skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was confused by this section too. You state:

> Notice that this solution is composed of the first two queries, however composing in SQL kills your performance, and this is generally not the right way to structure the query.

That sounds like an optimizer issue, not a problem with SQL per se. I often structure my queries that way--it's only sane.

What platform are you using?
Maybe if all you are doing is web browsing and using the minimal apps, but some of the appeal of a netbook is that it is a functioning computer that is more portable than a normal laptop. Edit: I mean functioning as it can run large apps such as msoffice

Besides mac minis are like the netbook of desktop computers.
it has to be humor ON TOPIC. basically something technologically sweet or novel.

like the crowdsourcing smiling robot thing, that was cute and funny and well received because it was also bringing to table a novel concept.

certainly blonde jokes and toilet humor will not fare as well, and i don't think this should be the place for it.

it's hacker NEWS after all... not hacker jokezone
I second your Ratio plug. I'd also recommend adding Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day to the mix, another great (easy!) bread book.

http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutioni...
Because nobody here has one.
Ask HN: No funding? Is it the company or the economy?
Today's investing climate blows nuts, lets be serious... But is that a real excuse?

To me it just seams weak, rather I feel this means only the best will survive.

But who knows. Maybe I have just been brainwashed by the man. What do you think?
This is a nice article that gives great detail on how the new Wolf3D for the iPhone works. However, I couldn't help to notice how the mostly artificial limitations Apple puts on iPhone development using the App Store hinder development, and delay porting of games to the iPhone. I wish they would just open it up and allow us to do whatever we want with it, to some extent. "Private" and "Undocument API calls" being forbidden is on par with any evil thing Microsoft has ever done.
And HN's take on that article:

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=542173
Maybe in the way it's encouraged other web frameworks to adopt MVC, but that's not a huge deal. MVC has been around for a long time anyhow.
Yeah, but any sane database hacker will make sure each SELECT statement returns a relation. It's too hard to reason about otherwise.

That said, SQL sucks.
I tried to submit that link, but it only redirects to the original article. Perhaps they're checking that the referrer is sciam.com to display the printer-friendly version...
If "we" told "you" why "she" was making $5k more than you, you'd disagree with us, argue, sulk, do subpar work for a few weeks, and then quit. If we could put everyone in a straitjacket salary bracket system, we would, but that would make it harder for us to hire talent. So we do what almost every other company does, and ask people to keep what they make to themselves.
I'm Charles. http://trending.us
MHTML - When you need data: URIs in IE7 and under
one thing that i am kind of curious about is: why not use event-based (epoll/select/poll) libraries (libev, libevent etc) and create a message passing model on top of those ? the message passing could be done with either protocol-buf style messages or xdr-encoded ones (asn.1 totally sucks)
Hacking the english language
I am a cyclist and a big "BSNYC" blog fan. Some people have a real gift in there use of the english language.

"Like all episodes of "Frontline" I've seen, it made me feel hopeless and despondent. This in turn led me to drink more TV cocktails (I didn't have to get up--I pour them from a pitcher next to the La-Z-Boy) and before I knew it I had passed out."
BSNYC

When I was a teenager, Bob Roll's writing in Velonews was epic. So good.

What authors do you read as soon as they post / publish new material?
That works because the partners (and even the associates) at those firms have a lot of control over how many hours they're going to bill, and because some semblance of a meritocracy assigns lawyers to the most lucrative accounts.

Those conditions do not often hold in dev shops.
I love that they use data: and I've never thought to do that for something as simple as a PDF (which can be really simple). Kudos to the developers!
Historical Debugging in Visual Studio 2010
And just how would you go about explaining to one employee that he/she is less valuable and/or doing less work than the next?

You should read what Joel Spolsky has to say about the issue... There are more variables int this than you'd think. He gives a good explaination of why this is a problem in his article on inc magazine:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em...
"Depends whether your looking for large amounts of money or enjoyable work environments."

Correlation does not imply causation.
there is video/screencast (referenced from the article) available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Historical-Debug.... on another note, it might be possible to have something like this in dtrace. but it would have to be scripted on a case-by-case basis.

edit: seems to be available only on managed code...
>Everyone focuses on securing the bits, but no one worries about the wires. It's disturbing hearing about this kind of attack.

There's a distinct difference between obtaining information and destroying it. While being an anarchist can be useful to some extent, getting 'inside' is far more useful to the thoughtful deviant.

That being said, still agree with your point. It's still frightening how much said anarchists can shake up the world.
Not just that...

