skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relational Databases are great, until you have downtime.

PostgreSQL has the slowest database restore procedure the world has ever seen. So backups are basically useless for anything bigger than "trivial". Master/Slave replication is death for HA.

MySQL has Master/Master, and is actually reasonably supported "in the cloud", so that's probably the only realistic option if you don't want to run your own hardware, need HA, and don't want to pay Oracle or MS.

AFAIK Oracle and MS both have decent HA solutions, but you're probably looking at $100K starting prices, and again, you're probably going to have to run your own hardware.

My #1 database of any type would be PostgreSQL. If it was HA. And if you could run a decent sized deployment (hundreds of GB) without having to run your own hardware.

I think this more than anything is probably why NoSQL is so popular with this (HN) crowd. Because in-Memory "free" databases are a good fit for people who don't have $100K to throw at a vendor in licensing, and who don't want to lease their own hardware.

RDBMSs are way behind the curve on that. Even for people like me who genuinely like them. Unless you're willing to go with MySQL I guess. But even then, do you trust RDS to be dependable and fast? Without a dedicated DBA?

I can goto Cloudant and get a database that's very fast, has relatively modest costs, I don't have to run my own hardware, and BigCouch (derivative) has a far better HA story than any RDBMS I'm aware of outside of maybe VoltDB (which I don't have any practical experience with).

I make some compromises on ACID, which I'm learning to be OK with. I lose transactions (which really hurts some things, but rolling your own 2PC on a case-by-case basis works passably when you really need the semantics). And I have a mostly-pleasant, sometimes very fragmented set of tools to help me work with my data. It's a living.

But I'm not responsible for the hardware. It's much cheaper. And it does HA. When PostgreSQL steps up and gets that right, I'll switch back.

Not to mention, there's no excuse for the amount of tuning a decent PostgreSQL install takes. Speaking as a guy who's built several 80K-TPS systems, the barrier to entry is needlessly high. Try MS-SQL sometime and contrast. Then again, PostgreSQL is free.

Plus the free RDBMSs need enforced clustered indexes. This crontab stuff is for chumps. 99% of the time an enforced cluster would be preferable to increased insert performance for 99% of web-apps.

/end-long-rambling-rantish-comment. :)
Looking at the list it appears all you have to be to be an "entrepreneur" or a "founder" is release some code you wrote, create you own domain (ending in .io usually it appears) and have it be moderately popular.

Looks like I'm an entrepreneur and all this time I haven't been calling myself that ad nauseam like everyone on here. All those years wasted. sigh.
I have never worked for a company that gave anything back to the open source community.

Newspapers, commercial kitchens, design studios. All of them used open source software like PHP, jQuery, etc.

I developed a lot of jQuery plugins that will never see the light of day.
No, you need to go back a bit.

First set up a society that massively favours women for a few millennia, seeing men primarily in terms of sex and procreation, THEN do your experiment, ensuring that there are still a good few people around who still see the world in that way and are happy to both express that view and use it to guide their actions.

Otherwise you're only doing the very, very end bit.

Seriously, you can't just flip the genders, there's a mass of context that ignores. The point is not that everyone is malicious and see the world this way, just that there are many people who do. That means that, while it's often not how the comments are intended by the person saying them, it's an entirely reasonable way to believe that they're intended.
Seems like this precedent should make Omega's appeal that much harder.
Buzzkill: Coca-Cola Finds No Sales Lift from Online Chatter
Instagram for BlackBerry in a few simple steps
Scotrail journey alerts: a study in bad usability
Anecdotally, most folks I know use Reader every day at both home and office, but "use" G+ only to the extent that it's plugged into other Google services.
I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but is the technological mediocrity of this site intentional (e.g. "Unknown or expired link.")?
I agree completely - nothing about his life was wasted.

Thank you for writing this comment - if I could, I would give you one hundred up votes for it. :(
Thanks this is a good article. I've been looking at HTML5 for game development recently for 1GAM [1]. One of the things that has really annoyed me is there does not seem to be any kind of standard way of structuring games. Is there anything like MVC for games?

[1] http://www.onegameamonth.com/
There is a really cool project called Ripple that's designed to do exactly what you suggest: build a P2P transaction system where Bitcoin or USD or whatever you want is the "specie gold." It's basically a distributed banking system which IMO is an awesome concept. I don't know if this is going to take off but I hope something like it does.

http://ripple.com/

(I have an account and about $5 USD in XRP but no other involvement)
The issue with unicode characters has been resolved. visit posterous.com/#backup and request a new backup.
Well, there goes my trust for Amazon.

Also love how the GAO's IT director is named Dave Powner.
http://gimmebar.com does that for you. It saves the page as an image.
Winning Through Intimidation
> One thing you should remember is that for most of the time, it is not the companies who are giving away source code, but it is the individual efforts that make it happen. They come up with these ideas and bravely debate against their managers and internal pressure to make a contribution to the public domain.

