skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, no, not at all. If you are an "enterprise" then you are paying $$$ for the "enterprise" version of MySQL. If you aren't, then you'd never buy Oracle anyway, you don't need it. At the end of the day MySQL is pretty irrelevant to Oracle's plans for Sun.
That might be as simple as having super-low level operations that they hand write in assembly for each supported CPU, and all other layers staying the same.
Yes, it matters.

An entrepreneur friend of mine sold his first company during the dot com years and made a mountain of cash in the deal. He then went on a spending spree (trying to build new, ultimately unsuccessful companies) that very nearly bankrupted him.

With his savings dwindling and the looming prospect of having to go back to work for someone else, he locked himself in the basement (so to speak) and, in a last-ditch effort, built a profitable company in a few months time. AND, here's the part that gets me, he made this product successful, nearly single-handedly in a market that was already crowded with competitors.

He tells me now that its harder for him to have success in business (5 failed in the last 2 years), primarily because there is no real sense of urgency to drive him to succeed anymore, what with the checks still rolling in. This is despite the fact that he is amazingly talented, both in software development and in business development.

Since meeting him and learning his story, I have been looking for ways to make myself as determined/desperate as he was when he built his company.
I just gave it a try and was pleasantly surprise. I am still not sure why. It seems fast and the UI is very simple.
Facebook releases Tornado (Python web server that powers FriendFeed)
Source: http://github.com/facebook/tornado/tree/master

Documentation: http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation
Child protection programs mine your kid's IMs
I'm not so sure that kids have problems with learning to use any technology, if they can get some use or fun out of it, so the whole "will this teach kids how to use computers" position is kind of irrelevant anyway. Chances are they'll be more proficient with whatever they are exposed to than adults would be.
An FYI, if you guys care about more passive attacks that let you deduce the source of NAT'ed packets and other tricks, check out "Silence on the Wire" by Zaelwski. Awesome read.
Play foursquare
Reasons why foursquare the application is clever and innovative:

- potentially rich information about mostly locations, venues and events, (memories?) gathered through the needs and inclinations of 20 something year olds and gathered under the pretense of a time loved game

2 questions to chew on:
- playing games get old.
- api to data??? :D
All of his predictions might be right. However, the times until they happen are going to vary greatly. The first two might really arrive tomorrow. But the third?

> Everything will be 3D, virtual reality, ....

Having done research in VR, I can tell you that there are some very hard problems relating to focusing (VR is annoying to use), touch feedback (VR is not believable), and UI design that are still very much unsolved after 20 years of work on them. It will be a long time, I assure you.
Brilliant comment:

"The Southampton Planning Board has taught me more about Buddhism by accident than the Dalai Lama did on purpose."
Besides saying "fuck" over and over again, was the whole point of that post to complain about licensing? If you don't want to deal with licensing issues don't use any proprietary technology. Release your work online in OGG format.

These types of whiny posts don't contribute much of anything. There's no real solution proposed. Other than "I want to use proprietary technology but I don't want to pay the fees".
It is obvious what this means. Oracle up to 10g accessed NFS filesystems via the OS. They were mounted just as normal filesystems would be. Oracle 11g connects directly to the NFS server, completely bypassing the OS filesystem layer.
Interesting use of Mechanical Turk for cheap split testing
China’s love-hate relationship with the dollar
The first comment on the page by Krischan is right on:

Space DOES really look like that. If you have the right set of eyes. Hubble and its team just prove this with every picture.

So it does not look like it would look to you naked eye? Nice thing that human eyes are not the standard. Put in some false colours to offset their failure.
What interface doesn't have text boxes, scroll bars, etc…?

Let me ask you this: Other than "to be clever" what's the point of creating an alternative interface in a device that's supposed to be a teaching machine? When we teach people to drive don't we use real cars? Would it make sense to use a car that had the brakes on the steering column but was the same as normal cars in every other way?

Teaching isn't about inventing new things it's about finding a way to convey old things to people who don't understand them.

P.S. The ribbon does in fact suck, you'll get no argument from me there.
A pretty good showing from Java on this, even though Java's I/O system is pretty annoying. I don't think the implementation he shows there is too odious if you're used to Javaland pain.
Polaris Opens Dog Patch Labs in Cambridge
Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source
Unfortunately, the proposals in this blog entry make me very nervous. I'm all for making it easier to allow talented people entry into the US, but I hate the idea of empowering investors to grant green cards. I think Paul Graham is an inspired investor and a smart guy, but should he be allowed to decide who comes into the country and who doesn't? Should a panel of credible lawyers, VC's, and entrepreneurs be allowed to do this?

I think that an employer should be able to offer a job, not US residency. I think an investor should be able to offer money (and advice, guidance, support). But not a green card, no way.

