skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adolescents are not allowed to join the workforce until their specialized, but are not allowed to specialize until college. I have always thought it would be cool for kids to be able to begin an apprenticeship in medicine or engineering earlier on in their lives.
Shipping a 1.0 product isn't going to kill you, but it will try
You still have to write it, it's just called Executive Summary ;-)
No it is not stupid. RDBMS are old thinking, and have not inovated in decades. They made sense when procedural programming was all the rage, now they just don't anymore.

My ideal database would just act like a big hash table. Where I can store an object and retrieve it at will, without having to learn any other language. (sql in this case), or use complicated ORMs, (Hibernate, or Django models). etc..

So, for some reason or the other, there hasn't been much inovation in this field. Maybe b/c the big players in databases like it as it is, and there is no incentive to inovate.

Just b/c you drank your koolaid a while ago, doesn't mean everybody else has. In the programmer's poing of view, right now databases are a necessary evil, but they could be much better.
> I'm not sure what you're asking here-- Netflix doesn't care about anything but movies, and it probably wouldn't be able to recommend movies any better if it knew your musical tastes, or even how your tastes compare to mine.

That's wrong. The only thing that is movie-specific about the netflix recommendation system is the preference data that it runs over. It doesn't know movies from eyebrows.

If netflix (the company) also collected preference information about music, the recommendation engine would predict music preferences. And, since it would have both music and movie info, it would use music prefs to recommend movies and the reverse, just as it uses movie prefs to predict movie prefs today.

Amazon's "users who bought {something} also bought" is an example of "doesn't know anything about the domain". (They have to tone it down to keep it from recommending "strange" things that are way out of category.)

Disclosure: I know the guy who implemented NetFlix first recommendation system and have written a collaborative filter myself. I know what I can do with the fact that we both like the Pogues and Chunky Monkey. I still don't see what I can do with how we group those preferences.
The best CV I ever got listed "cake decorating in the form of ski-slopes (as well as the tradiotional style)" in the interests section.
A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel
A blogspot-templated blog; how cute. I always find it slightly humorous when people who profess to be "programming gurus" use something like a blogspot (or WordPress or MoveableType) template to dispense their expert programming guru knowledge. FTA:

"You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't you? Argh!"

IMHO, there's absolutely nothing wrong with listing HTML on one's resume, especially if one actually knows the context and how to use HTML to do something besides make text (for example, render) bold or italic.

Plain text resumes can indeed work to get information across, but if ever there were a way to demonstrate actual ability to code electronically, a resume coded in HTML would be that way. Resumes are about presentation. HTML, coupled with CSS, is a valuable way to demonstrate ability to present plain text.

Actually, thinking about it, most programming is essentially about presenting or rendering or parsing plain text, is it not? I would rather see somebody's hand-coded text/HTML resume than a plain-text text/text resume with (undemonstrative) HTML listed as a skill.

More on why job search is broken (and part of my startup philosophy):

There is a lot to be said for the meaning of irony when companies who claim to want creative and "out of the box" thinkers request that potential employees visit their website in order to submit the info on their resumes via little, pre-formatted text boxes.
Logic will get you from A to B.  Imagination will take you everywhere.
8en,

So which culture are you from? You can't be an American? And of course America is a culture without a history and prejudice against people with dark skin right?
I hope I don't get negged as a starry eyed Rails enthusiast, but here goes...

Up until recently, I generally heard programmers complain constantly about the limitations of SQL and RDBMS's, and I heard a lot about object databases. The idea was that programmers would define objects, and the database would provide persistence for the objects. It was (and still is) a nice idea.

Rails took a completely different approach, embracing the RDBMS as the model itself. Rather than creating objects and pushing the design out to the RDBMS, you define the relational structure and allow Rails to extract an object model. If you are doing basic CRUD operations, you may not have to think about SQL again, even in a reasonably complicated app, and the syntax is very clean.

I just love it. And Ruby is like a beautiful flo... oh yeah, didn't want to get negged, better shut up now.
Today's action items:

- Give me a list of good (lifetime sales > $10,000) customers on the west coast (CA, OR, WA) who bought any product on the defective list during busy season (10/06, 11/06, 12/06) and haven't placed an order since our last email blast. We'll find out why.

- Give me a list of phone numbers (using our Caller ID) of people who called in the last 4 days, whose call wasn't answered and had never called us before. We'll call them back.

- Give me a list of our slowest moving (10%) products that haven't been ordered in the last 4 months that are sitting in prime space (Location beginning with 1,2, or 3) in the warehouse. We'll move them to pallets to make room for new stuff.

- Give me a list of all products returned from Territory 7 in the last 3 months with a Problem Code related to fit or size. We want to make sure their description is correct on the website.

I could go on (and on and on)...

