skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this is somewhat more subjective, documentation and tutorials I've read for PostgreSQL consistently seem better informed about relational databases than MySQL's. I keep seeing cases where somebody is having performance issues with MySQL, and it turns out they neglected to do something basic like indexing their tables. This is probably partially due to its reputation of being good for the web, and thus getting a used by a lot of people who kinda-sorta know PHP but know nothing about the relational paradigm, but MySQL also has a history of ignoring fundamental relational concepts
(http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/764fp/mysql_vs_...), so it's not a coincidence.

Also, it irritates me when people write off relational databases because of a bad experience naively using MySQL, but that's neither here nor there.

You should probably program for a neutral wrapper and do actual testing to determine which will work better for you, though. I like PostgreSQL, and have had very good results with it, but I've never come close to needing the sort of dramatic scalability that people seem to worry so much about.
Introducing Garb: Access the Google Analytics Data Export API with Ruby
Are you using nginx for static files and proxying apache for python? I recently set something like that up and posted about it to spread the word. http://codespatter.com/2009/04/23/how-to-speed-up-your-djang...
No it isn't. The only difference is that this link doesn't have the trailing slash. The page is the same.
How the domain name industry works - part1
A fun(!?!) and informative explanation of how the domain name industry works.
Think of it this way, the fact that it's an obligation is interface; that it was not implemented as a stand-alone fund is the responsibility of the managers. And given what has happened in the financial world in recent years... it's quite possible that stand-alone funds would have been completely wiped out through mismanagement or outright theft.
It's called avoiding channel conflict. If I'm buying Oracle from VAR V1, it is in Oracle's best interest to ensure that V1 continues to sell me Oracle, even if it's Oracle on IBM, HP, EMC or other gear.

If all of the sudden they stick a knife in V1's back, V1 will ensure that some substantial number of V1's new and where possible, existing, customers will seriously look at Oracle competitors.

It's not the same as NewEgg competing against mWave by deciding to add computer cases to their product line to make them a one-stop shop.

By all means Oracle may transition over to being a one-stop shop, but it's more likely in the short-term to work with their VARs rather than pit themselves against their resellers.
It's completely different behavior depending on the type of operator.

Edit: And apparently it even respects the associativity of the operator! There is nothing gained by making the language more complicated just to cut a few characters.
I'm not sure most IT departments really want a seamless, easy-to-use and easy-to-administer solution. Judging from the IT shops I've worked in, I'd say that they prefer the opposite. It employs more people for longer amounts of time that way.

They also tend to prefer expensive 3rd-party vendor software with expensive support contracts too. That way, they can increase their budgetary needs year after year and inflate their importance to the company who sees IT as a cost-center, not a place to save money through technology innovations.

You always have to judge these kinds of things not by what they say, but by what they do.
Night Owls Stay Alert Longer than Early Birds
I modded you down because you told me to, twice.
antiquarian |ˌantiˈkwe(ə)rēən|
adjective
relating to or dealing in antiques or rare books.
• valuable because rare or old : out-of-print and antiquarian books.
noun
a person who studies or collects antiques or antiquities.
Isn't this like complaining that '[how the hell do you escape two asterisks?]' for exponentiation is too confusing?
These days, it doesn't quite matter. Especially if you're using something like Rails, which can switch between the two very easily. Just modify your config if you later feel you want out.
I actually found myself quite annoyed by distractions. I felt like I was God, and I wanted to get my project done as soon as possible. Felt wonderful.
Computers are good at simulating Turing machines. Computers aren't good at determining whether Turing machines halt; in fact, it is impossible for a computer to determine in the general case whether a Turing machine will halt.
ha! ok. fair enough.
The dopamine production in your brain can become dependent on the Adderall. Reaching this point would make you "that fucking addict" in your local community.
It's not a well-worded sentence, but what he means is that if you have to call out an ugly hack, the REST of the code is probably pretty decent. If the code is full of ugly hacks, they wouldn't be worth mentioning.
You're not reading what I've said, are you.
MySQL has the advantage of being better supported by the developer community, but otherwise of being a technically inferior product to PgSQL.

