skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine there are some serious high availability requirements there - if the wise words of the great leader are not copied down then presumably Bad Things happen so it's RAINT (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Note Takers).
Darwin: A Friend of Theology?
Ask HN: Are big-boy acquisitions always glam?
When we hear regular news of smaller businesses or startups be acquired or acqui-hired by the likes of Google and Facebook, I often wonder how the relationship started.

Is it always the case that the big guy says to the little guy "We like what you're doing, let's talk"?

How often is the little guy pursuing the big boys until they bite the cherry?
> I thought the main advantage of document-oriented schema-less databases (I haven't used MongoDB but I have used CouchDB) was that they are supposed to give more flexibility in the early stages of projects.

Depends on your requirements, I guess. If you want to maintain even eventual consistency, any update that crosses document boundaries has to be thought about very seriously in order to avoid breakages in the face of concurrent modifications. So, ideally you design your documents such that any one logical operation only has to hit one document.

This is pretty easy for very simple tasks, but can get rapidly more difficult in the face of more complex or changing requirements. I suspect a substantial proportion of Mongo or Couch based applications simply ignore this problem, and are lucky that they don't have enough concurrent activity that stuff breaks frequently.

Using Postgres/JSON neatly avoids this problem because you get ACID back, and you can do cross-document updates all you like.
It would have been interesting to see the power consumption compared. The Raspberry PI model A can be operated below 0.5A, in some cases 0.25A, which makes it attractive for mobile installations. How do the other two boards compare, do you know?
My favorite poem for endings:

Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn't fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.

They're not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht, "On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love")
The worst year of my life
Data-based formats are most useful when you know all the requirements one will need up-front, because they need to be coded into your "schema" or DSL - these schemas quickly break down when you have new requirements - and initialization is an extremely diverse area.

The only way to actually manage such a DSL/Schema is to provide a way to "break out" of it into a general purpose language - that's what systemd does by allowing you to run shell scripts in the case you're not using a "standard" service, and it's also what the Nix expression language does in order to build software.

It's far easier to just provide a fully capable language up front - and abstract the common patterns into functions or macros to simplify the usage for users. sysv has worked well with just shell scripts for years, despite it being a sub-standard general purpose language - although various hacks like the LSB init headers have been added to provide some kind of structure to them - a problem that will be better solved with records in Guile.

As for maintenance, I see it as a big plus - with a language like Guile you have access to a useful REPL and debugger - no need to roll your own debugging interface or inspect log files. On top of that, having a dynamic language makes it easier to develop and test patches for new requirements - you're not forced to recompile and restart your DSL.
Keep it simple. There's no reason to overanalyze the failure. Ask someone why they're not on Google+. There response: "What's Google+?" If they know what it is: "Why would I use Google+? No one is on there. All my friends use x y or z." Google+ has a huge public perception and identity problem -- who is it for exactly? Why use it when there's other social media?
I suppose my first question is... Why doesn't this union already exist?
Do you really want to work for a company ran by criminals? Why aren't Jonathan Rosemberg and Eric Schmidt in jail?

Fuck them and fuck the entire legal team at Google!

Disclaimer: I work for Google.
I think the problem is more that just because random person X "has me in their circles", I've no idea whether they're interested in my posts about cheese or my posts about Latvian clog dancing or my posts about C++, so I can't assign them to my topic-specific circles for targetted notifications.
"dropping a db column via ORM" - prevent this via security configuration, release schema changes to production via plain SQL. ORM is not a complete replacement for dealing with DBMS.
It's not a legal question, so the legal answers are not relevant. We know that it is legal to do so, that doesn't mean we should.
Michael, I have seen you comment here many times. I don't know you, and have never met you, but I feel it's hard to believe your stories.

Almost every time you comment, there's immediately a comment from an active Googler telling everyone how you see things in a completely different way.

For example, you casually mention here how you must be black listed because you have seen career problems since. Yet this is nothing to do with unions, and all about anti poaching agreements. I don't intend to slander you here, I just find it extremely hard to believe anything you say isn't delivered with an agenda.
Bingo. The mistakes to be learned from are many and well-documented in this scenario.
He should really consider smoothing it out a bit and selling it as a beginners' kit somewhere.

I would love to give my little nephew something like this where he would have to assemble all the separate parts and do some basic Linux configuration. Perhaps Adafruit could help him out with that?
Don't favor vigilante justice but if by chance the victim's brother happened to see this scumbag on the street, I wouldn't waste much sleep over it.
The FCC’s new net neutrality rules will kill Aereo
Google+ came in a time when social network fatigue was setting in (Facebook usage was declining in the US) but there still wasn't a clear sense of what people wanted in a social networking site.

It was an uphill battle, and nearly unwinnable the way Google chose to take it on.

