skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't agree more.

Presenting your personality is precisely why I carefully write a friendly, intriguing and upbeat cover letter for each and every job.

You can't present a culture fit better than by presenting your personality.

I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years.

That says more about me, outside of my skill set and experience, than my CV ever could and works wonders for making me stand out, as well as intriguing whoever may be reading my application.
It happens with large RDBMS systems anyways after about 5GB of data, same type of scalability decisions have to be made.

More like 5Tb these days.
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As an entrepreneur, I disagree. If anything, I'm under-confident. I give pretty much every other developer (and designer) the benefit of the doubt that they're better than me. I just make websites; it's not kernel hacking or compilers, you know.

And it isn't unusual risk tolerance. You know what's really risky? Depending on a salary to pay your mortgage. Having kids. From my perspective, multi-decade obligations are risky. Compromise is risky. Making my own way is the only risk-free thing I can do in a society which exists to remove its own free will.

Perhaps some people are confusing "overconfidence" with a lack of belief in absolutes like "failure", "success", and "mistakes".
Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement
If game theory analysis of the viability of AEG switching to an innovative business model to adapt to a crisis isn't on-topic on HN, I'm not sure what is.
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Dell Developing Android-Based Mobile Internet Device?
The MT implementation used with Lua* generates a predictable sequence based on seeds, though. It may just be the PHP implementation that makes random number sequences non-reproducible. Why would this be desirable, by the way?

* LHF's lrandom: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/#lrandom . While this is not in the core language, it's by one of Lua's three authors, and could be considered a semi-official extended library. (Since Lua is targeted for embedding, it's core standard library has been kept very tiny.)
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Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers
I can confirm that claim.

This is over a sample of about 3 million uniques / month.
Ask HN: Any ideas as to why Google changed search result margins?
We know that their design choices are largely data driven:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Any thoughts?
Yes, but you'll notice that it hasn't been a onesided thing, the GPU and CPU have moved towards each other as it became clear that the general purpose problems that needed to be solved were addressed rather nicely by both.

It's a bit like reverse cell division.
Not really interesting to people who already read Hacker News :)
http://xkcd.com/353/ I need no other reason.
While I haven't looked at the source, if it's anything like other prototype-based languages, they would either share the same prototype ("vtable"), literally adding the method to both at the same time, or it would be added as an extension to only one of them. (Being able to add a method to just one object OR all sharing a common prototype is a feature.)

Using prototypes, it would be one pointer. I don't see why that would be particularly space-inefficient.
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just my own website
Many people use Ruby because of Rails.
:) agreed but just figured people who like to see it all the same
I've hired a couple of people recently, and personally I use cover letters to see how people write.

Not every hiring manager cares about this, but I will not hire somebody who can't write half a page of text without making egregious spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. I've seen cover letters that, when opened in Word, become a sea of red and green squiggles. It demonstrates a total lack of attention to detail, among other unflattering characteristics.

Sadly, I rule out a LOT of applicants this way.
One could argue that it wasn't the company doing anything wrong. It was the CEO. The company is just an agreement on a piece of paper after all...

So, the CEO is liable and goes to jail. Someone is willing to pay him big money for his paper despite that jail-issue. Why not?

Are you saying his company should be absorbed by the gvt instead, the piratebay.org domain deleted forever?

No, I think this part of the story is just about right (albeit I strongly disagree with the conviction in first place).
Definitely consider what differentiates you.

What's the draw? Why use this instead of, say, OkCupid.com?

EDIT: You also claim to be the best free dating site on the web. This is arrogant and unfounded. It didn't do it for me.
I think rather than blogging about something intelligent, I am just going to start saying how much I love $social_news_site_du_jour. Then I can get mega karma and mega ad views, and win the internets.
Hmmmm. Is it 'really hard' to develop web apps with python and avoid django? No. It isn't.
You think they did not have some D10 and some D20? :)
Another thing is that some people have problems with SQL itself, not relational databases per se. SQL is just the compromise-of-a-standard that came out of several RDBMS query languages competing for mindshare.

And, naturally, in some peoples' minds any problems that MySQL has are joined to SQL, and in fact all relational databases.
Unfortunately, downloads are one of the things that broke recently :-(

I work on the egonet project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/egonet/

The latest release was on June 25. Yesterday the big "download now" button was offering the May 30 release. Today it is offering the April 20 release. Yesterday I was at least able to look at the settings page to confirm that we had correctly set the June 25 release as the main download, but now I can't even find that.
The sticking point with BDB is typically its license - if used commercially, you suddenly need a commercial license from Oracle, and the cost is unspecified.
What do you mean? Github hosts git repositories. git repositories are a great way to manage your website. github charges you money to use your own domain name for your github website, but lets you try it out for free.

