skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would that tool ever be mongo ? I think Mongo is a thing because people coming from Rails ORM libraries feel like "wow I can jump on the no-sql bandwagon just by using a library that feels kind of like the ActiveRecord I'm used to".

It's only popular because there's less of a conceptual gap between mongo and the relational database tools that a lot of people are used to.

Couchdb on the other hand requires you to actually learn and use map/reduce.. which is a pain for people who don't feel like having to learn something new, but Couchdb is MUCH MUCH better in a lot of ways and Mongo is pretty much fundamentally flawed in my opinion

I do wish rackspace luck though with their offering. I think it was smart of them to create this mongodb product for one simple reason: a good number of people are already using mongodb so it makes sense to help them get the most out of it.
Under my current understanding the reach is much farther, see for example google open source directors response @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sourc...

>>> The Affero GPL is designed to close the so-called "application service provider loophole" in the GPL, which lets ASPs use GPL code without distributing their changes back to the open source community. Under the AGPL, if you use code in a web service, you required to open source it.
I'm proud that I'm building something that combats the unconstitutional spying of American citizens, and also helps others around the world avoid surveillance.

This app is largely a response to the overreach of the US government. While I believe in fighting for our constitutional rights politically, private solutions are also a viable means of protest.

We probably will have liability issues down the road. Nobody said this would be easy. However, being completely transparent and publishing all our code open-source will help mitigate a lot of these issues. On top of this, by making the clients able to secure their own data, the company itself can respond to any government information requests without actually revealing any customer data.
Ok, that's fair. Here's a list of things that worry me, specifically related to Facebook, but they can apply in other cases.

- Private messages. These can be really dangerous for personal relationships and community standing if leaked.

- Profiling data: friendship graphs, location pings, browsing history, political alignment, sexuality, religion. Can be used to make targeted attacks on individuals by predicting their behaviors; to track an individual's influence in communities; to create credible misinformation about the target or their community; to make strategic decisions that will minimize a person's/community's influence in the outcome (for instance, politically).

- Images. Can be used with automated systems to deanonymize crowds and thus passively surveil.

The issue isn't so much zero-sum. I'm not worried about a sudden crackdown on citizens that's orchestrated through this data, because there are other more relevant safeguards (like cultural health and the functioning political process). I'm more worried about the value of the information as intelligence in political strategy.

Anthony Weiner's embarrassing blow-up is a good extreme example - not that he was targeted (it appeared to have been self-inflicted) but it shows what embarrassing information can do to a politician. Facebook has that in spades, and I'm certain there will be politicians looking to buy.

The more subtle applications are more troubling. Applied well, the dataset could be queried for potential or active dissidents and used to discredit them. It wouldn't be hard, either. Make an anonymous tip to someone's SO that they cheated once, perhaps - if their marriage blows up publicly, that's a success. Think of a pastor or a CEO, in that case.

This sort of thing doesn't happen yet (I hope) but information "wants to be free," which is why you can't let it out once. As I suggested before, there's system breaches, unethical sale of data (perhaps even by employees) government mandates. It's not like any of it is unheard of even before the big data era. And even if most citizens are not a target, by complying with the arrangement, we endanger the people who could protect us by dissenting. The health of our cultures and our republics relies on distributed pockets of inalienable authority - in this case, over private information.

Should you stop using Facebook? I don't know, it's all about trade-offs. I do my best, but I've still got a gmail account and a linode setup, the former because I'm more worried about system breaches with my email, the latter because I can't afford dedicated hosting. I don't like either situation. You can call me a bit hypocritical for that too, but the situation is partially social, so I advocate for change as hard as I can.

Lately I've been thinking the best strategy possible would be to call for Facebook to release self-hosting software that's still compatible with their network. But there's also the possibility of somebody creating a really superior alternative, and that would be nice too. That's what I work on, but it's really hard to beat the featureset.
I can do that with `cat`.
"Intellectual property" is a neologism. It isn't property at all. It isn't a right. And what does "intellectual" mean in this context? That phrase was not in use in jurisdictions from which the Framers got the idea to allow patent and copyright monopolies.
Nice material! Thanks for sharing.
It doesn't require that Ars be in on it - or even necessarily Facebook.

But why do you think it's improbable for a company and their acquisition to plot a PR move?

PR people for corporations lie all the time - look at the Sim City release for EA, and the obvious lies about the online component from their PR person.

Edit: For the record, I don't think that it's what happened. I think it was just crazy people being crazy. However, your objection is nonsense and doesn't preclude what the GP was alleging to be the case.
Hmm... now I need a chart showing healthcare prices for the past 50 years as well as percentage of claims denied.
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/336859/var-functionname-f...
> 'looking' here means having a person look at the file or possibly having a system run analysis* of the file. Neither happens.

