skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason I began with that inflammatory statement concerning comp-scientists is that comp-sci is a branch of mathematics,

I see this statement frequently, and it's almost always said by people who don't identify as computer scientists. I have a Bachelor's and Master's in computer science, am about a year away from a PhD in it, and I'm still not comfortable defining where exactly my field stands in regards to others. The best I can come up with is that it's a combination of math, science and engineering related to computation (the idea) and computers (the implementation).

The point he's trying to make with this statement - programs should be viewed as a natural expression of a solution, not a to-do list for a computer - is valid. But he ignores that while computer languages can be put in the same hierarchy as natural languages, they have properties that allow us to use math to prove or guarantee conditions.
It's just statistics.
The Game Disses Jay-Z and Gets The Crowd Involved | Hip Hop MVP
Wasn't a quote, but considering his alcohol consumption, maybe it should have been well then, MacGruber.
Absolutely. But your wording seemed to take all of things that may happen as a given.
This article is about relational databases that you read from and write to. It isn't SQL-specific. It's a good article, not another "SQL is obsolete" as you might think from the title.
I took 15-213 at CMU. The moment I saw that code block I knew that's where you came from. One of the best clases I've taken there.

Good old csapp.c
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845/sp02/csapp.c
Talk to me after Ken has made enough to quit his day job.
It's not bad as these things usually go, and it has some nice features. The right-hand pane with the transcription in the same physical layout as the scanned image is useful. The option to view some pages in raking light is also useful and I think quite unusual. (Though it's not a matter of website UI as such.)
Rackspace to issue as much as $3.5M in customer credits after outage
"Sharding kills most of the value of a relational database."

I can appreciate the point the author makes about partitioning schemes requiring heavy integration with the business logic, but I disagree with the claim that sharding doesn't work.

It's probably more accurate to say that sharding only works well if you design your database very carefully, or just get lucky about how your data model maps to sharding schemes. A bad sharded database can probably hobble your app, but a good one does get you remarkably close to true horizontal scaling.

In my experience, at least.
Open Web Tools Directory
No, they just need to not be used for authentication, but only for identification. Everyone's SSN should be published by the government to force people to realize that they aren't (and never have been) secret information.
I thought it was a good summary of the problems facing SQL databases as organizations grow. However I would have appreciated some solutions to the problem.
Did you miss the part where he blatantly misrepresents research? The writer irrelevant. Utter your soothing "well respected scientist" mantra all you want. You can look at the abstracts yourself that show campbell's misrepresentations.
Launch info from the blog:
https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/07/open-web-tools-directory/
In the final paragraph he compares himself with Capt Kirk, facing the Kobayashi Maru: "we can only solve this problem by redefining the question."

Well, perhaps that's as difficult as solving the "SQL scalability that 20 years of brilliant programmers haven't solved"?

...because he declines to attempt to reframe the question.

[ or maybe he's leaving us wanting more: like his next post? ]

Anybody up for reformulating the question?
In the near term, plug-in hybrids with flex-fuel engines, plus lots and lots of nuclear power plants, followed by space-based solar power satellites in the medium term. Fusion in the long term (defined as "after I'm dead, dammit").
HTML 5 drops open source video codec
Computer science is what you get when mathematics and philosophy have a child, and hire electrical engineering as a babysitter.
then that information should go in your profile. that's the point of the no-signature rule.
> Taking Ritalin to "enhance work or study performance" is getting high.

No it isn't. No more so than drinking a cup of coffee gets you high on caffeine, or eating a candy bar gets you high on sugar, or drinking a bottle of Jack gets you high on Jack.

Getting "high" is generic slang for the consumption of some mind altering substances for fun. 99% of the time getting high specifically means smoking marijuana. You do not label the taking of all substances as getting high, I'm not getting high if I take a percocet, I'm not getting high if I take a paxil, I'm not getting high if I take an abilify.

You can tweak on Ritalin by taking far more than the prescribed dose which people usually do by crushing and snorting it. This is not at all comparable to those taking the pill in the prescribed fashion in the same dose that one would take for ADD.

> What changed to allow us to use such different terminology for the same act?

What difference, you don't say an athlete is getting high on steroids, that's not what getting high means. Secondly, you'll note we're against steroids because they're known to be very damaging to the user, not because they enhance his muscles. If steroids were as safe as Ritalin they wouldn't be illegal and they'd be used by the vast majority of athletes just like every other legal substance they've found that works.

The terminology hasn't changed, you're just mistakenly thinking we use the same term for every drug and intent. We never have other than the generic "using drugs". Name a drug and there is specific lingo associated with that drug.

