skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Over the past year we have from scratch built a significant web-application with MongoDB. We also have a social graph. We build infinite-scroll activity feeds on the fly. We handle multiple writes per second and 10s of reads per second. We have hundreds of thousands of users. We have 100 million documents, growing nicely. We've forced square pegs into round holes on occasion, but nothing we were too surprised about.

It seems like you walked into to your database technology choice with your eyes fully shut. Given even a modicum of of preparation - e.g. reading the MongoDB documentation - you would have asserted the social graph use case to be a challenging one with a data-store in which relations are unnatural.

Then - because you realized you may have a sub-optimal solution, you optimize it by changing technology. And then decide to join this ridiculous anti-MongoDB internet bandwagon.

For somebody who builds "4-6 web-applications per year" and has deployed "most of the data-stores you've heard about - and some you haven't" this seems surprising.

Or perhaps not, actually.
Leeches cannot live independently.
"Persistent" is but a bullet point on Clojure's own explanation of its data strucures, so I suppose we as a community should follow in the official docs' footsteps :)

http://clojure.org/data_structures
I'm not participating but I can understand the backlash - over the past few years I've had plenty of junior developers arguing that we should all be using mongo for everything, because it's "web scale" and it can handle "big data", before they even know what a query plan is. A lot of what we do as developers is, and should be, mentoring new devs, and helping to strike a balance between prudent adoption of new technology and understanding the utility of mature technologies, like SQL databases. It has tested the patience of many competent, pragmatic, experienced developers to have to repeatedly justify the use of standard SQL dbs on applications for which they are completely adequate. So the backlash is to be expected.
This is pretty much how I feel most of the time. It often seems like simple things are hard and hard things are simple, and even after years and lots of different projects, I still end up playing "guess-and-check" with complicated centering stuff.
You'll have to provide a bit more context for me.

But again comparing modern day professions to the 19th century equivalent does not bode well for your argument. If you'd prefer the medical industry return to its standards and practices of the 19th century, your welcome to visit such a doctor.

I prefer my modern day certified medical professional.
should it be "Jenkins" instead of "Jenkin" in title?
I'm trying to connect with other Atlanta-area hackers (I'm presently in Midtown and work at Tech Square). Care to chat over coffee sometime?
End of Inception decoded [video]
The laziness-vs-non-strictness part pretty much nailed one problem beginners may have with the Haskell community.

On the other hand, I don't think your 99.something are a feature of humanity, they are the result of the last decades of mainstream programming development. It took me less than a year of on-and-off Haskell hobby fiddling to find functional and non-strict less awkward to think in than imperative and strict.
Thanks tikhonj for the very well articulated response. I wish that this thread had been pointing directly to your comment rather than the blog post that you responded to!
Yes, I do the same and have tried to use Gdocs for this for a long time and I really am sick of it. Please sign up and we will try not to disappoint you.
Great news. I'm absolutely abysmal at FTL, but I have fun every time I start it up.
Focusing attention cancels brain-dampening effects of visual clutter
> GWT is/was a terrible amount of overhead baggage

GWT is very much alive and kicking, but it's primarily used on internal business applications with large and complex code bases. And what overhead baggage are you talking about? GWT is designed to reduce overhead though cross-compiled, browser-spesific builds, dead-code removal, and js-optimizing.
ProjectSherpa is in Public Beta
Please, if those countries really wanted to keep their identities, their inhabitants wouldn't consume so much US music, movies, style and products (iphones, anybody?).

People are already buying into the "just a province of Europe (I'd say, just a province of US)" with their wallets. I don't see how forcing a local language is helping in counteracting the "provincialization" trend.

Finally, in my ramblings around Europe, especially north and central Europe, I noticed that people really love to keep a "fake" identity. They would wear weird dresses (the Germans), eat weird stuff (the Danish), have a weird Santa Claus (the Belgian, pardon, Flemish), just to think they are "different". They are not different, most of the EU countries are very, very, similar to each other. I really wish we realized that and stopped this craziness about "losing our culture", we already lost our culture, because that was the good/optimal thing to do, please let's get over it.
Anecdotal data-point: a few years ago I rescued the data off my 3.5" floppies from the early 90's (IBM PC and Atari ST formats) and they all seemed to be fine.

