skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So up front: I know this question sounds like a classic flame, however I'm honest about it, and the similarity to flame means I have yet to see an answer that I am satisfied with, as the discussions degenerate quickly. Anyway:

What is non-relational data? I have been under the impression for a long time that datasets all have internal relationships, be they semantic or other, and that relational databases are systems to store and query data based on the relationships. Even a key value store defines an explicit relationship.

When I first learned about databases, the class was about Normal Forms and Relational algebra, with rdbms thrown in as an example. These 2 key concepts are methods of working with data in a subtle and nuanced way -- a way strongly based on set and/or category theory. SQL it always seemed to me to be a decent extension to this, a DSL specifically designed to work on sets vs individual pieces of data. In that I found it elegant. Now this doesn't mean SQL is perfect, I get that, in a lot of cases it is clunk or worse. Nor does it mean that the underlying datastore needs to model data to exactly follow the relationships that describe it. And in light of CAP vs ACID views on data, a lot of exploration of this space makes sense. None of this includes a concept of relational vs non-relational data. In fact I view these systems as potential new building blocks of relational sytems.

So this has turned longer than I originally thought, but badk to the main question: what is non-relational data?
Ask HN: Please review our new project, sexshoptv.gr
www.sexshoptv.gr is a film about a sex shop and a TV channel, written by the award winning director Makis Papadimitratos. The film has been directed with the internet in mind and designed to be released in installments, 10 minutes each. The first part, "Prologue", has been subtitled in English and Spanish. We are looking for feedback and ideas on how to market this project on an international audience through the web.

Greetings to all from Greece,
https://unweb.me
Ask HN: Your Github profile
Just wondering what everyone's github profile was, I'm 'jawngee'.

I ask because I just found swombat's and he's got some great code in there, I'm sure other HNers have got some nice repos too.
I've written about this here before, and though it's not a popular position on HN, I don't think that most startups offer a good return for most employees.

There are exceptions. One is the topic of this article: people who are able to move up a rung faster than they would at an established company. Leaving a grunt programming job to be a technical VP is a valid reason to pick a startup. Another is to learn how to run your own startup - of course, you'd have to be going to a position where you'll actually get that experience. Heads-down hacking for twelve hours a day doesn't teach you to run a company.

It's the rank-and-file employees who usually get the short end of the stick in a startup. There are the obvious drawbacks - low salary/no benefits/long hours - and the possibility the company will fold up. Unfortunately, there's no real upside for the average employee. The average startup is not going to hire on enough staff that early hires are going to have much room for advancement. Assuming the company reaches an exit - almost always selling the company - the employees won't get a big payday, but they usually suffer in the acquisition. I've been through several purchases, and it's usually not a happy process unless you're waiting for a large check. Even if the acquirer wants the startup's staff, the founders and a lot of the staff will probably be gone in a couple of years while whatever was attractive about the startup's culture is systematically disassembled.

Of course, many startup employees probably don't see it this way. Startups thrive on young grads looking to preserve the sense of purpose, freedom, and esprit-de-corps of college life. After all, if the last year has shown anything, it's that most people don't make decisions like strictly rational, self-interested economists.
Ask HN: Any HN readers in Austin, Texas?
I see a lot of San Fran stuff on here, and that makes a lot of sense. The start up scene in Austin isn't exactly dead and I was wondering if there were any like-minded hackers in the Austin area that wouldn't mind getting together for anything and everything, disc golf, business, etc.?
Not necessarily, just because we have access to better tools in the west doesn't mean that television can't be a benefit to those that have previously had access to none.

I believe that, if choosen wisely, television can improve your knowledge of the world, give you new ideas and stimulate creativity.
I am.

There is at least one site (Door64) dedicated specifically to Austin tech, that has regular networking events. It may be interesting to join them because of the focus on Austin.
Net Neutrality: John McCain introduces bill to stop it
Along with percentages, be sure to consider the vesting schedule. Make sure your shares vest over time (4 years with a one-year cliff is common in technology startups) so that you both earn your equity. For a two-person venture, a shotgun clause is probably a good idea too.
Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals: Chapter 4 of 13: Up now
I didn't say that everything was a client/server type of interaction; I said that client/server interactions are more common than bi-directional client/client interactions. You've provided a list of client/client protocols, which is great, but I still think client/server is much more common.

For client/client, you're right: HTTP is not appropriate. If you can stomach the XML Jabber (aka XMPP, right?) looked like a good general-purpose bi-directional protocol, and if I'm not mistaken that's what Google Wave is using. If you don't want to pay the XML parsing/serializing overhead, other protocols are available, and maybe that's why BERT-RPC was created. My original point was simply that, depending upon the requirements, the existing HTTP protocol might be sufficient for the kind of interaction needed and it's supported by a rich infrastructure.
I can't help love the power of real macros, though. Can you get something like loop to work in Scheme?

