skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to sound negative or anything, but are we going to have a story anytime a popular service like gmail, MSN, twitter or whatever goes down?

Also, aren't you guys supposed to work at this hour? ;)
This discussion is sounding more and more like the card game "En Garde"...

http://www.slugfestgames.com/games_eg.php

The only difference I can tell is the game uses the term "poise" instead of "focus." But the notion of attack variants, responses and improvised gear pretty closely meshes with what everybody here and at the original post's thread seem to want.
The unasked question is how the black/white achievement gap came about in the first case. It actually started fairly recently, say the late 50s/early 60s. (I'm not saying that black schools had equal resources. I'm saying that black schools did very well with the resources that they had.)
I have to say, I don't understand your join in the first example. In my head, key1 was the primary key.

In the second example, if key1 is unique and the database knows it, the optimizer should be able to determine that c returns no records, and therefore the outer query returns no records as well. It bypasses execution entirely, thus 0.00 sec.

If key1 is not unique, or it is unique but the database doesn't know about it, that is impressive.
This just keeps reminding me... I gotta start using this Python module!
Where's Blackberry on this list??? Blackberry Pearl for me. Black. Slim. Browser/ Camera/ Music/ Video.

I'd probably add an iPod Touch long term as well, for the things a Blackberry doesn't do that well (until Blackberry finally gets a decent Browser app).
I know you're right but I wish you weren't. Personally I'd much rather typed my credit card number into an https://amazon.com page than some random site I don't trust. But I'm sure that's not the way most people think about online payments.
I'd prefer they just open source theirs, actually. I like having more browser choices, but it'd be nice to see them open up more..
The query optimiser should be dealing with that. If you're doing an outer join and checking for the key being NULL then it can easily see that the operation can be short circuited.

It's all implementation details. I've worked with databases where a NOT EXISTS would run a query for every source row where as an outer join would run through once doing the join and was therefore faster.
I took down the semi-protected stub. I've been trying to assist in writing this article for the past few days. Needless to say, there are a few admins that would rather see us not succeed (or so it seems).
What an excellent title for an individual: "Robert Cailliau, collaborator on the World Wide Web project and first Web surfer."
It's called "deduplication" in databaseland, it's common strategy for tape backups.
I find this to be true with news reporting as well. Compare CNN v. BBC.
> For ACID storage, one transaction per disk rotation is pretty much a theoretical limit for sustained performance.

Why? There's nothing about "all or nothing" that forbids performing independent application-level commits with a single implementation-level commit. And, it's even possible to do application-level-dependent commits at the same time. (Yes, it's tricky.)

And, you can have commits on different spindles. And, you can do multiple writes during a single rotation.
Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care
Ask HN : Use MySQL as a non-relational database
I'm searching for anything that could help me using MySQL (or SqlLite) as if it was a non-relational database (like couchDB) in ruby. Is such a thing exists?
In real life, "winning" 10-7 isn't all that much of a win. More to the point, "a touch" doesn't cause a position reset and some touches are far more important than others.

Fencing is amazing, but it isn't fighting even if fencers do better at sword fighting than folks with no experience.
Being able to build something cool is not good enough. Neither is fast performance. Both are important, but the human commitment and real ability to make actual individuals happy at firms that are potential customers is more important than either. Doing what you say you will do--promising delivery dates and consistently meeting or beating them, for example--wins big. Convincing potential customers that you will work ten times as hard as the nearest competitor to please the customers wins sales. Version management, customer support, and documentation quickly become vitally important.

to summarize this article, delivering and committing to your customer/client. common sense business etiquette IMO, but strangely enough — an easy and strong differentiator, so many people fail at this concept.

on the flip side, I'm also known to support the notion of rejecting your customer. there is a good read about it in the book, Mavericks at Work.
I am not entirely sure it is a fair comparison - I would hope the Nat Geo clip seems childish, as the author says, because it is in fact a children's programme, while the BBC one is for a general public. I actually watched many Attenborough documentaries with my daughter when she was younger, and there were often tears involved, what with the cruelty of nature and such. (Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary Britains...)
Thanks for the feedback - we're hearing this from others as well. I think as we're growing we're outstripping our prior explanations, and we definitely need to do something about that. I know what my morning's going to be spent on!
Shouldn't you rather use a real non-relational database if that's what you need?
Nokia N81!
Blackberry 8700c purchased three years ago, still going strong.
I don't think that's wrong as such. Imagine there were two sports teams in Chigaco that merged. You could say that team Y merged with "Chicago rival X" without meaning that X was a rival to Chigaco.
iPhone now but wife has Android and I'm intending to switch.

