skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair to the noSQL guys, the technologies that drive the alternatives are very, very young. People are just starting to play with it. There's no reason to think that techniques for performing more traditional sql-style queries on distributed data won't quickly surpass it.

And as far as a lookup occuring in log(n) time, imagine a broadcast "hey everyone, row associated with 1030923". Each node checks its bounds (in parallel) and then, if it exists w/i those bounds, does a log(n) search. That's pretty reasonable.

In short, my prediction is that these things will grow way outside of key-value pairs and into a complete solution that scales very well (and is _incredibly_ redundant).
"... with a fairly high amount of certainty that it's not going to change the behaviour."

Enough certainty that you won't want to test it?
Except for python, of course:

http://www.google.com/search?q=python+ninja

http://www.google.com/search?q=python+rockstar
The point in your second paragraph was the point I was trying to make :)
Strange Cellphone Behavior
I think the key insight in all this is that the same database you store your objects in... shouldn't be the same one you write reports from. You can have two. One object store for your application, and another analytic DB for your reports.

The complaints about SQL is that is optimized for report writing, not application development. Fine, so split that out.

Which is happening. Which is working.
Furthermore, there's lore about the "reality distortion field" around Steve Jobs. People would suggest ideas to him, he'd ridicule the ideas, and then a week later suggest them as his own.
Great idea but all I can think of is the room for abuse for criminals. Easy to break into cars in pitch black.
You might be better served doing this on the Digital Point forums or Flippa.com.
New Linux patch could circumvent Microsoft's FAT patents
Dev stays without pay to finish Mac Graphing Calculator as skunkworks project
Sudoku Game in JavaScript and RightJS
reminds me of a certain hub, that uses git.
Ask HN:How do you become a really good web designer?
Hello all.

This question is especially for those who are professional web designers.

I am trying to improve my web design skills, and while I know basic HTML and CSS, I just am not very good at design. I do believe though that I have some artistic talent based on the fact that I used to paint and sketch quite a bit until a few years ago.

So, my question: how can I systematically improve my web-design skills? Specifically,

- What are the tools of the trade that you use?

- What are the component sub-skills I must master?

- What are the canonical books that deal with web design topics?

- Anything else that I've missed?

Many thanks in advance!

- Arun
Soren Johnson on Asynchronicity in Games
Not quite! My point was meant to be what happens when (if?) that certainty reaches 100%?
The safe refactorings included in IDEs have a far higher bar of safety than mere testing; if the code is syntactically correct and there are no escapes from the static type system used (such as reflection), then the refactorings are proven to be correct, no testing needed.
I agree, the article is really sloppy, a typical piece of journalism I would say.

I just want to add that column stores are not in any way anti SQL. They don't change the data model at all. They're just a different implementation of the relational model, more suitable for analytics than row stores. For OLTP apps they're bad. Reconstructing one row isn't necessarily expensive (as column stores don't just store individual columns), but writing one row is expensive.
Ipod cases
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This language is pretty fascinating, I like its concepts quite a bit...maybe someone needs to write Cauldron, Potion's agile web framework ? :P
To make the subtlety more clear -- I think that over-confidence could have three slightly divergent definitions:

- Too much confidence to accurately predict personal outcomes

- So much of the first that it becomes harmful

- So much of the first that it deviates significantly from the norm

As I recall, most people fall into the first, and I presume the article is suggesting that entrepreneurs are the third.
Me too.. Completely lost.
A SVN Branching Strategy that works
> And in the meanwhile SQL is just sooo convenient and easy to develop on.

No, it isn't, it's a pain in the ass because it doesn't match how applications are programmed. I know SQL pretty damn well, and I know how to tune a database very well, and SQL still sucks.
Jobs in Mumbai
A job search engine which aggregates jobs from various job portals and corporate websites to show them all on just one website.
Python performance is a fool's errand
There are potentially two problems:

Your database's query optimizer sucks, or

The overhead is of object inflation, not a slow SQL query.
Agree that you need a little overconfidence sometimes.
But perhaps the fact that there are more support systems around (move back in with parents, social benefit), means that we as a generation never grow comfortable with risk in the first place, and thus can never be truly confident with it.
The first (and only) thing you should do with with any proprietary UNIX's cc is to build gcc.

