skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I entirely agree that one should try to learn from the past. I disagree on the "scale x intent" issue, though. The initiation of aggression is immoral, in my view. Attacking someone who did not attack you is wrong regardless of the death toll. In this case, I believe that intent does matter.

Sadly, McNamara would probably have been remembered as a great man had he left his office after JFK was killed. After all, McNamara played an important role in nuclear deterrence, during the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Too bad he was foolish enough to help start an unwinnable, useless war in Indochina.
Summary of an article about how "SQL Databases Don't Scale":

1. Mentions RAID, not SAN
2. Mentions MySQL and only MySQL (with the exception of PostgreSQL once).
3. Mentions Master-slave replication as a killer scalability feature.

I suggest he rename the piece to "A $500 server and MySQL Don't Scale" and then we can all agree and get along.
Scale like what? If you aren't IBM, Facebook or Google, why do you even care?
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You should watch Fog of War if you haven't. It is an unflinching look at the man and what he did (with a big impact because of the camera that Errol Morris to get direct on shots of interviews).

McNamara tried to systematize warfare like a factory. He played a high stakes game that ended up killing millions of people. He thought he could control the monster. He was wrong and it spiraled out of control.

The movie takes an honest look at his life and it's something we have to understand if we want to avoid repeating his mistakes. Which we apparently haven't since we're stuck in two wars right now.
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If you like building from scratch, you might also like the linux distribution Gentoo.
While Skype's PL/Proxy is a great way to make PostgreSQL more scalable, it doesn't do much to refute the basic argument that SQL databases aren't scalable since the SQL it helps you scale is limited to short RPC style operations.
Absolutely. My girlfriend (a midwife) is jealous every time she reads a story of a doctor/nurse/midwife assisting in an emergency birth in a plane or something.
So there was some other factor that by chance made the hormones benefitial for the women in the study? Or all the women somehow where more healthy than "normal" women to begin with? How does that happen? And how could one control for it, wouldn't you need thousands of identical twins?
so...what did he create? I didn't see anything about him actually creating anything.
Can You Be Too Perfect?
It's a causal relationship. If you believe that all software should be free (the GNU folks—those "first kernel developers"), then you must at least dislike any company which tries to profit from the creation of artificial scarcity of software. The two groups (the idealists and the "haters"), which now have very little overlap, originally started much the same.

> Don't be surprised when it turns out that your free database was indeed some cheap stuff which doesn't come fully featured.

But if being "fully featured" is the goal, then it would be very surprising indeed if what you considered a "competitor" was not, in fact, fully featured. It would not, then, by definition, be a competitor. Or, at least, it would not be worth calling version 1.0 yet.

To refine that: Oracle currently has no FOSS competitors, because there are no FOSS databases that are trying to compete with Oracle. They may be trying to take parts of Oracle's market share, but this is a different thing—optimizing their fit for a situation where Oracle itself is a bad fit.
The CP is then more or less useless for free and open source software---the freedom to modify and redistribute the software is worthless if any feature you choose to add, remove or modify makes you fair game for a patent lawsuit. The users have no real control over this sort of software, because they can't legally distribute modifications which violate the letter of the specifications.

It sounds like C# and the CLI is still best avoided for open source software.
I don't see a good reason for "which server has my data" to be in-your-face application logic to code, when "which sector of which disk has my data" has long since been delegated to the platform and forgotten.
I'm not an expert, but I'm dubious about that comment.

For starters "designed with hardware implementations in mind" is a double edged sword. It seems to me that H.264 used this as a crutch to a degree that maybe only makes sense if selling decoding chips is part of your revenue stream.

But it appears that even "hardware" implementations of H.264 don't even use ASICs anymore. They just use a seperate, but generic, chip with DSP. It's sometimes treated as a hardware black box by the rest of the system but inside it's software:

http://lwn.net/Articles/337101/

There's an OMAP version of Theora being built right now, (sponsored by Mozilla I tihnk) but I can't find the link right now. That should reset people's expectations somewhat in this regard.
SQL atop an unstructured datastore, with minimal metadata. Something of an innovation, not a traditional RDBMS, but yes - still SQL :)

The nice thing about HIVE is - you're not limited to just SQL, though. You can still analyze your files on HDFS any whichaway, with Pig, with your own MapReduce jobs, whatever. Personally though, I look forward to Apache Pig getting SQL, and being able to run SQL queries on any intermediate state of a Pig script.