Do any of these with your "big hash table" in less than 1 second and earn a seat at the table with the big boys.

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's obsolete. Maybe because it works so well.

And just because someone understands this doesn't mean they "drank kool-aid".

Nothing wrong with a little debate. But please come up with more creative methaphors.
keeping application data in memory

No, I leave that to optimization. Could be in memory, on disk or wherever else my compiler and the run-time system decide them to be. When I see performance isn't good I may start fine-tuning my run-time system.

Indexing by arbitrary column

That's a matter of optimization. Thinking in indexes is clearly premature optimization that can be done automatically.

Subranges & slices, again by arbitrary column

That's map/reduce with some clever infrastructure that can optimize things for me.

Joins

Pointers.

Sorting

Sorting is sorting :)

Quick summarizing, over any combination of columns

Map/reduce.

Transactions, Persistence and Concurrency control

Possible without the DBMS.

Access from multiple languages

Honestly, I give up here. If we are going to have a programming language that itself handles large data structures, then other languages are probably out.

Distribution

What you mean by distribution?
The timeline is kinda neat, but it woulda been a lot better with an accompanying list with sort controls.

Pretty good example of using AJAX to do something that you could've done easier and better without it.
Arnie St. => Amie St.

Also, that was an investment, not an acquisition.
The Ridiculously Clever Dock
Cant they just write a macro that automatically turns any scheme or lisp library into an Arc library?
It is my observation - I too studied in India. It is common knowledge that brahmins (caste) as a group are more intelligent than the average population. For example, They have made up the bulk of Nobel laureates from India.

My room mate was from the untouchable caste (translation for Americans). He was super intelligent too - managed to leave the country and got 2 post graduate degrees in the USA, trained himself to run marathons.

regarding your comment on hereditary occupations, please read this article

And no, I am not a brahmin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2231011.stm

"In the dead of the night, when the city of six million goes to sleep, groups of jobless low-caste Hindus, known as Dalits, eke out a living by removing human excrement from pits in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city."
Everyone gathers in the middle of the woods with black hoods and candles then chants Paul Graham a thousand times.
ask any student from India. (I was born and raised there). That is why there is affirmative action for the lower castes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59891
Angel Networks
This morning I attended a seminar about attracting angel investment which was hosted by a regional angel investor network. Essentially, this angel network is a non-profit organization of independent angel investors who review and discuss business plans submitted from early stage (primarily tech) startups seeking funding. Each quarter they filter down submissions to 4 promising companies, which are invited in to present in front of all of the angels.

Does anyone have experience with such Angel Networks?

My impression from reading PG's essays and elsewhere is that the really "good" angel investors are typically independent and work almost entirely off of recommendations. It was mentioned in the talk that referrals really help, but they will also look at business plans which are submitted cold turkey (although there is a $250 application fee, which I found strange given the organization is non-profit). Does anyone have input on this?

Some things I learned:

- With the exception of basically 1 VC (Austin Ventures), VC money is still dried up post-bubble here in Austin. Angel investments are on the rise to fill this void in the mid-sized investments area however.

- An underlying theme of the talk was "risk aversion". It sounds like investors here are still very weary of risk, and therefore will only really invest in companies which have an established business plan with a viable plan for turning profit. If you are not cashflow positive already, you better have a plan to get there quick.

- Not only would this risk-aversion make getting seed investment more difficult, it might also yield terms which are less desirable than they should be. For this reason it really does look like moving to Silicon Valley is a good idea when seeking early-stage investment. I always speculated this before, but now it is pretty clear.
> A blogspot-templated blog; how cute.

What's wrong with using Blogspot? Surely the important point is the message, not the medium.

> IMHO, there's absolutely nothing wrong with listing HTML on one's resume

You managed to miss the point entirely: HTML is not a programming language.
Didn't pg say somewhere that Viaweb included cgi-bin in urls for the same reason?

Edit: Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625
Sorry, but that is the truth IMHO. Anti-Hispanic feelings run high in many states in the US and is largely unreported in the media. Just as anti-black feeling was socially acceptable in an earlier era.

(I look Hispanic myself, and realized how much they are disliked when my wife observed that I receive glares and cold stares from strangers).
If you don't know how to program
and you have a relatively simple web app you want to make, where do you start. What scripting language would be best to learn on? All the RoR buzz started to lead me in that direction and I bought the agile web dev book, but now I'm not sure if that is the best place to start. Now I'm more thinking about PHP. It's simple and very forgiving. From an unexperienced programmer, it seems much easier to just hack something together.