After that, your problem disappears.
Not to mention responsibilities. As a 24 yr old guy, if I put everything on the line and lose - big deal, I can wipe the slate clean and start over. My 34 yr old brother with a wife, 3 kids and a mortgage can't take the same risk as easily as I would.
The author of this article seems to explicitly reject your interpretation of the phrase.
Meeting Ticker
Google App Engine Full Text Search From App Engine Patch Team
"Object oriented models are fine if you write one application. But they tie functionality to data very closely and that makes repurposing of data for seperate applications much more difficult. So how do they analyse their data or use it in more than one application?"

This was an extremely poorly-written and poorly-researched article. One problem is that the projects being discussed are not object databases in the sense of storing straight-up serialized representations of business objects.

Take CouchDB for example; the basic "thing" you store in it and get back from it is a JSON object, which is a set of key/value pairs. In this sense it's not too far removed from SQL-based DBs, because you still choose which bits of data you're going to store (the keys in the object). It departs from the SQL point of view in not requiring that all the records have the same schema, and in not having a representation (at the data-storage level) of relations between records.

This turns out to offer some big advantages: in my experience, the number-one cause of unwieldy SQL is a schema that's had to grow over time to accomodate ever more edge cases. Maybe it's been done through lots of nullable columns, maybe it's been done through lots of related tables or some other mechanism, but it frequently has to be done and ends up making the database painful to work with.

CouchDB throws that out the window: edge-case records simply go in like anything else, and if they don't have some particular field present in other records, so what? The "query" is actually hitting a map/reduce in which the "map" function can take whatever action it wants with a record that's missing some particular key. It can skip that record, it can spit out a default value for a missing key, it can do anything it likes.

"I'm convinced that data has a different life cycle than procedural code and therefore needs to be expressed in a simple, uniform, reductionist model independent of all application code."

Simple and independent, yes. Reductionist and uniform, no.

To run with CouchDB as the example, those assumptions are thrown out because CouchDB essentially adds a layer to the stack. Traditionally, you have application code over here, querying data over there. In CouchDB, you have application code which queries a CouchDB view which returns data, but the query doesn't necessarily know anything at all about what the actual data in the DB is, or how it's structured (or even if it is structured in any sensible way; maybe it's just a bunch of random key/value pairs). The view layer is the part which cares about that.

And views are not static (or mostly static) things like the schemas in relational DBs; views are free to evolve over time, you're free to add or remove views in response to changing needs, and the underlying data never has to change as a result. And so you don't need to agonize over the most efficient way to reduce your data to a uniform schema. You don't need to "migrate" your underlying data storage representation to change the types of things you can store or the types of queries you can run.
50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine
I'm on record as saying that SourceForge's UI was a crime against non-technical users, but I think it has improved in some respects. (My old comments are halfway down this article about competing with OSS: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-comp...)

Compare their old download page:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/download-what-ag...

with their new download page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingocardmaker/files/

It is now MUCH cleaner, with obvious visual cues as to what you need to hit to download the file.

The download button which automatically selects your OS & etc on the front page for each project is another win for non-technical users.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/

If anything the button could be doubled in size, but the positioning, color, and size clearly draw your eye to it as soon as you open the page.

(This is one of the first times I have seen Sourceforge conscientiously optimize for the experience of the passive user of software rather than the developer. I find that overdue since passive users outnumber developers by four or more orders of magnitude.)

They've also made some changes to their URLs which will be good for SEO and usability. Compare the before/after on download pages:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148249...

versus

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingocardmaker/files/
"I wonder if we just have a generation of programmers who can't think in SQL."

Maybe we have. I'm not so sure.

What I am sure of is that we've had multiple generations of developers who've seen that real-world data almost never fit into a uniform, enforceable schema, and so are happy to have solutions which accept that reality instead of demanding that developers and DBAs try to shoehorn the data into uniformity anyway.
Also stuck to 24/25 ... I've seen something which should be a clue but I clearly don't see what I have to do ...
I would say those are actually not very important. Domain name recognition, page rank, user base, organic traffic and database are what matters in "websites".

Any pasionate bastard can port it to the host and infrastructure of his or her choice in the proverbial "weekend" ;-)
You might get that if you worked at some place I wanted to work more than the average place, but for the average firm, why bother?
I feel like I'm becoming disconnected with the average user

Do you mean the average user or the average person :-) ?

