skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly wouldn't bet on that. Did you read the UI research the Office team published with the release of the 2007 version?

The amount of work they put in determining what their clients needed and how they used the software and what would make them more productive is staggering. It's the best UI research I've ever read. Here's a presentation about how they went about their work: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-o...
So the world's third most popular database system acquires the second. So much for competition!
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/
It's interesting that a lot of the things kids to do each other in high school, would if they tried them as an adult land them in prison.
Being socially inept is not a good reason for people to break your fingers or burn symbols in front of your house.

Is. Not.

I don't understand why this is so difficult. :(
Yeah, but... so what?

My experiences weren't the same, because I was geeky, uncoordinated... and six foot four, thank God. I've dealt with it and don't hold on to anger like it sounds like Mark has... but I didn't bother going to my 10th, because, frankly, why? I didn't like the majority of them, the ones I did like I'm still in contact with (or for one particularly notable exception, married to), and otherwise, they're just people, the majority of whom I still won't like, just for different reasons, and even if I'm wrong I could just step out, walk downtown, strike up a conversation at a coffee shop, and have odds just as good for finding a friend, if not better.

I think a lot of posters here are losing the thread here. All arguing about how wonderful people may be in theory after 25 years gets you back up to is "neutral" on the reunion... gosh, it might not suck as much as I expected? Sign me right up! cracki in a sibling comment says that they get a chance to show they've changed; I say no, not really. Who cares if they've changed or not?

If you don't have happy memories, if you aren't nostalgic for a time period where you had no rights and were stuck in a boring room seven hours a day, five days a week, there's no reason to care about the coincidence of who you lived near, so why bother?

(Every year of my life since I was about five or six has been better than the last, and I can't go beyond that simply because I don't remember. Some through circumstances, some because of health issues, some because I'm getting better at living well, which is itself a skill. I'm not much for nostalgia.)

Incidentally, my wife, who isn't particularly a geek and didn't have a bad time of it the way I did, pretty much feels the same. Her friends were mostly in the grade above anyhow, and we've kept in touch. (We'll be seeing all those again literally next week, at my son's first birthday party which has turned into quite the shindig.) Facebook has really eaten into the positive reasons for reunions, even for nongeeks.
Mice are tiny and very short lived. Cancer rates in mice don't translate well to cancer rates in humans.
So the debate is: what's wrong with high-schools?

Is it the kids? is it the (lack of) discipline? is it because of social reasons?

I went to public schools in different ditricts in France, and it changes a lot... It's not surprising that a school in a more urban and "bourgeois" place has more emphasis on scolar success which makes it a little easier for geeky types, but there certainly are other kinds of bullying (sometimes more on social aspects).

Of course kids at this age are very "mimetic": they want to be in the mass and do like popular ones, they suffer to be different. But they are building their personnalities: maybe they not only need better models, but also better structures to make them more mature. We're hearing about current "let-it go" public schools or about old-style strict schools, but what about making schools really more participatively democratic places to live in (I'm thinking of taking some good points from experiences like SummerHill [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School]: I wonder what good/bad lessons we can get from that)?

I'm just thinking of this two simplistic things as I read people saying things like "lookily i was in a private school...", but school is the manufacture of future society: we should care!
Postgres is very good. So much so that many of us use it instead of Mysql in any case:-)
Of course you have to pay, what would be the point of paying 1500$ for WWDC if you can get all the session videos for free?
God vs. Science
One 15-year-old writes about his friends, and dozens of writers mistake it for actual data.

In case my point is not clear: we don't actually know the demographic break-down of who uses social internet sites like Twitter and Facebook. At least, I don't, and I've never read anyone cite any studies. Consequently, this piece, and write-ups like it, are speculation.
Database portability isn't the only reason to use a DB abstraction layer. They provide a way to better integrate the data from the DB with your language's data types and development model. Not to mention making it easier to plug in caching like memcached.

If you write your app using an abstraction layer (or even a simple class wrapper), adding caching is almost trivial. If you are using the low level DB function calls it becomes a large task to cache any of your requests.
"what would be the point of paying 1500$ for WWDC if you can get all the session videos for free?"

other paid for conferences do release videos of the talks so this argument isn't very persuasive.
And pg's experiences from the 1.0 .COM era, and his connections.
Oh my god, what a headline..

"a steam-powered rover that converts biological material to electric power"

Well, is it steam-powered or biological-matter-powered?
It's tough to take anyone seriously who calls something he disagrees with "bullshit".

