skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to clarify, I never said Oracle was the be-all end-all solution for everything.

And I didn't rationalize anything with a "job history", but rather with large systems that actually have been built and are working.

I'd be very interested to see just how many people in this discussion actually have actual experience building large, scalable systems?

The original article made an asinine, generic statement without any context, or mention of cost, and I said it was silly, and pointed to the obvious (and easiest) reason why it was silly, and that was Oracle.

All of a sudden a bunch of people started making statements and assumptions about the scenario the article was probably talking about, that weren't actually made in the article, to discount Oracle as an option. Cost, commodity hardware, etc., etc. Then people started to point out other large websites that actually HAVE scaled, without the use of Oracle, as if that disproves Oracle's abilities... and yet it totally disproves the statement of the original article.

If you want to get into some context-specific details of why certain specific SQL technologies don't scale well (or at all), at a certain price-point, then that's a whole other discussion that I'd be happy to enter into, and would probably agree with.

It's also interesting to note that most of the "DB technologies" that are being used to scale those sites aren't DB's at all, but rather various levels of data caching that are employed to reduce the load on the databases, and are only applicable to the general read-only and non-transactional nature of social sites.

The whole reason I brought up banking sites in the first place is that they are one of the few, more obvious scenarios where most of your end-user interactions are actually hitting the database in real-time, and all data must be current and consistent. There is no real option for caching to save your ass, except at the DB layer itself, via such mechanisms as Oracle's Cache Fusion technology.

Social sites generally don't have any of those real-time, consistent constraints, and are therefore much easier to scale larger, because the nature of the site and the data allows for so much more technology to be used in front of the database.

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that building a large, scalable system is hard work. It requires that you analyze and design ALL aspects of the entire system to scale, not just the database. (Network, caching servers, application, database, hardware, etc).
I agree.

Also, the execution is really slick, not only in the app, but also in the actual landing page. It took me longer to choose an image than it did for me to figure out what to do. You must have an amazing UI designer.
Saint Louis or Chicago anyone? I really don't know of any real tech communities throughout the Midwest but there certainly is a lot of talent here.
But they do have ethics, something that seems to no longer exist on wall street.
Take out the MBAs and you have a valid business model.
Let's presume that the world can be convinced of the safety of native client security. What's it worth? I think this is the same question as, "What kinds of things aren't good enough on the JVM or CLR?"

Modeling/Simulation/etc. certainly benefits from running on the metal. But, with the exception of SETI@Home, etc., nobody runs untrusted simulation code. Games are the obvious target. A webby sort of Photoshop might also benefit. What else?

Am I wrong to think it obvious that Google's goal is to do away with the last major reason(s) to run Windows? Is there any other benefit to being so close to the metal when we have nice, sandboxed VMs that JIT compile quite efficient code?
perl has a "study" function that examines a string in anticipation of doing many pattern matches on it. I'm not sure what it does exactly, but the kind of structures it creates could be serialized and stored along with an input file (or perhaps replace it), and used as kind of regular expression optimized index. This isn't necessarily an "index" in the normal sense, but then, neither is the likes of a full-text index either. But really, any data structures that are optimized for a specific kind of processing are indexes.
Was Michael Jackson an Autogynephile?
Certificate authorization alone may not protect you from 0-day exploits to your ssh server. Not all port knockers use that pinging ports combination technique. Again, I recommend a look at fwknop which addresses your concerns by using certificates actually.
At first I thought they were trying to be ironic. But they keep it at such a level that I think they're being serious. In which case, I'd definitely run.
Anyone wanna go over/under on 50% of the apps being Twitter related? (I'm still participating b/c I think it'll be fun and challenging, but I'm going to rack my brain to make sure we build something at least semi-useful...)
So Much For That Idea. Facebook Has Killed Off Its Great Apps Initiative
URL shorteners providing opportunity for spammers
Philly's got lots of colleges & universities, though not as well known as Boston's. One of PG's criteria!
Unintentionally starting an XML debate
It's interesting to see that some developers really are okay with accepting XML for what it has become, thanks to tools/abstractions that make it easy to cope with. I don't think they actually feel as if they are coping though, but rather they are consuming something that is good in principle or even design.

Edit: I'm really just regurgitating stuff I've read in the past on HN and comp.lang.lisp (namely posts by Kaz Kylheku and Erik Naggum), including:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666611
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/tree/browse_fr...
http://web.archive.org/web/20071231152902/xmlsucks.org/but_y...
I asked a similar question about a week ago, and the responses I got were:

1) "I think because of [cloud computing and the recession], server hardware isn't worth what you think it is. Go lower."
2) Use traditional channels such as eBay, Craigslist, etc.
3) A few people that were interested provided their direct email addresses.

