skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder if we just have a generation of programmers who can't think in SQL. They're used to using ORMs (which are useful abstractions) but can't work at a lower level. Sending a query over the line to get exactly the results you want, and no more, and have it optimized and run entirely on server is pretty damn efficient.

Yeah, it's really obvious if you ever work with a really really senior DBA. I don't think it's the queries though, it's the modeling. I think a lot of software teams model their database sort of like they model data structures and then use various ORM tools to be the glue. DBAs tend to model the data in ways to make it most acceptable to the database and minimize the loss of any information, it's almost always more complex. The database as become an object persistence engine in a lot of cases that has some relational properties that may or may not be used. Instead of writing and managing files in the filesystem, you shove stuff in to a database.

Just for starters, your ORM will model an object for a row of data, how many times do you get the whole row when you're really interested in just a column or two? Does your ORM let you just specify the parts of the row you're interested in or does it hydrate an object and populate all of the columns? (Those extra columns being copied does add up...) ORMs are a religious war, as a software engineer it's a really beautiful idea, in reality I've never seen one that really works well with the database, they're too softwarey.

The other thing that seems to be rampant is the traditional 3 tier application model has kind of collapsed. It's not the case everywhere but I've seen it at more than a couple places where there is a persistence tier and then kind of a combined presentation/business tier. With a more traditional data model the business layer is absolutely critical and shows a lot of value, you might have to glue some more complicated queries together in to objects inside a transaction rather than just hydrating a row from a table. When you use a database as a store for your data structures a business layer just doesn't seem to be as valuable.

If you just want keyed data storage, a relational database does become the wrong tool. I would think, and this might just be parochial thinking, that at some point keyed data storage would essentially reinvent the relational database as the problems grow in complexity.
a shorter version of ^ would be

there just isnt enough interesting news in the tech world to have 200 interesting links posted a day, better trying to make the news than to find it.
What about PatientOS or Medscribbler's community project?

http://patientos.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/medscribbler/
Yes, yes it will. The job I hold now, the interview process went as such:

* Phone interview with resource manager. "So, are you interested in working at such and such doing Coldfusion and .NET?"

* Phone interview with hiring manager. "Do you know Coldfusion and Perl? What have you worked on?"

* Had an open interview session with another part of the company. Explained this to the hiring manager. I was told I would hear something the following week.

* Offer letter arrived on Monday.

It really doesn't get much smoother than that. Not once did I have to defend things on my resume, make up answers to crazy questions, or jump through silly hoops. They wanted someone who could do the job, and I could. So they hired me.
there's a cool idea!

Now let's hope some of the folks at apple read this.
Now they have the brick separator. Works surprisingly well.
http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=630
Lifetick.com has been an interesting trial too, I didn't see that one.
How long is it?
I was there, it was a really really funny talk, and a nice little introduction to haskell
51 minutes
Pitch MP3 (eg. audio pitch shift in Flash)
This site isn't nearly spammy enough for the savages over at Digital Point but Flippa might be worth a try.

Also, if you're serious about selling, put a very visible graphic on every page with a link to a sales pitch PDF. The basic stuff everyone here has asked for should be included: traffic, revenue and background technology information.

With no revenue you're going to find yourself instantly offended by low-ball offers but you might find a diamond in the rough if you're patient.
Ha, I wrote OpenEMR when I was 16 along with a few of my high school friends in Connecticut. One guy's mom was a doctor, and wanted an EMR system, so we whipped one up in PHP over a summer.

My first startup, and I've since forgotten about it, but I'm glad to see that OpenEMR is still alive. The codebase looks nothing like it originally did, but I guess that's a positive for open source. (Who really trusts some high school kid's PHP code, anyhow?)
There's a lot on it, nicely done, but really not very much theoretical computer science. Two or three pages of discrete mathematics (I suppose I should say "concrete", since much of it clearly comes from GKP), a page of trigonometry (!), about 2.5 pages of integrals and derivatives, another page or so of Taylor series expansions. A bit of graph theory, a bit of number theory, a bit of probability, a tiny fragment of geometry. Nothing at all on complexity classes, computability, logic, automata, type theory, denotational semantics, or any of the other stuff you might think of when you see "theoretical CS".

