skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the best reason, in my opinion, is to make it so that a company only has to pay the least amount possible to keep an employee on staff.

its not particularly "fair", but thats how it works. helps improve bottom lines of companies. always at least try to negotiate :)
I'm not sure this makes sense. 1 heavyweight application can easily consume more juice than 10 lightweight ones.
I'm Tim. Just left due to a bad headache, but it was fun. James from Emeryville, you can give me a buzz so that we can organize that 3-people Emeryville meetup. (email: timothee gmail)
Google Appengine SDK Update Released
What percent of the top N (your pick of N and your choice of big-ness metric) websites do you suppose are using predominantly string-eval'd SQL? I don't think it's very many; I'd wager that most big shops are quite happily using SQL, using stored procedures, views, and parameterized queries far more often than using "jam SQL into an nvarchar and execute the resulting string".

SQL may have its warts, but in the world of "I gotta get things done and not sweat data persistence", I think it's pretty wildly, successfully, and fairly universally used, almost like the cockroach of the data center.

When I look out and think about what's going to kill our ability to take orders, scale to new levels of growth, or to have development be efficient at developing new features, SQL the language doesn't make my top 20, and probably doesn't even rise to the level of "all other receiving votes". MS-SQL the database engine probably does make my top 10, but that's only because we're continually chopping away at the items on that list. It does take us a while to train brand-new devs on how to write effective SQL, but it takes us time to train them on how to write C#, how to write good test cases, how to structure code for testability and write unit tests, etc. IOW, it's just one of a laundry list of needs, and a proposed alternative interface would also be something on that list to teach them.
IMHO, your professional background is hindering your ability to understand Capo's target market. You sound like the folks who can't understand why the Mac sells so well when Ubuntu Linux exists.

I go to the occasional bluegrass or folk festival full of beginning and intermediate players. I often feel like the youngest guy in the room, and I'm not that young anymore. A lot of people pick up an instrument after retirement. Many of the old-timers are plenty smart, but they were not raised on software; other musicians are actively technology-phobic. They don't want multitrack software -- they don't need or want all of that functionality. They want something that they can just sit down and use, that has about four buttons that can be pressed with one hand.

Even I want that. When you're trying to play the banjo the last thing you want is to deal with is the cockpit of a 747. Your mind is very busy. Your hands, even more so. I love sound engineering but I can't drive my multitrack software and play at the same time.

And given that the cheapest banjo worth playing costs like $350 new, and a more typical price is $800 to $1000, I wouldn't be surprised if a $39 piece of software doesn't even register on the budget of many musicians. That's just one more instructional book, or video. That said, it's easier to put an expensive piece of software on sale than to raise the price later.
Sequoia uses WSGR for counsel.
Recommendation Systems: Where Are We Now, Where Do We Need To Go?
They're experimenting with a bacon-scented body spray

Now you too can smell like you just got off your shift at McDonald
"It’s worth noting that Intel’s hyperthreading technology allows it to treat one core as two, via software. Hence, Intel says its eight-core chip does the work of a 16-core chip."

That's a little optimistic on Intel's part.
I've been doing some programming with Haskell lately, and what I notice is that almost nothing I write is tail recursive. Why? Because anything that I might write that would be tail recursive uses a combinator (foldX, map, whatever) instead. Only rarely do I write a tail-recursive function, and even for those I'm probably missing some combinator somewhere that could solve my problem.

Python, of course, doesn't use "combinators", but provides loops and iterators and a number of other things that are different, but pretty much just as good. Better some ways, worse others, and that's all you can really ask for from a language since "uniformly better" isn't really on the menu.

The more I learn about functional programming, and modern functional programming in particular, the more this sounds like a gigantic argument over Python not having a compiler optimization that doesn't even make sense for Python anyhow. If you're trying to write a tail recursive function in Python, you've almost certainly passed up a "more Pythonic" solution, which is to say, a solution that is more idiomatic, runs faster, and will make sense to your fellow Python programmers. If you're writing something so painfully functional that you need Python to optimize tail-recursion, it's probably time to get out of Python altogether... it is not a functional language, and while you can dip into old-style functional ("first-order functions", "closures"), it does not and can not do new-style functional ("immutable", "monads", "continuation passing") worth a crap.

