skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once used Ubuntu for desktop (I loved it, but my old laptop eventually died).

Right now, OSX for desktop (I just use a laptop that I always keep with me, no multiple computers, just a single one!). And Debian for headless machines / web servers and so on. I really love it.

(I also have to deal with "degradated" Windows installations at home, so every computer keeps its factory OS with a good security policy, much easier to re-install from zero)
Ask HN: Do you use project management software, which one?
-Do you use prosject management software, which one?
(I also commented on the article, but nobody seems to be commenting over there, so reposting...)

The advantage of statically typed RDBMS that he's leaving out here are (a) storage optimization (b) query optimization (as jawngee has already noted).

You could get halfway to simulating a dynamically-typed RDBMS by declaring all your columns as, say, VARCHAR(5000). You could store strings, integers, floats, dates, etc. all in there pretty simply. However, they would use a lot more storage space as strings than they would as native data types (e.g. integer 1000 is one byte, string '1000' is 4). Over a large data set that would really add up.

Secondly, when doing queries, your comparison operators (e.g. WHERE date > 2009-07-06) would be way less efficient as string comparisons than native type comparisons.

I don't want to be dismissive and curmudgeonly about this, but over and over what I hear from people enthusiastic about NoSQL solutions is that they solve the current problems of RDBMS, while forgetting all the great features that we have spent the last 30 years building into database systems.

The current "limitations" of SQL-based systems are often in fact age-old trade-offs that we made, but people have forgotten the positive benefits of those trade-offs. The reason databases are statically typed is because that saves storage space and processing time. The reason there's a standardized, domain-specific language that you have to learn is because having to learn a completely new API and mental model every time you want to access a data store from a new vendor is inefficient. Oh, and the reason SQL is so complicated is because relational algebra is complicated.

Sure, SQL and RDBMS have their limitations. They're not the right tool for every job, and they are not even 100% perfect at the jobs where they are the right tool. But too often I hear people saying "fuck SQL!" simply because they don't want to learn it, and because they're too early on in their little pet project to realize the scalability problems a NoSQL system is going to run into that RDBMS solved 20+ years ago.
What is the point of making this almost religious? Ok, C++ sucks. Now what? I know it's shocking but you will find similar criticisms for any other language out there. Just keep an open mind and use the right tool for the job and circumstances at hand. Sometimes it may be something you are uncomfortable with. Do you want to be a programmer or do you want to be a java/c++/python programmer?
Yes, but this is normally a bad trade off. For one thing, if you are in a large organization your DBA (or at least your lead DBA) is often a senior person with a lot of experience and was normally a developer before becoming a DBA. Part of the DBA's job is to protect the database, and data integrity, from developer mistakes. In said large organization most of your developers are younger and less experienced and may not always remember to put in the checks in the application. Code review will certainly help, but even there you often have to validate input in a lot of places where you define database types once.

This relationship changes somewhat in smaller organization with a more hand-picked team of course, but even there it is normally less work to set up the schema properly then to make sure every application that ever touches it properly validates every single piece of data for proper type.

There are times when a dynamically typed database makes sense, for instance when it is primarily an object store for an object oriented program. But if you want a relational database with the data integrity and data analysis capabilities it brings to bear, then it probably makes more sense to use a statically typed database.
"I think that private universities such as Princeton should be free to engage in whatever kind of affirmative action they want."

That may be the blogger's opinion, but that is not the law of the land. In fact, higher education institutions are prohibited from discrimination on the basis of race,

http://www.ed.gov/policy/rights/guid/ocr/raceoverview.html

and one student who filed a complaint

http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/complaintprocess.ht...

against Princeton under that process found that his complaint was broadened into a compliance review, which still hasn't been resolved as of the last press report on the review.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/09/08/21307/
Is there enough added convenience here to justify a hardware purchase? Hardware is a tough sell. Make it work with bluetooth alone, and then I'll be interested.
I particularly like the idea, especially after the first payment-processing apps started showing up on the App Store but without any sort of accompanying hardware or ability to capture the credit card number. Just because you need external hardware to read credit cards doesn't mean the hardware isn't feasible for use. Neither does it mean this service needs to require that you swipe a card or only accept credit cards.

I for one would love to have a garage sale with such a device, or to go sell my knitted or baked goods at some gathering somewhere where people without such a mobile device might be at a disadvantage payment-wise. I could also, depending on how durable the external hardware is, see using this in a retail setting to accept credit cards in a convenient manner, like at the Apple Store.

