skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you thought about the latency increase inherent in moving your database across the city or state or country? You may be surprised by how large an impact this can have on overall application performance.

YC company FathomDB (http://fathomdb.com) set off on this path and have/had some interesting ideas about caching and such. I think they settled down to specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and low-latency. The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve. I believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar dragons. I don't know their names off-hand. But, databases are an obviously large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the problem as we speak.

Why are you looking to outsource? You might consider just outsourcing the backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well-understood and has lots of providers.
Comment I left over at the article:

I began using Paypal right when they launched, when it was an application for beaming payments over the IR ports of Palm Pilots (remember that?!).

I continued to use Paypal after they migrated to web payments and discontinued the Palm support.

About four or five years ago I became hugely disillusioned with Paypal and never use it, and refuse to support it at my two ecommerce companies.

Why?

As a customer:

* Supporting Paypal is a signaling mechanism. It says "I am too rinky dink to get a merchant account".

* The dispute resolution process drags a third party in.

* The account can be frozen.

* The appeals process is laborious and indeterminate.

* There are too many steps at checkout.

* Paypal wants to force me to upgrade to a full verified account. I have to supply too much information. I have to wait for 2 deposits to clear, then report their sizes.

* Even for the 1-off "act as a merchant account" process flow, if I try to use a credit card that has previously been registered with Paypal as a full account, Paypal will NOT LET ME do the one-off transaction; I have to come up with a (long forgotten) password to the Paypal account.

* There are about 50 more user-interface horrors that I don't recall right now, but I would seriously (seriously!) hit my fingers with a framing hammer before I would use Paypal again. I don't have emotional reactions to most brands. Apple? Eh. Windows? Sort of dislike it. Amazon? Sort of like it. ... Paypal? HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE.

As a merchant (http://Smartflix.com and http://HeavyInk.com), I won't use Paypal because

* all of the above

* crappy admin interface

* crappy interface to delegate rights to other employees

* fear of having funds frozen

* inability to re-charge a credit card for follow in transactions (unreturned DVDs, late fees, etc.)

I wish Paypal nothing but death.

---
Travis Corcoran, President
http://SmartFlix.com
"What do you want to learn today?"
ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Business Value Study
what type of data are you storing and what type of application is retrieving it? i would imagine the latency between your network and the sql provider's would hurt performance badly.

most web hosting providers can give you a sql database but in those instances it works well because your website is probably running on the same local network as their sql server.
Sending large datasets to Amazon? Use the Post Office
I know I didn't grow up in the US, but horrible, horrible socialist Europe. As a result of this I'm obviously retarded and I can't possibly imagine paying a tax as measly low as 10% no matter what income I would have. How on earth would you be able to fund anything in society if people don't pay their freaking taxes?

Right now I'm making somewhat less than $100k, which I consider absolutely decent, and I'm very much fine with paying 40% taxes. How about that?

Anyway. I fail to see how this newsitem in particular relates to hacker news. Anyone care to enlighten me?
errr... Mornington Crescent.
Indeed. (I mentioned Fortran in one of my replies above.) As far as I know, Fortran isn't used much for new development projects, though; I hear more about using the C interfaces to LAPACK or whatnot even in very crunchy (e.g. genome) apps. Far from a complete survey, I could be wrong. :)
It depends what platform she wants to develop her solution for.

If she's doing web based development I'd suggest Javascript. Javascript has a lot of superflous non-sense in it but if you learn it the right way it's a very powerfult language. More importantly if she wants to develop web applications that do a lot of math calculations she's probably better off learning a browser based technology (so the burden for all those calcs won't be on the server)

Anyway, I'd suggest Javascript: The Good Parts as a book to start with if she goes that way.

If she's doing desktop apps I'd probably suggest learning Actionscript and Adobe AIR (which provides the most cross-platform bang for the buck)
she wants to use her maths/physics knowledge towards creating industrial/scientific applications.

The functional programmer in me is really happy that so many people are saying "Haskell!" but based on my own experience in applied physics, it's a terrible idea.

Programming in the sciences is all about numerics. That means giant fiddly matrix manipulation libraries, adaptive conditioning, stability bounding, and adjustments for the phase of the moon.

There's a pretty simple reason for all the gobbledygook. Often, the entire solution to a given problem is expressed as one giant matrix equation (i.e. y = Ax), because that's an easy format for a big computer to chew on. The trouble is, there are lots of possible ways such computations can return a result that looks right but is actually completely buggered. Finite precision floating-point numbers is one, but there are others. And since inverting one giant matrix is pretty much the only thing* that happens in a computation, you don't have a lot of debugging options when something goes wrong. So boutique languages like Haskell won't be all that useful except for prototyping because nobody else will trust the numbers you produce.

