skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right. MySQL will be used for years and years. And it is getting better every day.

But MySQL is still behind Postgres in features and reliability. I have being bitten by MySQL shortcomings for a year. Last month was the limit of max 64 indexes per table. Before that it was the dozens of stupid limitations in the procedures and functions. Before that it was some stupid bug that only happens in master-master replication. I can go on for days ranting about MySQL.

Think SVN vs Git. SVN can get better everyday and it does get better, but incremental upgrades will never convert SVN to Git. You scale MySQL by putting Memcached in front of it. But this makes MySQL a fast read-only DB. You can't scale MySQL in a OLTP setup.

Postgres had some performance and scalability issues about 3 or 4 years ago. But the foundations were solid. Now Postgres has fixed those issues and the foundations are better than ever. You can scale Postgres in a OLTP setup and it will eat MySQL lunch every time.
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The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways.

A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage.

If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them.

In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states.

I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.
Thank you... I always wondered why that was true.
You're right, it's a pretty bad analogy! I was more going for the whole NIB/Code debate being something that's never going to be adequately resolved.
Design is about empathy.

When I design, I am placing myself in the viewer/users shoes and thinking about what it is they are trying to do/understand. The subtile differences may not be critical when viewed at first glance but the designer thought it affected the experience enough when they were thinking about it from the end-user/viewer's perspective, that he/she thought it needed to be slightly different.

Sometimes it is just insanity. Yes, I admit it is a bit crazy to spend 30 minutes on something that no one will really look at twice and I'm completely guilty of it. And as a designer, sometimes we can't help ourselves... because "it just doesn't look right." I can't explain what "right" is but I'll know it when I see it... so I'll experiment with a numer of different approaches.

Sometimes however, it's a genuine care for the experience and the cumulative effect of sweating the small things showcase a level of polish and care that Apple is/was famous for. You just have to decide whether it matters to you (as a company) or not.

Some of the design choices made for the two versions seem like just an evolution in the style for the app that weren't back-ported to the older version. For example, the different colors of orange for the button, gradient shading, etc. Other changes are adjustments that, from his eyes, seemed necessary to make the experience better/acceptable on the 2x version, such as the sizing of the Search button, border bevel, etc.
Still no websockets :(
"If you're looking for a good iOS developer, drop me a line!"

Seems like he's at least partly using it for some self-promotion.
The designers who created the Welcome Screen , kudos to you all , it looks awesome :)
Been to many a meeting at Google HQ in London and almost everyone I've met there owns an iPhone.
Definitely - I'm guessing you would need to submit for merge for review as well? Maybe someone from Google can clear it up. The merge would be pretty likely to break things like alphabetical ordering that seems to be a terrible no-no at Google. ;)
"Under plea agreement discussions that were never finalized by a judge, and that occurred in February 2011 before Stuart was charged with any crime, Stuart says New York authorities pressed him to install a backdoor in his software and distribute it to clients so the data of gamblers and bookmakers could be retrieved."

I hope the Bitcoin community is paying attention to this.
Highest voted articles from Hacker News for 2012
In other news, people are still looking for the inventor of the hammer to charge him with multiple accounts of manslaughter, consequence of every death in which his invention was used. People with sore thumbs are waiting for a verdict before presenting their griefs.

Faraday commented: "I am not guilty of the use of electricity in Guantanamo"
4.2 also has "do not disturb" mode. It works properly too!
That's some pretty impressive work for an 11 year old. I'm curious what kind of help he had.
Do those casino's sell their gamblers coca-cola? Better go after them, or maybe even pepsi!

Those drinks are being sold to gamblers and these soft drink companies are benefiting directly from gambling proceeds!
If they contain English words I would say no. Otherwise we get into the same argument about similar phrases etc.
Right one for me. The shadows aren't "right".
It is worth noting that the material stays online, so you can always learn at your own pace - just without the certificate. I agree that it can be difficult to fit to a schedule, but one other advantage is that with a schedule the community taking the course can grow and learn at roughly the same pace, and it can help foster further discussion. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
> He says the New York district attorney’s office tried to strong-arm him into a plea agreement that would have had him hacking into the systems of his software clients in order to obtain the usernames and passwords of gamblers and their bookmakers to help authorities gather evidence of illegal gambling.