It's also good to compensate excellent performers without every other member of staff getting jealous... :-)
So am I to understand that this person's time is worth nothing?
Research like this can help us geek architects really create amazing experiences :)
I enjoy humor. I do not enjoy the 157th regurgitation of a joke, which is meant not to be funny but to remind me of the experience of that joke once being funny, particularly when that wastes space from my dedicated business/programming bandwidth. See: absolutely any reference to Monty Python, lolcats, the bastardized pieces of proto-humor commonly sometimes described as "memes", etc.

High voted jokes also breed more of themselves. (As do highly voted comments, on, e.g., sexually gratifying oneself. Oddly enough, people often think the creeping pornification is a substitute for humor, too. We're pretty harsh on those too, thank goodness.)
17 cool magnet tricks
And the spate of Erlang articles which followed pg's quoted post was one of the funniest occurrences on Hacker News, ever.
Actually, I'd wager that industrial sabotage can be just as useful in many cases, as industrial espionage.
I agree with that the size of HN helps with the goal of maintaining quality. I have always loved being able to visit digg/reddit and get more socially-involved content, then visiting HN and being able to get more professionally-involved content.

One thing I have noticed that could be good or bad depending on the situation, but sometimes good posts I notice in new (technically relevant, different content that is truly interesting) doesn't make it to the front page. However, every 3rd+ Tech Crunch article does.
The root reason is really simple. The company will have to spend 5k more to keep you, while it doesn't have to if salaries are secret.

That covers the case when talking about salary is prohibited by a company policy.

Why people don't tell their salaries? Well, I do tell to (some of) my co-workers. None ever said to me: Wow, you make a lot of money! - Instead, they say: Wow, I could be making more. - So they'll start looking for other jobs (not counting lots of other factors beside paycheck. Lots)

Anyway, top reasons why people don't tell how much they earn:

1) We deny a chance of making others sad;

2) We fear our bosses will discover that we talked about our salaries, thus a) being the reason why an employee quit; b) being the reason why an employee asked for a raise (increasing the company expenses);

3) Fear of security; Once your salary is "out there", the watercooler talk might be: Wow, do you know how much inerte makes? And you don't know who'll end with this information.

4) Compensation isn't a factor when there's blame to assign: Wow, inerte makes lots of money, how come he did this stupid thing? - As if someone less expensive, with a similar set of responsibilities, is allowed to make more errors.

And you know what? Some of these reasons are true. I know how much 6/7 members of my team earn per month, and I know I am being underpaid. In 3-5 months I am probably asking for a raise. If they deny, I will at least dip my feet into the job market, and see if I can also get 33% or 90% more.

Yes, someone earns 90% more than me for something that I know how to do it. He has more experience on some other stuff, but he's also friends with the boss. His salary is so above the market that I suspect someone is getting something out of this (aka, corruption?).

I tell how much I earn because I do want others to look, if they want to, for better paying salaries or to negotiate their current ones.
"You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang "

That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously

Haha, a bit ironic that you mention this, considering it turned into a pretty sophomoric joke...
I should have been more clear in the article. There are two different ways SQL is not composable.

1) predicates can be composed, but only by resorting to string manipulation (i.e. str-join([a,b,c], " AND "), which sucks.

2) Views and subselects CAN compose, but only a few levels. Every DB I've ever seen has huge performance problems with just a few levels of nesting. Imagine your programming language only allowing 3-4 stack frames before it just dies. That's not acceptable in your programming language, so why is it acceptable in your database?

It's not obvious which queries are slow

Any decently experienced programmer can determine the correct big-O complexity just by reading the code. With databases, you have to read the query, and understand what optimizations the current version of your DB is capable of making.

No back door for map, filter, reduce

The reason I want that feature is for the case where the DB pukes on your query. What happens when your database is not capable of generating an efficient query for the data you want? Pulling everything into RAM isn't an acceptable solution either. When the DB pukes, you should be able to say "fine, let me give you the exact plan". Then I expect the DB to go off and execute that plan, and give me a stream of data using limit, offset, etc.

The DB allows you to define custom predicates. It doesn't solve the problems of needing to do string manipulation to piece together a query, and it doesn't solve the performance problems of nesting views and subselects.

I never compared SQL to MapReduce. MapReduce is a project created by Google. map, reduce are functions for working on sequences of data created decades before Google was founded.
Apple could make a decent netbook that runs OS X, enter the market, and make a killing. They have the power to let computers run OS X, and OS X doesn't need a lot of RAM to work well. Apple has enough expertise in miniaturization that they could make a pretty good netbook without much of an effort on their part.

The problem is that anything Apple makes impulsively will be below Apple's standards. Apple refuses to launch products that aren't either great or potentially great in the future. They sell computers on their reputation alone. So if they ever enter the "small computing" market, they'll do it after a lot of thought, and likely only if they can instantly change the public's perception of netbooks so that they have a chance of creating a potential monopoly like they've got with the iPod/iTunes and like they're angling towards with the iPhone/app store.
I don't think there is such thing as fair payment at all.

