skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wondering why everybody is using MySQL if Postgresql is supposed to be better. Are there any (startup) success stories involving Postgresql?
Its a private university, but they (like most research universities in the US) get a lot of federal research funding.

As an alum, no idea what to thing about this ruling.
We also don't mmap the data files, though it's much more relevant to the internal architecture than user facing features :)
This article is currently top1 of HN home. It relates with some male's obsessions with their bodies, but has nothing to feed to one's intellectual curiosity. Flagged.
It's kind of fun that this article is illustrated with a man firing a gun that, upon following the source link to flickr, turns out to be for paintball.
That's good to hear. I've only recently started working out, and started on free weights with a Power Rack and Barbell (doing Stronglifts).

Glad I'm not partially wasting my time, and going onto the good stuff!
2009 and the internet? This has been the dominant conventional wisdom in all fitness media for at least a decade. If you open any fitness or "men's" magazine in any given month you will find at least one article telling you that: strength training is better than cardio, free weights are better than machines, and lifts that use multiple major muscle groups in coordination are best. The funny thing is that every one of these articles acts like it is the first time any of this has ever been written down.

It's the exact same way with articles advocating diets relatively higher in protein and fat. An assertion of novelty seems to be a mandatory element of any attempt to market anything fitness related.
The patents in question covered technologies used in billions of chips over a number of years. I think it is quite conceivable that the rights to those technologies could have been worth $1.2 billion if Marvell had licensed them.
I've been considering reading Fowler's Refactoring book, but I haven't written Java in 10 years. Is the book accessible to someone with minimal Java knowledge?
I'm not addressing that part; I'm merely pointing out that circular references are solvable without weak references.
Amazon's Snafu Rattles Customers
I also meant to say that you may face in part what budding programmers face: Find that 1% of books and materials that are really a class above in their clarity -- and, being so effective, often in their brevity, as well.

I don't have a list at hand and may not be the one to provide one. But... you might look around and cross reference comments to find the "quintessential" works on these topics.

One exceptional book can be worth (more than) a car load of the alternatives.
And it depends on how you define "DB". We've recently started using Redis for a number of things, and it has been incomprehensibly faster than our SQL database when it comes to rapidly finding and inserting records in (the equivalent of) a billion-row table. It's also far cheaper to run than significantly beefing up the database server just because of that one bottleneck. Easily worth the time and trouble of setting it up (neither of which was very much).
Note to the value investors out there: Marvell is an undervalued company (even after taking into account this $1.2 billion penalty.) Their stock price declined by 10% today, making it even more attractive.
If you're a skeptic (i.e. scientific skeptic), then you default to not believing a claim until evidence is introduced to support it. Is it intellectually lazy to say "citation needed" to someone that is accusing someone else of being a witch? I firmly believe that I have no obligation to prove that I am not a witch, and moreover that such attempts would be impossible. The person who makes a claim that has not been widely observed empirically is the person who needs to present evidence.

In the case of user interface analysis, I thought most of us agreed that real data is much more important than a single user's anecdote. If someone makes the anecdotal claim that since they dislike a certain UI feature it must perform worse in general, that person needs to present actual evidence. Unless I have done my own research, the only thing I can do is request evidence and remain skeptical until I see some. It is equally fallacious for me to counter with my own anecdotal evidence. Saying "citation needed" is precisely the appropriate response to baseless claims.
Oh yeah, back to Snapchat, I never explained what it does.

Sexting.

Yes, you read that right: sexting.

Here's how Snapchat works: you can take a picture of 'naughty bits,' send it to a friend and they can view it for two or three seconds

Ho-ly crap. Oversimplify some more, please. If that's the case then virtually any sharing application or service where you can specify a time limit on access (like various URL shorteners) are built for sexting.

There seemed to be something to the article until the absurdity started.

Look, kids are going to be curious, they're going to wonder and if you as a parent either don't or aren't capable of satisfying that curiosity, they're going to find out. Trust me. I don't have kids, I was one, and so were you.

Going off on a screed and suggesting Facebook is set out to copying an app that was (according to the author) specifically designed for kids to send each other pictures of certain organs just to go on yet another "I have kids, you don't get it, I'm a parent" rant is absolute cruft. This article tries its best to be some kind of pragmatic approach to the 'Acquire over innovate' approach to Facebook's carving of the social landscape in mobile, but the undertones are woven thicker than military grade canvas.
Which is why bedrock is a "distribution" rather than an application.
"...how much more it makes you tax your own body. When you're at the gym, you don't push yourself."

Says who? This seems like a false premise to me.
Absolutely. It's amazing how time-efficient resistance training is. Strength training in particular where you're using the higher weights and lower reps.
Thanks, I really appreciate that.