I don't have any hardware to read my pile to 5.25 Atari 800 disks.
Did you bother to read the post? It pitted two different DOM traversal libraries against each other:

* cheerio (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/cheerio)

* PhpQuery (https://code.google.com/p/phpquery/wiki/jQueryPortingState)

Both of these use a jQuery-esque syntax, so your comment regarding DOM traversal in PHP is a moot point.
Please make it something that helps me spot errors, and enforce better structure on the huge 2-d field of rectangles that has been in place since the 80s.
$149/month for a 500MB database is a bit much. Nice idea, though.
The argument you really should be making is that the Javascript syntax is familiar. jQuery and it's methods for traversing the DOM can trivially be implemented in any langauge. e.g. PHP:

http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/dom_crawler.html#n...
> I have trouble getting excited about getting more people to pay more for a product that's already available.

This so-called "Stanford model" looks more likely something about old companies. I think for most older generation of people, for whom "marketing" is really what's it's all about(most of the executives in old companies back in the 70s 80s were promoted from marketing I believe), that is their view of "starting a new business". However, they didn't innovate, not exactly because they didn't want to, but because they didn't know how to, in an already stagnant field. This is why I don't really believe this is the case for today's tech-oriented companies. In Peter Thiel's terms(I don't really like him, just using a reference here) this would not even be a "startup" at all(0 to 1). I mean, I don't believe there exist more tech startups which make themselves big by just extensively marketing existing technologies, than those which lead the innovation of new ones. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know a lot about these things anyways.
If only economics were the only factor in commute time.

Housing price, cost of living, and public school quality play a significant role in determining where to live for many people.

I've avoided positions in cities like New York and Washington DC precisely because I didn't want to (a) live in a shoe box, (b) spend 3+ hours in a daily commute, and/or (c) pay for private schools.

I would take a pay cut to reduce my commute and relocate to a lower-cost area. How much is almost entirely based on how much I can reduce my mortgage payment.
Hahahah, very true.
That dude is Thomas Peterffy who founded Interactive Brokers and is now worth something like $6 billion.
It reminds me of Ren & Stimpy in the best possible way.
>"According to M-W "isomorphic" has pre-existing definitions from medicine and chemistry"

That link doesn't say that those definitions were "pre-existing". They say the first use was on 1862 but failed in specifying in which context was used first.
Video game storytelling: The real problems and the real solutions
Which Vim colorscheme do you use?
I'm currently using mustang: http://hcalves.deviantart.com/art/Mustang-Vim-Colorscheme-98974484
Sounds a lot like what Tim Ferriss advocates in the 4-hour body book.

Would have been nice if they would have linked to supporting medical research though.
Can it be called a course if it's a 1-1/2 hour webinar? Do courses require more than one session?

I do love maps though and this is an interesting topic.
Nike+ FuelBand SE review - the active person’s fitness tracker
Don't forget that just about everything in OSX and Linux supports readline navigation:

C-n - next line
C-p - previous line
C-f - next char
C-b - previous char
C-a - beginning of line
C-e - end of line

I assume there are others as well, but that's pretty much what I use.
Bitcoin entrepreneurs want to put virtual coins in your wallet (Coinkite)
Ask HN: Did you quit your full-time job?
A lot of us on HN toy with the idea of leaving full-time work for more freedom. Be that freedom part-time work, consulting/contracting, a start-up, or what have you, for many of us it remains but a dream (with all the rosy characteristics of a dream too).

I would love to hear more personal stories from people who have taken this path. I'm equally interested in successes and failures. I'd love to hear from young and old, single and married, no kids and multiple kids.

Thank you in advance for sharing!
> Even if Node was 5x slower than PHP I would still go for Node because of its easy jQuery syntax

That "jQuery syntax" has nothing to do with the language itself. jQuery uses Sizzle[0], which is a CSS selector library for JavaScript. There are plenty of PHP libraries which provide CSS selectors, such as the Symfony CssSelector component[1].

[0] https://github.com/jquery/sizzle

[1] https://github.com/symfony/CssSelector
Even if the case is that immigration is public debate in Sweden (and I don't doubt that), Sverigedemokraterna's success (in addition to the underdog status given by the media) is in part due to a feeling of taboo for their point of view. A frustration boiling to blow the lid.

The lack of immigration debate in the 1990s is what caused Dansk Folkeparti to gain enough support, that from 2001 to 2011, they could control the Danish government. So even if Sweden's immigration debate is happening, immigration debates always happen too late.

(But this is not unique to immigration.)
> Different languages have different strengths.

On the other hand, some things are better in all important respects than something else. Merely stating that among similar things "different ones have different strengths" is not much of a counterargument.

(This comment is not related to any language or technology in particular.)
I will give more for sure!
>use a pie chart or a donut. We know it's very controversial (data visualization mullahs tend to yell after anyone using a pie chart) but it's actually pretty usefull in a business environment.

Translation: it's for people who (you think) want pretty plots instead of an actual understanding of the data. The article's repudiation of "mullah" (?!) opinion is a little anti-intellectual IMO - these people tend to have a lot of experience and therefore understand common pitfalls better than a lay person's intuition.