(For the avoidance of doubt: The only thing I'm complaining about is the title. Which comes straight from the original document, except for the word "ultimate".)
i doubt it was available for registering, some money had to change hands.
From the pdf at the bottom of the page:

IF YOU INVEST $50, AND THE FILM IS...

SOLD FOR $250,000 = YOU GET $50 (100% RETURN)

SOLD FOR $500,000 = YOU GET $75 (150% RETURN)

SOLD FOR $1,000,000 = YOU GET $88 (175% RETURN)

I don't think traditional investors count like that.. I presume the investors won't get paid back their initial investment, so if the film sells for 250k and each investor gets his $50 back, that's a return of zero. A return of 100% implies a doubling of your initial investment..

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way it's phrased here is quite misleading (otherwise great idea though).
ComScore: Russians Spend More Time On Social Networks Than The Rest Of World
Great post. Clear, sensible, and informative.
I've read somewhere that the best place to hide valuables (from thieves, not from your kids) is in a stuffed animal in a kid's room because no thieve would search through the mess average children have in their rooms. So this safe might be safer that it looks :-).
IPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Devs Adjust To OS3.0, Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power
I believe this article spent a bunch of time on the front page a couple days ago.
Gherkin - a domain specific language for business analysts
And that's only 1 million dollars revenue. Which is nothing.
Yes, I actually purchased it from Expedia for $462 less. Somehow I doubt that ITA would have done the opposite, and says "hey, we found a lower price!" right before purchase. By the way, both Kayak and Orbitz had the price which was $462 higher as well.
IBM's Blindfolded Calculator
Many adults cannot name a scientist
I sort of (jokingly mind you) consider the new interface twist a much needed category theoretic twist to the interface. Now we can specify mappings from a label to a set of emails (the drag the email to the label action), and mappings from an email to a set of labels (the drag the label to the email action)
Another technique is to write something original and meaty for your own blog that's relevant to the audience here. Then submit that link. Instead of looking for the work of others, create your own.
Cover letters are often used to weed people out, so it's not always a good idea to create one. IMO, if you have a great cover letter include it, but if average or below skip it.
How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack
I can't count the number of projects that I have been attached to in some way that was aiming at providing some panacea to the business analyst... and I doubt my experience is very exceptional in that regard. Maybe THIS time they got it right. ;)

-m
I think it's about stretching with what you have, i.e. rationing your saved-up bootstrap money. Spend 20% less gives you 20% more time, something like that.
Witness the Real-life (Beta) Version of Star Trek's Universal Translator
Faviki's Social Bookmarking Tool Makes Semantic Tagging Even Easier
Blogger.com Refreshes Page Every Few Seconds on Old Browsers
His post was more interesting than this comment.
Yeah. That's like the number fifteen million saying, man am I glad most of the numbers came before me. It doesn't make sense.

Unless you interpret this as a warning on the short time humanity has left or something, which is not what I think was meant.
Except that between 12 and 17 you've got so many hormones racing through your body that you rarely make any sensible decisions...
Security guard charged with hacking hospital systems
My eyesight isn't great and perhaps it just takes getting used to, but I found periods rather hard to scan visually. Ay first glance I'd prefer something else.
The thing with feeding truly random numbers to a person is that they never seem "random enough," so you'll have people rejecting a stochastic process because they see patterns, so they'll go out of their way to make it look more like noise, and decreasing the entropy.
Steve Blank: Rocket Science 2, Drinking the Kool-Aid
Gizmodo will always garner my affection simply for their humour. Absolutely no other gadget site has been able to reach their level of hilarity. Gadgets are great and all, but after the twelfth Samsung phone or the thirteenth camera phone of the day, Engadget's dry prose just gets to me.

