skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is sage advice - but you just shouldn't have to do all that crud.

It assumes that the structure of your data is knowable upfront - but most businesses just discover this as they go along.

So the first quote is brilliant - you have to know where your going. Well even if you know where your going as a business, do you know exactly how you'll get there, will you know precisely what your data will look like?

Should it be static? I think not. We've been doing data for 30 years in basically the same way. We have good stable fast cheap open databases like postgreSQL, but they dont solve the problem. Its just too damn expensive to _change_ the structure of your data, and move your data along at the same time.

BizGeek - "Um. I thought before that there was always just one boss for any given salesperson, but now we need to change that.."

DataGeek "uhuh, yeah it would have been nice to know that upfront, ahh its gonna impact the schema and um, the code.. thats kind of nontrivial."

For a long time I could not understand why people put their valuable data into spreadsheets..losing all the important inter-relationships in the process. But its the right decision, because once they move it into a DB.. they will never ever get to change it!

There just has to be a better way.
I think Kurzweil should be more explicit in step two.
More likely they can't buy one of the component chemicals.
It's quite common in aerospace/defence kit that you need a solvent or an insulation that isn't made anymore because of environmental concerns. You can't exactly say to the maker - I need you to keep making chemical X because it's a top secret part of our weapons design!

The other problem is that it's rather difficult to test whether a replacement will work as well. You cant really ask the maker if their new aerogel formulation works the same when used in a nuclear bomb!

The story is also a slight red herring - the UK navy leases the Trident missile from the US but designs and manufactures it's own warheads.
So? Most people don't want constant out access from the information they have there. The one important asset, photos, already can be easily extracted.

If you choose to use Facebook, you choose to play by their rules. Nobody forces you to pick them over anybody else.
Cut him some slack; he's French :-)
When was the last time Facebook released a feature* that wasn't picked up by the majority of its users within 6 months? The newsfeed, pages, and video all become huge fast, because Facebook keeps things intuitive.

It's not about features. Facebook added nothing. They just reorganized what they had already, and in doing so changed their focus.

*Not counting Facebook Marketplace, which was reliant on money to work.
HAH. Well said. Plus, if any aliens get out of hand he can kick ass with the tonfa training he got on TJ Hooker.
theres too much white space in the green box? you gonna fill it up?
also i was able to reply to a post without an account, use captcha or something to prevent spam
Absolutely! I think the problem that they're running into is that it's tricky to make something like that without cluttering.

The best solution I've seen is what the Vanilla forum system does (http://getvanilla.com). They provide a bunch of options to give you slices into information. What are the last 5 threads you visited? Which are new? Which were the last 5 you replied to? The idea of thinly slicing information is excellent and works very well if you're a focused web site. (It inspired a lot of my startup's front page design.)

The problem is that Facebook is all about the aggregation. They can't dedicate that many resources to one application. For them, it's all about that little notification window, and that means that you can probably only really give users one little notification for any particular update. So, unless their users click into the Groups application, there's nothing they can do.

It would be interesting to see if, now that Facebook's increasing their level of aggregation, they begin increasing the amounts of information an application can pipe to users. That might let Groups gain prominence again, at the risk of increasing the level of spam existent on the site.
The design has a whole needs to be more consistent. Several visual elements seem to be working against each other, like the green that was mentioned.

Also, I think the area that is used for questions needs to have more width to it.
this is not the comment you are looking for
Non web programmer's way to highlight code on your blog
The inconsistent use of "Chuwe" versus "ChuWe" was the first thing I noticed.

The other thing I noticed immediately was the way the green box didn't line up with the question title. Another minor gripe I know...

How're you planning to seed this? Stack Overflow (from memory) had a private beta seeding period with invited beta testers who made sure that when the general public hit it, they had a great first impression of the amount of content. At the moment you're probably losing a lot of people who drop in, see how little traffic there is, and don't bother posting a question.

If you're going to allow anonymous answers, you should probably have some community spam protection ("Flag this"). Also if you're not logged in, I would put in voting controls as a call to action and to try and get people to register.
I think this is a great idea. Startups need a place to talk. But I question, is this really a startup? By that I mean, is this a potential business that will employ people or is it more of an online forum where people can talk about startup stuff?
Well, for the spam, we'll work on it manually for the time being. We want to make it as easy as possible to join in at first, kind of zero barriers-of-entry (would you have posted a reply without having to make an account? What if you got the captcha wrong twice?). No captchas right now, no email required for an account, etc.

As spam becomes unmanageable, we'll implement captchas for anonymous accounts. They're ready to be flipped on with a switch!