There really aren't that many mainstream choices. Matlab is the all-singing, all-dancing prototyping tool that you must know if you want to have any dealings with scientists. Matlab can compile its code to C or Fortran (I'm pretty sure, anyway), which are your two other choices.
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Additionally, python is also becoming fairly widely used in industrial/scientific applications. In terms of scientific libraries, it's only slightly more inconvenient than C or Fortran. The FFI is reasonable too.
I don't know if I agree. Getting around in C++ depends on having not just a sharp mind, but a fairly broad knowledge of computer science concepts. Java is quite similar, requiring a familiarity with many (OO-centric) CS ideas. For a novice to programming but an expert in analytical thinking, I would suggest a more forgiving language, at least to begin with.
In my opinion, it shows the absurdity of tax competition among states, not of tax hikes themselves.
Business lessons from The Wire
What applies to states does not necessarily apply to countries. It's easy to re-incorporate in another state; there are a number of small businesses that have nothing to do with Delaware other than being incorporated there for the benefits (tax and otherwise) involved. Relocating to another country is orders of magnitude harder.

Where are these pissed-off millionaires going to go? France? Sweden?

If you use a country's infrastructure, defense, and social services (which prevent the poor from rising up and killing you) you ought to pay for them.
We're looking at outsourcing a few of our non-secure applications because management is unpredictable. They will, without any warning, just decide they need to give x group of employees a computer and we'll have to add 20 computers to the network within the next week or so. Given that volatility we need to be able to scale quickly on the server side. That's led us to EC2 but we need a database for all those instances to pull off of.

Oh, and thanks for the suggestion :)
Personally I tend to prefer multi-process over multi-threads. I like my IPC to be a bit more explicit. It seems cleaner, better defined and easier to distribute across boxes. Sure it's a slight performance degradation, but you can always use shared memory if they are on the same machine.

This seems like the kind of bug that wouldn't hit until production ramped up and it would be a time suck to find/fix.
The Life and Death of Congressional Bills, Visualized
Read the article. It is talking about the state tax in Maryland, which is on top of federal income taxes.
We're doing this specifically to test but I don't see latency being a serious issue. The apps only pull text of about 1k at any given time and we have a 40Mbps connection so assuming we find a service in the U.S. I can't see it being a problem.
Thanks for the tip, not quite what I had in mind but looks pretty useful.
Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All (2005)
Because it is a book?

early 14c., from Anglo-L. biblia, from M.L./L.L. biblia (neuter plural interpreted as fem. sing.), in phrase biblia sacra "holy books," from Gk. ta biblia to hagia "the holy books," from biblion "paper, scroll," the ordinary word for "book," originally a dim. of byblos "Egyptian papyrus," possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The port's name is a Gk. corruption of Phoenician Gebhal (modern Jbeil, Lebanon), said to mean lit. "frontier town" (cf. Heb. gebhul "frontier, boundary," Arabic jabal "mountain"). The Christian scripture was refered to in Gk. as Ta Biblia as early as c.223. Bible replaced O.E. biblioðece "the Scriptures," from Gk. bibliotheke, lit. "book-repository" (from biblion + theke "case, chest, sheath"), used of the Bible by Jerome and the common L. word for it until Biblia began to displace it 9c. Figurative sense of "any authoritative book" is from 1804. Bible Belt first attested 1926, reputedly coined by H.L. Mencken.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Bible
: WASHER ( -- ) WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;

http://www.forth.com/embedded/swiftx-embedded-systems-7.html

It's in the tutorial. :-)
One step I used to help lower my stress level and fight burnout was this:

Never check statistics and analytics outside of the office.

I used to be a mouse slapping that cocaine-delivery-bar in my cage: I'd get up from my reading chair every 15 minutes in the evening to click "refresh" in my browser.

Good stats? On top of the world!

Bad stats? Obsess, dwell, worry, calculate.

There's time for that - do it in the office.

If I'm already putting in a 10-12 hour day, there's no need to take that crap home.
I believe the US system has Federal taxes as well as state taxes. So the top tax-rate is much higher than 10% - but that 10% is all the state gets out of it
Nokia Ovi Store Launch Is A Complete Disaster
When 1.3 Billion People Are Too Many
Many memebers are devotees of Ayn Rand writings, in one of which the rich go hiding underground after the government goes after them and then society crumbles (because, you see, the rich are the pinnacle of humanity). They are thus, trying to draw parallels between that highly fictitious wold and ours. Of course, this isn't the case at all, since if was the federal tax and not state tax that was raised the rich would just stay put and pay up.
They are non-overlapping memory areas: "Note that in our case the source and destination memcpy() regions are completely disjoint." (2nd para)

