skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since one can easily find comparisons, benchmarks, gotchas etc ( you can always start here: http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL ) the one thing that made me decide in favor of PostgreSQL is this (quoting a blogger):

MySQL is an open-source PRODUCT (and can be bought as such).
Postgres is an open-source PROJECT (and can't be bought, and will be around as long as there is a sizable developer pool).

http://www.jiaozhoujob.com/newsprint-995.html

EDIT: PostgreSQL also seems to take support very seriously. Their latest security advisory has a patch back to version 7.4, which was released in November 2003.
VARs add their own fees on top, and the activity requires expertise that they may or may not have. Any mistakes they made, they can blame the individual parts' vendors and push you off.

The original vendor, however, can take a little responsibility in the matter. When you call Oracle about a problem, they can't really push you off onto someone else.
If you asked me a year ago, I would have said "use whichever you're most familiar with". Right now, given the unclear situation with MySQL development (will the real MySQL please stand up?) I'd say to go with postgresql.
I'd like to know who these "experienced entrepreneurs" are that you are using to appeal to authority.

Are they the same ones who say it's all about passion? Cuz those I can find.
AAPL reported better results anyway.

I can't compare Mac & Vista but I know that the 8 year pld XP is better than Vista. I'm happy with Ubuntu GNU/Linux though.
I wonder if the author has had anyone extol the virtues of Ubuntu at him yet...
Not to sound fanboyish, but Ubuntu's package manager (Synaptic) more or less meets a lot of hit requirements. The best part is that all of the updates are coming through the same source, so you don't have to hunt down the updater in every single piece of software you install.

Of course, I say Ubuntu because that's what I know. I would not be the least bit surprised if other linux distros/mac os had similar package managers.

It seems like even windows could form some kind of agreement with various software vendors allowing them to push updates through the windows updater. Opt-in of course.
The Super Website Marketing Handbook (E-Book)
In this Super Website Marketing (55 page) Handbook” you will learn:

* How to market your website to the world

* How to create multiple streams of traffic to your site

* Social Media Marketing - How and Where!

* How to drive traffic from social media

* How to do Search Engine Optimization

* How and where to market your information on the web!
Reflections on a complaint from a frustrated git user
If you try a fresh install of XP even on older hardware it is lightning quick.

If you have a PC that is not connected to the Internet and runs the same software all the time, from a supplier you trust. Then yes automatic updates and virus checking is a waste of time.

Otherwise if you follow this advice you are asking to join a botnet.
BlackBerry External Battery Charger
External Battery Charger. (battery must be removed from phone). Comes with removable clips for North American, European, United Kingdom, and Australian outlet adapters. Unit plugs directly into the wall socket.
Hi,

Thanks for the great reply!

The problem is that when you increase the pain, it also limits your possibilities. I do believe in building a business on desire alone and I believe that all great businesses were built this way.
Jessica Livingston posted her interview of Woz on the Founders at Work website. It's one of my favorite in the book because you really get a sense of the pure hacker/engineering genius Woz is. If you do not already own it, consider buying the book through edw519's link - it's an amazing trove. I bought my copy at Powell's Bookstore in Portland.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
How did you get it to work? I got a screen that said "Loading" with animated dots. Left it 20m while reading other tabs and came back to the same thing.
I like that they don't force ORM on you. Personally I think the ORM is lacking and can cause things to be more complicated to do.
I can think of very few times where a social problem has been solved purely by technology.

Here are some candidates, some more arguable than others:

Slavery was destroyed by the steam engine.

World wars are no longer rushed into due to nuclear weapons.

The Pill contributed strongly to equal treatment for women.

The automobile changed sexual mores drastically (whether you view this as a "solved problem" or not).

Poverty itself was solved by technology (yeah, I know that statement will be controversial, but I think it's eminently defensible).

In fact, I think a case could be made that technology is the only thing that has ever solved a social problem in anything like a permanent fashion.
Agreed, that is a great chapter. JL's lead-in also sums it up perfectly - Woz is a hardware guy and it shows through in his thinking. But the notion of always thinking about and refining our models is what still sticks with me.
Also available from the MOMA Shop in New York and Cyberdog in London.
In theory, you are 100% right.
In practice, if I do that, I'll scare 98% of my player base away. Most of them are high scool or college students, and don't even have a credit card. Maybe in a glorious future where micropayments are as trivial as email.
Dreamhost's blog post is a good read as well about Geocities history and crazy valuation
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history...
Plausible. I guess the word could have taken that meaning.
Thanks for the link, wallflower. I forgot about that. (Buy the book anyway. You just don't know which chapter might change your life.)