I know my AmEx card has expresspay (pretty much just rfid on your card) so I can just wave my card near a reader instead of swiping, but I can't see that being standardized for all cards, nor can I see that really working out for consumer devices like the iPhone. I could sort of maybe see cameras, but that ends up taking more time than a simple swipe. So why complicate things?
This sounds like what Enron was doing to cook it's books, just moving money around, except in this case the banks and the government aren't technically the same entity but heck they might as well be after the bail out.
Good point. There are certainly cases where performance is paramount and it is hard to beat C in areas of pure performance, but those areas are becoming ever more rare.

In fact, in some cases you can get better performance out of a language built for multithreading like Haskell or Lisp than out of anything but the most highly optimized, multithreaded C code.
Arch Linux here as well. On my netbook, laptop, and htpc,
What's interesting here is that the headphone jack in the Iphone isn't a passive output, but can evidently relay signals back to running applications.
Apple uses portable POS in their stores with great success (ironically on Windows Mobile). I could see it being handy for salespeople in the field or for service companies. Not revolutionary, but handy.
Consider the source. Climate Progress.org is a projet of the Center for American Progress, headed by John Podesta, self-described as "progressive" and setup expressly to counter groups such as the Heritage Foundation. No bias here.
I have a different perspective on this, having built a product company (Zoho Corp) in India for the past 13+ years. Basically India's emerging IT industry coincided with the global credit bubble of the past 2 decades, which simply inflated the IT services industry to monster proportions, in the process sucking the oxygen of talent out of the system. So product start-ups that could have been never got off the ground.

This is the mirror image of the process in the US that funneled talent towards the financial complex, which meant the IT industry had to import talent or outsource the work. A good percentage of the talent came from India, and a lot of the outsourced work went to India. In that environment of easy money flowing into services, product companies found it hard to recruit talent (which the author of the post also alludes to).

This process basically derailed the emergence of product-based IT industry in India. Some of the Indian services giants of today (Wipro and HCL in particular) were product companies originally. They built some innovative products in India (an x86 based Unix well ahead of Linux, an IP concentrator/router for ISPs in early, to quote two examples) in the late 80s/early 90s. But once the 90's boom got underway, they found it far more lucrative to rent out the talent than to build products.

In Economics, it is impossible to argue "what might have been", but I believe the configuration of IT industry in India points to how the bubble massively distorted an industry.
The only one I've ever willingly used is Trac[1], which is a simple but extensible system that does as much as I would want. Its "out of the box" setup is pretty reasonable.

[1] http://trac.edgewall.org/
Which makes sense because the headphones also have a mic and volume control.
Vaccines & Autism: A Deadly Manufactroversy
"Basic time management software called Zodiac"
Not "NES processor", but "NES" itself.
"NES processor" is justa a 6502 cloned thousands of times.
PHP. I am serous.
Phew, glad I don't have to worry about any of the actual arguments or evidence then!

[Edit]
On second thoughts, sorry, too glib. I try to be a bit more thoughtful for the HN. The point I was getting at is that there's verifiable facts, data and arguments in the post. It would be a much more interesting discussion, one I could learn from, if people would tackle those.

I'd also just read Julian Sanchez's piece on what he calls the 'oppositional morality' cognitive bias, the tendency to disbelieve evidence that The Others are using to push their conclusions:
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/10/12/oppositional-moralit...
That's not how I read it at all.

I think it is actually pretty sane stuff in there and you can use it to your advantage when programming C++.

It's a pretty subtle kind of humor I think, but I don't think it is meant as a put-down, more an extensive critique from years of experience. You can't know that much about the shortcomings of anything if you haven't spent significant time with it.
The US taxpayers are lending the money cheaply to banks and whoever else wants it. You can take part in this as well - go buy a government bond.
Good points.

But I'm not sure I would trust someone with a card reader on his iPhone to swipe my credit card. . . .

And while I'm also uncomfortable at the gas station doing the same, I have a higher degree of confidence that the station is legitimate.
You might call it that. Not very pretty, but workhorses are 64 bit athalons, some dual core, low cost.
1. My startup project
2. Not sure what you mean. No database involved, logic boxes each have different function, cluster is strictly compute.
Well vm won't work as they are all 100% or 200% cpu when working.
Interesting tidbit on the flickr page he links to: "Google can customize your search results based on location, recent search activity and/or other, logged out or not.... Adding &pws=0 to your query turns of personalization."
Cygwin

(None/Windows isn't really accurate for me - I have a POSIX-compliant emulation layer on top of Windows)
CAP is hardly progressive. I'd say it's accurately socially-permissive centrist with a neo-imperialist bent. Remember: this is the same think tank that stood right behind the Republicans in the run-up to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When Iraq turned into a quagmire their tune changed. They still haven't given up hope on Afghanistan, but I imagine their view will change in the unlikely event Obama decides to go with Biden over McCrystal.
I'm typing this from #! right now. It's nice if you are looking for a lighter Ubuntu-based desktop, though I still ended up pulling down 7 gigabytes of software once I went through all the packages I wanted. That's a number that borders on "inconceivably large."
You got downvoted, I'm upvoting you. I'll seriously consider it despite the prejudice against it.