Tail recursion is the functional answer to the "private" attribute in OO languages, a language design issue that got falsely enshrined in the paradigm itself as the One True Way to program. It's not. It's a compiler hack, and you don't need it in Python, any more than Python programs come crashing down because they don't have "private" variables. (Yes, I know about double-underscores... all about them. That's why I never use them.) Just as you very nearly don't need tail recursion (directly) in Haskell.

I write fluent Python and Erlang and decent Haskell, and I miss OO in Erlang and Haskell (even a basic purely-functional variant, and yes I know about typeclasses in Haskell and various Erlang hacks, I use some myself; I know how to get it done in the native style) far more often and far more acutely than I miss tail recursion in Python.
Rallying Montreal Entrepreneurs: StartupDrinks next wednesday
I'm always aghast at the cover stories of magazines like SmartMoney where they include a couple's household income.

Salaries are confidential because disclosure of them can damage the company/team dynamic ("Why is she making $5k more than me?!"). It's one of the most private numbers people have.

And if you really want to know what people at a fairly large representative sample of companies make, reference the H1-B database or glassdoor.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570952
Hello $23/month iPhone, meet my normally priced iPhone that has functionality.

I mean this is novel and could have its uses, but most people would want data for the additional $20/100MB and throw in some more for texts, and at that rate you're pretty much at normal prices.
From my experience, numerical algorithms at all complicated in PHP tend to lead to major suckage. We use Thrift (http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/) to send the task to a daemon written in something more reasonable, most often either Python or C depending on required intensity. Works beautifully, few problems. Also, this lets you run the task asynchronously, so you can still return the page in N ms and then load the results on a lag: responsivity means a huge amount to users. Nothing's worse than the script dying from memory limits or timeouts and having the user get nothing (and PHP doesn't do threading).
The Peter Principle lives on
My point is that the queries aren't composable, but the predicates are. Think of predicates as basic operations, and "SELECT * FROM X WHERE predicate" as a functor.

Then "composing" Select(P) with Select(Q) is identical to Select(P "composed with" Q).

Composition works, you just need to think of it the right way.
This is how I feel about farming: you put some seeds in the ground and then several months later, you have a ton of food. What?
I should have not been, but I was startled that this could be done with js alone.
I think that headcount is a (n often) necessary evil in growing a business, but keeping everything else equal and increasing headcount alone actually makes your business less likely to be long-run great, IMO.

Paying additional salaries and benefits and taking on additional management and coordination overhead are all losses/drags on the business, unless the added body brings in far more money than they cost.

Yes, you often need them, but successful large companies often have a lot of people because they have a lot of revenue and profit, rather than having a lot of revenue and profit because they have a lot of people.
The thought that so many people find such novelty in the carcases pigs sickens me. Given the way many pigs are 'farmed' I'd say a more accurate description would be 'Tortureprenuers'. One day, within our lifetimes, this will seem about as funny as slavery or child molestation and the stench of it will never be removed from those who promoted it.
AirBnB is ok until the Craigslist Killer finds the site.
Monty Widenius, MySQL Founder, Forecasts the MySQL Future
The game method sounds like a shady way. If you want to enlist the help of multi-lingual users, why not reach out to them?

"But while MySpace plans and launches its international sites in a more traditional way -- setting up local offices, getting entrenched in the culture and then launching, -- Facebook is building out its foreign language versions with the help of its vast and committed user base. Instead of setting up an office and a staff before launching in new countries, Facebook is putting its audience to work with an online Facebook application that allows translation by the Facebook community. To participate, Facebook users add a Translation Application to their account that they can use to translate, review and vote on translations in their language. Once the language translations are completed and quality has been verified by the community, the Facebook site in the new language is launched for all Facebook users.

Facebook is currently working on 22 more language translations, and many hundreds of users have left suggestions about other languages that they would like to see translated -- and have volunteered to help with the work."

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/16/facebook-vs-myspa...
Ask HN: Why no sense of humor?
Is it just me or is any humor on hacker news down voted right away?
This almost makes me want to invest in some VR goggles and play with different virtual ceiling heights, greenery, etc in different situations.
I've wondered about that as well -- and it is strange to me. Hackers are widely-known for their impish pranks. And even when humor is used in the service of a point, that comment is usually voted down.

I know we don't want the place to turn into Reddit or, worse, Digg, but a little humor actually improves my thought processes and analytical skills.

But every community has its culture. HN is no exception.