Think of the implications here. A young investor really doesn't need the money. He's ramen profitable. But he needs the investor's permission to be a startup in the us! Well, that's one way for VC's to get the upper hand in an era when their money doesn't matter as much.

Look, I know hacker news folks tend toward the libertarian side and are generally skeptical of government. But I want the people who decide to award green cards to report to the voting public, not to Larry Ellison. I admire PG, but he doesn't answer to me as a member of the voting public, and he shouldn't. Once VCs gain control over the immigration system, they assume a government role, but we can't exactly vote them out of office if we don't like their decisions. And even if you have faith that PG will be a good guy, do you feel that way about "credible VCs and lawyers?"

Winston Churchill said "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Personally, I'm not all that interested in trying out a regime of VCs, no matter how credible a panel has found them to be.

As for the "Green cards to all CS majors" idea, I think a very narrow rule targeting CS would discourage US students from this field, and encourage them instead to pursue more protected degree paths like law. I'm worried about any policy that would drive the already low interest in CS among US students even lower. I also think a University should be in the business of granting degrees, not US residency.
For the record you should probably spell out what you're talking about when you say Xerox Parc. A lot of people were born post-Apple II so unless they study history they probably aren't going to know what you're talking about
An instance of the chat demo is running here: http://chan.friendfeed.com:8888/

Website: http://www.tornadoweb.org/

Source: http://github.com/facebook/tornado/tree/master
I think they raise awareness at least. By convincing more people not to use the product, you leave a larger gap for a better product to come along and fill the void. What else can a consumer or producer do, if not complain?
I wonder if USB sticks will be cheaper than Blu-Ray disks in the long run? (And offer more capacity, too).
Good point, except the the irony is the reverse of that.

I think that many observers would say that the Wikipedia system works quite well considering they are one of the most widely used sites on the Internet. Since this article is published on Wikipedia, it would seem an ironic disproof of the article's contents that the publishing platform uses the very strategy that is claimed to be an anti-pattern.

I would go a step further and suggest that the technique listed uses the relational database such so that in the end it is more like a columnar database, although I have to think about that further before I feel more sure.
I'm not sure why vulgar language is becoming so acceptable and commonly used . Am I just old school (even though I'm 30) when I find myself turned away from people who talk in such a manner or do others feel similar to me?
I'm confused about the "driving is subsidized part".

Last time I checked nobody helped me pay for my car, my registration or my gas taxes. Which do help pay for public transit...

Am I missing something?
Envision skipping a stone:

Your throw is the product launch. The quality of your stone, the angle of your throw, etc will affect how the water reacts. And each skip is the point of reaching a new audience.

If your product is great, it will skip a lot further than other stones...
Chat demo running live: http://chan.friendfeed.com:8888/

Bret's blog post: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-web-server
I put this in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C*-algebra

The results are better than I would've guessed, but not really so great (this article is pretty degenerate I think, versus more "human-interest" type stories).

One thing I'm curious out: the list of topics is here:

People (7.88)
Algebra (4.47)
Research Groups (3.41)
Software (2.42)
Math (2.03)
Functional Analysis (1.53)
Journals (1.01)
Science (0.71)
Publications (0.64)
Logic and Foundations (0.6)

...does looking at the content give you any sense for why "People" comes in first?
I would feel uncomfortable giving recognizable VC firms a competitive advantage in this way. If KP gets to select who gets into the US, chances are they will have a lead on getting to invest in those people.

That said, I also don't like the idea of having a non-government board decide.
A big difficulty with the ERP space is that it's just too big. A lonely startup might be able to build a better product, but the hard part is getting a company to stake their future on it[1]. Companies shopping for ERPs value stability of the company as much as quality of the product. The last thing a company wants is to install an ERP from a company that may go out of business in 5-10yrs.

It was said in the article, but I will reiterate: enterprise software companies are mostly made up of salesmen-not software engineers. The majority of their profit margin is from after-sale products such as warranties and consulting. These products have very little to do with the quality of the software product itself. In fact, it might even pay for the software to be buggy since a) more bugs = more consulting = more renewed warranties b) multi-year software contracts are not unheard of and c) ERP switches are extremely costly so companies stick with them for years, if not decades.

As a programmer, I wish that a quality ERP product could stand on its own, but sales and (company) size are key if you want to compete with SAP/ORACLE/MS. At the very least companies will ask for previous customer references, run a D&B on your company, and ask for a proof of concept install. This is a space so ripe with opportunity it hurts but for a small startup to succeed, it will need to pick off pieces of the giants before competing with the entire product.