If the premise of Harvey Silverglate's book, "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,"[0] is correct, then this is quite plausible. A key message from Silverglate's book is that because it is impossible to know if one's behavior is lawful[1], it is impossible to be sure that one operates within the contours of the law at all times. Thus, if you would be convenient to nail not because of anything in particular that you've done but because you can probably be convinced to testify against someone higher up in their chain, beware.

From my recollection of this book, this was a tactic more typically used at the federal level, so either the tactic is spreading or my recollection of its state-level use is just dim.

EDIT: In response to all of the other comments pointing out other absurd choices the authorities could make (they could prosecute Pepsi since they sell soda to these operations, etc), Silverglate's book provides a nice framework for why this programmer would be targeted and not Pepsi. He's not the fodder, but he does have meaningful access to the fodder (whereas Pepsi surely does not).

[0] = http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...

[1] = In contrast, it's often quite possible to know when one's behavior is unlawful.
There was a nice article on Reddit recently about why someone doesn't use nibs but the discussion in the comments may shed some light on your question.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15jjfi/why_i_do...
Even if it's possible to type fast on an on-screen keyboard, there are still a fair number of problems with it -- (1) requires the display to be in position which is good for typing, but not so good for viewing, (2) takes up half the screen for the keyboard, (3) is simply less pleasant to use than a real keyboard.
Properly indented code is like properly layered design graphics. It should be a habit such that you're unconsciously doing it all the time, regardless of whether you're otherwise doing things "right" or taking shortcuts to be "good enough for now".
These are awesome! Thanks for sharing.
I see where you're coming from, but to me all you're writing is an excuse for unlimited perfectionism. Perfectionism rocks of you're among the lucky few who're in a situation where you can get away with it. In most circumstances, however, there's a product to ship, with the end of the money in sight.

I mean, in terms of the 80/20 rule (the last 20% of quality costs 80% of the time), we're not talking about turning an 80% thing (i.e. typical in-house enterprise software) into a 90% thing here. Hell, even going for 95% is something I believe we should all go for, and fight our colleagues, bosses and project managers, and customers for. But the OP's example is more like turning 99.5% into 99.8%.
I imagine the with a code base the size of Google you code is constantly being added so you have no hope of merging with the master branch and getting the code reviewed before someone else changes it.
Right... good point.
It's black and white and red all over. Please tell me you deliberately chose that color scheme for that reason. You'd be my hero if you did.
Maybe I'm one of the only ones that don't mind pdf's? Easy to drag onto my kindle for reading on the bus.
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Apple Is In 'Advanced' Negotiations To Buy Mapping Startup Waze
I am in the same boat, and in the end, I simply ended up becoming a statistic (dropped out). I agree with you on the Udacity point. I found the lack of tight schedule a blessing, actually.
> It's basically a way for those who are secure in their own identity to inform others of the essential pointlessness of their existence. Fads and trends are actually a con-trick; they bring new cults of personality to our lives.

> Deriding people for not buying into your neurotic bullshit is dumb as shit.

wat
There seems to be an aversion to A/B testing because that would clearly challenge their title of "experts".

A/B testing is useful, of course, but the results can only ever be as good as the options you test.
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It should probably have a word counter. Also a spellchecker? Chrome seems to identify the spelling errors, but I don't know if all browsers have this.
Umm, nary an iPhone to be found? Most people I know at Google have an iOS product of some sort. Maybe it is different in Google Australia vs Mountain View, but Googlers aren't shy about Apple HW. I would say 50% of Googlers carry MacBooks.
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If they're qualified for the job can't they just learn how to use the already rather basic tools properly?

