Raise Solar Cell Efficiency to 50%
Of course, this is against the ingrained commenting style of HN, but I genuinely got a chuckle from that mistake.
I've been using MongoDB to "start" with for quite a while (and used AppEngine before that). Instead of using the low level mongo libraries, I use a wrapper like Mongoid to provide a high level object mapping.

With MongoDB + Mongoid, the schema is in the code in the form of Mongoid models and data stored in MongoDB mimics the in-memory application structures. I've found that this makes it much easier to visualize data flow - although it does force one to think carefully about their schema up front.
Oh, right. It doesn't change the fact that the US is very culturally homogenous.

because a language is not much spoken, it doesn't count?

A langage that isn't much spoken is one you're much less likely to encounter.

I neglected them because they're numerically negligible, and because if I had cited all native languages in the United State, I should then, too, have procedeed to cite all minority languages from Western Europe, which are more widely spoken.

There are, for instance, 13 million native speakers of Bavarian. By comparison, there's less than 3 millions native americans in the United States.

I could have been more pedantic, but for brevity's sake, I decided not to go too much into details.

My point stands.
GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software & More
I think that is an important observation. The total population might be stable or slightly rising; however, that should not be interpreted as no one leaving and only a few people moving in. It's has to do with the churn, or velocity of people coming in and then going out (leaving) as children begin reaching school age. The (public) schools, which very few exceptions, are terrible and just about everyone I know who has young children has plans on moving somewhere with better schools when it comes time.

Yes the city has many cultural and civic attractions, but they do not outweigh the educational deficit, for those with young children. For singles and for empty nesters the city is perfect, for people with young families the dearth of good public educational institutions is maddening. The wealthy can afford to send their children to private schools, everyone else cannot.
Is this related to Lockitron?
The Pi (Model B which all the new ones they ship are), is 512MB RAM.
Still soaking it all in, but one inconsistency jumped out at me:

"Shipping Mid January 2013"

"First batch ships December 2012"
Lots of fun.

This really needs to be properly EQ'd though. Watch these tutorials, and you will be able to make the thing sound 10x better with ~30 minutes work. It doesn't matter that the tutorials are for guitar music and are using specific EQ plugins, the advice is universal. Once your spectrum is less saturated, you'll be able to dial back the limiting as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSNYBbPAvKE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_-PjWts3nI
That's not true. WebGL can get you to pretty much any level of animation you would need, it's just much harder to code for than CSS.
Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility
As long as you have the data then you can calculate it. It may be easier with SQL and a normalised form but that forces a lot of other constraints.

With a non-relational DB the idea is to attack it with map reduce and possibly in app calculations. This may not be ideal, but the benefits of easy placement and access of the documents outweigh the aggregation problems on most of the problems I have dealt with.

Neither solution is perfect you just need to make a prediction based on the projects requirements and make a choice.
Straw Dogs by John Gray - Interesting new ways of looking at things. Read at your own peril.
Bicycles that have significant carrying capacity cost more than cars.

Emily Finch is all cool and shit, but that's about $3500 of bicycle that she's pedaling.

Someday that'll probably change.
Inertia and friction will always be a challenge. I would suggest combining the online ordering process (website) with the in house ordering process(menu) by creating a 'second screen' that can be used on a cell phone to display more in depth menu information (pictures, reviews, payment etc) regardless of location. As the approach gains traction introduce iPads into the restaurant. Frankly, with so many large screen phones and iPads already in use it would be great to see an ordering solution that spans local and online customers.
Yet you are still using schemas in 2 places : not DRY , SQL just doesnt fit OOP design. Most of languages today have strong functional capabilities , that makes SQL obsolete , they have functions , event systems , RDBMS exist because people use to query those systems directly , does your users log into your database directly ? no they connect your database through middleware, that's where the job should be done.
Recently I replaced my old video card on my PC, the old one had something like 160 core while new one has 960. I plugged it in and nothing really noticeable has improved. Same with when I swapped my HDD's out for SSD's. In contrast when I was a kid, there was a night & day difference going from an old Apple ][e to a 286 chipset.

