skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely wrong.

We use Dell 2950's for our DB nodes in our Oracle clusters. Biggest one right now is 12 nodes.

And if it scales, but costs too much (a relative concept at best), then it somehow doesn't scale any more?

Of course cost matters, and it comes down to what your application requirements are, and what your revenue model is, and your risk management requirements are, etc., etc.

If you want to talk technology only, it's a no-brainer.

If you want to talk cost and context-appropriate implementation of technology, then provide a detailed context, not generalizations.

Again, you're not going to see an online bank use CouchDB as their back-end, and likewise, you're not going to see a relatively free service use stupidly expensive technology.
How much data, and with a SAN? How much did the SAN cost? What kind of data?

But yes - if its too expensive to do, that means it doesn't scale well. Since when does money not matter in everything? The entire point of all of this is to use commodity PCs to achieve linear scalability cost-effectively, and to escape relational structure for data ill-suited to relational schemas.

I don't think anyone is suggesting an online bank should not use existing commercial databases and SQL.
Why are there no open-source implementations of the "proper DB technologies", then?
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"For example, Facebook is, for the most part, a read-only, fairly static site."

FaceBook's actually one of the more dynamic sites out there. I'd bet that the average FaceBook user makes many more updates to their FaceBook profile than they make financial transactions.

The real difference in requirements is that FaceBook can - and does - drop updates on the floor. If your friend throws a sheep at you and you don't get it on your news feed - oh well, FaceBook never claims the news feed is exhaustive anyway. But if somebody writes you a check for $10,000 and they see that you cashed it and you don't see it in your account, that's a problem.
And (imo) there's no telling which way a judge might rule. Eg see the email exchange betwen rms & Bruno Haible on why CLISP is under gpl: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

"I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The
issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in
two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was
lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning
like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for
free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider
such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward
them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program,
rather than how it is labeled."
Now walk with pride with the Samsung F480 Tocco
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Seems like this is a pretty critical thing to do.
This is a very important point. The obvious strategy for Microsoft is to open up enough of the platform to allow it to proliferate, but keep enough of it closed to give their implementation the edge. If you were hesitant to invest efforts in the .NET platform before this announcement, and you depend on the high level APIs, you might have more reason to worry now.
People can still make money charging for them?

Open-sourcing is the last step in the technology lifecycle, after the technology has become widely understood and commoditized. When people can still make money off something, they will. What's the incentive for them to give it away?
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Which Microsoft famously tried to circumvent with J++.
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I'd beg to differ.

Go take a look at Adam Leventhal's work with the Fishworks stuff.

Specifically, go check out the Sun Storage 7310.

It will scale HUGE, and is nowhere near the stupid cost of NetApp or EMC or the other major vendors.

I'd love to see how a bunch of commodity PC's will scale to 100TB, and still be manageable, and have anywhere near the same feature sets.

Again, if you're railing against something as ubiquitous as a SAN, I'm not sure there's anything I can say to change your mind.

Not that I'm really here to change your mind.

Again, the original focus was about SQL not scaling, and you seem to be fixated on the cost of that scaling.
When I make a serious career level mistake in judgment, software projects might fail. Someone might even lose their job. When people of certain levels make the same order of errors, many people may die. We're both human. I haven't the fortitude to make those decisions (even if I was in the position to), but someone has to and sometimes they are wrong.

Some of them hang banners on aircraft carriers and pretend they are right anyway. Some of them humbly admit they were wrong. The people still die. Bummer.
I took CS61A with one of the authors of the book, Brian Harvey (CS61A is the introductory computer science course here at Berkeley). While I loved the class and enjoyed having Harvey as my professor, I found Simply Scheme a bit too limited and simplistic. SICP covers more material in greater detail.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Worth knowing if you are a large online buyer, that CA still charges a use tax - that is, you're expected to declare out-of-state purchases for use in CA and pay the same rate as sales tax, and it would matter if you got audited. So if you spend many thousands online in the belief that you're saving yourself sales tax, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. That said, I've never heard of any regular person getting audited for state taxes.