The white space in the green box is for the voting arrows, but I think you're quite right. Everyone has mentioned those, so we'll have to work on them.
50%? Are you sure? If you're counting anybody who's tried, I'd guess the percentile is much higher than that. (Lower if we go by the assumption that marijuana shouldn't be illegal on account of near-harmlessness, but even then I'd imagine it's pretty high.)
Interesting article. I'll probably get downmodded for saying this, but I do believe that this being #1 brings HN one step closer to reddit.
I went to a barcamp in Vancouver and it was awesome, but why compete with SXSW? Seems like there will probably be a lot of people who would enjoy both, I would for sure.
If you explored outside of your boundaries and learned different ways of programming (like functional programming), you might realize that there are perfectly valid styles of programming where lambdas are as common as if-statements and for-loops. I think that it is reasonable to assume that creating named local variables for each and every one of them would be silly.
At which point, we kill them as well. And yes, I really am being serious.

For countries which have implemented this proposal or slightly watered down versions: see Singapore and China and note that even though they are in the middle of a drug heavy region, they have still managed to keep their countries relatively drug free.
Fair question. We don't see much revenue coming from this, it's just the first part that we wanted to open up for public use. As we develop the community and site, we have some plans for monetization, certainly.

For the time being, we're cockroaches - living cheap until we can make it to ramen profitable.
"There are indeed places where drug dealing or use is punishable with death.

These places still have pervasive drug use -- in fact, greater use than places without such penalties."

Examples please. I have examples to the contrary: Singapore and China. What are yours?
Nope. I have never used or dealt in drugs. Nor do I plan to. How about you?
What the Stock Market Really Thinks About the Economy
"While you're at it, why not shoot all the people who skip the bus fare?"

Because people who skip bus fare are usually not involved in large organized crime units. Also, skipping bus fair is not addictive (in the medical sense of the word).

"Also enforce proper adherence to schedules under the same technique. The buses, trains and planes will finally run on time, can you imagine that?"

See criticism above.
"No Patch" versus "Starting Patch"
Nope. The reasoning is that continued use of this policy will convince possible dealers that the action is not worth the effort. Econ 101. If you want to reduce some activity, increase the costs of engaging in it. That is exactly what this does.
As long as as an employer, I could test my employees for drug use, and as long as as a patient, I can be assured that my doctor is not a crack addict, and as long as as a driver and a pedestrian, I can be somehow assured that no one is driving or crossing the street while intoxicated, I'm for the legalization.
[Edit 1]: Naturally, this policy would be continued in the future. If anybody is ever found to be knowingly in possession of illegal drugs, they are shot.
I just went to see a band - I then checked their website, I can buy CDs/download tracks/T-Shirts. There are links to the tickets for their upcoming gigs. there are even press packs to download ready for the lazy journalist to put in their newspapers.

I don't know who their recording company is - and why exactly would they need one?
You're right, he only said that the first company (pre-Pyra) was unfocused.

I filled in the rest based on the comment above and on memories of people calling Odeo unfocused. I just wanted to kill any notion that Ev's successes come from being unfocused. Really, it was Ev's focus, keeping us from getting tied down by biz dev deals and refusing to settle for a middling success even when we got positive feedback, that set the groundwork for Twitter.
Thanks for your feedback - we'll make sure everything is consistent in the next couple of minutes (or so I hope!)

Design gripe noted.

It's an interesting point about content, perhaps we should revert back to some "closed beta" system while we build up a reasonable amount of content?

And we'll work on getting the flag bits in, it was up next anyway. I had hidden the voting, but it's true it should be there as a call to action.

Thanks tons!
Green is top on our hitlist. It's goin' down.

Do you mean the content div should be wider?
A lot of people submit "rate my startup" links. There are two ways to do this - either sumbit a link to the homepage with an appropriate title or submit a question-like post with the homepage link in the title and additional commentary in the text field.
In the first case, the author must add a comment the regular way which may not be at the top/visible the whole time. In the second case, there's no direct link to the homepage, one has to copy it or type it manually.
I would appreciate if HN would improve the UX with these kind of posts. I won't suggest a solution, I'm sure PG will come up with something clever if he decides to implement this.
If you really want, limit it to people in immediate knowing possession of the drugs. However the initial massacre is necessary to establish a precedent. If the US government had not squandered its credibility in law enforcement matters, this would not be necessary. We could instead offer unconditional amnesty to current users and dealers. Give them some small time period (like a week or a month -- less than half a year) to clean up their act and then put these laws into effect. As it is, it is a recognized fact that the government will not take extreme action without the n to the nth-level of bureaucratic paperwork and thus to establish an effective deterrent, the punishment needs to be exercised.
Caffeine? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Well, I have never seen a read-slave setup in a webapp for the purpose of scalability that would've made a lot of sense.

It's a sometimes a stopgap measure when money is cheaper than time, but will come back to haunt you later.

