skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These heroku guys are selling something. They're on a bandwagon, constantly bashing SQL databases. I'd say SQL Databases are great for 90% of information based systems.

The problem you are going to run into, I know a company they wanted a particular database, so they got a designer turned programmer who built a system for them in Perl using flat files. His architecture was to put one data field per line in a file and then put the one-to-many records, comments about the master record in the file starting at line x. Well, now they have fields for the master item all the way to line x minus 2 and they know they want like 5 more fields.

If the developer who built the system had started on an SQL database, then the solution to the problem of needing more fields would be really simple.

Now this problem is just one issue. Add to this the problem of needing to query the master records on particular fields. The programmer has to open up every single file and go to the particular line where the field exists and see what the value is. Of course as the file based database grows, it's really starting to impact performance.

The big problem here is that the original programmer didn't know SQL or how to manage a SQL database so he downloaded some Perl code (note, I absolutely LOVE perl, so don't be hating) that managed a dataset in perl and just went to town.

This is not the way to build a robust information based system.

SQL databases are a tool and files are a tool and CouchDB is a tool and a lot of people are going to read this biased stuff about noSQL and think, "hey, let's use couchdb, et al" and they only have 5 users on the system and, you know, maybe a million records and Access, MySQL, SQL Server Express, or any number of other free sql based systems would handle a problem like that just fine.

Instead, they're going to go write a ton of code to fit a key/value store to the problem and it's going to be a nightmare to support as the system grows and they need to implement security and manage more fields.

But the pro-noSQL people don't talk about all those issues that are going to arise later and focus solely on the scalability issue when in the vast majority of cases scalability is really the last thing you need to think about.
LSA/LSD has been shown quite effective at breaking up cluster headaches at "below threshhold doses"

(lsa is effectively quite similar at about a 1/10th the potency)
I realise you're hoping for a better solution than manual testing and I can assure you, so is everyone else. However, if you do not have a real or virtual Windows box to test on, you might find these links of interest:

http://www.browsrcamp.com/

http://www.browsercam.com/
Mushrooms are qualitatively MUCH different than LSD. But they are in the same family: tryptamines.
GNU Mailman (for lists) and Mhonarc (for archives) work pretty well, it's just a question of whether you have any place to host them.

http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html

http://www.mhonarc.org/
PHP Security Tips
Shareflow: it's kind of like Google Wave, but... not?
http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow
3 01 Giám đốc KD, 2 Nam, nữ NV KD 
Tốt nghiệp Đại học trở lên chuyên ngành kinh tế, ngoại ngữ, Maketing...; - Tiếng Anh giao tiếp; - Kiến thức Quản trị kinh doanh cấp cao; - Kiến thức tổng hợp kinh tế - xã hội và thị trường quảng cáo - truyền thông;...
Light Emission Compatible With Silicon Chips, Making Them More Efficient, Faster
Right. I love SQL, don't get me wrong, but there are a couple things my site does which SQL is just a suboptimal solution for:

1) Action caching. I stick it in memcached. This gets me free expiry-by-time, free blow-away-cache-when-deploying-new-version, and saves me having to create and maintain a table specific to caching in the database. (I really, really hate changing my schema, since I invariably manage to screw something up when migrating. Solution: don't, absent a clear need to.)

2. Caching expensive queries. Again, memcached. Much of my analytics data is publicly accessible, changes infrequently (how often am I going to add a new sale to March 2007, honestly?), and lets users calculate very expensive summary statistics. This screams "cache me!" rather than letting somebody burn my server to the ground just by opening up /stats and clicking like mad.

3. Short-term scratchpad. I have a couple of places where I need to remember little bits of information for a few minutes.

For example, a lot of customers have issues with entering registration keys, so I try to make this automatic for as many as possible. One way to do this is to have the application generate a random ID for itself, and submit this random ID to my web page when requesting the sales page. The sales page then passes this to my offsite payment processor, who will in turn pass it back with successful transactions. Meanwhile, the application polls the server periodically to see whether their ID has been associated with a purchase recently. Sure, I could stick that in the Customer table, but it feels unclean: logically, it isn't a business requirement of customers, it is just a little hack I use to make their lives easier, and it has no meaning outside of an interval which lasts, on average, about 30 seconds.
Why not send secret tweets "@thenewggirlinmyoffice I think you hot"? It does not have to be rude.
Football pictures
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Except you just showed that normalization has performance tradeoffs, not that relational databases aren't a good solution. They offer you the flexibility to normalize or denormalize as the conditions demand.