I know that, and you know that, but I showed this article to my wife (who is a casual computer user), and while she understood the difference when explained, she said that as a non-techie, she interpreted the title differently. If you hash my data, and take action based on that hash, then you have looked at the data, however cursory or algorithmic it may have been.

FWIW, I had this same discussion on reddit, where it devolved instantly into name-calling. HN is much more civil. Thanks for that.
Wanted to look more into valgrind but their website is down :(
- Oculus founders have an interest in tuning out the negativity

- Ars (or the media) has an interest in hyperbole and sensationalism to get views

- No one has anything to gain by making death threats...
The shell is centered on my iPhone; tapping it takes me to the blog homepage. There doesn't seem to be any way for me to get to the actual service without Googling the name myself.
DigitalOcean not destroying droplets securely, data is completely recoverable
I would consider "Its easy to get started with" a valid technical reason.

Of all the "We moved from MongoDB to Cassandra/Riak/etc and gained massively!" I've rarely seen - and its possible that this is selection bias - companies start with the other NoSQL options.

I want to say, that unlike MongoDB - the others actually force you to think about your data and actively decide how you are going to store it. With MongoDB you can pretty much add an index on anything, but with Cassandra (maybe Riak/Dynamo too) you only get one free index before you have to denormalize and write application code to keep your performance.

Then lastly, MongoDB is good enough for most use cases. We didn't see major performance issues until we started constantly writing data to it (high write/low read) (basically we were wrestling with lock contention). I'd wager for a significant amount of MongoDB deployments, not only is Mongo easy to use, but fast enough too.

So while the other NoSQLs are (probably) more complicated and likely more performant, MongoDB, to me, hits a sweet spot of ease of use and performance that is good enough for most applications out there.

However, considering other "raw" technical aspects like performance, durability and scaling I've never seen anything that has shown MongoDB to be a leader.
P/E is a useless metric for high-growth industries.
Is anyone using J as a component in a "modern" application? I am looking for an excuse to learn the language, but my current projects are more traditional web applications.

I could likely find an excuse for it in data analysis/manipulation, but that seems like the obvious application.
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people responding to this news - why wouldn't some of them just be crazy?

There's no reason to think that this is widespread or representative of the general response. However, they're expecting that people like you will distract the conversation from their terrible business move by worriedly talking about how a small portion of the response is from crazy people, and surely we must do something about it!
First edition was a great book. For anyone interested in other OS dev books, I highly recommend:

- Design and Implementation of the UNIX Operating System (Maurice J. Bach)
- Modern Operating Systems (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
- Operating Systems Design and Implementation (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
- Linux Core Kernel Commentary (Scott Andrew Maxwell)
You needn't be disappointed, what you suggested is clearly IMO what I expect to come to pass. These are steps, not leaps. A model with a full-range battery at $40k would mean Tesla cut the price in half compared to the S. That's just not realistic.

Far more people shop in the $40-60k range versus the $60-80k of the Model S. So more economies of scale are realized, the tech marches forward, and then the NEXT evolution could possibly provide base models in the mid 20s.
A great book on this topic is How to Live Dangerously by Warwick Cairns. He tells the story of a school in Norway that conducted a similar playground experiment. In that study, they had two playgrounds -- a "safe one" with rubberized mats and chaperones keeping a watchful eye and a "dangerous" one with tall structures, concrete, piles of wood, metal poles and no adult supervision at all. Within a couple days, several kids in the dangerous playground had broken limbs or had minor scrapes, but they continued the experiment. Within a couple weeks, the injuries had subsided and the kids in the dangerous playground were exhibiting all sorts of positive behavior. Compared to the "safe" playground, these children were happier, healthier, and more socially developed and getting along better with each other.

I did all sorts of crazy stuff growing up. I'm thankful I had parents who gave me a large radius to roam and didn't freak out (too much) when they had to drive me to the emergency room on occasion. The radius for which kids are allowed to play outside has been shrinking dramatically over the past few years. Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment. We're more worried about child abductions than childhood obesity. Statistically speaking, only one of those is a real issue today.
If you want to understand how operating systems work, this is a very good book to start with.

If you just want to learn enough to be able to use unix, look for something else. As the title says, this book is about design and implementation, not usage.
A Website to Learn Irish
No collusion is necessary. It works with any number of people.

Even if just one person receives* a single death threat then they can change the subject. Everyone in that person's tribe, already disclined to listen or accept any criticism of their partisans, will line up to condemn the death threats and welcome the change of subject. They might recognize this as part of a PR strategy, or not, it doesn't affect the execution.