Pie charts do not work as intended in general, but may work in specific cases like the one the article shows. Pie charts have low perceived precision because people are bad at estimating radial distances. If in the article's example potatoes were 60 and rice 58, the pie chart would not convey that rice is lower than potatoes - they would look the same. A bar chart or stacked chart does not lose this information because humans perceive location with very high precision. There are several other pie chart failure scenarios, like too many categories, or very imbalanced categories, or very balanced categories. Overall, it's a very non-robust visualization method. It may look good in your presentation now, but when you get updated numbers you may find it becomes a mess.
Mini Metal Maker to bring 3D metal printing to the masses
Net Neutrality simplified for people
As a company you're constraining yourself so much by requiring Dutch if you want to hire good people. I know many companies that still do so. Better for the rest of us!

One thing I noticed: Dutch people can switch pretty well during "work" discussions, but during lunch or social events, the switch is harder and you have to remind people to speak English.
People in neighboring Bhutan(17), Sri Lanka(22), Pakistan(24) are happier than in India(35).

http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-world...
> It's not clear yet that what they did is illegal.

So? It is clear what they did and continue to do is wrong.
What Happens When Freelancers Do Graphic Design Work for Clients w/o a Contract
It think the problem is you are feeding into the same loop. There are also probably ways of making the PHP script go faster still.

Also, that seems like a bit of a magic flag to add / tune, why is that not the default, and would I have to keep tuning it for each of my apps?
Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.
Russians infect International Space Station with USB-stick malware.
$36,297 in 24 hours: behind the scenes of The App Design Handbook launch
Actually, a bit more info on that. The date was chosen by a public doodle poll that I spread around via email and twitter. I was thinking about posting a new poll at the end of the class so that all participants could vote on when the second session would happen :)
I didn't know about this maxSockets limitation.

Is this something safe to raise?
If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful.

Proper statistical analysis would help you there.
How should Christians engage with technology?
I like monokai
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4667`
This is the "insane default" that substack goes on a rant about in the hyperquest README: https://github.com/substack/hyperquest#rant

There is a default connection pool of 5 requests.
If you have 5 or more extant http requests, any
additional requests will HANG for NO GOOD REASON.

This one trips up people on #node.js constantly and hopefully will be removed very soon.
Perhaps punishment was too strong. But it was a forfeit on a bet, and the implication of having to dress up as one of the female cabin crew as a forfeit is distasteful at best, however innocent the intention.
5 Tricks for Getting Deeper Visitor Insight with Your CRO Tools
Conversion Rate Optimization is all about understanding your target audience and what makes them tick. CRO tools are essential to gaining that insight, but you don’t necessarily have to invest in a new tool every time you want to dig a little deeper. In fact, often all you have to do is take advantage of the more advanced features of your current tools. Here are 5 tricks for how to get deeper visitor insight without investing in new tools.
Well it seems like this is heavily based upon the progress of sqlalchemy based on the shoulder of giants comment at the bottom of the page. Whether that is in a philosophical way or a technical way, I haven't looked into it enough to find out, but it would be nice to know the comparative differences and similarities.
http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/http.html#http_agent_maxso...

If you use it smart its safe enought
"How can money compensate for a loss of utility without increasing utility?"

Direct, measurable cost of the commute?

Distance of commute correlates positively with time of commute. Not perfectly but close enough. My current 30 minute commute is twice as long (and far) as my previous employer, therefore I put twice the wear and tear on my car. I'm driving 20 more miles per day than I used to, at 50 cents/mile I need to earn $10 more per day just to break even, or about a buck an hour more. For a "computer guy" this is a rounding error, but for a part time fast food worker or part time retail worker, a long commute can be a large fraction of total income. The primary beneficiary of high school kids having after school jobs are the car makers, gas stations, insurance co, etc, the kids often net less than half their income, or sometimes end up in net negative income territory.
You can picture functions with the IO type as something to compose a program out of. This program is then run by runtime system of your implementation, and that's "when the byte is written".

Here's a nice explanation of Haskell IO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13536761/what-other-ways-...
Low-tech doesn't mean necessarily mean "old".
The noise you hear is five hundred patio11 followers writing that app... myself included :)
Sounds like c# and the .NET platform might fit that criteria in yoyr tangential point.
> but I think that the problem with the way it manages side effects is that it does so through lazy evaluation, and lazy evaluation is hard to wrap your head around.