I read some human-interest blogs to decompress, my favourite is by a UK paramedic and is at http://randomreality.blogware.com/

The problem with these kinds of blogs is that it is hard to jump in the middle (unlike a technical blog where you can start reading at any point). The blog format makes this worse of course- it's generally hard to start "at the beginning". Anyway in this case the guy has written a couple of books covering the highlights so far.
Are you kidding? I wouldn't say it's impossible, but "no reason to think that techniques for performing more traditional sql-style queries on distributed data won't quickly surpass it" is quite a stretch. There's plenty of reason to believe that. Mainly because of the number of databases and the sheer volume of thought put into RDBMS', both theoretical and practical. Sure, when it comes to massive scalability there are dozens of promising new technologies that beat SQL databases, but they all make tradeoffs, there's just no way not too when you're talking about something as powerful as SQL.

I imagine there will be some great improvements that come out, but I think we're past the point of any major data store revolutions unless something fundamentally changes like quantum computing becomes a reality and we have to all basically start over.
i see many people whining in the feedbacks, but i'd guess that this change is welcomed by the majority of gmail users.

i like it so far. finally a way to hide labels i don't care about in a "submenu".

the "move to" business and the drag and drop should have their semantics explained somewhere. sometimes it acts like labels are folders, sometimes it doesn't. i'd rather have a true "labels" feel or a true "folder" view (of course as an option to the user), not such a confusingly mixed deal.
A great classic.

People who enjoyed it are urged to read more like it at the mac-oriented Folklore website:

http://www.folklore.org/

A treasure!
It has it's pain points to be sure, but the fact that "it doesn't match how applications are programmed" is because it's modeling data not code. Yes your object store will make the application much easier to write initially. But then what happens when you need reporting or worse, some feature that you never anticipated that requires a different view into the data.

That's not to say SQL is the end-all-be-all, but people are so quick to dismiss it, and I bet there is going to be a lot of pain felt as code based on simpler databases ages.
You get a job because you want to make money. Whether you write Java stuff for bigcorp a or bigcorp b doesn't matter, they are going to require the same skills so they are "commodity" work places. You get a job there because you love to code and would like to make money. In short, you love to work.

Now, there are a few exceptions, of course, such as Frog Creek or your dream job, where you get a job because you love to work there.
Steven Levy's book about the creation of the original Macintosh is also wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Great-Macintosh-Computer-Ever...
Neat. The site looks pretty good.

What are some examples of things people would categorize?

Who would use this? And why? Who is your target market? What age group?

Could this work as a FaceBook app?
That's awesome, like the gratis / libre distinction present in romance languages.
Arun, I'm sure others have asked similar questions here before. So this might help:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a...

Good luck!
"They all have trade-offs. Key-value stores eliminate your ability to access data by anything other than its key. So, you have an article with an id of 5. What if you want to look up the articles by author 9"

You build and maintain indexes, just like you do with an SQL db.
Has someone thought about carrying an electric torch? Or display a white image on your cellphone display to get light.
The only way you are going to learn is by doing. Set yourself a challenge of creating a website design each week. Your first attempts might not be very good but, soon, you will start producing good work.

It is also worth checking out design showcase sites for inspiration. www.webceme.com is my own personal favourite.

One of the biggest issues I had when I started trying to design websites was getting the color scheme right. I would suggest, to begin with, checking out the color schemes on other sites. There are also a lot of tools for generating nice color schemes on the web. This article gives a good overview: http://whdb.com/2008/follow-the-rainbow-101-color-resources-...
Facial and Skin Products
the following links will help u a lot - good luck ...

http://www.blogdesignblog.com/blog-design/25-must-buy-borrow...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16603
I think Osirix should be on the list.
http://www.osirix-viewer.com/
Do you happen to know any articles on people splitting their data across 2 types of storage this way ?

If there is any data that should be stored in 2 separate stores, I can see applications becoming messy rather fast in trying to replicate changes.

Unless of course this is usually done by having a clean separation between which data goes where, but I doubt if any domain can ever really be that easily split up.
Basic Introduction of Object Oriented PHP
Apple-Exec-Turned-Vc Sees Big Opportunity in Mobile Infrastructure
Official Twitter blog about trademark for "tweet"
I guess you just found that the oddest of articles can prove popular. I submitted a couple of my own pieces that I found really interesting and they just, well, died instantly :) And a recent off-hand analysis of modern cyber security brought in 1500 views...

One thing I do think is obiovus: unlike reddit and slashdot et all HN doesnt care if it is a self-submission. I avoid self-submitting elsewhere but deliberately take time to do so here. If it's not a popular article it will die quietly but no one will bitch about the factyou submitted it :)
Why does VanillaIceCream (question 22) call it's parent class's constructor?
21 of the Fresh and Rich Free Icons for Web Designers
This post is a list of the fresh and rich free Icons for Web Designers, Developers and Bloggers use this and enrich your website design.
I don't really have the numbers to back it up, but I think if you compute the expected value of starting a venture, the numbers will show you that you that taking the risk is not worth it (vs. getting a normal salaried job), since most ventures fail.