If anything, the trouble with PgSQL is it's too feature rich to be easily understood by the typical developer. It's more DBA-grade than MySQL.

If you're building a real database driven application, though, having an engine like PgSQL is a real asset since it gives you a lot of capability within the database itself that MySQL does not easily provide.

That being said, MySQL is a fantastic engine for some applications that use it as a fancy file system. For example, message boards, blogs and chat rooms are often driven by MySQL because it's nearly foolproof to install and is mostly self-maintaining.

MyISAM is actually very fast database engine, but that comes at the price of forsaking transactions, foreign keys, and overall data integrity. For some applications this doesn't really matter and "good enough" will do.

While you can outgrow MySQL's feature set, it will take a long time to exceed the capabilities of Postgres. Most likely by the time you do, you can afford to hire a DBA so it won't be your problem.
Apparently something went haywire with the database. Should be back up and running now.
The syntax seems perfectly reasonable, or even natural, to me. Perhaps you're over-thinking the specifics, or are too used to other functional programming languages where 'reduction' has a slightly different, more specific, meaning (i.e. fold).

[+] 1...5 = 1+2+3+4+5
[*] 1...5 = 1*2*3*4*5
[**] 1...5 = 1**2**3**4**5
[<] 1...5 = 1<2<3<4<5

Note that this means, unlike the normal reduce, that it follows the operator's default precedence rules, and presumably the less-than operator works similarly to Python's in that it allows comparison chaining (i.e. 1 < 2 < 3 works as you'd expect) to make the result using reduce seem natural.
I actually quite liked the Pearltree gadget, though I don't think it's elegant. It provides a linear guide through the set of content, whereas links and a summary don't provide such structure.

That said, as I think about it, I think a "Top 10 Articles on the Freemium Business Model" may have been better. Still thought the gadget was kind of nifty.
I picked up Capo while it was in beta for $9. I bought it after about 30 seconds of playing with it. Loved everything about it. I'd previously scorned the use of slow-downers as a crutch, and more recently given in to Audacity for figuring out the blistering stuff that I'd never have been able to learn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRRjEZaN1M).

Its interface was the leading factor. It just worked, looked nice, made me feel good. Capo outranks audacity for speed–bending ten-fold. When the $40/50 price was announced I was however very glad I'd heard about it ahead of 1.0 and snuck into the beta program.
yeah. i don't really get what is being gained. you have to keep some much context in your head in order to write perl - as compared to python ... it's tiring (as i keep saying)
It's hard to take this article seriously when the authors of the study make statements like this:

Peigneux said this information could be useful in job decisions: 'If you have a night job, it's better to be an evening person,' he said.
Startup 121: Lessons for the Recession from Rice Krispies
"...every computer since the Apple I ... had a keyboard..."

One can now change it. "Every phone since the iPhone didn't have a keyboard" :-)
It is pretty as all heck. I'd be A/B testing it against a simpler one-click-and-done pricing scheme, though. I think geeks get a high off of complex pricing schemes like very few other people do, in particular, in a way that very few people who have the authority to sign off on a $3,500 a month ongoing cost do.

I mean, take the hourly cron option, for example. I'd be asking myself the question "Is having this standard feature on the pricing page, where the presence will probably not influence purchasing decisions but will make it one click longer to get through to entering payment details, going to make us more money at $3 per customer per month than it will cost us in lost conversions?"

You don't even have to make the pricing different -- just abuse the power of defaults and hide all the details on another page that 98% of your customers will never click through to. One enterprise plan: we assume you want the top DB, our recommended number of dynos, unlimited backups, and unlimited cronage. One SMB plan. One startup plan. One hobbyist plan. That takes it down from 6 or 7 layers of decision points, some of which are quite complicated and may be beyond the ability of the person actually making the decision, to a quick "What best describes the type of business you work for" check.