I don't think that anyone is really complaining about SQL. SQL is a swell query language for certain kinds of data. They're complaining about static schemas in relational dbs and having to store objects via SQL - reasonable complaints.
I've been using Linux since the day Linus posted to minix-list about it.. Yggdrasil was my first non-hand-built Linux config, then Debian, and now .. Ubuntu. Which, on my particular hardware, I am finding is very, very stable, very useful, and 100% supported - including Bluetooth Audio, as well as Firewire-based Audio (I'm a musician) and other nifty tricks like that.

I haven't dived into Arch Linux yet - haven't really found the need, and I guess I'm pretty much settled on the Debian way of doing things .. but one thing I have been thinking about lately is that it would be nice to have a stable-as-Ubuntu Linux system that has 100%, without fail, FULL SOURCE on-board, with everything configured so that if I find and fix something, it can easily go back into the sources as a patch or something.

Is Arch Linux going to provide that sort of configuration - full source onboard, easy to submit patches from whatever source I edit, etc? I might dedicate some time to checking out Arch in the future, and if it means I can configure my system to be 100% full source-onboard, I might do it sooner rather than later.

Of course, the idea of doing my own distribution based entirely on onboard-sources and instant patch contribution to a common public pool has also crossed my mind .. maybe BSD delivers in that regard? I really want my system to become a programmers paradise ..
Ask HN: What's wrong with note taking applications?
I'm writing a web app that combines note taking, mind mapping and to do list management. What features would you look for in such an app? What's missing in the tools that we have now?
Unix is 40
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In my experience, the thing that sets true genius apart from the contentious kind, is the willingness to listen. If you don't have that, then you're not really as smart as you - or others - think you are.

The capability a person has for listening to other people is a skill that very rarely gets acknowledged as a particularly genius trait. However, there is really nothing that can be done in this world if you aren't willing to listen at least as well as you talk.
Please see my comment a bit further up about parity of exposure.
Personality: its infectious. There is such a thing as contagious psychology. Hang around at Apple long enough and you, too, will start to appear Guru'ified.

Hell, Apple have made a fortune on this fact alone.
Free: It works, it cries, it bites. Review wars over "Free"
Interview with Sam Odio, Divvyshot
Please write on the blackboard 100 times: "HTML5 has to be something that works well on mobile devices, not just on desktop/laptop machines."

And right now that's going a long way toward killing Theora; mobile devices need a power-efficient hardware decoder to do video, and if they don't get one for Theora they're not going to run everybody's battery life into the ground by using software decoding.
It is not just a specification, it is a standard. Why would you even want to implement something violating the standard?

>It sounds like C# and the CLI is still best avoided for open source software.

Why? How does the language or compiler matter for writing open source or not? I think the sentence should read:

It sounds like Mono is still best avoided if you are paranoid

And moreover this news is about microsoft promising not to sue mono. It has nothing to do with microsoft suing or not suing you for writing code.
If experience is the name we give to our mistakes, McNamara had lots of experience.
I once had David Pogue on my twitter, becuase I reallly loved his talk at EG conference. But took him off in about 2 weeks. I just hated his rate of tweets. It wasn't all that inane tweets (lunch dinner)... but c'mon.. go easy man!
I don't think that anyone is really complaining about SQL. They're complaining about relational dbs.

Actually I suspect Mr. Wiggins is really only complaining about problems with MySQL and PostgreSQL. He would be less inaccurate if he admitted as much rather than making sweeping uninformed claims about SQL and relational systems.
I think the point of the article was not that he earned a bad reputation for griefing - it was more that people reverted to a rather medieval behaviour when confronted with such a situation. Earning a bad reputation and being denounced as a pedophile are two entirely different things.

If someone farts in your face repeatedly and you go on to punch them or harass them in any way that is considered inappropriate by society, would you say that your actions were 'justified?' To me, that would seem rather biblical, in the negative sense: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

So the point is: we're still in the biblical era of social behaviour: if someone harasses us, we harass back. Though I wouldn't know how to respond 'properly' and in a 'civilized' fashion to such a situation, even though I'm an online gamer myself. In WoW, there's the anti-social practice of 'corpse-camping' someone, and thus killing them repeatedly. In such cases I just log off and play an alt, and let the camper waste his time.
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ouch, I'm not IBM, Facebook or Google but SQL scalability issues are a good part of my daily workload.

(the other part is made up from file system scalability issues).