With that stated, I think that entrepreneur overconfidence is a features and not a bug. The fact that entrepreneurs are overconfident may, in most instances, be to their detriment, but it also will engender great breakthroughs that have huge payoffs and make society much better. Without overconfidence, this wouldn't even be possible.
I'm no crypto expert, but I'm guessing nobody had previously cracked it because they hadn't really tried. By today's standards at least, it seems relatively straighforward.

I love how obviously human-generated the key is: "13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49." - the differences between the two digits are almost all 0, 1 or 2. As a species, we must really resent random numbers.
I am stuck at #13. I tried using 6 & 9 for G ...but it does not work. I am sure I have all 4 answers (1) G...(2)B* (3)B* (4)L*, but it seems it is not accepting.
I have no idea how awesome you are (or not), but I consider myself a fair-to-OK programmer, when I can actually focus, and I just spent about thirty minutes on a nascent content delivery engine just making sure that all of the file paths it handled were inspected, cleaned, and reformatted in certain ways.

The only reason I don't have a lot more security holes to fix is because this thing is only responsible for grabbing data and presenting it. If I were dealing with the administration side of it ... no fun.

Then there's caching to do, too -- that'll probably be a couple hours if I do it right.

So, I'll be really impressed (for what little it's worth) if you manage to get a working copy going over a weekend and include even rudimentary performance and security features.
Simple solution: a requirement of receiving public funds should be that authors are required to make their work available for free online (possibly via a community license).

This way the journals don't get a choice as to what copyright scheme they'd like to use.
Google's Next Target: Unified Communications
Anyone that rolls their eyes after you use 'mobile' as a collective noun is a good bet.
Well, there's a subtle difference there, I think.

The quote isn't, "open-source software's usability could be perfected in a weekend". The quote doesn't suggest that it's easy, or not time-consuming, just that the end result right now isn't great.

Which I would agree with.

You're just saying that a lot of people are working hard to make it better.

Which I would also agree with.
Trying it out to see if it will help us have shorter and less frequent meetings.
Ever tried dropping your age from your resume? There is no requirement to put it on. If you get into the interview and the interviewer has an, "Oh, you're not what we're after" moment you know why. In this country that is grounds alone to sue so most companies will give you a decent interview, at the very least.
At the point you see the load drop on the following graph, we switched from MySQL to Redis:

http://db.lloogg.com/load.dir/load-1month.png

Alternative DBs are not good for everything, but SQL databases are not good for everything as well...
Wow. Talk about over-engineering.

Seems like a button would have done the trick.

Put them at the ends of streets (or one on each lamppost, if you can afford it) and have it turn on the lights for the street/block.
What is the use case for subrepos? http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/subrepos

It it analogous to svn:externals ?
"Isn't great" or "needs improvement" is quite different than "total clusterfuck". This last statement is extremely rude and dismissive of a lot of hard work that has brought great progress to the Linux desktop, which, contrary to the hand waving, is quite usable these days.
List Of Celebrities Who Will Die
Death, why are we very much afraid of it? We have these drugs which are touted to keep us young, medicines which are said to combat ageing. But what is wrong with growing old and eventually dying. These past few months we have seen a lot of celebrities die and we have once again developed increased fright of death.
No man, motion sensors.
Will your Michael Jackson tickets be worth more than the refund?
Bing Adds Twitter Search
Well, not to criticise your bro, but that's the life he signed up for. He willingly took on those responsibilities.

It's not generally thought of as a risk, but he definitely took one - by locking himself into multiple, multi-decade commitments he tossed the dice on continuing to be perfectly satisfied with his current lot, and there would be a lot of pain if he was wrong. After all, what is commitment phobia other than a special type of risk aversion?
Blu-ray disc burning software, Burn Blu-ray disc 
Sothink HD Movie Maker is a welcomed Blu-ray disc burning software, which you can burn Blu-ray disc with with any type of video. This guide tells you how to burn Blu-ray disc with this super Blu-ray disc burning software.
Alternatively, leave this open throughout the day to see how much money you've earned.
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/freescreencast.com

how about some hard data then ?

It looks like the site has very little traffic, a few hundred users / day at best. What is the businessmodel ? Revenues ? Expenses ?

If you really want to sell it wouldn't take more than 10 minutes to collect the most important metrics.