(Note that this may result in some large business customers overpaying for services out of a desire to not have to submit reimbursement requests for "Hobbyist" services. Aww shucks, right?)
The Goldman conspiracy, or how to buy a government
The point is to try to get the spammers to go someplace that's less work to spam.
I'd argue that a Dyno isn't nearly as resource intensive. If 4 Dynos == 1024MB slice, then each Dyno would be using 256MB. Ruby app servers don't need that much RAM each and with a 1024MB slice you could fit a good deal more than 4 Dynos in it.

In fact, the Phusion Passenger documentation says that they recommend 30 app servers within 2GB of RAM. They do say that if you're running lots of other things like MySQL on a 256MB VPS, you probably want to limit yourself to two app servers. Still, it scales up much nicer. For $70/mo you could easily fit 10 app servers with your database on the same box - something that would cost several hundred dollars with Heroku.

That said, Heroku's selling point won't be cost. Heroku makes deployment exceedingly simple. You don't have to worry about installing anything, configuring anything, making sure things stay up, etc. And that has value - especially if you aren't a *nix gearhead. It's more than a slight premium, but it can still be worth it given that it gives you a worry-free environment.
5 Cool Firefox Tab Tricks
5 Cool Firefox Tab Tricks
There was this one guy in The Original Series who appeared quite often as an extra. He was a roman guard in "Bread and Circuses" and also a red shirt in "Trouble with Tribbles." He was also in other episodes as an extra. I'd like to see a full face index, including the extras, so I could figure out how many episodes he was in.

(And, no I'm not talking about David Ross/Lt. Galloway, who appeared in 9 TOS episodes. The extra I'm talking about was uncredited.)

EDIT: I've been browsing Memory Alpha. There are quite a few actors who appeared in a bunch of episodes, some are in more episodes than major characters!

64 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/William_Blackburn

32 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Roger_Holloway

59 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Eddie_Paskey
This was a good, technical article that focused on what's new, as advertised. Does anybody at HN have experiences with VACUUM in Postgres? (referenced in the article)
> Use a good abstraction library and start coding. Seriously.

I'm pretty skeptical of this approach. Cross platform development is a pain in the ass, whether we're talking databases or operating systems. I say pick the most powerful database you can and marry it. Use its features to the fullest and ignore portability. I suggest db2 or oracle.
I guess this is the point at which I go from left-leaning to right-leaning.

Stop fucking spending my money on bullshit and you won't have to create new taxes.
Everyone wants to be Twitter and Hulu
I'm not sure this essay has much value. There are some fairly obvious observations, like "learning takes work", "not everyone is good for every career", "learn from your mistakes", and "programming involves typing". That's fine, but not particularly insightful.

Perhaps less useful is the author extrapolating from his community college classmates to the general programmer population.

But the part I disagree with is the reductionist description of programmers as people who only type and solve problems. This is only true if you expand the definition of "problem" to be so broad that it's meaningless. As a good software developer, you have to make aesthetic choices, exhibit empathy with customers and coworkers, do boring paperwork, be personable, and many other things. I'm not sure all of these things are problem solving.

I also don't think any of his 8 pithy statements of advice are very helpful. Just one example: "Take everything very seriously." Really? Is this tongue-in-cheek? How about, "Don't take yourself so seriously. Have fun and be curious about your world." That sounds like better advice to potential programmers to me.
Unfortunately most people fail to realize that. In the last few months, bashing bankers has become a socially acceptable norm... and I don't know whether that anger is directed at investment bankers themselves (you know, the ones who do corporate finance) or at anyone who happens to work at an investment bank.

