skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, the CD commences install without any confirmation whatsoever!? What terrible design!
"To get around these problems Salesforce's Craig Weissman, Chief Architect, created an innovative approach where tables are not created for each customer. All data from all customers is mapped into the same data table, including indexes. The schema for that table looks something like orgid, oid, value0, value1...value500. "orgid" is the organization ID and is how data is never mixed up. It's a very wide and sparse table, which Oracle seems to handle well. Hundreds and hundreds of "tables" and custom fields are mapped into the data table."

I thought I was on thedailywtf for a second there. So they took Oracle, and implemented an RDBMS in it?
I look at it this way: you need your 'collection' side of things to be as lightweight as possible. I would 1) collect request data in memory 2) 'post-process' and move that data periodically into your db (once a minute, once a second, whatever) - allowing you to basket that data however you want and 3) move that pre-processed data back into memory to add into your responses as needed. That way the most expensive work would get done in a dignified, scheduled manner.

I don't know anything about MongoDB but if it's not MySQL that's a good start.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.
I think this is very important to take into consideration. I've heard a lot of stories about like-hiring-like and ending up with an imbalanced team. Part of that is the interview process, part of it is the interviewers.

Good interviewers should be able to recognize strengths in the candidate that they lack.
Care to give us any data points to back up your broad unsubstantiated claims? They're certainly at odds with my own experience.
google of course now links to this page first!
I still find it hard to believe that someone would apply for a programming job without being able to write fizzbuzz in the language of the position.
For some interesting thoughts on mapreduce frameworks check out this interview with Jonathan Ellis on the Cassandra project which is facebooks version of a distributed data store.

http://techzinglive.com/?p=75

From what I remember: Google built it's parallelizable stuff around it's already excellent distributed filesystem. In hadoop they are essentially cloning the filesystem and the rest of the stuff from scratch, which is a pretty hard thing to do, and a more leaner approach would be better.
.. Although depending on the particle theory you subscribe to, it may only be unidirectional to us (positrons being electrons moving backwards in time, etc.)
I agree with most of your points except one: I recently switched back to PC, and am amazed at the hardware i can get for the price. I can get a superior PC (operating system preference aside) for FAR less than a MAC.

But, that being said, I am so used to OSX that I prefer it over windows XP at the moment. But I have recently enjoyed the simple breadth of things I have been missing out on (gaming and game design, add-ons and free apps, etc).
Suitable Christmas Presents
Lots of nice presents can be found on this site - which would be suitable for birthdays and christmas.
Hm, I've introduced Ruby programming to a couple of non-programmers and thought the book "Learn To Program" by Chris Pine was good. It doesn't assume much and starts from the beginning. It's very hands-on, ie, not much theory, but if there's someone available to answer the inevitable questions I thought it worked pretty well (50% success rate).

Good luck! I love teaching if the person is genuinely motivated, it's really rewarding and you end up feeling you understand the subject better yourself just from having to explain it.
Free Access to Worldwide iTunes Appstore Data
What a lovely groom and bride
From the very beginning of GUIs, all the way up to now, Microsoft's attempts at copying Apple's lead have just ended up creating cargo-cult operating systems. Yes, $450 sounds like a better price than $1200, and yes, they both look pretty with their eye candy. But what you are getting is fundamentally different; it is cargo-cult design. With a Mac, you get stuff done. With a PC, you get less stuff done, as you run into all the issues that come up with cargo-cult technology.

So... back to the ad. I read the yanking request was over claims about pricing, which were incorrect claims since Apple's pricing had changed. It wasn't about anything like Apple trying to censor Microsoft, as some hyperventillating commenters on the net have said.
Ton Roosendaal (of Blender fame) to receive honorary doctorate today
Edited to fix the name, sorry.
Ask HN: What's missing in Porn sites?
I'm regularly irritated by the consistent use of 90's era web design in porn sites.

What bothers everyone else?
Except the interviewee is not plural. We lack a singular gender-neutral pronoun in English that it is acceptable to apply to people, and appropriating "they" doesn't seem like the right fix.

Personally, I vote we either appropriate "he" to be gender neutral or realize that stereotypes influence language more than language influences stereotypes.
Fear is a blank sheet of paper
The network diff feature looks especially useful.
Video: Saturn V Blast Off, Apollo 11, Forty Years Ago Today
OK - but how often do you plan on dropping your laptop? I fixed/maintained hardware for many years, so while I think you are overstating the case a bit I can agree with your basic point.

But if I, say, buy a craptop for $750 that does 90% of what I want from a $1500 Macbook, well I have $750 left over that I can use. I take a 10% productivity hit, but if I can get more than a 10% ROI on my cash (perhaps by buying a better software package or whatever) then I am ahead of the game, at least until such time as my craptop gets damaged and needs replacement.

