skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If i think about what scares me most about using a noSQL database, it's the loss of expressivity.

I believe noSQL databases can be fast, compact, and well-behaved. But SQL is a phenomenal query language; it anticipates Alan Kay's (alleged) maxim that "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible". Not only does it make complex things possible, but modern query planners make a decent fist of making them fast, too. NoSQL databases either don't support rich queries at all (eg Riak, which is in all other respects rather wonderful), or have substantially less power (eg Mongo). Even databases which are queried with map-reduce operations using functions written in real programming languages (eg CouchDB) are lacking compared to SQL, due to the lack of anything like joins, subqueries and so on.

(The only kinds of noSQL databases that have something approaching SQL's power are graph databases (eg neo4j, whose Cypher query language is really rather nice), some object databases (eg ObjectDB, which supports JPQL), and some of the pre-SQL options like Pick databases. However, these are rarely the ones which get the attention, and it's notable that their data models are actually not far removed from the relational model.)

The reason this flexibility matters is because it supports change in the future. I might be storing and querying data for some purpose now, but it's possible that a year down the line, i will want to do something entirely different with it - usually yawn-inducing things like reporting and auditing, sometimes just implementing new features that look at the data in a different way. The expressiveness of SQL lets me be confident that i will be able to do that with my relational database. With a noSQL solution, i run a substantial risk of not being able to do it, and so being forced to export my data into another store to do it, with all the headaches that that entails.
> also the atrocious guitar playing

You're joking right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoiUpe7N3D0
True. You can also make good programs in PHP if you "do it right". it's not exactly promoted or encouraged, or even anywhere on the radar though, and doing so involves a fair bit of that relational logic being implemented and enforced in the client.

The point is, it's possible to have a "relational database management system" which enforces the relational axioms for you. SQL is fundamentally incompatible with this concept, and forces the programmer to keep the databases relational.
SQL is popular because for many classes of problems it is awesome and uses a very powerful abstraction (tables) and query language. Most implementations are also very robust and able to provide very interesting guarantees (like ACID).

The only problem of SQL was that the computer industry was trying to solve everything with SQL databases, that is not a good idea.

It's good that there are other databases now, but I don't think SQL is going to face away. For instance many NoSQL databases like MongoDB, RethinkDB, may well be SQL databases with different implementation tradeoffs but just picked a different query language because... well because... I don't know why honestly. Not that's a problem but the model is very very similar to objects with fields (tables) I can query.
Amazing no one's quoted the inner platform effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

Hmm, SQL query too slow takes 10 seconds for one query.
I know, I can use a non-SQL solution. Each query will take 100 milliseconds.
Whoops turns out the users need all the relational "stuff" for my reporting and also in my CRUD to keep it consistent enough. I mean, everybody knows databases are consistent and codd normal form and relational, and nosql is a database, therefore when the users spec a database they'll be fine either way?
Well no big deal I'll just write my own JOIN. After all, I'm as good of a programmer as the team at Oracle who's been working on JOINs since before I was born, so I'm sure a couple cans of red bull and I'll have something better.
Whoops, each "nosql" query does in fact take 100 milliseconds but now I need to run 1e6 of them and shove them into my homemade JOIN routine, so I've now "improved" my total overall system time from 10 seconds to 10 kiloseconds. Whoops.

I've never been able to implement a nosql solution at work because I always get stuck in inner-platform tar pit, or massive consistency issues making the CRUD a nightmare, etc. Usually if you complain about that in the nosql community you get pretty intense complaints that your business is doin' it wrong, lol at a paying gig thats not going to work very well... I'd like to try something new but I haven't had the business case for it yet, or rephrased a deep enough analysis has so far always excluded nosql solutions and that Might indicate a positive analysis isn't deep enough. Hear hooves, think horses not zebras. I've bought the "seven databases in seven weeks" book and its an excellent introduction unfortunately its something like a guided introduction into smooshing up against the business requirements limits of each DB as much as a technical intro.

Another point is the original request was "persistent storage" not why does nosql not work most of the time. Back in the olden days we called that a "filesystem" but lots of $5/mo webhosters don't allow that type of thing, but they do give you mysql... Also its hard for the PHP coder types to not shoot themselves in their foot with filesystem access, for example, allow the user of the order.php form to store their picture in username.gif what could go wrong other than lack of input sanitizing and some goofball is going to register the username order and upload a "picture" with the filename order.php that actually does something rather naughty, etc. Even if it works, next week, the boss asks to store two image files now, one full size and one icon size now. Hmm the filesystem soln doesn't scale... Rather than all that input sanitation, wouldn't it be simpler to just dump it into a blob column in a mysql table?
The co-op features do not work http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-not-...
"I'm sad now because"

Why would you be sad? SQL databases are just a tool, and happen to be the right tool. Why does that make you sad?