This goes back to the 1930s, incidentally; it's not some anti-internet thing.
I agree... never meant to imply that Facebook had fewer hits/etc than a banking site in raw numbers, just that the ratio of DB reads (not considered a transaction, very easy to cache, etc) to DB writes, makes the site much more read-only than write-only.

Facebook has the ability to do a TON of edge caching, with very few (relatively speaking) operations having to go to the database to perform an actual write operation.

It's the DB writes that really kill performance and limit your caching strategies and gains.
So, there is a line somewhere between excusable and inexcusable mistakes. Who gets to decide where that line is drawn?
There's still a penalty for non-willful infringement; if nothing else, the inventor can request an injunction that shuts down your whole production line. That's the scary thing about patents... unless you have comprehensive knowledge of every patent in your field of endeavor, they are financial time bombs.

If the plaintiff can show that you did know about the patent and infringe it willfully, the damages are tripled.
The only thing Global Gaming Factory got out of this deal is the domain name.
Neat!

Thank you, I'll definitely look in to it. The biggest problem with blocking bots is false positives, identifying and giving a pass to your real users. It's a surprisingly hard problem, bot writers are quite clever when it comes to masquerading as real users.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688995
May he rot and burn in hell, and may all the world forget he ever lived.
I've used both the BSDs and Linux for almost a decade. Both have their strong points, but I'm finding that I like the Linux distributions which take inspiration from *BSD.

Arch Linux is currently my favorite desktop OS: rolling release, bleeding edge, minimalist, customizable, binary packages and a ports like build tree (ABS). See "The Arch Way" for more: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way

For a server you can't go wrong with Debian stable or FreeBSD (or OpenBSD if you can sacrifice some convenience and speed for increased security measures).
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North Vietnam did not initiate aggression, the U.S. did. In fact, the Vietnam war was an undeclared one. How ironic. The longest war was never declared officially.

About mistakes, let us see:

- having the CIA planting a brutal, oppressive puppet government in Saigon.

- when puppet government fails, invent a fictitious act of aggression, lie to the Congress, bomb South Vietnam to hell, and send in thousands of American boys to die for nothing.

- years later, after 58K Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians have been killed, write a book saying "sorry, it was a mistake".

Yeah. It's really hard to draw the line here...

If there had been a threat against the U.S., then yes, decisions would have to be made, and unavoidably mistakes would have been made, unfortunately. However, in Vietnam there never was a threat to the U.S., except in the "brilliant" minds of the "domino-theorists" who never bothered to try to understand the enemy and its motivations.
I guess when you're co-responsible for willingly killing a couple of hundred thousand civilians the bar has been met.

Seriously, the option to 'be sorry' is there for everybody but there certainly isn't an obligation on the part of the victims to let it go.

And they - the victims - should be the ones to decide where that line gets drawn, clearly.

Being sorry just makes you a little bit less of a jerk.
Usually, an ideological one. The first group of Linux kernel developers (past the "toy" stage) all hated Microsoft with a passion, and wished to deprive it of as much revenue as possible. They wanted to give people a "free alternative", and lower the total investment people [that is, they] would have to make in owning a computer. I could imagine an analogous situation with some developers and Oracle.
So, you're comparing a software error to the act of initiating aggression and killing millions of people, including 58K of your countrymen????

If so, you need to put things in perspective, imho.
You both own your mistakes, you own yours, mcNamara owns his.

I give the man props for genuinely being sorry but that does not absolve him from the damage that he's done. I'd hate to have been in his shoes though, I can't imagine what that kind of guilt would do to your nights rest.
#moonfruit, #spymaster, #yetanotherbloodycontest

Carrying out an entire conversation - a few tweets back and forth is fine but when you're racking up 30-40 in a row it's irritating.
If you like point-free, you want Haskell. Scala can do it, but it's not as pretty.
Earlier in the article they said that a 70 watt bulb is now giving off the same amount of light as an older 100 watt bulb. They said it was 30% more efficient.

Later in the article they say:

> David Cunningham ... [has] develop[ed] a reflective coating and fixture design that he believes could make incandescents 100 percent more efficient.

