skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use MySql for all my projects these days. In the past I've used both Sybase(when working at one of the big investment banks) and Informix(when working at one of the worlds leading customer tracking systems) and postgres for a number of small person projects.

My current project is a logging/reporting system which has between 50-75 million new rows per day amongst 2-3 tables in MySql with very few problems on a single Amazon EC2 instance(I've had to switch to partitioned tables for reporting recently though). My last employer did a tracking system with over 1 billion impressions a day on MySql with no problems(Multiple servers) Including near realtime reporting(delayed by about an hour).

Thats my plus side for MySql. I really have no negatives for Postgres but I haven't used it much so I can't honestly report from either side. Others I am sure will be able to add more from that side of the argument.
I find the names confusing (blossom, fugu etc.) someone who doesn't know about heroku or cloud computing would spend at least 5 or 10 minutes to decipher it
What gives you the idea that IBM doesn't know what they are doing? Their public statements about the product road map have been pretty clear.
I think the original article misses a critical point.

I WILL make time and gladly pay for any truly intelligent publication. At least in my case, it's not a fixed sized market.

But intelligent work is hard to find. You can't fake it, it's hard to buy and that's why there's so little intelligent reporting and writing. And that's why I read the economist.

I read the economist online edition. Hacked into it when I was a broke college student. I had recently arrived in the sates and resorted to hacking because I was poor and shocked by the lack of hard news in the US.

That was many years ago and now I can easily afford a subscription. I keep thinking I really should get one, it would be the right thing TM to do.

But I'm a cheapskate and I keep forgetting to pay for the Economist. Which means you'll never see me carrying an issue, or reading one. And because my memory for anything other then code is crap, I'm not going to tell you I red this or that in the Economist. You'll almost never hear me mention the Economist. Except in this post - The Economist :)
Instead of a captcha, what about something that is like a puzzle to complete, that way you can also avoid low quality submissions which might come from people not intelligent enough to solve said puzzles and would also be a delightful little game for the rest of us who like to solve puzzles/problems?
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I was going to object to your "finger on the pulse of every detail of their project", because as complexity increases, it eventually becomes overwhelming and too difficult to understand, and you have to construct intermediate representations to handle the complexity - that is, a form of modularity, not for coding it, but just for understanding it.

But then I saw your quote here, about the need to understand it, and the having very few parts makes that possible, by limiting the complexity.
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. I guess you might mean something that allows people to piece together actions (functions) to describe some goal they'd like. For example, "Purchase with CREDIT CARD -> from GROCERY STORE -> LAST WEEK'S GROCERY LIST -> deliver to HOME ADDRESS -> after TUESDAY CLASS TIME". Isn't Ubiquity trying to act as something like natural language processing in Firefox?
Good points, both.
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That's one of the nicest animations I've seen in a long time.
http://puredata.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data

I'm sure there's more out there. It's a pretty common paradigm for audio/interactive software. cf. Max/MSP, Reaktor, Audiomulch.
Someday, we may simply program by having the computer interact directly with our own brain.
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Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: New Features in Postgres 8.4
Er, my URL-unshortening service just returns the URL ;) http://therealurl.appspot.com/

There are some possible uses for such a service, I think. For example if you want to get this functionality via JavaScript (eg JSONP), or perhaps you just don't want to bother with HTTP.

(unshort.me, I hope you don't mind me plugging it here - if you do, let me know (email's in the profile) and I'll delete this comment. Looks like we're about to have as many unshortening sites as shortening ones, at this rate :)
I just can't take one seriously if they think that using a firewall will protect them from security flaws in applications.
So, presence of oxygen and methane aren't necessarily indicators of life because "that makes assumptions about what life is", but stating that life must result in a huge majority of specific-handed molecules doesn't?
Replication does nothing to enhance searches over large datasets, and in the case of master-slave replication, you don't even have a second server to query.

Not to mention, that MySQL replication is known to be horribly fragile, and silently corrupts data -- which is why you need separate tools (like Maatkit) to know when it's time to rebuild the slave.
Inexplicably, this creates JPEGs instead of PNGs.
Says the guy who wrote his own DNS client.... ;)
Site isn't responding for me.

Google cache:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:jnMtyv9i7LUJ:www.worthle...
What are the issues you've seen with Slony-I and/or PGCluster?
I've found it helpful to keep setting a countdown timer for 15- or 20-minute work intervals and 5-minute "goof off" intervals. That seems to be just enough to overcome inertia.

There's a small, inexpensive multi-function timer made by National Presto and available at Ace Hardware among other places - http://www.acehardwaresuperstore.com/presto-4-in-1-electroni...