In the past 2 weeks, I've sold 3 servers (combination of Craigslist and eBay). The prices weren't horrible, but what surprised me was how small the demand was (i.e. number of inquiries and bids, respectively).

One interesting idea I heard recently from a friend of mine who runs a startup in NYC is to post the servers on SF Craigslist.

Otherwise, I've been sticking to Craigslist. There are no fees, and I seem to get similar demand volumes as eBay. My strategy has been to post an item on Craigslist at price X and lower the price by 1/4 after every 7 days (the default post expiration on Craigslist).

Good luck.
We're rolling. (I'm the program director). Started out small this summer with 7 companies with plans to increase to a dozen in our next round.

Of course I'm biased, but I'm not sure I'd call us a rip-off. We make no bones about the fact that we are attempting to replicate a model that has been shown to be extremely successful in other cities.
FYI Google Voice invites are the new Gmail invites.
hmmm I dont see an option to send out voice invites
Interesting idea - if I were you I'd figure out how to extend the software/engine behind this to support other cities before others become to copy the idea.

(and if you're already working on this, then kudos!)
That's not quite true. Microsoft had a Hotmail plugin in Outlook Express that was "beta" for at least 5 years. Microsoft simply used the term as an excuse to avoid supporting a product that people don't pay for. Sounds pretty similar to me.
When it comes to fine distinctions, the game is a sad joke.

It's an arms race toward writing nearly machine-language code as best your language supports it.

There are Haskell programs that are doing a significant amount of work as essentially "peek" and "poke" inside a memory buffer.

There are Java programs that use variables q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z rather than two arrays of size 5.

I guess if you have a legitimate need for getting the most performance on some fixed task (and abstraction, readability, and extensibility can all be sacrificed), without using a call to C, then both are fair.
Pornographic films have storylines?
Because people who believe that Apollo was a hoax would surely be convinced by instrumentation asserting that a laser is bouncing off a mirror those guys left there.
awesome, im gonna go there tom AM
Quantcast valued at $300 million
After sleeping on this, I finally figured out what was bothering me about the massive number of responses here claiming that this Professor was being clueless.

The basic assumption is that the Professor was griefing other players. He wasn't. From the article, it did not appear as if he had the intent to deliberately harass and annoy other players. Instead, he was merely ignoring social customs and determining the best PvP strategies from there. Further, he was attempting to conduct a study. I am assuming (big assumption) that he was at least trying to be objective. In other words, there is nothing personal in what he was doing.

The stunning results isn't that there were people who backlashed at him so much as that, he perceived his actions as being impersonal, yet it seems many of the people on CoH ... and here on Hacker News ... perceive his actions as griefing. What is profound here is that this false perception generated an incredible amount of backlash. It is the same mechanism used in witchhunts. It looks like crowd sourcing has a downside too.

It implies that people still don't stop and consider whether the other person was doing it out of ignorance or simply because that other person ignores social conventions. The aggravation generated by this snowballs because people want something to blame. What is also interesting to me is how otherwise intelligent people automatically reacts to their own irritation.
What book would you suggest as a good starting point for good Agile techniques?
That last point (8) sounds worthy of a decent debate. Any posts on the subject?
Our thoughts aren't standardized, so you get encryption for free.
Ask HN: Who has a really good paid signup form?
I'm working on my signup form for a monthly subscription service. Looking for examples of the best signup forms.
I wrote about this in a different section. I'm with you here.

People takes things too personally. From the article, I never got the sense that the Professor was taking this personally (he shouldn't, he is conducting a study). He wasn't deliberately aggravating other people: he was ignoring the social customs.

In you and your friends case, it is even more ambiguous. What you do doesn't directly harm someone, neither physically in the real world, or virtually in WoW. And as you said, you don't take it personally ... it seems though, a number of people do.
You're assuming that the professor was griefing.
The last couple of versions of Illustrator have finally been allowed to use the tech from Adobe Streamline (the legal requirement that it remain a separate product expired), and are substantially better than they were before.

Lots of design shops reportedly kept running old hardware w/ Mac OS 9 as dedicated Streamline machines for years.

Try Illustrator’s tracing out sometime. It’s pretty useful/fun.
Seems like the key to winning is to have the string "lambda" in your submission.
neither do I. I guess that's case and point.
Black Box - Development of Market Prediction Software: http://www.thomasbass.com/black_box_1356.htm
They can buy their own damn lasers and try it themselves.
Welcome to boston! http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/
Our goal for coverage launching in beta was to get business coverage to continue to onboard manufacturers. When we do the consumer launch, you'll see us in the Martha Stewart's of the world :)
Did I mention money?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#Agil...