For me, the motivation for transparency came from too many frustrating instances of being kept in the dark after things had gone wrong. The worst thing both during and after an outage is poor communication, so I do my best to explain as much as I can what is going on during an incident and what's happened after one is resolved.

There's a very simple formula that I follow when writing a public port-mortem:

1. Apologize. You'd be surprised how many people don't do this , to their detriment. If you've harmed someone else because of downtime, the least you can do is apologize to them.

2. Demonstrate understanding of the events that took place.

3. Explain the remediation steps that you're going to take to help prevent further problems of the same type.

Just following those three very simple rules results in an incredibly effective public explanation.
er... 200 MB is pretty big. The fact that it looks like a feat is alarming!
Nice to see Domain-Driven Design mentioned. As DHH said it's a bit of a slog - but worthwhile.

For those who want a good overview and don't fancy the slog I'd recommend taking a look at http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly - a 100 page summary of the book from InfoQ.

The original is definitely worth a read - the summary might let you see why it's worth the effort ;-)
You really only devoted 5 hours per week?
Very interesting. Though aren't several of these also "habits" that Steve Jobs had?

E.g.

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
For the last 5 years, I've gone to the gym once or twice a week (usually just once). I do powerclean or snatch -> squats or deadlift -> bench and then I leave in around 45 minutes. When I explain my routine to friends and coworkers, they dismiss my results, believing they are due to genetics.

Thanks for posting the article. I definitely recommend reading Starting Strength if you haven't had any formal weight training instruction.
How does the Smalltalk book compare to "Object-Oriented Software Construction" by Meyer? The latter is my goto OO book (in combination with "Object Oriented Design Heuristics" by Riel)
Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact.

Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visionary. If the company fails, we say 'he never listened'.

If you really wanted to check the influence of a certain character trait, you'd need to try to (carefully) compare how CEOs with the trait performed compared to CEOs without the trait, and make damn sure your sample sizes and methods are sound before making any confident assertions. What you definitely don't want to do is look at a handful of failed companies, find some common traits among their CEOs and call it 'The 7 Habits Of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs'. That's intellectually negligent, and it's a testament to something that is fundamentally broken in journalism — we have publications that pretend to educate when they in fact serve misinforming entertainment.

Shame on Forbes for publishing such ill supported claims, they should have more respect for their readers.
I like how every general fitness article refrences "brad pitt in fightclub"...brad pitt in fight club was a little under 160 lbs so beyond aesthetics,I doubta 156 lb male had any real functional strength.
I get the impression that issue wasn't network hardware but bad high availability design on fileserver side. Why do GitHub has failover network on same network hardware as primary network? But I am not surprised as I see this at lot of clients that they have failover network on separate VLAN on same network hardware. And, whenever they have network hardware issue, servers run into split brain problems.

The failover network should be totally different physically and logically from primary network. The heartbeat between file servers should be checked through both primary network and failover network. If a server can't be reached by its partner over primary network, it should be gracefully taken offline by partner through failover network.
You're right on all counts. We have a great many plans with regard to how we want our network to operate that are underway.
Since not everyone here is ops, if your holiday is going to be potentially impacted by a deployment, you are fully aware of that going into the deployment. We take note of people with blacked out dates (e.g. you booked your flight before we ever started talking about this), and everyone else impacted knows what's on the docket. While the issues are sudden, everyone at least has that nagging feeling that they might get a call to action.

I agree that we should be moving to automated infrastructure testing and stuff like that. To some extent, it may be possible via puppet/chef/auto tools, however, not all infrastructure is like that. Sometimes you have to go physically move stuff at your downtime window, and you can't do redundant wiring (particularly for network). I've been bitten network outages more than anything else, particularly with partial/undetected failures.

I think we're seeing a move to the "treat infrastructure as code" future, such as cluster fileservers (Netapp 8-cluster mode, or Isilon systems). You'll be able to "seamlessly" migrate data around, and virtual interfaces without impacting production. I'm looking forward to seeing how that changes ops.
Benching without spotting is easy if you aren't going to one rep maxes. If you are doing sets of 5, then don't do rep N if rep N-1 was too hard that you think you will fail the rep. Also, if you stop before the 5th rep, you should be doing sets at a lighter weight.
I only saw this comment today, after you referred to it in another one. Yesterday was Christmas, after all.

I'm afraid I've lost the point of this thread. I say that employment can be viewed as a monopoly, and more importantly, that an employer can abuse those monopoly powers.

The standard model says this is correct within the transaction cost interval. I agree with this model, which is why I asked you: "how large (in $) do you think transaction costs of changing jobs actually is?"

