skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like you're picking things which are difficult to deal with no matter the language/framework your application code is written with -- DB replication, cache invalidation, etc.
ORM is not a good abstraction for anything but the trivial case of a table. As soon as you want to do anything actually relational, I have yet to see an ORM layer that comes up with an efficient join.

Microsoft's Linq for SQL generates mostly OK SQL from your code. While not perfect for all complex operations (like multiple joins with aggregations), the SQL isn't horrible. For most use cases though, the SQL seems to be on par with what I would write myself. Ofcourse this is a rather vendor-specific implementation (for Microsoft SQL Server), but there are decent ORMs out there.

The biggest problem really comes when people don't understand what underlying SQL will be required for specific operations and just write code blindly. This can cause things like the famous nested-loops effect instead of efficient joins, but this is solvable trough knowing how to properly use your tool.

That being said ORMs are good at poking at small amounts of data (single or few objects), while SQL is probably the best language there is for huge set-based operations. When you are doing set-based things, not using SQL will most likely be a bad choice.
cool! Any more info on the game you can provide?
#1

Give me a sandbox to try the thing first. I bled some good cash testing my twilio stuff, thinking it wouldn't deduct money if I was calling from my registered phone number. Yeah right. I learned the hard way to sign up for a test account to test it when I used it in a second project.
Economic theory says no such thing. It is true that investment might reduce if taxes are raised if ceteris paribus, but as tax rises either increase revenue or reduce national debt, they are never ceteris paribus.

Imagine we had very low taxes, but the state did not build roads (so transport costs went up), provided only minimal policing (so companies would have to spend more on their own security people) etc., it is far from obvious that it would be good for business in general.

Ireland is increasingly annoying not just the US, but other EU countries, and many others. It is also subject to EU law, and its economy us currently very weak, making more dependent on the rest of the EU.

Incidentally, Warner Chillcot was originally a Northern Irish business (Galen) that changed its name to that of an American company it bought.
Felt this was relevant to the article:
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I'm not sure where they plan on having it manufactured but if they're first time overseas manufacturing virgins, I'm guessing "quailty fade"[1] will hit them like a freight train. If they do go on sale, buy one from the first run.

[1] Quality fade is the odd phenomenon where your first batch of manufactured goods from the asain factory is fantastic. You pop champagne, sell the first couple thousand at a tidy profit and the world's your oyster. Over the next few successive shipments, the quality of the products deteriorates until they barely remain assembled during shipping. The dirty trick was that the factory took a huge loss making that first run out of quality materials but then slowly substituted inferior parts without informing you until it became profitable for them.
Research and Markets: Smart House in the United States 2009
So, in the context of the SSO cookie, could tampering with the encrypted data be prevented by signing the ciphertext (please excuse the terminology if it's not correct)? What I mean by that is, encrypt the cookie's plaintext (e.g. "user=username, role=admin, etc."), and then sign it, so the value stored in cookie is something like <ciphertext>:<signature>?
Er so the ad is up for 21 days but I can get a refund within 90?

"How long will it run for?
21 days, unless you remove it sooner. Job seekers are generally reluctant to apply for older jobs than that because they may already have been filled.

What if I don't find anyone I like?
Thanks to The Fog Creek Promise, there's no risk at all. Just ask us within 90 days and we'll refund your money."
I'm saying that a paragraph that long is uncomfortable to read, given that HN comments span most of the width of the page. It needed to be broken into multiple paragraphs.

Frankly, I'm offended that I got downmodded so much on this. People clearly did not carefully read what I said.
Actually, there is a way you can view the votes by (gender,age-group,etc.) - click on the "Option A vs. Option B" tab right under "Who responded to your question?" Is that what you were looking for? If so, it's our fault for not making it more visible.

Thanks for the heads-up about the mturk job search - we're making tweaks so that those previews show a sample question from now on. Helps keeps the responses more random too.