Database abstraction, like many other things, serves a purpose under the right conditions (when flexibility and portability are needed to serve customers). Get over it.
This model worked out so well for the print newspapers, it's bound to succeed on the web. sage nod
I doubt, for example, students would pay $300 for development videos. They would, however, happily watch those videos if provided for free on Youtube, and perhaps make something awesome because of it.
I wouldn't use that on children, but he's not a child anymore.
FTA: "It’s not hard to see how a warming Earth could change those dynamics: as the globe heats up, the top of the atmosphere should get colder."

But if that were the case, noctilucent clouds would normally be an equatorial -- not a polar -- phenomenon.
It may well be very good, but it's much more painful to set up and get running than MySQL.
Also, adolescents turn into adults, but they don't forget what passed before. So if you were evil to someone in high school, the adult thing to do would be to apologize if you're going to contact that person.

Agreed. But I don't think that trying to forget something is dealing with it. It may be a way of coping, but it's no resolution.
A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Respectfully agreeing, but sharpening the definition, I would say that the topic rarely gets ugly here on HN (it gets terribly ugly most of the time elsewhere online) and that I personally had a lot of new things to say on that topic the first few times I posted on it here. I do research on that topic

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

that most other online participants have never bothered to do.
If I were Goldman, I wouldn't be worried that he would build a better version of my software. What I would be worried about is that he would analyze it, find holes in the methodology and figure out a way to screw me on my trades that are made with this software. Either by beating me to the punch, OR trying to game the market is such a way that my software would make a trade that is not advantageous to me.
I think these kind of articles miss the point of "status updates". For most people, it's not really narcissistic behavior so much as it is efficient social communication. Of course you can find outliers, douche bags are everywhere with or without Twitter/Fb.

I can't tell you how many times I've caught a drink, attended a community event, or grabbed a bite to eat with my friend(s) simply because I read he was nearby, etc. Real-time communication makes things more exciting for people that like more spontaneity in their life. I think introverts tend to have a problem with it, and are the most critical of others having fun and socializing.
Have you ever had your fingers broken by someone? Unless you're a Buddhist monk, I think you'd be hard pressed to forgive that and multiple similar transgressions.
It's not and I have never said it was. I just said he didn't have it all together. Sounds like he still has social problems--instead of facing people who used to not talk to him he'd rather tell them to fuck off on the internet. Works for him I guess, but that's the whole reason why he was targeted in the first place. It's sad that happened to him, but I bet everyone who messaged him has no idea of what his memories of highschool are like. They never got to know him but assume he had a good time like they did.
How many times do we have to hear this tired screed about social media? Try googling twitter and narcissism, and you will see what I mean. Some of my brethren in the Christian community are the worst offenders. I mean, it's popular, so there must be something wrong with it, right? Narcissism is the closest they can come, and so they milk it for all it's worth.
No it isn't:

apt-get install postgresql

Then a few commands to create databases and users and things, and you're good.
That's likely only a result of your unfamiliarity with Postgres relative to MySQL.

Also, installing via apt on any Debian-based Linux is pretty much just as easy with Postgres as it is for MySQL.
The original fox news article has since been revised. It doesn't eat corpses, it's a vegetarian.
The way I understand it the phrase "abstraction layer" is usually used to refer to the layer between your SQL and the database and is supposed to allow you to run the same SQL using multiple database engines (at least in theory). While the author's DIY library abstracts the database, I would say its main purpose is isolation, not abstraction. This makes it easier to port apps to new DB engines because it's not that hard to replace an instance of a class with mysql specific code with an instance of a class containing postgres specific code.
I am not sure if the paths would be compatible.
Looks like it is using suid pulseaudio to load the exploit into the kernel. I don't think RHEL5 systems install pulseaudio by default. Also note that this is a local exploit, you need access to a user account on the system.

ETA: I just tried this on a CentOS5 vmware image (2.6.18-92.1.22.el5) without SELinux and couldn't get it to work.
Yes, this is an opinion piece, not based on any particular evidence, not the conclusion of a scientific study.
That's just marketing, I believe Bill Hicks has some good advice for people in that profession.
Prison and school are in fact natural, it's civilized society that's takes effort and breaks down under stress.

And I think coping in a Lord of the Flies like environment is part of being human. We can not easily extend the adult civilized structure into childhood. Only in extremely tightly controlled environments does that sort of work.
>> The "like" feature is plain terrible, the smiley face is distracting me from the content of the feed because it's on top and bright yellow.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

About four months ago traded out my normal GR for an instance of it in Prism with the Helvetireader style sheet, and have never looked back.

Do that, and see how nice and minimalist a web app can be.
Too much generalization. Were all of you really abused and friendless in high school?

I was(and still am) a huge geek in high school, and I pretty much loved it throughout. I made great friends I still keep in touch with(some of them from when I was captain of math team and quiz bowl), I was never physically abused or ostracized, and even managed to date a couple girls who were way out of my league.