100% more efficient? Zero power input? Me must really be giving 110% to acheive results like that.
Go ahead and do it then, we'll see how long that lasts. Newspapers are not competing with other newspapers with paywalls, they're competing with all the other internet content.

Newspapers are going to be one of those institutions that we'll miss when they're gone, but gone they will be.

The smartest ones may be able to find a way to adapt, a paywall on non-unique content isn't going to do much good I expect, it will only hasten the downfall.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688832
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They are (in Scala).

I think it's overloading (punning on static type of the same function, operator, or method name) that makes explicit type declarations more often necessary in Scala than in Haskell or ML.
3 upvotes and 2 downvotes without a single response.

As a junior member of Hacker News, I demand an education when I'm downvoted! :)
"I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have
three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn't
help get us true interoperabiliy, since the people who are willing to
implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people
who aren't are not going to be swayed by what the spec says.
"

That appears to be the permanent fate of the World Wide Web Consortium and its specs, unfortunately.
It's amusing that he thinks master-slave replication is MySQL's killer feature. Didn't IBM have it, umm, 30 years ago?

Also that he says SQL database and not relational database. The whole article reeks of inexperience.
Isn't Facebook using MySQL?
I think he was aiming at contrasting the two.
Yes, but Scala is a less polished FPL than Haskell. If you're using Scala instead, it's because you love OO, want convenient global mutable state, aren't interested in the purity (read: B&D) of Haskell's effect system, or want to use Java libraries.
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I get that. But imho it's a tiny bit distasteful contrasting them, isn't it?

The total number of Vietnamese who were killed was to the tune of 3 million. That's a "semi-Holocaust". No one would compare a software glitch to the Holocaust, right?
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I'll look into Arch Linux. My biggest frustration is with drivers. I made the switch from WinXP to Ubuntu last year but I couldn't get bluetooth audio to work. I loved Ubuntu but it wasn't usable for daily workflow. I had to go back to Win7. After increasing crashes I'm going to try out BSD. I'm pessimistic about driver support but i hope it's up to par with Ubuntu at least. I really like the philosophy behind the OS. Haven't looked at the code yet but they won me over with the "build from scratch" no-binary way!
We went to Iraq, didn't we? I'd say we forgot him straightaway.
Slackware is pretty BSD-like also; I know it's pretty straightforward to use NetBSD's pkgsrc (a fork of FreeBSD's ports mentioned in the link) on Slack. Like Arch, Slackware uses the BSD init system.
Millions? GS made profits of $1.2 billion (with a B) in the first quarter. I'm sure it's a headache for them and will be expensive to fix, but GS can absorb a $100 million loss without breaking a sweat.

32 Megabits

Only 32 of 1,024 megabits of the software code was transferred, [defense attorney] Shroff said.

Tee hee. I anticipate much straight-faced computer nonsense on the financial news channels this week. I'm tempted to call or email one of the CNBC types demanding to know whether GS uses unsigned integers.
Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice.

Millions of Americans served in Vietnam. I think the veterans will never forget nor forgive McNamara. He shall be remembered as the architect of one of the greatest crimes in History.
More interesting (and inexplicably): http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?p=469
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The permanent fate of any specification is down to whether people are willing to implement it.

Whatsmore, the original intention of the W3C wasn't as a dictator to companies as to what to implement - the use of the term "recommendation" rather than "standard" is very much deliberate.
You can't be talking about Hive[1], the SQL system for structuring and quering Hadoop datasets. That would never scale...

1- http://hadoop.apache.org/hive/
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I wasn't one of the ones who upvoted or downvoted you, but just because you asked . . . while abstractions around your data-handling code are always a good idea, on some level they always leak. (For example, see the classic post http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute... describing how ORM, one of the most common approaches to encapsulating data-handling code, tends to fail).

Most of your code is data-handling code on some fundamental level, so it's pretty inevitable that it's going to matter to your application how that data is stored and what sorts of operations you can do on it, and that's especially true if you care about performance (which you generally always do after some level). So even if you have a nice abstraction of your query layer, the kinds of questions you can ask the database efficiently depend heavily on the underlying storage mechanism, and so your application logic has to be built so it only asks the right kinds of questions.