I move between countries for extended periods (the US, UK, Australia) and Apple has absolutely raped me for updates and activation. I'm a paid customer, I shouldn't need to crack my phone to use it.
I knew someone would say that but I'm not ready to install a RDBMS on a production environment yet. Besides that, I'm also just curious if someone did it.
Major Update of Nokia N96
Sneaker reviews, news & trends
Love the Spreedly Team!
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/3drealms.com

"Looks down from here" suggests to me that it's simply doing an HTTP GET and interpreting the returned status code (or timing out). http://downforyouaswellorjustme.com/ would probably be more accurate.
I don't think there was any standardized testing before the 60s.
If key1 is the primary key then how can you have duplicates of it? By definition it's not a unique key, and c does return records.
I know the site says the fonts are free, and with a commercial-use license, but I'd love to see an actual link to a page saying what the actual license is, or at the least, a blurb on the main page confirming that license is indeed a DWTFYP type of license...

Edit: Apparently I'm blind; thanks for the clarifications.
Btw, the Nokia 1100 is the best selling consumer electronics device ever -- they sold over 200 million units of this single model in 2003-2007.
30+ Great Ubuntu Wallpapers For Desktop
eye candy ubuntu wallpapers for greedy geeks.
To store a billion records in MySQL if you don't needs it's abilities (indexes, joins and updates) is overkill.

If you never do updates, and you write your own index, then a much simpler storage method with far less overhead would be what you need.
Speed Test: Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista
that's quite a simplification, ain't that?
if money alone would do it, then all one would need to have to beat every single 'hit' site on the internet would be a big wallet - and VCs surely would be willing to give their money away, if it was that simple...
It's in Python rather than Ruby, but Infogami's ThingDB and its successor Infobase are distributed key-value stores built on top of PostgreSQL:

http://pharos.infogami.com/tdb

http://openlibrary.org/about/tech

http://infogami.org/src/
For the two I recognized:

Gentium is from SIL, and released under their Open Font License: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&...

Museo is from Ex Ljbris, and is released under somewhat restrictive terms viewable at http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/exljbris/museo/buy.html (click on "Commercial"). Most of Jos Buivenga's typefaces are available under much more permissive terms, such as the one at the bottom of http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/delicious.html
LG KP265 at cellhut.com
The unlocked LG KP265 triband gsm world phone is a sliding music phone equipped with lots of features including style that will turn the heads of anyone who sees it.Bluetooth connectivity is a great way to attach a headset.
The Theora guys have given themselves a bit of a PR black-eye here. In amongst all the fascinating yet mostly incomprehensible progress reports they make a passing reference to x264 which has been stripped of all their carefully worded caveats and unleashed on reddit et al to completely hijack the good press they should be getting from this.

Instead of "solid progress of free codec, supported natively by popular browser, potential game changer for online media" you get a standard online benchmark squabble stealing all their press and goodwill.

Maybe it's one of those "no such thing as bad publicity" things and they've been taking lessons from DHH. Then again they probably had no hope of avoiding it, the same arguments appear every time there's Theora news.

Open Source Lessons Learned:

from pulseaudio: linux users get really(!) upset when you break their proprietary Flash plugins and Skype.

from theora: there can be no compromise in quality standards when transcoding bootleg DVDs.
It isn't a matter of not rising past the minimum monthly fee--it is a matter of the burn rate while ramping up when you're bootstrapping. Shortening the runway is a bad thing.

If their sales person hadn't blown me off, I might have settled on them after looking around. As it was, I decided to hold off opening the account until we were farther down the road with development.
Awesome... in fact, this verges on sci-fi awesome. I wonder what the inorganic binder is?

I think the real breakthrough will come when one is able to print aerogel on a similar scale. Oh well, I can dream...
there's a link to the foundry website of each font and the license of each font

eg http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Surface
Fixing Twitter: Improving Performance and Scalability
U.S. Lawmaker Defends Imprisoning Hostile Bloggers
This is an interesting approach. Not sure why the title says "like YC" other than as link bait. The only similarities are that they are both helping to start startups.

In any case, this is an interesting approach. They are essentially hired guns who take 20-40% of your company in exchange for "200-250K" of services to help you build it and enough money for living not to be a distraction. Can't be that expensive in Bloomington, IN. Maybe this is the answer to the age old "I'm an MBA and have this great idea, but I my coding skills start at logging into my laptop and end at adding cells in Excel" problem.

While not appealing to me, this could churn out some pretty interesting companies as they are very focused on revenue ... something that many others just aren't. I'm eager to see what they can do.
Model-View-Controller GUI in Clojure
In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap.

It's only repeating if those were the same statements. They aren't.
Ruby developers urged to use test-driven development
Increased food intake alone explains the increase in body weight in US
What does a programmer have to barter with?
He missed my favourite.