For Windows Vista sidebar gadgets, there's an online stopwatch that works OK. http://www.online-stopwatch.com/vista-sidebar-stopwatch-gadg...
You should read his rationale for using Eudora. Here's a snippet:

Any feature in the menu list, any action there, can be added as a button. I changed it so I have a vertical menu bar, so I can have tons and tons of pre-made buttons saved right where I want them up top, and I learn where those place are. You can script actions to the buttons, too, so I can quickly copy messages to my assistants.
"Oracle trying to cut out that middleman step will not be undertaken lightly (by Oracle)."

Why not? That's like saying Oracle would not take lightly alienating someone like SAP, whose software ran on Oracle (does it still?), by directly competing with them. I think anywhere that Larry Ellison sees a revenue stream related to one of his products, he wants it for himself.
First, I don't think I would be delighted by an automated puzzle on HN.

Second, the idea that puzzle-solving-ability is somehow closely related to interesting/insightful writing is specious. People are smart in different ways, and as a programmer myself, the kind of smart that I want most is the kind I don't have, which is often not the problem-solving kind.

All that having been said, I'm not against a captcha. I just don't think it'd be delightful and I don't believe that it'd somehow raise the quality of posts around here (beyond from removing some spam).
When I started learning perl, more than a decade ago, I loved that there were so many cool syntactic tricks. From what I see reading this article, perl6 brings even more cool syntactic tricks(/features).
But then I discovered the regular beauty of Lisp, and the syntax problem evaporated at once from my mind.
touche! Not for external use though...

Java sadly doesn't have a decent non blocking dns resolution system :( On a restart, Mibbit needs to do a few thousand DNS lookups... and quick. I can only stand a thread pool so long.
What the world needs are more non-programmers who can think logically.
From their "How It Works" section:

"A dyno is roughly equivalent to a Mongrel, except that
dynos are spread across multiple servers, so
performance in most cases is greater.

4 dynos are equivalent to the compute power of one
CPU-core on other systems."

A dyno is different from the common RAM+Bandwidth VPS slice, so it's difficult to make a comparison. (I'm going to do it anyway...) I would say that a 4 dyno machine, with everything else dialed down to the lowest value (so, free), you're roughly equivalent to Slicehost's 1024MB slice. (That's roughly $108/mo at Heroku, $70 at Slicehost.) You've got more storage space (so, the db can grow) on Slicehost, but you have to setup everything yourself, and adding power will take longer than a couple seconds.

It should be stressed that Heroku makes everything really simple. You can save a lot of time and energy if you've got the money to get started with Heroku up front.

I like setting up and tweaking a VPS, though. I haven't seen any benchmarks to show that Heroku with 4 dynos performs as well or better than 4 mongrels, or Apache + mod_rails on the 1024 slice, etc.

I think it's a bit expensive, but, man, it's really cool, too.
wow. what a mess ... and they're still not done. seriously, mod me down if you will, but someone has to say it. i will carry this cross :P - compare this, with something that would be titled "what you can do with python 3 today", or ruby, clojure, cl-lisp, javascript ... perl was revolutionary and it changed the world. we were using it at a NY financial institution since v4. we loved it. when 5 came out, we went all in. we had configuration files in perl, when every one else was writing parsers, home made databases when people had to buy sybase licences, home made template languages (yes, more than one. it was that easy) when others were struggling with c++ string libraries. and we killed; (lispers had always had these and more benefits) but alas, the world has moved on.

... and we're getting tired. it is much easier to find ruby and python guys, and i always thought ... "python? that's for sissies." until we tried it. and fellow programmers, i still had energy at the end of the day. that was the most striking. perl tires you out. perl culture and community tires you out. what a difference python makes.

initially i missed some things, but you quickly begin to see the light, and in no way will go back.

my theory is that python/js/lisp are simple because the core ideas are few. ie, because the rest of the language is the logical implication of a relatively few simple ideas. lisp is the best at this. the fewer special forms, the fact that you write in the same data structures the compiler sees (less complication) which translates into less to remember. less to keep in mind (quickly, what is the difference between 'use' and 'require' and system("") or system(@) ... bleh) which leads to less energy needs to get your stuff done. on this energy scale, perl rates pretty high. not as high as c++ but high enough that i never want to use it again.

so go ahead reader, mod me down and throw your tantrum, and try python (or ruby, etc ...)
There are several replication solutions for PostgreSQL but they all require a level of sophistication and configuration from the administrator. One of the biggest issues I have seen in the field with setting up replication for postgres is that people design databases without primary keys and with duplicate rows. A DBA who understands the relational model wouldn't do that in the first place; and none of the common solutions for replicating a postgres database will let you copy a database with broken referential integrity.