This is why developers should be the boss, all too often I hear of great ideas and initiatives that are squashed for imagined fears of a suit. Hackers intimately understand change and are not afraid to push the envelope.
Fiat paper currency and fractional reserve are basically independent concepts. Fractional reserve is practiced by the banks, and was done under gold-backed currency just as much as today. A really interesting thing is the period of "Free Banking"[0] -- in Scotland in the 1700s/1800s where banks were essentially unregulated; State banks in the US were loosely regulated in much of the 1800s as well.

All that's required to do fractional reserve is the ability to distinguish "money on account" from notes. Either issue private notes, or maintain ledgers of balances.

You could conceivably have a 100% reserved bank (doing bailment of physical fiat notes -- a $100 note in the vault for every $100 in a savings account balance) even under fiat currency. Or you could have something with only one entity allowed to increase the money supply (deposit with the central bank, but a 100% central bank reserve requirement, but the central bank allowed to do loans).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking
Right. Because earning your respect is all we need to strive for.
Scala Jobs Board
You should really look into the history of altcoins because I'm positive one with a constant mining release schedule has been done. One issue with some of them has been premining but if it wasn't premined and was reasonably well-known at launch it probably stands as a good test of whether something like it will ever work. Funnily enough the altcoin that has done the best has changed very few parameters.
Why? Because they gained enough clout to close a government contract? If anything, trust should go up.
I'm afraid this will be massively downvoted but self-censorship is wrong!

So I've heard of Gumroad (probably only from HN) but it didn't leave a big impression. I misconstrued sidebar.io (probably due to their generic .io domain) as having the distinction of breaking numerous websites of late (until I manually permitted their javascript) but then realised actually they were some kind of random design linksite - not the culprit in question - and weren't even having that impression.

Perhaps I'm missing something but if the systems created by these people are supposed to be a contribution to anything greater than the founders' own pockets then I am missing it. I don't mean to downplay the work these people have put in to whatever it is they built, or the success of raising some money, but honestly: is this something to emulate? Silly-Valley 2013: a sad state of affairs.

Still a good idea for a book, and probably full of interesting tales.
gracias amigo
The legal fiction of a "corporation" is abused in all manner of ways.

True, but I don't see how to fix it without serious unintended consequences in other areas.
I always forget the new name. Luckily, the old URL http://freshmeat.net still works. I browse it maybe once every few months. Mostly for nostalgia sake.

I also noticed http://www.osnews.com/ has picked up more recently. I used to browse that a lot too, but it was stagnate for awhile. Glad it's trying to make a come back.
Your well thought out arguments have convinced me, I'm going to re-write all our systems in C++ right now!
It would be better if CIA just appropriated 3x as much money to build a cloud infrastructure that was 1/5th as good?
Intro.js in your Rails asset pipeline
This is a bit sycophantic and too personalized, but the general points hold true. This is an excellent opportunity for people who want to optimise for learning, less so for people who want to optimise for innovation.
Yahoo! is hiring???
Nailguns are a pretty pathetic tool for you guys to keep projecting as a tool to be proud of.

Screwdrivers, on the other hand, I will respect.
Wow if there was one area where I thought the cloud would be the last to permeate, it was the federal intelligence and defense sectors.

I wonder what this means for Oracle/IBM/other on-site vendors over the next 2-3 decades.
The brutal truth about marketing your software product
ابراج اليوم- ابراج يوم الاربعاء 2013/3/20 حظك ليوم الاربعاء 2013/3/20
I agree to some extent.

At the end of the day though, we make our own opportunities. I've spoken to a few product managers at Google. Being a PM at Google, Apple, etc. would be a dream job of mine. I'm not quite prepared for such a role, but I will be one day.

I'll basically get a run down of the things they've accomplished up until they got that job. From there I'll seek out similar opportunities and turn down others that don't align with what they did. It takes a LONG time but, it's worth going for.

And, if it doesn't work out, at least I come away with a list of great experiences and interesting projects. Most of these things are outside of work mind you, as my work is not closely aligned with product management.

There's so many opportunities to learn and "prepare" for these types of roles. You just have to know where to look, and who to ask. :)
...It sounds like the CIA is being a secretive, but normal customer.

I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription.

(I guess I assume they can do that anyway.)

But where's my free outrage?
I have noticed the same thing.

I hope that I just notice all of these software deaths because I'm involved in software, but I feel like we're losing too many amazing people way too soon.

Everyone please take care of yourselves.
If you think the CIA wasn't able to get access to any information they wanted.... I mean, this doesn't change that. They were able to before, and can now. All major cloud providers work with various levels of government for law enforcement and anti-terrorism stuff.

