skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it isn't, but it appears to be the endgame of representative democracy. I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan, or perhaps Hayek's Road to Serfdom, if you haven't already, as both anticipated this exact malaise. The US and the UK are in the terminal stages of decline.

The representative democratic ideal is ultimately revealed to be a fiction, and the rule of law is a falsehood - for without a universally applied rule of law, there is no rule of law - just authoritarianism - and our rule of law is decidedly not universal, and never has been. One set of rules for us, one for them.

All representative democracy eventually declines under the same disease of creeping authoritarianism due to the inevitable desire of entrenched power structures and bureaucracies to self-sustain and expand. This should not be mistaken for malice, rather it's the inevitable output of a system optimised for self-preservation.

The only solution to my mind while maintaining a democratic ideal is either strict sortition, or direct democracy.
I'm tired of waiting for Google spreadsheets, so I'm building a fast alternative
Searching for the main point, when the arguments brought forth to support the conclusion are wrong, does not make sense.

From elementary mathematics, A => B only makes sense when A is true, because falsity implies anything. And I know that productivity and all the other traits that matter haven't been proven formally for the paradigms we talk about, but in our flame-wars we could at least pretend to be scientists.
Yup, just said the same as you. Hobbes and Hayek both anticipated this.

Revolution is the only way out.
Interesting stuff, but definitely a 101-level course. A more in depth treatment would discuss the trade off between non-data ink and embellishment, which is one of the most difficult problems in good data viz.

Some more specific thoughts:

ALWAYS represent more than one data series if possible: otherwise you're wasting space. But make sure your thesis is still sensible. It's very helpful, for instance, to plot a series of interest against a backdrop of the greater population.

A histogram is NOT the best way to show the average value. A box and whiskers plot shows the average as well as the bulk of the population in a one-dimensional form that can be extended simply for comparison across categories or time.

Also always remember that the data is king. Line smoothing is only a good idea if you're not using it to give the impression that you have more data points than you really do.

All in all their visualizations provide great examples but they could do more to share the nuance that went into designing them.
> This is a low quality article from someone who, given his qualifications, should know better.

It really depends which audience this article is targetting (Do you believe that S. Peyton Jones speaks in monads to his mother?). If this article was written in response of a talk between undergraduates in a TA session, it is perfectly acceptable, and even provides links to advanced material for the curious.

> A general definition of an object (following Cook somewhat) is something that satisfies an interface along with some form of dynamic dispatch. There is no reason why a function can't fall under that definition.

Yes, but why have that definition, if you already have functions as builtin types? Conversely, if there's a need for functions as builtin types, why force programmers in using that clunky alternative? That's pretty much the point made by the article: don't corner yourself in one paradigm when others might be better at some tasks.

> As several others have pointed out, the fact that Java doesn't have proper first-class functions is also utterly irrelevant. In fact, it is possible to program in a very pure OOP manner in any language with proper closures.

Careful, the wording is a bit lacking here imho: you join two different ideas and make it seem like the second one validates the first, while it's not the case.

> If the author is representative of the quality of researchers working on programming languages, it's no wonder the field seems stagnant.

That shows you probably don't follow much the field. Anyway, this article doesn't fit your standard (see first point), ergo this man's whole work doesn't, ergo the whole field doesn't? That twice too much stretching from someone who isn't very careful in his own argumentation.
Besides, the assumption that only a single application will access the database is often wrong in the real world.
I know that feeling. Recently I bought new ThinkPad T430 (N1T56PB / 2344-56G). Quite expensive, but good stuff.

My previous ThinkPad R61 (NF55WPB) became defunct a few years ago, because of nVidia NVS140m internal chip failure.
> 300ML people all speaking the same language...

Not to mention the culture. The cultural difference between Washington state and Mississippi (for example) is much smaller than the difference between Germany and France.
One possible group would be a consortium of parties that are interesting to transact with. Say Paypal decided to mess around, they might have a blacklist.

People that received tainted coins could repudiate them with high fee transactions to invalid addresses (so that most of the coins go back into the network as mining fees). I guess 'invalid address' is the wrong language, but you get the idea, an address with no private key.
No, and he is not making fun of women, he is making fun of his own masculinity.

And there's a difference between making fun of homosexuals to hurt them, and to make fun of them to be merry with them.

