skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I appreciate how thorough the article is, it's a bit of a strawman. Pretty much everyone who makes use of a relational database in a professional capacity has to be aware of what transaction isolation level they're using, make their own choice about what to use, and then do things like acquire explicit update locks or do optimistic locking in order to ensure data integrity. But that doesn't mean that the ACID properties are useless merely because you have to do that; it might mean you have to think about a few things more than you'd like to, but it's still a different world than trying to mimic ACID properties in a NoSQL database, and there are still fairly hard guarantees about things like consistency that you get with other isolation levels. For example, with read committed or snapshot isolation, I still have transactionality and can be sure that if I issue a sequence of 10 updates in a single transaction and then commit it, any other single query is either seeing the results of all 10 or of none of them. That's an important guarantee in many situations, and it's a guarantee that I can use to make decisions about how I structure my application logic.

The author of the post basically seems to treat any isolation level below serializability as some sort of sham perpetrated on the development community, and that's not the case: they're still useful, and they're still something that you can use to build the sorts of application guarantees you want. The mere fact that pretty much every database vendor gives you a choice as to what isolation level to use should be a pretty obvious clue that there's no one-size-fits-all answer there, so harping on the non-existence of a serializable isolation level is somewhat missing the point.
Do you have a PHP library?, he asked sheepishly.
I've no doubt about that. I'm merely pointing out that his own list removes him from the pool of VCs that he speaks of. I just don't think his post was well thought through, to be honest. I don't know anything at all about Mark, I'm glad to see that he is top quality!
A matter of opinion perhaps but I don't consider having emails that require action achieving "inbox zero" (even if they're not in your inbox).

I follow almost everything in this post except for the starring. Instead, I do the following:

* If an email requires action and it is fast, I do it now, then archive.

* If an email requires action but will take longer than a minute, I keep in my inbox (but read). I clear these emails out once per day.

* If an email requires action but I can't because I'm blocked by some outside factor (waiting on something for example), I use followup.cc and redirect it back to me in a certain amount of time, then archive. When it comes back to me, I use followup.cc again if I'm still blocked.
Hands-on with Audojo - an iPad game case hack
Perhaps part of the difference is that the PS3 is actually fairly underpowered by today's standards for general purpose computing (CPU intensive stuff, unless specifically made with their architecture in mind.)
Can you really claim inbox zero if you've just moved the workload from the inbox to the starred folder? Seems like the same problem with a different name.
This is good to know. I merely pointed out some contradictions in his own blog post. I don't know anything whatsoever about Mark. I wasn't attacking his person - promise!
Awesome stuff guys! We're very excited about adding SnowPlow support into analytics.js - expect a pull request soon :-)

Does adding support for SnowPlow into analytics.js get us "server-side support" for free, or is there anything else we have to do too?
LOL at being the lowest rated comment in this thread. I spent the last year (just a tad longer than two weeks) working on Basecamp along with a team of talented people.
Could possibly be Sparkleshare[1] which uses Git as the underlying sync technology, especially if he has already got git set up.

[1]: http://sparkleshare.org/
It definitely jumps the shark there at the end.
I want to sign my artist up for this, he has a pretty large fan base i'd like to know more. i added you on fb my name is Jada Brown and i'd like to chat. i know Mazy btw. I dnt mind the $20.
So to make sure I have this straight, they'd like to compel a big pharmaceutical company like Pfizer to report all clinical data they've acquired, whether good or bad. Do I have that right?

What would be the effect on pharmaceutical companies from such a requirement (and how do you even enforce it)? Would they simply do fewer trials, to avoid the risk of a bad trial result hurting sales of a product?
Ignorance is not an excuse. It just isn't.

I'm not interested in excusing anything, I'm interested in understanding the real world. And what I see is that a lot of people who insist on the absolute need for ACID don't really understand it because they're using non-ACID technology right now.

I do not understand what point you are trying to make here.

Consider MySQL with asynchronous replication to a slave. In a weak sense, that is a distributed system because the remote slave is on a different machine (and probably very distant) from the master. But the distributed bit here doesn't interfere with correctly implementing ACID: MySQL with async replication operates identically to single node MySQL: it just transmits the binary logs to a slave server. The database system itself is a single-node service whose state gets replicated at transaction boundaries.

In contrast, distributed shared-nothing databases like Volt have to work really hard to maintain consistency: there is no single node in those systems that does all the work and gets replicated: multiple nodes have to cooperate in order to get anything done.
It's also incredibly likely that plea bargaining is responsible for much of the convictions at the state level as well. I'd be very surprised if a pathology at the federal level didn't exist at the state level as well.
Haha, we've got one in the works! Shoot us an email (friends@segment.io) and I'll get you on the list and let you know when we release it.
Cities are far more Schumpter-style agents than national governments - look at Detroit for an example of a city that has suffered creative destruction.

