skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Protovis: A graphical toolkit for visualization with the Canvas tag
But there is still a 50% or so divorce rate.

This is actually a statistical fallacy. The divorce rate is not that high in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html
P-complete and the limits of parallelization
Smart People are less Stressed.
The fact is that RDBMSs work great when properly implemented and maintained.

Programs written in assembly also work great when they are properly implemented and maintained. The thing is, properly implementing and maintaining it is difficult and time-consuming. Alternatives to assembly made implementing and maintaining software easier; why do you think that this won't happen with databases?

(I consider RDBMSs as "assembly" because everyone thinks they can solve every problem. But you have to work at a very low-level to solve certain kinds of problems with a relational database. Something higher-level is an improvement, even if it isn't "necessary". You can write your Web 2.0 app in CPU microcode, but you probably shouldn't.)
"it is illegal to collect the rainwater that falls on your property"

Stupid lawyers, stupid laws.
Amazon to no longer pay for paid search referrals
It's not idiotic at all. Most musicians, even of the mega pop star variety, make most of their money performing music, not from royalties. I would go so far as to say that musicians should make most of their money by giving concerts.
"I think you generalized a lot of things there. I personally am arranged married, and I couldn't be happier. I have a lot of friends who are in the same situation (even ones who are 10+ years into marriage). I also know people who married in 'love' that are not so happy today."

Of course. If you didn't have the choice of who to marry then you resign yourself to the notion. But if you made the decision yourself then you'll always wonder if maybe you could have chosen someone way better for you. There was a TED presentation about this some time ago...

(Not saying it's not possible that the particular arranged marriage may have matched you with the best person for you anyway)
PS: I like to think of it as Java/C++/whatever infecting the database.

Java and C++ are not OOP, so think again.
PayPal, Visa rival Revolution Money gets $42 mln from Goldman, others
Yeah. I was going to comment strongly against that assumed second meaning; that first one I have more mixed opinions about.
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548802
"We’ve got the technical skill, the domain knowledge, and the grit to work nights and weekends while holding down day jobs."

You're not working on this full time? Or is this me reading it wrong?
Only the Beginning
CVS joins Google Health Rx network: millions can access medication records online
Q: Was Amazon’s policy on bidding on words such as “amazon,” “endless,” or “kindle” changed?
A: No. Associates are still prohibited from purchasing or registering Amazon’s proprietary terms such as “amazon,” “endless,” and “kindle,” and misspellings of those words) to send traffic to any site. Please refer to the Operating Agreement for more information.

This sounds questionably legal. If I write a book about the Kindle, I can't buy a search ad to advertise it?

I really like Amazon, but not when I read things like this.
iPhone. D'oh!
That sounds like a really good idea actually. The only problem with this is that it would take more than the typical 10 lines of code (9 for interface) to set up a url shortener. Currently, all you need to set up a url shortener service is a domain name and a database.
I looked at them before, saw the pricing and left, thinking it was RSS pricing (surely ridiculous) not email. Someone has to fix their site!
I don't think a compression algorithm is going to work. Compression rarely works on such short texts and most URLs are already very dense in information per character. Also, URL shorteners have to stay in the URL-safe character set, and the final product has to have a URL format.

I tried gzipping a Google Maps directions URL and then outputting that in base64. Results:

$ wc -c url*
217 url
186 url.gz
252 url.gz.base64

So the compressed and then base64'ed version is actually longer. And of course it's more opaque. And I haven't even added on some http://some.domain/ at the beginning to make it URL-like.

This doesn't even work in theory, let alone the practical impossibility of getting every http-fetching service to adhere to this scheme.
Extensing Bash Auto-Completion
who the hell eats eggs like that
Yep, nights and weekends, not full time. It worked for Obsidian Portal, and it's working so far for DoLeaf.

I know the conventional wisdom is "Quit Now!", but I like to eat.
were you seed funded with that startup?

I ask because I can't imagine applying for seed funding without being 173% committed -- eg, I have to make this work because I like to eat.
Facebook Begins Testing Virtual Currency
I'd say offer OSX for the PC at $49.95 and force M$ to slash their prices and their profits in half. That's the sound of a 800lbs gorilla falling.
Spoken like someone who has never implemented a large graph in a relational database.

One of the main things you do with a graph is traversal, not just recalling edges. Doing graph traversal in an RDBMS is beyond painful. Every edge you traverse typically comprises of one query. Sending that rate of queries to an RDBMS isn't anywhere close to efficient.

As for key-value stuff, that can be done pretty easily in an RDBMS, but is often more natural in databases geared specifically towards that. If you'd prefer not to use those sorts of systems, by all means, don't.

