skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I built a Django site with hundreds of thousands of users... Pownce. At Pownce, we started with the basic ORM and dropped down to pure SQL queries for certain often-used or slow queries.

Meh. Problem solved.
They've updated Halifax, but not Winnipeg? :(
that thing looks like it would disable you with major burn injuries with a 50ms pulse.
Forgive me, but do you work somewhere where you have access to what's coming down the Android pipeline? You're in for an unpleasant surprise.

Most of the devices I've seen are great by themselves. If I played with one in a store I'd want it. But as a group, when they're what my company has to target for distribution, things could get really ugly.
I fail to see how this makes sense as a Facebook acquisition. There are plenty of location-based social networks out there with many times the users and, I'm absolutely sure, available on more devices than this is.

It looks like more of a Facebook application than an integral part of Facebook.
Full quote: "I think it’s important to reset the culture from time to time. And I think several years ago we did that. Clearly, people had extrapolated from our past practices what the vision might be. And having actually been there, and knowing the rationale…we decided to, for example, we significantly cut down all the snacks that had been available."

It sounds like he's talking about a change that's already been in place for years.
As long as the perks are done well :)

eg "Wear a Hawaiian shirt to work day" != perk
Except you're falling right into that worldview.

You seem to be arguing for databases which exist and are structured independently of any applications which happen to access them. Personally, I think this makes about as much sense as arguing for, say electrons to have well-defined properties independently of anyone trying to measure them, which is the same as saying that there is no such thing.

You also seem to have trouble accepting that there may be lots of situations where there is exactly one application, and if that application goes away, then so does the company (or the department, or the project). In those cases, I don't see much value in trying to make the database be independent of the application; the database exists to serve that application, and if they happen to be tightly coupled to each other, so be it: sometimes that's how you get something to work.
His life is on the line to the extent that he'll have to work a couple more high-paying computer jobs if he fails to get funding this time around. It's not exactly Russian roulette with three bullets in the cylinder.

I found the histrionic tone and especially the title of the article to be out of all proportion with the content. I don't think my description was in any way unfair. The article does a sufficiently good job of trivializing itself.
Business impact of high performance
MillenniumIT already has a high performance trading platform in use by other stock exchanges
Nice overview: clear & concise. Thanks.
HTML JavaScript, front/ back-end, desktop/ web app... well defined technology for commercial applications.

Internet / web application platform is not likely to go away.

Lightly developed on NeXT Obj-C, spring controls ~20 years ago. Glad seeing good NS ideas being adapted and extended.
Argentina is (and has been) doing better than Brazil by pretty much any indicator of education, but Brazil has obviously done much better in terms of economic development.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ar-argentina/edu-educati...
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/br-brazil/edu-education

Argentina's education was world-class for a significant part of the 20th century and is still pretty good. Unfortunately the article didn't provide any evidence or citations to back up its hypothesis.

"Uneducated people are the ones that elect the most corrupt/incompetent politicians and are the ones that never understand discussions about policies."

For starters, Argentina had many governments that were not elected by the people. Second, can you prove that educated people always make the choice that's best for the country? Third, there are abundant counterexamples of dictatorial countries that did great in terms of their economics and industrial development.

Like other people said, Argentina's problem is not education but the lack of coherent policies over the decades.
Falling Forward- three failures on the road to profitability
You don't think that military bases and big federal contracts aren't just another form of welfare subsidized by blue states like California?
The perks were meant to keep people in, to keep them working. I think it's a good thing that they're cutting this crap out.

That said, having worked as an intern at a place where they decided to get rid of free soda makes me positive that I won't do that again, though. IMHO, it's a "screw you" to developers.
Article's rather disingenuous. Google's perks list is still Extensive - trimming services out of fiscal concern isn't the same thing as switching to a minimalistic "be glad we give you anything at all" approach.

And how much of it's just PR from Schmidt to avoid looking like they're out of touch with the current economic situation?
What a stupid post of someone who obviously doesn't know a bit of android app development.
The UI widgets are done through XML (not unlike you do HTML for the browser). And guess what: Browsers can display the same webpage on totally different resolutions and be navigated by keyboard, mouse or whatever you want.

It's quite the same for Android. You do the layout in XML, Android scales it and puts it how it fits. This works pretty well.

Second: In general every widget, button, whatever can be access by touch or buttons. There is even an android phone without a touchscreen.
This list goes on and on.

One part of why android is a great platform is that it is designed from scratch to be a _modern_ mobile operating system and the developers took care of a lot of cases. Unlike some other operating systems, it's new and especially designed for modern hardware (now, look at windows, symbian, and i am wondering how mac osx would perform on a variety of devices...)