On the cultural aspects of traders, Tom Wolfe wrote a rather biased (not to mention obnoxious) article on that a couple of years ago:

"The traders are on the front lines moment by moment, pulling the trigger with only seconds to think about it. They are our kind! They are aggressive real men! Their plain vanilla C.E.O.’s know it too. They will pay a daring, battle-hardened trader $50 million and up per year to keep him from defecting to our pirate fleet. They pay them more than they pay themselves, because they are worth more, because they are real men, because they are willing to fight. What idiot thought up "boards of directors" anyway? My board of directors consists of me, myself, and I. My investors don’t have to love me. I don’t have to charm them. I have to do one thing and one thing only, make them money."

http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/04/16/The-...
Dabble is "primarily used by tech companies"? Where did you get that idea?
The point is to read, think and progress.
The #1 knock against the Oracle Database is its price. The #2 knock against it is the difficulty of managing it.

For the last 10 years, Oracle has been continuously attacking #2 so that enough people will overlook #1. Now, Oracle is just about as easy to set up and configure as MySQL. It really can't get much easier to configure than it already is.

That is why they are going down the stack to the operating system and hardware. They want you to be able to order a box from them, plug it in, and instantly have Oracle running. Companies will save money because they will need fewer DBAs and and fewer sysadmins.

It is the same strategy that Microsoft is pursuing, except Microsoft also wants you to migrate from your own servers to Microsoft-managed servers in Microsoft's data centers.
I actually consider their pervasive editorializing to be their weakest point, not only because they can be quite wrong (The Iraq war as others have pointed out), but also because it actually gets highly repetitive and tiring. I like reading about political malaise in Japan or the energy industry in Brazil, but I don't like them putting the same opinion in both articles. If they left their opinions only in Charlemagne/Lexington/Bagehot, they'd be a much better magazine.
Thanks for this link. It makes an explicit link to similar demographics for "ESP" games.
The Pirate Pose
it's slowly getting there. But I think it's too late.

Area's where IBM/Lotus dropped the ball:

- It looked too old for too long - pretty much anyone my age will find it (at least < v8) pretty archaic. I think the focus for so long was on keeping the interface the same (so as not to have to re-train any users) - it missed the fact that anyone new to the corporate world is going to be horrified at how old/slow/crap most of Notes 7 looks -- (and don't get me started on the Workspace)

- Desktop Email clients are probably in a slow death circle (note the fact that I've had a web based email account for about half of my life now - 12 years). I love the 8.5 Sametime integration - but for an email interface - I prefer my gmail account.

- The sales pitch was always pretty confused. Email. Groupware. Databases. There is definite value in some of the Notes/Domino offering - but getting a sales rep to explain it to you is a fair bit of a challenge

- Lack of end user marketing / interest. How many organizations in the world today could could announce "We're deploying Lotus Notes" and have people excited? Not many I'm guessing -- at least - most people I've talked to have only ever heard the horror stories For most people -- their opinion of the notes interface equals something like: http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/lotus.htm or http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/

I think IBM are basically doing the right things with it now.. but I basically see it slowly dying..
Exchanging ideas? No way. Interesting viewpoints, if they stand out at all, will manifest as odd data points that are indistinguishable from user error. This is only useful for studying large groups of people in aggregate and characterizing them according to ideas already understood by the experimenters.

I.e., it's just a fancy way of gathering and visualizing polling data, and it doesn't seem very original. What are the odds that political consultants haven't already applied PCA to polling data (and probably been disappointed with the results)?
Microsoft Posts First Ever Drop in Quarterly Revenue
it is less to type, yes. it is not conceptually shorter; not to me at any rate. so if it works for you, great.
If you want structure, you can use a list of lists. Nothing wrong with repeating elements if you must. As it is (with a total lack of explanation), I have to guess why the articles are even chained together the way they are. This is particularly annoying because what I really want to do is just read them all.

Oh wait. Sorry. I see I'm supposed to hit 'Play' if I want an explanation. But why would I want to have to do that?!
This is still a bad deal. You're moving from one crappily-run, crowded ghetto to another crappily run, crowded ghetto that won't even let your site use 10% of a server's CPU without shutting you down.