If anything, this tells me that the CIA didn't actually have enough computing power and/or competency before to do it on their own.
News Roundup - FinCEN's Guidance Re: Virtual Currencies
How a prosecutorial culture of paranoia, zero-tolerance, and fear harms security
I think subtle animation for transitions and changes make for a much more pleasant user experience than when there are no animations, but animations for the sake of animation should, IMHO, be avoided. For example, I find the animated fade-in effect on the chart.js site to be distracting.
Except for the coaches who embrace it. When the Mavericks hired Rick Carlisle, a big reason they hired him was that in Indiana he had consistently used his teams best lineups, and in his interviews expressed a strong interest in embracing analytics (which, with Mark Cuban as your owner, you won't ever lack the resources to get the best analytics). In baseball, the best (in terms of wins/resources) team is the Rays, who hired investment bankers as their GM and have a coach who listens to the sabermatricians, platooning like crazy and shifting the infield all over.
Would be great if they added support for tooltip style labels on datapoints!
It's proposed, not passed, no? It's also completely unrelated to the bill it's amending (http://www.azleg.gov/DocumentsForBill.asp?Bill_Number=SB1432...).
LOL, not at my friends campus. He's the network administrator and it is very secured, probably better than most banks or big businesses.
Why are you apologizing. She is an asshole who cost you your job. I really hope you are just doing it for potential employers in the future.

Adria is a shitty person for getting you fired over this.
Depends on the market you are aiming for.
Not easy to be a vendor for Federal Intelligence with tremendous audit and compliance review, wonder how long it took for them to seal the deal?
There are a lot of technical reasons I dislike Ripple and would prefer to just have a bunch of separate "mint operators" (technical organizations who run servers) and "currency issuers" (financial entities) and "exchanges" (which do instant currency conversion and publish exchange ratios), all using a common protocol, but not one based on consensus across multiple parties for each entity, but fully independent entities implementing their own governance and controls.

rdl-USD-001 is a "brand", and if it has weak security or weak financial backing, it trades at a huge discount vs. jvm-USD-001. There's no need for either to be "the official USD". You might create "hn USD" which is an index fund of hn particiant-issued USD obligations. There's no reason for everyone to use the same currencies for store of value, and with exchanges, you can convert to a common currency for transfers. I'd probably choose to display all my prices and account for my personal wealth in units close to USD, but someone else might pick EUR or BTC. Separating the 3 roles of money is the key element here.

Ripple essentially tries to be a multi-currency bitcoin. It also has no anonymity.
That sounds awfully counter-intuitive. Before there'd be nothing left to buy, the prices of things to buy would go up (i.e. inflation), which would discourage further hoarding.
It goes even beyond that. It could be the first time in history where wealth can't be taken by force.
It sounds genuine to me. He articulates a lot of the same reservations I felt during my brief time working there.
Peter Thiel invested $500k for 10% and was left with only 2.5% at IPO, so it looks like dilution is indeed stronger than I assumed.

At that dilution rate, $1k in Facebook would be worth "only" about $1.9 million today.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch headed to Apple
All of this makes sense, which leads me to think that when you said "deflation is bad" above you meant it in a very general sense rather than as a criticism of bitcoin. After all if there will never be significant loans in bitcoin it can't very well be implicated in a breakdown of the lending system. Sorry for misunderstanding.
If it's free and you don't like it, don't use it and move on.
"is this something to emulate?"

Regardless of whether it is worth emulating, clearly many people want to achieve some sort of financial success (i imagine the "entrepreneurs" in the ebook made some money already), and this book caters to that crowd.
That's utterly unrealistic. There is no way there would ever be only a factor of 15 cost/performance difference in IT between a CIA contract and a leading commercial entity in a competitive market. :)
It's around 2:49.
Everyone's life FEELS hard, especially compared to the lives of those a few rungs up the ladder.

That said, not everyone's life IS hard. If you can afford not to take a paycheck for a few months to work on a dream, perhaps you should recalibrate your "how hard life is"-o-meter.
I'm actually rather shocked that 37 signals only has 9 engineers on board (presumably DHH isn't included in this number). I remember reading that the company has 30-40 employees [1]. I'd really love to know what the other 20-30 do, and what the other (relatively) heavily staffed groups are (I'd imagine technical support would be one of them).

[1] Ah yes, 1 year ago they had 32 employees. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3188-from-4-to-32-people-in-e...
TortoiseHg was and possibly still is the best graphical VCS extension, and Mercurial, being written in Python, has always been better on Windows than Git.
>I want to stick said birth certificate into my purse and go to Arizona, and start pissing in the men's room everywhere I go.

