skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arguably most of the nuclear tests were done to prevent war. Each side wanted to show the other they could match and one-up them in nuclear tech. Neither really wanted to ever actually use them to kill people.
Brain Research in the 21st Century
>Underdeveloped vs Tokyo, certainly.

Because Tokyo is the largest city in the world bar none: a phenomenon that would likely not have happened without high speed rail.

>Low unemployment in Asia is not hard.

Low unemployment is not an Asian phenomenon and high unemployment is not a Western phenomenon. Both are the results of economic policymaking.

>No, it would have resulted in unprofitable businesses going bankrupt

Unprofitable businesses were kept alive thanks to the Japanese banks doing extend and pretend. It had precisely nothing to do with stimulus.

A lack of stimulus would have meant GOOD businesses going bankrupt due to a lack of demand while the politically protected ones with their debts being extended-&-pretended STILL staying alive.

Stimulus isn't making the recession last forever. Japanese banks' insistence on extending and pretending is.

> But you are probably one the guys who think devaluating 40% of the Yen value is the best way to increase Japan's productivity.

No, but it would be a great way of bringing back Japanese industry from its current semi-dead state. Wanna know why Koreans and Chinese are eating their lunch in the electronics industry? This.

>Abenomics all the way !

Abenomics is business as usual. If you think there is a significant difference to what came before you are an idiot. The stimulus portion was small and the rest of it was just more QE (because that worked fucking great for the last 20 years!)

Nonetheless, the small stimulus was responsible for a dribble of Japanese growth over the last year or so.
Sounds like poor language skills.

If you've written three paragraphs, for something that needs two sentences, chances are you should spend another 5-10 minutes re-writing your email and say what you need to say, not just send a stream-of-conciousness document to burden your colleagues.

Still odd that someone that manage to be concise and to the point in asynchronous chat, should be verbose in email?
I agree. Using rich data structures that you can manipulate instantly is awesome. And usually your language will have superior query and manipulation abilities, without the mental gymnastics of adapting your algorithm to the underlying data store's query interface.

I'm looking for a good Node library that handles serializing /restoring my program state. Have you seen any of note? Seems like an easy task, but I'm hesitant to deploy anything substantial without much experience with long term operation.
That's going to make a trademark claim difficult, since your service hasn't really entered the stream of commerce yet.
SEEKING WORK - Bangalore, India, Remote

Computer vision / image processing / machine learning / algorithms.

More than 9yrs of experience working on software research and development. Co-founded a tech startup, ~2yrs as a full-time freelancer.

Computer vision topics I've worked on: background subtraction, binary segmentation, facial expression transfer using active appearance models, object recognition, restoration, projective geometry correction, object tracking, video stabilization, graphs cuts, face authentication, OCR pre-processing, gesture recognition, etc.

color: color quantization, color constancy (shadow removal), reduction to dominant color palette, illumination invariant color distance, color blending, color correction (gamut transform),

Learning topics: Classification: linear regression, LDA,
SVM.
Clustering: KMeans, hierarchical kmeans, nearest neighbour. Probabilitic analysis: naive bayes.
Recommender systems.
Performance optimization: Speed up of background subtraction algorithms by writing optimized C code and SSE intrinsics.

Please see my linkedin profile for more details: http://www.linkedin.com/in/link2hemangshah
email: hemang.j.shah@gmail.com, skype: hemang.j.shah

Proficient in C/C++/Java/OpenCV,
Others: Matlab, Android
Why I Think Cloud Is the Future (From a Corporate POV)
Hey Microsoft, where can I buy one of these octobrella?
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
From a technical perspective a standard web page could be saved in single HTML file that can be opened offline (with all JS/CSS inlined and images base64 encoded and inclined)--so it can be as easy as double-clicking on a file (just an .html file instead of .ppt).

The average user probably lacks this knowledge though and wouldn't know to or try to double-click on an html file but it is technically feasible.
I find it interesting how YC is trying to increase its classes sizes significantly and YC partners are traveling all around encouraging everyone to apply (which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in, unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year) in light of pg's point about gaming the system. Getting into an incubator, for many applicants, is effectively like "playing house" at starting a company or gaming the system, when really what those people should be focusing on is just building/growing their product, rather than figuring how to get into an incubator before they have a validated product. Especially given the predictors on a YC app that might increase an applicant's chance of getting in (prestigious school, work experience, etc.), seems like there are still lots of opportunities for "gaming the system" in YC.
I dont see how they can get in trouble for not providing their advertised speeds so long as the speed degradation only occurs outside of their direct network.
Lincoln assassination eyewitness (1956)
Not exactly hilarious. For sure.