It's like saying "I wanted to eat soup with chopsticks and everyone told me to use a spoon instead. That made me sad."
Which, depending on where you live, is absolute nonsense.

Russia just abandoned DST and the rest of the world should too.
As a matter of fact I have indeed played Bach and Beethoven among others. Currently, I'm working on the 21st piano sonata of Beethoven for a performance. The example you have given is very accurate, in the 14th piano sonata, Moonlight Sonata as it's affectionately known, Beethoven instructs the performer to hold down the pedal for the whole duration of the first movement. That simply won't work on modern pianos. What do we do now? We try to replicate the sounds Beethoven himself would have gotten from his own piano. There are books written about pedal techniques.

And I worded that wrong. Technology is and should be a part of classical music performances. I just don't see the relevance of this product from a classical music standpoint.

And I did look at Synthogy's website. They have a good product but if you're saying that that product does replicate the sound of a real grand piano, we have to agree to disagree. They have solved some good problems, like half-pedaling. Harmonic resonance modeling is impressive. But in I can't say that these replicate the sound of a true acoustic 100%.

Small note: Dynamics were part of Bach's era. Bach himself was a very talented organ player and there are dynamics in organs. Piano is a descendant of harpsichord, true, but it's also a descendant of organ.

And as I said in my other comments, this is getting pretty off-topic and I don't want to derail the thread. I'll be more than happy to discuss this with you klodolph through mail or whatever.
> They are a 100% guarantee that you won't even get laid

That's a killer point. Thanks for the pespective ;)
Bootstrap 3 preview
First its recommended to have sbt installed. Also, I love giter8 which lets you setup your project structure layout like a snap.

Play is an awesome MVC framework inspired by Rails, so if your background is Ruby on Rails you'll love Play.

Recently, I developed an API using LiftWeb which is a lightweight full-stack web framework. It has many features that you may not find in other Scala frameworks like Comet and ajax support.

I dont have experience with developing UI with Lift, but the API I designed using Lift's net.liftweb.http._ can handle more than any application I developed using Ruby.

On the other hand, if you want a solid Database library, I used Squeryl and Slick, and for MongoDB: Rogue by Foursquare.
Oh dear, this is turning into one of those "You say Tomahto, I say tomato" kind of discussion.... even though I did not intend it to be.

Personally, I think there is no point splitting hairs over whether they goofed up or whether it was intended... MS-Word as a product is intended for the "write it, and then print it" market (whether the actual printing happens or not is another thing altogether), and for that demographic, the typographic convention is Serif for body text and Sans (not a necessary condition, though) for heading [0]. And from that point of view, the design choice is mixed up. Right or Wrong, that was the only point I was trying to make.

[0] Again, I am aware that "is serif readable?" is a different can-of-worms altogether.
You've been smoking too much FabianPascal
Top Prenda officials want to skip hearing: "no dog in this fight"
I love that book!
Did you try grabbing the code of the ``auth`` function so that you could discover what you were supposed to do?
Okay, I'm no expert on heave metal. Perhaps another kind of audience.
Pretty much the same possibility of being recorded has existed for decades. Does no remember Nixon's presidency?

The only difference is Google Glass makes it more noticeable.
Of course it's to do with it. If it had a traditional single-player architecture, there would be no issues at all.
Interestingly, when the author described the CIO position I immediately had to think of bits from the DevOps movement - trying to bridge gaps and bring people together.
I don't want to sound negative but I can't hold it back.

Anyone who wears this spy gadget for no specific reason (eg. recording jumping out of a plane or something), but because it is "cool", is seriously delusional, and a poor fellow who can NOT make decisions about his or anyone else's wellbeing.

Why?

I understand that recording every move of your life is an interesting idea, at least it would be, in an utopian world. Unfortunately, we live in a world where approx 99% of people is being ripped off and oppressed by their government and co. Encouraging the behaviour of wearing this CIA sponsored hoax is just...

I seriously can't find words.
Maybe they should use CloudFlare?
No reason at all, except the finance business is not very innovative in areas like raising capital for companies. It would be easy to have a structure like an ETF where brokers could get more issuance from a company if they had excess demand for shares.

Underwriting does get you what it says, a guarantee that they will take the whole allocation, which was the original reason for underpricing. There have been a few cases where underwriters lost a lot of money (eg the BP floatation in the UK), but usually the underwriting fee is pure profit, especially if you can get the launch undervalued, and there are usually options that make it pretty hard to lose money (as with Facebook).
well, just because he's an antisocial unbearable asshole doesn't mean he's not right.
The preoccupation with ownership is a bit awkward for me as European. Considering the tragedies around land ownership in the past of the Americas, I would expect a very sophisticated view on the matter. To "own" something because you "bought" it, is all such a virtual affair. The thing that matters is that the artist or studio that made this possible, is able to survive and will prosper because they make this thing that is liked by their customers. Everything else I consider side-effects (and no I am not an artist myself).

