skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This title is a little misleading...not your fault, since it's the same headline the article has.
The Justice department told the FCC they're against net neutrality. The decision rests with the FCC and from what the article says it doesn't look like they've decided anything yet.
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The stage where you receive seed funding might not be the best stage to be featured in writing by TechCrunch. Although three of them have launched already and two more have "a working application", it sounds like their demoing is still under development.
For datawarehouse applications you're (obviously) doing many more reads than writes. The number of columns you return for any given ad hoc query is typically low. Take something like "give me the names and salaries of employees who missed more than 3 days last quarter and who also work in California".

Since a single datamart might have 200 columns spread across dimension and fact tables, and since this query is only touching 5-6 of them, it pays to make it easy to get to individual columns, instead of reading entire rows. In a row-store database you'd have to read the main fact table rows and the Employee and Office dimension rows, and that might add up to 50 columns. If you can only touch the exact columns you need you're better off.

All that said, I've never done it. I really need to get an open source column store and whack at it for a bit.
Robbing a bank successfully takes hard work too, just of a different kind.
23

..I'm a very good driver, only drive on the driveway, only drive on Saturdays...
I know we're diverging from the original topic a bit, but I'd like to make a couple of comments about 'Good to Great.' I enjoyed it solely on the fact that there was a tremendous amount of research and data mining involved. He set it up as close to experimental standards as you could get in that area and pulled out the threads with the highest correlation. Adding buzzwords like hedgehog to it, however, is another story.

Since I have a mild fetish for management books, I've drawn a couple conclusions on the whole genre itself. 'Clever ideas' are subjective. I feel that if a book gives you a straight-line recipe to success, then the message has failed because it has overlooked the nuance and gray(grey?) areas that is associated with running organizations and working with people.

Enough of this; back to the topic at hand.
Well you know, half the time it's trying to shove its own products at you, are you confusing those with the recommendations?
Why Equatorial Guinea?
Linus is hellbent on not working with "substandard programmers" and chooses his tools accordingly. Bad programmers are really counterproductive and he's damn brilliant for weeding them out so aggressively.

In his "I'm a bastard" post to the linux kernel thread in 2000, he lambasted people arguing for a kernel debugger. His argument, clear as day, says he doesn't want to work with people who depend on the debugger , he wants people to understand the code as a whole.

"Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck, and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.

Quite frankly, I'd rather weed out the people who don't start being careful early, rather than late. That sounds callous, and by God, it is callous. But it's not the kind of "if you can't stand the heat, get out the the kitchen" kind of remark that some people take it for. No, it's something much more deeper: I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful. It's Darwinism in software development."

Here, 7 years later, he applies much the same argument to C++:

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if
the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out,
that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

"And limiting your project to C means that people
don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that
do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any
idiotic "object model" crap."

Call him a prick, call him selfish, call him egotistical, the bottom line is he's in charge of a product that is much bigger, more complicated, diverse, mature, and successful than the majority on the planet. Smart hackers will get past their emotion and understand his principles are sound, proven, and successful.
My ten awesome ideas for the big Internet sites (1% reward please)
>An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up".

Omouse isn't (directly) asserting anything about perl. He's making assertions about Naggum's assertions. For that purpose, the ill-informed rant in question is an excellent source of corroboration.
Predictably, yes.

I've learned at least two things watching people misunderstand essays. First, when an essay touches on a polarizing issue, people tend to peg it as one end or the other of that polarization. Second, once people peg an essay as making an argument that they disagree with, they stop paying attention, if they keep reading at all.

I'm not trying to be critical of anyone; I tend to do the same thing.

Quote: I hear variations of this same tired argument probably once or twice a month. (It comes with the territory when you write a book titled How to Become a Straight-A Student).

He has you lumped in with the rest of his critics. "Obedience to authority" is a collective quote from the lot of you, with your words "index of obedience" as just one fuzzy part.

What's funny is in the end he agrees with your last three paragraphs. Quote: It's fine to make the point that college and grades aren't everything. In fact it's important.... I'll be the first say it: College is not necessary for success!
Why do companies need permissions to charge for web traffic?
As far as competition is concerned, I think that until Adobe offers a widgetized version that can be integrated into other photo-sharing sites (which is clearly where the money is to be made in this market), fauxto/snipshot/et.al. don't have to get too worried...
The link still isn't working.

But this is not an assumption on my part. It is from experience. At my last startup, we ran the entire most everything over https because it yielded better sign up numbers and payment conversions (pre-payment page). We had at some points over 50K people signing up daily (and of course many many more hitting the initial sign up page and current users logging in and clicking around). The registration # is to give you an idea of scope. All of this still ran fine one dual CPU machine, i.e. all the https didn't hit the server too hard to where it mattered.