Google Hangouts was, in my view, one of their biggest assets. It's a solid piece of technology. It was way better than its competitors. The problem is that they couldn't come up with a viable way to make it part of Google+, rather than a great standalone project. The vision was that people would spend time in Google+ and "hang out" with others who were available. I knew, off the bat, that that wouldn't happen without (at first) a context around which to structure a hangout. Board games are a great starting social context for early adopters, but since they're a cognitively upscale group, you need quality games, not Zyngarbage like Farmville.

I thought that a focus on game quality (Real Games Initiative) could, even though it'd piss off counterparties like Zynga wanting to throw us our crap (because they didn't expect us to succeed) and still get preferential treatment, give people a context in which they'd actually get comfortable in G+, and then want to use it. Games were an area in which (circa 2011) Facebook was shitting the bed-- low-quality games and game spam were a primary driver of social network fatigue-- and I thought it was a great way to distinguish ourselves as cognitively upscale and attract early adopters and the more charismatic elements of the early majority.

Maybe a quality Games product wouldn't have saved G+. It's too late to know for sure, and I'd guess that RNCH was a bigger problem, but I feel like that was a key battle that has been lost.
At the risk of evoking the wrath of HN...

It is curious that he was charged with 45 felonies and had a million $ bail (which is ridiculous) yet in the end he plead guilty to 1 misdemeanor charge? Which what happens sometimes when prosecutors want to save face. Plenty of charges are prosecuted with out video so it being ruled inadmissible is a pain but not some insurmountable roadblock. He might be a horrible person, and I will condemn him when I know for sure, but we seem to be possibly missing some details here.
Which to me proves the point, at least in this case!

A paywall is magazine with most of its pages ripped out - a magazine that does not work.... :->
The same way I feel comfortable that I won't accidentally write and execute a SQL script that does it. ORM doesn't make it especially trivial to corrupt your database.
I think that's just your browser removing the trailing slash.
Pink, Taligent, OpenDoc, CHRP

Dear god, those are words that still chill me with the memory of hype and shattered expectations.

The rest of your analysis is fairly spot on. Although I do think that Steve grew some outside of Apple. The reality is that Apple needed its years of failures without Jobs to realize how much he was needed. Really, even when they brought him back, they didn't understand how huge his impact would be. They just thought that they were buying NeXT with a bonus.
This is a good read, and definitely something I've seen with my friends in the music industry who have carved out success. Being excellent at your craft alone won't get you where you want, it takes an equal amount of work & savvy on the business side to promote, set yourself up to do well financially, and control your direction.

The most successful that I've seen amongst my musician/songwriter/composer friends enter unorthodox spaces that have strong potential, such as creating high quality sample libraries for instruments like guitars for use in DAWs (digital audio workstations - software like FL Studio, Cubase, Logic, Reason, etc.), aggressive promotion via forums & writing articles of interest to their potential audience on their blogs, and networking in scenes such as indie game developer communities (via forums & IRC) & events such as GDC and Video Games Live. I have an acquaintance who even found success networking with musicians at concerts!

It's certainly a tough business to be in - you have to love it, both the music and business side.
Apprenticeship Patterns
The Valuations of Popular Flappy Bird Clones (Infographic)
> To wit, I don't use Google+, but thanks to its bundling I've also stopped logging in to any Google service on my laptop except on a strict need-to basis

This has been the unfortunate consequence for me as well.
Of course they had to share webkit, KHTML and KJS were under the LGPL so they had to. What they didn't have to share was the apps based on top of webkit such as Safari and they didn't share Safari.
Scrabble Word Finder (my fun project)
Fachadas Energeticamente Eficientes
Only just noticed this response Don. Sorry for the delay.

Those are the only substantive arguments they offer, and no, I don't own a Glass. I wish I did but I can't justify $1500 on alpha/beta tech.

I wear glasses though, so they could be incredibly useful to me.
Analyzing a NHL playoff game with python
I wish Netflix would just deny access to every Comcast subscriber. Maybe that will knock Comcast into reality after like 20% of their subscribers instantly cancel their account.
I'm not going to be convinced unless I also hear a biochemical mechanism, and I can't imagine where digestion of yeast and metabolization of alcohol intersect.
Lelouch: A Machiavellian Analysis
Nokia: Where it all went wrong, by it's former CEO
Encryption Will Protect Data At The End-Points
Schema changes are often (normally?) done using a separate mechanism and operations called migrations rather than in the main code.

In a production environment they should be well tested before deployed to the live system. That plus backups should help prevent calamities.

There are still possibilities of deleting the data whether through the ORM or direct SQL, both could be easily accomplished so test before deployment and keep regular backups in case of disaster.
It's not odd.