Cities can and often do act as independant (global) agents (bidding for Olympic games comes to mind, and offering special sweetheart deals to banks etc). London has a revenue and expenditure of roughly 22BN - putting it around 150th in the Fortune 500, and it is far mnore concerned with attracting and retaining talent from New York or Paris than from Sheffield.

If London fails to provide the right mix of house building and amenities, those people and businesses will (eventually) go elsewhere.

Humans do not physically move often or easily - but cities do rise and fall and compete with each other - they are the right level IMO to look at "good neighbourhoods" and if we want to solve the "livability" of cities, then cities (or possibly sub-city-areas) are the right sized unit for the discussion.

Its not about houses, its about neighbourhoods.
>So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point - the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar.

Yes and no. Suppose I want to take a stab at automating Westlaw. Now I need to download all of the court opinions ever so that I can put them in my database and use them to train my machine learning algorithm. Can I actually get them for any reasonable price? All of them? And without doing something that will get me charged with unauthorized access to a computer like Aaron? Because if not, fixing that is a legitimate goal. (And if so, do post the link.)
A new world record for solar cell efficiency
My first soundcard was a GUS Ultrasound, and after that I saved for quite some time to buy an AWS64 Gold. I loved that soundcard, kept it forever. I used it with Scream Tracker 3 and later Impulse Tracker 2. I've never actually left trackers either. To this day I still use Renoise (http://www.renoise.com), a loose FastTracker variant with vsti, rewire, effects, and more.
It was so fantastic when I could control my synthesizers over MIDI from a tracker.
Gold Reserve Mysteries
Aww come on! I just ordered an N9 so I could run Firefox OS (and several other phone OSes coming out this year) and now this comes out?
"MySQL will continue to be available for at least one release, but MariaDB will become the default."

One release? Replacing MySQL may be the correct move, but is't one Fedora release cycle only 5-6 months? That is't enough time... There is a lot of code out there relying on MySQL. Drop-in compatibly or not, thing can break, so we need time to test and migrate.
> Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case--they are not intended to be a source of law

As a former lawyer turned programmer I just want to say that court opinions posted to the docket are a source of law. Even unpublished opinions have some use, and while you can get some published opinons from court websites its far from comprehensive and not easy to search. Never mind what a great research source other attorney's briefs are.
You can read more about that (and download the geocodes as a JSON file!) here: http://www.oldsf.org/about

The gist is that we made a big list of San Francisco streets and looked for intersections and addresses in the descriptions. This approach can even work for complex strings like "Mission between 16th St and 17th St". The lookup for "16th and 17th" fails, but the other two pairs succeed. We average "Mission and 16th" with "Mission and 17th" and get a geocode at the perfect spot.
Hmm...

Having now gone back and researched that a little better, it's only Waved Albatrosses I was thinking of and sources seem to disagree on whether they can take off from flat ground or not. They certainly prefer a cliff, and will make a long walk to get to one if necessary.
How do you become a "Professional" CEO?
One other disadvantage of having too managers is that it leads to a reduction in organization productivity. Each team reporting to a manager eventually becomes a silo. A team only works on the tasks assigned to it by its direct manager only. This results in some teams which are overburdened, while the team sitting next to them doesn't know what to do with their time.

The managers are too busy in their daily meetings to figure out what is happening on the floor. This causes lot of resentment in the teams.

If a project gets assigned to a manager and the best resources to work on this project are on some other team, it is really tough to pull them in to work on this project. This results in reduced overall efficiency as teams have been artificially divided to create a reporting structure for the manager.

I understand that some of you would not have seen this type of manager in your work life. But I am speaking from my own experience and recognize that there are managers which are very good. But I have seen too many of them coasting along, doing little real work while increasing the organizational inefficiencies.
Web Development With Sublime Text 2
Most of the elderly I know who don't have good enough eyesight to pass a driving exam can still walk around ok. My grandmother in Greece was able to do her own errands up until her 80s, for example, even though her eyesight was not good enough to drive. It wasn't a mile to the nearest supermarket, though; that might've been more difficult. In many cities you'll typically find a supermarket within a few blocks, if you live in the city. Here in Copenhagen, I would guess there's a supermarket every 1/4 mile on average.

