skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Database scaling for credit card companies
All,

I've got a particular interest in database scaling. I'm familiar with the standard techniques taken by web2.0 companies/ facebook/ myspace / etc. However, I'm curious what the big boys, like the major credit card companies, do. Or bank ATM networks -- what kind of scaling do they have so that they can keep everything sync'd in realtime?

When you read scaling stories (I'm thinking about a digg conference presentation I saw) about web2.0, they talk about having soft synchronization -- that it isn't 100% mission critical to have everything updated in real time, in every single slave db server. But that can't happen in financial institutions.

Does anybody here have any insight into what kind of techniques and technologies the big (enterprise) boys use?
I guess it depends on how you define "success", but I think the chances of the YC startups getting more out of it than they put in is higher than 1-2%. Even if they end up folding the startup, just having been accepted into YC and having the network probably changes your career path significantly.
After you remove domain from one account, you cannot add it to another one purchased with discount.
New Google Chrome Beta
Twine's page on cool is actually cool
So he must have put all of this in the "stimulus" bill since he cares so much.
Live from Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Press Conference
Yea, F them for not giving you the new customer 90% off promotion! Greedy bastards. (They have this to get new customers, you have already come and gone and most likely won't stick around to the point of profitability.)
IPhone Allows In-App Purchases tied to your iTunes Account
Thank you for proving my point.

99.9 people out of 100 would look at what you just wrote with a blank stare.

This didn't work because there's no way to sell it to 99.9% of people. It might be more elegant and simpler mathematically, but you're fighting against centuries of inertia for little to no gain to the very people that would need to adopt this to make it work.

I can't believe we're even talking about this :)
Shouldn't we wait until this conference is done before posting?
Isn't the caching of copyrighted images in an http proxy just the same issue though?

That's the point that I made, and Weaver's response is (1) there's a difference between what's legal and what will get you sued and (2) HTTP caching is in some sense grandfathered in, while there is still time to define rules for P2P caching.
Do you have any examples of Dreamhost's competitors offering > 14 day retention of data for cancelled accounts?
Having a look at your responses throughout this thread it seems like you're looking for reasons to go rather than reasons not too.

Starting a startup is a huge commitment, potentially a lifelong one depending on your idea.

If you're even slightly unsure (which you seem to be), you should perhaps maybe think about it some more, or start it up from where you are.

I'm not trying to make you depressed or anything mate, but when things aren't going according to plan and everything goes wrong (as things can do with startups) you still have to be willing to give it 110%

So yeah, read some of the advice in this thread but really sit down, have a LONG HARD think about it. If you're prepared to make sacrifices (which there will inevitably be, it's your choice what they will be though) - then make a decision.
I wouldn't bank on getting in if you have no co-founder. You should probably worry about finding one of those first.
Ask HN: Anyone within traditional corporate env. think that Office docs are going away?
<irony>I'm glad we have a 100ml limit on liquids to be carried on airplanes</irony>
Are You Left-Brained or Right?
Facebook Lexicon: easy way to get counts of what people post on walls
Ask YC: Best bank for startup related services?
Fellow hackers,

With which bank(s) do you have an account for your startup or small business? What services do you use most, and find most valuable?

I'd like to find a bank that offers custom invoice tracking, allows a great deal of online management, yet has a local presence in major US cities. I'd like to avoid arbitrary fees, but I don't mind paying for real service and value.

Thoughts? Experiences? Recommendations?

Thank you,
-Ben
too exciting
SDK access to bluetooth? Awesome, I have a client who is dying for this...
Keep in mind that P2P consumes upstream bandwidth which is precious in many ISPs. If caches can reduce that, the economics may change.
I said nothing about complex solutions. What I did say was "tackle apparently impossible problems", which is very different, and, as I'm sure you'll agree, extremely useful. Specially if the solution is kept as simple as possible.
I'm guessing you're referring to home loans, which had the lovely property of inflating prices without any correspondence to a real increase in value. There was more money in the system to bid on a fixed set of assets, so prices went up.

Business loans are fundamentally different, aren't they? Sure, a lot of these businesses will fail, but at least the whole point of a business is to create value, and there will be a lot of winners, too. Money has to move around, that's how the economy works. I'd much rather see it moving around trying to drive people to create value, than to consume concrete assets.
New fed CIO offshores work, lists firm as "local, disadvantaged" to win DC contracts
For the devs: When adding a new provider, you should trim the secret key field because I kept copy-pasting from Amazon/AWS and it kept putting in a space character in the beginning of the field.
no, or at least, not nearly as fast as techcrunch is reporting. perhaps they're dying, but they're going to "die" like cobol is dying, most likely.
I love discussing the manhole question because the alleged answer is not the point. The point of such a question is for the candidate to think aloud and walk you through their problem exploration process. Such questions select for people who are a little meta about themselves, which is why they can think about something and talk about their thinking at the same time.