I've never even heard of this guy or his company before this. I also wonder if this company has a "coolness" factor. For example, if the CEO of AT&T, Monsanto or some Oil company did this I wouldn't expect outrage from SV since those companies' reputations in SV are already so low that no amount of badness from them would shock the tech-community.

They'd be like just "Huh, yeah... rich execs in evil corps getting away with horrible crimes because our justice system only works when money & ethnicity aren't a factor. yawn. Happens every week. That problem is too big for me. Moving on..."

Not saying this is good... just expectations and moral-bar is set differently for different companies. If the CEO of Mozilla/Facebook/Apple/Google/Dropbox did this we all _KNOW_ the interwebz would freakin' E-X-P-L-O-D-E.
Yeah this is why I don't use it. I added a ton of randomers to a web desgin circle from here and reddit etc.

I must trust they suck me into a web design circle also AND then; Trust they share related content only to that circle.

What actually happens is I have a random stream of peoples kids and dogs etc as they all seem the "share with all" by default.
Almost every time you comment, there's immediately a comment from an active Googler telling everyone how you see things in a completely different way.

Google has almost 50,000 employees. Not all of them are intelligent, well-adjusted people.

For example, you casually mention here how you must be black listed because you have seen career problems since.

I don't think I'm "blacklisted". I've definitely caught inappropriate communications behind my back, to the point that I've had to pursue litigation and have collected a couple of (small) tortious interference settlements. "Blacklisted" implies inability to get jobs, and it hasn't been nearly that bad for me because I'm ostensibly good at what I do. I've just had to deal with annoyances, like inappropriate questions on job interviews.

Yet this is nothing to do with unions, and all about anti poaching agreements.

The original purpose of shared blacklists was to shut out union risks ("troublemakers"). No-poach agreements are a similar, illegal, collusion among employers who are supposed to be competing. There are also HR departments in tech companies who share salary and performance reviews down to the level of the individual, and that's also (if not illegal) extremely immoral. Three heads of the same beast (no-poach lists, blacklists, salary databases) but the infrastructure of collusion is the same.

I just find it extremely hard to believe anything you say isn't delivered with an agenda.

I'd like to fix technology. That's an agenda. What's wrong with having "an agenda"? The alternative would be not having one. I wouldn't post on this forum if I didn't care about the future of this industry.
Given that MS managed to do a Trojan takeover of Nokia, I'm gonna say yes, it's probably gonna end as a Pyrrhic victory for MS.

I mean MS has a track record of screwing up mergers, on par with Yahoo's.
Why It’s Insanely Easy to Hack Hospital Equipment
It seems much of the problem was not being as good as Apple/Google/Microsoft at OS development which they needed after the iPhone came out eg.:

[Vanjoki] "was in charge of its MeeGo smartphone OS with 2,000 people serving under him, but still Google managed to get better results with some 500 Android engineers."
Theres alot of "put aside" in the beginning of the article. We just can't put them aside. He was my inspiration to learn guitar. Awesome read.
Simple and Easy To use Crates Models to Get Your THREE.js Game Started
You generally only let the ORM create/update your schema during early development. By the time you get to production (or heck, by the time your team is even seriously engaged), you will have disabled that feature. In pretty much every enterprise-grade ORM I've ever seen, schema modification is disabled by default, and must be explicitly turned on. In most Java shops where I've ever worked... unless it's a quick prototype, the database schema will be developed before you start coding anyway. Also, in a typical enterprise scenario, the username with which you configure the ORM lacks admin-level privileges to alter the database.

Most of the criticisms about ORM's come from people who have never used them, beyond maybe working through a Rails chat-room tutorial once upon a time. It really has nothing to do with "abstracting away the database".

As the name indicates, Object-Relational Mapping is merely about reducing the boilerplate required to map a relational schema to programming language objects. If you do that mapping by hand, then you have to make decisions when a table/object has relationships. Picture a CUSTOMER table, which has a foreign key relationship to an ADDRESS table. When your application loads a "Customer" object:

[1] You could "eager fetch", meaning that you go ahead and retrieve all of the ADDRESS rows related to that CUSTOMER, and attach the Address objects to the Customer object. Eager fetching is wasteful and leads to poor performance, because you're hammering your database for values that you often don't ever use.

[2] You could "lazy load"... meaning that your Customer object has an "addresses" field, but you wait until some code tries to use that field before you actually query the ADDRESS table to populate it. This is much better design, but complicates things. The lazy load logic has to go somewhere. You either have to ensure that every piece of code using that object is aware of the lazy load pattern, or you have to stuff database logic into the "getter" method for each lazy-loaded field.

ORM's give you highly-performant lazy loading, without the buggy boilerplate suggested by #2 above. Moreover, enterprise-class ORM's typically handle caching for you, to avoid hitting the database unnecessarily. Monitoring the state of objects to notice when they've gone stale due to changes on the database side, etc.