And I have to say that the failure rates for PC laptops are not as bad as you (appear to) think.
I found it hard to believe also, but it happened plenty. I think it's more common once you get outside of silicon valley startups. For the startups I worked at, we were almost always able to hire from within the community and most people we interviewed already had public demonstrations of code. They weren't all perfect candidates, but they could at least write fizzbuzz.
I love how they just casually mention that they've been scanning the entire internet. It makes sense to me from a technical perspective, but quantifying the internet is still a pretty amazing thought in my mind.
It simply means that it doesn't matter how many articles you submit. If more people prefer other articles, with say more linkbait headlines, then yours will be buried. In short, simply submitting and voting is not a solution when more, many more people are voting other things up. More generic, shallower things.

And I flag a lot of articles, but very few of those get banned, same principle as with submitting. If a few people flag and a lot vote up, it stays. And "few" and "a lot" are relative terms here. They'll change with time.

I've seen narrow and deep focused discussions be replaced with wide and shallow discussions on many sites, but in rough order: Slashdot/Digg/Reddit/programming-reddit/science-reddit and I know I'm forgetting a few that came and went fast.
What bothers me about these ads is the rigid set of arbitrary features the consumer "has to have". A laptop is a complicated technical product, so certain features are going to affect the price tag. A $700 laptop is reasonable, but a $700 laptop with a 17" screen is going to be making hefty compromises somewhere else. I have never seen a commercial where battery life, weight, durability, maintenance, or lifespan was a "requirement". Call Apple overpriced if you like, but these commercials are strongly encouraging people to make poor purchases. $1,000 may seem like a lot to these customers, but amortized over 3 to 5 years, its less than $600 every 1 ~ 2 years.
Achieve Your Goals With This Simple Formula
Yeah, especially for a mobile device. It's a non-trivial problem and even your solution has the problems as the skyhook solution. The data goes stale and needs to be refreshed continually.
The problem is in just about any off-the-shelf PeeCee laptop you will find only a 6-bit-per-color display, which, if you do any sort of color or print work is just no good. Apple notebooks, however, by virtue of being aimed at graphics professionals, are bound to have superior 8-bit displays and... oh. Oh, right. Oh, crud.
"The Palm Emulator is built on VirtualBox, virtual machine software that you can download free from Sun Microsystems."
Shouldn't that be Oracle?
"Apple is pissed that the ads claim the actors are real people."

What I read is that Apple lowered the price of some of its models by $100, thus making the ads obsolete. The lawyer's call (if any) was probably suggesting that the ads were misleading if they referred to non-current pricing without a massive asterix and disclaimer.
Matt Taibbi is a great, ascerbic writer.

He's also wildly creative and, at times, gonzo.
He interviewed the former head of the Office of National Drug Policy Control while on acid, wearing a Viking costume.
Why I'm Quitting Social Media
When you read a book, watch tv, or consume other type of media, you do it for a purpose. Most of the time the purpose is to entertain yourself. But on the web, specially on so called social media like Twitter, the purpose is constantly being challenged and shifted. It’s a two way, or asynchronous conversation as it has been proselytized, but you still have to manage that expectation. To listen or to talk, to participate or to follow, to write or to read. This is theoretically great, but you will never have that sense of completion I was talking about. It’s an open loop that never closes in your head.
I don't really know MongoDB. Memcache seems like a good fit: you could use key names like '{{url}}-{{day}}-{{hour}}' etc, incr/decr is built into the API and make use of its expiration system. Keep in mind that with memcache (AFAIK) you need to know your key names - ie, you can't search for "all keys starting with x" so you might need to keep a table of keys in a SQLish DB.

Perhaps take a look at Google App Engine - it has Memcache built in and is optimized for handling a lot of short requests. It might save you a lot of deployment/scaling headaches.
With a Mac, you get stuff done. With a PC, you get less stuff done, as you run into all the issues that come up with cargo-cult technology.

I don't know about you, but I nuke-and-pave any laptop I come into possession of with Linux or NetBSD.

Shit gets done on my laptops.
The Big Mac index: Value meal
Here's an interesting alternative to Hadoop using two HN favorites, Erlang and Python: http://discoproject.org/

Seems simple enough, though I haven't used it myself.
Anyway you cut it, she's probably going to have to pick up some basics coding skills to become familiarized with the skillsets of a programmer. Might want to look at the following books:

The Pragmatic Programmer
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

And oh yeah,Dilbert & The Tao of Programming for philosophical contemplation.
Reddit is still a fantastic place for discussion. Also it arguably has a better interface i.e. orange mailbox, saved links, etc. Perhaps not for startup stuff, but for politics & pop culture I think Reddit continues to do as good a job as anyone. Also, its tough to criticize Reddit with a blanket statement considering there are many independently moderated subreddits (arguably including this very site).
iPhone hacking at Loopt
We're looking for iPhone hackers who want to change the way people use their phones to interact with stuff near them. Be excited about about location-aware services, smart, and get things done. We've got a lot of cool projects and a great group of smart people to work with. You'll get a chance to impact a lot of users' lives, see how a fast-growing startup works, and work on very cool projects.

http://www.loopt.com/jobs/iphone-application-engineer or send an email to SAM at LOOPT dot COM
I'm sorry, I don't get how a guy who runs a business based on bingo cards could possibly not know about bingo cards? Am I missing something?
The Learning Test
First, this is from another of your startups, but it bothers me: "Measuring Process Quality By Means Of A Technical Opinion Survey" is patent pending at the United States patent office."