The github pages concept adds value to your subscription, which seems like something that's very good for their business. Seeing this page is like free advertising for Github. "Wow, I could have a page like this too. Wow, I can manage it with git. Hey, only $7/month to get private repositories and my own domain name for this site. <buy>."
Well, the disk space is not the controlling parameter usually. Getting a ridiculously huge amount of fast, reliable disk is pretty much a solved problem. If all you were doing was writing logs at a constant rate then you could "scale" pretty much indefinitely just adding larger and larger disks to the same poky DB server, and it wouldn't matter if it was 5GB or 5PB.

The proper scaling issue is, of course, with the cpu and memory of your single DB server - and its disk speed - which can only be expanded so much, and at exponentially increasing cost. It's conceivable that even with a fixed amount of data, say 100G, you might have to confront scaling issues with increasing site usage, long before you reached anywhere near the limits of your raw disk space.
The approximate age of the candidate is going to be glaringly obvious even without a date of birth. It's easy to infer that they're over 40 from things like graduating college in 1975, having 20 years work experience, etc.
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Reflection does not break the static type system in any way. However you are right in assuming the refactorings are in general not correct in the presence of reflection.
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Technically, we have this one too: identity, versus equivalence. Just like in the real world: when one thing can replace another (it has the same members or properties), they are equivalent; when modifying one would modify the other (or, if you like, when two of the same thing occupy the same space, e.g. the house at 123 Fake St. and the house at 123 Fake Street), they are identical. There's no need for the word "pointer" in that explanation, notice :)

"Equal", however, means neither equivalence nor identity; it's generally just a math term, meaning "identical/equivalent in magnitude" (where numbers are the only things for which "equivalence" is "identity.") Phrases like "equal rights" imply that the total value of the rights can be reduced to a number, and compared; to put it another way, that the rights are sortable. "Equal" has no meaning for things which cannot be sorted—there can be "equivalent paintings", or "identical paintings", but never "equal paintings."

"Equal" is basically the worst possible term to have absorbed for talking about the comparison of anything other than numbers. The underlying comparison is always one of either identity, or equivalence, and this should be simply stated outright—it causes no confusion, nor are there any special cases for which "equal" is necessary.
Dude... you spelled Atheist wrong under Religious Views.

It's spelled Athiest right now.

EDIT:Your spell check has an ad in it to buy the spell check's licensed version. That's kind of tacky.

Also, you don't support the features in your rich text editing - my underlines and italics disappeared!

Is "Buy x a drink" a feature to be implemented in the future? Also, this /is/ real life. Your alert text is kind of lame.
Coming from desktop mail apps (Apple Mail, Eudora...) which (almost ?) all work with folders, it was quite difficult in the beginning for me to understand how labels worked.

I guess that's why they are doing this move, labels are just too complex to comprehend for the computer illiterate.

Typical users want to organise mails the way Outlook does, so Gmail adapts itself to the mass without giving up the idea completely.
In fact, testing the software is not just there to make refactorings possible. The tests for the software are there to check if the software behaves correctly for a (hopefully representative) set of inputs.
Thus, the check if a refactoring is invariant is mostly a side effect from having a test suite for your software, and thus, in my opinion, it does not matter how secure your recfactorings are. I do have my tests already!
(And yes, I do consider it a heavy code smell if there are no tests written, because lots and lots of things are so very, very easy to test if structured ... if structured ok. not even well structured, just without hard-coded dependencies)
very enjoyable read. thanks.
Why can't I upload pictures of myself from the web? I don't keep any pictures on my computer anymore... so this means I have to download the picture, and then upload it again.

Yet another usage barrier (but maybe it's not an issue for everyone).
Well worth reading the follow ups and discussions. This has been like a geek version of The West Wing.

Bottom line is you can't adopt anything that requires royalties for the web. You just can't. From then on it's just politics and "arguing on the internet".

It's also a real travesty that the furore over video has eclipsed the unarguable case for Vorbis as the default audio codec.

The next big move for Theora fans (apart from the more obvious: lots and lots of compelling Theora content) is getting Xiph Quicktime Components installed on the 3/4 of Macs that don't use Firefox. Maybe they want to hook up with the Perian guys? I wonder what their install rate is?
I'm just saying that the optimizer sucks if semantically identical queries don't execute the same instructions against the database.