Lastly, for complex queries, most ORM's have a query language (e.g. JQL, HQL, etc) that is nothing more than a VERY THIN wrapper around SQL. It merely smooths out differences between various vendor dialects. You're not abstracted away from the database, you still very much need to understand SQL and the underlying structure of your data.
These are all scams. No amount of VC money can solve this problem because it's not a technology problem it's a legal and political problem centered around the legal definition of 'money laundering'. See e-gold, liberty reserve, etc
TDD isn't dead just because DHH can't do it
Even funnier is that they mention "New Jersey legislators" were at the opening; New Jersey being the most recent state to ban the sale of Teslas. Granted the aforementioned probably weren't on the side of Chris Crisco, but still.
It looks like all three regions have been fully traced and validated? This is the first time I've seen this, but it looks like there's nothing to do there, to me.
Despite the rather juvenile headline, I found this pretty interesting. Makes a lot of sense for someone that does a lot of beer tasting and wants to stay coherent.
Startup master resource list
Occam's razor answer: Because the vast majority of Silicon Valley engineers are happy enough with their working conditions, with their ability to find new work if their current gig goes belly up and confident that if a major conflict occurs, they can find the help they need (eg. a lawyer) in the open market.
Blacklists and shared salary databases. If you move from one big tech company to another, your new employer typically knows exactly what you make, because that data is often shared. Some HR departments will also (although it's never put in writing, for obvious reasons) assist future employers in finding back-channel references.

This is a very old game, and the original reason for employers to share all that data was to blacklist "troublemakers" who might unionize the workforce. Now, it's more often used to verify compensation (lest people lie and big themselves up) and enforce no-poach pacts, but it's every bit as unethical.
There are good reasons why work has stopped on the WebSQL specification — everybody was using SQLite, and the specification can't be tied so closely to a single implementation of SQL. The specification even has the line "User agents must implement the SQL dialect supported by Sqlite 3.6.19"[1].

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/#web-sql

Edit: here is Mozilla's rationale for not supporting WebSQL: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...
I don't know why this is being voted down i wasn't being sarcastic or anything.

I like her way of thinking and would probably get along with her if I were to meet her.
Ask HN: Would you use GitHub for Terms and Conditions tracking?
We (longaccess.com) are preparing for an update to our Terms and Conditions. We are looking for ways to make this and future updates more transparent to users, and help them track the changes.

One of the ideas on the table is to use GitHub: we could publish the terms as text files, tag major changes, let users see the diffs, etc.

What are the cons and pros of such an approach? Is anyone doing it already?

If you think it's a good idea, do you have any technical suggestions, related to tagging, commits, etc. (For example, would you tag a small change to fix typos?)
Mildly interesting, but I wish that a series of tiny experiments (70 people here, 80 people there) were not strung together to make authoritative sounding arguments. Idiots like me are going to read this and believe it - it sounds credible after all and it fits my biases - whenthe truth might be a lot more murky.
Mozilla is a political organisation relying on public support. It needs a leader that doesn't have public political views that are strongly opposed by those whose support it needs.

This guy is head of an ads company, if the customers refuse to do business with it the board will sack him or they will go bust.

If this guy is named new Mozilla CEO I think that you might see a stronger reaction than that to Brendan Eich.

Edit: For the record I wouldn't want to do business with this man or his company but the Mozilla comparison is completely irrelevant.
PiBrick.
The people in your Circles have no idea which Circle they're in.

And you have no way of knowing which of your post topics they're interested in.

Google failed to grasp the distinction between author and content.

This was pointed out by many, many people very early on (myself included), and remained one of the huge failings of the services from day one. Certainly one of my own frustrations.

"Pages" and "Communities" were bolted on later to try to address this, but were both poorly designed and communicated (I still can't tell you what "Pages" are supposed to be). UI/UX on many of these features was also poor.
your history of compulsive megaposting across google's internal message boards, your university's message boards, autoadmit, hackernews and several other sites indicates low mental stability and a paranoid mindset. it's not hard to believe that you really are a low productivity troublesome employee, and that this explain your lack of career success.
Flood Beacon warns of danger in real time
Probably around 1-2 man-hours directly. The first bit was myself and my coworker running around trying to figure out what this was and how big of a deal after seeing the post on HN. I manually patched a few non-essential systems to make sure the patches took without a huge dependency tree update, then my coworker rolled it out automatically to all the systems.

We spent some follow up time checking Amazon's site to make sure our ELBs were updated (because it wasn't by the time we patched) and sending out the post-mortem to the team. Our certs were already going to expire, so we renewed them and updated them again via automation.
Not just Iliad's Free - I know first hand that others admit internally that they are doing it too... But they choose to let Free be publicly vocal about it while they are just as violent behind closed doors.