They're better off with free blogs from blogger.com or Tumblr.com or WordPress or anything, really.
I found the best way to hack television is to ignore it altogether.
I'm definitely interested. I've contacted you by mail (let me know if the mail didn't arrive).
The Global Village
How do you know she left? (Seriously)
Gun Problems? Not really
I also agree with this notion. Also notice the absence of spam here... In addition to human editing by the admins, active users on HN here really care about the quality on the site.

It's as if sites like Digg, Reddit, & Slashdot have set some sort of a precedent, and people now have a better sense of what to avoid, moderate, etc.
> ...Java...

Well there's your problem! :P
It could do caching. That would be nice in case a shortener went down.

If it did caching, it would also act as a proxy. That would be nice if I decided to build a greasemonkey script/firefox add-on to automatically unshorten things; I wouldn't necessarily ping the counters attached to every shortened URL that loads with a page.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/the_revolving_door/mca...
Though I haven't read the article, but if the title suggests that life is limited to what we observe on Earth, then either we are defining life that way (and by definition we would only have it on earth-like objects) or have taken a very narrow view of what life is. Life is a very fuzzy concept, every researcher, every journalist defines it in his own way. Does life have to have carbon? Does it have to wiggle?
Whatever this turns into, whenever it's ready, I think Perl 6 needs a re-branding. There's just too much baggage associated with the name after all this development time, I just naturally think "vaporware".

That has nothing to do with the technical merits of the language, but perception is important - especially when you are trying to convince someone to use it for a project. Ruby is positioned as being "new and exciting" and the successor to Perl. If Perl 6 is going to be relevant it needs to get in that spot.
Of course. But what I meant was, why go to your site? Why not go directly to economist.com to read, think and progress?
Comcast pissed me off for the last time a few weeks ago. They jacked their cable/internet prices up on me to $120/mo for the second time in a year without telling me. Their sales reps lied to me about rates/promo's, etc...

So I ditched them. In Boston, MA, Comcast charges $42.99/mo for cable internet with a cable plan, or $57.99/mo for internet w/o a cable plan. Their cheapest cable plan is approx $12/mo, so to get the best deal on internet, you need to sign up for cable TV too (I think they do this to meet some stupid subscriber quota numbers).

Well, Earthlink offers internet for $45.99/mo over Comcast's cable lines. It's just as fast. You don't need cable TV to use it. I called them up and they switched me over in about 10 minutes.

Add in Netflix at $11.99/mo (w/Blueray), which is about as much as Comcast's basic cable, and I can stream movies over the net through my Xbox. Nice. Next I scored an Apple TV and threw Boxee* onto it. I can stream just about every program I want to watch over the net for free with extremely few commercials.

The quality isn't as nice as Comcast's HD feeds, of course. But it's good enough. If I really want super-high quality, I get a blue-ray disc from Netflix. I could care less if the Daily Show comes to me at 1080p.

*Boxee does work on Apple TV, but Hulu doesn't. Well, Hulu loads and plays sound, but the current version of "Apple TV Boxee" skips Hulu video frames horribly. But no big complaints - it is alpha after all. I'm sure they'll fix it at some point. All the other channels/video-feeds play fine though (with occasional glitches here and there).
If PHP is compiled, then it still has almost the same benefits and drawbacks compared to all the other languages, except for one: once it's compiled, PHP runs faster than it does when interpreted. Simple.

IIRC the compiler for PHP uses a scheme compiler as a backend.
You do make very good points, and I can't disagree with you. The article wasn't meant to be a blanket statement involving all programmers. It was rather meant to be a rant about how a lot of people who begin to go down that path either don't know what they're getting themselves into, or just simply don't care what kind of burden they are putting on others.

As for the statements of advice, you are correct. They are indeed broad, and would do with a good bit of expansion. This wasn't meant to be the alpha and omega of posts about what it means to be a programmer.
<shameless_self_promo> managedassembly.com </shameless_self_promo>
if you are a startup you are not even considering db2 or oracle. you consider exactly what the op suggested. further, as your business grows so to will your needs. you may start with one backend in a particular configuration and evolve and/or migrate to a different configuration/platform.

abstraction is "the right thing to do" (tm).