From boss point of view: me and her are doing same work, payment is equal.

My point of view: I always deliver my work within deadlines, she is late sometimes, I should get $5K more

Her point of view: I stay extra half an hour most days, he leaves at 5PM sharp, I should get $5K more

Solution? Well, not disclosing salaries more or less works so far.
thats what i'd use bonuses for :p
For a very much non-brief history, this is a fun book: http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856...

Real cheap used, comes with plenty of interesting anecdotes about English words and history that will make you a hit at parties.
They Gave You Pop Art
Not allowing the use of Private and Undocumented API calls allows Apple to change that implementation without worrying about breaking 3rd party software. I don't think there is anything evil about that.
Your salary equals:

market value for the kind of work you do + whether your employer pays above or below that + your individual skill level and experience + timing of entering the company + your negotiating ability

All are highly variable values for any individual.
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design (Rough Cuts)

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS (Just released)

Trascending CSS (Released)

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library: Develop your next generation web applications with the YUI JavaScript development library (Released, for yui and some javascript)

I want them but don't have money.

Have a look at OOCSS:
http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss

And CSS Discuss:
http://css-discuss.incutio.com
Yeah. I too cannot understand why the techcrunch articles are getting to the frontpage so often. I see a lot of NYTimes too.

As of now, I am satisfied with the content in HN.

I like the ask-HN kinda stuff more.
part of the reason for a query optimizer is that if the physical representation of the data changes, the queries don't need to change.

And that's a great reason to use the declarative query as the default. What I'm complaining about is when you need to eek out the last bit of performance out of a query, there should be another option. Sort of like dropping into assembly to optimize a tight loop. Of course you don't want to write the entire program in assembly.

you need the DB's type system to be distinct from any of the client language's type systems.

I don't agree. Just because your DB's type system uses say, Java, doesn't mean that other languages can't access the DB. Non-Java languages would access the DB the same way they do today, but at least the Java developers wouldn't have to convert.
Two words: slow cooker.
There is nothing preventing Iris from working with libev or libevent.

It's primary focus is how to handle work after your event loop. For example, you can saturate your network card on very little use of a single cpu. Iris focuses on how to efficiently use the rest of those cpus for processing.
I heard good things about it from the people who attended last year.

I just registered. I think it's one of the cheapest conferences there is.
Another thing that differentiates humor on HN from humor elsewhere is that disrespectful commentary, no matter the level of wit, is rejected.
Are you kidding? Many of the comments I've made have been marginally witty, and shot me up into karma stardom.
Thats true, money and enjoyable work environments can coexist.

The second part of my comment is more accurate-its the nature of the business that made it aggressive and it will attract that type of people. They might enjoy being hyper-competitive (ie the stereotypical salesman) and they are greatly awarded for doing so.

Having bean bag chairs and guitar hero might not sound like a fun place to work, to them.
"I’m not saying that you can’t have success by pouring in all your waking hours. Of course you can. I’m saying that you don’t have to. That the correlation between the two is weak."

I still don't get this argument I see afloating the past days from 37signals.

Hard work is hard work. It can occur in 6 hour span. It can occur in a 10 hour span.

First-time entrepreneurs will always commit their whole waking and sleeping hours to hard work. When they are burned they will know they need a balance.

It's about character and experience. When someone has succeeded he will surely happily commit to other stuff to provide a happy balance to their life.
I should also add that messages are ref-counted. The only time they will be serialized is when passing between processes or hosts (which I haven't written yet but is a goal).
"Initially buying spices ($4 each)..."

Let me recommend Penzey's:

http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/shophome.html

You'll get vastly better spices and herbs than you would at the store, for half the price (less if you buy in larger quantities). Every year, I shop the retail store in my hometown, and walk away with all the spices I need for a year (20 or 30 different kinds) for about $60. It's slightly more if you have to get them shipped, but still way cheaper than the megamart.
I'm attending University right now and in the middle of my finals exam period. Over the last month or so I've been studying and working in one of the Libraries available (I have a Room-mate that plays loud video games.)

It's the first time that I've ever left my room or living space to work and I'm amazed at how much more effective I've been in terms of the work and studying I've gotten done.

I live pretty messily and I think the biggest difference is working without looking at so much clutter on my desk, being in a room full of others working diligently and for some reason I find working on a nice wood finish to be very productive.

Experiment around until you find something that works and stick with it.
Actually I use a line-oriented text editor. I prefer using it because it makes me write shorter code, and I can't slack off five minutes because I'd forget the contents of the file.
> Since the creator took the pains of inscribing some message all over the surface of the slabs, it must have some importance.