And the array is not left in an inconsistent state. They are doing the equivalent of

memcpy (a, b, n);
memcpy (b, a, n);

and a different thread running at the same time observes incorrect data in the supposedly unaltered `b[]` during the second memcpy.
Publishing profitably rather than just publishing
Although it seems to be the same page, this URL would have been less confusing: https://bespin.mozilla.com/

This page is more informative: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/bespin/
Preventing Skynet: just say “no” to genocidal artificial intelligence
A summary based on what I've read elsewhere:

rtmpdump is a stream recorder that can save videos streamed by Adobe Flash's RTMP protocol

Adobe has a more "secure" version of that called RTMPE

surprise! it's not really secure. Analysis: http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt

Quote: "the Adobe RTMPE algorithm tries to provide end-to-end
secrecy in exactly the same way that SSL provides end-to-end secrecy,
but the algorithm is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, provides no
security, relies on publicly obtainable information and the algorithm
itself to obfuscate the content, and uses no authentication of any kind."

So the DMCA anti-circumvention provision makes this software illegal in the US, even though the "protection" that has been circumvented is laughable.

Apparently that could be a basis for a challenge, i.e. nothing has been circumvented as there is no protection there in the first place.

(Odd note: the examples of content that could be infringed are shows on a British channel. As far as I'm aware this software is legal in the UK)
His concern is valid, and while I think that we should never go back to C++ by breaking memory safety, he makes a good point. His languages are not expressive enough to allow the programmer to do what he wants.

More languages maybe should have value types, like C#. Maybe they also should have linear types and/or uniqueness types.

Lots of mechanisms exist to enable aggressive (and scalable) memory management. There is no reason why we should just accept the current state of the art.
How does TipJoy compared to Paypal in terms of ease of use, transparency, APIs etc?
Ask HN: Which persistent in-memory database to use?
My particular task involves a lot of (>100 per sec or perhaps >1000 per sec) reads/writes to the database. Though I haven't tested, but I doubt the db I am using (MySQL with MyISAM as storage engine) would scale to that level without a lot of additional resources (slaves, memory, faster disks).

So I was considering replacing it with a (distributed) memory based key-value or normal RDBMS. The problem is that I want data to be persistent and be able to dump least used data to disk periodically. Ideally it would be like memcache, except instead of deleting expired keys-values, it would dump them to a persistent database.

I have explored Memcache, Memcachedb, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, in-memory SQLlite and some other solutions but none is close to what I have in mind. Can anybody can suggest a solution? Perhaps tweaking settings of existing solutions would do the job?

PS: I am using PHP as the language, but practically any language would do if I get what I am looking for.
Emergency Radios - Motorola CP200 | Amerizon Wireless
Davis Law Firm is a Bankruptcy Law Firm that is offering free consultations for chapter 7 or chapter 13 consumer cases to help those with financial difficulties with foreclosure, credit card debt, repossession, IRS problems and other TAX problems
I agree with David Mathers. I believe that time has given you enough perspective to put you more than one level above Solomon.

Its poetry is enough reason for me to see it in the Bible, and it reminds us that fame and money themselves are useless.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/level-above.html
I did reread the article, but not knowing Maryland and not knowing the US tax system I can't say how much of a increase this really was.

All the article says is "raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%". It says nothing about what it was so I'm kinda short on data.

Anyway: If you have a million dollar income, the loss of 6.25% of that would be 100% insignificant to your experienced wealth. Because seriously, you are making a million dollars.
Simple predictor of supreme court cases: which side is asked more questions
“Super-recognizers” have an uncanny ability to recognize and remember faces
I think I've read this before when Zed was "so fucking awesome". Is his whole "dropping the persona" gig just a way to get more mileage out of old articles?
Setting up and keeping up an LLC is a bit of a pain in the neck. Also working out how to pay yourself, keeping accounts separate, and so on takes extra time.

One benefit of an LLC might be a somewhat more professional image (for some customers anyway). Also, my guess is that corporate customers may not want to do business with you unless you're an LLC (though I wouldn't know for sure as I have no corporate customers).

Anyone here go from having your own LLC to dissolving it and going sole proprietership?
You might be right.

I also think Austrians especially have no idea how good they've got it. They think the US is different because if you just take trips to NYC or other major destinations, you don't get a feel for it.

I'm grateful for what it's like to live in Austria. Typically at least once a day, something will remind me of how much better it is here.

I don't even care about the taxes.
"- Paris reminded me in a lot of ways of a significantly more laid-back New York."