But I also believe that Apple's gouged out a large chunk of customers via ipads and osx based computers.

There's also the question of what is wrong with Windows 7 for anyone to leave it? I can't find supporting numbers right now, but how many years did it take for XP's user base to abandon it?

Additionally Valve is starting to prop up linux's weakest sales point and make the consumer friendly distro's gamer friendly.

I guess my overall point is that a lot of little bites and not one main culprit is responsible for eroding Microsoft's market share.
Show HN: Easily convert Apigee WADL to JSON for use with IODocs
I want a tiny tablet with the form factor of an iPad with an active digitizer.
In Monaco there's no income tax. And it's not the only country in Europe without income tax. In Estonia the marginal tax rate is 21%. In the US it's 35%+ ?

> From what I know, it's hard to fire underperformers in most of Western Europe.

That's typical in places like France, Spain, Italy. But as my fellow Dane tries to say in his article: don't generalize and think it's the same everywhere :)
what does PHP "drops" in the name of getting started quickly ?
PHP is now a robust language with robusts frameworks like SF or ZF.
All the more so because current "jruby-on-Android" has performance problems. This hits particularly hard on startup (where a simple app can take several seconds to get past a splash page; see http://ruboto-startup.heroku.com/measurements for timing). But even once the app gets running, things still drag compared to a conventional JVM because the JIT doesn't work (due to Android's nonstandard Dalvik bytecodes).

If rubyflux winds up bypassing most of this overhead, it could be a major win. (Right now, I've got a project to try to use Scala to try to build a full-featured, reduced-boilerplate Android environment here: http://rst.github.com/positronic_docs.html --- but I'd really rather be using Ruby if the performance penalties could be ironed out.)
Have you read it? Did it change your life?
Always tricky to prove intention, especially when so many related details would be secret.
My god, some of you people live in the weirdest little bubble, where you have no idea what is going on in the world.

> The consumer PC market has cratered since the iPad

No it hasn't. Not even close. There are a lot more PCs sold per quarter than iPads, and the rate of PC shipments is still increasing.

> How many people really want a Windows machine at this point?

According to every available stat, a vast majority of people choose Windows over Linux and OSX.

> With Valve's aggressive move into taking PC games off of Windows altogether

Valve's biggest market by far is PC, and will remain so for the immediate future. They have no intention of moving off Windows - just establishing other platforms.

> I'd put money on Windows 9 going Metro only

I will take this bet for any odds you are willing to give. The fact that you are even considering this as a possible outcome shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
This post is not addressing the right question. Think of databases as storage space, like wardrobes. The sql database will allow to store your clothes in spare parts each with its own dedicated space, allowing you to quickly calculate the sum of all stripes on all your socks. That's great but on the other hand, if you want an outfit you have to put it together, starting by sewing the sleeves on the shirt. On the other the NoSQL wardrobe will have various boxes where you can put any cloth you want. Now it's up to you to tidy the whole thing. If you want you can put full outfits in the box so that you don't have to think much about what to wear. However to count the number of stripes on your socks, you'll have to go through the whole wardrobe. The point is: It's not the fault of the wardrobe if your room is a mess
Hi Big8 (Marcus from Ninja Blocks here). Thanks for the heads up, I've put in the fix.

Cheers,

Marcus
I don't think I would quite agree with that.. I would say that mongo is very accessible in terms of getting started... also, you can index nested properties via dot notation, unless you are really deeply denormalized, collections of objects with collections, I haven't been aware of any issues there.

A few things that surprised me about mongo... first that if you do a sort, you either need an index on your sorting fields or your sort info needs to fit in 32mb. I'm using skip/limit for paging, and it really became an issue once I was running against the full datastore. Second, only one single index is used in a query, unike most sql databases that will collate results of mutiple indexes under the covers... this caused me to rethink my index strategy, as well as add both asc/desc indexes for sorting results.