It's a feature.
I think a lot of people would say Microsoft had the better quarter, considering Microsoft earned a $13.7 billion profit and Apple earned a $1.21 billion profit.

By the way, your use of the Apple ticker symbol made me curious, so I checked AAPL vs MSFT on Google Finance. I am amazed that APPL has 2/3 the market cap of MSFT but only 1/10th the profit.
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That was really amazing. And the filming/editing was great too which is somewhat uncommon for that kind of projects.

From the YouTube description: "I keep hearing parts of the song are out of tune. Keep in mind the scanner and floppy drive are not musical instruments."
Yeah, and it doesn't even sound like Freddy Mercury! Seriously, some people...
Ah I like your description. Finally I see the attraction.

So do you think those of us with a combination of Oracle and Solaris skills are now more or less valuable? Do Oracle have a history of subcontracting to 'partners'?
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"Ars longa, vita brevis" is a Latin phrase, a translation (by Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae, 1.1) of an aphorism originally by the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, and is one of the sources of the popular English aphorisms "Life is short" and "Life is short, art long."

[wikipedia]
Great marketing, timed for the release of the new Star Trek movie. (Assuming that it's not an old demo, and its just proximity to the movie responsible for it being posted and up-voted here.)
It would work great with a firefox/whatever plugin that would show you this link as a tooltip, avoiding the copypaste grind
Another vote for Postgres. MyISAM is a joke for serious use, and InnoDB isn't better/faster than postgres in my experience.

Postgres has felt much more mature and more focused on delivering things you'd expect in a real database (FKs, etc..) for a longer time.
I can see several reasons for this:

1 - Build a database of short to unshortened URLs as a backup in case that one of the shortening services goes under.

2 - Such a service can be useful for anyone who wants to know where the URL points to without clicking it (or without the skills to unshorten it themselves).

3 - It could allow for batch unshortening

4 - A database can still unshorten URLs that no longer exist
etc..
boy am I glad I don't have to do that anymore. Used to be on call for financial systems... ouch.
Are you saving the urls after someone requests one to be lengthened? It could act as a backup if one of the shorteners went down. Maybe one of the firefox extension developers that expand urls could use your saved urls in that case.
There used to be a tremendous gap between these two databases. MySQL had an incredible dearth of features (subselects, triggers, TRANSACTIONS, and others were missing). PostgreSQL had the features, but it was relatively unpopular, so the language bindings were generally immature and not well documented. Then there was Interbase/Firebird, which was even less popular but was supposed to have an even better feature set (I never used it).

These days, both have come a long way. MySQL has most of the necessary features, and PostgreSQL has perfectly good bindings in most popular languages. It doesn't matter so much which you use any more. The reputations remain, however, that MySQL is lacking critical features and that PostgreSQL is black magic.

The legal issues around PostgreSQL are probably a little more stable at the moment, given the Oracle question (it now owns the trademarks). If Oracle starts causing any serious problems for MySQL, you can bet "YourSQL" will appear very quickly (sort of like how Iceweasel did). I wouldn't worry too much about it. Pick one, and start coding.
Not very likely. According to the author, he's behind a well-configured firewall.
It's one I wrote.
Not in applications, but operating system. Windows Automatic Update becomes quite unnecessary if you're behind a firewall.
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Ask Mr.Paul Graham: Suggestion/Request for visited link indicator 
I am a heavy user of HN(addicted). I have a suggestion for you:

Could you provide option to change the color of the link or maybe put a check mark next to the link(s) that user has visited/clicked?
This is great. Any plans for integrating an image upload to make my own pattern?
What's the point of that?
Techmeme's algorithm seems to rely on a combination of clustering similar articles and an analysis of the interlinking of various articles. So if you a textual analysis of two articles and discover that both use very similar words -- e.g. both discuss possible merger talks between yahoo and microsoft, they would be placed in a meme together. Also, if an article links to the main article of a meme, odds are it's on the same subject as the main article of the meme. The larger the meme and the more clicks it gets, the higher on the page it rises. And I'm sure there's a number of other factors considered.

Google News seems less sophisticated. I haven't worked as hard at reverse engineering it but it seems to rely solely on clustering.

I wrote the <a href="http://drupal.org/project/memetracker">Drupal Memetracker module</a> last summer as part of Google Summer of Code. At this point it's a usable but fairly simple + unsophisticated memetracker (but patches are highly welcome!).