GDGT seems like a new take on the idea. Personally, it sounds like Weardrobe for geeks. That's not a bad thing, but complexity really waters down content. Hopefully they can overcome that.
and then spell check it... :)
Yay for business models that decouple money earned from hours worked for the sake of working hours. After I get 3.0 of my app launched the website won't suddenly throw a FatalLackOfButtInChairException, even if I'm e.g. sleeping or on a date when I could be working.
I have tried different approaches over the years. The best seems to be to have a todo.txt file and use my favorite text editor. It is very flexible, I indent to show subtasks, I can make notes anywhere. Use - as a bullet for uncompleted tasks and + for completed tasks.
This is more of a subjective 'this is what works for me' review than an objective analysis of the various offerings. Not that worthwhile in my opinion. Try them each and see what works best for you - this article isn't going to help you much.
Cool. Also it has a nice viral element.

Could you just open it up to the world instead of keeping it behind the alpha? What's your fear? What's the worst thing that could happen?

Here is why it might be a good idea to open it up. When I went to the site I liked the layout and the appearance but I didn't really understand what it was about. So I was not motivated to sign up for an alpha. If more of the site was visible I'd "get" it and might want to sign up.

Another neat feature would be if I could invite some of my friends.

Also it would be nice if I could just interact with it, at least get a basic feel, or get a demo, without the sign-up. That would help me decide whether I wanted to sign up or not.

I have noticed in my own ventures is that when I release things and people start using them and sending me feedback that becomes an incredibly powerful source of motivation and energy for me to keep working on the stuff in the evenings and on weekends. The lack of motivation only occurs before the release. So it's good to get the release out of the way quickly -- even if it is a flimsy and pathetic release. Sort of like a newborn baby -- flimsy but functional.

If the back-end does not completely work yet, is there a really simple, really tiny scenario that it could implement so that it could be useful? Think minimal and simple and throw out all the elaborate features that you need more people to implement.

Another thing I have found useful is to add a feedback form somewhere so that early users can send me direct feedback. People say the weirdest things which can lead to some interesting results.
Yes. I know this because my wife's cousin, who is 12, said he wanted an iPod touch for Christmas because it can do everything a laptop does: facebook, IM, etc. I was floored when I heard that and it hit it home for me how big iPhone devices will be in the future.
Nice app.

However, it assumes certain things about the size of the font displayed, without which it displays incorrectly. And guess what? In my case, it assumes wrong. Bad web design.
Real web-surfers use the Firemacs extension :p

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4141
So I'm working on a small project that will develop into a startup if the prototype works. It's heavily based on information handling and to supplement the functionality we plan on having an internal user profile database.
You are obviously familiar with the functionality of modern database tech. Was thinking SQL, might there be faster/lower latency lookups?
Haven't nailed down all the fields yet but baseline will include taxonomy(language topics), historical preferences (general and specific)
I can go into more detail by email if you're curious)
> But then what happens when you need reporting

Then I replicate the applications data out into a relational database for reporting. 99% of what applications need isn't reporting. I want to use many different data structures, not be forced to fake everything with a table, or continually reassemble things from tables.

SQL has its strong points, being a convenient data store for applications isn't one of them.
Apparently you don't understand how it actually works. At least in the case of DB2, the database engine doesn't store a "verbose textual representation" of XML documents. It breaks them down into a more efficient internal binary format that still preserves the structure.

I deal with complex XML documents that go a dozen or more levels deep. It would certainly be possible to represent that data in a relational structure. But then to query based on the value of a deeply nested element would require a large number of table joins. Keeping everything in a single XML column is much simpler and faster, since the specific inner element values can be indexed.