Thirdly, your opinion on the feelings of men in general is rather inconsequential. What do you want to do, flog every man who finds it humiliating to dress in drag?
He did indeed, but it was in response to the following questions:

"In the case of MongoDB i have worked with an ODM [by which he means ORM] on top of it where i had to define a Schema and Object relations and was left wondering: What is the benefit of this anyway if i still define Schemas and relationsships ?"
Human beings with a brain, in discussion with other humans, creating the kind of world they want to live in. Just like everything else in the world is decided.

It makes no sense at all to pretend that humans are too stupid to understand what is and is not good for our planet. The whole point of having language and intelligence is that it should be used, not just discarded with some discredited hand wave that "if we just do nothing, everything will work out for the best!"
y.ahoo.it URL Shortener end-of-life announcement
Furthermore, if their new process is truly innovative it can be patented and may end up being adopted by their competitors in exchange for royalties. Similar to the story of Pilkington Glass, which invented the float glass process for making large sheet of plate glass. Pilkington made as much money from royalties and license fees as from manufacturing glass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilkington
If I would buy a new laptop, the most important specs would be an IPS screen and the best keyboard available because IPS screens cause me less eyestrain and a quality keyboard with a trackpoint is a pleasure. I value ergonomics. I also value a light laptop, as my desktop has ample power. I am a programmer.

I also value the capability to run any OS I want, because like brokenparser said, "because I am what I am and the supplied OS is never good enough."
I've had a look at a few teardowns but can't find another battery. My 'phone copes with the battery being removed while in offline mode so there's power somewhere.
Typing Faster
"Error. The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later."... lol :)
We're building something similar for https://harrow.io/ which acts as the secret store, it's a Redis API compatible database with a strong auditing layer, and baked in crypto, it requires a single key to start and unlock the server, but we didn't know how to split the key to keep the secrets out of a single dev's hands. Now that we do, we'll build something based on the SSS algorithm and YubiKeys (which we use for all other tokens)
Why Twitter needs Saudi Arabia
A nice idea, but please change the logo.
In my case, I distinctly remember lots of articles along the lines of "if you are still using a relational database then you are dumb", and arguments that gravitated towards "Integrity? Why would you want that, when all data is trivial either way?" (hyperbole added by me, of course). The "Mongo DB Is Web Scale" video was funny because, parody aside, it reflected the feeling at the moment.

Assertions like that (perhaps not officially by the devs, but certainly from the community) gained MongoDB the reputation of "pretentious" you mention, IMHO.
My guess as to the rise of MongoDB usage is that the rapid application development needs of the startup world led to people deciding that representing application data as JSON across all tiers speeds up the early stages of development. Unfortunately, as soon as data needs to be used relationally, developers are finding themselves pigeonholed in an inappropriate persistence format.

In short, developers that skip studying how their data might need to be queried in the future are to blame, not MongoDB.
Well, it's hard to say as two is not really an adequate sample size.

The article actually makes this point (about anecdote), but their data suggests that failure rates do rise substantially after three years.
I'm signed up for it. I've been toying around with CartoDB for a while and it's totally awesome. I put together a map of truck routes vs bike routes in NYC in about 10 minutes, where my only experience was having only seen a short demo of CartoDB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyygn8HFTCo if anyone's wondering. They were a pleasant surprise when flying last month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtyfiPIHsIg is the new one.
Kanban at London's National Gallery
Freewheelin' JavaScript
Maybe a use for that old microwave.
I can't work out if...

"PDOException: SQLSTATE[42000] [1203] User bryanbra_drp1 already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of /home4/bryanbra/public_html/includes/lock.inc)."

...is the punch line or not.
It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.
This looks like a really useful library. A few questions:

1. What size limits/practical constraints are there on freezefiles (and accompanying JSON files)?

2. Are there any code samples for consuming freezefiles, or should I just assume it's simple JSON/YML parsing?

3. Has there been any thought in using this to expose database contents via static REST API?

Final thought: this seems like a great step towards solving the age-old version controlling data problem.
I don't know that the solution to "programmers are lazy" and databases are hard is for them to learn a niche concept instead of taking the time to actually learn about data storage or, find someone who knows it well and work with them.
Go to the local Chamber of Commerce, or other watering holes for businesses, and say you're going to teach a free lecture on business use of email at the VFW hall, with reception to follow. The hall rents out for ~$20. Buy donuts and Starbucks coffee for the reception.

Talk for an hour on how to solve business problems with email. After the hour is over, you're going to be mobbed with people who want to pick your brains about email. At that point you just continue teaching them things until you win the engagement.