Of course they aren't the answer to every problem, and I think unstructured or semi-structured data (such as HTML pages or text data with entity tags) is a good case for storing things in a more document oriented system.
Ok, where do I know you from? :)
While I agree 100% with your point that people need to think carefully about their actual needs and not just follow the hype of the moment, comparing "NoSQL" databases to someone writing flat files in Perl is a bit harsh! Using SQL these days, with modern ORMs, is if anything quite a lot easier than manipulating flat files. And that's the problem! SQL is the new "flat file", the hammer every programmer knows, so you know what every problem starts to look like.
Oh, also, offer some consulting for clients on their database woes.

We do this at the day job. It runs about $X00 an hour, with a minimum of Y hours, if our customers need it. Heroku, on the other hand, has a lot of customers who are wondering how far their $50 a month is going to get them. For these customers, many of whom are Rails types who don't quite grok indexes, it might be a better solution to say "Um, look, rather than us teaching you a core engineering skill that you're manifestly unwilling to pay for, how about we suggest a technology stack that makes this skill unnecessary".

Previously, one of the Rails hosts (Dreamhost or Heroku, can't remember) released stats saying something like 97% of customers create no indexes. I totally understand how that can happen, too -- you expect ActiveRecord to be magic, and with what it does it is very powerful magic, but it is not magic that totally obviates your need to think about database design. (Edited to add: My business runs on Rails, I consider myself to have low to intermediate SQL ability, and if you contact my day job to get consulting on your database woes you won't get handed off to me anytime soon.)
JQuery Visualize: Automatic chart creation from an HTML table
Yes, that was a bit harsh, but the point I'm trying to make is that the noSQL proponents aren't really talking about PRO-couchDB, they just keep hammering on how "bad" SQL is, when it's really frickin' awesome.
my question is: If you have NO files in any of your temp folders, do you always get the same random number?

Doesn't seem very random to me.
Agreed, however I was expecting someone to point me to a feed reader that supports negative keyword filters.
GSM would allow it to be used in markets without EVDO, although Amazon would need to figure out some kind of roaming agreement, flatrate data pricing, etc.

I use my Kindles (K1 and DX, I've seen other people with K2...I'll probably buy one myself for completeness) here in Afghanistan, and am probably going to set up a semi-pirate 1xRTT network, as USB gets old fast. The K1 only does EVDO (for which BTS gear is expensive), but the K2/DX do 1xRTT, so you can hack firmware on some of the consumer femtocells to remove GPS checks or spoof GPS.
Thanks for posting this, I remember reading it when it first came out and having a lightbulb go off in my head. I have been looking for it off and on over the last few years and couldn't find it.
You are not reading what I write. Human growth hormone is why humans grow vertically. I never said it has any effect on obesity. To grow vertically, you need to eat. But the cause of that vertical growth is not the eating. Eating is the effect. HGH is the cause of vertical growth in all humans. Saying anything else is bizarre.

If we can explain vertical growth as a hormonal effect, and overeating as the result, than there is no a priori reason that a similar explanation is impossible for horizontal growth. In fact there is great evidence for exactly that explanation.

Your other objections were equally tangential. You seem determined to discuss tangents rather than the central points. And what evidence do you have for your sugar hypothesis? Sugar is no different from other nutrients, hmm? So glucose and insulin aren't related to FFA uptake by the fat cells. And glycogen from insulin isn't a necessary molecule for that process? I'm curious as to what research has caused you to declare all the textbooks wrong. It must be compelling.
How about setting a suitable default zoom level? That way you only have to sometimes decrease it.

( At least Opera supports this, don't remember about Firefox )
Is your city prepared for a home-made nuke?
It's unfortunate the conversation seems to have taken that turn, yes. I don't like the term "NoSQL", which is why I put it in quotes. SQL is a fantastic tool, so is Couch et al .. I don't understand why people need to "declare" for one side or the other. Ah well, human nature I suppose.
This guy happens to be a damn good software engineer. He shouldn't have to recompile Firefox to use it. His choice in typography and blog design sucks ass though.
Even when I'm trying to be really obvious:

http://www01.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+peanut+...
His example raises a question...
'items': [ {'product_code':'AX5718','qty':'1','price_per_unit':'5.00'},
{'product_code':'BB9388','qty':'3','price_per_unit':'2.00'},
],

This is starting to look like an N queries type problem if I want to print out an receipt that includes the name of the product. I'll have to grab all of the product codes out of the order and iterate over the list to separately query for each of the n products to get its name. A join would be faster. And what happens when a product changes its code? Where's my surrogate primary key?

I also don't see where he gets the infrequently-written part of this:
"If we restrict our use of SQL database to only what they are good at - small, infrequently-written, long-lived records with complex data relations - and start storing all our other data in more appropriate places, we won’t need to push our SQL databases to such high levels of performance or scale."
A lot of frequently updated data is better off in a relational, or at least normalized, store. If the price of a stock is changing all of the time, do I want to keep updating it in everyone's portfolio document? If you denormalize, you turn a single update into a multiple document update, which turns into locking a bunch of documents or records which might be waiting for another multiple document update.