Second (and hopefully more constructively) there have been many web page annotation startups, which is not to say your idea is the same (it's not, as far as I can tell). But it might be useful to think about your idea in terms of features and versions, and ask yourself: if my version 1.0 release looks like what some other startup has had at some point, then why did that other startup not ultimately evolve to my final idea? Is it just that they were not smart, or were there good reasons the idea wouldn't fly?

Or maybe your thinking is you would just jump to full features on version 1.0... however, in that case, thinking about the above question might still reveal some insights.
SOOOO.... obvious question. what other groups have you thought of doing this for and do you plan to do it soon? I could see it working for the tech blogosphere pretty well. politicians, too?

I love how the celebs talk to each other - and how you only show @replies within the group. would love to see this creating a space for conversations between prominent people in all walks of life. academics, big-company employees (google, yahoo, etc.) ...

you've got a great idea and great implementation here. i love also how you have made strong decisions and reduced the interactivity to the absolute minimum. no pause or rewind - only restart, click on a name, or click on a link a celeb has posted... this makes it like TV, but with hyperlinks in a completely non intrusive way. and the links should definitely stay popups.
Likewise, although in my case it's often unintentional!

I wrote a satirical post on the elderly called "Old People Suck" and spent 3 years trying to get rid of regular searchers looking for porn containing, well... use your imagination.
That's why I use an Alto.
Change in landscape occurs more slowly than changes in WiFi networks. But you're right - this is a particularly difficult problem to solve.
It depends on what you value as quality. Many of the things you guys have mentioned is either cosmetic, or used to preserve my computer far past its average lifespan...(with advancements in tech I have to get a new computer at least every 5 yrs. The cheapest PC with non brand hardware will last you that easily...

Cae in point, I bought my cousin an emachines computer for $299 three years ago, and the only problem she's had in all of this time is with trojans (she downloads everything).

I bought my mac in 2005 for 2400 (I loooove my monitor though)and I feel soooooo outdated. So I recently got a MUCH stronger PC for under 600 bucks. I wanted a mac, but the comparable Mac was $1900.
The Game Crafter- CafePress for Boardgames
Exactly... This is really off base...
|What's next, the abolition of 44.1KHz audio?

Actually, it's funny that you pose that question in this article. I think MP3s are a great example of "44.1KHz" audio that is not the fidelity of what you're probably thinking of, the CD-Audio standard.

People are clearly prioritizing things other than the sheer quality of the material, be it visual or audio. I think it's impressive that the LCD folks have been able to engineer LCDs at the prices they have. And, much like MP3s shrunk music file sizes by throwing away parts of the music that people aren't supposed to miss, the LCD guys are throwing away quality that, apparently, people don't care about either.
Ask HN: review my app: Search engine: ruby/rails, javascript, CSS, browsers
This is a database I've compiled over the past couple years to help me with grammar, tool and implementation issues with Rails, mySql and the Ferret, solr and sphinx fulltext engines. I think for certain areas like these 3 index/query engines, and CSS/JS issues with firefox and IE, it provides pretty good results. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of holes, and the interface needs work, but any feedback appreciated.
It's only a problem if your time is valuable and you are interested in running a reasonably secure box.

My time is way too valuable to be used to read bugtraq and hunt down security patches for every piece of custom software I have installed on my box. Or, as is the case, hundreds of boxes.
This is a significantly better piece than the RS article (although the "great vampire squid" metaphor will live on forever).
Wow. I wish I can vote down more than once...
This is a database I've compiled over the past couple years to help me with grammar, tool and implementation issues with Rails, activeRecord, mySql, and the Ferret, solr and sphinx fulltext engines. I think for certain areas like these 3 index/query engines, ruby syntax, and CSS/JS issues with firefox and IE, it provides pretty good results. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of holes, and the interface needs work, but any feedback appreciated.
Hehe, I knew I'd lose some points for that one. All the die-hard apple users constantly bash what I use, so I decided to give 'em some back. If its so great, why is its market share at such a low percentage? I realize its all personal preference, while you like your Mac, I can't stand the sight of one, but I've obviously used both and a PC is far superior. Its really more about how I despise Apple as a whole, more than anything. They're closed-mindedness will eventually lead to their downfall. Developers have poured blood, sweat and tears into creating apps for the iPhone, that make the device do more than Apple ever dreamed of, only to have them rejected from the app store because Apple is threatened by them. They get the 'usage of undocumented APIs' excuse. The only thing I've ever heard spoken positively about a Mac is that they're 'good for media', and I don't even believe that. Also, its all fun and games when they air their commercial, publicly bashing PC's, but they whine like a bitch when someone else does it? I just can't bring myself to purchase anything from a company like that, not even if the product was decent, which it isn't.
No, I was missing something. I read 'baby shower bingo cards' as an example of random internet fad. I was basing my comment on past experience writing for someone who would look up the underexploited search terms first and then build short-lived blogs/sites around those underserved search markets.
Yes, I play Quake Live with it.
From wikipedia:

"On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle Corporation announced that they entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun for $7.4 billion. The deal is still pending, with no date yet given for its completion."

Also, the Sun name probably won't go away for quite some time.
For about 8 years now we've had a TV but no live reception, which means DVDs, videos, but no adverts. Works well for me.
Singular "they" isn't an appropriation - it's a reversion to pre-1850 usage. See http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html for details.
What bothers me? All male porn stars. Most female porn stars.
Had to downvote you for blatant fanboyism with no substantiation. I'm a Mac user too, and I dislike Windows strongly, but if you're going to bash Windows please do so with more backup than vague references to cargo cults (which as an analogy doesn't even make sense).

I get stuff done on a Mac, and I get stuff done on a PC just as well. I dislike the amount of maintenance that needs to be done in Windows, and the disjointed UI decisions, which is why I dislike it. Still, to say that people are less productive in Windows is blatantly false.
I smell an iPhone app. Uses GPS to determine what city you are in and then displays direction in local terms. I want one. This could even work in Boston where the North End is mostly east of City Hall and the South End is a couple of miles west of South Boston
These are good. One of my favorite questions is "what have you done in the past when you had conflicting requirements?"

If you say it never happened and have more than a year or two of experience, I'll be very surprised.

In our interviewing process we divide up the type of questions to ask the applicant with some overlap. So one guy will ask mostly process-oriented questions (what kind of unit testing do you do), another will ask CS/programming related questions (what are common problems in multithreaded apps and what are some solutions), and another will ask team-oriented and "soft-skills" stuff like the one I mentioned above.

It gives us a more rounded view of the candidate than whether or not he can code.
iPhone app monitors speed traps
hehe, yes, I see that now :)
"although I do not consider myself deterred"

Not my intention. I do seriously consider it unethical, but it's a very intellectual sort of thing; I'm not emotional about it, and more data may yet prove me wrong.

"begin implementation in a walled garden in niche subject area"

Probably your only hope of success.

"There's a fascinating question here...???"

Only because you asked: http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . It's pretty easy for me to go on... and on... and on... about this topic, so I try not to without a lot of provocation now. :)
You could let a candidate be fuzzy with estimation, but it's much better to dig in. If they say something will take 40 hours, ask why. The "why" answers are going to tell you a lot about how they design, code, and test, and those answers are going to come under pressure (you want the smallest reasonable time, and they know it, but you also want to detect BS).

Also, I think design skills are less valuable than estimation skills. If you can estimate reliably, you can design. The reverse isn't true.
This is also a company that once tried to get a patent on GUIs, windowing systems. They thought they should be the only ones around to produce a machine with a graphical desktop. Thank God that didn't happen, the computing world would be a horrible place. Why don't you tell me why paying more for the same hardware specs for the Mac should be justified? Because it 'looks' better? Are you all that superficial? I could understand if the Mac outperformed the PC, but it clearly doesn't. Linux is good for servers, Windows is good for a desktop, and I guess a Mac is good for 'looking good'. It's not like I'm the only one with this opinion, read the facts. Windows has what, like 86% of the desktop market? Even Vista sold more units than OS X. Don't give me the crap about Windows is so popular because it comes pre-installed, OS X runs on Apple computers, if these people wanted OS X they'd have bought an Apple. Also, with that market share, there is obviously a crapload of repeat customers. If PCs were so bad, why do people continue to buy them? There's just this little inner circle of die-hard Apple fans, who throw a fit about any harsh word said about the products. And boy, do they love their Macs. But answer me this: Why is this group so small compared to the PC market?
Ask HN: Where did the "little girl with moon ambitions" article go?
I saw this article (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/technology-blog/2009/07/moon_landing_space_anniversary.html) at No. 3 on the front page at around noon CST. By 1p CST the article has dissapeared.

My guess is that the link was flagged and taken down. What was the criteria behind this? I am not advocating for the article but just trying to understand the rationale behind this step.