[1] Yes, ERP software and implementation is that big of a deal. There are old stories floating around of botched ERP implementations costing companies millions of dollars and, eventually, sinking them due to the loss of business (even after reverting to pen/paper accounting).
While you are at it, please, make it GPLv2+ so it can be linked with the rest of the Linux kernel ;-)
Infrastructure 2.0 is about Orchestration
I think the source of the author's confusion is the mixed bag that comes along with desperation. On one hand desperation can incentivise you to act and spur you to try things you probably wouldn't have, but which may turn out brilliantly. On the other hand I think it can pressure you to the point of making unwise decisions or possibly folding altogether. I don't think it's desperation which helps as much as it is taking risks or doing something to change your situation, but one doesn't need to be desperate for that. As far as the success of Richard Branson's ventures it reminds me of Donald Trump saying he always found it easier to raise money for larger more ambitious projects than smaller ones, so there may again be some correlation favoring higher risk taking - at least if you have nothing really to lose. I would never advise over extending or self-inflicted monetary desperation.
Live From Motorola’s Android Announcement
On the other hand, perhaps Wikipedia proves the point, and perhaps it could be argued that something other than a SQL DBMS would be more appropriate. I think the more rabid of the noSQLites would go that way.

Personally I prefer to be more descriptive than prescriptive and judge them on their success under extreme duress.
They're developing part of the kernel, which will be included in future RHEL releases. They also have people working on Spacewalk and Xen too IIRC.
This is really great news for the Sprint data plan users. I have the unlimited everything for $99, but I mostly call other mobile lines. With this change I can drop my plan down to the $69 bracket and still be fine on minutes. The free minutes are added to your plan at the start of the billing cycle if you have one of the unlimited data plans.

With an increase in the use of Skype and Google voice which circumvents the minute counts anyway, Sprint made a good choice to push through with this.
Oracle would be crazy to give up MySQL. Controlling it, they can ensure it'll never compete with their high-end products, while taking the air out of the entry db market.
"I saw someone in the distance. He was riding a horse."

Wrong?
Ok, complaining is one solution. Many times it's the best option for consumers. However producers like this guy should work with the owners of the technology and negotiate a better deal.

Get support from other independent producers, get a following, get some press, and eventually get your way.

Instead he chooses to just complain. That's just lazy.
I think MySQL users either regard themselves as MySQL users or MySQL customers, but not 'Sun customers' per se.
Agreed on the CS majors thing.. sounds completely arbitrary that somehow CS majors are more valuable than other majors.
Wow, so you just posted their email to you on the web and then posted links to it? What are you, the pirate bay?

This was an opportunity for you to educate your client on the design process, and you not only failed, you embarrassed yourself trying to humiliate them.

Feel free to send me the client's deets and I'll walk them through the gig.
I'm new school (if 19 isn't too old to call myself that), and swearing's becoming such a huge trend because of how natural it feels. It's part of the huge trend towards the unprofessional.

That's a good thing. While it's got some irritating side effects, the overall idea is getting rid of bullshit attitudes towards one another. Swearing is a part of language. There's nothing wrong with its being used.
Stratified JavaScript and Multitasking
Precisely. We stopped supporting math subject completely in our e-learning product because we couldn't handle MathML. Its too cumbersome, takes way too many resources, and ugly.
Why not?

Well, if first and rest are unsuitable for parallelism as Steele says, a programming edifice built on top of better implementations of those might be beside the point.

My understanding of the slides is that we don't need better language runtimes to exploit parallelism for us while we continue to write the same kind of code as before; what we need is a new set of primitives (modeled by conc lists in this talk) that would allow us to compose programs differently, with more parallelism. And that far from being insulated from this, programmers will have to be thinking about it throughout.

It's possible that Clojure's implementation is already such that these primitives, and a programming style built on them, are feasible today. If so, that's awesome. But this is a different thing than providing better implementations of cons-based abstractions.

Edit: another thing - the transformation from cons to conc is nontrivial in the Lisp context because Lisp's code=data is so tied to cons. It might be an interesting to think about what programs would look like if you applied code=data rigorously in a conc model. Would a language whose expressions are represented as concs look or feel significantly different than a cons-based one?
As someone who wasn't especially successful at business in an eight-year run, I'd say that desperation mostly hurt me. Worry destroys my ability to work, so unless I can convince myself that my life isn't tanking, it's really hard to actually get anything done. Having a stable job has done wonders for my productivity. :)
great combination of wget parameters!
I'm one of those types. It's like a mini vacation and a great way to build up airline miles for personal trips.
Write a million 1 megabyte files on a hard disk formatted with FAT32.

Now, on the same computer, reformat the hard using ext4 and write the same files.

See the difference?
Erm... I seriously doubt the T1 is optimized for MySQL. Where did you get this?
I've done a lot of these ERP implementations and the first thing the project heads say is: we aren't going to change the software, we are going to change our business processes.