But I viewed the parallels as interesting and thought others might be interested as well. In the future I'll be sure to make my comments dead pan serious without any humor.
This is almost always not the best approach. Database software has been written in order to make developing software as painless as possible. Transactions (even at the single write level), foreign keys, indices, constraints are all there to make sure that your database should as much as possible not be able to end up in a broken state.

Writing a database yourself is immediately reinventing the wheel.

In terms of the advantages you mention:

- Datastructures - this is a niche advantage. There are probably some constraints, but all of the datastructures that I've seen map nicely to a serial form - one that might not is probably bad smell (though that might just be because I haven't seen any decent examples).

- Avoiding the network - you can do this already with (say) sqlite, which is probably ideal for what you're describing.

- Serialization - bad luck - if you want to persist your data you must still serialize it.

- GC - with a modern runtime that can do generational garbage collection this is as good as free.

- Clean - usually at the expense of correctness. If you have enough data and time, you'll start seeing interesting bugs. I agree that writing raw SQL is frustrating, but there are usually libraries that do standard tasks whether that be configuration or ORM.

- Fast - you sound like you're at a data scale where the difference in speed doesn't matter - and even if you did have data on the order of hundreds of millions of rows, you'd likely only see a very small perf difference (assuming sane batching etc).

Writing your own database is probably fine if no existing database meets your needs (whether that be price, performance, storage capacity, etc) but this is rarely the case for all but the most demanding applications.
Hi spicyj,

I just graduated from DevBootcamp. Are internships available to non-university students? If so, what level of programming experience is required for an internship at KA?

Thanks in advance,
E.
Everyone keeps citing the netflix openconnect initiative. But did netflix also offer to pay the co-location fees to place their servers in the ISPs datacenters?

ISPs already allow businesses to co-locate servers, netflix could have done the same. But it'd have to at least pay colocation fees + bandwidth fees.
How exactly you have solved the problem of "durabity" given that any disk is orders of magnitude longer to access than RAM? The Mongo way - push buffers to be written to an OS kernel and forgot?)

Let's put it straight. Words should mean what they originally meant, not how sales or PR guys want them to be meant.

For us, a database is piece of software which enforces data consistency and is fail-safe. That's why we want it - to reliable store our data.

According the laws of physics, the throughput is bounded by the slowest operation (the same way a durability of a chain is bounded by a weakest cell) and in case of a database, this operation is an atomic update in a persistent, failsafe storage with consistency guarantee. That is what we call a transaction. This was the meaning since System R or the first version of Berkeley DB.

Transaction "in memory" is a nonsense for us, so are any memory-to-network-stack or memory-to-client-process "benchmarks".

As long as there is no proven (not advertised) consistency guarantee and fail safety guarantee such system should be called a Cache, not a Database.

Call your product Cache, and all the confusion would disappear. In other words, "in-memory"
is not a database, it contradicts with the meaning of the word, no mater how your sales people are trying to twist the language.

There is no "specialized databases". There are specialized caches. OK.
Grammar inspired software: naming things
The Model X is dual motor all wheel drive. So maybe it's being ported over to the Model S. Musk speaking about it below.

http://youtu.be/2cpe0stVtLA?t=3m25s
I would say that doing the other guy's benchmark is the most objective thing you can do. You should take it one step further and include other competitive products. In this case, it's pretty easy to beat the crap out of Oracle, it's an elephant. I would challenge the MemDB guys to run the same benchmark against VoltDB and report on that.

Also, let's get down to brass tacks - I don't see the actual queries that are being graphed in the MemDB post, and what is that graph actually measuring?

I think the LMDB team has done a really good job with this type of comparative benchmark. They took the LevelDB benches, then ran them against a lot of competitive products, both new and legacy, and gave a really good view of the entire field, in terms of performance on a number of dimensions:

http://symas.com/mdb/inmem/

http://symas.com/mdb/inmem/scaling.html
> I would hire an ethicist and an ombudsman.

Absolutely.

My smallish company even has an ombudsman on retainer, and we deal in physical goods. It exists for customer-company disputes and internal affairs issues. We've never used it, but it's totally ridiculous not to call up the local premier law firm and just get one on retainer. Very common service.
I'm quite serious.

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/21/cincinnati_archdiocese_to_ca...

The article quotes a vatican directive about stem cell that uses the phrase "cooperation in evil".

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/06/28/protesters-gathe...