Relational databases break down at the point that the sort of queries that you're interested in running don't map flexibly to a relational model. You can insist this isn't the case with handwaving and saying the guy that wrote the DB doesn't know anything about databases, but Google, Amazon, eBay and LinkedIn (just to name the few that come to mind off the top of my head) disagree.
I don't think this is true. I think the keyword "Windows" is much more common, and low-paying jobs dilute the high-paying ones. Consider, for example, a low-level secretarial job. Would the job posting include wording like "Must be familiar with Microsoft Windows and Word"? Probably. (The idea is that non-technology jobs, which tend to be lower-paying, include the keyword Windows, but not OS X or Linux. This drives the price of "Windows" down, but it doesn't say anything about the price of a Win32 developer or an AD admin.)

Then, as we move into the real IT jobs, the word "Windows" probably doesn't show up, since it's assumed that you already know it. (I forgot to ask "what OS do I have to use" at my first job interview, and ended up having to use Windows without having any Windows experience. Fortunately, VMWare made that problem go away.)

If you're a student hoping to get a job after graduation, your best bet is likely to aim for the largest and/or most resilient markets.

No, please don't do this. Focus on something that you really like, and get really good at it. Then you will always have work, regardless of the market's whims. (If you took this advice 4 years ago, you'd just now be ready for a lucrative career securitizing mortgages. Have fun working at McDonalds...)
Tips To Help Your Website Convert
Meh. It's already a metaphor. Only a fraction of the relevant people are actually on Wall Street. Viva la Internet (and communication in general).
if he existed in real life you wouldn't be able to find out who he was. and if you did, then that wouldn't be him...
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I think the idea is that if TechStars accepts you, then you quit your day jobs and jump in full-time. That is part of the opportunity they are providing.
No funding on either project. We fully expected to work full time on DoLeaf if we got accepted to TechStars. We know how it works.
How many times does it have to be said? Apple would not make a killing by selling OS X to other hardware manufacturers because Apple does not make money off of OS X. Apple is a hardware company. Their entire business and culture is based around this single fact. Might as well say, "If Apple were instead completely and diametrically opposed to the company they are, they could make a killing." Possibly true, but in no way useful or relevant.
This is another example of how if you go public people will try to kill anything that makes you original. How long before we start seeing stories about how Google needs to end luxuries like 20% time?
<cynicism> Maybe it's because they've spent time in the US, and absorbed the American idea that You Can Have It All, that some Indian men think it's perfectly reasonable to ask for a wife who is "smart, fluent in English" (i.e., has intelligence and skills enough that she isn't economically dependent on her husband) and "simultaneously, docile in the house" (i.e., willing to put up with her husband's bad behavior). </cynicism>
Coming soon: 37signals University
Do you not have an "edit" button? I thought all logged in accounts were allowed to edit their own posts?
Colleges Face a Financial Aid Crunch
of course. I wasn't being a dick, sorry -- I was just curious. I think these funds really value if the founders have already made the jump and are powering along 24/7 before seed funding.

Looking forward to your next post. You can totally jump down my throat when I write a post if we don't get into YC tomorrow ;)
One of the elephants lurking in the living room is the matter how how large the potential market is. More people eat food than purchase plants. (Your D&D start-up looks pretty neat, though.)
Point number two... why not switch to FreeBSD/OpenBSD and drop Solaris? Sun could save a ton of money and still do what they have historically done. Instead of writing and maintaining their own OS 100%, take care of 20% of a good, free operating system that allows this sort of modification in commercial environments. It worked for Apple in OSX.
You can buy a search ad to advertise it, you just can't be an Amazon Associate. Google has rules against trademarks anyway, which could be used if you really wanted to break their rules.

http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html
It's about 11 lines of code. All you need to do add a wildcard entry in the DNS so that *.XXX.YY resolves to the same IP as XXX.YY, tell Apache to accept all Hostnames for that IP address, extract the subdomain from the hostname while extracting the hash.

I reckon I could get this up and running in about an hour if enough people upvote this comment :-)
PS: It's a really great idea.
We made sure to notify David, in order to show that we were supporters of open source

It was at this point that I started to wonder if maybe you sent updates/questions to the TechStars guys a little too often (I assume that's who David is.) I'll be interested to hear your analysis of what went wrong.

Was I just not aware that this level of communication is common in the pre-application phase of these programs?
Anyone looking at OFC2 should have a look at OFCGWT.

http://code.google.com/p/ofcgwt/

http://ofcgwt.googlecode.com/svn/demo/Demo.html
Proposal for a semi-transparent URL shortener
Very thorough and interesting discussion. When is HTML5 expected to hit mainstream?
True, and Star Trek was broadly ahead of the game on that front.

