skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you have any resources you would recommend to understand or at least give an overview of indexes?

I learned basic SQL once-upon-a-time and understand the relational algebra side of things, but only truly picked up the finer details and specific engines in piecemeal manner, as needed in various projects.
Totally agree. I was more using "relational" to mean "cross-relational". I.e. Consider plotting your data on a 2-dimensional space, connecting your "related" data with lines. If your data looks like a spiderweb, probably some graph-type database is most appropriate. If your data resembles an inverted funnel (hierarchical) more than a spiderweb, then a document-store probably is more appropriate. More traditional relational databases are probably more appropriate somewhere in between (which is probably why they're still the most popular type of database being used).

Of course, I can't think of any real-world scenario where your data wouldn't resemble a bit of both. Even very hierarchical data usually has some cross-relationships between un-nested documents, which is why it's still awesome to have a document-store database that supports join-type relationships.
That could be because it was a shell script originally :-)

We're somewhat limited in terms of dependencies. We can add a dependency, but it needs to be available on all platforms we support (Fedora, Debian, Arch, SuSE, Gentoo, OS X would be the main ones). Of course this is an argument against OCaml, but so far we've been fine needing only a handful of libraries and liberally calling out to C.
This is the correct code:

def formatted_zip_code(digits)
case digits.size
when 4 then "0#{digits}"
when 3 then "00#{digits}"
# 2 or less digits is an invalid input
else digits
end
end
Companies like Instacart, Doordash, Postmates, Amazon, and Google are (in different ways) building a new, siloed delivery infrastructure. At the same time, the USPS and their local delivery infrastructure are in trouble.

Is it conceivable that the USPS could leverage their infrastructure to build a national same day delivery network? It's obviously a stretch, but they already have the scale and resources. As a country, we aren't as interested in having letters delivered to our houses anymore, but we sure are interested in groceries and appliances.
My understanding of my group (which may not apply to all parts of Microsoft, of course) is that our 6-person groups are too small to stack rank, so stack ranking rolls up to the next level. So Microsoft doesn't apply stack ranking at such a micro level either.
This "default languages" issue seems to be mostly about testing the gcc backend. Looks like the consensus forming in that thread is that Ada would be better than Go for this purpose.
GlobalFoundries to make Apple chips in New York fab
The Eternal Struggle Between Business and Programmers
From my conversations with friends and family, I think many people think that the NSA's sole purpose is to fight terrorism. That thinking has been reinforced by the NSA and the administration repeatedly claiming that NSA surveillance is justified because it prevents terrorist attacks. If not the "sole" purpose, in the least they think it's the NSA's "main" purpose.

But the main point of the article is that the Obama administration justifies surveillance by saying it's critical to preventing terrorism, but that surveillance is being used for many many purposes beyond just counterterrorism, making it a poor case.
Ask HN: Rule of thumb for identfying fake web traffic
We suspect that our marketing firm is generating fake web traffic. This is mostly a gut feeling from watching past traffic but we need proof. Our privacy page is suddenly very popular and people hang out on the video page without watching any videos. Is there a good way to tell if it is a bot from the server logs? Any input would be appreciated.
Rupert Sheldrake Fools BBC, Deepak Chopra
Should Tech Designers Go With Their Guts — Or the Data?
I wrote JONESFORTH - a literate FORTH interpreter - and I really don't think it's easy. It's easy for me now .. having written a FORTH .. but I don't think that counts as easy for beginners.
This is true, but the "wtf js is such a fucked up language" meme is outsized compared to the actual problems of javascript. Having worked full time in python for a couple years I could easily show you just as many weird python semantics that will inevitably bite you[1]. I think the grandparent's point has merit, that people expect to invest in their primary language for a project, but when circumstances dictate that they need to use a bit of javascript they find it annoying.