For me it was a matter of getting away from an over normalized data set (30+ queries for a single vehicle classified ad display, 23-joins if you wanted to reduce 15 of those queries (my main VIEW created for migration)... denormalized data makes more sense for this use case. For others it may or may not make sense.
Small script to easily convert WADL files to JSON, formatted to be used with IODocs - would love some feedback
I'm pretty sure Chrome still hasn't fixed the cleartype feature so embedded fonts look decent like they do in Firefox.

Chrome really isn't that far ahead of FF or Opera. all three are still pretty close. The only real loser here is still IE. Their paltry developer tools and IE8's incompatibility with HTML5 has pretty much doomed it to the trash bin.

Just in case you needed some benchmark facts:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/the-big-browser-benchmark...
It's urgently worth knowing that "for security reasons", the folks at Inky will refuse to "delete or deactivate your Inky account," even at your request. I find that completely and utterly unacceptable.
If it's a minimal cache, though, you might as well.

This is probably the single main concern I have about this -- I've spent chunks of time away from home where I find an internet cafe, sync up email (send and collect new email), and go -- then take the time to read and write email later (while offline). This method would be pretty broken if long conversations were missing most of their history.

If the vast majority of my email is actually unavailable when I'm offline (or experience connection problems, etc.) that at last partly defeats the purpose of having a native email client at all.
A good book on piracy from a cultural and business perspective is The Pirate's Dilemma. It used to be "pay what you want" but the payment system seems broken.

http://thepiratesdilemma.com/about-the-book
"Touchscreens, and by extension tablets, are not useful for desktop computing. It ranges from amusing to mildly annoying when people in online comment threads believe otherwise..."

I can't tell for sure if it's what you are implying, but I don't believe tablets comes close to replacing desktop computers in terms of functionality, nor do I think they should be used for "desktop computing".

However, I believe they have the potential to cover the needs of most people. Saying that tablet-sales will overtake other kinds of devices, and saying that tablets are fully capable of replacing such devices are very different things.
Getting Your Analytics Right: Gaug.es Saves Me Time
For the power user -

Windows 7 - press start key and type the name of the program you want to start, get a list of matching apps in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Windows 8 - press start key and type the name of the program you want to start, get a list of matching apps in the middle of the screen.
Nope (but we hope to integrate with them in the future).
I should also give them a shout out for making http://selfstarter.us/ available. We used components from it and shoved them onto Sinatra instead of Rails.

Cheers,

Marcus
The missing files aren't stopping you, it's the last line "mkdir _build: Permission denied".

To get around it I just ran the build as root ;)
One Piece 579 Vostfr
That's quite the rant. It's a shame that someone's been put off like this, but it doesn't seem like there's enough in this article to really work out what's gone on.

Regret that I'm only learning of Cryptoparties now - I quite like the concept.
Not actually a compiler, more of a translator.
I don't think that schema or schemaless should change your app structure. Your entities/models should contain your data structures. If you structure your application right, schema doesn't matter. In fact, your persistence mechanism shouldn't either. Mongo, Mysql, Redis, they're just different ways to store and retrieve your data.

The biggest reason to avoid schemas is to avoid schema migrations. On big enough datasets, they take a long time. That is not every app's problem, so it depends on your app. Also, not having a schema doesn't mean you completely avoid data migrations as a result of changing your schema in all cases.
The Leica M9, as a pro-hobbyist photographer
It's actual data from one actual (and very common) use case.

Also, the document itself is just one fairly small piece of the whole puzzle.
The hardware package alone makes this look like a really good deal.

Why isn't the "remaining" number going down?
What do you find lacking in the countless existing blog engines for the JVM? It seems to me that hosting blogs on the JVM is about as well-supported as hosting them with Ruby.
Show HN: UUID as a Service
And there's a basic documentation for the "API" on https://github.com/pcarrier/uuidaas

This is obviously a joke.