Any other input? Thanks!
That's interesting. I'm curious as to where your theory places Lisp hackers. We could arguably be placed in either category.
The next best thing to actually piloting a plane
How to Get Venture Capitalists to Like You and Give You Money
Not to mention hair dye, padded bras, shoe lifts, tanning lotion, girdles, braces (for straight teeth),teeth whiteners, razors, etc.
SQL indexes work transparently. Creating them automatically would not be good, since they have a cost for write operations.
If you really don't know anyone who might know an angel then you have to ask yourself if $250 is worth getting in front of them.

They all may say no, but at least you'll have the beginnings of a relationship.
Is scientific journalism doomed?
Writing Well, Part 3: Origins of a Writer
Slides from RailsConf Europe '07 on Scaling Rails and Joyent Architecture
<<until [they are] specialized>>

Hate to be a stickler here, but one of the reasons people are encouraged to specialize later rather than earlier is so that they get broader exposure and education in all fundamental fields - including (ahem) the English language.
I like the idea. It's similar to Goalmigo but with a competitive twist.
That's really cool! I wonder if it's an easy skill to master. I can just imagine how much faster my commute would be.
Thank you for exposing this Steve Yegge fellow for what he really is. I have to confess he had me fooled into thinking he was some kind of "programming guru" just because he ported Rails to JavaScript/Rhino. I hadn't noticed the blogspot template. Thanks for setting me straight.
Joyent has interesting services (disk, VPSes) that are alternatives to Amazon EC2 and S3. They're using Sun equipment for the newer services, and I was wondering if any current Joyent Accelerator or Bingodisk customers would comment on their experience. My old VC account on TextDrive was unusable for production, so I'm a little wary.
I don't know what the poster meant by distribution, but one of the nice properties of a DBMS is that it's available when your application is down and can be accessed by other applications. Everyone is a client, so no one else has to be a server (for that data).
dude i am rich now!
You can specialize in engineering long before college. I was writing programs for our home computer at age 12. I'd bet that more than half the people reading this started out the same way.

In the specific case of computer hacking, this works - because even professional-level computer work doesn't require any equipment that a twelve-year-old cannot get. People in other fields aren't so lucky: You really can't learn much about the reality of practicing law, or medicine, or manufacturing from books or websites. You kind of have to learn these things on the job.

Why are so many tech companies founded by people in their twenties? Because software is one of the few fields where a twenty-two year old can have more than ten years of experience.

Of course, even young hackers face problems. They're still treated like children. Back when I was young, teens were rarely exposed to real mentors, taught real computer science, given real tasks, or paid real money. The web has helped to change a lot of this - on the internet nobody knows you're a teenager - which explains why young people are the web's most enthusiastic users.
pg's thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177
"What you mean by distribution?"

Ability to spread your data across multiple physical machines.
I agree. I think getting to know an angel is pretty key, so as to have a reference. One thing nice about Austin is angles (at least from my impression) are very down to earth and friendly, and are very willing to chat about startups if you want to talk to them. Outside of that, it could be difficult getting angel's attention though (which I think is a huge benefit to being funded by YC, who help facilitate initial introductions through demo day). SV could be a totally different ball of wax.

One thing that was made clear by those who spoke is that you need to be careful not to spoil your image. News travels easily between angels. If your company looks promising but the angels do not invest for a specific reason (such as risk), then they are likely to look at you again in the future if you improve. But if you leave a very negative impression or piss someone off in some way, then you could have much more difficulty the 2nd time.
FWIW, the Basin is a pretty good restaurant.
Hard-coding access paths is what is premature optimisation. RDBMS defer decisions about what loops to process until runtime. So the optimiser can make good decisions based on statistics it has about the data. Decisions that programmers do not have to make prematurely.

I think it's pretty clear that if you know exactly how your data is going to be used, then performance is better if you hard code everything and store it in a way that is optimised for retrieval. However, if data is used for multiple purposes, then hard-coding access paths is horrible in terms of performance and maintainance.
Thank you! I've bookmarked this reply, so that the next 20 times I see ardit33's argument made I can just link to it rather than pounding out my own long-winded reply or just beating my head against my desk until it doesn't hurt any more.

(The reply that I would have written if you didn't respond first would probably have emphasized the amount of code required rather than performance.)
That makes sense because angels don't have to answer to anyone. They're people, not businesses. If you piss them off, you've pissed them off personally. If you pissed off a person at a company, the good of the company often trumps their own personal feelings.
Thanks for the heads up. Have you had any success/discoveries since you posted that? Just curious.
For anyone who has read this, is the argument much more detailed than the one John Taylor Gatto makes in his book? It's pretty long (at over 400 pages), but if others think it's worth reading then maybe I'll go through it at some point in the future. The article in Psychology Today made it look like there wasn't that much new from the Gatto though.
I think that you have to learn how to program because if you don't need the skills in your day to day work, at least you need the skills to judge correctly how much work a given task takes, and to understand the possible complications of the process.
> Resumes are about presentation. HTML, coupled with CSS, is a valuable way to demonstrate ability to present plain text.