> And why should I not be concerned with changing social norms?

You should be aware of them, but not concerned because what other people do shouldn't concern you unless it affects you, I fail to see how it affects you. Being concerned implies that you feel the right to object to the behavior and prevent others from doing what they want with themselves, that's what I'm objecting to.

Social norms change, that's life, they've always been changing. If someone wants to take a pill - widely considered safe - to make themselves perform better, who's business is that but theirs?
Sweeter than Cheese (or is it?)
I think one of the points made at the end was that there kinda isn't one - people have been trying to come up with the perfect solution to scaling RDBMS's for ever and the current state of the art (pretty much) is as described in the article - i.e, not great.
People with really massive MySQL setups (eBay, for example) basically just do a huge amount of the stuff described here, but with lots of message-queue type stuff to glue it together and loads of hard work; i.e. you can make it scale but it's really really hard work because RDBMS's aren't inherent scalable.
nice! I scanned, lots of text for an at work distraction (:
How To Try Spotify Immediately, No Matter Where You Live
The research article is here:

Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university...

The only thing I would like to add here is the study tested ethical codes of conduct governing research. People weren't consulted, and they were emotionally manipulated for the sake of the study. Surely that must have raised red flags at Loyola.
I'll chime in. I won't say how I'm involved with Tom, but we've been associated in the past. Let's just say that the impression I had upon meeting him was that he's basically a tax-dodging former child star with an ongoing microfinance scandal (covered by apparent nemesis David Baines):

http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id...
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html...
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html...
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id...

I wouldn't go as far as Baines (he gets petty and tedious after a while) but I do think he's got some validity to his arguments about accountability and trust. Specifically the lack thereof as regards Tom.

Let's recap the story: a 14 year old kid's paid summer internship was deemed to be good PR for Apple. That paid off in mediocre terms (as you can see via his QuickTime/Kid story, Apple divested itself of its drudgeons after PepsiCo's frontman took the hit for Apple almost dying) but, in the process, it created the modern Tom Williams who, after imagining that 50 year old men were being anything other than patronizing toward a teen, had no incentive to grow up.

Youthfully ignorant entrepreneurial drive win, personal growth and development fail. His wife's hot, though.
Up and Running With Cassandra
Given a large enough performance difference (and non-pathological code), is the answer ever "fewer op codes"?
Here's an email that I received from the AWS support staff regarding a recent failed transaction. In the payment panel, the status was "failed". When I clicked through for more detail, the additional detail was "failed". So, I found an email address for support and sent off a request for more info, including the transaction number.

"Greetings from Amazon Payments.

I am sorry for the concern you have about the failed transaction (#XXX).

We are not able to provide transaction partners any information about a failed transaction. If the other party needs confirmation of the charge failure, they can contact us directly. However, as stated in our last message, we don't have details on why a credit card charge fails.

Once a transaction fails, we are not able to retry the same transaction. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you for using Amazon Payments.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:"

Hmmm, no. That did not answer my question. So, I'm supposed to ask my customer why their transaction failed, have them contact Amazon, and oh, would they pretty-please try to check out again?

Amazon understands the power of 1-click ordering, but cannot seem to grasp the conversion loss rate you see when you have to beg someone to check out for a second time. Getting them to click "Buy" the first time is hard enough.

We're not even running that many transactions, maybe 5-10 a day. Still, even with that we see probably a 5-10% failure rate.

To be fair, it may be that Amazon knows as little as they claim. Still, it's frustrating as hell to be completely in the dark about why stuff isn't working.

Also, it's quite easy to get to the form shown in the picture. Just log in to your payment console, click on a transaction (like one of the ones with a "failed" status), and click the big huge button that says "Problem with this transaction?" Here's another screenshot: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/145070/amazon_error.png
I use this script for similar purpose - http://www.inetbase.com/scripts/ddos/install.ddos

The advantage of this script is that it directly monitors the IPs using netstat so one could stop bots from hammering things other than your webserver, say socket connections.

It is customizable to use APF or iptables and worked quite well when one of my friend's site was hit.
The SO answer is still not correct.
RAID doesn't meet his definition of "scalable" because it has a central controller.

This whole post could be summed up as "ACID doesn't scale", which has been proven. Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance; pick two (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.1...).

Good introduction to non-ACID databases:
http://highscalability.com/drop-acid-and-think-about-data
They used omnivorous animals. Yes it's not concrete proof that it will translate to humans but if you take all the evidence together - the animal trials, the cellular-level experiments and the observations in humans - it's enough to convince the author of The China Study. And more importantly it convinced me.
Older cultures also didn't live to their 70s like we do now so I'm not convinced that this is a good counter-example.
The "China study" referred to in the title is the China Project, a study comparing diet, lifestyle and disease chacteristics in sixty five counties in rural China in the 1970's and 1980's conducted jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and Project Director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project.