Hierarchical databases have been around for years, and actually predate relational databases. XML databases are just a specialization of hierarchical databases. Some applications are a better fit for the relational model and some are a better fit for the hierarchical model. With hybrid databases you get the best of both worlds and can choose the right tool for the job.
Guidelines to Lock Down Your Website
Ask HN: Selling a Startup?
We've been working on a site as a side project for ~2 years now. It's had great media attention, good growth. It's profitable, there are clear models for greater profitability, but we've hit an inflection point; we either need to dedicate a large amount of time to building it out or sell it, and we're leaning toward a sale.

We've seen flippa (sitepoint), ebay and digitalpoint's marketplace - it doesn't look like the liquidity/volume is there to support acquisitions in the price range we think we're worth.

So, how/where do you sell yourself in the ~100k range?
... and correct that for inflation, of course.
Does anyone know where I can find more Michael Jackson news on the internet? I have been searching all over for hours and haven't found anything.
Ironically makes me less interested in learning about this company. Kinda like my desire to ever try FogBogz evaporated after noticing Spolsky's essay pattern of "<% interesting title %>some content about FogBogz<% closing paragraph%>"
For UK readers, the majority of which are license fee payers, I agree.

But I'm not sure about international visitors as the BBC generates revenue from ads shown on their site, so I'm not sure if it would make sound financial sense and be good use of the taxpayers money if it would impact their revenue stream. The downside is that people using online readers would be hit in the cross-fire, but that's unavoidable.
not really, apparently he sold 750 million records, and only made 700 million during his career. And most of that money came from Beatles rights ownership and concerts.
I find the inclusion of Escher's Knot a bit... whimsical.
not exactly. its a post about HN and why people should read it and participate in it. i barely mentioned our portfolio company.
what ads?
http://pat.io

It's simple yet still aesthetically pleasing.
A syntax-aware editor's highlighting or automatic indentation could provide an extra clue, though. It can scan for periods quite easily.

Prolog and Erlang (which was initially implemented in Prolog) use periods to end blocks, as well. While it can make rearranging expressions in a block a little annoying ("," vs "." in Prolog, "," and ";" vs "." in Erlang), it's small potatoes compared to the syntactic quirks in, say, C.

Also, Lua does the same "table as an argument -> keyword arguments" trick. (He mentions Lua in the list of influences.)
What is the difference between a megacolony and a species? If I replaced s/ant/mouse/ and s/megacolony/species/, would there be anything surprising about their results?
Indian Court Overturns Gay Sex Ban
What's the reward in finding links that aren't popular elsewhere? Surely posting something that has clearly garnered interest on other sites is a faster route to karma?

Also, I'd say: subscribe to interesting RSS feeds and twitter accounts and post stuff from those. (That was mostly my strategy as a pro-blogger, though without the twitter part :P)
I was a little confused at that too. I didn't downmod you but your original post had some pretty mangled grammar. Looks better now though.
Many parking meters in Belgium have photovoltaic collection plates. It's being done.
When Our Brains Short-Circuit
Neither Python nor Ruby AFAIK have tail-call optimization.
The BBC shows ads on its website to non-UK visitors and have done since 2007. From http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/bbcworldwide/worldwidestori...:

"The BBC Trust has approved proposals for the BBC to establish bbc.com, a commercial venture to offer advertising on the BBC's international online service for users outside the UK. UK users' experience of bbc.co.uk will not be affected.

...

bbc.com will use robust geo-IP technology (see Editor's Notes) to separate out international visitors to the site."

From these ads, they made £1.5m ($3m) in the 5 months after launch (from the BBC Annnual Report at http://www.bbcworldwide.com/annualreviews/review2008/Digital...).
> In most cases an ORM is just another layer of complexity.

That unlike SQL, drastically reduces the amount of code the programmer is forced to write for the vast majority of applications that programmers write.