You don't really need a book. The Agile page on Wikipedia and links to the descriptions of the different flavors are all you need.
Yep, we knew that... but they had told us specifically that they would honor it. No matter, it all worked out :)
At least they have credibility. These guys are sticking to their guns and keeping the hacking underground just that, underground. Anti-sec is a response to the fear-mongering era of 1998 - 2004 when every hanger-on wannabe computer guy became a security researcher and started publishing "advisories". Between dotcom bubble era to 9/11, everybody was a security guy, and not only that, but the "security guy" was pointing the finger at the hacker community everytime a script kiddie defaced a geocities web page. Those most sec guys are snake-oil salesmen and absolutely deserve no sympathy from me. If they're gonna bad-mouth hackers and promise protection to everyone with a PC (Sec industry essentially being a racket) I say let them protect themselves from the real Hackers; by and large, they're out-gunned and out-skilled.

Anti-sec doesn't go after civilians, by the way.
The sad fate of The Printed Blog, a hybrid loaded with optimism
agreed very annoying I couldn't figure this out either. tried foreaching through the $_SERVER too still can't get it.
Haha, that's great. Clever idea. Wish there was some kind of interface for those of us without smartphones who just want to look stuff up online, but that sort of defeats the point of having it as an app. Still, good idea.
Here's some info on why "Alice" - http://flywheelblog.com/?s=domain - The Brady Bunch connection is a nice benefit.
yes, the video is good. but it's in flash, which means it can't be viewed on a real iphone.
There is indeed enough variation. I unfortunately can't find the link, but they went further and had people imagine something like the letter 'n,' and of the whopping eight people they tested, one came out completely garbled, even after training.

Also, I suspect that variation increases with abstractness, so it will almost certainly be impossible to extract high level thought without extensive cooperation.

For example, the brain state that the word 'conciousness' invokes in me is going to be entirely different from you because I have different associations, examples, knowledge, and general representation.

Now try to extract an entire sentence without training first. Have fun!
I think it has more to do with the attitude and sarcasm of the comment.
Getting meta: http://imgur.com/pxOff
The only thing I've ever heard is that some people _like_ programming in C# and refuse to learn other languages.
phpinfo(); it was from above and is correct.
Funny timing, this article about Dowd just peaked last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690592
That's the actual meaning of the phrase "begging the question."
study does not do anything really interesting. It looks up substrings in a table of substring -> average frequency. It then scans for the rarest character first, so that it can fail quickly for most input.

From the docs:

(The way "study" works is this: a
linked list of every character in the string to be searched is made, so we know, for
example, where all the 'k' characters are. From each search string, the rarest
character is selected, based on some static frequency tables constructed from some C
programs and English text. Only those places that contain this "rarest" character are
examined.)

Basically, this is not what Google is doing for code search.
Is the global search really a regex? I thought it was just substrings.
I have a kid. You can spend time on things outside your startup and focus on work at the same time.

Ditch the day job, not the other parts of life unrelated to work.
Previous discussion of this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390555

My arguments for NaCl:

1. Rewriting C code in Java is expensive.

2. JITs do a poor job on SIMD code that is used in multimedia.
this should not be news
What is the name of the YC-like program in Chicago?
Austin is great. We have a large university, many freelance web developers/designers, and lots of wi-fi. A small amount of money goes a long way here, which is a big plus.
Heart surgery for $2500
FWIW, the Tokyo subway posts this data throughout the stations. I always wondered why they don't do this in the US.

Edit: here's the best picture I can find: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eloketh/320918361/sizes/l/

It's that blue sign in the background/center. I will try and find a better picture. But at least I know that I am not imagining this :)
I worked at a company that often times needed to upscale out of the loop people's logos to then feed to embroidery machines for custom products. So many people in the golf industry have no idea what sizing and quality standards are for logo work that half the time I received logos that were copied and pasted from a website...

So needless to say, we had a monthly subscription to Vectormagic while I worked there...
That's my issue with Clojure as well. A language that provides and encourages use of a foundational feature X doesn't seem ideally coherent if it depends on usability provided from (Java) libraries which are unable to make use of that feature X.
Agile(n): a buzzword used preemptively on a project to remove accountability when things inevitably go wrong.
Writing a Google Voice App
They are probably using desalinization. "Depending on local energy prices, 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater can cost around $3 or $4." http://www.livescience.com/environment/070625_desalination_m... Even still adding ~1.5 cents per gallon of gas equivalent is not really expensive.

However, the connection charge is just highway robbery if you are really paying that per gallon. They might also be adding the sewer system charges based on your water usage.

PS: The average American uses ~90 gallon /day * 0.3 = 27cents per day * 365 = 100$ / year which is hardly breaking the bank.
Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice
i'd say at least 2 or 3 steps up
I would love this. (And I actually have a use for it.)
Post your email addy in your profile or check my profile and email me.
please help (Why is quantcast worth / need 50mm?)