I don't see many people out in wheelchairs either, and I agree accessibility for them could (and should) be improved. I do see quite a few people with walkers, though.
I've been curious about this too.
Moveable Type 4.x Unauthenticated Remote Command Execution
Tweetping (Backbone.js + Processing.js)
You can read about some of the recent development work on OldSF here: http://www.danvk.org/wp/2013-01-21/developing-the-oldsf-slid...
Well, it's just an example. When a page is still compromised, and under the control of someone unexpected, you can't really anticipate the state of the page, and what it might deliver to your computer. I pointed that one out because it's a pretty recent drive-by exploit. You dig?
It's actually addressed a bit in the article, when the author talks about the cognitive load of mixed messages. I think the point is that not everything in the inbox warrants being a "Todo". When you're done you have a list of action items to be accomplished, which isn't quite what you started out with.
>You don't have to buy twice.

How do you know ports will be free? It removes most of the incentive that developers would have to make a good port: money (unless Valve pays for the ports, which would be very expensive).
Even The Best Need an Advocate #TBPP
Microsoft may invest in Dell buyout
I am not an FRP expert but I've played around with both Elm [1] and Flapjax [2]. With both libraries, I ran into a basic mismatch with what I wanted to do. They both make it very easy to have static controls create dynamic behavior. You create the controls, observe them, and then combine their signals to output whatever dynamic output the program has.

But most interesting web UIs are not static->dynamic; they instead involve dynamic and circular dependencies. Pressing the "add new todo" control doesn't just dynamically affect the display, it also creates new controls that need to get added into the set of observable things that affect the display. This idea, of modifying existing observables to include new observables, is somewhat problematic. In examples I've seen, it ends up leading back to code just as unfortunate as imperative callbacks.

If you can use Bacon to create an entry for TodoMVC [3] showing how to have dynamic->dynamic dependencies, I'll be sold.

[1] http://elm-lang.org/

[2] http://www.flapjax-lang.org/

[3] http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/
That's only sufficient if your network is perfectly reliable. Otherwise, you can still get split-brain in situations like this:

https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/2488

This particular bug is probably fixable, but reaching consensus on a set of master nodes in the general case, without race conditions, is quite hard.
I think its more because you only got 1-5k installs. If you find a country where you can buy a yacht for ~£25k please tell me!
The difference between "free" and 10 cents is quite stark. That's the famous problem holding back microtransactions in general.
Prediction: Cord Nevers Become Cord Getters
"Google Scholar provides a US Federal case law database which includes US Supreme Court opinions since 1 US 1 (pre - 1776), Federal Appeals opinions since 1 F 2d 1 (1924+), and many Federal District Court opinions from the Federal Supplement. Opinions from all 50 states are included since 1950. Internal page numbers are included as well, and cases are hyperlinked to other cases within each case. Click on the "Cited by" link to see citations of a particlar opinion in other case law." (http://virtualchase.justia.com/wiki/united-states-federal-ca...)

So very close to "everything."[1] Why don't you ask Google to put up a torrent?

[1] Anything that isn't in there is probably on a library shelf somewhere, and you're welcome to do the same thing Lexis/Westlaw did and scan it in yourself.
This seems to be the perfect video to get setup before reading your book, which is very light on the "proper setup". I imagine that a book might not be the best format for that, or simply that this is not the content your main audience expect to start with.
I am biased (full disclosure - I'm a founder), but TitanFile offers a secure file sharing solution (encryption, audit trails...) . There are free accounts available for new users at titanfile.com.
Can you provide some context and/or evidence of this happening more so then other start ups? I don't get this experience but I don't look or follow any NYC start ups specifically.
This is a very valid point. Most managers think communicating the immediate work load of the team is their only responsibility. But most of the time the team really needs to know the bigger picture. What is the future direction of the company, product etc. and most of the managers are really stingy with these types of details. This behavior results in lot of duplication of efforts. Managers are happy as they have something to show in their status reports. But in the long run, it reduces the overall product quality as most engineering decisions cannot be prudently taken without having the bigger picture in your head.
Many performances I've heard of "Rhapsody" were essentially a sweep (portamento? the terminology is a bit muddled). But even if it's not possible on the real instrument, or the real instrument doesn't have the range, doesn't mean that limit should be there; I agree with you that limits suck, and it would be nice if someone invented something better than MIDI (and made it popular/standardized).
Ask HN: Unpaid Internship Options
I have an internship opportunity in Glendale, California working on games for a Viacom company, but it is unpaid and they do not pay for housing. I am currently on the other side of the country, and have a paid internship from last summer working on Android applications for a defense contractor. I can do the unpaid internship with the fairly well known Viacom company using a $4000 dollar stipend from my university, or stay in my lesser state writing Android apps for pay. The Android work is actually very interesting, but doesn't have the allure of working for a well known company in California across the country.