The CDBaby story had me thinking about it.
Noted. It's not merely a personal project, going to try to ply it into a side business/income if possible.
Kubuntu for main development, on my laptop; Vista on the main PC thing; Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini for when I have to do Mac dev or testing.

I've a C64 in the closet, too. Should bust that out, see if it still boots.
Even Bill Maher has caught the disease. http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=cel...
So if you are part of the "False Economy" you get to make billions thanks to the suckers... err tax payers... who will bail you out, whilst everyone in the Real Economy gets to suffer the effects of the Financial Crisis.

Maybe it's time to go back to contracting work at financial institutions...
But can I borrow money at 0% interest from the Fed to do it?
Wall Street's Naked Swindle
"Clearly, some very sound thinking! I like this guy already!"

Because Rails is a programming language?
Why is RESTful desirable?
You know between this and the link posted the other day (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_grea...) about Goldman Sachs I start to wonder if we that strive to create wealth with technology, with odds of failure stacked squarely against us, are really the smart ones. Sheesh. Too bad I have morals.
Sridhar, I had heard (from a relative in India) that the networking products (your first two on your list) were consulting projects that you productized. It appears what I had heard was wrong, and I apologize.

Kudos to you for building a product company from day one; that's the tough road, and I commend you for pursuing it.
Fine by me, pick your latest toy language and demonstrate how you can write a toy webserver in 3 lines or a Fibonacci calculator in 3 characters.

When you need to get some real work done give me a call - I just put my rates up.
What's wrong with it? It requires nothing except what would seem to be a fairly simple device, that reads the magnetic stripe. I'd imagine the cost of that is a lot less then getting a "real" credit card processing unit.
> You can take part in this as well

Except for the free money part.
Subtle humor and critique? If you say so.

"And you can also test your code by creating programs that check if it does what you want it to do in a bunch of cases. It's the same with C++ except that it compiles forever and you have to write notable amounts of code to implement the simplest test, so C++ code ends up being tested pretty rarely."
I agree with jacquesm--see the humor, but take it as cautionary. I did 12 years of C++ and it helps to take the 20% cut. If you look at google's coding standards you can see the restrictions that they put into place.

Few modern languages get as much criticism as C++, and I think rightly so. It is very complex, and takes way to long to master.

Think of the FQA as a survival guide.
The main server at home is debian. i have one desktop box and the tiny vaio running ubuntu. recently being hacking obj-c for the iphone so osx has become my main desktop. have been considering switching to opensolaris for my server.
Could you please explain to me where this argument is made in the above linked article? I couldn’t find it.
If I'm not mistaken, the person who wrote the C++ FQAs has a blog (http://www.yosefk.com/blog/) with some rather impressively technical content. He appears to have a fairly solid grasp of what he's talking about, and not to be some (e.g.) Python/Ruby/Perl/etc. programmer who hasn't written a line of C++ in the last five years but will gladly rail against it.
> Mutex lock/unlock 25ns

That looks suspiciously cheap to me, 1/4th the cost of accessing main memory? I tend to think of mutex ops as quite expensive considering they involve things like memory barriers.
Holy crap, it's older than me!
Man, this was perfect sarcasm, perfect to tag this comment as a mere ad hominem, no need for any further clarification.
So you could also have it ping you when the candy bowl needs refilling - sweet!
Fractional-reserve banking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
NYT: Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy
Nothing exciting. I own almost no furniture. What little furniture I do own is mostly to hold a flat screen TV, Wii, laptop and some CD's and game cartridges.

We have our priorities straight. :-)
There is a mass of blog posts etc about why RESTful can be a good thing ( even if many get REST somewhat wrong ), I don't think anything is going to be gained by my trying to fit all that information into this small textarea.
As an SEO "expert" I take exception to this post, Yes there are a lot of bad companies out there selling snake oil, just like there are in most (all?) industries. That does not mean that all SEO companies are evil and it certainly doesn't mean that all SEO techniques don't work. Lots of people spout the "content is king" mantra, and while i'd agree content is the most important part of a website, you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it? Unlike the author, most people can't afford to wait 10 years for their site to become popular. The fact is, to get to the top of the results pages you generally need a lot of links, and link building is HARD. This is why every major company has an in house SEO team or hires an agency - because SEO is one of the most effective ways to increase your ROI.
Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay mocks Booker judge's sci-fi 'idiocy'
One situation that calls for a typeless database is when the system must accept data from a source that's unwilling or unable to adhere to a well-defined static schema.
That depends on the cost. If it's like $20, for a mobile vendor that already has an iPhone, that's a minor expense. It's also possible that the dongle is free with a monthly subscription fee.