Not much to ask, if they can't figure that out then maybe they don't deserve a job at all
For those interested in next steps:

- w3c Plan 2014: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/html5-2014-plan.html

- proposed elements for HTML.next: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/next/markup/
Normally those minor merge changes do not require another round of review, but it's up to the original author of the changelist to ask for it, in case the difference is substantial. Engineers are trusted to use their best judgement in such situations.
Thanks. We will try and add these features soon.
Most laws are intellectually dishonest. Creating a legal code that is so big that it's impossible to know what it is and thus, to be able follow it, is intellectually dishonest. Really, the fundamental basis of our legal system is intellectually dishonest.
This is a duplicate of this hn post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4991255
Why does having an unexpected family problem have to do with being a problem for future clients? Everyone has had bad things happen, it doesn't mean anything. If my mom died during my last project I don't think that would harm my chances of getting a next project.
My ears are burning.
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To be honest, I am not a designer myself.Experimented with a few colors, this looked decent and pushed it.
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that would net you 100k after taxes. I could be wrong and that could be a very unrealistic salary expectation.
Probably very true, hence my final sentence on balance (admittedly a feeble nod to rationality, but still).

Personally, I believe that much of the value created lies in the final 20% that takes 80% of the time. If what you say is true, near anyone can create something that's 80% of the way there. It's your job to get as close to 100% as you can realistically, while balancing time and money and value. It's not an argument for unlimited perfectionism; it's an argument for quality. The higher you can get, the better you will produce, and the more you will succeed. And don't just limit this to product quality; extend it to everything you do (including customer service, including planning and resource management, including hiring and culture) and you'll create a company that has a chance of being better than the others.

Perfect? No. But if you're not striving for creating something of quality (in other words, of value) then what are you doing, exactly?

Edit: There's a caveat here, I think. It may not be your job to worry about every design detail down to the pixel. It doesn't have to be. You can find someone who can help you produce what you need at the level of quality you desire (like the designer the OP is talking about, presumably) and you can worry about all the little details of running your company. Details that I'm guessing a designer might not understand or care about, but you do.
You're not saying anything. If you don't sue, you lose them by default.
Is the speed of light not absolute? If what you said was true, wouldn't the statement you made be an absolute?
Absolutely. Every time the cost of tertiary education comes up on HN (and elsewhere online) a lot of people reccommend doing the first year or two at a community college and then going to a good state college as a transfer.

The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that.

I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC.
That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work.

The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway.

Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready.

I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree.
Same here... anyone know of a rails engine/plugin that will do that for your e.g. blog posts?
The problem is that after a while you'll notice that every country's government is partly corrupt and every country has ridiculous laws that, at some point, are going to affect you.

It might be less bad in Luxembourg than it is in the US, but it is a common trend that if a small group of countries move their laws and regulations in a particular direction, other countries with a comparable culture and standard of living are prone to follow sooner or later.

You can keep fleeing to the next non-sucky country, but in theory, you're going to run out of countries at some point. Maybe not in your lifetime, so your solution is practical, but if it becomes widely adopted, I think we're going to get a problem.

Afaik, there's no indication that countries whose people leave en masse change their laws, regulations and institutions to try and fix it. Thus, I doubt that "voting with your feet" like you can do in a market economy works with countries. Try and find a Macedonian with a university degree in Macedonia, for example.
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Great to be in such great company thanks! And some really cool concepts featured here. Great job as always.
For clarification, I agree with your implication that the authorities could make these absurd choices, not that I think your comment was absurd.
> Even so, when held at arm's length I'm doubtful of how noticeable the differences are.

I know of no-one, tech or non-tech, that holds their phone at arm's length. Most hold their phones much closer.
A gorgeous question, but also somewhat controversial.

Corresponding meta discussion, mentioned in the question: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/129423/on-the-bounda.... I merely wonder why it's tagged 'java'.
The article uses a good example of designing things for other designers. The difference doesn't improve the product in a way that benefits the user. It's why I fail to understand designers sometimes.