It relies solely on clustering right now to find memes. To step a bit into machine learning concepts -- to cluster items, you first find the "distance" between different items. Then the clustering algorithm runs through the different items bring together items close to each other until it reaches the distance threshold you've set (i.e. at this point items are too far apart to bring together). This type of clustering is called Hierarchical agglomerative clustering see http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/hierarchica...

Memetracker uses two tools to do the clustering. It uses the MySQL FullText search to find the distance between news articles. Basically it searches every article against every other article which returns a very accurate distance score.

Then for clustering, it uses the PyCluster library as thesethings mentioned.

It uses PyCluster as thesethings mentioned.
I am excited to see a device using one of these screens. It's the beginning of a needed evolution of a fundamental aspect of many peoples live; staring at the glowing screen.
> compare this, with something that would be titled "what you can do with python 3 today", or ruby, clojure, cl-lisp, javascript

This is about syntax. Please do post the equivalent examples in any of those languages. I bet the perl 6 will be a lot shorter, which is the whole point.
I'm not sure how wanting to avoid reboots makes one sound ignorant. We've come a long way since the bad old days when you had to reboot virtually every time you installed or reconfigured anything. I agree with Yegge when he says "Systems should never reboot."

As for asking the developers to write better software in the first place, it's quite reasonable. It's extremely difficult (maybe even impossible) to catch all the bugs and vulnerabilities in a complex piece of software before publishing it, but having to update as frequently as we're usually expected indicates a lack of proper care for security issues in the first place. And that is what the author is complaining about. In a way, it's just like it often happens with videogames: release in time to catch an important date and then ship patches.
> Koi $15, 50MB storage, Great for a small company intranet or staging server.

I don't know how this isn't clear or concise.
I've been using postgres in production situations since 1998, at 4-5 different companies. I've never had a problem with it.

OTOH, the many times I've tried to use mysql I've run into gotchas even in development that were unexpected and obnoxious. Also, I don't really like the dual gpl/commercial license thing.

My faves about Postgres:

- Very mature OSS development community with amazing devs/community support

- Ridiculously stable

- BSD license

- I practically never run into a postgres bug.

- GIS support

- ltree data type (native trees with powerful query syntax)

- Clustered indexes

- Very fast under load

- Simple to manage

- Lots of tuning options

To sum up, I've used it forever and it's never caused me a problem. I am a postgres fanboy.
You've got it backwards. They are not saying all life-bearing planets must have chiral molecules, and therefore we can tell whether a planet has life based on the light. They are saying that if a planet exhibits light coming from a source with lots of chiral molecules, then the only known explanation is life, and we can conclude it is life. A non-chiral source proves nothing either way.

Note this same logic holds for oxygen. This expands our ability to positively identify life to places that may not have gone the oxygen route. (We know this is possible, because Earth itself was like that for a while, and we continue to have a wide variety of anaerobic organisms, and even some complete anaerobic biomes underground, I believe.) It does nothing to our ability to negatively identify life (or positively identify lack of life, if you like), which we have little ability to do in general.
My God. Here's their example of the "reduction meta operator".

say [+] 1...5; # sum
say [*] 1...5; # product
say [<] @list; # is @list strictly ordered ascendingly?

What the hell? With [*] they go for a reduction, but with [<] they go for a reduction over a zip of the list with its own tail. The behavior changes completely! How do you predict that? That's simply dumb. Extremely dumb. Things like this don't make the language complicated, they make it risky. It is risky to write Perl 6 programs. And we know programs don't get any thrill out of that.
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"Comments like "UGLY TERRIBLE HACK" tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course."

For Microsoft or for everyone?
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No one is stating that live must produce large numbers of chiral molecules, but that large numbers of chiral molecules are expected to be produced by life.

(Although it is harder to imagine life without chiral molecules than life without carbon molecules.)
I'm not saying competition is the only cause, just that it's a root cause. I haven't heard your claim before, so if you have numbers, I'd be interested to see them.
He says it far better than I. Hell, he does everything far better than I, even dancing. (Does he drink beer or play foosball?)
Things might be slowly getting better for Windows. Omaha http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ was released under an open source license recently. It will be interesting to see if other projects adopt it, or if it remains being used by Google products only. Ars Technica had a good summary about the current state of Omaha. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/google-opens...
Also check out comment #3 on this post:
http://www.financialreflections.com/why-i-didnt-buy-an-hdtv/...

Guy hacked up a solution for about $160. Pretty impressive!
Operators operate on the list. Conditions test the list. How is that confusing?
I agree with his assessment. Sometimes ugly terrible hacks are the best solution given the external constraints (time, 3rd party code beyond your control, whatever). And if you have an ugly terrible hack, you should definitely comment it.