This pretty much sums it up for me:

"When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product."
This should be getting more attention. Seems like the HN crowd would be a little more on top of this.
Yes, but that would mean that he took the effort and used his skill to present a truly interesting comment. This isn't particularly hard, but I think harder than a bot or hired non-english speaking captcha breaker can perform.

We don't have to make an unbreakable system, just one that makes us less profitable than the rest of the internet.
Got that in FF too. I ran it in IE, clicked through the error message (which I probably get because I have a debugger installed) and off you go.
Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the comment and excellent advice. I like what you said and where you're headed and would love to hear from you or anyone out there on what they are doing to motivate themselves to finish their product/service and get to the launch pad.

All I'm after at the end of the day (I assume others are the same), is to find tools we can use to help improve the chances of our startups succeeding.

Loved to hear from the more experienced folks out there on what keeps them going. My article was only intended to help others by sharing what my present thinking is, but if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it and reshape my mental picture.

thanks,
dave
Ask HN: Review a simple URL un-shortening service.
This is simple service that let you un-shorten URLs created using any of the URL shortening services.

I thought it might be useful to create a single place to un-shorten URLs. I know some of you are tired of hearing about another URL service, but it works with all of the shortening websites such as TinyURL, bit.ly, tr.im, even with Hapylink and others.
The Connected Home
Growing World’s Biggest Study Group - wePapers
This should be required reading for those entering CS programs and, more importantly, for those that want to be developers that have a non-CS degree. There are way too many 'I got a B.A. in Art History but now I need to eat, so I'll program' people in this industry, and it shows.
Agreed to a certain extent. Yes, blindly increasing the pain will limit your possibilities, but appropriate application of it is a good move.

If you're in the planning phase or design phase, you don't want to needlessly time box it and/or punish yourself for failing to meet a deadline, because it will limit what you come up with.

However if you're in the building phase, say all the broad stroke type of decisions have been made and the main task is plain old coding / grunt work, you can use the pain to motivate you from distractions and procrastination.

dave
I currently work a daily 8-5 job doing .NET and some (at 27 years old, you can laugh at this) COBOL.

on the side I freelance web work and am considering trying freelance full time. While I would end up working longer hours, I actually enjoy the freelance and I wouldn't be stuffed in a cube daily and forced to use really weird tools.

So, when I'm on a freelance project, total I pull close to 14 hour days for about a month straight (and work weekends), but then the job will complete and I'll be waiting while they spec out another one for about a month, I use that time to work on side projects.
<language snob>

The word you want is "antique", meaning "old thing".

"Antiquarian" means "one who collects old things"

</language snob>
This has been on thinkgeek for a long time. Why is it so high here now today, spam?
dupe of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577188
Yes, here I agree 100%. For grunt work fear and punishment are the best motivators. But not everything is a grunt work!
I don't run virus protection on my Windows machines, but I am a stickler about automatic updates.

At work, where I manage a few hundred Windows machines with virus protection and updates (managed through WSUS), I'm able to see whenever our virus scanner gets a hit. It's almost always the same users doing the same stupid things. (They are all running in limited user accounts though, so it's usually only their own accounts they damage).

Linux machines are generally taken over through ssh key attacks, cgi vulnerabilities, or social engineering (this happens more than Windows machine takeovers at my workplace, unfortunately).
To me the big problem with ads on the web is that they move (or even popup/over) when you are reading text so I use Adblock. Ads in print don't move so there is no problem IMHO.
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." -- Chaucer
Well, it mostly is; But the humor that gets upvoted its VERY funny, so, im ok with that high threshold.
I keep coming here because of the signal/noise ratio wich has not changed that much in my more than 562 days here, wich in internet time its a lot of time.
So, this is a truly valuable place.
"Founders at Work" eBook on Sale for $10 today with Apress Daily Deal
WTF?

I didn't pay for bugs, I paid for software. If it's buggy and they don't want to support it, they should sell it at a discount. If they charge me for a complete product, but the product is buggy, they owe me more software.
Or, alternatively, switch away from environments where that sort of pestering behavior is common!

I haven't used Linux in a while, but from what I remember it was rare to have a program itself tell me there were updates necessary, but the package manager globally managed those things for me on its own schedule.

The Mac application community has the fantastic Sparkle framework that lets individual applications poll for updates. This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds: generally speaking, applications have preferences to opt-out of automatic updates, and the updates include complete changelogs. It's gotten to the point where if an application doesn't include Sparkle, I get annoyed.