The infamous retort is this parody: http://hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000962.php

But that really illustrates the trap of almost all interview questions. The interviewer is obsessed with the correct answer, when in reality it's the process of arriving at any answer that matters.

My personal beef with "Aha!" questions is that if given one that I actually solve on the spot, I can't tell you much about how I got it. It just came to me.

The only exception I can remember is a question about finding whether a linked list has a cycle in it. The "proper" answer involves a pair of cursors, one of which operates at double the speed of the other. I came up with a much less efficient but equivalent solution because the problem reminded me of something we did with Turing machines in college back in the 80s.

So in that particular case I could actually explain how I arrived at an answer. Now that I think about it, I think I'm a pattern-matching machine. My algorithm for solving problems is to perturb them until they resemble something I've seen before.
Mesothelioma
When you, or a loved one, is diagnosed with a potentially life threatening cancer, such as mesothelioma, it can be a very frightening and confusing time for you and your family.
Here is a hard interview question - "Here is a problem we encounter every day at X company. Have you encountered this before in a previous project? How would you go about solving it?"
yay for turn by turn apps in the future
Personally, I think TechCrunch's sense of importance here is a bit inflated. I think Office still has a long time left in its domination. Most companies are not early adopters. And I think Google Docs, etc. still require "early adopter" status in the corporate world.
In-app sales will create huge new opportunities.
didn't know its like that.
This is really scary stuff (and I was hoping that it would never make it on HN). I heard from an aeronautical engineer once that if one drop of mercury somehow gets let loose in an airplane that the whole plane needs to be basically taken apart (and possibly scrapped).

Mercury by itself is very toxic. There was a custodian who broke a thermometer in our office building once. That would have been ok - had she not spread it everwhere by playing with it. And, speaking from experience, as someone who broke a thermometer as a kid in his room and was mesmerized by the liquid, I can't blame them. Whole building had to be detox'd - almost spaceman suit E.T. style.
From the report:

No backgrounding, no multitasking, no unobtrusive notifications. No copy and paste (yet), no MMS, no video. Really pretty minor stuff thus far.

Ah well. So we have push notification, better hardware access and the maps API opened up for apps. Not totally shit but not revolutionary either.
journalistic sensationalism pulls in the pageviews
I use Ubuntu myself but I think it's still a year away from my grandma being able to use it.
Apple really nailed it with version 3.0, and this is going to be great for us. I suspect you'll start seeing app acquisitions as companies look to acquire an 'install' base to leverage.

Time to get crankin' on more apps before gold rush 3.0!
The problem for social networking sites is that they've largely just codified existing social networks

I've never met 90% of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter, so I don't think that theory affects Twitter.
That's just flat-out wrong, you can post short messages directly in FF just like with Twitter. If Twitter closes its doors, FF is probably in the best position right now to be its drop-in replacement.

You seem to be of the opinion that Twitter's purpose is to "post short messages". I doubt that's why people use Twitter. FriendFeed's message is no solution.

No, they're trying to keep the users they already have. You don't think competition includes keeping an eye on the up-and-comers and trying to keep your advantage?

I don't. Facebook isn't basing their strategy around Twitter. They're basing it around their own set of features, which do something entirely different. As I said: perhaps Twitter inspired their new system, but Facebook's not stupid enough to think they're a Twitter alternative, and it's not stupid to think it should be.
Shes in one of those majors that will keep her in school for another 5 years. Thinking like 7 or 8 years total of schooling....
Selling the idea?
A Look at How Diversified Entrepreneurs Are
Basic summary

* Most people cheat a little and more often compared to cheating a lot and less often.

* When reminded of morality, people cheat less.

* The greater the distance from cheating to reward the more likely people are to cheat.
Its akin to the United States moving to the metric system or the internet to IPv6, methinks. Both are wonderful in theory, but the transition is painful. The only way I see it becoming pervasive is either a) another recession and a stimulus package going from a green economy to an internet time one (just sayin' ;) ) or b) slow, steady introduction, which would be generations in the making.
Startups are hard on partners, but if its serious and this is something important to you then you should apply.

Trial by fire :D

I love my wife, and I know she loves me too. And part of the reason I know that is because I was broke as hell on the second iteration of my first startup when we met. I crashed at her apartment and ate her food while I built my prototype.

She put up with it, she must love me :)
Found the girl early on in life. Way before college. lol. Now stuck with the girl. Love her to bits though so can't let go and move without her.
All the research I've seen seems to draw the conclusion that the only strong predictor of performance in a job -- is past performance.