To further explore it, in my experience of 15 years in the tech industry or its outskirts, I think a small but vocal minority of tech types are humor-impaired, and that often has an over-large impact on any tech-oriented site.

But who knows? I'm just spouting off ideas.
> How about an RDBMS that exposes a relational algebra api

MonetDB does this, though rather low-level:

http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Documentation...
> 100MB of stuff that must be pulled from the disk

If the 100MB is stored as a contiguous array of bytes, the process would take no more than a few seconds. Other inefficiencies are at work here.

Also: do you ever wonder why the BIOS takes so long to initialize devices? There is no solid, watertight reason for it. It just so happens that most BIOS (esp. extension card ROM) vendors do not give a rat's ass about initialization speed.
I would say that teacher passion is even more important than skill, and both are significantly more important than class size.

But student:teacher ratio is so easy to measure, compare and discuss that it becomes the de facto metric.
No the article's title is how to use an iphone for 23 bucks a month and not how to use an iphone with skype.

Being able to insert a pay-as-you-go SIM card is front and central to the plan here, or you are forced into a full cellphone plan. That implies either the turbo sim card hack or a soft unlock.

Further, insinuating that i have not read the article or neither the link that i have posted is quite annoying. The topic is not easily answered, because with Firmware upgrades by Apple it's a cat-and-mouse game. Over a longer period, the most quoted solution that I have read about is the Turbo SIM hack.

The Turbo SIM card hack was popular with first generation iPhones (and made big press in previous years; I recall the company Bladox from Czech Rep. was featured a lot). That's about when I read up on this topic. Recently though, it stopped working with the Firmware 2.2, which is when this software hack from Yellow Sn0w worked... with 2.2.1 and beyond soft unlock doesn't work anymore, and it's apparently back to turbo sim - see: http://www.edmartechguide.com/2009/03/research-before-you-up...

For further info, from iPhone Hacks, O'Reilly, April 2009:

Hack 47. Unlock Your iPhone with a SIM Hack

---------------

You can use a locked phone on a different carrier with a physical hack to the SIM card.

As mentioned in Section 45, the second method of the anySIM software hack changed the baseband so that any MCC/MNC pair (used to identify a cell network) portion of the phone's IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) would appear to be a valid pair. Even if you can't successfully hack the baseband—for instance, on a 3G iPhone—there is a hardware method for doing the same thing.

As there already existed a large market for unlocking phones prior to the iPhone, many companies were already producing solutions for hacking SIM cards. Bladox, a Czech Republic–based SIM test tool manufacturer, introduced the Turbo-SIM in 2004. This clever device consisted of a thin circuit board shaped like a SIM card, and a tiny microcontroller (Figure 7-8). By cutting a tiny square out of the plastic casing of the SIM card (which did not affect the SIM card's normal functioning), the Turbo-SIM could piggyback the SIM card, intercept its communication with the phone, and mediate between the two to make sure they "agreed."

SIM card sandwich hacks of this nature were some of the most consistently effective for first-generation iPhones, and are currently the only effective solutions for iPhone 3G hacking. As with many hacking solutions, a game of cat-and-mouse has ensued, and many of these SIM piggyback cards ceased to work when firmware 2.2 was released for the iPhone. Because the piggyback SIM has a reprogrammable microcontroller, they can be upgraded with new firmware (with the right programming equipment) to work around new problems.

---------------------
Don't Recycle
I think it's an attempt by companies to hold down costs, but it doesn't work; most people within six months of working anywhere, if they are clever at all (no hacking, other than the social kind) knows what everyone else makes, thus causing even more resentment than just revealing it publicly would.

And having salaries out in the open would have a democratizing effect, which would at first be bad for most companies.

It's easy to see why most companies hide them, as counterproductive behavior is often rewarded, especially if it appeals to our monkey-brain instincts.

If I ever start a company, though (which is likely), all salaries (including my own) will be posted in a public place.
When I had my iPhone 2G on a data plan I was burning through a clean 1GB a month without even trying (the Maps feature is pretty killer)... This plan would not hold up for anyone who wanted to make real use of the data features.
The iPhone and iPod Touch are already better netbooks than most netbooks.
There's a much higher standard here for humor than other sites. Things that are really, truly funny, especially while also being sublimely clever are often modded higher than all surrounding comments.
In all of the browsers I tried (FF3, IE8, Chrome), the timer gave me 4x slower using the MXHR stream on first try. But when I refreshed it was always wildly faster for the MXHR side (and still substantially faster on cache refresh).
Highly recommend Ruhlman's "Ratio":

http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2009/04/ratio-the-simpl.h...