To me that's just part of the beauty of Common Lisp. While it is rather ugly in some places, it has these nuggets of just pure gold.

(I actually do not know scheme well enough to say. Are such complicated macros possible in it?)
I normally work in the south bay but I'm trying to make Friday my regular WFH day.

We used to do Wednesday in the Mission but Friday seems to work better for more people.

I'm sure some people may stay later, but right now 3-7 are the hours we are trying to "guarantee"
Arizona politicians have seriously gone off the deep end this year. I gotta get out of this state - who's hiring?
The Troubles of Korea’s Influential Economic Pundit
Yep. And sometimes Perl module documentation can be as bad as man pages can be. Good guidelines for how to document are not sufficient; good technical documentation skills are necessary as well.
Installing Win7 on a netbook just got simple - Win7 USB/DVD Download Tool
You've got it the wrong way around. He is talking about his own brokenness, not anybody else's.
The mixed metaphor per sentence ratio of that article was off the bird in the hand charts.
http://github.com/blackbrrr
I'm about 90 miles away in College Station. Not too much goes on around here even though Texas A&M is here in town.
You mean the part where you say, "I have the inside line on this, trust me", right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Film_and_Literature_C...

"Currently only Michael Atkinson, South Australian Attorney-General opposes the R18 classification introduction and is also blocking the release of a public paper that canvasses the opinion of the Australian public on whether or not an R18 classification should be introduced."

Don't really understand the opposition to the GST. It massively simplified the sales tax system in Australia. We're one of the lowest taxing countries in the developed world.
Agreed. He's basically been the face of modern web design from the beginning. Even his emotionally-charged posts contain valuable bits of wisdom.
Any key value store can be described as scalable because they are so easy to shard.
Why would apple be responsible? Last I checked they were using a separate radio processor chip from someone else (I believe Broadcomm), so wouldn't Broadcomm either have already negotiated the patent rights or ultimately be the one responsible for any patent suit?
Well, Matthieu Ricard is always happy: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/matthieu_ricard_on_the_hab...
See http://docs.plt-scheme.org/mzlib/mzlib_defmacro.html

(And I would not want to do loop in Scheme. That's just too imperative. Interestingly Haskell's special syntax for Monads and its lazyness makes the need for most macros / special forms go away (though not for all, and Haskell has plenty of syntax on the surface).)

Consider that Paul Graham, the author of the fine book "On Lisp", chose PLT Scheme to implement Arc on top.
This is a really important question because the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 that's rumored to be announced in November with a January releases uses the Snapdragon.

If it is indeed faster I think the real "iPhone killer" might be the X10, not the Droid if the X10 is affordable.
The article claims that (a) television prevents war and other bad things by exposing people to role models (e.g. women with few children) and other cultures (e.g. Kobe Bryant in China); (b) as access to TV, particularly digital TV, increases, people will have more choices about what they watch.

I wonder if these two influences will end up working against one another; if Network A, whose soap operas model a multi-cultural community where women control their fertility and control their own businesses, is in competition with Network B, whose soap operas model pious, nationalistic, and dutiful women with eight children each, who will end up having the most influence on the culture?
Wow, I had no idea this reflective and self-critical post was actually all about you. Thanks for enlightening me.
http://github.com/brl

Some security and privacy related tools that I've written.
Too bad that journalists in Finland can't write about these ...if they want to keep their job.

Nokia is too big a player in a small pond.
1001 Rules for My Unborn Son
http://github.com/mbrubeck

My current side project is "compleat", which is a super-easy way to add smart tab completion for shell commands. It's not release-ready yet (not finished or fully documented) but feel free to try it out.
I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to read it .. you skip to a few highlighted parts, you look at the pictures, you think "wow there's so much info here it must be highly effective and very credible", then you're hit with the "guarantee" logo they made up. Finally comes the signature to personalise it all, it's addressing you, this whole thing is just to help you out.

PS: we'll even reassure you how much we're doing just for you at the end.

The only thing I thought was missing from the burnthefat one, say, was the limited time offer and the many-pointed star to visually anchor the order form link.

I'm sure the people who wrote these sites aren't going hungry!
What's the Difference between "Data" and "Information"?
I've been asking this question around and have been getting some interesting responses. Thoughts?

"To you, what is the difference between 'data' and 'information'?"
How To Get Windows 7 For Under $120
Beware California's hidden cell phone tax

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar...
It's a little old now and a documentary, which might not be what you were asking about, but you should check out Startup.com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
also, if you're working for no pay, then you need to consider the value of your hours as a cash equivalent investment. if you're bringing $50,000 of services to the table, and not getting paid for it, you're creeping toward a 50/50 split, maybe even a 60/40 split. what is he bringing to the table- the idea? the idea isn't worth much. ideas are free. are you going to work 20 hours a week while he waits for you to work, or are you both working 20 hours a week unpaid?

if he's paying you a salary, it's totally different. but the honest question you both should ask is, without each of you specifically, will this idea sit around for another year as just an idea?
You can cache cache that in-memory! Because you've got a persistent app server.
The visual web was horribly crippled in order to achieve a mediocre result with a few non-visual edge cases.