Another example.
As a developer you want to have the geographical position of the phone: Easiest way to do is ask for it, regardless of it coming from GPS, WLAN or GSM cell info. But you can also put criteria in the exact same function call if you want exact positioning (say, GPS but von WLAN). Of course, if there is no geo information available the call will tell you this and you have to take care of it. But you'll have to do that anyway, because GPS/WLAN/cell info is not available everytime on a capable device.
This goes on and on in the whole framework.

Last but not least:
Afaik, neither iphone apps nor windows mobile nor symbian apps will run on a different CPU architecture. Android apps use a VM and can be just run on every architecture the VM runs for. Switch from ARM to x86? No problem, take the same app (not two versions compiled for two different architecures) and they will run just fine.

It's quite shocking that someone writes such a post. It doesn't look like he has even read 1 page of information about android, yet he spreads bullsh.
A shame this is posted on YC, too.
The risk of instituting a new perk isn't the cost over the first N months -- it's the impact on morale, PR, etc. if you ever decide to take it away. Restaurants have "special pricing promotions" to set the expectation that the "lower price" perk won't be around forever (and to motivate people by through the creation of temporal scarcity). During the perk period, the restaurant gets more people in the door by offering a better deal. Google's perk cycle is opposite that of a restaurant. During good times, they have to make working there really attractive. But, right now, they don't have to give away so much, so they can scale back. The problem is that the expectation was explicitly set high (think about the IPO owner's manual).
If you think that, then you think wrong. I am fully aware that there are plenty of alternatives to that model. I wouldn't choose to use them in Perl, but they exist.

Which is why what I said earlier in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866558 (back when I thought that by "lightweight thread" you meant something like a thread in the JVM) boils down to, "Here is the standard way to do it in Perl. If you want to take this other type of approach using a similar class of scripting language, I would recommend one of these alternate implementations of Ruby or Python."

Thanks for the tip on getting around the lack of a reply button.
"I just alternate-click and choose Open With Other Application" he said in his best Marie Antoinette voice...

Although I would answer that I would normally ruffle my feathers when a software company chooses for me what my actions mean, in reality I have always just lived with the behavior. Doesn't that come with the territory? I didn't write it myself, so I learn the rules of the road according to this system...

In Windows, I learned to alternate click most of the time so that I could choose the desired behavior instead of trying to remember Microsoft's rules (i.e. drag to same drive letter=move, drag to different=copy).

I am thankful Ubuntu offers at least one of the same alternate click choices.

Edit: According to the above, then, it seems I would be "taught" by Snow Leopard to open the app first, then choose what resource to work on with that app. Same work-around I use in Windows and Ubuntu.
For Unix systems-level/network programming, I'd also add to the list:

1. UNIX Network Programming: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI; Volume 1 (W. Richard Stevens) - the books is considered the bible of the BSD networking APIs, and if you're interested in writing network software at any scale, in any language, you should start with this book -- everything else builds from here.

2. Write Great Code: Volume 1: Understanding the Machine (Randall Hyde) - At the end of the day you're writing code that will execute on a machine. Understanding how the machine works will help you understand your code.

3. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil) - If you've ever wondered how copy-on-write pages work (some of the magic behind the fork(2) model), or how your processes get scheduled, this is a good place to start -- even if you aren't using a BSD, the tenants hold.
I feel like I'm missing something about laser weaponry - couldn't you just paint your vehicles and such chrome?
"It's not exactly Russian roulette with three bullets in the cylinder."

Nor did he ever claim it to be... I think you're reading far more into that post than was ever implied. It's clear that he has a large amount of personal money invested, and that this demo could be the make-or-break moment for his company - and a culmination of perhaps years of preparation and work. I think that qualifies as a big deal.

You're still trying to trivialize this man's experiences.
Just speaking rhetorically.. don't mean to generalize. I'm sure Bill Gates would have dropped out sooner (in high school, instead of college) if opportunity came knocking
sooner.. You're obviously an exception & probably dropped out for good reasons :)
The analogy is more like: you gave a delivery company the key to your house and agreed with them they could come take back whatever they delivered to you whenever they wanted to. And then when they did, you got ticked off because you didn't think they ever actually would, or something. And then they apologized, and you didn't take your key back.

Nobody's forcing anyone to buy a Kindle. The DRM and this ability they're retaining is one of the big reasons I don't have one yet (though I have to admit, I'm probably not going to hold out much longer).
http://apple.com

(Steve was medium-technical, back in the day, though IIRC he never designed any of Apple's hardware or wrote any of their software.)
How are these complaints really different from developing desktop software? Remember those little "system requirements" blurbs that use to be on the sides of software boxes when people actually went to stores to buy physical media with software on it? Developing for any platform is hard and having to deal with missing or inadequate hardware has always been a stumbling block.