On the other hand, I'm sure designers would say the same complaints about source code optimizations. But I hope we can agree it's about personal satisfaction, and that there's not necessarily anything "crazy" about it, it's just the sort of passion that results in quality.
Global Scans Reveal Internet's Insecurities In 2012
Carp/ucarp are pretty fun. Additionally keepalived in linux implements vrrp and some additional nice features such as scripting what to do on failover of resources.

An addendum to this guide might be to add in connection tracking across the master/slave nodes. In *BSD this is implemented with pfsync. In linux it would be iptables connection tracking.

More on pfsync: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/carp.html#pfsyncop
Linux conntrackd: http://conntrack-tools.netfilter.org/

Edit: Oh, and everyone always forgets about using LVS for load-balancing and failover. There's endless documentation on the web about that, and it's not a proxy service like haproxy (which is both good and bad).
Because, as would any President of the United States, he cares about prosecuting his policy objectives as effectively as possible on a national and international level?
Serious question, whats there to backdoor short of bundling a trojan with the official client? All transactions are out in the open in real time.
Edit, went on to Google and found this: http://nerdr.com/shutting-down-bitcoin-really-taking-down-th...
This is not a fair comparison. A hammer has multiple purposes. In general, it is not an instrument intended to cause harm. Even a gun can be used for a purpose other than causing harm to others -- it can be argued that it serves as a deterrent to violence.

What other purpose could gambling software be used for? It's irrelevant whether it was sold to overseas countries since, given the nature of the internet, New Yorkers would have access to those sites.

I'm not saying that I think what is happening is right, I just think your comparison is unfair.
Of course. There are differing levels of perfection, however. For example, something I despise is when, somehow, spaces are left at the end of a line by hasty colleagues, e.g:

"someFunction(); "

Their existence doesn't damage maintainability, performance or code readability - yet to me it feels wrong and I can't stand it.
Dissension is not a requirement.
I wonder if the discussion changes if we use the same argument against HN-beloved companies, like Buffer or Stripe. A company named Stripe Processing that processes credit cards would be safe, as I'm referring to the "stripe" on every credit card, not a specific company.
My understanding is that Googlers get a choice between a Apple computer (primarily MacBook Pro but I think iMac's are a possibility) or a computer running their customized version of Ubuntu.

You can get a Windows machine but you need to jump through some hoops and paperwork to get it.
Winning is the worst thing that can happen in Vegas
The style guide (in that link at least) doesn't actually enforce or even mention alphabetical order for ivars. It seems an unusually proscriptive restriction for what's quite a reasonable style guide. The stated restriction - dealloc in declaration order - makes a lot of sense.

(Also, line lengths merely have to 'try' to be less than 80 characters, so there's wiggle room here too.)
You are right, connection tracking is must have in production environments, I will try both pfsync and iptables. Thanks
Point 5 seems like dangerous advice, shortening types (especially floating-point types) without analysis isn't a good idea and especially not a deadly sin.

Changing doubles to floats can give a significant performance boost (mainly on ARM with Neon) but it brings significant limitations on range and accuracy that can lead to subtle bugs if you don't do the analysis (especially if you mostly test it with double precision.)
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Winning is the thing that can happen in Vegas
While there are things to be concerned about with this case, this is pretty silly.

He sold gambling software while living in a state where gambling was illegal.

I'm all ears for arguments that gambling shouldn't be illegal or that prosecutors abuse their authority or many other arguments.
2012’s Tablet Showdown: iPad vs. Nexus 10 vs. Surface
It goes in a JSON file for Node because there's already one present to configure NPM packages, just as for Ruby applications you can define the runtime in your Gemfile. In the Python world their package manger uses a file called something like "packages.txt", and so runtime.txt makes some sense alongside that.
It's about perception. The slightest imperfection can be glaringly obvious to one type of person, while another will never notice.

I am not sure if that kind of "eye" can be trained or not, but I know I have it, and that the slightest misalignment or aliasing will jump out at me and I have to fix it (if I can help it).
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