Dr. Campbell received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell, and served as a Research Associate at MIT. He spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975 where he presently holds his Endowed Chair (now Emeritus).
We actually have very mixed feelings about csapp.c. Students don't seem to understand that you should quit the whole program just because one thread fails. Especially in servers (like proxy lab :))

Still, an awesome class!
Sorry - I linked to the full version as I figured readers here would prefer to see a click-free version of the story, will add warning in future.
that'll work, frankly I don't understand why the social security card does not come with a photo
If you data model maps well to sharding, it maps well to distributed databases, and you're not gaining much by being on an RDBMS. I think the point they're trying to make is if you're going through the contortions to shard a relational database, you're better off just doing it in a distributed database in the first place.
In this case, "the rules of the game" are not like the laws and courts IRL, which Myers would like us to accept, but more like the laws of physics.

MMO's are cool because a community develops and, just like in the real world, organically evolves accepted laws and customs. Good MMOs develop rich communities and customs precisely by having very open frameworks.

Myers went around whacking people with a bat because the "laws of physics" allowed him to. The only defference here is that it was much harder in the game for the citizens to organize a police force to stop him, and as usual, the "gods" (game moderators) were of no real use.

Ironically, in this context, he was the definition of a "super villain". On a personal note, it irks me that this old doddard made such a colossal nuisance of himself for years to a whole community of gamers just for that goofy bit of fluff he called a paper. Publish or perish indeed.
"Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. "

Then they weren't exhaustive were they? Virtually nothing is proven ever. In fact, nothing is absolute except abstract mathematics. When there are numerous studies showing a correlation then we can feel somewhat confident in it. When we then look at disease rates in societies that do not eat me and see a clear correlation between meat eating and heart disease then we can feel even more confident.

Also remember that in the china study the group that got more disease (and ate more meat) got roughly the same amount of exercise and had roughly the same lifestyle. This isn't absolute proof, but nothing is every absolutely proven. I always find it fascinating that there is such a knee jerk reaction to this issue.
Haml uses odd number for unstable releases, even numbers for stable releases. 2.1 became 2.2 when it got released.
What does that have to do with anything? since when was commercial success a measure of quality? (specially in writing?)
Sharding means you can't do "select * from a join b using (k)" unless you can prove the a record and the b record will always be hosted on the same shard. So of course you often have to write application code that knows where they are and goes and gets them separately. But that's precisely the problem that relational databases were developed to solve for you.

Then there's the whole distributed transaction thing, which is so painful that some people just live with wrong answers instead.
Apologies.
I'm new to using searchyc and didn't expect it to miss the URL.

http://searchyc.com/submissions/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.matas...
SQL databases are fundamentally non-scalable, and there is no magical pixie dust that we, or anyone, can sprinkle on them to suddenly make them scale.

I find this claim laughable. If the databases Mr. Wiggins chooses to work with fail to meet his scalability requirements, perhaps he should consider different databases. Scalable SQL databases have been around for over 3 decades.
Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone regarding Mono.
In Hacker News, Soviet Russia thanks YOU!
Financing a Software Startup
Okay, see... here's more of the no-SQL agenda at hacker news. This isn't a question of "Does SQL Scale or not?" but "How much do SQL Databases Scale?"

I feel like the propaganda here is that because RDBMS doesn't scale to youtube or google scale they suck and that's not true. Like SQL is a waste of time because at some point, you're going to need to shard your database.

Look, at that kind of scale, you're going to have problems with any solution to any problem. Handling that kind of scale is going to be expensive no matter what solution you implement, whether it's map/reduce or flat files or some other solution.

But deciding to build a system from the beginning on something non-relational because someday you may have to accommodate that kind of scale is an example of premature optimization. The vast majority of features you get with SQL are going to outweigh the limitations of noSQL.

I've worked on some pretty high scale systems built on SQL and yes, there are problems, but there's just something irrational going on here and it's off-putting. It's like we are throwing out the baby with the bath water or something.
Hacker News and Reddit for everything, pretty much; I enjoy reddit's programming section.
Well of course it is defensible to study what happens when you get people mad. For example I read a great account of a social anthropologist who queue-jumped on purpose to study how (English) people dealt with it. But the scientist queue jumping knew she was doing something wrong (and felt terrible doing it too).