What happens when your resume is processed/displayed by something that knows nothing about html?

If I have to open a browser to read your "plain text"....
As someone that's a professional seller on eBay, the URL will be the last thing I'm going to worry about (bookmark it, done!). What matters to me is how are you going to help me increase my sales and margin while lowering my eBay fee.

btw... what is the different between your service and something like Auctiva? As far as i can tell, they're already doing everything that you offer and they're FREE! (they take a cut from my insurance sales instead of 1% of total sale)
There are probably all kinds. If you are the type that love DSL's, but _only_ if they are implemented in lisp, then I would place you in the first group.
lol

I could have made any number of technical arguments. We'd be pissing at each other all day.

Instead, I cited a few things that concern those who pay the bills. As hackers engaging in good technical debate here, it's too easy to lose sight of those whom we serve.
<<the English language>>

I also hate to be a stickler, but I would distinguish between "the English language" as such, and orthography. The (grammar of the) former is learned all-but-completely by the age of 8 or 9. The latter is arbitrary and mostly meaningless. Shakespeare spelled his name numerous different ways. Is he uneducated in the language?

...

So: Would any companies be willing to take on 13 year olds for 4 year periods ("apprenticeships"), receiving a modest tuition in the process? That is: For 40,000 dollars over 4 years, would a company like Microsoft be willing to train up teenagers into professionals?

There is no doubt that such a system would educate more fully, and more broadly, than high school.
Are Second Life's users brain-damaged?
When I first learned a scripting language I learned from examples, go here for lots of free examples: http://www.codango.com/. Besides scripting learn sql and how to normalize tables.
Well, one drawback is that it is difficult to query tree-structured data.
The End Is Near For Mongrel (Glassfish is here)
"will only really invest in companies which have an established business plan with a viable plan for turning profit"

Look on the bright side. If you're one of these (which you should be), then they've already narrowed focus.

When the men are separated from the boys, the men oughta have a better chance.
Viaweb is missing...
I've thought about this a bit, having had to write various ORM layers over the years.

My conclusion is that OOP is conceptually built around single "objects" where RDBMSs are built around sets of "objects". The difference in nominal units is some of the basis of the impedence mismatch.

Think about what it takes to do something interesting with a collection of objects in c++/java/whatever, such as pick out the subset that have a cost>n: it is a loop over the entire set. Ruby makes it prettier and cleaner, but you're still just looping. Unless you create a custom collection class that internally stores a hash organized by costs. But the creation of the new class is extra overhead because the nominal unit is the single object.

The counterexample is just as instructive. To retrieve the newest 10 entries in a blog uses the LIMIT syntax in SQL, which is painfully nonstandard: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#select-limit

Things that are simple in one space are hard in the other.

In my own work I've resolved some of this by attempting to avoid abusing the "standard" ORM tools that are out there that allow designing queries in your language of choice (Rails for Ruby, Hibernate for Java). Instead, I attempt to figure out exactly what I need out of query: how to structure the SQL to give me back the exact set of data I care about. No subsequent looping in Ruby/Java allowed.

That forces a line in the system between the DB and the application code where each is able to be use its nominal units in as native a way as possible.
In my case, none of the previously mentioned books. Too complex, with too many assumptions about what you know.

Specially PCL, it helps to feel several 'whoaaa lisp can do that!' moments, but not really to learn the small basic things that are common in lisp.

Instead, I learnt with COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach
downloadable for free here: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/WWW/faculty/shapiro/Commonlis...

It takes your hand and teaches slowly, but with a solid foundation. If you do al exercises (and you should), you will implement one or two of the very complex projects showcased in On Lisp, but with the difference that you will understand the code from top to bottom (since you wrote it).

Take into account that I have not read "The Little Schemer", so take it out from the list of lisp books I criticise.
Maximizing Network Revenue
Viaweb was sold in 1999 if I remember correctly.
Have you heard about filters? That's what they exactly do, narrow your choices according to specific circumstances. You get the list of object that fits the exact pattern of a filter (or multiple filters), and you are done (ok. maybe in java you have to cast the object).
But that's it.

Tables and SQL are old concepts which haven't evolved thru time.
If SQL was so great, why in the heck there is so many ORM frameworks out there? Is it b/c people are stupid, or maybe b/c there is actually a need to just have a Object Oriented Database.
The most important part is to just start, as soon as possible somewhere. Cause you'll pick up on common practices as you go along, plus you need as much experience as possible to produce a good app.
duh. Hibernate has been doing this for ages, before even rails existed.
And it is a mess. You are trying to shoehorn a solution (ORM) so the database will fit the way you would like that data back.

How about actually having the database start evolving just like programing languages have?