This built Brennan Dunn's business (to a ~7 figures consultancy with 10ish FTEs if I recall correctly), in a very not-generally-associated-with-great -Rails-sales-environment part of the country. It was also, broadly speaking, a major portion of my lead generation when I was consulting. (I sold consulting services primarily to B2B software companies, so speaking at events likely to be attended by them was generally a win.)

n.b. "I follow your newsletters and get great value from them" a) Thanks, that really makes me happy and b) this points the way towards another option for you, since if the small insurance company in Kansas was saying that about your newsletter then you're pretty much made for pipeline.

Also, with regards to cold-calling: I've never done it, partly because it would give me stress hives and partly because I've never needed to do it, but I disagree that it is necessarily unscalable. After all, if you're selling $40k engagements, then adding ~10 qualified leads to the pipeline every month would easily sustain a small consultancy. That's not all that much calling. As your consultancy grows you tend to collect recurring engagements / referrals organically, but if you absolutely positively have to make e.g. $2 million this year to cover all employee salaries, that's still only one engagement a week, and if you're counting in the millions you have throw-money-at-this-problem options to being tired of all the talking on the phone.
OMFG, people with smarter strategies have an advantage in the marketplace! Call the SEC!
I have been packaging applications for 2 years with ThinApp and that video was amazing! Working within a VDI environment application delivery is the part that seems to be the afterthought. I have seen many instances where capturing an app given certain requirements (like interaction with other apps) is just not possible. This may have just made my whole morning.
'For its day'? GWT lives in many forms, most notably Vaadin:

http://vaadin.com

Vaadin is consistently rated one of the best web app frameworks. Why its not more widely known is beyond me.
That's always an interesting effect, really annoying too if you're on the receiving end of the complaints. People tend to only speak up when they don't like something, so many times the amount of negative feedback overwhelms the positive, even if the vast majority are content with the product/change. If only people spoke up more often about their positive feelings...
Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi
Take control of your phone: use an app like Tasker to set up profiles to silence notifications except for ones you specify, like phone calls and messages from certain numbers.
I worked on an ambitious project which used MongoDB (as a kind of cache to service queries only) with some success in an app which dealt with huge variety of semi-structred, ad-hoc data. The system was to empower users to create and use their own schemas in an excel-ish kind of way, i.e. no waiting on DBAs or programmers to get stuff done.

But on reflection, the capabilities of MarkLogic or, if we had an infinite budget (this was a thing we built while still doing our core work), some pile of RDF/SPARQL-tastic workflow and a team of 10 engineers gluing something together that's drivable by normal human beings - would have been better.

We found the promise of "schemaless" MongoDB a little lacking back in the Mongo 1.6 era with respect to supporting the ad-hoc queries users wanted to do. That's down to paging, which needs sorting, which doesn't scale unless you have indexes. And I don't mean in a performance sense, I mean, it just died and you got errors instead of sorted results. The work-around was to use limit to make the sorted result fit inside a single BSON document, but then anticipating exactly what that limit should or can be when you have wildly diverse document structure and contents was very tedious and so stupid hacks ensued...

... but in conclusion, this is the type of use-case I hope MongoDB would be appropriate for.

It was still the right choice for our limited budget and resources, we got the 80% solution very quickly indeed.
Nice ideas! Some of them I had already implemented the same way in fact. Currently I have shipping and billing in one step - the only reason I could see for not splitting them up is that they can be different people / addresses so making them repeat an email address there might be confusing.

Right now an order number is displayed on completetion as you have described (and also emailed to them) so it's not fatal if the email address was wrong as they have a chance to note the order number down by other means. I do like the idea of telling them where the information has been emailed and giving them the option of re-sending it to a corrected address.
Almost all of the increase in reported crimes is due to a few specific crimes being reported more now and population growth. Most violent crimes have been decreasing and when asking youths in surveys much fewer admit having participated in crimes compared to when I was the same age.
This has hit a couple of new sites I read but I'm still not sure what the story is.

Something that was never intended to land doesn't have a landing site. In related news, my can of coke doesn't have a landing site either.
I didn't speak up until just now but I was also enraged.
Office 365 doesn't allow two people to work on the same document at the same time? That's unbelievable. Isn't that 70% of the point of online document editing?
I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them.

Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
you web dev people just won't get the big picture. that's why some black smith can learn to build a website/app in a couple of month but he can't do machine learning, numerical optimization or natural language processing or what have you. because it not the same thing. anyone could build websites, wake up!
How cool is my (biomedical) research?
I added "cache:" before the URL in chrome: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Abryan...
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

"Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.