Probably the most striking thing for me is the difference in cafe culture. In the urban US, cafes are filled with professors and grad students, telecommuters, realtors and programmers working on their computers or on paper, while in Paris (and most of europe) they are filled with people just hanging out. I actually feel uncomfortable working at cafes in France, similar to how I felt in the late 90s and early naughts in US coffee shops, often being the only person with a laptop before wifi took off.

"- The food was great but it's difficult to find ethnic food in many parts of the city."

Strangely, Nantes and Bordeaux have a more noticeable diversity of restaurants than Paris, from what I've seen. The two are actually better in this regard than anywhere but a handful of neighborhoods in the US, although there is still a much stronger emphasis on meat than in the US.
So despite the fact that single motherhood has no apparent effect on happiness[1], his solution to the "happiness gap" is instituting a social stigma against sex, to prevent single motherhood.

[1] > A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.
Did you follow the palliative treatment? Did it solve your problem?
Great advice. I especially like establishing the guiding principles early on.
Transferring money from your bank to your PayPal account takes a long time

That's the banks' fault. They still take their sweet time clearing checks, and screw customers over in other ways so it's not surprising that it takes a long time to transfer cash from them
Thinks she have som objectives with programming.

I'd download the java tutorials with full source, buy Core Java to her, Install a pretty minimal version of Eclipse nicely set up with the workspace for eclipse osculating the java tutorials source and Core Java source, give her a bookmark to javadocs, java tutorials - big index, java ranch, and just let her go.

She should be able to learn that with a minimum of assistance, and have fun too.
The only alternative which can be more fun and rewarding
would be Visual Basic I think. So java is it for obvious reasons.
And don't forget numpy/scipy for numerical computation and nodebox for plotting (http://www.nodebox.net) which are extremely convenient libraries.
OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More
It's a very old post.
stats of what?
That wouldn't be burn out (the mind has a full tank, but can't start it's engine), that would be stress or fatigue (the mind is out of fuel).
Totally undermines his own point with this quote: "No doubt the majority of that loss in millionaire filings results from the recession".

I'm laughing at the thought of "millionaires" that went to all the trouble of moving to another state only to find that they weren't worth that much anymore and the cost of relocating outweighed the unexpectedly low tax benefits.
Yahoo, Twitter, Google talk BOSS [video]
This is a (probable) re-submission of an older article of his.
I read this in 2005.
I don't know whether geekcorps is still active, however, you should be more lucky with the Lion's Club International, which organizes similar projects : http://www.lionsclubs.org/
Things You Don’t Need to Do In the Clouds
How many reads and writes? MySQL is adequate if it's 1 write and 1000 reads.

Or you could look at Oracle Coherence/TimesTen or [kx] http://kx.com/.
I've been keeping an eye on this for a while now. Unfortunately, it's still too buggy.
I've looked it up. The picture I remember was in Leo Brodie's Starting Forth:

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html
Microsoft and the great netbook price-fixing scam of 2009
I'm the author; thanks for reading and let me address it "go[ing] a bit far."

In the context of Hacker News readers (presumably startups looking for funding and with employees) there are many good reasons for setting up an LLC, including limiting liability if one of those employees gets sued, and limited contractual liability. However, the point I was getting at is that the LLC doesn't totally shield you from liability, a misconception that has brought a lot of trouble to people who played fast and loose with their conduct and ended up staring down the barrel of potential personal liability.

The core point is: don't try to "dodge" liability. Instead, take steps to reduce the likelihood of causing harm and get a good insurance policy.
10 Free Screencast Creation Programs
Michael Meloan (mdmeloan@aol.com) has published fiction in Buzz Magazine, LA Weekly, Chic, and Caffeine. He has also written for Joe Frank's National Public Radio show.

Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ask HN: How do you prefer to run background jobs for a website/service?
Just about any sizable web-available service generally needs to run background jobs. This almost always includes some interaction with inbound or outbound mail services which tend to be slow (even with my man Exim on the case). Kinda curious what solutions HN readers prefer for handling this. E.g. a lot of Rubyists use BackgrounDRb, but I prefer my little Looper.rb.
In the UK, the National Health Service pays doctors a flat fee per patient, so doctors have a powerful incentive not to provide treatment. On international measurements of how healthy the population is, the UK scores about as well as the US does (i.e., pretty mediocre for a First World country)--but the UK spends only 40% as much as the US does for health care.
I've been using PayPal for several transactions a month since 2002 with no problems. They did temporarily hold my account when I went over a certain limit, due to EU money laundering laws, but once I proved my ID, etc, it was back up and running.

It's quick, easy, convenient and they're the only company I'm aware of that makes it easy to pass money around from place to place internationally. (That is, there are many local services, but as a Brit who does 80%+ of billing in US dollars, it's pretty much unbeatable.)