Thanks for sharing it!
The war in Iraq ended years ago. What we've been doing is /occupying/ - in this case, a self-sacrificial and utterly terrible action.
No - we could easily, totally dismantle NK's nuclear capability using aerial bombing. It's literally that easy.
Gulf War? Civil War (from the Union side)? Lots of US wars have been straightforward and successful. And an attack on NK would not even qualify as a "war".
Aircraft have floating, jettisonable radio beacons (Emergency Locator Transmitters) that transmit on the international guard frequency 121.5MHz (with intentional harmonic distortion that allow reception on the military guard frequency of 243MHz). That frequency is monitored by SARSAT (Search and Rescue Satellite) in North America -- the middle of the South Atlantic may not be monitored, since the automated search notifications would not necessarily reach anyone able to do much about it. Local air control stations will attempt to determine the position, but ultimately it's usually someone with a portable directional receiver that pinpoints the actual source of the signal. (Occasionally a unit will begin transmission due to mishandling or malfunction, and I spent far too much of my time in the air force trying to sort through ejection seat packs and spare ELTs to find an overambitious backup gone wrong.) ELTs are also normally located on any floatation rafts the aircraft may be carrying.

The aircraft itself will also carry an underwater acoustic beacon (pinging at about 40KHz) or two so that underwater wreckage can be located once the general area has been established by the ELT that should have been jettisoned on impact. Both items (the ELT and the UAB) have limited battery life -- they pump out huge signals relative to their size. By convention, the UAB is located in the same general area as the FDR and CVR longitudinally.

In the case of the Air France flight incident, it would seem that the ELT did not work or was at a significant distance from the crash site by the time the search reached the position. That the black boxes (the FDR and CVR) are expected to be recoverable at this point seems to indicate that the UAB did work (it would have been detected by a sonobuoy dropped by the search airplane, which looked to me like it was equipped with anti-submarine warfare equipment, judging by the MAD boom on the tail).
"Companies should pay tax in their home country on the profits of overseas subsidiaries."

That creates an incentive for companies to move their headquarters to the most low-tax, business-friendly country. Moreover, companies already benefit society by employing the majority of people. I don't see any moral reason why they should pay taxes at all, and I don't see what companies owe to the countries they're located in.

What you may regard as tax cheat, I regard as acting on one's self interest.
In my experience there are two sources of problems with Relational databases. They are either designed by Programmers or they are designed by DBAs. They both make a complete and utter mess of the task almost every time.

Programmers design databases to make their programs simpler and DBAs seem to design databases to make programming near impossible.

The most amazing thing is that Relational databases are simple things to understand and design - when you understand the data. That is probably where the trouble lies - neither of my two design groups understand the data - they both have entirely different agendas.

To get to the point - Relational Databases are fantasticly flexible high performance tools - it is just that so many examples of poorly designed databases abound that people get the idea that they are a less than ideal tool.
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Thanks Lukas, I plan on being there. Looking forward to meeting up - you guys are doing some awesome things with MTurk.
true, but expensive customer service. Slicehost does a great job w/o charging by the hour, etc.
It's hard to read this as anything but "Touch my money and the workers get it in the neck."

Ballmer never was the subtle one. Getting into a public pissing match with a president who has shown a certain willingness to take decisive action in matters relating to ensuring that the money keeps moving, may not be the wisest move.
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Yeah, we all know how effective the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was. The USAF cannot blow up hardened bunkers deep underground. You need boots on the ground to get the job done. And U.S. soldiers and marines would be brutally punished by the North Koreans as soon as they set foot on NK territory. You could count on thousands and thousands of flag-draped zinc caskets. Better keep negotiating until the only option left is the military one.
Here in California, we have very high taxes, and the state does not build roads, and provides only minimal policing.
StackOverflow Podcast 56 - Spolsky, Atwood, and Calacanis
To show how committed you are, why don't you volunteer for that attack!? If you talk the talk, you must be willing to walk the walk...
Right. What's so "Er" about that? Maybe you don't notice that you hired an ax murderer until the third month.
Far too many people are confusing problems with SQL with problems with the relational model.

SQL != relational database
What's so sacred about the browser as we know it? People want to use web apps. Why not make it convenient for them?
What will Obama do? Kill Microsoft in response? Ballmer has to serve the Microsoft shareholders, not the American people. Obama has to serve the American people, not the shareholders.

Let us face it, the president and other members of government are, in many ways, a bunch of puppets. They shape the policies and create the incentives, but they can't force business to do what they want. Unless we turn into a totalitarian state.
That's interesting, I was under the impression that pensions were an agreement between the company's management and the union. But it seems you're saying the company had no say in the matter? I know I've never had a pension anywhere I worked. Please explain.
Panda 3D was used to make one Disney MMO at least. And that one's free!
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Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?
Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field.