So I guess I'm not disputing https takes a lot more CPU than http, but in the aggregate, with a decent machine, it just isn't going to matter. This is especially true if you just do it for authentication, and yes I was thinking of the same cookie process as described by mdakin when making the original comment.
28.

John.
The fauxto web site doesn't make it clear that they do offer a widgetized version. That change would help them.

The snipshot web site doesn't have news. Since they're a small startup, it would be reassuring to see activity there, for those of us thinking about integrating with them.
28 here, too.

[insert random speculation here about average score of successful yc alums]
Networks want the right to decide which packets they send and which they don't (right now, all packets are "neutral", sent at the same speed and priority).

If granted, it would allow networks to extort, essentially, payment from any web site, to make sure their service is accessible by its users.

This article is a good summary of what's at stake: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06...
For applications that do not have frequent writes (or updates), the performance of column oriented databases is significantly better. Anecdotally, we recently started using Sybase IQ for an application of this type with a DB of the order of hundreds of Gigabytes and it is an order of magnitude faster than MySQL for the same data. Having said that, I wouldn't say Sybase IQ is as stable as MySQL and we have run into at least a couple of issues, for which patches aren't yet available, that cause intermittent crashes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_IQ has more details on Sybase IQ.
Cal's a pretty smart dude (grad student at MIT) with a couple of books under his belt (both about doing well at college). I think this essay isn't a fish for attention; it's his worldview. It's actually not so far divorced from what Paul Graham is saying anyway, since he readily admits that you don't need a good college nor good grades to be successful.
I think competition would take care of that problem?
Netscape Goes Traditional; Does Calacanis Take the Hit?
hhmmm, guy who makes his living selling books about how to do well at college blasts essay from guy who says 'college... meh'. nuff said.
Except there's little to no competition in the ISP industry right now. In my area at least, you either have Comcast or Verizon, there's no other options.
Two questions:

1. Why exactly do they care? Isn't their job to enforce policy rather than create it?

2. Other than being a dominant opinion in the department, how does this actually affect net neutrality?
He advocates throwing out the internal storage mechanisms of relational databases and instead having a wide variety of mechanisms suited to different ways data is used. Storing columnar data together rather than storing rows together is one example. This does not make the database look any different to an application programmer.

http://www.vertica.com/product/overview

Q: How are Vertica databases accessed?

A: Just like any other relational database, using SQL and/or JDBC and ODBC. Vertica has partnerships with BI/Reporting software vendors such as Business Objects, JasperSoft, Informatica, and Talend to help ensure Vertica is compatible with popular reporting and ETL software.
Ever-younger entrepreneurs
Internet, low costs lead to early-in-life startups
Are you sure about that? I don't really know the internals, but I would assume the implementation looks something like: Let the compiler put the array (of characters or numbers) somewhere where I can get them, and I'll take that pointer and keep it in my stack-allocated STL data structure.

Any references that say you're right?
Burns Statistics -- Spreadsheet Addiction
Rule of thumb: When empirically testable statements are framed as philosophical arguments it's because they aren't supported by the numbers.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html looks to be the same questions in a different order.
Well I'm not going to tell you not to order it because it's overfished, but you should seriously watch out because of the mercury. I know about a lot of really rich people who ate sushi a couple times a week when it first came to the US. Then they started having their hands shake and having all these weird neurological problem. Turned out to be the mercury, so now they aren't allowed to eat fish at all and they have to have all this crazy medical treatment.
Actually, though, this has some truth to it. Not only that, but the truth of the statement is directly proportional to the quality of the institution the student attends (or at least the German philosophy department of said institution)
Interesting - I'd actually like to discuss further, but your profile has no contact information. Email me at davidw atttttt dedasys.com
Surely you're not implying that vectors, hash tables, and sets are hard to write in C.
Justify that statement with evidence. Why would you assume hash_map would outperform a C hash table, or vector outperform a C VLA?
Your third argument is fallacious. C++ is gradually incorporating everything you're talking about into the standard. Stroustrop has openly stated that lack of standardized threads were a mistake: you can't get much more environment-specific, model-specific than that.
Let's make it clear that that was a joke.
Darn it, you're probably right. I was so proud of myself for only scoring 20, toward the upper end of "average". But that may be average only for people who will answer all 50 questions.
It was also a uniquely useless comment he responded to. Imagine the alternate universe where Linus responds, "you're right! Git hackers, commence the rewrite!"