Desktop applications have shifted to the web. It's only a matter of time before mobile apps are also obsolete.
Sure, but people will still rediscover things independently, unless they choose to read everything ever written before actually doing anything.

I don't think that blog posts (or any form of writing) needs to be restricted to sharing new information only. Writing can serve as a mechanism for demonstrating what you have learned to potential clients/customers... it can serve as a means of solidifying concepts in your own mind... it can serve as a journal to help you remember things you were thinking in the past.
There are a few more parts due to come out in the next few days. The turnout and attention to the event was surprisingly high given the minimal amount of promotion that was done and the fact that this was the first month for it.
The impression I learned in my statistical mechanics course 20 years ago is Gaussian distribution works well in the case similar to Random Walk. If the system has restrictions on microscopic behavior, then Gaussian distribution will not apply. I think the benefit of talent may not be in normal distribution. The distribution of probability depends on the case and conditions that we pay attention to.

For example, a talented chef can only serve similar amount dishes in a night as less talented chefs. But the dishes they made taste much better than those and charge more.

At the same time, a talented plumber or a talented doctors can not serve more customers or patients than a less talented plumber or doctors.

It seems when the benefit of the talent scales, the distribution of their influence is Pareto distribution. So it seems developers, musician, artists, physicists fall into this category.
Wwwtwitter.com: Best Website Ever
How? Android 1.6 seems to provide enough features for abstracting away the differences between current and near-future devices.

Practically; I was an early adopter for the HTC Magic. Despite that, all the apps designed for the G1 worked fine. I could even use Emacs in ConnectBot (ssh client) with the soft keyboard. Now that's abstraction!
Ooh... advertising in educational settings is a razor-sharp double-edged sword. On one hand, schools are eternally hungry for more funding - but establishing a sufficiently impenetrable barrier between academia and advertising is a difficult task in the best of situations.

On the gripping hand, my own school's seen its budget axed by double digits multiple times in the last few years, classes shut down by the dozens, and literally thousands of students rejected based on scarcity of space alone. And to top it all off, I'm writing this from the sunny and desperately BROKE state of California.

I'd much rather see us wrestle with the ethical concerns of advertising than wrestle with the ethical concerns of closing down schools amidst high demand for education.
Did you check whether the downloads had been truncated? Downloads finishing prematurely is a frequent cause for a checksum mismatch.
Maintaining a hacked-up-piece-of-shit is a different problem from starting from scratch and Doing Things Right. In the situation that you're in, you probably made the right decision -- throw RAM at the problem so you never have to think about it again.

When writing an app from scratch, though, you have some control over the quality of the code, and can aim to serve more users with less hardware. System administration is hard, and the less systems to administer, the better.
The unhelpful answer is: it depends.

Obviously, you should design your application to reach as many people as you can with a core set of functionality.
For us, this means passing on possibilities that work only on a small set of devices. (Unless that small pool can generate enormous revenue)

Further, we add nice-to-have features to our core app that can be switched on and off at build or run-time by our QA team depending on the device.

Sorry I can't be more specific. If you're looking for more information feel free to email me. :-)
I dont see why it would be hard to change the screen resolution on the fly, kinda like what desktop games do. Other apps can use fluid layouts to fit multiple resolutions.

When it comes to other features of the phone, e.g. camera or accelerometer, like one of the posters said- you'll have to do progressive enhancement. Intelligent web developers already know how to do this. You feature test, then you enable a particular feature. Its not all that difficult.
I agree. My spare time is precious, and so are my spare brain cycles. If I have to spend a few hours at work researching and choosing a networking library, then fine. It's boring, but at least I'm getting paid. If I sit down in the evening to do some hopefully fun and/or stimulating hacking on a neat problem, and instead I end up researching and downloading libraries for functionality that most other languages have built-in, I chalk that up as an utterly wasted evening, and I blame the language.
Education (alone) is not sufficient. Look at Uruguay.

(Uruguay had one of the highest rates of literacy and school enrollment in the Latin Americas.)
Yes so what perks are being cut exactly? The article is vague about that.
Market economics? Is that what Pinochet's regime is being called now?
The nationalization had a major impact on outputs and in particular on agriculture exports. Go to Gapminder.org and check GDP during Peron's first presidency 1942-1955.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peron (not great but a good start.)
See: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/scaleout/scaleout_pitfalls.ht...
Pseudo-experts seem to be everywhere, and they're making it that much difficult to pick out people who actually know what they're talking about. So much noise...

You're absolutely correct that it seems like this person hasn't built a single android app.
It went into the top 50. We'll supply more stats once they are worthy and detailed enough for comment --GymFu Jof
Are Hookworms the Next Claritin?
Depending on how I parse your first sentence, it's either true or false.