Even abstracting away the differences between, say, Oracle and MS SQLServer and MySQL is difficult enough, because of the different capabilities and performance characteristics. When you do that, you basically end up coding to the lowest common denominator, which can often limit what your applications does.

Trying to come up with an abstraction that can encapsulate the difference between a row- versus column-oriented database, or between a relational database and some other kind of storage, is pretty much a losing proposition: they're too fundamentally different in terms of what kind of data you can store, how you can store it, how you can query it, what kinds of transactional guarantees you get, and what operations are fast and which ones are slow.

So you really do kind of have to take your best shot at it, choose an approach, and if you choose wrong and have to change, it's just going to hurt. A lot. Good encapsulation and abstraction will ease some of the pain, but it's more like drinking whiskey before your leg gets sawed off than it is like general anesthesia.
> Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice

Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again
Very well-categorized Web Usability Guidelines By Userfocus
WRT exposing Postgres, you're right that you can't simply expose a database and then expect the DB to scale under random selects, inserts, etc. (RAC is another matter I guess.)

However, as I said in the first comment to the blog post, if you define an interface using stored procedures (a pattern familiar to many Oracle DBAs), then PL/Proxy (http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plproxy/) lets you do hash-based partitioning in a way that's more or less transparent to the end-user of a DB, again assuming that it has a defined interface. The PL/Proxy installs form a 'bus' between the DB and the user.

Self-promotion: I'm currently working on hacking PL/Proxy into something that can be used to auto-scale a Postgres cluster on-demand, which has interfaces as a pre-requisite, along with some other things. The end-goal is to do exactly what you say: to scale-out Postgres like any other internet service on an ideal horizontal. Link: http://code.google.com/p/hotrepart

(Hum, I'm gonna get accused of spamming for repeating myself so often :-)
Ok, let me put the right hand brace on this one before it gets away. My point was simply that humans are going to make mistakes in the course of their jobs. People can be hurt by these mistakes. The difference is a matter of scale, and not intent.

People want to make McNamara out to be Evil with the big e. I think he probably wasn't. His actions later in life point to this. The idea is that if we accept that people make mistakes (sometimes HUGE ones) we can prevent a few of them in the future by learning from the past. If we'd really listened to McNamara its quite possible we might have avoided Iraq. If we just call him evil and forget about it, we miss the wisdom.
Being ideologically for open software and an open operating system is not the same as "hating Microsoft with a passion". Mixing these two different concepts into the same bag is misleading, as the first one represents an ideological conviction and the other merely childish spite.

And if you insist on being cheap, don't be surprised when it turns out that your free database was indeed some cheap stuff which doesn't come fully featured.
I don't really see Microsoft as the enemy anymore, but playing in their back yard is still really, really foolish.

It's not like there's a shortage of cross-platform languages or good JIT VMs.
Crazy. My instance has been running for days, with dozens of tabs open at once and I am currently at 89Mb with 4 tabs open at the moment i.e. it scales back the memory like it should. I've found that memory usage has improved significantly in recent builds.

If you're using more than a GB under normal conditions there's either something wrong with one of your extensions or your profile is messed up. Try starting a new profile with no extensions and see if the problem remains.
Dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691070
If there is no direct causal link then all correlation does is suggest such a link. You have to FIND the link and prove its real in order to make this about something.

X is observed in people doing Y is not a scientific breakthrough, it is an observation. If not all people that do Y have X there is no story, just more work to get to the bottom of what is going on.
the current state of the art (pretty much) is as described in the article - i.e, not great

That simply isn't true.

For me, thousands of transactions per second and 10s of terabytes of data on a single database is normal. It's unremarkable, it's everyday, it's what we do, we have done it for years. And I know of installations handling 10x that. It's only people who's only "experience" is websites that whinge about how RDBMS can't handle their tiny datasets.
Doesn't your last line completely undermine your argument and your moral authority to comment on fanboys?
Patents, Complexity, Marginal Returns: Hello, Devolution