I.e., if the transaction costs are $3k, monopsony/monopoly models might explain why someone's wage is $51k vs $53k, but they don't explain why it is $50k vs $25k.

I disagreed that your examples of Hostess/etc were related to this model, since the price changes there were far larger than any reasonable transaction cost I could think of.

Near as I can tell, Rudanko isn't doing anything different from this.

Also, you were correct that I should have said risk-adjusted dollar costs should be used to determine market power. Note, however, that risk-adjusted dollars are not the same thing as P(bankruptcy), which you seem to be using.

To conclude, I think your parameter choices are wildly off (e.g., to make your ideas work, I think you need transaction costs proportional to wages). I strongly recommend actually writing down your models (with numbers and math) to clarify your views.
Working on it :-) to be posted on github.
I'm about done into a re-write in perl (I just like that lang, don't just judge me :-P) that threads it out to all cores and cuts the memory usage in half for data large sets.
Visit it later - instapaper for places
Imagine you're on holiday in a foreign city and you found a good Restaurant for dinner. To make it easy finding this restaurant later again, just get your iPhone out, hit the "Visit it later" button and baam!, the restaurant is saved for later. Check out http://www.visititlater.com
Right, maybe a not so subliminal message that if people feel the urge to shoot they can always play paintball :).
By your logic then as soon as you get out of the bathroom and touch anything, then your hands aren't clean anymore. So what was the point in cleaning them?

Being too much of a maniac with such thing is no good. Especially not for your kids: an environment that is too clean will prevent them from developing proper defenses and as soon as they'll be outside, they'll get sick like sissies all the time :-/
I'm not sure I understand what would make this different from simply making $HOME your Dropbox folder.
Wounded Warrior Pose
Thanks for the hint! I already took a look into it. There are indeed only 676 options to guess the secret in many cases. We do block brute force attacks, but given that there are only 676 possibilities, you could just run the brute force tool at a very low speed.
This makes no sense to me. The initial environment of using counter-offers as a substitute to raises is, of course, crazy and must be avoided. But never making counter-offers is also dogmatic and crazy. When something is bad, the answer isn't to do the opposite. Maybe 90% of the time, doing the exact opposite is also bad.

It only seems right to me that counter-offers should be made when the situation warrants, and that they should in no way be made to substitute for proper compensation and raises in the first place.

Ideally, you never have to make counter-offers, because you pay your people properly. But mistakes will be made. If a really good employee gets a job offer with a better salary, and suddenly you realize that this guy is worth it, why not make a counter offer, if you think he's honest and isn't going to just leave three months later anyway? If the situation warrants it, do it. Take the situation as a sign that you screwed something up, but that's no reason to not even bother to try to fix it. Likewise, if a guy gets another offer and he's clearly not worth it, wish him well and let him go. Don't be dogmatic.
Benchmarking Scala against Java - all that jazz
I read this article around the time it was first published, and it has changed my life. I know it sounds corny and cliched, but it's true. This article was the first seed in my head that I needed to change the way I was doing things.

It took me about 18 months after reading it to actually buckle down and start lifting, but it's no doubt that the journey started here. I ended up reading "Starting Strength" and started up on the program. It's been about 6 months now and I'm stronger than I've ever been in my entire life- by a significant margin. I've gained 40 pounds of muscle. I feel confident, capable, and strong.

The only downside is that I cannot fit into regular clothes anymore- I have to buy clothes made for fat people and just deal with the extra room in the midsection. I also eat an incredible amount of food, which can get tiring and expensive (I eat $40 a week in steak alone). Overall, though, I'm thoroughly satisfied with the path that I'm on, and wish I had started years earlier.
Cardio machines are innocent enough, as they won’t actually make you any less fit, but maintaining cardiovascular fitness doesn’t really take much more than breathing uncomfortably hard for about 20 minutes, three times a week. And we all know that swimming, hoops, bike riding, and even Ultimate Frisbee can get the job done, and that treadmills or elliptical trainers are a pale substitute.

I think the author is overlooking one of the great benefits of elliptical trainers. They get the job done and they're very safe. If you're an obese out of shape person you're unlikely to get hurt getting your cardio in on an elliptical, whereas activities like hoops, bike riding, and Ultimate Frisbee can really fuck you up.

If you wear a heart monitor and keep your HR in the appropriate zones the elliptical can be a safe, effective cardio workout. I spent three years doing hour long cardio sessions 3-5 days a week, with around 60% of that hour spent in the high end of the aerobic zone. At the end of it I had lost a considerable amount of weight, and I had a resting HR of 38.
"we're not worried about making money right now."

how many times have we heard that... you mean you're going to sell ads or my data. Thanks, but no thanks.
News stories are blindly passing information free snippets around based on the article from Reuters.