I would certainly not be surprised if this happens in real life... but the solution is to not to hand-code every SQL query, it's to fix the database.
Point taken. I must admit I did not read the article fully, just went by the title.

Unflagged.
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oh sorry, I turned on the propaganda machine
This is probably one of the more relevant posts of it's kind though.
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Perhaps, but I am just pointing out a wider trend. It seems like every time I accidentally visit Reddit the top article is about how great Reddit is. It is somewhat sad to see it here, but hey, we are all people, and we all want to support our tribe. ("USA! USA! USA!")
"I wonder if we just have a generation of programmers who can't think in SQL."

And they don't even teach set theory in elementary school anymore like they did in the early seventies, which may be among the root causes of the malaise. Understanding things like relational databases and conditional probabilities is so much easier if you have been taught a solid foundation from early on.
As indicated by tetha's comment, that's not really true. Nature is a pretty good RNG. I was more amazed that someone who seems to have taken a keen interest in cryptography would not be concerned with generating good keys. Maybe I should expect that of someone who lived 200 years ago. I don't know.

(yes, the numbers could of course be truly random, but they don't seem it to me)
Actually, the site at the top of the thread is free: tobytripp.github.com. You only have to pay if you want the CNAME support, as you suggest, but this example is not of that. So I suppose it adds value to the free subscription, yeah.

But .. is it really worth diluting the brand, and diverting the team's attention? I have seen personal articles on a username.github.com blog which have nothing to do with code. Someone seeing the site via one of these avenues for the first time would come away with the impression github is a free blog provider. And, amongst other things, they are!

And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files? It might not have happened yet but it will. Then one of them gets slashdotted, the site slows to a crawl, and the team's running around putting out fires caused by some free service which doesn't have anything to do with version control, just "adds value" to having an account on that site.

Well, I guess they've thought all this through and decided it's in their interests. I was just surprised, is all.
Something they didn't touch on is the possible size of payouts: if you get your refund, you get N dollars (pounds, I guess, in this case), whereas there is no set upper bound to the ticket.

That said, if you look at the comments, some guy did something clever and searched eBay for Elvis tickets, and found them going for $60, which may well mean you'd be better off getting the refund.
I know you don't mean it this way but this sounds like SQL databases can magically index their data without scanning it. Add a new index to a large table in any RDBMS and it'll do exactly what you're describing.

Query on an un-indexed column and it'll take forever every time. (There's an Oracle database I deal with occasionally that takes 50 seconds to count 78 rows. No we can't add an index.)

All NoSQL (eewww) non-RDBMSs do is move the pain around. The efficiency and lookup times are (usually, mostly) orthogonal to the orientation of the data, all you can do is align your use case to hit as few pain points as posisble.
I agree, it's much faster. When hiring for a developer position I usually ask "what's the most recent scientific paper you have read" and ask them to discuss it. Extra credit is given if it's in a different field than computer science.

I have found this a very reliable way to weed out candidates who can talk the talk but really are just winging it.
i like these oldies but goodies, too, but can a story from 2004 really be considered (hacker) news ? i don't think the chronologically "what's new" aggregator is not the right solution for "best things of all time".

it's no good if this story pops up every year. hacker news should prevent duplicate urls, and perhaps provide more browsing options, eg monthly top stories.
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It's called "building a community". And that is very much central to their business. It seems they are doing quite well at it, too.
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So this is basically a story about how much traffic your site gets from HN, and a plug for the DB company you have a vested interest in promoting?
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No to SQLServer and Oracle. =)
And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files?

There is a size limit. But unless Github is hosted off of someone's DSL line, this is probably nothing to worry about.
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Wouldn't the interview traditionally fulfill those criteria?
Which is why you don't use Python where performance is one of the biggest priorities. I'm a big fan of Python, but it's not for everything.
Can the iPhone Replace Your Laptop?
I fully agree with that. As an entrepreneur as well, I will definetly that I am very very under-confident.

I love this saying : "Everybody knew it was impossible, then an idiot came and did it". I feel like an idiot : I don't know anything and I doubt everything; starting with myself.
No. Its standard modules were coded more portable way.

btw, Solaris will stay on its niche like FreeBSD.
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Being a blogger can be very rewarding when you have a continuous flow of targeted content for your readers, but the problem that most bloggers stumble into is creating that targeted content on a daily basis.
Sounds like Atlas Shrugged 2.0 and a much shorter quote from John Galt.
"Cassandra can write 50GB of data in 0.12 milliseconds ..."