That's assuming there is no intent to handle the PR disaster. Most organizations in this position will have or appoint someone to come up with some messaging strategy, whether that is a spokesman or PR firm or private mailing list. But the effect is really the same.

No conspiracy required.
That was in 1997 though. As was the Asian crash and Russia default (which partly caused LTCM), so there are plenty of other reasons for the Fed action.
Not all people have Chrome or latest version of Chrome and I think a fairly recent version is required to relay over TCP.
High-tech gardening?
When haskell programmers say "functional" they mean "functions, like in math": yes, mathematics has higher-order functions (derivative, etc) but the main thing is a mathematical function doesn't fire missiles or mutate variables (what we call "side-effects"). Writing code that's like math is "declarative"; you describe what things are not what to do.

Others have given lots of good views on the various upsides to using haskell, especially the ways in which the type system can catch bugs for you. But my favorite thing about the type system is it lets you create good abstractions. For example it's possible (and often quite easy) to create a library which cannot be used incorrectly. And because you finally have abstractions which are good (not brittle or leaky) you can build on them to create larger abstractions (by "abstraction" here, think: conceptual unit that is easy to reason about). And that's also one of the challenges with learning haskell: there's more to learn because we can create new abstractions that are worth learning.

I like talking about haskell, but certainly won't presume to tell you you should learn it. But if you want to learn and are put off by what you've seen of it on HN for whatever reason, I can tell you that the community is incredibly generous and full of very kind and smart folks (though some humility and an open mind, as always, will get you far). The community is why I actually have something of a career in software today.
These pitfalls can be easily avoided by following a styleguide [1]

[1] https://github.com/polarmobile/coffeescript-style-guide
It's clearly positioned as an alternative to a tool that prevents copyright infringement. I don't think it is obvious that their intention here is not to present an alternative that facilitates infringement [0]. It seems like they are even proud of that [1].

[0] I am not saying it is good or bad, right or wrong.

[1] Observing, not judging.
I have no idea why you were downvoted, and I can't reply to your child post, but I wanted to point out that you're both agreeing with one another: if you're not changing the source, there shouldn't be an issue. Most deployments AFAIK wouldn't change the source, so no issue, but if you do AGPL does indeed require you to change it back even if you're not distributing said source.
> if it compiles, it most likely just works

I believe the more you learn, the more this becomes true as well. To begin with, you'll write a lot of code that has potential bugs (like missing cases when pattern matching, using types that you really shouldn't, using error when something like Maybe or Either would be more flexible etc.). eventually you realise how to write code that can avoid a lot of these problems.
Dropbox does have full access to its users data, and uses this property to enable its deduplication and public sharing features.
I think it was because - in the words of The Dude, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

> I'd take a NullPointerException over a memory (edit: space) leak any day of the week.

That's your preference and I can understand that preference from your point of view because in order to debug a space leak in a Haskell program you would first have to learn Haskell.

I'm not the one who downvoted, but I also didn't think it contributed much =(
They are not claiming you should use it for infringement. They are however advertising that it works great for infringement. "That’s how [they] like it"

It doesn't really matter what you or I think anyway. If it came down to being sued by a copyright holder, a blog post like this is definitely not going to help their case.
> this article is insinuating that Dropbox has full access to your data

They do. They send data over HTTPS from the Dropbox client, and they store it "encrypted" on S3, but they hold the encryption keys and also have full access to the unencrypted data while it's in memory on the servers.

Turtl encrypts all data with the user's personal key before it leaves the client, meaning the server has no access to the unencrypted data.

As far as hashing in the client, that's true, we actually could do that, and it might be a viable option if we ever implement public file sharing. Right now, all sharing is person-to-person (and private).
Choice between cancelling a print dialogue or cancelling a "subscribe to read" pop-up, I think.
Actually my first thought was also, "well, it is targeted toward gamers". But Starcraft? Was your handle "uglyblacklesbianexxonexecutive"? I play starcraft II almost every day and I find the community very polite. The worst I ever see is occasional gloating after a victory or accusations of cheating in defeat. Most matches the only chat is "glhf" and "gg".
Right, to fully evaluate something you'd use Deepseq. With data structures like Data.HashMap.Strict, Data.Text, etc., the HNF gained from strict data fields tends to be sufficient to avoid most issues caused by space leaks -- but even for something like !String, i.e. ![Char], you'd have to try pretty hard to blow up the stack. (Evaluating the first cell is also more useful than it might seem at first glance.)