But go back and watch some of the episodes; it's still thin compared to the reality of today, let alone the reality of the future. Communicators that are like cell phones, sure, except that they only do voice transmission. My real-life cell phone is more powerful than my first couple of computers and has the apps to boot... and I have a piece of crap generic cheap cell phone, not even an iPhone. Talking computers that get asked very simple questions and are "working" for several loud seconds. No computer graphical enhancement of anything on the viewscreen (until the movies). Mainframes that generally need to be walked up to and used. The feel of the tech is very different.

Please understand I'm not complaining. This is one place where Star Trek has a legitimate claim to being ahead of the curve (although they pretty much jammed in that one spot and are now way behind) and I tend to be down on Star Trek at this point as my parenthetical shows; my point is that even so, the computers aren't as well integrated into people's lives as they are even today. Obviously, in the 1960s the special effects technology wouldn't have been there even if a time traveler from the real-life 21st century came back and tried to do it right with local tech and on a budget.
That's what they told us to do at TS4AD.

"Make us keep thinking about your project."
Obviously. What I submit reflects upon me, and as a founder of a startup I don't want to be known for submitting junk on one of the largest startup communities.
But Linux for the PC is priced at $0.00, and the gorilla stands. The reason people prefer Windows to Linux is that it runs most software on virtually all hardware. Doesn't OSX has the same problem as Linux?
Please do write a post. I want more info out there about the "real" state of startups. There's too much get-rich-quick crap that distorts the reality (especially about iPhone apps).

The truth is that it's a long hard slog to any sort of success.

We also applied to YC, so we expect to get rejected tomorrow as well ;)
Additionally, the custom software is pretty straightforward. It's certainly simpler than the rest of their app.
Except even Pixar characters make the 'tude face. But I usually see that crapola only on box art.

One thing the investors didn't seem to notice is that the acquisition of Pixar seems to have spillover effects into the rest of Disney. With Lasseter in the driver's seat as Chief Creative Officer, their quality seems to have improved a tick. <i>Bolt</i> was an outstanding film, not <i>The Incredibles</i> great, but funny and fun to watch.
I, too, wondered if all the emails were at a level that might be considered annoying, but I guess only the people involved can say that with certainty, and apparently they didn't tell you to lay off.

BTW, ever read the book 'Growing a Business'? It's one of my favorite business books; it's about a mail-order garden tool business (which is what triggered the association).

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business

It probably doesn't have a lot in it that you don't already know, but it's a nice one if you can get ahold of a used copy or from the library.
I don't use Facebook, but I think their goal is to minimize storage costs, even if it means over-compressing images. If you want lossless copies of your photos, use Flickr (or a similar service).
Yeah, but there's a steep difference between that and "pester us and annoy us". That's like saying that marketing should make you keep thinking about your project. If you were a marketer, would you spam people and irritate them constantly with email, or would you be tasteful and let them discover for themselves?

"Keep us thinking about your project" probably works best if you're constantly updating your project. Keep building, gently announce releases - not TO David Cohen, but just on Twitter where anybody can see what you're doing - and show that you guys aren't desperate. TechStars (or any other seed funder) is unlikely to accept the people that most want to get in. They'll be accepting the groups that put in the most effort to their project, who showed they could create without worrying about their funding.
Being so close to the mentors, did you ask for some feedback as to why your application didn't make it?
I'm sure kicking back a bit has its merits (and I'll give it a shot), but I can't shake the impression that if I say "OK, I'll stop being relentlessly hungry and relax now, I can work later", there goes my inertia and my expected level of success plummets. Am I wrong?
Yes. I rarely submit; when I do, I only submit things that might actually provoke interesting conversation.
Video: New Microsoft commercial makes Giampaolo happy for $1,500
That's not what it's about. In the case of Billy Bragg, it is he who's trying to control Google's content. In the case of that Guardian piece, there's a fundamental lack of understanding about Google's role. Google is the lifeblood of content providers. If you write an article and nobody can find it, does it really exist?
I think Microsoft deserves criticism for strong-arming hardware vendors into making Windows a mandatory component of all new computers.

(I thought this was amusing back when IBM still made ThinkPads, and the phrase, "IBM recommends genuine Microsoft Windows XP." was right below their logo. You know that was there to satisfy a contract from a monopoly, not because they actually recommended it. I am going to go ahead and consider that evil.)
Yeah, I noticed that as well... Kind of bizarre. Especially since Rhino was a pretty good educated guess; I went and took a look at it as well since I know there are some pretty performant languages running on the JVM that aren't Java.

For whatever it's worth, I think the problem Javascript is going to have with speed is that it is so dynamic that it makes it difficult for compilers to optimize. If it ever got type hints it would probably be much easier to make fast.
Up is an amazing film. It's funny, endearing, classic, and artistically excellent. The film breaks out of the mold of 3D animated film art direction with stylized characters and it prefers graphic shapes over the hyper-realism so common in the genre (you'll have to trust me).

While the characters are not toys, cars, or fish (which are easily merchandised) they are still cute. It will probably sell (at box office and toy shelves) at the same level as Ratatouille, but that is still a major success for any other studio on the planet.