In a job interview, statements like Dmitry's are what I'd call a "leading indicator". NO HIRE.
It was a rude and egomaniacal comment that he responded to, if you think about it. But that's OK. I don't think Linus cares if you use his code or not.
The three phases of software development (after the Seattle stuff by Joel)
in my experience, the school you go to has a huge impact on what jobs you can apply/get recruited for - i definitely could see it having little impact on startup success...also doubt it has much impact on people who go into sales. both are sink or swim scenarios. but, the education you receive at harvard or mit might be no different from what you get at bunker hill cc, and if you go launch a company you may be no worse off coming out of bhcc, but if you are going into the mainstream workforce, the average MIT/Harvard/Stanford grad has a massively better shot at getting a job at NASA, Goldman, Citadel, Google, etc. Not because the students are necessarily better at those schools (although many would argue that they are) but simply because the alumni base is already embedded in those institutions. i think it is under emphasized for undergrad, but in large part matriculation choice is a decision of what alumni base you want to "buy into".
isn't every weekend a "weekend of code?" ;)
I've been following this "net neutrality" debate for a long time, and both sides have made some decent points. I used to be a hardcore in the camp of pro net-neutrality, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that there are some things that regulation does not solve efficiently. I guess the most frustrating thing is that _lack_ of regulation is not going to solve anything either.

One thing that lack of regulation on this issue does is make it substantially more difficult for small innovators to reap the benefits of their efficiency. Those tiny, seemingly insignificant increases in efficiency go practically unnoticed by the large monolithic telecos, but the people who are in the position to innovate further upon those marginal efficiencies (increasing rate of return on efficiency, if that makes sense) cannot do so when the ISPs themselves are taking more than a reasonable share from the people who are doing the innovating (whether the innovators are customers or competitors is important to the ISPs in that I imagine most ISPs would rather have innovative customers than innovative competitors). And that is essentially why I think that a Laissez-faire approach cannot be good news for the tiny, tech-oriented startup whose lifeblood depends upon an Internet connection.
I heard "fake steve jobs" was conducting that interview.
There's a fairly good chance that even Kant didn't understand Kant.
C is beautiful if you're standing on a motherboard staring up at it. If you think mostly in terms of how hardware works, C is a clean, powerful language.

"The language isn't truly high-level" isn't the whole argument; which would indeed be a straw man. That's the main part that's tied to the "most C++ programmers suck" argument, though. He thinks the "pseudo high-levelness" of C++ encourages sloppy programming.

Also there's another argument in there: Object-Orientation is overrated and often causes as many problems as it solves.
Calacanis destroyed Netscape :(
The best reference is the source code.

Let's look at the string. In C/C++ there is no reliable and portable way for your program to find out whether some (char*) points to a constant string literal or not. So the only oprion for a dynamic string implementation is to always copy any data the constructor receives to somewhere else, normally to the dynamic memory. As a result, any initialization involves dynamic allocation and copying of data in C++.

At the same time languages that have built-in support for dynamic structures avoid this by creating proper structures in the constant segment. So a statement like string s = "abc" would do nothing but assign a pointer.

This is a huge problem in C++ and even C++0x doesn't solve it unfortunately.
The author, apparently, does not have a good understanding of Kant.
"but, the education you receive at harvard or mit might be no different from what you get at bunker hill cc"

There is no way that is true.
Hacking a rail road... [video]
I think it may have been better to say that the more capable you are, the less it matters where you go to school. (Use your best judgment to apply boundaries to that statement.)
Hack to boost WiFi [video]
haven't you seen good will hunting?!

seriously though, one dedicated teacher at bhcc might give you way more than all the TAs you get at harvard. of course the same student that gets a lot out of bhcc would probably soak even more out of harvard. who knows
This test also fails to take into account the "grumpy old bastard" effect.

I won't announce my score, other than it in the set of the Nth-prime-numbers where N is also prime.

PS - there are 50 questions, but they don't require whole-page refreshes.

PPS - I'm not suggesting you are a grumpy old man!
http://www.isle-of-avalon.co.uk/cgi-bin/aq.cgi - here's a fixed version of that one. It doesn't look very pretty, but it does the job.

edit: if anyone else wants to host it, drop me an email and I'll send you the source.
Texas startup says it has batteries beat
I am, in fact, a PG fanboy. If I wasn't I wouldn't have noticed this site. That has to skew your results. It will be a while before the site attracts a population of people who don't find his topics of interest. Meanwhile, why worry? You could go back to Reddit.
When you calculate the score can you add what it means?
A good example why unions aren't just "Razorfish"
Sorry, it still bugs me.
Sorry, it still bugs me.
Well, the original test was kind of vague about what it means (and because I don't have a working Flash, I can't see what this one says about it). I can mention the "the neurotyp mean score was 16.4, but 80% of aspies scored above 32" bit though.

edit: done
Sounds like someone is bitter he didn't get an iPhone and all his rich friends did...