When your reads are starving in a webapp then you should look into fragment caching and content-generation but not much further. If that doesn't solve your problem then you're just very likely doing something fundamentally wrong and better go ask someone smarter.
Most printers are simple to use

They were 5 years ago, but they're hard again for some reason. Not too long ago you could plug a printer into your router, find it on the network from any machine and print to it. No software install. Just find it and print. If you weren't on a network, you could just plug the USB jack into your machine and print just as easily. Remember plug and play?

For some reason, it doesn't work like that anymore. You need to find the CD and install the drivers, and even then chances are you won't be able to connect to it over the network. Even if you have the USB cable plugged into your box, it's not smart enough to pretend it's a memory stick and give you the drivers you need.

Anybody know what happened there?
True. Although I hope someday Mandarin will become second nature to lots of Americans, in the same way that Spanish "grande," "hola," etc., can be mixed with English to effect a certain attitude.

Let's start with 厉害. Easy to pronounce and sounds like its meaning (at least to me).
The article states this took place shortly before the Adsense for Domains program was unleashed.
Python's lambdas aren't really functions. They're callable expressions.

Once you understand that, a lot of the "issues" go away.
this was inspired by a super-talented developer calling the game 'complicated' -- we figured it wasn't actually that many lines of code, and hence not so complicated after all. After writing it, I realize that the state change between offense and defense happens quite a bit. :)
Data.gov Is Coming — Let's Help Build It
Yep actually I have. Not professionally but among friends.

Seems like a strong opinion to have about something that you have zero expirience with, no?
Few commercial projects will open source their code, unless they already have reasons to believe that they can't be usurped for one reason or another.
Kurzweil is one of the few guys whose predictions I take serious, simply because his track record is solid... in fact quite a few of is predictions he's directly made happen. If you look at the claims made in "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and the follow up a decade later in "The Age of Spiritual Machines", you realize the guy is pretty on the ball. Not 100% of the time, but even when he's wrong he usually got some part of it right.
I'm going to assume that you're a younger guy? Back when I was in high school I might have thought the same way - this was before I actually made friends with some drug users and tried some myself in college.

Drug users are not bad people. Most drug dealers are not bad people. On my floor in college, the kid who sells drugs is a pretty cool kid: good student, active in sports. There's some social problems he runs across because he's "the kid that sells drugs," but he's a pretty cool guy. He's a typical college student who just happens to sell drugs to the kids who want to buy drugs.

That is not deserving of death. When you talk about killing somebody, you're talking about ending a life, unconditionally terminating a person's future. Some things are worth that (I will hold to my dying day that enjoying the Twilight book series is admitting your lack of will to live), perhaps, but drug selling and drug use? No. Not at all.

As I said: I tried marijuana a handful of times, and I thought it was pretty relaxing. Nobody was harmed. (To go to the extreme, if you use a vaporizer, you're not even risking lung damage, which means that your body seriously is not injured in any way, even minute.) It was voluntary on the part of myself and some friends. We were okay with paying for those drugs; the kid who sold them was fine with trading them for money.

Do I deserve to die because I voluntarily used chemicals? Does the dealer deserve to die because he gave a product to somebody who wanted it? Who is the criminal here?

Enforcing drug rules is basically punishing people not for actually doing anything bad, but for doing something that the government is telling you is a no-no. If I told you that it was bad to, say, whistle, and you whistled, and I told you I'd kill you if you didn't stop, maybe you'd stop, but that doesn't solve the real problem, which is "unalone is a dick who's setting arbitrary, pointless rules". The problem isn't your whistling, it's me.

It's fun thinking of things so black-and-white when you're young, but once you reach the ripe old age of 18, you'll start maturing a little bit.
So... you're suggesting that most people who use drugs are organized in large crime units rather than just hanging out with friends rolling blunts? Because I'm pretty sure the average drug user isn't involved in crime beyond buying an illegal substance.
Ask Barack Obama.
First of all, at the time 5k was completely unrealistic. I've worked for nearly 20 months without salary on Shopify before launching it and all my last savings went to pay (very low) salaries to my friends and colleagues who agreed to work on the project because they were passionate about it.

But even now, Shopify being a multi million dollar company, I still don't think this would have been well invested money. We had Slony setup and PITR is of no use here either. The point is that you cannot upgrade the schema and data in a migration without downtime in a Postgres setup. Mysql simply replicates alter table statements to it's clients and everything stays in sync.

Besides, changing architecture took - as i said - a few hours which ends up even at crazy hourly rates to be no more than 1k so even by direct comparison we saved money.

I know that you mean well with your suggestion but it's the same thing i've been hearing from a lot of Postgres supporters, they always argue that we did something wrong.
The reason no other language does that is because no other mainstream language uses newline and indentation to indicate blocks, which makes all general-purpose multi-line anonymous function syntaxes inherently ugly

Haskell is newline-and-indentation-based and allows multi-line anonymous functions.