Btw, what do you mean make it work with bluetooth? The dongle?
In a weird way this kind of does prove their point.

Of course it also goes to the point that Microsoft just cannot make anything browser related even slightly secure.
As soon as someone bashes a programming language, people start shouting "use the right tool for the job" and, most of the time, I agree. However, I think that is only true if the language really is the right tool for any job. I'm not sure C++ is ever the right tool. And when C++ is a decent tool for the job, it is only with significant policy reducing its feature surface area.

The two areas were C++ is strongest are actually better handled by C or by a combination of C and a higher level language....

Systems programming: C code is more predictable; less place for bugs to hide. It also better represents the underlying execution model.

Performance critical applications: C offers a standardized binary interface to implement performance critical components with effective interop for business logic written in higher-level languages.

That's not to say that C is the be-all, end-all systems or performance language. It's just better suited to the task than C++. Writing an entire application in C OR C++ is almost never using the right tool for the right job.
It's good writing I guess, but honestly they're trying too hard. It just sounds fake to be that over the top.
Really good talk by a pioneer in the industry.

A few highlights.

1. They recently installed a 2.6 GW project in Spain. In one year. For this project, an approximately 20 person crew was installing 2 MW/day.

2. Photovoltaic silicon areal production [sq in] surpassed chip silicon in 2000 - currently it's producing ~10X the area of chip silicon.

3. In regard to the fluctuating nature of solar energy production, utilities are coming to realize that it isn't really that bad or hard to deal with: for decades they've been dealing with a fluctuating load from their customers - solar is just another fluctuating load; only the sign is different. There are areas in Germany and Japan where solar and wind make up over 20% of the grid, with little difficulty experienced.

4. In the past 20 years photovoltaic production has increased 200X: he expects this rate to continue for another 20.
I ran Gentoo from 2003 to 2007 -- I credit it with opening my eyes to how simple and elegant *nix is. When I got tired of monthly upgrades taking six to twelve hours on each of my four systems (including twenty to forty minutes at the console for each, running various commands and fixing things that inevitably broke), I switched to Debian Sid. When it (unsurprisingly) proved too unstable, I moved to Ubuntu, and have remained with it ever since. I don't always get to play with the latest shiny toys, but I'm amply compensated by weekly upgrades that take no more than sixty seconds. I'm glad that I gained a more thorough understanding of my system's workings through Gentoo, but I find Ubuntu lets me focus my attention on tasks more interesting than system administration.
> This article is linkbait/SEO.

> Just because something attracts a lot of links doesn’t mean it was linkbait. This is my personal site, where I talk

> about things I’m passionate about. That’s all I did here.

Shades of Bill Hicks there.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your definition of "built for multithreading", but in my (admittedly limited) experience, Lisp isn't it. To my knowledge, McCarthy's Recursive Functions paper, the Scheme standard, and the Common Lisp standard all fail to provide for concurrency (although something like it could be implemented with coroutines, I don't have the impression that's what you're referring to). That said, it's entirely possible I'm mistaken.

I can't comment on Haskell, having no knowledge at all of it.

Erlang is rather more in the region of what your comment seems to be getting at, from my perspective.
Cheetah, Gecko and Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs
"you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it?"

By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.

You shouldn't have to hire someone to tell you what you can find out for free.

Also, you registered just to make this post?
Exactly - environment fail.

There's no download link for IE when you're looking at the site from a Mac because...there is no IE8 for Macs available.

So where you'd think there would be a download button, there's text saying "IE8 is only available for Windows", which is correct. If you look at the site using Windows (http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3662/iedownload.jpg), there's a big ole' download link, which is exactly what the complaint is about.
Summary:

1) Hedge fund wants to short Bears Stearns

2) Hedge fund borrows 1M shares and sells them. Deposits its money with a Prime Broker.

3) Stock in Bears Stearns falls in price and hedge fund buys back the 1M shares it shorted (making a profit)

Now, where this gets insane is the shares the hedge fund borrows don't actually exist (it sells stock it does not have, delivering IOUs to the stock buyers and by dumping those non-existent shares it depresses the stock price)

> Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment
You say, Oh that language sucks. This is my favorite language. MyLang Rules!!!

OK you are a jerk.

You say, well I'm not a heavy user of that language. Actually I don't like it much. But this is my favorite. I like it because of this. Maybe you too like to try this :).

Hmm... You are great.

That's what I think about language bashing :).