Sure, I wasn't invited to any of the big parties and I wasn't good friends with the popular kids- I was firmly entrenched within the geek clique. But I wasn't ignored or anything, everyone was pretty much friendly or at least cordial.

By the way, just like the author, I was a skinny 120-lb kid, so if anyone wanted to bully me they easily could have.
I think it's the bitter the-world-hates-me victim mentality that contributes to bullying, not being a geek.

This article is rife with stereotype, are these really true? Is this story #1 because all of your high school experiences were similar?
I'm not sure where you're coming from with the position that "interesting = value." Just look at the top stories on Reddit and Digg (or MSM, for that matter).

What tweaks the interesting receptors is often formulaic, sensationalistic, base, pablum.
It would be great if, instead of posting the same arguments over and over, people were editing and strengthening a canonical version of that argument. At least you'd get higher-level flamewars.

The difficulty would be preventing people from deliberately weakening the other side's argument.
Knowing more than one approach for dealing with hierarchies in relational dbs is a good idea. I've used both nested sets and proprietary approaches (things like CONNECT BY in Oracle).

Thanks for the link to the PostgreSQL ltree, I wasn't aware of it.

Also the article mentions Joe Celko's books, which I recommend to everyone who wants to build up their SQL skills.
Steve Blank writes about his learning of this phenonemon while working on electronic warfare systems in this post: http://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-h...
I switched from bloglines to google reader two years ago, greader evolved in the wrong direction imho, I was expecting a gmail like experience but every new update adds nothing to usability... is there something new to try that let's me really focus on my feeds?
I don't know much about PHP abstration layers, but Django's ORM makes an app pretty damn portable from DB to DB. I know, without a doubt, that I could roll out my CMS/blog/documentDB in a heart beat to MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and SQLite with nothing but a change to the settings file. I have to think that Django is by no means unique in this regard, and that PHP has the equivalent.
Automated Web Services Composition with the Event Calculus [pdf]
Opinion pieces are fine, as long as they explicitly state the status of the premise that they start from. In this case, the premise he starts from is "most users of social internet sites are not teenagers." Then the opinion part of the piece tries to explain why that is.

My complaint is that there's no evidence for his premise. In other words, he's trying to explain something that might not be true in the first place. I worry that he, and his readers, don't know the distinction.
I'm not sure it's a loss, really. Someone "friending" me, who is clearly not my friend seems more like an imposition. My real friends are happy to call me on the telephone, or send me an email. Facebook "friends" are faux friends, and a site dedicated to quasi-communication by faux friends seems, well, creepy.
The author fails to mention another very common approach that does not suffer (as badly) from the nested set approach. This strategy is called "materialized path".

In the materialized path strategy, each node/row has its full path in the tree stored in a column and that path is "materialized" or "derived" from a depth-first traversal to that node. In conjunction with the adjacency list approach this could yield much better results in most situations than a nested set model.

Taking the tree used in the article, the paths would look like (using '/' for path delimiter but you can use whatever you like):

electronics
electronics/televisions
electronics/televisions/tube
electronics/televisions/lcd
electronics/televisions/plasma
electronics/portable electronics
electronics/portable electronics/mp3 players
electronics/portable electronics/mp3 players/flash
electronics/portable electronics/cd players
electronics/portable electronics/2 way radios

Alternatively it would make more sense to base the materialized path off of an immutable field such as the PKey of the record (in the same order as the paths above, from the article):

1
1/2
1/2/4
1/2/5
1/2/6
1/3
1/3/7
1/3/7/10
1/3/8
1/3/9

This has the following advantages:

* Node insertion/deletion overhead is low / does not require updating other nodes unlike nested set model
* Query for subnodes is easy: "select * from tree where path like 'electronics/televisions'". To get only direct subnodes add a parent_id specifier.
* Getting the full path for a node is easy: it's built into the node itself
* Node depth is easy: count the number of path "segments"

Downsides:

* Moving sub-tree requires updating all sub-node paths

Hope this helps someone!

Cheers,
-Zach
If you're a U.S. company dependant on MySQL to run your business, tell the DOJ about it so they "have a talk" with Oracle about not killing it.

For those that are worried about the future of OSS software as part of the Oracle / Sun deal, and the affect (both good and bad) it may have on their business, the US Department of Justice is encouraging companies that are dependent on MySQL / Java to contact them and tell them how the deal may affect their business. The more information the department gets, the better equipped they will be in deciding what their recommendation for the deal will be.
I'm afraid this is turning into armchair psychoanalysis, so I better stop.

But suffice it to say, when I was still a kid and thought about the other kid who almost broke my arm, I was filled with rage as well. I almost never thought about, but when I was reminded I was very angry over it.