The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one developed for Eve Online, which I believe is profitable but has only about $300k players. Mind you, with that number it's insanely complex already. I had to stop playing, because to do so well requires the same level of commitment as a full time job.
"You can spend hours at a coffee shop polling 50 random people or bug everyone you know, but you'll be getting a skewed population"

Not to rain on your impressive parade, but I'd consider the type of person that wants or needs to use MTurk to be a pretty skewed population too, just in a different way.

Not saying it's not valuable, it may well be, and certainly more honest than asking friends - but I would expect a fairly low-income or bored-teen demographic.

Actually, an interesting meta-survey might be to survey the MTurk population itself, see what they think, their incomes, political beliefs etc; might be an interesting use of this very service.

But enough nit-picking - congratulations on a great idea, swiftly executed.
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Ron Conway To Focus On Real Time Data Startups: 40-50 New Investments
Actually, my current employment does relate to maintaining U.S. air superiority, though I'm a civillian computer science guy.

I would enjoy being a military pilot, and if I were, I'd volunteer for this mission.
This comment right here merits the removal of "mediocre" from the story title.

P.S., Joel, apparently you hired one of my friends as a summer intern. This guy is smart, earnest, and great to be around. What a good catch. I'm gonna try to finagle a Fog Creek visit through him ;)
It's not necessary to destroy all deep bunkers to effectively dismantle NK's nuclear weapons program.

I would be stronlgy opposed to a ground invasion. Your post appeals to the straw man fallacy by implying that I support a position I do not.
survey the MTurk population itself

a few people have done this already

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica...

http://waxy.org/2008/11/the_faces_of_mechanical_turk/
Useful tool. While waiting for results, a progress bar would definitely be more useful in terms of feedback than the spinning logo.
USAF pilots have it easy. Until they're shot down over enemy territory, that is...

I know nothing about NK's nuclear capabilities, but I doubt a few well-place JDAMS would do the job. Bombing nuclear facilities is not trivial. Israel did it successfully once, though.

A pre-emptive attack on NK could be a great idea, or it could be a disaster. There are thousands of U.S. soldiers in South Korea. An attack on NK would give them the motive they want to attack SK. I don't know if you've read about NK's elite troops. Those guys are savages... cold-blooded killers... they would eat U.S. Army babies for lunch if the combat took place on the ground.
Its the scope of MMO's thats the problem. Building a massive game world, with massive networking requirements is very hard.
well .. not too intuitive .. and also too much info needs to be given.
Why not use an open source one? I saw a Google tech talk by Keith Fulton, one of the main architects of PlaneShift. He said that although the engine is GPLed, the characters, rules, scenery, etc. are all separate from the main project and can be scripted. So if someone wanted to, they could improve the GPL engine while creating proprietary art and storyline that could then be marketed.
> schlepping around large data structures in message-passing can be a performance problem,

Not really, it is not too hard to implement it locally as passing pointers around.
The point I am trying to make is simple: bombing a country is an act of war. If you start a war, you must be ready to face the consequences, including using ground forces to supplement the air raids. NK can't send bombers to attack the U.S. but they can cross the border and engage U.S. forces in SK. This would have to be carefully thought out... I don't have the intel to assess whether an attack on NK would be effective or not, and fortunately I don't have the power to send thousands of kids in harm's way.
No. It's not just the dev team, it's the players. They think they own the dev team.

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
http://www.themis-group.com/uploads/Pitfalls%20of%20Virtual%...
http://eternal-lands.blogspot.com/2008/03/mmorpgs-economy.ht...
http://eternal-lands.blogspot.com/2008/03/mmorpgs-economy-pa...
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.ph...

The canonical book is Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds. The first essay is from him, and a classic known by all MMO developers. The next three are an academic essay by Bartle on virtual economies, and a two-part essay by Radu Privantu on the day-to-day practicalities. The last is also by Privantu, a ~5000 word post mortem on the genesis, growth and maturity of Eternal Lands, a simple but moderately successful fantasy MUD.

There's about a full day's worth of reading here (or two if you read it carefully), but it will pay for itself many times over if you are ever thinking seriously of starting or joining the dev team of an MMO.

Many of the lessons therein could easily be extrapolated to other online contexts, especially those built around a persistent social model.
I don't think that a hosting company that monitors their servers deserves this much credit. I have a few co-located boxes for personal projects and, even though the services they run aren't that critical, I still monitor them using Nagios. It's not hard and it should be something that every systems administrator sets up as a matter of course.