Puzzles and psychometric testing are useful, but have a lot of limitations. However, you may have a job that involves a high level of responsibility (e.g. people's lives) and you want to assess their response to stress/crisis. Again, it's not perfect -- you don't truely know how someone will respond in a unique situation -- but in those circumstances you might want all the information possible.

References, by and large, are useless.

Cultural fit is incredibly important, but there are very few interviewers or interview techniques that do this adequately. There is so much bias in this it's hard to assess very well.

So what are the keys for me? Validating what they have on their CV. If they have experience with a particularly technology, I ask about it. I propose problems that they are likely to encounter every day in their job, and see how they go about fixing it. From what I've seen, abstract problems do not exercise this sufficiently.

What is it from there? Well, if what they have been doing is a fit for the job, then that's great. If there is a gap, there is an assessment on what it will take to bridge. How a person has conducted their career is a good indicator on how achievable this is.
The actual answer to the "hardest interview puzzle question ever" is 17, and the pirate starts from the left.
My girl is doing the same to me now. Living off me while she attends school.
Yes. In fact I think we will soon go back to having a room of "computers" instead of using an excel document. In other words, take your calculations up to a roomful of gals who will do the calculations, double check them, and then hand you the answer some time later. Since clearly spreadsheet software has no practical use.

Or not.

:-)
That's why Microsoft lost to Google
This is really scary stuff (and I was hoping that it would never make it on HN) I saw this on reddit today and a few of the better comments debunked the scare mongering hype: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_i...

And yet here we are with popsci near the top of HN. I blame Jeff Atwood.
Ask HN: Startup Share Distribution for New Comers
We are a startup of two who have an idea that we started working on for sometime. For example, we have gone so far to form partnerships with groups who specialize in the domain of which problems we are trying to solve.

We realize that we need more people to help us implement our idea in a timely fashion. We want to involve our friends who are willing to join and who we think are among the best in the industry that we are in. However, I and my founder are faced with the problem of share distribution - who gets how much - for those who join us right now or the immediate future.

We have some ideas of our own; however, we want to listen to those who have gone through such a phase or who have encountered such a problem.

What are your thoughts or experiences?
So you can embed Google maps in your app, but you can't use their maps? Isn't that kind of worthless?
Left brain here baby. But then I already knew that. Maybe I can get somebody at MIT to extract my right hemisphere for me and then sell it on e-bay for a profit, since clearly, I have no use for it.
Over the last few years I've spent more time interviewing than being interviewed, so I sympathize with these questions.

Questions of the form "How many X are there in Y" are vanilla sizing questions, which are not first-order relevant for coding but are crucial for even the most basic engineering. The notion behind these questions is that an interviewee should be able to take a topic they're nominally familiar with (their favorite beverages, their home state), find a candidate correlation, and extrapolate (there are Y million people in my state, and the average consumer consumes X beverages per unit time, so XYtime).

Questions of the form "You have X consumable Ys, how do you accomplish task Z within those X Ys", also wordable "how few consumable Xs do you need to accomplish Z" are about resource allocation or consumption, and are frequently used to ask questions about O-notation without using formulas or having programming/scripting interviewees tell you "oh I don't remember how to write bubble sort... but that's OK because every library has all kinds of sorts now" or to find out if system administrator candidates know about automation tools and how to apply them.

The questions are very much not about rote memorization of brain teasers, and if the interviewer can sniff that behavior out it's _very_ negative: the interviewer most probably has no interest in the number of gas stations in Texas and will never be at the leaning tower of Pisa with two lightbulbs and an afternoon to spend. The idea is to ask one question that can test:

1) a candidate's willingness to pick up a new or unusual challenge

2) their ability to adapt what they're familiar with to solve a problem that they don't know off hand

3) the thought process involved in arriving at the conclusion

Studying a list of "brain teasers" and their answers is like attempting to study a test's answer key -- it may get you through the door but it's very dishonest and a disservice to yourself as you cheat yourself out of an opportunity to expand your mind in a very relevant way using facts that aren't directly related.
From the talk: "Would you like to purchase one rocket launcher for $0.99?"

Oh yeah, that sounds like fun. Clearly a great way to be nickle and dimed to death in every application and game.
Peer to peer communication and device apis are nice too.
An iPhone interface and/or a generic smart phone interface (Android, WinMo, etc). Forget the lower end phones that don't support CSS, they aren't going to be in your demographic anyway.

A lot of times you can get away with a decent smart phone interface and just put a few meta tags in the head tag for the iPhone so that it looks slick for the iPhone too.
If by "shiny stuff" you mean "it works really nice and feels good," then yes. That's what I'm saying.

I guess people who pay money for wallpaper are stupid? It serves no practical purpose. I guess people who buy expensive desks rather than cheap wooden ones, they're stupid? Or people who'll buy a sports car rather than a smart car? The people who'll pay money for an original painting? All really, really stupid, right?