The Mac has a thing called safe sleep where it saves your memory to disk when you close the laptop. This is good because if you lose power it takes you right back to where you were. This is bad because it can take a while, especially if you have a lot of memory an sometimes confuses things if you close and open too quickly.

Smart sleep gives you the best of both worlds by only switching this behavior on when your batter is below some user defined level.

http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html

This should be the default behaviour! I will be sad if it's not in Snow Leopard.
Please also leave comments on the blog post itself. I'll update the original post with good ideas from the comments (with attribution, of course).
This idea was suggested by the four hour workweek (tim ferriss), that's probably why it's getting a lot of play.

I was thinking of trying it out for myself sometime soon, but I see from the other comments on this thread that it's probably not as much of a slam dunk idea as it sounds.
College Board testing began in 1901, and the first SAT was administered in 1926.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#1901_test
Python not ruby, but the language on top is a minimal piece in their setup: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

This is a really good article that can get you started with this idea. You would have to develop your own solution but a lot of good ideas here.
While your at it, a rss feed for http://news.ycombinator.com/best would be great!
Google Friend Connect Gets Comment Translation
Very nice... I like how it's not too intrusive.
> The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results... you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results...these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That's because a large percent of people (and a HUGE percent of folks who are drawn into the non-profit world) care more about how much they care, and how hard they work, than they do about what they accomplish.

In that world, measuring and comparing two programs against each other are both unacceptable things to do.

There's a reason that "New Math" and "Whole Language Reading" have persisted in the schools for decades, despite their demonstrable failure.

There's a reason that the DARE program is still running decades later, despite the fact that it has no results.

There's a reason that all politicians love Head Start, even though all effects dissipate a few years after the program graduates a child.

There's no profit motive in this world, and there's no mindset of measurement and continuous improvement.

Go read some of Phil Greenspun's posts on how frustrating it is to try to work with non-profits.

They don't want results; they want to build empires, and feel like they are doing something.
Realtime visitors map using GeoRSS
I, for one, am tremendously excited to see kids laying around on a couch and reading.
hello my name is kayleigh, i like to eat pie. that is my opion on nuclear mining
A Laptop, a Child, a Dollar -- And a Promise
So the very first webserver was a NeXT computer. Interesting.
Thanks! I was searching for that post and I didn't remember where it was.
I think a better summary of the article would be, "Cool technology can give you an edge, but doesn't mean anything if you aren't providing profound value to a paying customer."

So often as geeks we look for a problem to solve with the latest technology/language we're fascinated with, rather than looking at our own lives and professional experience and at problems we need solved that might have broad applicability to identifiable, verifiable others regardless of how sexy the guts of that solution are.

Its the classic trap to fall into, and despite all the resources out there telling you not to, more technology startups make this mistake than don't. As geeks, we are drawn to technology, not attuned to market needs. Must learn difference.

Thats how it is for me, anyway, and I think its what the author meant :)
At 650 posts a week, I don't think that feed is highest rated. I've clicked plenty of articles from the feed that are low rated or brand new.

I wish there was a highest rated feed - the default feed is way too noisy.
This won't be much value for graphic designers, but I'm most often asked for help with manipulation of text files.

If you don't know about regular expressions, there are all sorts of problems that are only solvable with great amounts of tedium. There have been a few occasions where sed s/something/or other/g has saved friends of mine hours of avoidable typing, at a cost of a few minutes for me.

Also, I tend to have access to servers with more bandwidth than the average person needs, which has proved useful in the past for short-lived hosting of large files, web demos, and the like.
Technically, my inbox is owned by Google. I just look at it a lot. Kinda like billboards.

Again, the original postings weren't allowed (like spam to my inbox).

There are some who argue that billboards are like noise pollution, but with your visual instead of auditory space. I think that is partially correct, and so I don't mind this kind of corrective action.

Note that this kind of of public art display is exactly what makes NYC a vibrant place to live and other areas really boring. That kind of vibrancy definitely has economic value.
Your description doesn't reveal very much about the project, but if your time estimate is anywhere close, I would personally charge in the ballpark of 25k, and bill 1/3 up front, 1/3 at a midpoint, and 1/3 at the end.

Of course, if they don't want to spend that much money, then it depends on how badly you need the project and you'll need to decide how much you're willing to come down.
Google: a natural monopoly?
Although I must admit that I find the quality of BBC news to be slowly declining (I don't care what Barry from Essex thinks should be done about swine flu, thank you very much), I think the fact that it is directly accountable to the public has a good overall effect on British newscasting - we don't tend to get the vastly exaggerated (or simply false) stories making the leap from tabloid to telly quite so much as seems to be commonplace in predominantly commercial media ecosystems.
So HFCS has nothing to do with it?