The visual web was deprecated in favour of presenting information in an accessible manner (for people and computers). Not a perfectly accessibble manner for sure. Direct visual fidelity has always been available with PDF and to some extent with flash.

There are good reasons why all webpages are not simply embedded PDF pages although [print] graphic designers will probably beg to differ!
Can you build a website name?
Dunno. I think reasonable people could disagree about the net neutrality issue. A stand against it is pretty consistent with basic conservatism.
I think it hinges on your definition of relational and where you want to cut off "what's reasonable."

Everything in a computer's memory is related by existing in a uniform address space.

Key-value relationships can be ordered implicitly or explicitly, either by describing an algorithm to sort the keys, or an algorithm that creates a new indexing by comparing the values.

Caching data creates a relationship with manually defined logic.

I think the right question is "how formalized are the relationships?" and a related one is "how reflective is the data?" Programmers have plenty of ways to access data both formally and informally - the informal methods are often closer to the machine, but remove context that would help to automate and verify the process. You can also have data that doesn't say much about its context, and data that is very heavily cross-referenced.

NoSQL, to me, seems to be mostly about relaxing the heavy formalization of SQL - to shortcut to simpler or even incomplete descriptions of data, and deal with the resulting fallout later, in the same way that dynamic languages eschew static checking. Good if your needs are simple, potentially dangerous if your data becomes complex.
The topic "Why the industrial revolution was in Britain" it's one of the firsts ones in the History class that I took at university. The short answer it's "because the glorius revolution": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorius_revolution
That's just not right...
Google violates Chinese author's copyright?  Ah, the irony.
David Logan on tribal leadership
There is a difference between a willful patent infringement and an un-willful (not sure what the real term is) patent infringement.
Both are patent infringements, and both carry penalties etc., however a willful patent infringement carrier a much higher penalty.
So, even if Apple didn't know about it, it could still be infringing on Nokia's patents.
This is exactly the reason why patent attorneys constantly tell folks in the R&D to never go look or read other's patents, so that if they are ever sued in the future, they can at least claim that it was not a willful infringement.
How to Get 1000s of TV Channels on Your PC and Never Pay Monthly Bill Again
Hulu to start charging for content in 2010
Hulu To Start Charging in 2010
Could this be a possible counter-argument to the recent anti-Google Bing ads? Maybe it's good for you after all... I can only hope.
I am in Austin but mostly a lurker on HN.

I have lots of ideas for start-ups but none compelling enough to make me quit my day job.
This sounds like double taxation. The "subsidy" is something you pay for every month on your bill, which you also pay taxes on. So they get you for their imaginary cost of the phone, then they get the actual cost (minus what you paid upfront) as part of the taxes on your monthly bill.

I am all for paying my fair share of taxes, but when two groups in the same organization can't communicate and it costs me money, that upsets me.
Nothing new here. Be skeptical of politicians who constantly talk about how they are above influence from lobbyists. It's a good way to cover your tracks. It's called Double Think and it works really well.
Does the user adoption chart look like a hockey stick? If not no VC is going to touch this slow-and-steady technology.
It does real master to master replication.
ENGL 300: Introduction to Theory of Literature
An amazing lecture course recently put up in the Open Yale Courses site.
I took the class in college, but with a different professor. The TAs always said that Paul Fry's course was much better. Now I can see why :)
Why is it a net loss? I agree that a lot of programs on prime time are trashy and sensationalistic, but there are a lot of great programs on television as well.
I'll throw in my two cents: 99% of the blogs change no more than once a day. What is the point of needless complexity, databases, settings, etc. I like simple, single script that rewrites my content for the web since I still have my content on disk. I can easily grep for content.

Disclaimer: I have a static generated blog.
Is there a Seattle equivalent? :-)
No, I'd much rather not have the rules at all :/

With the rules setup how they currently are, it'd be irresponsible for a company such as Apple not to patent things incase they get sued.

I'd rather see that changed so that no one can get silly all-encompassing general patents, and certainly not software or UI patents.
I was about to ask about the financial aspect, but it seems touched in other response.
How do you know when to invalidate the cache without doing a scan over all the files?

(Answer: hope your filesystem updates the directory change time when a file inside changes, or that your app server is inotify-ed of the change. Both are more complicated than querying a database.