The article mentions a 1994 incident in which a gunman murdered two people and injured five more in attacks at three different clinics that provided family planning services.
>>which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in, unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year

An ulterior motive behind Sam Altman's startup class? Incredible engagement already with 400+ University viewing groups*

*https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5xh1t0SOUlVmFkLKPk0...
Detection of a branched alkyl molecule in the interstellar medium
While reading this article, I remembered this: https://github.com/jlongster/js-csp, which explicitly relies on es6 generators. I wonder if anyone can help us out by comparing and contrasting this to the subject of the article (https://github.com/srikumarks/cspjs).
Who cares? We all know who holds the SSL keys
You know nothing about me except that I criticized your post for being misrepresentative. That's all. You have no idea what I do in my daily life to promote equality, what I do in my workplace to make it more welcoming for all, how important it is to me to "do the right thing." You have no clue, at all.

And yet you're comfortable saying that I'm "exactly the problem", that I'm "desperately" defending Hacker News, that I'm crummy to work with. You don't know me.

When I say that I feel victimized by you, you call me more names, say that I'm running my mouth, that I'm used to being coddled, that you can't possibly have more privilege than me. Sound familiar?

Please try to have a bit of perspective on your own behavior. There are much more effective, humane ways to win the hearts and minds of others and achieve your goals.
Building Robotics in Oakland, CA http://buildingrobotics.com/building-robotics/careers/

We are an interdisciplinary team of engineers, designers and building industry experts re-inventing building controls with advanced computing and thoughtful user experience.

Comfy, our flagship product, enables building occupants to control the temperature of their space with a simple user interface. Comfy uses machine learning to learn people's preferences. By adjusting building temperatures dynamically, it also saves energy.

Operations Engineer (3-5 years experience)

Buildings are critical pieces of infrastructure – availability, security and reliability are paramount. Our operations engineers design, implement, and manage our cloud-based, distributed control fabric for buildings. This could include everything from improving our automation tooling, implementing consistent monitoring and internal dashboards for key service metrics, and auditing security concerns to digging into building control systems to integrate our platform with a new vendor. The ideal candidate is comfortable with complicated architectures spanning multiple levels of abstraction and making improvements to make the overall system more robust, scalable, and transparent.

Skills: Knowledge of CI deployment workflows (travis, trial, fabric), monitoring (sentry), services (apache2, postgres, supervisord), Linux networking (openvpn, iptables), and EC2 deployment best practices. Experience managing distributed service-oriented infrastructure.

Frontend Engineer (3-5 years experience)

A delightful, intuitive user experience is core to our vision, reinventing the way we interact with the office buildings we all spend over half of our time in. Our frontend engineers develop delightful and informative user interfaces, exposing complex building mechanics simply and in real-time.

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Backend Engineer

Modern buildings are complex digitally controlled mechanical systems with thousands of sensors and actuators. Our backend engineers develop infrastructure for wide-scale data collection and actuation that can scale to millions of buildings.

Skills: Knowledge of Python, Twisted and c/c++. Experience developing distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
Peter is correct. Cageface is wrong. No one is influxing to Vietnam, especially after the internet there was cut for the second time in the past few months. There is currently no Visa that fits the needs of a digital nomad. The business visa is too complex as DMs aren't actually working for a Thai company. Which means a Tourist Visa is actually the best suited visa currently.

The solution would for Thailand to create an easy to obtain Tourist+ Visa which would cost more but would allow the tourist to also work on their online businesses while here, as long as it doesn't interfere with local Thai businesses, accept Thai baht, have Thai customers, or take away Thai jobs.

Digital Nomads would happily pay $300+ for a 1 year, multiple entry TR+ visa if it existed.
one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology—to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something that ought to exist.

I think this is one reason why geographic clusters of startups occur: You get a few people "living in the future" co-located and suddenly the "uncannily prescient" idea no longer just seem obvious to you, they seem obvious to everyone around you too, and everyone wants them now.