I find myself using deepseq the most when I want to be sure a data structure (and any exceptions any pending operations might throw) has been fully evaluated before passing it off to another thread, not to prevent space leaks.
I've spent the last two months wishing I'd written the project I'm working on now in Haskell instead of C++ - the main reason? Lazy evaluation.

I'm working on developing a new algorithm, which is most easily defined as a set of constant functions over my data structure (a DAG with about a dozen node types). There's a fair number of places where I want shortcuts to not calculate things if they're not needed, and with Haskell's lazy evaluation I'd be able to just let the compiler handle most of those (the pattern matching constructs would make my functions-by-cases cleaner to define too).

I'm doing some funny stuff with memo tables indexed by object pointers that would be trickier to do in Haskell, but I think there's likely a library I could leverage.
The probability of one kid being killed or seriously injured in this one school in, say a year is nearly zero so it won't happen and everyone will think it's wonderful. But if all schools do it all the time, you'll start to see some fatalities and brain damages where rules would have prevented them and people will start saying "let's forbid high forts with concrete to fall on" etc.

Anecdotal story. As a kid playing in the street I ended up under a moving car. The only reason I'm alive is somebody alerted the driver in time. We don't notice rare accident deaths, but we do notice pervasive safety measures (don't play on the road even in a culdesac anyone?)
>If you say "functional programming", please elaborate. I know all about function pointers in C, and I've read the docs of Python's functools module

That's maybe 1% of functional programming, if that. And from how you write about it, it seems like you haven't even tried to dabble with that (I mean, merely "read the docs of the functools module"?).

But, if I may, I think the issue here is not about Haskell. Judging from the Haskell query, and what you write about learning Vim, I think you have a general aversion to anything that doesn't have an instant payoff and/or isn't trivial.

Of course you can go on not knowing Haskell or Vim and 100 other things. Many do, and don't lose much, because there are other things.

But if you go on avoiding anything that needs hard work and only offers a future pay-off, that is, anything with a learning curve, it will certainly hold you back. That is, if your ambition is to be a very good programmer (which might not be).

If, on the other hand, you just want to have fun, and are content with easier stuff, there's really no reason to learn Haskell or anything hard for that matter.
Not trying to be tangental, but I believe this is true with EmberJS which was originally modeled off of Coaco. You inherit from Ember's base Objects (ArrayController, ObjectController, etc) and rarely find yourself extend classes that you write. Here is a hierarchy of the "base" classes. http://emberjs.jsbin.com/bahetoka/1
Another widespread phenomenon the internet and after it social media facilitated, the ability to send death threats to people "hiding" being a computer (or a fake identity). Much easier than doing it in person. It is unfortunate that for every good discovery or invention, there is always a way to exploit it for less compassionate means, like greed, bullying (death threats included), criminal activities.. True that if we stopped in our innovation tracks just because of possible negative effects, we'd still be using sticks and stones, but it seems that as much as technology as a whole has greatly evolved, common sense and compassion is still not something that comes instinctively to a lot of people in this world.
Less than a month ago I was at an event about Big Data in marketing. One of the speakers spoke about how they used user data to improve their client's brand experience. If was very effective and I agree they did something extraordinary.

I then asked what tools they used. He responded with a well-known relational database. I then asked the total size of their dataset, with a good idea of what the upper bounds would be. He responded "around 100 million events" since the product started, 6 months ago.

It's really sad because they may end up under fire despite the effectiveness of their work.

Big Data is a lot like teen sex.
Your expectations of what would happen (which align with my own) have no bearing on what is right or wrong.

I wasn't talking about expectations about what would actually happen. I was talking about your claims about what was right or wrong, with which I disagree. See below.

"pandering to the ego of a bystander" (is that what they're calling politeness these days)?

In the particular context under discussion (a cop who has more important things to think about in the particular situation under discussion), yes. A cop who arrives at an accident scene is under no obligation to say "good job" to a bystander who called 911. Just saying "Move" to the bystander if he wants him out of the way is not impoliteness; it's prudence in a situation that, to the cop, is not yet under control.

surely they have much better things to do than spending hours engaging in an egregious miscarriage of justice to flatter their own notions of self-importance

But you weren't talking about that. You were talking specifically about the cop just saying "Move" to the bystander. The bystander not complying immediately escalates his status, in the cop's mind, from "bystander" to "potential threat". That's why the bystander got arrested.

I certainly agree that the cops took things much too far after they arrested and cuffed the bystander. But again, you weren't talking about that; you were talking specifically about what happened before the arrest. Big difference.

(i.e. that they deserve unquestioning obedience even in non-urgent situations)

You were talking specifically about what happened at the accident scene. An accident scene is not a non-urgent situation.