There's a bunch of specific information about the case here, for the curious: http://dockets.justia.com/docket/pennsylvania/pawdce/2:2009c...

-_- the uspo has terrible links, but here are the links to the patents themselves too, they're pretty specific.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
Web Developer Admits: Objective-C Beats HTML5
Is that UI supposed to be "Metro"? Because I don't care much for it.
I bought my wife's ring from Blue Nile - www.bluenile.com - and would absolutely recommend them. They made it very easy to get what I wanted, and did a good job of educating me on what options were available to me. It's entirely an online operation, so it's very easy to browse their inventory over a long period of time and research any ?'s you might have somewhere else (if you don't trust their shopping guides). It's the antithesis of what I experienced at a couple of brick and mortar stores, where salesmen were pushy, unwilling to answer ?'s about their product, and at one point actually told me "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" when I asked about a ring of lesser quality than what I wound up buying. I don't plan on making it a habit to buy jewelry that expensive again, but if I did, I'd use Blue Nile in a heartbeat.

Also, they did probably the coolest thing I've seen with shipping. I had the ring shipped to my office address, and spent much of its arrival date refreshing the tracking page. Almost immediately after I saw that our shipping department had "signed" for it, my phone rang. Someone from Blue Nile called to say that someone other than me (the name of someone in our mail department) had signed for the package, and they wanted to make sure it was in the right place. I didn't pay anything extra for this service, but it was a really nice touch and I've told that story to everyone I've recommended the company to.
SLC Camp - EdTech Codeathon Bay Area, January 12-13, 2013, Mountain View, CA
Slightly off-topic but as a primary PHP developer, how can I get into C? Are there any free resources or good books to get started?
Ask HN: Best way to learn about concurrency
Specifically in Java. Are there any tutorials, posts, blogs or books that the HN community could recommend?
You can, but as this relationship is obviously toxic, those devoted, upstanding employees who treat the relationship as a business one won't stick around.
I've been in companies whose CEO exhibited all of the items on the list (two in particular has a good 5 of them). They became CEO by convincing people with money to invest in their "vision" (it always starts as a vision sale).

Now both companies are under new management where the CEO only has one or two of the items on the list and are doing ok. In both cases, neither CEO could understand why they were being removed and were certain the company would totally fail without them -- as they were the most important person in the company!

Another favorite of mine: Feel they can do everyone else's job better than them. Also, You are an expert until you hire on -- then you are just another body.
@mediocregopher

Re: replica sets.
You don't need config servers to run replica sets. You need config servers to run a sharded cluster. Your understanding of when to run an arbiter is also flawed. I think you might find the documentation enlightening: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/. The unfortunate situation you describe where the master was left in a read-only state is a flawed setup -- not an error in mongo.

In your second paragraph referring to "random occurrences" you're again conflating sharding and replica sets... I'm not sure what exactly you're describing, sorry :(!

IN general you should not ignore errors in logs... the mongo processes all have log rotation via signals or server commands.

I think a lot of what you're describing is hard to take at face value because of a lack of a common vocabulary -- or some misunderstanding. In my experience mongo has worked fairly well in some large scale systems. It's not the solution to everything -- I'll agree with that... but if you read the documentation it does what you would expect.
I'm no javascript expert so this is probably not the prettiest way of doing this, but:

javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].bgColor="#eeeeee");void(document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].text="#333333");

Makes the article readable
The NYT has existed for a sufficiently long enough time that they could not possibly have been losing money. Now, their revenue from subscriptions is apparently going up after than their revenue from advertisements is falling. Shouldn't that indicate that they are still cash flow positive? Alternatively, are you saying their costs are going up dramatically to compensate for this increase in revenue, and that, in fact, they are now losing money and will soon die?
"Are your lights on" is a fantastic book, my high school comp sci teacher lent me a copy and i've read it many times since then, always getting a little something new from it.
Writing with Constraints
Reddit isn't a "Brain Drain", it's a Climate Change
I'm specifically addressing the original parents straw man.

> There are maybe, what, a thousand people in the U.S. that have worked on network administration for something GitHub's size?

I didn't intend to deflate any nerd egos, just putting things in realistic terms. GitHub is cool. It's the biggest in its industry. It's definitely an interesting problem. But it's still hosted within Rackspace, which in itself isn't that big.
Please add PGP and S/MIME support to your TODO list. All the major desktop clients have support for both of these, either natively or via plugins.

You could even sync the encrypted keychain between installations.