Pixar used to be lauded for its originality and commitment to high quality. Suddenly, it's being panned for those same things.
Someone did it already: http://decenturl.com/
That's not really a fair comparison though. There's no parity mismatch between assembly and high level languages. Sure assembly opens a few doors for optimization, but you don't give up any fundamental logic when you move to a higher level language.

As for RDBMS, well, they have scaling issues because of the rich functionality they provide, and some queries can definitely be tricky for the same reason. However conceptually they are much more straightforward than assembly, and offer a very pure data model with more overall utility than any of the alternatives.

That's not to say that we don't need alternative data stores for some applications. But I do want to go on record as saying this article is a mixture of hype and FUD. RDBMS' have been challenged for decades by alternative supposedly-superior technologies. I think the problem is that no model is as comprehensive as the relational model. It's trivial to write a faster database providing some subset of SQL. You can even reduce the parity mismatch to some languages by making it store objects more directly. That's great, but I have yet to see any serious challenge to the relational model's stengths, instead all I see is hype and tutorials about how to convert some simple query to map-reduce.
Yes, we asked and David gave us some good feedback. If he gives permission, I will post some of it in the follow up.
I upvoted you, because you make an interesting point, but I disagree. What if I'm a conceptual musician? What if I'm a terrific composer but a terrible performer? Shouldn't there be a venue where I can make money through my compositions even if I can't assemble a traveling band to tour and perform them?
One of the first things Lasseter did was knock down walls within Disney, quite literally as well as metaphorically.

He got the teams communicating with each other more readily - this is probably a result of one of Steve Jobs' greatest legacies for the Pixar studio.

But yes, Bolt was a great restart for the Disney studio. Let's see what they pull off for the next one.
This reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Krusty opens a clown college after running out of other ways to make money off his name.
Most web design shops which build websites for clients will end up using some form of Content Management System, to allow those clients to maintain the site after launch. BrowserCMS is a solution to our firm's problem, which is wanting the productivity of Rails for building custom websites, but giving clients Web CMS tools to maintain the site after launch.

I'm the product manager for BrowserCMS, so hopefully I can shed some light on the 'whys' behind the project. It is certainly not to clone Drupal in Rails. Drupal is mentioned in the presentation because many developers are familiar with it, so the enviable first question I hear is 'How is BrowserCMS like Drupal?'.

Our intent with BrowserCMS is to provide a client friendly CMS. Making a site maintainable and understandable by non-technical users is the primary goal of the CMS. We also want to allow Rails developers to be able to customize sites. We do have a module system (different than Drupal's), which allows developers to build custom modules (News, Events Calendars, Blog, etc). The dynamic content can be placed by non-technical users on pages. Obviously, it's a new project though (still in Beta), so we are about ~4500 modules behind Drupal here.

Anyway, if folks have more questions, our mailing list is at http://groups.google.com/group/browsercms
Observing the Pentagon Report on China Military Power
HN guidelines strongly discourage editorializing in the titles of submissions, and these titles can be edited after the fact by site editors.

Without the power to editorialize in the title, I don't think there's a good way to distinguish between submitting something that you agree with and submitting something that you would like to discuss, even though you disagree with it.

This is actually one reason why the anti-editorializing guideline makes sense. We really don't want HN to clog up with links to bad arguments that need refuting. There are far more bad articles than good ones, and the readers just don't have the time to sort them out for themselves. That's what HN is supposed to be doing for us! So we encourage people to submit only quality links, or suffer the consequences to their own reputation.

I think it's important to remember that HN isn't designed to replace blogs. If you want to start a critical discussion about some piece of content, write a blog post that criticizes it, then submit that blog post. That's what I would do.
Of course this makes perfect sense. Amazon is bidding against its own affiliates, who are driving up prices and diluting its click-through rates (thus reducing click-through volume and further increasing its bid prices). In the cases where they are already the top search result, they don't need or want AdWords links from themselves or affiliates distracting the user and costing them money unnecessarily.
True, we do agree that Hackers eat.

But this isn't a revolution in the area of cooking eggs. Don't get me wrong, I loved the video (I'd seen it before) but I just don't think it has a place in this site.
You have a point there. But it's also true that many Kamikaze believed that their suicide missions were the only way to save Japan, and hence their families back home.
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The Zipper Data Structure [pdf]
Don't we hear back today? Says April 6th here: http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html
I've had a lot of problems with 64 bit Linux and no problems with 64 bit Windows or OSX (to be honest i did come late to the 64 bit Windows game, after many problems had been resolved). OS X is good but not if you have to pay the Apple prices for ram, or for a Mac Pro that can support more than a piddly 4 or 6 GB's.
Messagepub: New Pricing Plans (based on HN feedback)