Bread is much simpler than even Bittman is making it out to be.

This book is the kernel hacker's guide of cooking.
Mediasmart: How to Handle a Reporter by a Reporter
An amazingly useful book that reveals how mainstream media (especially, but not only, TV) find sources, and how you (the source) can control reporting about your activities.
I agree with all of this (cooking is my most expensive hobby), but bear in mind that your point is the entire thesis of the Slate article.

If you haven't read it all the way through, I highly recommend it. Something about the way it's written just seemed right for Hacker News.
They scale pretty well, but when you get to gigantic data sets, they don't do so well and things like map reduce do a better job.

I don't think the evidence supports that. See the recent MR vs. parallel DB comparison, for example: http://database.cs.brown.edu/sigmod09/

There isn't a good massively parallel open source SQL implementation right now, but that is just a matter of engineering -- SQL databases have been shown to scale to massive data volumes (e.g. Fox Interactive have ~200 TB of user data in Greenplum, which is a parallel DB based on Postgres).
I try to avoid eating things that come from large capital-intensive factories manned by Chinese peasants.
If she is doing the same work as me, why is she making $5k more than me?

The problem here is unfair payment; by not disclosing salaries, the problem is hidden, but it doesn't go away.
Some law firms operate on the principle of transparency of compensation and transparency in how many billable hours each associate is putting in, and those law firms tend to thrive in very competitive fields of law. Sometimes people do work harder if they all know they are part of the same team, playing by the same rules.
He disses netbooks, saying most have terrible quality, and gives that as a reason why Apple won't make one. To me, that seems very backwards. If the state of the netbook is so horrible, wouldn't an Apple "done-right, just works" netbook be an excellent idea? If the competition is terrible, despite demand being high, then it seems like that's the perfect time to enter the market.
You should read Fog Creek's take on this http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
And the smaller keyboard sizes are actually a big plus for the peitie women of the world (which is a large amount of them in asia).

And the vaio P series shows you can make a fullsized keyboard netbook.
Joel Spolsky answers that question:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
The big draw of netbooks is cheapness, and apple likes avoiding cheapness.
A Brief History of the English Language.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=building-around-the-mind...

One page, printer-friendly version.
Metalink protocol combines traditional and p2p download methods
Take the case of Reddit. Programming reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.

Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.

Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:

"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.

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 than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."

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

It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.

Taken from http://www.diovo.com/2009/04/broken-windows-theory-online-co...
dualism is also the core of the age of enlightenment and scientific philosophy. funny that.
A second life for Biosphere 2
37signals is crossing the line from confident into arrogant hubris. It's understandable. The incentives in the eyeball/clicks world is to be inflammatory. Doesn't mean we should be paying attention.
Judging by how frequently they make the front page, people on HN really, really like to talk about them as well.

Their perspective is intriguing, even if it isn't generalizable.
Humor is anathema to good discussion on sites that use voting models and karma.

It would be a lot different if discussions were flat, or at least where comments weren't judged on a per-comment basis. The problem is that the most humor a voting site allows, the more the top answers get diluted. I was a hardcore Reddit user when it started going downhill; the shift happened after one or two puns/jokes were breakthrough huge successes. After that, everybody tried to get the same success.

I downvote comments that are humorous but don't add to the discussion. I also usually don't upvote useful comments that are humorous. This community is valuable because when somebody posts they're rarely being sarcastic/ironic. You get a lot of people saying things they mean at face value. Humor's downside is that it adds uncertainty to conversations.
how about a 10+ table join on f(any function)?
The thing about slavery/child molestation? They're offenses against human beings. Animals are different.

We can argue about animal rights at some point, sure, but let's have the argument when you're not comparing human pain to animal pain and when you're not making up stupid words like "torturepreneur."
I'm Adam, working on DB2 for IBM, I'm short and had a brown leather bag. My blog is derwiki.tumblr.com, you can find contact info there.
A more accurate analysis is that they dislike low margin markets.
Humor is great, except for when it gets upvoted more than actually constructive comments.

For that, I go to reddit. When I feel even more impish, I hit digg.

Basically, there's a place for humor and there's a place for constructive dialogue. You'd think the two would go hand in hand, but a voting system like HN proves that it's a tough thing to do.