Will the unpaid internship be worth the experience?
Crapware add-ons as part of the Java update already existed long before Oracle bought Sun.
Targeted release: Fedora 19 - Replace MySQL with MariaDB
We handle adding server-side support to our REST API separately, but the delay is pretty short :p If you do submit a pull request, send us a logo file (friends@segment.io) and we'll get you in the interface real quick!
Would it be okay/possible to post the materials online? I'd be interested in going through the course.
This looks like an interesting app for logging in "without passwords" by scanning QR codes using a smart phone and entering a passcode. (I consider a passcode to just be an insecure password, but we'll let that slide for now).

Unfortunately, the app crashes immediately on a 4s with iOS 5.1.1, so I can't test it out. This brings up a concern. If a bad update (like the current one) causes the app to not work with your device, you can not log into anything that uses this for authentication.
> A demographic gets targeted just because it's under-represented.

How are these demographic categories themselves not entirely arbitrary? How is analyzing a demographic category as though the definition of that category were preemptively relevant not an exercise in question-begging?

If you conducted a study that indicated that people with odd-numbered shoe sizes were "under-represented", would you begin targeting that "demographic"? Why would you have been looking at people's shoe sizes in the first place?
Try searching on http://www.github.com. There is a lot of open source apps/boilerplate listed there that you can leverage. Most of the apps listed on the OP site host code on Github.
>Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in your name?

Isn't that a completely separate question? You can argue that things like that should be sealed, but if they're not sealed then they're a matter of public record and the government should publish them for free on the internet.
I am terrified of the idea that you're trying to encourage governments to compel scientists to do anything against their will. Washington doesn't have this right any more than they have a right to read your encrypted email.
Down voting is an option?
We can't even fund things we all agree that we need via taxes at this point, like paying down the national debt. Right now the government budget is zero-sum, and this has been true for some years now.

If you want something you get rid of something else, and while I'm sure there's many things we could find to pay for PACER from appropriated funds, the problem is getting enough of Congress to agree on that, and getting Congress to take the issue up at all (because given that PACER is already funded, changing the funding source really isn't a very important issue for them).
Are the server side libraries hitting your servers and then being forwarded to the specific analytic service or hitting their service directly?
I think read committed and repeatable read is "pretty close" to ACID. Certainly compared to a straight up NoSQL system that has close to none of A, C, I or D.
This is a poorly conceptualized article.

Mozilla makes money off Google. Google does not hold the purse strings and therefore cannot tell Mozilla what to build and what not to build. Of course a business deal could be made that restricted Mozilla's options, but I'm not aware of any such restriction and I don't think the non-profit organization would ever accept such an offer.

There are other incorrect assumptions in the article, which are not backed up by fact or interview sources.
For more information on Ruby-based tools and libraries make sure to check out the Ruby Toolbox https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/by_name.

It's my first stop when I have a specific problem I am tackling.
I actually think it's quite nice to supply a Vagrant VM (or at least the definition and cookbook) to get someone started quickly.

I'm only confused at why installing pip/python isn't done via the chef file also. If you ever wanted to destroy the VM instance it'd be nice to not have to re-run any setup.

This tutorial doesn't require you to learn chef or use it directly in anyway so I don't think that's fair to include on the list of complaints.
I don't know what interest the general public have in historical docket filings but I do know that Pacer is very useful in following ongoing cases. Check out groklaw.net where significant IPR cases are followed and the owner/blogger often has to spend a fair amount of her own cash to make the information available to her readers. So while it seems a low return effort to maintain a partial copy of PACER it seems a good idea to be able to crowdsource PACER documents for cases that are ongoing and of public interest. Groklaw should be interested in this browser plugin for sure.
there are still fairly hard guarantees about things like consistency that you get with other isolation levels

What do you mean by consistency? I agree that there are many ways to ensure that application integrity constraints are not violated--without using serializability. My point is that, without ACID serializability, you'll have to do some extra work to ensure them in general [1].

The author of the post basically seems to treat any isolation level below serializability as some sort of sham perpetrated on the development community, and that's not the case

Weak isolation has a long tradition spanning decades [2] and is hardly a "sham." It's well known that weak isolation doesn't guarantee the ACID properties as traditionally defined. My point is that many databases don't provide ACID as they promise.

It's still a different world than trying to mimic ACID properties in a NoSQL database

In terms of current offerings, I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but you might be surprised how cheaply we can get properties like the transactional atomicity you mention.

In general, I'm curious how easily anyone's able to take their application level requirements and map them down into an isolation like "read committed," especially given how awkwardly they're defined [3] and how many corner cases there are.

[1] e.g., http://www.bailis.org/blog/when-is-acid-acid-rarely/#arbitra...

[2] "Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency in a Shared Data Base," Jim Gray et al., 1976 http://diaswww.epfl.ch/courses/adms07/papers/GrayLocks.pdf

[3] e.g., http://www.bailis.org/blog/when-is-acid-acid-rarely/#weak-no...