These numbers have been taken from p.21 of the linked PDF by the Facebook engineer Avinash Lakshman where it shows this MySQL vs Cassandra comparison:

"MySQL > 50GB Data
Writes Average : ~300ms
Reads Average : ~350ms
Cassandra > 50GB Data
Writes Average : 0.12ms
Reads Average : 15ms"

Which I'm guessing actually means: with a database table which is more than 50GB total size they have measured individual row accesses at these speeds. Maybe Avinash has accidentally transposed the read and write figures - I can't think why the read would be slower than the write.

15ms to write a row to disk seems possible given that a fast modern disk

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_cheetah_15...

has a latency of 2ms and seek time of 4ms and a sustained transfer rate of about 100MB/s. The track to track time is only 0.4ms so maybe if you just wrote all the data to disk serial-log-style you could reconstruct from the log after a failure and handle all reads from memory. I don't know Cassandra. Obviously, from these figures, the disk couldn't do a row read in 0.12ms.
Argh. I see the clue; it just makes no sense. I see the at-sign and the dot, and I suppose the riddle tells you how to decode the rest.
phpinfo();
Somebody help me with #21

What're those round numbers?
It gives the kids a good excuse for wanting a cell phone :)
Interesting stuff, though I'm surprised that the writer concludes that this "craze" is a reality and not just parents getting worked up over nothing as people have in the past about "reefer madness" and various other faddy notions.

She does something she calls the PBS documentary on and moves very swiftly from lurid tales of "train parties" to cold stats on teenage experimentation which struck me as a strange leap to make if you weren't trying to imply something the numbers didn't actually show.

It did occur to me (as someone old enough to be married with a kid) that since this was published nearly 4 years ago, and given the demographics of hacker news, which seem to skew quite low, that some people here would be able to call this as BS from their own personal experiences.
I am really sick of companies calling these positions interns. If you really are a start-up that still has not launched your product, as your company seems to be, then you should be expending all your efforts on finishing your product, and simply won't have time to teach an inexperienced intern the ropes. What you're really asking for however is not an inexperienced intern but a competent developer who you want to work for you for free or below market rate. Why is it that people value development so lowly that they think they can get it for free while you never see a company asking for accountancy or lawyer interns.
Oh yeah I know. But RDBMSs tend to be much faster at ad hoc queries.

I don't know what's going on with your Oracle install but even taking the small example of 1k rows, an unindexed ad hoc query in MySQL will return pretty quickly, well under a second on a decent machine/disk. That might be fine for, say, occasional use of a "reports" web page - and you don't need to then store and update an index. The same query on CouchDB will be at least 10 times slower, possibly making the page unusably slow, and if you want it to be usable you need to store the index - no choice.

But yeah, just "moving the pain around" is absolutely right. Ain't no silver bullets.
Please join me in flagging any submissions with "Hacker News" in the title.
can object x replace object y is dependent on what you do with object x. To replace a laptop with a phone is only possible if you do not have to do those things that a laptop is reasonably good at, displaying things on a larger screen and any amount of data entry.

If the answers are 'no' to both, in other words you only do stuff that you'd be happy to look at through a phones reduced display and do not do any significant data entry then the answer is 'possibly', but you'd still have to at least try it before you make the switch on a permanent basis.

Personally - as a software developer - I already find a laptop with its sub-size keyboard and screen a very limiting environment, I only use it for the most urgent stuff (using a 3G modem), anything else can wait until I'm behind a decent screen & keyboard.
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I don't like it. I can't do things like hide applications... which is a must. I hate those stupid quizzes.

Plus, it doesn't look significantly different. I guess this is a less-is-more approach?

Great set up interface, though; I really liked that part.
From http://blog.freescreencast.com/2008/08/28/update-on-the-stat...
"8000 downloads, over 2500 accounts"
Fully agree. look at graph databases like Neo4j, which has ACID
semantics but no SQL interface. Then, IMHO SQL is not only geared towards a special RDBMS type of underlying database but even against a special problem domain that is not always applicable, leading to query languages like SparQL.
The size limit is 300M. You might be surprised what a 50M file being downloaded a few thousand times in quick succession can do to even a 100Mb link.
Installing the buttons incurs a capital cost, and then there's the cost of maintenance, and the risk that vandals will pound on the buttons just for the hell of it.

By contrast, the Dial4Light system builds on infrastructure for both control and authentication that already exists.
Hey! Your comment is the same length as this "post"!

I'm pretty sure, "Can an iPhone replace your laptop?" is a question I am capable of asking and answering for myself. I really don't see the point in this.