In short, the posters issues aren't with Automatic Updates, they're with an environment that doesn't respect users.
Introduction to Machine Learning: Class Notes 67577
BarCamp Boston 4 this weekend.
This is a poorly written / passive-voiced comment, but the core thought is good.

Restating:

"Don't leap to assume the worst of others".

or

"People can come to different conclusions honestly - disagreeing with you does not mean that they are venal".

or

"Reasonable people can differ".
Was it always this way, or were comments removed for some reason? It seems to me that there may be some value in being able to discuss the job or company.
I was about to post the same thing - what is this PearlTree crap and why is it getting in the way of me and my information?

I know Scribd is a YC company and all, but this is just like it - reinventing the wheel and adding a thick layer on top of our interactions that nobody ever asked for.

How hard is it to write a few blog posts and place hyperlinks in them?
I like the way of the tinyURL API better - you simply get the new URL in the body of the response. Otherwise, I am not sure it is easier to parse the XML response from unshort.me than to simply resolve the redirections directly.
I second "The Atlantic".

Harpers has moments of brilliance, but there's less there that I would consider compelling reading.

The New Yorker is too insufferably Upper East Side Manhattan Pretentious Intellectual for me - it's more, IMO, about espousing a particular world view of weary sophistication than anything else.
That requires a lot of energy. (For both cases.)
UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 11: Deception
Don't lots of states, Maine comes to mind, have such a use tax? I full agree it's the stupidest thing ever, but I'm just not sure the constitutional inter state trade clause applies.
That's a neat way to recruit new customers. I like the way you have to prove you're a Geocities user. Edit your Geocities page to say: "I’m off to DreamHost!" Pretty clever.
It's not unreasonable to say that you can run Windows XP without antivirus, assuming that you are a competent computer user and keep Windows Update going. Once you have a virus, you will have to reformat to guarantee a clean system anyway; antivirus is simply a conceptually wrong solution to the problem (see also http://xkcd.com/463/).

But, on the other hand, why not just use a better operating system? Linux, of course, but even Vista is going to have better lockdown of administrative privileges.

One of the things I really couldn't stand about Windows was how every program had to have its own stupid little updater, with its own rules, taking up resources and system tray space. This is the worst part of automatic updates -- somehow most Windows developers are totally incompetent at writing them.
I think the point is that for those security updates to be properly address, security updates need to be less of a pain to install.
For those that understand what a 'Dyno' is, is this expensive?
Twitter Eats World: Global Visitors Shoot Up To 19 Million
That's the first time I've ever seen a grammar mistake on NY Times ("and make eBay can be an important player"). Also strange how an article on Meg Whitman's role at eBay led to a critique of PayPal's business plan based on the writer's obvious bias.
agreed, computers are good at solving math problems or running Turing machines (since they are them). You would be better off with a turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test) that only a human can answer - and if any does get a computer to solve it you get them to start a company because they have solved a fundamental computing problem.
I'm don't agree with the article's premise, that "the world needs better data manipulation tools than Excel and Access".

Most of my present colleagues are not programmers, and they manage to create relatively complex applications with Excel and a bit of Access. There's no gap between what they can do with their tools, and what I can do with a real programming toolset. Also, I can't see one tool fitting everyone's needs.

I have also observed that most non-programmers have an allergic reaction to anything that looks like code, even something as basic as VBA. They'll do acrobatics with all sorts of weird macros, but that's OK because it takes place in a GUI; there's very little syntax to get wrong, or structure to create.

I think programmers underestimate the learning/confidence people need to code even a simple program.
Smilebox.com Coupons| Smilebox.com Coupon Codes | Smilebox.com Promo Codes
Now you can save money with Smilebox.com Coupon Codes and Smilebox.com Coupons.Just Click above link for Smilebox.com name Coupon codes and Smilebox.com name Coupons. Deals365.us is the best source for the Smilebox.com name coupons,Smilebox.com name promotion codes,Smilebox.com name coupon code or offer codes.
A spam bot can find a link that is published at the same time on reddit (by example) and HN, take some comments with lots of upvote and submit-it to HN. He will probably get some upvotes.
ChaCha has all the answers
I'm at a loss to understand why someone needs an API to unshorten a url. Can they not just unshorten it themselves?

What's next? A webservice API for doing DNS lookups?
What made you decide to solve this problem? Did you encounter issues that this solved?
What the woz has for startups in that article...

"...I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you'll end up owning so few of those ideas. You have to create a working model, something that you can show people and demonstrate that it works, and then you can start building a future for it."
It aint better to check the http header? It's fastest than a full api request (even for a light one like this)
Yes, program authors should just get it right the first time. If they hadn't written those bugs in the first place, there'd be no security exploits!