- we have all seen the webpages that appear in search engines for obscure webpages - we click through, since when they show they are the only thing worthy of a click; we find that the sites gets .9k hits a month and 53% of those were female; then we are ask "Want us to quantifie your site?" and even though we get 10-20k uniques a day we can't really understand why we would want to know these numbers....

--- What do they do? What is their business model? and why the 50mm? ---
It's true that SBCL doesn't make the binary delivery process easy.

However, both Allegro CL and Lispworks put a lot of effort into it and succeed quite well. For example, Allegro CL will automatically copy all loaded shared libraries that are not from /lib or /usr/lib to the delivery directory, which nicely solves the CFFI wrapper issue.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/DV/html/deluser....

http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/deliv...
a stricter definition of AM? 10? 9? 430?
Go with the girl, go with your startup - give up everything else.

I, as well, had extremely long hours working on a startup. But the girlfriend, now my wife, was always there to back me up and lift me back up when I was doubtful of things (and believe me, you will be). Your french lessons won't do shit to bring you up out of the depressive, completely overwhelmed slump a startup will bring you.
Posters containing this data are posted throughout the stations. You can also buy a book, if you want to know every station on every line.
Actually.... If you look carefully enough.

This was posted 5 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684343

That being said, yes, I did learn my lessons.

Thanks for keeping me honest!
How? You don't get to pick which gate you arrive at.
In the past there has generally been a pretty impressively wide range of different apps.

In the past the prize categories have meant that people with more unique apps have a significant advantage at the end.

Particularly as the main prize category was the sum of your completeness, design, usefulness and originality ratings. Missing out on any of those categories would make it very hard to be competitive.
If I understand correctly (a big if) and the underlying structure is something along the lines of a giant suffix tree then searching for any particular string takes time asymtomtically equivalent to the length of the query string. What if there were another corresponding "meta-data" suffix-tree perhaps this would allow the fast abstract search. what if the nodes contained meta-data such as length/type etc instead of merely containing the data itself.
I really think if a coherent image had been made from visual recall, that news would travel fast.
There were interesting comments about this when it was posted here before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394826
This only applies to color laser printers and color copiers. Your inkjet printer is just fine.

The wikipedia article on laser printers links to a nice sample on a 1cm ruler... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Printer_Stenography_Illust...

The part of this that I find most interesting is that these have been known since the 90s and in 2005 there was a flurry of interest as some of the schemes were decoded, but I have never seen an authoritative reason why they are there. Does some entity in the US government require them? By what legal mechanism? Are the printer manufacturers trying to avoid liability for manufacturing counterfeiting equipment?
What's up Steve!
The labels are links to regularexpressions.info so I'd guess yes.

I'm pretty sure EN just greps subject + output of something like 'strings' though, it chugs pretty hard on broad searches.
Anti-sec doesn't go after civilians, by the way.

Let me guess, if I have a job and a computer I'm not a civilian, right?
I'm disappointed Wired removed the second ampersand from the title.
I realize that there are a lot of crappy degree programs out there, but this just plain wrong-headed. CS theory is applicable to anyone writing any kind of software more complex than simple one-off scripts. In fact I would argue that most of a proper CS program is more applicable to more practical problems than 90% of what you do in real world jobs. That's not to say you need CS to be a good programmer or anything silly like that, but the scope of things you learn in a CS degree is pretty much impossible to attain in the workplace without working on an amazing array of different projects.
Mugasha is great, for the record. Here's hoping you find some money, keep it going, and get a full launch.
I can certainly relate to Hofstadter’s law. It always takes me twice as long as I predict a software task is going to take and awareness of this flaw in my schedule estimating abilities has not improved my guesses.
1 month isn't much for a system with 468 stations.
> But you'd have to do that separately for every language.

That's correct. It's one of the challenging parts.
In college I had a black roommate who was addicted to funk & hip-hop, and at the time I was heavily into punk & hardcore. By the end of the year our musical tastes had switched hosts, so to speak.
Backtype (YC08) releases Tweetcount, far more accurate than Tweetmeme
This isn't too surprising to me. In the world of gay rights, it's well-known that the biggest predictor of having positive attitudes to gay people is knowing at least one gay person. People debate about whether this is cause or effect (do you like gay people because you know one, or do you know gay people because you like them?). This puts some weight behind the argument that familiarity breeds tolerance, which has always seemed intuitively true to me.
Just out of curiosity, has the model been shown to be extremely successful in other cities? Is there evidence that anyone has succeeded with it to the degree that YC has? (My gut feeling is that it's a lot harder to replicate YC than the "model" makes it seem.)

Good luck anyway. The more opportunities for founders to create something valuable, instead of being stifled in corporate environments, the better.