That describes the writings on every ancient artifact.

While there is a Rosecrucian Museum in San Jose, I think that it's reasonably safe to say that few people take the writings in pyramids as a guide to life today. Sure, they're "important", but ....
You should read up on Semco, a Brazilian company run by Ricardo Semler. Quote from their website:

The Semco Group seeks to involve people in discussions regarding what is a fair salary for each employee. Of course, there are times when people think their salaries should be higher and the company believes it cannot pay more. What is important is to always provide an opportunity for discussions regarding this type of issue.
http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/content.asp?content=3&con...

Also try one of Semler's books, like Seven Day Weekend, excerpted here: http://www.inc.com/articles/2004/03/7dayweekend.html

His methods might never fly in America, but it's useful to know that open salaries are within the realm of possibility.
In 1999 I worked at Petstore.com (a competitor to the sock puppet firm) and we used to joke that we were going to create a website "termsheet.com" which would generate a term sheet we could then use in negotiation with VCs. WSGR built it! Now every entrepreneur will be able to say to a VC, "we have a term sheet...and need to know whether you are in or out..."

I wrote a review of the WSGR term sheet generator here:

http://www.altgate.com/blog/2009/04/law-firm-wilson-sonsini-...
This probably wouldn't be downmodded so much if people were less defensive when they were reading comments.
The point is that the record industry is better off working with the public than in secret behind locked doors. The blanket license is simply a single possibility that may be compromised on if there is ever an open discussion.
How was the turnout?

How often is the meetup? Hope the next one is somewhere around downtown.
I feel like I recently read that these kinds of NDAs are not enforceable in certain states, but my Google-fu is failing me now. Anyone else know if this is the case?

Edit: bingo! From Joel's Inc. article:

Some companies even make it a fireable offense for employees to compare salaries, or they write something into the standard employment contract prohibiting workers from disclosing their pay. (In the United States, this kind of rule is unenforceable, by the way, but some bosses hope their workers won't know that.)

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em...
Heh, never even knew there was a book for http://www.csszengarden.com/ (or was it that the garden was for css zen), still I probably got the most from doing little zengarden mock-ups; ya know sort of like a time-trial. . .[ramble]. . .Coming to back to the web to the without tables was probably my biggest hurdle, but doing enough stuff in the spirit of zengarden really helped out.
These day though I find myself having a harder time getting inspired to start something fresh in Photoshop than anything in my text-editor. Once you stop thinking and developing in terms of a graphics editor you will start seeing and thinking in terms like this, how do I want my user to interact with this document?

I honestly couldn't really recommend a book though, CSS doesn't necessarily require a text to understand how to format a hyper-text document, other than that, I don't think there isn't much else I could recommend besides just dive into an xhtml document and start formatting your view according to something that catches your eye on the web.

Cheers
I gotta say... the mindset of many on here seems to be: quickly find a flaw that I can knock down. People on here are usually confrontational in their approach, e.g. humor gets attacked. The tone on here seems to be rather grumpy (but I'm more used to the academic world).
I don't like fluff-talk, but I also dislike easy criticism and literal-mindedness. However, HN is currently the only game in town.
Letter to Start-ups: Don't Be Afraid to Charge
I agreed with the second part of your comment and I know what you mean. I've worked in extremely competitive / aggressive environments and I got a serious buzz from it.

If you can channel that aggressiveness and competitiveness outward (without pissing off the market), then it's much more productive. It's also all too easy to let it cause damage internally.
You are spot on, there's little humour and Slashdot is way funnier.

I always upvote something that is funny: maybe here funny isn't smart, which is wrong, or, funny is smart, which can easily be the case, but smart people who aren't funny don't want to acknowledge that others are funny.

Maybe "humour" is upvoted but "funny" is not because it's weird and uncommunal. So humour is often not appreciated because it gets too easily percieved as funny amongst the ultra-seriousness.

Maybe being in serious concentration, which gains the upvotes, people forget about their funny side in both reading and writing.
Hacker News is for entrepreneurs making money. It is serious business, not a place for fun.
Facebook’s new design on IE6 - Doesn’t Exist
Risk as a Strategic Weapon.
50,000+ Job Opportunites In 28 Firms
Agreed. I see no reason to downvote that comment so strongly. People really need to lighten up.
Have a look at the book 'Beautiful code'

http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra...
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090210/1014293724.shtml

Either are actually crimes, punishable with 5years and/or $250,000 per incident. Since copyright violations are one of the few civil matters that the government has been conned into making illegal. But you are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted. Unlike restaurants (bday) and Amazon ("performing" a book).