The strange thing is that in this account (which I hope is misrepresented) the researcher seems surprised that violating the social norm got him a hostile reaction.
Craig Venter gives Richard Dawkins a tour of his laboratory
Can we convince Craigslist to raise their revenues and donate to charity?
Shame the site wasn’t a little more subtle about the joke, at least until the fold.
Props to facebook for fixing it!

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.qmail.general/55843

Although he credits reddit, this is the only post I can find and its karma score is less than 10:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8u78r/facebook_b...

It had to be HN! :-)
I think this is one of my more realistic crazy ideas. I would appreciate any suggestions you may have for improving the copy to increase virality.

The basic feasibility rests upon whether or not Craigslist will actually add an advertising banner if enough users demand it. Since Jim made a public statement in 2006 saying they would take such a suggestion seriously, I think we'll at least be able to start a dialog. And if it works, it'll be one hell of a hack.
That sheds some light on things. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is that your disk writes are completely flat now, no real variation through the day.
So he's doing more UI type work for them then?
Exactly the kind of nonsense that makes me not want to do TDD. Testing = good. TDD = religion.

Ok, maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But not much.

Everything in moderation.
Crazy idea: Write your data-handling code in it's own tight little module. Use good abstractions so that the rest of your app doesn't give a crap HOW it's happening. When it's time to update to millions of clustered servers running bigTable, you rewrite the module, and you're done.

Software Engineering saves the day!
Ah I totally misread your comment. Sorry about that. Branches can definitely kill performance in heavily pipelined archs.
Playing Whack-A-Mole With Data: The Pirate Bay Lives On
Start me Up - Shirlaws Business Links
Valley's one-time godfather of multimedia is leaving for...Ohio
Mesa DUI attorney
Arizona qualified DUI/DWI Attorney and Lawyer provides Law consultation for Penalties, Punishments, Drivers License Suspensions, DMV Hearings under the influence of intoxicating liquor, any drug, a vapor releasing substance containing toxic substance or any combination of liquor, drugs or vapor releasing substances if the person is impaired to the slightest degree.
Title is false advertising. I suggest changing copy not to mislead people. If I join, there won't be a $10,000 donation made. You just hope there might be due to a complicated chain of events any of which might not work out.
I had the group title as "The Craigslist Revolution: click to join and raise ONE BILLION for charity!" before but figured I would go all out.

I'd be willing to add a word or two as a minimizer in the group title. Any ideas? Yes, the chain of events is certainly complicated, but I think the misdirection in the title is a lesser evil to maximize the spread of the group. My major concern is that Facebook would have a problem with the title, but it is not an outright lie.
Your comment would hold more weight if you elaborated some more. Are you referring to scaling by his standards? Please explain.
RailsRumble 2009 Registration is now open
Team 'The Lame Ducks', previously known as Great Lakes Geeks, will be competing again this year, defending our 2008 win (http://meetinbetween.us). Who else from the HN community will be competing this year?
(agreeing), I believe that's called velocity. This skill will help any programmers while doing consulting.
The Best Way to Decorate Your Bedroom Walls
Are you looking for some new and exciting way to decorate your bedroom walls? For all of us our bedrooms have a special place in our life. This is a place where we rest and this place needs to be comfortable, soothing and relaxing. The size of the bedroom never really matters; we can convert any bedroom into a cozy nice place. We can turn this special place of our homes into exciting places by making use of self-adhesive wall stickers.
Yep! Check out the beta to see his latest work in action.
care to give an example?
For me, the big shift is a contextual one. Advertising has always seemed to come from a 'Take' mentality - 'we are advertising XYZ so we can take money from you'.

Product Specials (Sales) as a marketing tool, and then specials (and, now affiliate links etc) through advertising, helped garner attention. They were 'Giving' me a special deal.

Viral advertising works largely because it 'Gives' as much as it takes. It 'Gives' humour, for example, or a gaming experience, or (if the morons on my mailing list are to be believed) a bottle of Veuve or some free cell minutes.

I can't wait until advertising is fully personal, in a way that AdWords touches upon. When advertisers know my wants and needs, they can Give me the opportunity or motive to buy their product. I win. They win. But most importantly, they focus on me winning first rather than their own needs (clearly within reason), and then benefit in the long term.

When that happens, I won't ignore ads - because I know they want to give me something I personally want.

How you make that happen is the difference between my day job and you featuring on the cover of Wired.
You might actually better increase "virality" if you first improved your accuracy.

That, or you could literally donate $10,000 for each person who joins. Do that and I really will forward it to 15 friends. As it stands now, this sounds slightly more plausible than the old Microsoft "forward this email and get $100" chain emails from a decade ago.
Awesome. How does this work. Is the music legal?