I do, however, agree that 20 minutes down-time for a hardware failure is impressive. I wonder if they just yanked the disks from one box and jammed them in a spare?
The use of the term "mafia" here is really distracting from the main point.
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Hack the planet.

I feel so unclean for saying that.
yeah I think the standard answer is "don't store credentials i the cookie". session key only and central session storage.
I used it to compare televisions (I'm thinking about buying one) and it was surprisingly useful. It definitely reduces a lot of the noise around doing side-by-side comparisons of multiple products. The data was VERY complete, I am impressed.
I'd say the iPhone is the mother of all demos. But wave was quite cool.
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This is not to say Redis is better or MongoDB is better, it's just a different point of view

Sure. I didn't mean to imply any criticism, or imply that you were criticizing. I, personally, haven't figured out when/where to use a document database like Mongo or Couch, but I figure they must be a good fit for someone's use case or people wouldn't be making them.

The thing that I have trouble with is that in every presentation or discussion I've seen of these alternative databases the people presenting them never seem to have an understanding of what a relational database is. And because the language in these presentations is always so obfuscated (to me) I'm never able to get a clear idea of what exactly they do and where they stand in relation to a relational DBMS (by which I mean the platonic ideal of a relational DBMS, not SQL).

Redis is interesting to me because it's unlike the others. And because of the way it's unlike the others. It has data structures with operations. In other words it's a DBMS, or "structure server" in your terminology.

At its core a relational DBMS is just a "structure server" with one kind of data structure, called a relation, and operations on that structure. And that's all it is really. Others probably disagree but I think even a query language is optional. The query language is just the UI.

SQL confuses everything. A SQL DBMS is a relational DBMS (almost) plus a boatload of additional functionality. I see your point about how Mongo is like SQL because it has named values and queries, but it doesn't have relations or relational operators.

In summary: Mongo may have some SQL like features, but they aren't relational features. The set features of Redis on the other hand are getting close to the building blocks of the core of an actual relational DBMS.
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yeah, I'd like MS to move in China permanently. let see how many copy of windows they will sell there.
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Palm Pre review: AP thinks it beats the iPhone
imo the app store is a great differentiator for the iPhone.
This will make it very difficult for other phones to beat it (at least in the near-term)
Because wolfram alpha was a launch. Bing was a re-branding. So Bing gets all the traffic that MS already had, while trying to carve out a little more of the rest of the pie. Thus, you should expect to see different launch patterns.
Paid advertisement? I've been to a number of VPS hosters that do just that and much more - ServInt, Knownhost, liquidweb etc - and they have better plans too.
I believe the TV ads started today (Wednesday), so would not explain the entirety of the graph.
I don't really get it, is it
1) C language that gets translated into other languages ?
2) A C compiler optimized for the high level languages mentioned ?
3) Something else ?
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Cool. I like it.
Anyone on a budget or looking for a quick, cheap answer. Small businesses and entrepreneurs like ourselves were the initial target.
It translates C into another high level language.

In terms of actual practical value, it may be useful to allow the use of code written for one system to run on another, much more restricted system. For example, using clue you could use off-the-shelf encryption systems like gpg to work inside a web browser.
It's a C compiler that targets (generates code written in) higher level languages.

Usually, C compilers target machine code for a particular processor architecture. gcc, for instance, can 'generate code written in' x86 machine code.
It compiles C programs to perl or to Lua or to Java or to Lisp.

The author seems to hope that improvements in JIT technology will finally make the JIT-compiled translated programs faster than the original C program. That sounds optimistic to me, but I see two areas where this may be of use:

1. Portable execution of C code in a sand box on a web client -- just like Google Native Client, the provider of a program needs to change its build process, but the security of the VM is easier to check.

2. Checking that what you've written is ANSI/ISO C and not just, say, C for gcc on little-endian 32-bit x86 machines.
I don't see the similarity at all. Wolfram Alpha gives you detailed information about one thing. Google Squared gives you general info on a things in a category.
Yeah, we initially built it a few months ago to solve a need we had internally. Didn't see any easy way to do simple A/B testing so we decided to build it since we figured it might be useful to other people too. Haven't done much marketing for it yet, but glad to hear there's interest for it. Some awesome feedback here too.
I wasn't this lucky. My slice was once down for 12 hours or so and nobody told me...
If you can request a refund after your ad has run its term, doesn't that mean the service is free?

What's the incentive to not request a refund on day 22? (Besides being a tremendous douche.)