Instead, Low-tech Magazine talks about the potential of past and often forgotten knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society. Sometimes, these low-tech solutions could be copied without any changes. More often, interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology. We also keep an eye on what is happening in the developing world, where resource constraints often lead to inventive, low-tech solutions."
Chrome displays a phishing warning for this site.
Thanks for posting this. Just the motivation I need to read The Road To Serfdom which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.
You can use default warranty information to figure out the lower bound on useful life. Companies price the value of the warranty into the product and perform statistical QA to ensure that 95%-99% of all products released will work correctly for the length of the standard warranty. Also added warranties aren't worth the cost. Just replace the product when it breaks.
Quantity is priority: The key to higher quality is higher output
Interesting thesis. Which one is Google? :)
My wife and I were both enraged, but alas, we failed to speak up in the proper venue for our views to be counted. We apologize for our poor timing, but would like to document our rage now, for your convenience.
Thanks for pointing that out. Encryption is not really an issue for me. It's very easy to perform encryption using a encrypting FUSE filesystem or afterwards when needed.
But this is the difference.

I would rather be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond.

Especially if the first is many times bigger than the second one could ever be.
"You are not forced into anything"

Pretty sure that's incorrect. If I want to rate an app I purchased on Google Play with my Google account, with my Google smartphone, I need to post that review to Google+ even if I don't use or have a Google+ profile. That is lame, because I am forced to create a profile and use Google+ (in addition to having a basic Google account where my credit card and email are) just to submit a feedback score to the developer of the app.

Google forces its way between the task I'm undertaking - leaving a rating, and their Buzz 2.0 product which has nothing to do with me leaving a rating on an app I have paid money for.

Google can force whatever it likes on users as defaults, and I won't care one bit if they just allow options for users to change those default settings. Eg "don't use Google+", "don't hide editable subject field in the compose new message gmail window".
Related, what's the fin-tech equivalent of Hacker News? Is there one?
This is a great illustration of the difference between sites built with a CMS approach versus a custom built one, say using a web framework such as Django or Rails. It is usually easy for a non-programmer to build sites using a CMS but the end-user can often understand that it was obviously cobbled together using several clunky pieces. The result is often a poor user experience in terms of the user interface, functionality and performance.
One should also be careful about making blanket statements. For a high earning individual it is possible no amount of additional pay will compensate for the lost time.
Not sure what the shrink comment is about :/

How do you know they are unwilling? Have you tried? What are your proof they are unwilling?

Any system can say well we tried but they are unwilling or repent-less. What applies in this example applies to US. Their system tries its best but gosh darn it, those repent-less Hispanic and Blacks are unwilling to repent in face of prison. It's very easy for people to delude themselves of their greatness.
I don't doubt that MongoDB can be used successfully, but I think the whole point of the article is that MongoDB's success is due to marketing rather than suitability. Where MongoDB is truly suitable, I'm sure it shines. I've got CouchDB in production on two systems, but for applications or portions of applications that are well-suited to a document-store.
I just used really good ion weapons + shields to disable much of the boss's weaponry.
The data presented in the article only makes sense if you buy a large quantity of hard drives; if you only have had a handful then you were just unlucky.

I suspect the reason why people do "burn in" tests on hard drives is to make drives that suffer from early failure ("infant mortality" as described in the article) fail early enough that you can RMA them with the manufacturer. Apart from that, I don't think there's much you can do to improve your chances.
> Japan's problem lies with the fact that their technology is in it's own universe and not available outside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
I think the floods has probably been a factor in reduced reliability. It took forever for prices to come down to where they were and the manufacturers are probably cutting corners everywhere to save costs. Why ramp up factories when the tech itself is on the way out?

I think this is most evident in the reduced warranty periods compared to before when 5 years was quite normal.
Blighted Cities Prefer Razing to Rebuilding
It'd be very useful to have more detailed information about read/write volume and capacity, MTBF should vary a lot depending on those. Until then I'll keep being paranoid.
at first I thought this was a jab at drupal... then I see it's drupal failing itself. I don't think it's scaling well to YC traffic.
or a tinfoil hat!
For me as well
Apollo.js, standalone class manipulation API for HTML5 and legacy DOM
Also, in this example, the part they got wrong-ish is kinda beside the point. Most people will read it as "a person with a 1-hr commute has to earn (yadda yadda yadda) more money to be as satisfied with life…"
Real time cloud database with PubNub
The scale of Ringworld [video]