SQL can't do the one thing most programs actually need, give them the ability to select a starting point, and then navigate the conceptual graph of data as the user moves around the application. ORM's provide that, object database provide that, SQL doesn't.
Super Babies Reveal the Key to Strength Gene
Google Maps API V3
"Airbus's design is an UNlikely culprit for the Yemenia crash near the Comoros"

"If the author is reinforcing the argument that the A310's design is not likely to be a factor in the crash, then the title could be misleading."

The title implies exactly that, so what's misleading about it?
So it could work for new projects?
Maybe as long as there aren't any toys in the room.
Step 1: figure out who the potential buyers are. Competitors? Other's in the same industry who could find a network effect? Who would be uniquely able to extract more value out of the site than you were?

Step 2: approach them.
Stonebraker: Send Relational DBMSs to the Home for Tired Software
"those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart."

Good thing. I'd hate to see ants fighting when they're that far away from each other.
Actually, if someone created a lateral-thinking patent evasion group, as proposed, they would probably violate a patent filed by someone who thought of it in the first place but couldn't be buggered to implement it in practice.
Can the title be changed to Blogger.com instead of just Blogger? the current title is rather misleading, I thought some blogger decided to prank persons using older browsers.
Well it really depends on your space:

Competitors: as long as you have more than one, and one of them is bigger than you(to afford the $100K).

Customers: if some of your customers are big in the industry you serve, one of them might pick you up.

Media Companies: look around to see if there is one that lacks a website in your space.

Or you can setup a webpage for users to throw together a bunch of money, and then help them register a corporation, which will then take the pooled money and buy your company.
apparently Hacker News is a blog aggregator...
It didn't complain about github. It raised an interesting discussion about github's business model. But you're right: it was not adding to the discussion of the link.
Yeah, the guy just refuses to understand. This is from 422 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182193
Pirate Bay: Making sense of the sale
Please don't. That is exactly the kind of thing this site was created to escape.
Awesome story. I love the final line.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559402
Actually, I far prefer 'this works for me' over 'I've visited their websites and compiled these facts'.

(Remember the Milk works for me, primarily because of its Gmail gadget.)
Sharing Power (Global Edition)
I circumvent that $25 by using Twitter and Google Calendar on iPhone to remember RTM (95% of my interfacing with RTM is via Gmail).
There were some great comments when this topic hit Slashdot suggesting that it only appears that things are going faster than light, but it is simply the apparent phase shifting appears to propagate faster than light, but it is unclear if this phase shifting can be utilized in any way.
Hiring is Obsolete http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Defend America, One Laptop at a Time
That's the most thorough analysis I've seen yet.
So "Wall Street"?
i kind of liked the last option - i would say motivated crowdsourcing!!!

the other option (which has become preferred option recently) is to sell 25%-50% to the new owner who will run and/or control the operations (and see how it goes) and u be there to provide training and support - this will gain the confidence of the buyer community that your business is real business and you're transparent about revenue and growth potential... once the new owner sees that there is real revenue and growth, he/she start taking more ownership on monthly basis or give you lumpsum amount that was agreed upon.
I can't type for shit on my iPhone touch because the keys are too tiny for my fingers. So no.
That sharding is required once your DB exceeds what you have of physical RAM seems to be a irrevocable meme in the MySQL world.

Seeing the amount of people generalizing that to apply to all RDBMSs makes me think they don't have any DB-knowledge outside MySQL.
"If you come across a garter snake, nearly all of your brain will light up with activity as you process the “threat.” Yet if somebody tells you that carbon emissions will eventually destroy Earth as we know it, only the small part of the brain that focuses on the future — a portion of the prefrontal cortex — will glimmer"

Correct me if I am wrong here, but it's a darn good thing too. How horrible would it be if you got a flight or fight response every time a possible diffuse future threat was mention in passing by someone? I hardly think this example can be characterized as a flaw.
Freemium & The Evolution From a Web App To a Web Platform
Hacker News demographics (by Quantcast)
Indeed, it didn't work for me in the latest Chrome or IE.