1] What does this program do?

print object() > object()
What leads you to believe that Microsoft applies the curve at that level?
I haven't used CouchDB yet, but I have a good friend who's an amazing developer, and he swears by CouchDB, mainly for the reasons you mentioned. So, I don't have any context for your app, but it sounds like you picked a well-suited database to me.
Ugh. Most of my buys would skew 75% charity. With 10% for charity and 15% for admin this is little more than "greenwashing".
homepage error: link for "Not a member of a current Prime provider?" is http://stayinyourprime.com/%10#providers

Also, higher-level: how should potential customers check if their provider is already on Prime?

Finally, my first question when I see a service that will help me with sensitive, private data for free is: who is paying for this? Maybe the providers are paying; maybe the plan is to sell "non-personally-identifiable" data; maybe there will be ads and/or targeted 3rd party offers; but if the site is secretive about its business model, I assume the worst. In this case the privacy policy seems to suggest the latter two options, which are bad enough for email hosting, but really quite dangerous for medical data. The process of pseudonymizing medical data is difficult and necessarily imperfect; so the consumers of any pseudonymized data need to be responsible parties.
> No one in their right mind thinks that the sole purpose of the NSA is terrorism.

There are a lot of people on HN who think that the sole purpose of the NSA is terrorism. Most of these people can't be bothered to visit the front page of nsa.gov.
Each employee receives a single unit of value. Let's call it a 'credit.'

Each employee then has to distribute all of his 'credit' to other employees.

Each employee then gives away any credit received according to the same original distribution.

Each employee continues doing so until the credit received and distributed reaches an equilibrium.

Each employee is then ranked by the total amount of 'credit' they've accumulated.

Maybe we should call it 'PeopleRank' ;)
Conversely and factually rather than merely anecdotal, my Brother laser printer, Canon dye sub and big HP laser printers don't work if you plug them into a chromebook. Nor will it print to my print server. Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and OSX work instantly.

As it's a sealed featureless box, how would one proceed here?
Why STEM Isn’t Enough to Train Tomorrow’s Creators
Not to mention the tax write off that they'll get for donating such a large sum of money. It's definitely a win-win for EA since they were able to market their Origin platform in the deal.
My 14 year old friend just raised 200k
Its a really cool app that lets you anonymously message your friends.
The 'main' app at my place of work uses MongoDB this way; it even implements a 'relationships' collection that is used for one-to-many 'joins' (ugh, just thinking about it makes me feel ill). Unfortunately, I joined when the initial write was nearing completion and was unable to steer the team in the right direction in time.

I just submitted a proposal for a ground-up rewrite; unless it's accepted I'll be leaving promptly.
I guess in 2010, Neo4j did not have that much exposure as they have today. Still I concur that the author should not brush graph databases aside for something like a social network - they seem a better solution than a RDBMS.
It think it would be more accurate to say that Forth itself is simple in design, but it requires more learning to be effective than many languages.
How Soon Will Big Data Yield Big Profits?
Erm...we don't seem to have DHCP working. :(
It likely wouldn't make a measurable difference in the run time. The main arguments against using Python are lack of compile-time safety and difficulty in packaging up something that calls out to C liberally as virt-builder does.
Bitcoin Real-Time Market Prices
Bankrolling the Metropolitan Revolution
So we can expect most of the design decisions in iOS 7 to be reverted in iOS 8, then? Because that's what most Apple users seem to want.
I once tried to insert a screw using a hammer. I'll be writing my article "Why You Should Never Use A Hammer" shortly.

And here's the crux of the problem with this article, and of so many articles like it:

"When you’re picking a data store"

"a", as in singular. There is no rule in building software that says you have to use 1 tool to do everything.
Google Sets Up Person Finder and Relief Map for Typhoon Haiyan
The guestfs API and bindings in all the languages are generated -- by a large OCaml program.

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/tree/master/generat...

For an API that has 400 or so calls accessible through a dozen different programming languages, this makes sense. The bindings in each language are never out of date or wrong (except of course they can have a systematic bug, but those are much easier to fix).