If I used KiokuDB for Angerwhale, it would only take me one key lookup for things that currently involve traversing the directory tree. Caching is nice, but it is not the solution to all problems.)
Ask HN: Any startup looking for an intern ?
Hi,

I'm looking for an internship in Europe either during the winter break or next summer.

I know well C, python and scheme.
See my github page at http://github.com/khamidou for sample code I'm working on.
Sorry this assumes that you wanted consistent ordering, not necessarily that you want to be able to create arbitrary ordering for it. So you'd have insert ordering.
Incanter (Clojure) cheat sheet
Golden Rules from Business Visionaries
Unfortunately filing bugs is not enough. Memcached seems to be a well managed project, which is an exception rather than a rule (they close almost as many bugs as are opened! - that's really amazing!) And that attitude makes a difference.

<rant>
About a year ago I got to the stage where I stopped filing bugs for projects where I don't have a direct contact with any developer, because usually it's just a waste of time for me. I've got issues opened with OO.o, ubuntu, firefox, f-spot and others that weren't looked at for years. I didn't even get a response from developers to verify most of them... OO.o is the winner with 4 issues opened and 0 closed since 2005 followed with ubuntu with 16 triaged / confirmed (but no fixes).

Developers - please take example from memcached. If you let someone wait for 3 years, and then ask "so how do I reproduce it" the only answer you're likely to get is "don't know, I'm using some other app since 2005, because you can't be bothered to fix bugs"
Buy it out of state
I totally agree. The overarching theme here is communications technology. Both the Internet and Television enable us to communicate on a massive scale. They're not even completely distinct entities anymore, and the lines between the two will become more blurred in the future.
The basic free market case against net neutrality rules is articulated pretty well here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020448830457442....
the dictionary definitions are almost identical and they're referred to as synonyms.

but when i use the words, i tend to refer to data as information that has been processed/arranged/sorted/whatever. data implies structured information. and of course, information can still be used, as a word, to refer to data. thats just how i tend to use it.
This is one of the things I like about Haskell. Operators like (-) are just like any other function, so you're free to redefine them for new input. If you want to define a world where 3 - 4 =5, you're free to do so. It makes it easy to explore some more complicated mathematical constructs.
Austin here and I would be interested in a meet-up.
Thank you for making my point eloquently.

The assumption that the way you prefer to write code should be the only way to write code is, well, exactly what I was talking about.
I have the sense that information is content, and that data is content in a specific form.
I think the difference is plain if you think about file formats. I would be inclined to say that .wav and .mp3 versions of the same audio recording consist of very different data, but carry very similar information (not the same because of the quality degradation inherent in compression)
Any Python users willing to some feedback on some language ideas I had? Thanks
I think you're absolutely correct. They seem to be the most transparent company in that sense.
I tend to use them exactly opposite. Data is a collection of values. They may be good or bad in need of massaging, and so on. Information is what we learn by processing data, facts or statistics or whatnot that can be deduced from the data.
-sarcasm-
I, for one, support net neutrality. I can't wait for the people who brought us the amazing FCC to regulate the hell out of the internet. Maybe while they're at it they could stop me from getting rick-rolled so much...
-/sarcasm-

I'm skeptical of politicians...which is exactly why I support the concept of net neutrality but I could never support letting the US Government enforce it.
I've been wondering about this, and I guess this is a good a thread to ask as any:

Why does the iPhone cost $599? The iPod touch, with similar components, costs $199. Are the phone chips that expensive, or are there licensing fees, additional regulatory requirements, etc?
Can you spot Java Puzzler in this snippet? (Stack trace will hardly help)
Incanter is a R-like library for Clojure.
Great post, it is important to make clear that NoSQL is not just about performances. For instance now that I'm used to Redis lists and sets I feel strange when I'm using an SQL DB and I've a problem when to just pushing or popping stuff is the trivial thing to do.

Of course SQL databases are very useful and a great tool for many domains. It is also not a balanced view to think that SQL databases are to trow away. Sometimes the table-based data model, with the querying power of SQL, is just the way to go for many kind of problems, or in addition to a different kind of DB.
When technology fails to work for us
The complete TeX source (DVI)
http://github.com/jcapote

This is one of my favorite features of github...
სსიპ დაცული ტერიტორიების სააგენტო
Copy and paste isn't that reliable, I've had lots of little annoyances with line breaks and other formatting issues.
The above is a typeset book version (so in DVI form, is misleadingly named). For the actual source, see http://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/t...
Nice tip about Door64 -- I live here in Austin but hadn't run across them.
From what I understand, some proponents of NoSQL are even more minimalist than that--they are fine with the idea of relations, just not with storing them in a traditional RDBMS (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, etc). The most convincing argument that I see for this is traditional RDBMSs are all row-oriented and organized via relational theory, and that a lot of data is better stored and/or manipulated via column-oriented, or graph theory, or object oriented systems.