Now, if all of your writes are inserts, it's a little easier to live in a denormalized world.
I'm not sure when you last used IE but IE8 is as good as the others listed. Their marketing department can suck my ass though.
"You can drive a Mack truck through that over-generalization."

Can you? Oddly enough, the only capitalisms we've seen in history are states, and the only anarchies we see are...well, places like Somalia.

"Some kind of collective enforcement of property rights and contract law might be required, but that's so far from a modern state it's not funny."

But it is, however, a state.

Development economics shows us that institutions of some sort are necessary. None of the examples you gave were ultimately sustainable. At the least you'd need an authoritative record of who owns what--and with multiple private defense agencies each having their own record, there will be disagreements. Instead of property rights we'd have civil wars.

But fundamentally, we agree--you're not an anarcho-capitalist. And I think we agree that a lot of what the government does is unhelpful. Still, registering property rights and having the power to enforce them is such a fundamental role it's easy to forget.
Not necessarily. If this is a typical seeding algorithm, at most there would be one block of data in memory, used for hashing. And one would also think they are smart enough to zero it out before deallocating it. It IS a security library, after all.
Looks like it came before Google Wave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpJEA-dMhDA&feature=chann...
It would seem that, over a period of time, these "competing interests" came to dominate their own patches of land. And then the more powerful ones conquered their neighbors. Over time, the nation-state developed.

"Let's start all of political history over again, except with nuclear weapons and machineguns" is not a promising argument to me. That's not the argument an-caps are making, but if you take what you said to its logical conclusion, it's that.
The Pros and Cons of Having a Credit Card
Even the most expensive plan, $80/month, is limited to 200 "flows". So it's not a viable email replacement in the way it seems like Wave might be.

http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow/plans
I like that idea. It could also be words of wisdom or something in between. The framework is already there and I don't mind giving anyone this code. All that needs to be changed are the quotes and the domain name.
While a SQL database isn't always the right tool for the job, it most definitely is the best default answer most of the time. We keep seeing these articles over and over and they keep missing the point.

This is what the author says about an e-commerce order: "But in practice, and the app almost always wants to retrieve the entire record all at one, and write the entire record all at once."

Right, because no business ever wants a total of their orders in the month?!? Or a business never wants to know who their best customers are? This is the worst example ever and proves that this "in practice" thought is entirely backwards.
Nahh.. it is more like drop.io. But drop.io is better.
It's interesting how no one noticed this during the beta.
Christos Papadimitriou on the Complexity of Competition
If there are Rails developers who work with applications of any size at all and are not familiar with indexes, the problem isn't scaling - it's lack of knowledge of one's application's stack. The mentality that one's app should magically scale without any idea of what's under the hood is toxic.

Anyway, it doesn't get much simpler than: add_index :users, :account_id
How to extend your life by a decade or two
Ladyada's projects[1] are just beautiful. The Wave Bubble[2] almost makes me want to dive into my copy of 'art of electronics' and try to understand enough to grok its blueprints.

[1] http://www.ladyada.net/make/
[2] http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/index.html
My boss' wife called him the other day in total panic, the battery in her car remote had failed and she had to get somewhere fast. Once she calmed down enough to listen she was really embarassed about the whole, you know, open the door with a key thing.
Hotel Delhi City Centre
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Yes, and "not giving a shit" gave us the fun we had with GIF89 (Will Compuserve shut down the web?!?), various incompatible video formats (Real, AVI, etc.), so this time around, giving a shit might save us from having to go thru all that again.
An interesting generalization of the Subset Sum Problem
Is China Banning Submissions to Digg?
Really nice! I have already spent 30 minutes on your site and have bookmarked it alongside mylifeisaverage.com
Texas is not any better, for the simple reason that Austin is the only place any sane person wants to live, and most of the money is in Houston or Dallas. Austin is full of brainy people distracted by culture and working service jobs just to stay; Houston and Dallas are full of people with an appetite for money and nothing holding them back, not sophistication and not vision either (except visions of themselves driving expensive cars and screwing hot blondes.) Austin will continue to produce a modest amount of innovation, and Houston and Dallas will continue to produce an immodest number of millionaires. It's like having a beautiful pig and an elephant with a great personality and hoping they'll have perfect offspring -- the cities are hundreds of miles apart, the people don't like each other, and the DNA definitely doesn't splice.
My best guess.. RNG_SystemRNG first tries to use a deprecated API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa387694(VS.85).aspx), then CryptoAPI, then this temp file entropy gathering approach. But if the deprecated API is _broken_, rather than absent from the DLL, then it will fall back to scanning temp files without ever trying CryptoAPI.
Looks like a message board to me. A lot of these types of technologies seems like variations on what's been accomplished with message boards and bbs's.
Or just surf around with firebug installed. Then:
right-click the text area, choose "inspect element", then right-click the DIV its in, in Firebugs code area, then add this attribute:
style="line-height:1.5; font-family: Lucida Grande; width:50%; margin:0 auto"
(asp.net's ridiculous CSS is a bit trickier, but that CSS snippet usually gets most sites up to readability scratch)

Oh, and a poor man's arc90 readability thing can be found with the "zap annoyances" bookmarklets:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
Free General directory
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Does the OP believe we really need to have "database wars" to match the tired old "OS wars" and "browser wars"?