And yes, in general, you can still leak memory in a GC'ed environment, when you don't think about what you need to keep in memory. Or if you use lazy evaluation (like in Haskell), thinks can go out of hand very easily.
I agree to a point. If they end up being reasonably successful in predicting this information, and they can convince enough people of this, then someone's willing to pay for it. The latter problem is probably the tougher one. If people believe it works, you could sell to, say, business travelers--or more obviously someone like Fedex.
Precisely. When you've got no cash, you at least have yourself!

Furthermore, this trial taught us a lot; the lessons and the feedback from the community have been priceless - well worth the time we put in.

--
GymFu Jof
Can't find the link. But I'm pretty sure I saw a survey somewhere that showed the opposite finding: people prefer a pay raise to perks.
Actually, now that you point me toward the real data...

It makes me even more skeptical of TDD.

I would expect most projects using just about any new methodology to look notably better in tests through the programmer's equivalent of the placebo effect: a new methodology imparts energy and optimism compared to just doing the same old.

This would lead me to deduce that once the "shine" wears off TDD, it would actually give no improvement in quality and result in considerably longer development time...
Funny..

Btw, I think wwwycombinator.com [http://wwwycombinator.com] is still available ;)
I understand your concerns here. Fortunately, the features users receive are permanent (for a given install) and we allow free-form responses (some guy actually wrote "Tweeting for upgrades sucks" in order to get his upgrade - and we're totally cool with that).

Mostly importantly, it's been a really interesting experience in metrics, marketing, user feedback etc. Not an especially profitable one, but valuable in our understanding of how this sort of thing can work.

--
GymFu Jof
It's Fake Steve Jobs. I imagine it's a little tongue-in-cheek...
Really Understanding the MapReduce Model
Fluid layouts are a reasonable compromise, but they mean a layout that's slightly "off" in many cases. Look at how GTK+ scales on different mobile devices, for instance.

It works, but it means giving up a lot of control, and the results tend to show it.
Eliminating the call stack to save RAM
> The analogy is more like: you gave a delivery company the key to your house ....

Yes, that's closer. But closer yet would be that we're developing a new kind of housing, which cannot be bought without signing a contract that says the selling company gets a copy of your key. The problem is when this kind of thing gets on the accepted list of "standard business practices", and then people stop noticing that it's a bad idea.

> And then they apologized, and you didn't take your key back.

True, but keep in mind that, to do that, I would have to return the house.

I agree that Amazon has not broken their word on anything. They do not seem to have broken any laws. What they can and cannot do is part of the deal.

However, it is a bad deal. I am not treating Amazon like a company that is not doing what they said they'll do. Rather I am treating them like a company that sells a seriously inferior product. Because the contract is part of that product, and the contract is not good.
Can I meet your friends? My friends and family couldn't loan me $1000.
It would have been a good argument, until you try to use the capture current photo image on the iphone and then realize it wont work on the ipod touch. Or the compass features (for augmented reality) and find out you are out of luck on older iphones.
> ... never assume anything ...

Maybe you meant "Question your assumptions, often." You can't get anywhere constantly verifying things ahead of time. In the extreme case, imagine writing a test suite for printf just to be sure it works as advertised.

The way forward for a startup is to make only the right assumptions. Failing that, make as many assumptions as possible, but correct the failed ones in a reasonably short amount of time. Some minimal cost/benefit analysis on the assumption would also be good.
I'm just curious, can anyone suggest a good open source object DB which is also ACID?

Mnesia looks nice, but only for erlang...
It's too expensive to optimize for every device.

Agreed. The "solution" I suggest just allows you to avoid the lowest common denominator - it doesn't make it cheap, or even viable for all devices. But for the most popular devices it should be economical. I guess it depends on how fragmented things get - but I don't think a phone monoculture is any kind of solution, it just shifts the problem.
The free snacks, drinks, food are most definitely NOT gone. Have there been some cut-backs? Sure. So now the perks are merely incredible instead of ridiculous-verging-on-embarassingly-good.

So yeah, the micro-kitchens now have ~75 types of snacks instead of 100+ and we are now limited to 40-ish types of free drinks in the cooler instead of twice that. And now we drink filtered water instead of Smart-Water. Life is hard ;-)

Also there are still fresh-made sandwiches, sushi and salads delivered to the kitchen every day and I can still walk to one of the dozen-plus cafes and get three hot meals, prepared fresh each day by talented chefs.

Oh - the article neglected to mention the fact that Patrick's cost-cutting measured resulted in the annual bonus being paid out at over 100% this year, instead of the much lower amount that we were on target for before he showed up. So yeah - I would say a lot of people would consider Patrick to be a bit of a hero.
Twitter Down?
Is twitter down?