If you found a few more dumb gender laws like this to exploit and went around obeying their letter it could make for good material for a documentary (might not be the best example but think Religulous).
That's what Zepto was made for... the core of jQuery for modern browsers, without a bunch of the compatibility aspects of jQuery. (it's not 100% complete, but the core is compatible with jQuery) ex: jQuery 2.0 for newer desktop browsers, jQuery 1.9 for desktop and legacy, and Zepto for supported browsers... Do your testing in a webkit browser with Zepto, and it should be outward compatible with jQuery.
I think he's assuming that since the CIA is now a big customer, Amazon will bend the rules and give the CIA access to data from other customers, or at the very least the CIA will now have better experience in how AWS works so they'll be able to attack AWS customers more effectively themselves.
HN works as well as it needs to.
What did you trust Amazon to do or not to do before, that you no longer trust now?
Amazon is about to lose a lot of tin foil hat customers, but they are probably painful to have as customers anyway.
I built amazd.com just for that (plus it has a bunch of other features). I was tired of all these visual eye-candy bookmark collection apps. I wanted something nice and simple, textual, and serious (as in no mems, etc). You can check out my profile for a sample: http://amazd.com/ahmad
Correct, it's only proposed.
For mobile, try zepto... seriously.. it's not worth the DOM pain even there.
Rarely if ever do I find myself in agreement with Marco, but he articulates a valid point quite well. Monopolies and effective monopolies are obviously quite detrimental to the web, especially when they fail.

But, there is little that can be done about the tendency for monopolies to emerge within the web ecosystem, only to fail. If companies were to charge or advertise heavily from day one, it would effectively preclude any sort of viral, meteoric rise, because the overwhelming number of prospective users would turn their nose up at it. Most companies would never achieve widespread success. On the other hand, a lack of an organized business strategy leaves companies scrambling to devise revenue sources, as is happening with Facebook and their absurd gift card thing. Either one can try to make money and be relegated to obscurity, or one can become popular and end up exasperated at their inability to make money. There is very little opportunity to become both wildly successful and fiscally viable; that is why most companies fail.

As a user, I would prefer a lack of business model to a lack of a business: better to have an RSS reader (or social network, or mail client/to-do app) that lacks substancial income for 8 years than one with a direct business model that never gets off the ground.
Checkout http://www.surfmark.com
The bookmarklet saves the entire html and the firefox extension saves the pages as an image
A Stealthy De-Extinction Startup
The most practical thing to do would probably be to start a book bank; or, just have the department library stock up on textbooks which can then be loaned to every class that uses it. Those that want to keep the textbook can buy their copy, but most, who just want to read the material for the course, will happily use it
It does much more - but could serve your purpose
You're an idiot. Just admit that everyone else is making a better point than you.
refer the header is this file i imported into github

* https://github.com/justinkelly/chrome-rss/blob/master/common...

<!--
* Copyright (c) 2009 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved. Use of this
* source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the
* LICENSE file.
-->
HA!

My ancient ancestors...

They were selfish imperialists that built their legacy with wars and slaves.

Even if we could do it again in the present day, personally I wouldn't want it. But there is no other way, is there?

And let's just think about it:

We could build today a monument that it would still be there in 3,000 years. But it would take the lives of 10,000 slaves. Should we do it? Shamelessly exploit people that will die anyway some day, so that we can show off in 3,000 years?

I vote for no.

And by "my country" I refer to the modern version created in the mid 19th century. There is no continuity with the ancient times (at least in political terms). And there was no country in the ancient times to begin with. Only city-states. A few rich and many poor :)

Therefore, I think that my country is definitely poor. Forever and ever.
Ask HN: Moving to Boston need Hacker/Developer Advice
So I'm planning a move up to Boston from Raleigh around Aug/Sept. I was wondering if any local Boston people had any advice on where to live (somewhere close to BU). I'm a software developer with front end, back end web and mobile dev experience so hopefully it would be close to an array of dev companies/startups where I can find a job. Also any advice on finding a job in Boston? Any help would be awesome!!!
Free Facebook Store Promo  Limited Time
Supreme Court Rules That First Sale Doctrine Not Limited by Geography
I'm fairly certain that was always clearly legal.
@crazysim - this is from the source of the extension

<!--
* Copyright (c) 2009 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved. Use of this
* source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the
* LICENSE file.
-->
Stop Fast-Tracking Your Career [or Startup]
I think much of the confused back-and-forth in this thread seems to stem from the fact that "good business decision" and "bad outcome for users" are not mutually exclusive. I don't think Marco doubts that Google had valid reasons for shuttering Reader. His piece is simply a plea to avoid becoming dependent on "proprietary monocultures" so that when these shutdowns occur, the negative impact on the user-base is minimized.

(Though I'm not sure that he's entirely against regulation, as some in this thread have suggested.)
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Headed to Apple
Why I Work -- Robert O'Callahan
Where I have been (in the US), work done for a course is always owned by the person who is paying for the course, which in the case of an undergraduate paying their own tuition, is the student.

Basically, the person paying owns the work. If you pay, then you own it.
Undo Button in GitHub for Windows