With that in mind, I often prefer to name functions, but not let them be globally callable, i.e.

f = (g . h) where
g = (2*)
h = (1+)

Does Python allow something like this? (Equivalents in other languages:

(defun f (x)
(flet ((g (x) (* 2 x))
(h (x) (1+ x)))
(g (h x))))

Or:

sub f {
my $g = sub { 2 * $_[0] };
my $h = sub { 1 + $_[0] };
return $g->($h->($_[0]));
}

I think Haskell is prettiest, but this is not a concept unique to Haskell, and it's a technique I find useful in all three languges.)
I've always heard "if you don't fail from time to time, you're not trying hard enough...". I've failed courses, I've failed job interviews, I've had projects fail to work, or to deliver. I've had failed relationships, and I've failed to help people from time to time. Gobs of failures, I guess.

However, I think overall I've been successful, and I've tried to help out when/where I can. Might I try harder? Certainly, but I'm doing ok.
If all you want is a printer, the old HPs are really good. The Laserjet 4 in particular was a high water mark in quality. You can find them fairly cheaply, and if you fix the one problem they have (accordion jams), which is not very difficult and requires about $20 worth of parts, they will basically last forever, and are cheap to run.

The output quality from these printers is about the best I've seen from a laser.
Makes no sense. You don't have all these insurances today, why should you get them when drugs can be legally bought?
Entrepreneur Eric Janszen on the credit crunch
Someday maybe. There are something on the order of 25,000 genes. Lots, maybe even most, have variants, which increase the chance of disease, particularly with certain variants of other genes. Many genes are triggered only at certain times in the embryo's development and in an adult may have an entirely different purpose. So here you have a massive super computer with 25,000 objects and variants whose function varies over time. I don't think we are even close to figuring it out. For example, simulating the folding of a single protein takes a super computer.
I have just spent some time reading up on GFS2. It sounds interesting. But it also seems aimed at "SAN" style storage, which is expensive. The acronyms that gaius posted above were also interesting to google, but I don't want to buy storage from a place like EMC or NetApp, I have some drives from Fry's that should be more than sufficient.

Here is what I want to do:

I will take two consumer grade computers less than a couple years old, and install an extra gigabit ethernet card in each one. I will connect the extra crads with a cross over cable. On the "master" machine, I will run Postgres or MySQL, with the data directory on a separate partition if the replication scheme is at the file system level. On the "slave" machine, I willnot have the database server started up. Slow option with a lot of overhead: when the data dir changes, inotify kicks off an rsync that copies the datadir from the master to the slave. Better option: inotify kicks of something that doesn't have to scan whole data file on each side to find the changed data and move it.

On a failure of the master, either I would manually move a cable to make the system start using the slave, or IPs could be shuffled remotely, or one of the failover systems could do it automatically. For my particular application, it would be fine if I had to ssh in and change a DNS entry to make our web servers start using the slave database, and because I would not want the database server on the slave to start up and start writing to a disk that might also be receiving syncs from the master, I would prefer it be manual for now.

Aside from an inotify / rsync solution that seems limited and kludgy, does anyone have any tips on how to go about this ?
I've had a little bit of wine, so you'll have to pardon my honesty: I think Python is a crap language with a great syntax. I'd rather use C++ when performance is very important, or Haskell, when it's not.
Replication has nothing to do with scalability in most cases. Replication is how you reduce downtime!

It's the same reason why Raid5 is more then useless in a web server - if a disk dies it has to reboot and has to reconstruct data for hours. You cannot have downtime in a web application.

This is of course slightly domain specific. We host several thousand e-commerce stores that are the livelihood of our clients. If we are down then no one can earn money.

Shopify being down is a lot worse then twitter being down. In fact we may even see legal action if our downtime is too bad.

The reason why you need replication is because you need 3+ 100% accurate and up to the second copies of your database which can take over at a moments notice. One single server, no matter how beefy it is, can never accomplish this. Someone is going to trip over it's power cords eventually ( and if it has two then someone is going to trip over the power cord of the network switch it's connected to ).
That would mean executing our last three presidents.
> Is Google Rewiring Our Brains?

Sounds like a lawsuit.
The reason for all the discussion over the years is that a single line lambda doesn't cover 90% of the cases. If you think in terms of callbacks, I bet one liner cover less than 10% of the cases.
This quote cracked me up:

"No longer will the labels be tied to revenue limited to sales of master recordings - by then most or all artists will be under 360 music contracts that give the labels a cut of virtually every revenue stream artists can tap into - fan sites, concerts, merchandise, endorsement deals, and everything else."

I'm betting by then such deals won't be entirely necessary or at the very least can be approached via a fee basis.