Once you you get past a certain level these are non-trivial problems and anybody out there that is busy solving them has my interest.
Python experiences, or: Why I like C++ more ;-)
Codes is the normal term in serious numerical computing. Fluid dynamics, finite element, etc people say this all the time.
I'm a FreeBSD user and I've deployed it in many high load situations on servers. Drivers are not a strong point in the BSD world and it's best to check the supported hardware thoroughly before upgrading.

What is there generally works very very well but more esoteric hardware is often not important to the BSD community.
This just in: University Professor discovers MOBBING. Entire World sighs in relief, can finally put down the pitchforks, give each other hugs.
Compilers for embedded processors aren't bad at all. But architectures vary heavily, and the subject of this article is a system that tunes optimizations automatically, instead of having engineers tune the optimizations themselves.

Also, note that for embedded systems low-level performance is typically a more important concern than for non-embedded systems. You typically don't care whether a function in your web or desktop application ends up getting inlined or not. It can make a significant difference in an embedded system.
I've just read all your comments. Do you have a blog?
yes, because we all know google runs on a 'proper' database system like Oracle or SQL server.

Google is one of those excellent examples of a non-sql datastore that works just fine and seems to blow the socks of anything the competition has come up with to date.
thats a good news.
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depends ..
Fog of War is one of my favorite documentaries, but McNamara is not honest about two key incidents - the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

In the movie McNamara claims he was "I was trying to help him (JFK) keep us out of war." actually he was pushing for bombing the Soviet missile site in Cuba since the third day. This is documented by recordings of meetings with JFK.

About the Gulf of Tonkin incident McNamara claims that he and Johnson didn't believe the U.S. destroyer Maddox had been attacked, even though the crew sent messages that the attack they had reported was a not an attack after all.

I learned this today [1] and it puts McNamara in a different light, although the lessons in the movie are still very valid.

[1] The lies of The Fog of War (http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/), linked to by TFA
I personally think the outsourcing is quite ineffective for a startup. Early on, the companies (usually few founders/hackers) go through a lot of design discussions, architecture, feature prioritization, whiteboarding - do you think that kind of synergy is possible with outsourced model? I don't!
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I quote from the article "The idea of using punch cards to instruct and control a system became the basis of computer programming"

Good grief!
It's amazing how much paranoia and hate gets dumped on the Mono team around this issue. It must be seriously disheartening.

They just can't win. They need to spend so much of their time proving to everybody how open source they are, and how they hate Microsoft like everybody else (honest!), that they end up with pragmatist clowns like me griping at them for dragging their feet. And still there is this vocal part of the open source movement that will always hate them with a passion no matter what they do, because they dare to trust an evil corporation that eats babies and whatever else Microsoft is supposed to be up to these days.

This whole license things seems like such a non-issue to an outsider. It's just readily apparent that it's not in Microsoft's best interest to squash a project like Mono. Here they are saying it again, in the form of a legal contract, and STILL the die hards don't believe them.

Amazing.
dupe of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691121
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If you are bound to SQL databases, either for historical reasons or because the no-SQL database make other problems harder, then 'scaling the application' is a pretty good reason for writing that logic. There is no silver bullet.
Yes, there's a lot of heat over Chris Anderson's "Free: The Future of a Radical Price". I had no idea how much - nor had bother to look at the occasional link here, so I appreciate RWW pulling together the players:

- The book: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/...

- Gladwell's NYTimes rev: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/09070...

- Mike Masnick's TechDirt take: http://techdirt.com/articles/20090701/0422125421.shtml

- Fred Wilson at AVC: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.ht...

- Mark Cuban at BlogMaverick: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/07/05/the-freemium-company-life...

- Brad Feld's thoughts: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/07/would-you-want-it-if...

I especially appreciate the tip look where I might not have bothered: Wilson's post, who "identifies the two instances when Free actually works. The first instance is the service or software that offers a free trial and then converts users into paying customers. There are different flavors of this approach, the most popular being, give the basic version for free and charge for the advanced version."
Maintaining connections in the face of failure is a relatively little concern, what I perceive as the big problem here is having the database handle an arbitrary application with zero application-specific administration.

Google's datastore promises that if you write your app for their platform and it works on the small scale, it will scale out without problems. Datastore latency is constant regardless of how many records you have there. How will you scale a join between two tables, each being partitioned between multiple different servers, transparently for the app?
I'm not even convinced they will buy it at all.

The purchase has a bunch of conditions on it, such as PirateBay already being a completely legit site by the time they take over it (which is, what, three weeks from now?).