The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed -- William Gibson.
Everyday Statistics for Programmers: Significance
It's still very visible on the list of "active" (heavily discussed) threads.[1] Sometimes heavy discussion in certain patterns triggers the flamewar detection automated software, which causes threads (and subthreads under a particular story) to drop in page placement. Don't worry about it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/active
MemSQL is doing great work...However from a strategic point of view, I wonder how they plan to compete against 2 of the world's largest DB vendors (SAP and Oracle) at their core product. Oracle's flagship DB has more R&D, sales, marketing than a startup could ever muster even with the help of big name VC's. But I'm sure that's part of startup glory. "no one thought we could do it!" is how it always starts. I suppose they could be an acquisition target for HP or EMC or a company thats lagging in the data management world
What empirical evidence is there that intelligence is "75% maternal"?
The big countries had their way with peaceful nuclear technology. Now, the smaller/weak ones are denied their own nuclear research and tech. forced to buy tech from the rich or get sanctioned to oblivion.
Isn't this the kind of thing that diagnoses itself, in that someone super unhappy will seek the test out? Do they need a blood test to determine if they're seriously depressed or not?

Why would someone that isn't depressed ever get this test?
Nixie: a tiny wearable flying drone
Why? Apple is the leader; why should they bow down to the level of inferior competitors? Microsoft didn't refer to iphones and ipads out of the goodness of their hearts; but because these devices are the devices of choice for the creative crowd.
If my memory serves me correctly, that particular event sparked the creation of the Secret Service. The recent scandals involving the Secret Service makes this surprisingly relevant. Thanks!
Prevayler is always made the point that it is in-memory. Notably the front page says: It is an implementation of the Prevalent System design pattern, in which business objects are kept live in memory and transactions are journaled for system recovery

It's been around for quite a while. Nearly 15 years ago Ward Cunningham (yes, that Ward Cunningham) was interested in the system and wrote a benchmark for it - I was one of the people who contributed data[1].

I never thought it was a great idea then, but back in those days computers were usually RAM-starved. Now it might make a little more sense.

[1] http://c2.com/doc/SerializationThroughput/
Well written article.

I think PGs advice doesn't just apply to startups but to nearly everything in life. Learning (or as PG puts it, "Just Learn") is huge part of the equation if one wants to advance. You'll be surprise how this attitude is not very prevalent to the general population of adults.

Want to get earn more money? Just learn how.

Want that promotion? Just learn what you need to achieve.

Not an expert on a particular thing? Just learn from someone else.

In trouble and need help? Just learn where to find it.

Having said that, in my experience, I think another crucial step needs to tie in with learning is self-efficacy to make it worthwhile. Learning is one thing but if you don't have the belief to stick to it and act on it, learning will only get you so far.
I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned Project Orion[1] which involved using atomic bombs to propel a spacecraft.

Seems a little hare-brained to me, but they took it pretty seriously back then. Of course, it was all just theoretical, which might be the reason nobody brought it up in this discussion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...
specially when we are talking about moving to SF, one of the most expensive cities in the US. even 20% more salary won't cover the cost of living there.
I'm surprised you use fabric for the last mile instead of ansible. There's really no sequence of run() commands that can't be done better as a quick module.

Although I may have been more frustrated than most by paramiko's performance and stability.
> Knowing some programming language isn't it, its a mode of thinking and analysis.

You seem to be implying that we currently have tools that provide a suitably natural and frictionless medium for such thinking and analysis. But what if our current languages/tools are more like Roman numerals and there's still the computing version of Arabic numerals out there to be found?
Together We're Changing the World One Quarter at a Time
I can't seem to find the link again, but I think I read a Microsoft blog post somewhere saying that that name was already taken (by a Mr. Gates, circa 1985).
Venice,CA
Full Stack Developer (PHP, Clojure/Scala)

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I agree, I've seen it time and again, people taking multiple medicine for sleep disorder and nothing works. What works is taking a manual job or if you cannot take such a job, put yourself on treadmill and keep going till you fall off, I mean an hour or two. And see how you sleep after that.
I used Prevayler on a small project a long time ago; it was awesome. The webapp was just incredibly snappy. Thanks for the nostalgia. :-)
Cops Are Handing Out Spyware to Parents–With Zero Oversight
Regarding the first point, I recently came to this conclusion: "The reason listening is hard is that not-listening doesn't feel like not-listening, it just feels like the other person is wrong."

Keeping this in mind has been very helpful.
I was really hoping this article would be about how massive companies were built (billion dollar or otherwise) before the invention of the "startup."

Something along these lines: http://startupguide.com/world/the-history-of-entrepreneurshi... with less use of the word "entrepreneur" as PG expressed his distaste as such.
It seems like our officials just don't have a good grasp on technology...
They will be able to pull in customers who cannot afford to spend 3 million on hardware for a database but still need very high performance. There should be enough to build a business in that niche.

Those who can afford the high price tag will likely continue to buy from Oracle and the SAP in the short term. Over time, MemSQL can probably win some of these customers as they establish more credibility and a proven track record.