Haskell manages side effects by making assertions about whether a function has side effects part of its type. Lazy evaluation isn't quite orthogonal to that, but the connection goes in the other direction from what you imply. Because evaluation order in a non-strict language can be complex to reason about, such languages become impractical if unrestricted side effects are allowed. In other words, restricted side effects helps non-strictness, but non-strictness is not necessary to restrict side effects.
Default is 5. Should be just fine if you don't have a specific use case that would require higher limits.

If so, just crank it up, should be safe unless you assign Infinity or something like that and push it too much (then you have another problem though). We use 15 in production where our server parses a lot of external web pages.
I'm pretty sure that is an artifact of the fact that this is a blog post--it's easy to think of a hypothetical example of an innovative product in the MIT mold ("existing production process, but much better/cheaper!") and difficult to give a hypothetical example of an innovative product in the Stanford mold. We know we want to produce things more cheaply--we didn't know, before Facebook, that we wanted Facebook.

As pg puts it, writers who need to come up with startup ideas "come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but [is] actually bad."
Ask HN: Where is patio11?
I haven't seen a blog or email from Patrick in quite some time. Anyone know what he's been up to?
It's pretty much always safe to set to Infinity or to turn the agent off. This is an anti-feature.
India is an Untouchable Nation where majority people are Untouchables (~300 million).

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/indias-200-million...
Silent Update: iPad Mini With Retina Display
Well, not everyone earns the average income (obviously). So the percentage is wrong for everyone.
Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others.

Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.
PhpStorm 7
A marketing team at Intel tells us a vague story about what is either a very vague or very specific set of drives, or may be about an entirely hypothetical set of drives. It's not clear.

They even admit to the problem themselves at the end:

"Some hard drive manufactures may differentiate enterprise from desktop drives by not testing certain enterprise-class features, validate the drives with different test criteria, or disable enterprise-class features on a desktop class hard drives so they can market and price them accordingly. Other manufacturers have different architectures and designs for the two drive classes. It can be difficult to get detailed information and specifications on different drive modes."

That PDF tells me nothing interesting. It's marketing crap for clueless executives, not a technical analysis. (Given their absurd obsession with "Higher RPM" as some sort of defining characteristic, it's not even relevant to the statement I made in the first place.)
Commuting is about attitude. Plenty of people don't mind, or even enjoy, their commutes. The future is clearly office hotels paired with remote work. Go in the office a couple of times a week to reconnect personally. Work from home the rest of the time. It's the ideal mix. Company gets to reduce their real estate requirements due to hoteling: what is an office, these days, anyways? You don't need your family photos all over your desk. You need a laptop and a phone - grab a desk and get to work. When you aren't in the office, someone else is using that desk. Corporations invented airbnb long ago.

Certain areas are quite conducive to this lifestyle. NYC metro area, for example. There are quite beautiful villages in upstate NY sitting on a Metro-North stop, about 1.5 hours from Grand Central. If you only had to do that twice a week, it's completely manageable (especially in Autumn when you can gaze out the window on the Hudson Valley line at the incredible fall foliage).
It's not that surprising. Japan has always been an Apple stronghold... Going way back into the pre-iMac days
Two Rock Band Alums Are Making a Sick Looking Music Game
Twitter and iOS 5
Wireless Device Converts “Lost” Energy into Electric Power
That's the same one I use.
"Don't speak for everyone! That's my job!"
He has been active on HN though: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
so how does php fare when scraping javascript apps?
The Open Company
I built a heat-map demo in CartoDB a while ago. Very nice tool - if a bit pricy if you need more data then free service level can provide.
Those refinements are nice. Pre- and Post- conditions are illustrated, is there any way to describe an invariant?

Also, maybe you should have called them something else since a lot of people will think about completely different when they hear this word... (http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/doc/syntax/refinements_rd...)
apparently it is only straight white men who must follow this rule. The overly sensitive crowd doesn't usually bat an eye when a member of one of the protected groups slights another, unless of course differences in levels of protection are significant.

As in, get over it. People will find ways to take offense at anything. Most people realize where their effort is better used.
The First Open Company
Exposé of Tim Ferriss Mentorship Application
I have last years edition and it is a GREAT resource.
you all should be checking out ethercalc, i load 30Mb+ csvs into it everyday
I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year.

The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?" which I also objected to.
I didn't pretend to hide it... :)
Approximately 40 PB raw storage in our datacentres here, half of them Supermicro servers with whatever disk that came, half HP Proliant with $$$ HP Enterprise class disks, all < 5 years old, so quite comparable to the Backblaze situation.

80% drives surviving after 5 years seems right, this is what we're seeing as well. The hardware is decommissioned faster then the drives fail.
Honestly, I wish we'd see more spreadsheet-like apps move away from the "massive unstructured ocean of rectangles" and give us a little structure - something like Lotus Improv:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?