There's a sort of design deficiency in the world of hackers and programmers. I'm certain it's not just among us, but it's here that I see it most. People really don't seem to notice things like feel and look and effect. For a lot of people a design is just a long list of features.

The Macbook Air is not a machine for people who want features. It's a machine for people who want to feel a delight when they look at their computer, for people who enjoy the feel of a really light computer tucked under their arm. It's got a beautiful form and it feels beautiful when you have it open on your lap and typing feels beautiful. Those aren't features. There isn't a site that rates how good it feels to type on a computer. There's no score for this.

That said, calling good design "shiny" and saying it lacks "real merit" is pretty damn stupid, and I find the people who look at the Macbook Air and say they don't get it a little bit despicable. It's a bad attitude that gets people nowhere and encourages deliberate blindness.

(Another way to put it is: what do you have to gain from seeing movies in a movie theater? It's expensive and the food is bad and unless you're sitting particularly close to the screen, there's nothing that it offers you that a huge TV doesn't - with one exception, which is the experience of going to a movie theater. Good design is an experience.)
http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html
No, "encouraging people to think about what they write" is not all that it's doing (live writing, draft - editing, inline comments, etc). This thing is conceptually pretty intense and it's interesting to see how it's going to work out.
EXACTLY. Thats exactly where I am. Bootstrapped out of my own pocket and trying to get up and running.

EDIT: Thanks.
18 chars not enuff
Well, then do the math. A formal budget, something most 20 somethings have never done. Figure out what sacrifices you've got to make. Then sell the team on them.

Add a fudge factor, cause shit happens.

An exercise in startup leadership :D
"Now as I said before, 3.0 brings a lot of new features for devs, but for customers as well... starting... with cut, copy, and paste."

Freaking finally!
Chemistry is fascinating. I'm really not too worried about mercury being the next terrorist secret weapon. It doesn't seem flasy enough to inspire terror, maybe just a creeping unease.
There is no absolute standard for "readable" code. I have served in positions where recursion, lambda expressions and short circuit evaluation were considered clever hacks requiring documentation and got me branded as a troublemaker.

Ideally, readability standards would be made an explicit part of team/project policy but it's difficult to define that standard without taking things for granted.

Being a smelly jerk is certainly also a problem, but an orthagonal one.

Stereotypes are more dangerous than quirky developers. Though they are often found together, don't conflate aptitude with eccentricity or grooming.
I've had a hard time getting that prototype to work as a valid question because I've always found I'm leading candidates through the thought process. I have yet to find a way to ask it in an open ended manner and receive a satisfactory (meaning it has walked enough of the path to prove a candidate can engineer) answer.
I once applied for a job and got back an email asking, "You are given 9 coins, one of which is heavier. Using a balance scale, how many weighings does it take to find the heavy coin?"

I wrote back, "What is the maximum number of coins that you can process in 5 weighings to find the heavy one? If you know the answer to that, then you know that I Know the answer to your question."

I didn't hear back. I guess they didn't understand the algorithm or they thought I was a wise-ass. Of course I could have been filtered through HR.
PopSci from 2004, no less. Did Atwood finally break HN?
So, those old-style thermometers with mercury - even that much mercury could shred an airplane?

I know knowledge is power and all that, but I almost wish I hadn't found out about this.
All that posting on Twitter gets you is that it forces you to state each point in 140 characters, and it gives people a way to reply to your points.

Unless you're talking about your conceptual system? I'm a skeptic. I'm making a system for writers myself - that's what I'm applying for YCombinator with - and I doubt that any million-dollar enterprise will make people better writers. I don't know your idea, but if you think a machine will help people write then I'd bet a good sum that your plan would/will flop hard.
You can use their maps just not for turn-by-turn. Read the article. :)
g = Girlfriend.find(:all).last
a = YCapp.create(:term => 'Summer 09', :name => 'spoiledtechie')
if a.accepted
g.propose
self.move('SF')
g.move('SF') if g.fiancee
end
Lovely. This was a good platform choice for me to specialize in. I'm going to start consulting almost exclusively for the iPhone, I think it's a platform that will be here for a good number of years.
Re: In theory, theoretical questions are great. In practice, they are fidgety little things that must be asked precisely correctly to have the same "correct" answer that the interviewer has memorized and are frequently botched, almost invariably involve a "gotcha" answer in such a way that honestly I do not want to see a coder actually code, and have a laser-like focus on an aspect of the job that in most cases will involve less than 1% of your job, no exaggeration.

Indeed, programmers as a whole really have no clue about the biases they inject into interviewing somebody else. The knee jerk dogmatism that underlies the various "religious wars" in programming are merely a large, easy to see manifestation of the same fundamental myopic expectation mechanism. :-(
We just got copy & paste.