The company has just paid a lot of money for the software, which was chosen through an evaluation process where the vendors showed that they could support the existing business processes, which made up the RFP. They chose one vendor and tied them up in a contract to say that the software would meet the RFP.

Then the project starts, and the company notices that the software doesn't really meet the RFP, so they get the vendor/consultancy to customize it. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting their contract's worth, you know. The earlier claims of not changing the software get thrown out the window. Plus you have the business people who have been seconded to the project, they don't want to tell their colleagues they are delivering a clunkier system than the old one so they fight for the customizations. Fair enough.

IMO, any software that is absolutely critical to your company's special way of doing business (i.e. your competitive advantage) you shouldn't customize an ERP product to do it - you should build it yourself. Anything that is generic and not a point of difference between you and your competitors, you should keep as standard as possible. The bit where they join up, make sure you abstract it properly.

As soon as you create barriers for upgrading your ERP, you lose the value of the maintenance (which is the ERP vendor's developers working hard to add new platform and application features, instead of your guys).
I can't tell if you're being facetious in your last line, but I used to work at a place requiring, in their own words, "Adobe must be installed on every computer" long before they changed the Acrobat name.
"But how to keep up?"

Hype Machine! (http://hypem.com)
Yes,the false positive rate is a not the least and we are working on decreasing it!
I'm a potential user of such a visa.

As it stands, right now, I'm likely to start a company outside the US. I'll create jobs overseas instead of here just because of the hassles I've had with US immigration. I find the situation to be rather illogical.

I'm currently on a H1B and in the greencard queue. Anti-H1B people love to rave about my taking jobs from US citizens. I get to hear it in person from time to time because, since I'm white and speak English with an indeterminate American style accent, people presume I don't object to them bitching about the Indians and Chinese H1B holders while I wait at the coffee stand.

I'd rather start my own company. I've had a startup before in Europe so I know what I'm getting into. Then someone else could take my current job. I'm financially secure (close to $1m cash in the bank in addition to my long-term investments) but:

- I want to solve my immigration status and not resort to non-immigrant temporary visas like E-2

- I'm not happy to just hand $500k to $1m over to an investment of unknown risk to get an EB-5

- There is enough to do while starting up without getting bogged down in convincing some non-expert in the merits of a business plan and a schedule of hiring etc.

- My H1B NIW just got a request for evidence despite my letters of recommendation from "household names" in my particular industry (sorry to be deliberately vague).

- I have a government in another country willing to throw money at me to startup there

Now I could startup abroad and transfer back and jump thru various hoops that way. But, frankly, I have a young family and want to build a permanent base for myself. I rather like Northern California for that but there are many other nice places in the world as well.

shrug it leaves me confused as to why the US is so hostile to my intention to build a home here and create jobs.
I'm more curious to know what's going on with the mainframe side of the industry. Sun recently acquired StorageTek - I wonder if they plan to keep a lot that to compete with IBM in that regard, too.
Computer Programming with GNU Smalltalk
I don't see how that's clear at all. And which of those three do you work at, btw?
This is confusing the difference between concurrency and parallelism, the latter of which Clojure doesn't yet address.

If your program is divided into threads, having a language like Clojure that makes concurrency easy and lock-free is a wonderful thing, and of course you get some benefit from running on multiple cores, though I don't think that's entirely the point.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for a faster way to map a function across eight million lines in a flat file, using Clojure's map function won't magically make your program run faster (and pmap might not run at all -- you may run out of memory, since pmap isn't truly lazy).

The fact that a Clojure PersistentVector (not a PersistentList) is implemented with a 32-way tree (not 64-way) does not imply that Clojure has abandoned the car/cdr paradigm in favor of conc lists -- it still uses cons, in a more generic form, but still with the same first/rest concept. The trees allow vectors to be inexpensively persistent, so you can have actual practical immutable vectors.
Animated Custom 404 With jQuery and jQuery UI
How To Triple Your Twitter Followers Overnight: Call The President A Liar
apols for the repost - there was a bug that needed fixing!
I hear where you're coming from, and in all likelihood you're probably right - but I couldn't resist ;)

However, upvotes and insightful commentary are actions (in aggregate) that would encourage quality articles to rise above a so-so article driven (mostly) by celebrity
I'm in agreement with your assessment that the trend is towards unprofessionalism. I live in the US, and have been to Japan three times. My first time there I was totally shocked with the effort put into dress to look as clean and professional as possible. Top notch suits that were perfectly pressed, nice shoes, a nice brief case (very few backpacks), and a very polite attitude. I wish our trend was towards the Japanese attitude towards the way we present ourselves in public.

Off topic: it's so refreshing to come here (HN) and read a reply that isn't some kind of verbal attack towards me for the opinion I presented. I thank you for that, for stating your opinion with insights without attacking me.