HFSC - High Fructose Corn Syrup
And in 1901 black kids were going to "normal" schools and they achieved the same results as white kids?
Just about everyone in the world puts up with boring, repetitive #$()# which they hate with a burning passion but can't do anything about because they don't know how to make a computer do it for them.

You don't have that problem.
Team in Philadelphia aims to build modern, green LEED certified homes for $100k
Taken at face value this only invites the question Why are people eating more? I think a good answer is reduced dietary fat, which sates, and increased starch and sugar intake, which screw up insulin levels leading to regular hunger pangs.
Take a look at Mozenda.com
I was using them for basic scraping, but I read on their site that they have an extension to turn what they scrape directly into and RSS feed.

Hope that helps.
Search Goes Real-Time With Scoopler (YC S08)
Where do the unlimited funds of the "spam-shoppers" come from? Shouldn't they go bankrupt eventually?
Fravia knew RMS personally. Daniel at Wikipedia suggested to contact him for writing a tribute.

Is there someone here who knows RMS?
I am relieved to see that David Brooks has finally gotten off the pro-iraq war bandwagon and is now boosting school programs that teach harlem schoolkids... "how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands."

Sigh. The program actually sounds pretty cool, but I really dislike something about the tone of the article. But yeah, if I was a broke-ass welfare mom in harlem I'd probably try to get my kid sent to this school. It would be a bit like winning the lottery though... hey... why is that?

Neoconservative answer to social injustic: We have this special school that proves we can solve these deep social programs, we just have to get off our butts and do it! Yuppy jobs for all, even black people!

Socialibertarian answer to social injustice: Uh. Are you sure? Why does it keep only working for a tiny minority of the fucked population? Why are things not necessarily getting better? Don't people ultimately have to solve their own problems? And isn't this what you're proposing more of an illusion of that?

If you rely on a team of academics from harvard to boost your solution, your broke ass welfare moms are not... solving... their own problems!
Thanks for the reply! Right, and I don't really want to reveal too much more at the moment. I guess I really just want outright opinions, out of one's a$$ or otherwise. There's nothing abhorrently difficult about the work, there's just a fairly significant amount of it to be done. I'm just wondering how low my peers would go for 250 hours of light-to-moderate difficulty mostly web form and simple database work, integrating with multiple external APIs.
Here's a list of game & "virtual world" companies that got funded in 2008.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/26/second-revision-game-and-v...

Notable in that list from China are 9you and G10. Also from China there is tencent a.k.a. QQ (curious that their company names are all combinations of numbers, letters, and english words) which is not a game per se but they are making a lot of money selling virtual goods.
The news story linked to in the article is worth a read, if you're not familiar with it.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/prosecutors-seek-th...

Even though the jury did not find her guilty of the charges filed against her, they claim there's a legal precedent to sentence her anyway. The argument is that the jury's decision only means that there is "doubt" as to their guilt. But the constitution expressly says that someone has to be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" in order to be convicted (Ammendments V and XIV).

Both the prosecutors in that case and the proponents of this bill are on some very thin legal ice. As good as their explanation of why this bill is necessary to prevent cyber-bullying is, I fail to see the difference between the bill itself and Nazi Germany burning books. Blogging has become one of the most crucial forms of communication in our society.
"There's a reason that "New Math" and "Whole Language Reading" have persisted in the schools for decades, despite their demonstrable failure."

New Math, at least if you are talking about the version espoused by the 1989 NCTM, is currently considered the best practice. And Alfie Kohn debunks the idea that whole language is a failure in his book "The Schools Our Children Deserve."
One thery for the issue with HFSC(?HFCS) is they reduce the body's ability to measure how many calories it has consumed which promotes over eating. The other problem is they tend to be in high calory low nutrition food so people need to still need to eat nutrent food and the "empty callories" don't really help.

PS: While I have never heard much mention of this, I suspect people crave food that contain nutrents they are missing. So hunger is probably a fiarly complex system that might not be all that robust to "new" food types.
Exercise Machine That Does The Same Thing As The ROM Machine Cheaper.
This kind of generalizations aren't entirely correct, because they don't take into account levels of abstractions that exist in our industry.

If you are into OS kernels or compilers, for example, you are at one of the highest levels of abstraction, and you are least dependent of what customers think they might need or are willing to pay. At this level you decide what customers need more often than the other way around.

As opposed to writing a document management system where you are simply enslaved by your customers' immediate needs and of course things like performance or elegance don't matter any more.

(Been in both worlds already. Should I say how much I miss the more abstract world? Sigh.)
What a $275 CPM ad looks like