I bet the purchase won't end up happening at all, and the failure to do so will be blamed on the record industry not being interested in licensing their content in whatever fashion GGF needs it to be. That, or on ISPs not being interested in paying for the feast.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a stunt to drive up the stock price of GGF and make CEO Hans Pandeya some money. A few weeks from now, it will be announced that the purchase of the PirateBay has been cancelled.

Check back then and tell me I was wrong.
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WSJ follows hackers debates & strategies for iPhone(3gs) hacking
My guess is apps hosted on Heroku (like the majority of the internet applications) are a lot like Facebook and little like online banking: they don't really need reliable transactions, they need to be flexible, scalable and cost-effective.
Interesting, but I don't think that this concept applies to the "civil law" countries.
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I use Steven Frank's W2 wiki. It's a basic Wiki, supports Markdown, in PHP. Meant for the iPhone, but I use it on my Mac too.

Doesn't support mind maps, lists, etc of course.

http://code.google.com/p/w2wiki/
Well I assumed, as did others, that this was implemented as a joke. Gotos aren't inherently evil but if your code is improved by using them then your code is bad.
Er, okay. The point is that this does not have to spend the end for this program.
If only churnalists did the same thing.

I've seen it done a staggering 100 million times.
Are you programmer/IT guy? If yes, please be aware that the law does not work the way you think it works.

For recent example why your theory of parity of exposure is not valid, see Microsoft vs. Alcatel-Lucent.
Re: all the deficiencies of this article: It's journalism(-ish). Not even science journalism. The NG heading says it all: "Adventure Travel - National Geographic Adventure Magazine" ...not even the main NG site, but the "adventure" subdomain.

More suitable for pondering than analyzing, IMHO.
This thread was actually quite enlightening to hear the debate from both sides on the goto statement. Love HN for that. Nevertheless, it's always healthy to inject a little humor into the debate.

http://xkcd.com/292/
I just use OmniOutliner Pro.
Well, HTML5 is not going to be adopted by tomorrow. The adoption will take longer than the mobile devices lifespan.

It means, that if TI/Qualcomm/etc start developing Theora DSPs this year, they will be on the market and in the devices before HTML5 goes mainstream.

Standardizing on Theora is pretty good incentive to have it hardware accelerated.
The problem with them for me is that they are on the web. If it's not a desktop app in which I store my data in files local on my machine, I'm not interested. I use OneNote today and am very happy with the note-taking aspect. It has no todo list or mind-mapping management so I have other apps for those.
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You can use Hadoop to scale to 100TB using Commodity PCs and still be manageable, much easier and cheaper than you can use Oracle to do same. The featureset could easily DWARF those available using Oracle, as you can mapreduce all the data using your own hadoop jobs, and it can hold whatever kind of data you want it to - you're not limited to a static schema and precomputed summaries. HIVE is running on commodity PCs at facebook on more than 100TB, and they prefer it to their enormous, overly expensive Oracle OLAP system. So there's your answer, for one use case.

But of course, if you're updating the data often - you wouldn't use hadoop (or if you were, you would run HBase or some such on top of it). But there are many use cases where you only write once at that scale. And in those cases, from my perspective - its much nicer to scale on commodity hardware than on big iron.
But that is beside the point! Social Security cards/number were NEVER designed for identification... It is funny how things change overtime.

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/ssn.htm
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That's a good point, and it brings to light an unspoken assumption underlying my post, which is that the use-case is a web-based, read-heavy OLTP-style system. If you were thinking of things like OLAP and data warehousing, then I'd agree with you absolutely.

However, under my re-qualified assertion :-) for large, complicated commits, the logic would either have to be at the database level for it to be in the same transaction, or a solution using temporary tables could be put together for more convoluted calls.

Neither of these are elegant, I'll grant you, but the two basic approaches - longer transactions over logic closely coupled to the datastore, or staged writes - are what most DBAs on high-end databases end up doing anyway, and would probably be reproduced in some form or another in any ACID system, no? Either way you'd still have a database that scales.
A very detailed and in-depth post. Haven't gotten the chance to read all of it yet, but it looks like it might be the solution to many peoples issues. Probably the thing I like about it the most is the multi-datacenter awareness. This is something almost totally missing from databases today (i am speaking specifically about geo-redundancy). What I'm hoping is that it still gives you enough flexibility to do really basic GIS queries on data. Does anyone know if that would be possible?
any hints on #29?