This also makes it very easy to generate alternate "views" of the same API, like OCaml module vs OO views.
It's a good filter though. Not to say success is binary, but I use this as a way of finding who to keep in touch with at meetups and the like. Not to say that I enjoy being rude to people or feasting on people's tears, but I like it as a way of seeing who's been through the startup process before and who will actually stick around. Being able to take criticism in stride is key.
How does open allocation address performance evaluation/compensation? Doesn't Valve have both open allocation and stack ranking?
Terrorism and paedophilia are the usual scapegoats to justify unacceptable policies.
2.8 / 10.0 on a 1 week old 15" MBP (high-end) running latest stable Chrome.
> Any ranking system where an individual's outcome depends on their number of colleagues is bafflingly broken.

From the perspective of the company, it's not as clear how this approach is broken. Assumably promotions, hirings, and firings should be based on the current needs of the company, not what's fair to the employees or some ideological vision. I'm pretty sure attempting to apply any one method for evaluating so many different employees in so many different roles will fail in some manner.
> Its almost like Microsoft technologies are a moat around its castle that keeps talent from leaving.

This is not unique to MS and MS tech, sadly.
Good luck with Android
I usually preface this with the usual: take this with a grain of salt, try to ask them more questions, etc. I've found people are more willing to listen to feedback if you take the time to understand the idea. I also profess any biases I have up front that maybe relevant. If they still get upset, it's probably just best to move on anyways. There's lots of people out there.
> "Get your health records from any doctor"

Awesome! Sign me up!

> Health is inherently social
> Provide context for your friends and family by sharing real health information seamlessly. Focus on communicating about your health rather than communicating the technical details.

Yeah. No. Goodbye.

I would love to have all my records all in one place.

But why in the world would I want to share my high blood pressure/high cholesterol/chicken pox/herpes/aids etc. checkups with my friends and family?
> Some stuff may want data from across relations (who owns this thing, and what is their email), but that's pretty infrequent

That might be a shaky assumption. Speaking as someone who works on a CMS, content usually has an author, and people accessing that content might be interested in them.
I wish GitHub had a page like this: http://stackoverflow.com/users
National Think Tank Launches Attack On NSA: The Secret To Killing It? Water
I Stopped clicking on titles like this...
Titles with NEVER/ALWAYS/something in that direction are just there to make you click and mostly are not good articles.

Maybe this is i don't know... i don't clicked on it...
Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github
I tried switching to Firefox...
Functional data structures in JavaScript with Mori
A bit confusing that there isn't any submit button or other indicator that shows me that my preference is saved.

Otherwise, a cool feature; didn't know about it until now.
How was Google Glass necessary, or even preferred, for this application over a normal computer & monitor setup? I can't seem to make that out from the article.
I recommend Hover.

http://www.hover.com/
My favourite current hacked up laptop is a Motorola Lapdock paired with a small collection of PC-on-a-stick thingies, an rPi, a couple Beagleboards .. all very plug and play. With an Ubuntu-on-a-stick, I'm even able to build work projects and use it as a production machine.

It'd be nice if the fanboix stopped arguing the trivialities of the software - which after all, by now - with all the variations out there - is proving to be not so hard as the one thing that matters in this race: sensible hardware.

An upgradable laptop is what I want. I'll keep the screen, the keys, etc. Just, unplug one CPU, stick in another as needed for various things .. I hope that happens soon.
Kudos for having the smoothest subscription process I've ever seen. One click, instant!
While we're dreaming of database ponies, I'd love to see this taken even further - a database that lets you register queries (read-only sprocs) in a language that allows specifying worst-case asymptotic run-time. (Eg, "this should be logarithmic in the size of table foo".) The database would be responsible for establishing any indexes needed to meet the requested performance bounds.
Note: This is a created dilemma, with one horn being a strawman (with namecalling of those who chose that horn), and one horn occupied by the chosen "good position". This is a rhetorical device used to force decisions to the chosen "good position".
Lessons Learned in Engineering & Management
Any details on why the app was rejected? I understand that the walled garden can be frustrating at times, but having no walls can lead to its own set of problems too.
I bought a Chromebook, installed ubuntu and played with it.
The machine heats up fast and lags too much. The Chromebook couldn't even handle a default office app in ubuntu.