Careful analyses are useful (and I've seen some well-reasoned debates in HN) but what strikes me is that clear-cut cases for using one tool vs another are rare, for web-dev back ends at least. Witness: the large-scale sites that use various imperfect db solutions. Yes, they sometimes involve some "hacks" to the canned db solutions, but who's found the perfect swiss-army-knife that needs no modification for any project.

What does strike me as significant is the mastery level of the db developer (whatever the db on which they have the greatest mastery/comfort) ...because projects sometimes "go south" or end up getting late-stage additions of unforeseen complexity.

Conclusion: I'm a db agnostic. Or maybe "poly-theist." There are several good competitors. None is perfect. Several are powerful, especially in the hands of an insightful and experienced db hacker. ( IMHO )
I remember when visiting a friend at mit 2 years ago, I at one point encountered a gal who had an RFID injected into her hand for easy entry to her room, and i was also shown a room where the door frame was decorated with bronze/brass leaves such that if you pressed them in the right order, you'd gain entry (sadly, i think it was only active several residents previously). Crazy / Beautiful ways to open doors are nothing new at mit
Right, but it gets much more complicated.

Near trivial example: what index or indices do you need to support the business requirement "I want to know how long users stay active after they sign up, and I want you to be able to slice that data by signup date and by whether they're paying customers or not."

So programmer Bob goes off and does this.

"Oh, Bob, the screen only lets me slice the data by signup date and by customer type, but I want to slice by both at once."

So Bob makes a one line tweak to his controller (to use both conditions, instead of one or the other)... and BOOM, down goes the poor server.
How to Fire Non-Performers
yep, that declaration is crazy. They're all good tools. Use the right tool for the job. I think part of the issue really, unfortunately, is that SQL is tough. It's not taught in colleges very much. I learned it on the job. I never learned anything about SQL in college and it's not something you can just jump into, but a key/value pair is easy. Anyone who has taken a data structures class is going to understand it. It's basic programming.

You gotta kinda wrap your mind around SQL though and if you don't have a support group helping you do that, you're probably going to struggle with it. So I can understand the desire to find a simpler alternative to solve information based systems, something between file based Perl and SQL.
It should be way easier to get to a person's twitter page from your site, I understand the desire for lock in and all but, man.
Russell Roberts is trying to contact Paul Graham
Russell Roberts, an economics professor at George Mason University, author of several excellent books including 'The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity' and the host of EconoTalk, is interested in contacting Paul Graham. Maybe someone here would know how to make that happen?
Funny. But seriously, google indexes a few more pages than just bing, they ought to be praising google for already indexing this relatively new and unknown site :)

At least when you search for bing on google you get a few links that point to something else than bing itself. If you search for google on bing all you get (or at least I get) is endless google domains.

Even with the one 'down' page captured there is still a lot more good content in google about bing than the reverse!
umm, hehe, yah testing and high reliability, yah yah but umm - mathematics is a different kind of predictable...it's that kind of predictable where even if you don't know anything else, is it still true? yah. if we were in a different multiverse, where the laws of physics are varied in some ways, would it still work? yes. deduction is a beautiful thing.
Mount Abu gears up for tourism infrastructure development
Hah. "Casual sex will be the first to go." Have you ever met a person?
Xbox 360 Repair Guide
Fix RROD on your Xbox 360 in less than 1 hour.
Perhaps the knock changes on a daily or hourly basis!
Interesting idea for a site. Looks nice too which never hurts!

I would like to invite you to add your app to my site, launchly. Launchly is all about getting feedback and attention for new web apps. We track all aspects of your launch to help you see how you are doing and decide what changes to make.

I am currently running a free promo code for HN users so there is no risk for you.

Promo Code: HN_LAUNCH
Link: http://www.launchly.com
Chrome sparks new anti-trust concerns between google and apple
Nah, man, not when you want people to want to do the work. That's the point of the article - people want loot, not killing the same monster over and over. Likewise, if you give people rewards, they'll want the reward, but they won't produce quality work because they're just focusing on getting to the goal.
Thanks - will check out launchly to see what you offer.