But as I got older I got past it. It doesn't make me at all emotional now. The guy and I are not fiends, I still don't even like him, but we're civil and he doesn't push any buttons for me, there are no buttons to be pushed.

That's what I think is growing up and dealing, not simply forgetting.
Exactly. He's got enough pity for himself, I'm glad you aren't giving him more.
Good on you having an alternative database for your business use-case. But just because you don't use it doesn't mean you should wish for its demise and deny it to others.
> Put another way, if we lived in a world where daily ejaculation did not improve sperm quality, would we still expect animals to masturbate? I would say yes.

We probably do live in such a world. The "sperm quality" issue probably doesn't come up with animals that spawn at a given time of year.

Note that "sperm quality improves with masturbation" is a partial explanation for why masturbation is pleasurable for those species who do.
Or at least his disciple, Stephen Few.

I worked on some dashboard projects and have found that following some basic good guidelines from Few really improved the end results.

As a plus, the Few books were short and simple, so a minimal time investment was well-rewarded.
Isn't Vitamin E fat-soluble? Is it safe to consume such high levels for extended periods?
My best advice is to avoid macroeconomics to begin with, since that seems the most heavily politicized. Microeconomics teaches you the most interesting parts: marginal reasoning, opportunity costs, supply and demand curves--basically the things that everyone agrees on. You'll be surprised to find that even liberal economists agree that minimum wage laws cause unemployment, rent control laws cause housing shortages, and price controls cause economic inefficiencies. Why? The answer is all in the supply and demand curves.

When you do get into macro, start with the pure factual basis before you get into theory. For instance, instead of diving into debates about the gold standard, get a good factual understanding about how the FED works, what M1, M2, and M3 are, how fractional-reserve banking figures in, and so forth. A gold standard may or may not be an improvement, but learning how a centrally banked fiat currency is run will teach you important facts about how most currencies in the world are run. (My macroecon course covered this, as well as a little bit about currencies like China and Hong Kong that peg themselves to the USD, using similar but distinct approaches. I don't recall exactly how China does it but Hong Kong operates a "currency board" where they hold a reserve of USD that they exchange for HKD at a fixed ratio. Interesting, eh?)

Most of the economic debates center around what should be done, or how certain economic or monetary policies affect the economy. There are even controversies about the past--what caused the Great Depression and whether the New Deal helped is a particularly sticky tarpit. It's useful to learn these controversies, but do so by reading all viewpoints involved rather than just one. Then maybe you can choose your favorite.

I would not take a historical viewpoint, starting with the oldest economists and working forward. That's not even how physics is taught, really. That's how philosophy is taught. Unlike philosophers, economists have actually gotten to a point of relative agreement about most things. Remember that you want to learn economics, not the history of economics, so while we use a lot of Adam Smith, we also use the supply and demand curves and other tools that came after Adam Smith, just as a biology class would talk about genetics when teaching evolution, even though Darwin never knew about genetics.
I'm not sure if only Buddhist monks are enlightened enough for this. But I am sure all that anger is not good for him.
"$FOO is very good. So much so that many of us use it instead of $BAR in any case."

Your usage of FOO for some purposes is not a sufficient proof of its superiority to other solutions for all purposes.
If Aliens Were Tuning Into Our Television Frequencies…
those stats wouldn't be hard to acquire. There are various lists of all the YC winners. Love to see a comparison of YC vs Seedcamp.
How do you distinguish between hackers and corporations. A small startup, can in a couple of years of time become a large company, which can be bought by a bigger corporation.

Where do you draw the line?

That's the reason I think that GPL/dual licensing is the best. If it is a casual hacker, he shouldn't mind reciprocating. If it is a company, it shouldn't mind paying.
Not that it is important to this thread, but I had a few broken noses during my childhood.

I used to be fairly angry. But there came a time in my life when I was about 16 where I was happy, and it didn't really matter. Let it go and live well.

As a small side note, it troubles me seeing him push his kid so hard into Karate. It is still influencing his decisions and impacting his child's life now too. (not that Karate is bad, but the reasons are)
Yes. The generalization is generally -- by no means always -- true. That's why pg's essay about geeks in high school is such a rallying point: pg says "oh, don't worry guys, you aren't unpopular because there's something wrong with you, you're unpopular because you're too wise to play all their little games, which of course you could master instantly if you were willing to lower yourself." It's a very comforting lens through which to view a generally traumatic experience.
I think you have a parse error. I didn't write "Mysql sucks" or that Postgres is better for everything always.

Google for Postgres vs Mysql if you're interested in pursuing the topic further - it's been done to death here and elsewhere. I just wanted to say that Postgres is a very valid alternative.
This is so great to see. I have nothing but praise for the Blender foundation. I had the pleasure of meeting Ton briefly at a conference last year. I very smart gentleman.