Moreover, I hope these discussion will disappear in the future, because we enter a more and more interconnected world. In the case of Spotify, it is logical that you pay for their service, DRM does not have anything to do with it. The more software is provided to the customer as online services, the more transparent its use can be regulated.

The point of software is often just its functionality, not its physical representation in the form of machine code that can subsequently be copied. Ownership of a car doesn't entail blueprints so you can 3D print another one, or a free subscription to fuel, and even changes to your own car are heavily regulated.

I like reverse engineering stuff, but I don't think we have the right to tell people or companies that hand us over stuff in exchange for money to tell them what this exactly has to entail.
Should not the company hire some kind of professional(s) who will observe both sides(mostly the bank) and provide objective feedback? It seems like they were jumping into unknown territory without any knowledge.
I really can't believe all companies go IPO blind like I get impression from the article.
Not everybody has the Google-like resources to maintain thousands of fallback servers, and failing that often there isn't much one can do against a well distributed DDoS.
And just as a closing note for my own comment, I'm amazed by how hostile people can get over a comment. The fact that I don't see this used for classical music (the music that I enjoy and perform) should be free to express here. What should I have said? Oh great, cool stuff, this is the future of music? I just don't see it that way. It will be useful to some, and will have no effect on others.

When I wrote the first comment, I couldn't understand what the hype was about this and now, on top of that, I can't understand the way people acted over the comment.
I was astonished by the loading times. Click an article in the "News" section and it takes about 5-10 seconds (while looking at the huge spinner) to load. That's ages for one paragraph of text and a 900x600 .jpg. For a quick reader, the page takes longer to load than to read. That's not good.
Your analogy with a web framework is a good one, but it extends beyond that into growth of application complexity.

True, my giant sprawling complex web application appears that it should have been done in a complex framework, little does anyone know it started out 5 years ago as a single perl CGI formatting the output of "df" on a webpage...

A similar thing can happen with non-relational databases... are you willing to bet your entire dev budget and/or the company on NEVER EVER needing features in the future? Sometimes thats OK, usually not.
"People played [...] for hours on end before their game crashed" - aaa, what?

And you conclude from that that the game does not need the servers (explicit DRM or not)?
:) Thanks! I just do not know how to specifically address that there is nothing wrong with her or the other girls. Basically, it is fairly natural (I think, am I wrong?) to not get along with everyone. It is not a fault on either side, necessarily.
This is pretty much exactly what is tough. I know you can not get someone to be ok with something by saying "be ok." At this age, not that big of a deal, as we just make sure she is comfortable in everything else. When she is older and wants to get along with more folks, how do we get her comfortable then? (That make sense?)
The author has another blog post [0] where he writes and I quote

If you are not from a premier institute and you have to
work three times harder to prove yourself, but if you
have that prestigious degree you are welcome aboard even
if you don't have it in you.

Inadvertently, he has pointed out the actual problem. Sure the graduates from IIT's are sucked into "brain drain" but what about the rest large chunk of population who are as good if not better but don't have the brand label? The Indian society largely ignores (or in certain cases even castigates them) for thinking "out of the box". It is this section which needs to rise to the modern world and act with rationale rather than orthodox societal norms. For example, Arunachalam Muruganantham (now dubbed as the "Tampon King") was abandoned by his own wife, daughter and fellow villagers while developing a low cost (33% cheaper) sanitary napkins for lesser privileged women. In addition, the Indian government did not incorporate his solution into their national program. In this case, Mr. Muruganantham had the drive to go beyond all odds and get the job done. In a country where taking up "Arts" over "Science" is considered as being "weak in education", the number of Muruganantham's India has lost as a result of archaic societal norms would be a very good question to ponder upon.

[0] http://www.sachingupta.co/2013/01/you-aint-from-iit-you-aint...
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-tampon-king...
I'm not disagreeing, it seems you should be right, but I'm wondering why they would have reduced the fastest game speed if there was no simulation on the server? That doesn't really make sense if all they're doing is saving the game on the server. I guess they might save more often on a faster speed, but why not just slow saves in that case? Why remove the fastest speed if there's no simulation?

Other than that though, your explanation makes the most sense.
I think it'd be smarter to just add 10 - 20 new names for specific categories rather than an extension for every brand you can imagine ".apple, .amazon, etc". This could lower the resell price of the .com slightly and raise revenue. Like .co did but it wouldn't confuse the user heavily as this move feels like its changing everything.
Taking a Stand Against Copyright Thugs.
A lot of Chinese (and everyone else) hacking has been for good old fashion profit. But I do agree, I doubt the Chinese or any other "criminal" element is behind this attack.