These so-called pundits are getting huge sum of money from ASUS, Samsung, google, etc...
As much as I love GitHub, I think the exploration paradigm could use a little work -- it seems to have something of a flywheel effect, where popular repositories receive more exposure, thus more stars/forks/watches, thus appear as 'trending', thus become more popular. (For example: currently trending as #3 in Python today is the official Django repository; and trending as #2 today is the official AirBNB javascript style guide, which has been boasting around 4,000 stars and hasn't been updated in around ten years.)

I'd kill for a GitHub StumbleUpon: click a button (filtering for, say, vertical or programming language) and get transported to a repository that has a baseline level of merit (say, at least three stars).
I'd argue that, since the comment regards valid input, the note should appear at the top.
That's a feature not a bug; it would slow down Coq is the reason.
So how far do you go back? And for what countries and, indeed, cultures? Note that English Wikipedia is not American Wikipedia, but pretty much International Wikipedia. The world is a very big place. You still seem to be assuming I've asked you for "something obviously acceptable people like me", and that's not the case at all. What's a rule for people who are from somewhere that couldn't even tell you who Baba Yaga was, let alone a story about her?
I'd say if you want a webby OS for the sake of webbiness, then try Firefox OS. Otherwise regular Linux distro will be much better for desktop use.
I guess that's the reason it's opt-in. Some people want "push" some people want "pull".

Personally, I intentionally keep my incoming stream very lean. I like aggregators like this, Ruby Weekly, JS Weekly, etc.
Something that happens already is that virusses will patch security wholes and install updates so that no other virusses can use the machine.
I'd improve that because of this:

-> if the argument doesn't conform to contract, an assert/exception should be thrown so that the caller can recognize the existence of an incorrectly used function.
I guess this is just me, but I feel humble bundle lost their way a long time ago, when they started selling games with DRM and that we're not multiplatform. I stopped buying from them after that, and this store seems a continuation of that trend. Even the name humble bundle seems self-righteous to me, considering they are just a store.
My one and only reason to use Mongo over Couch is geo indexes. As far as I can tell this doesn't exist natively. I'm also not sure how Geocouch comes in worth this.
What about a filter which allows me to exclude repositories that use certain languages?
Can't you get the same benefits by using, say Twitter, as an identity verification?
Star, constellation, snowflake, flat.. Developers (not the author) would benefit from database introductory course even if they are not using databases. I think Stanford did one that was open to everyone.
it confuses users. its a bug. thank you for the -4 points... :)
It's uncomfortable because it's wrong and there is big resistance. I am part of that resistance.

The transition from the fragmented computer market in the 80's brought relief via standardisation into the clone PC and the rise of the Internet. Now it's fragmenting again into separate walled gardens.

The post-PC era that everyone keeps rabbiting on about is a battle between the big players. We'll all lose and be back to separate non-connected ecosystems, just like the 80's when you had a BBC micro and everyone else had C64's so you couldn't play last ninja...

Its already happened in the mobile space which consists of three ecosystems and some "promoted as ridiculous and unfashionable" old fashioned telephones.
> A _data_base product shipping with unacknowledged send-and-pray protocol as a default option.

MongoDB had a default initial fire-and-forget mentality, but that was on purpose for their initial use cases. Just because someone else uses the tool for a different purpose doesn't mean the software is to blame.

Also, if you're complaining about the default settings and you were running this in production, RTFM.
Link bait title aside, I'm a little bored with these "We don't like x, so you shouldn't use it" articles.