Just kidding. I agree with your point. It's well documented that humans get psychological satisfaction out of having more and better stuff than those around them, not just content to have the stuff to begin with. I suspect that a big part of the appeal of the iphone was the bling factor, the exclusivity of having one and showing it off during the usual weekend mating ritual. If you had spent all that money to be quirky and unique (since that is really what Apple marketing is selling), wouldn't you be pissed if suddenly your unique feature became mainstream?

You can read more about the Ultimatum game that tests this here:
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9...
I don't trust Alexa as a measure of Orkut vs Facebook. All those users in other countries don't have the Alexa toolbar installed.
It probably doesn't bode well for his ability to really understand Kant.
PG is a VC. I won't consider him a technology evangilist in a broader scope. Sometimes agreeing with a VC is simply agreeing with a non-evangilist.
He precedes his description with a nod to XP, but I still think calling these three activities "phases" is the right terminology if you're doing iterative development. The part about burdening the design phase with development doesn't make sense either.
Who honestly cares about Karma? I find it useful if I want to skim the posts/comments for a good one, but holding it up like it was some kind of achievement just distorts the whole point of the site, which is to keep up on things in startup-land. When you spend your entire day working on your karma score, you might as well go play WoW. No offense Paul, but WoW has way better 3d graphics!
> I won't announce my score, other than it in the set of the Nth-prime-numbers where N is also prime.

With a statement like that, I'd suggest that stating a score is superfluous anyway.
For me, every week is a "week of code" ;)
Oldest Affiliate Program In The World
5 Killer Startups
Software Engineering or Software Development?
I'm not sure how well the test distinguishes between those who are actually autistic, and those who simply cannot bear social situations under any circumstances.

(I'm also not happy about the lack of distinction between "x" and "strongly x". There ought to be some gradation.)
No, if you were succumbing to the trap he described about Perl, then you would feel smarter for having solved so many immediate problems.
Steve Jobs: "Because I Can"
>are you fascinated with dates?

Dates, dates, or dates?
First off, congrats on a completely misleading title.

I feel like your question overlooks something, namely that if your goal is to become successful, then until you do, you probably won't have the "buck" to pay your crazy smart hard-working individuals their worth to work for you. In order to acquire the money to pay them (and them is plural, remember) you're going to have to work for it. And working hard will probably get you that money faster than not working hard.

Finally, your claim about the people whose "financial situation just cannot get better" intrigues me. Who are these people? Do they have extenuating circumstances causing this? Do you find yourself in those same circumstances, or why are you so ready to align yourself with their plight?
Dates. Specifically the second one.
Do you count 2 as the 1st prime or the 0th?
And the edited version is still wrong.

Statement 1: high school transcript is largely a measure of obedience

Statement 2: Going to a top school shows only obedience.

Statement 3: Doing well in college demonstrates only obedience.

Notice how statement one matches neither statement two nor statement three, let alone both combined.
I'm using 2 as the first prime.
The times you are likely going to be able to beat STL is if you:

1) Have a highly specific algorithm where you know your memory characteristics very well, or

2) You are doing lots of memory allocation/deallocation. For example, something like vector<vector<myclass>> will be nasty in STL.

Outside of that though it will be difficult. STL was designed with speed as the foremost objective. It is simply very hard to beat in MOST tasks (but not ALL). For example, Vectors dont do any bounds checking. Most STL vectors will have performance on par with a simple dynamically allocated array. Iterators are also not validated before accessing a container.

So I wont say they cant be beat. They certainly can. But how much is your time worth? I guess it depends on your objectives and how critical every ounce of speed is. I understand there are probably situations with some where this type of thing is life or death.
Seedcamp founder, Saul Klein on Playfair: "It's Excel 2.0"

I have Excel '07, and damned if I can find it's equivalent of 'Help->About', but I know '00 was 9.0, so...yeah. Poor choice of words there, buddy. :)

Edit: (Excel 2.0 was released in 1987 according to Wikipedia...awesome.)
C++0x introduces move constructors.

http://www.google.com/search?q=move+constructors+c%2B%2B0x
OK, then I want you to write me an efficient implementation of Red-Black tree deletion, and do it within an hour.

(std::map and std::set are usually implemented with a Red-Black tree.)
Let's get Don Dodge (Microsoft is dead hater), this person, and we'll all PG hate for flash-in-the-pan attention.

My favorite:

"Let us not then, Paul, put her (straight-A student) down. She too, just as much as any homegrown entrepreneur, has worked hard and made use of her talents."

Or she drinks with the TA, or her Dad plays golf with the dean, or she's book smart, none of whom I'd probably want to hack with.