Github either pissed someone off, or it's about "street cred".

I was interviewing a candidate about a year ago. Who bragged to me that he hacked the North Broward Hospital District.

And I was like, "why would you hack a hospital?"

His answer, "It was there."

I was dumb-founded. I mean I hired him, but still. :)
> Seems to me that people get all angry when websites violate privacy, but when the public are encouraged to violate privacy with cool gadgets, suddenly its defence-able. OK, so this is a bar.

People already have eyes and memories. Head-mounted cameras like Glass and the Looxie are a way to preserve your own memory of what you were already seeing. Do you really feel that you have the right to wipe or degrade other people's memories? If you don't want someone to remember something, don't invite them at all.

> What about a playground? Nursery? School?

In general, all of these already have cameras everywhere, don't they? For safety?

> Changing rooms?

Changing rooms? Seriously? How many strangers do you let crowd into a changing room with you? Zero, am I right? So how could that possibly be a problem. As for similar situations like locker rooms, they already have the problem that strangers might be in there with you, with their eyes. I predict that as cameras go everywhere people go (and they will), we'll see a sharp uptick in single-person stalls in locker rooms. I would be far happier with that (at the gym, say) already; cameras aren't different from eyes in principle.

Edited as I got farther in:

> Put it this way, if I'm taking a leak in a bar's wash room, and I see some bloke wearing google glasses looking down at "me", he's gonna get very hurt. No joke. No irony. Hurt.

This is true whether he's wearing a camera or not, though, isn't it?

> It is simple: I dont want my urinating penis on the internet.

...or for people to see it at all, I'd expect. Once random strangers (like the guy in the wash room) are staring at you, the number of random strangers seems like a mere detail, no?
Alternative software to Adobe Fireworks for Macbook Pro Retina Display?
Hey, I recently bought a macbook with retina display and realised how unusable Adobe Fireworks became. Being an interface designer, this tool was my holy grail. Anyone knows alternatives?
So, when signing up, how do you know what the security question is going to be used for? And how do you know that won't change?

Any service that is sensible enough to give you that information will hardly make use of "security-questions" in the first place...
The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.
>Nurses and nannies don't earn as much money as IT specialists, but women don't need so much money. They tend to be the supplemental earners in a family, not the main breadwinners. Simple as that.

Really, honestly. Think about what you are saying here.
"the on-disk overhead of a SQL database is fairly limited"

The ___minimum___ on-disk overhead...

At run time after deployment after growth sometimes I have to scramble adding indexes and depending on the business demand for "instant" online reporting or query speed, you can end up with a ridiculous number of large indexes. Which also has a negative, hopefully survivable effect on insert/update/delete speeds. I guess I'd add:

* tunability - the DBA decides at the DB level based on defined business requirements how to trade disk space for read speed.
If it was only a dollar or two per month and not a -complete- pain in the ass to sign up for, I'd probably pay anyway.

I wonder if you could encourage the people who hate ads but would happily take a legitimate option by detecting ad blockers and instead of haranguing them for it, put up a polite advert for how to legitimise their ad free usage? (thinking in general, not just for twitter)
Qualifying Artificial Intelligence Through Poetry
A world without `this`
Yeah, I thought of the smart phone angle of this too. The other day I was part of an airplane evacuation drill and I noticed someone filming me with his smart phone after all was said in done.

On one hand, I knew his intent was to film the activity and not me personally. On the other hand, I still felt a little annoyed about it. I might have said something if not for the fact that this technology is everywhere anyways.
Microcode: the place where hardware and software meet
Google should add a LED that's on when capturing video, just like most webcams have nowadays.

For that matter, smartphones should, too.
There's definitely a lot of C# code out there. I do think that open source C# code is more limited than some of the other popular languages. However, the .Net standard library does so much that you often don't need much more other than perhaps a custom protocol implementation or some UI code.

I think Windows is the major drawback to C#. No one with half a brain is going to write server software that only works on Windows. Desktop software? Sure... I wouldn't write desktop software in anything else (at least for mass market software). I admit to not having worked with mono, and I think it is kind of a catch-22 - if it's not a common framework, no one will write for it, and if no one will write for it, the framework won't get much love... which is a shame, because Java obviously is in dire need of some competition to spur innovation over there at Oracle. Using Java feels like going back in time to 2002.
I'm shocked and awed that this magnificent internet battle has been waged for years and I never noticed it.

Is it too late for me to have an opinion on whether or not I hate Comic Sans?