The main downside of MongoDB is that it's new. This means less knowledge of best practices, incomplete or missing support in third party integrations, and feature-lacking tools. It also takes a different approach to architecting systems than you would take when using a SQL approach.
There are already good tools for measuring network delays. Firefox's web inspector does a beautiful job of graphing how the various requests contribute to overall page load time. This tool is about measuring how responsive the UI is, even when you're still fetching more data.
I think this is the first post on HN I wish I had a downvote button for, just for the reason you list. There is a reason there are different flavors of databases, and MongoDB most definitely would not be my choice for representing graph like relationships.

It's also scary that it has 217 points because it bashes Mongo.
Definitely annoying. I'd tell her to buy another printer before buying another computer though.
For comparison, here is MIT 9.520:

Statistical Learning Theory and Applications
http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/

I think it is interesting how different ML courses can have such different emphasis in content. The MIT course is all about regularization.
I don't think there are any laptops comparable to the Acer C720 performance (Haswell) at a comparable price. It benchmarks at about half a 2013 Macbook Air (also Haswell).
That said, I'd whack ubuntu on it, and love it as a netbook.

But I do doubt chromebooks will be big hit, they're neither fish nor foul, since tablets stole netbooks' market.
Once you get used to OCaml's type inference that just works, Scala seems a bit clunky.
If I could spy on anyone, I'd game the market, subvert the rule of law, and declare all my competitors terrorists. That is the American way.
There are lots of companies that love hiring former Microsoft employees because they use the same stacks. Its only when moving to a new tech like google or some startups that there would be a problem, but then again google and facebook opened offices in Kirkland/Bellevue for some reason....the moat ain't that deep.
Internet Explorer fanart leads to new anime mascot
Is Kevin Johnson someone important? Why is this near the top of hacker news? It's just platform evangelism that's rehashing points we've heard a million times.
That's not a problem with documentation, that's a problem with what is documented.
Why should I care about what he uses? Why is this valuable to me? "End of an Era" - Era? Thanks for the big title and my time wasted reading.
Well then you know .. with that position .. you are invoking the Imperial clause, and the age of Sovereignty of the individual is over. We are such fodder, given your terms, for master plans. Indeed: chattel.
First off, the HN title should be "iOS" not "IOS" unless it happens to be a critique of Cisco's products.

Secondly, there doesn't seem to be much content to the post other than a notice. For those of us devs who might be contemplating a switch, some information on the specifics of your situation might be helpful and instructive.
Upcoming Maniac Week
This post doesn't make any sense without context. I now know that a person I've never heard of is no longer going to do a thing that I didn't realize that they were doing.
It is a way for Valve to drive their own platform adoption (a purchaser on Humble Bundle store is committing to opening Steam each time they play their game).
Whitelabeling is the key to driving extended reach. I see no issue with with this. Valve is still the nervous system and the blood supply.
For someone that doesn't know who this blog belongs to, why is this hissy fit relevant?
odd, i have much the same mac, same cpu/ram with a regular 7200rpm disk, same chrome and i get 2.5
There is a good reason that relational databases have long been the default data store for new apps: they are fundamentally a hedge on how you query your data. A fully-normalized database is a space-efficient representation of some data model which can be queried reasonably efficiently from any angle with a bit of careful indexing.

Of course relational databases being a hedge, are not optimal for anything. For any particular data access pattern there's probably an easy way to make it faster using x or y nosql data store. However as the article points out, before you decide to go that route you better be pretty certain that you know exactly how you are going to use your data today and for all time. You also should probably have some pretty serious known scalability requirements otherwise it could be premature optimization.

Neither of these things are true for a startup, so I'd say startups should definitely stay away from Mongo unless they really know what they are doing. Being ignorant of SQL and attracted by the "flexibility" of schema-less data stores powered by javascript is definitely the wrong reason to look at Mongo.
Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.
itch.io has been doing something like this for a while. It's getting popular!