I understand that the updates are annoying, but all of the alternatives are worse. Silent updating? I want control. Manual updating? People won't do it. No updates at all? The botnet lords love this idea.

So the only real solution is to default systems to patch themselves, and hopefully get the experience right for the confirmation dialog.
"Don't save sex for old age." -- I forget who said that.
I typically use ORM for most models. But create custom DB methods within the model for more complicated queries. Having the standard DB library methods available within an ORM model makes Kohana very flexible.
All versions of Linux I know of have a similar package manager. Updates on the server and some more geeky distros tend to be run on the command line.

Some offer granularity of what types of updates to do (Mint classifies updates by riskiness to stability) and most offer some method of holding back updates on some packages (although not in the GUI in the distros I have used).
I use git for a few small projects at work, and I enjoy it. This article, however, falls prey to my number one gripe about the git community: "You don't really want to do that. Do this instead." In some cases, it may be better to do something in a different way, but not always. This article says to not use git push but to email patches instead. It never addresses the original complaint of how to use git push. At the end, it concludes by saying that sometimes people really do need to push, and, if you need that, bazaar is easier/better.
Use a good abstraction library and start coding. Seriously.

PostgreSQL tends to be what is favored by people here. I used to use it for everything until I tried to set up a replicated cluster with it. PostgreSQL's replication is severely lacking. Slony-I, the most mature of the bunch, is very difficult to set up (with many steps needed for every single table) and a lot slower than MySQL's replication (due to its use of SQL and triggers rather than binary log shipping as well as the fact that its design causes communication costs to grow quadratically).

However, PostgreSQL's query planner is a lot better than MySQL's (especially if you're doing something like subqueries) and I find that complex queries run decently faster. The community process is also a lot more attractive.

To address the Oracle question:

Oracle cannot withdraw InnoDB. It's GPL licensed. Anyone can fork it should Oracle decide they don't want to play ball - just as anyone can fork MySQL. In fact, there are already forks underway including Drizzle. So, that isn't a big deal. The bigger deal would be if Oracle decided to halt future development. I'm guessing they won't since it would simply mean they would loose control to the community that still has rights to the GPL'd code.

In the end, don't worry about this issue. It distracts from what is really important: actually creating something. They both work fine. There are plenty of abstractions that will allow you to create code that will work with either with no modifications. Do that, build your application, and let the pundits from either side debate this issue until they're blue in the face while you're actually creating useful things.
No antivirus? I can understand that. But turning off windows auto updates? Way to get hit with the next Sasser/Blaster/Conficker.
It's good this thing exists. Hope everyone can help to improve this & the author is ready to get feedback.
I really enjoyed this related post:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
R is now at the top of my programming languages to learn list. So, obviously, I don't know R yet, but is it something that could work well for this? Is there a way to skin it with a GUI/web front end that would make it more powerful than Excel, but still make mathematically astute end users not feel like they are "programming?"

In the theme of "ideas are worthless," I have a vague idea that a "Heroku for R" could be a winner. Collaborate on datasets, pay for extra capacity for long jobs on large amounts of data, good UI for quickly generating graphs from datasets, integrate with existing data stores like Simple DB, Couch DB, etc.

Does this make any sense at all?
Personally, I see value in it.

If I get a shortened URL link from someone, and I'm at work, I would like to go to that site and see what that TinyURL really is before following the link
Getting rid of cable TV is easier than you think
It's all just a degree of abstraction. Someone could say you were "programming" if you were using Automator. Explain more specifically to what level you think people should be programming their computers, because I think it will never happen to the level of writing actual high-level language source code, ala Python. People like looking at and clicking on/touching/interacting with pretty pictures/icons.
It's because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with.

Avoided local maxima of the at-that-time-doable, while still making -- completing designs on paper = iterating faster. Iterate more times than competition on paper, never build anything, then when time comes to build, you can supersede competition.

This approach may only work for perfectly logical, deterministic systems, like computers.
Face recognition + the entire original series of Star Trek (w/ vids)
My opinion/sense is that Postgres is better in every way, except replication. Which ironically makes it far worse than mysql since you can't easily use it for huge datasets.
it's another page
I agree that it is way too early to move to 1200 unless you create a dynamic design that switches according to user resolution. Furthermore, with widescreen monitors becoming the norm, most people will rarely keep their browser windows maximized to the full resolution. This will create problems for 1200px fixed width designs.

I do think grids in web design are a major step forward. After using fixed 960px grid designs (via BlueTrip CSS and 960.gs) on my last two projects, the productivity benefits of fixed grids on the web is clear. Grids have really changed the way I think about web design.