skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loves these sorts of robots because I hate being "that guy" who nitpicks over things like trailing white space. (It matters!!)

There's really no way not to sound like a pedantic jerk when you comment on someone's pull request about such things.

This at least makes the robot out to be the pedant.
It covers modern NoSQL databases but puts them in their proper historical context by comparing them to the (largely rejected) hierarchical database systems. (At least when we're talking about things like 'document stores.')
Ask HN: Is using ASP.NET MVC, C# with Azure a bad idea for startup?
I have idea that I want to start working on (website first). I have experience with Microsoft stack c#, asp.net MVC 5 and Azure. I think these are very good tools if not the best. I am very excited for MVC 6. The only concern I have is to find people who would want to join me (In case I am on to something). the other option is to learn latest technologies in open source world and AWS but that will require lot of learning time for me.

Any thoughts?
YapQ – The right way to travel
A general purpose court with a 70 year old judge ruled against Oracle after the judge learned Java programming to understand the arguments better.

A specialised court notorious for blindly enforcing tighter interpretations of IP laws reversed the decision.

You might want to try drawing your examples from reality, not prejudice.
iOS 8 vs. Android 5.0 Lollipop Review: Material Difference
Checked some of the available components and it seems like it should be possible to "just include" .js with the component and use in in the app. Not the best way to go about it as it is not that good of a practice, but possible nevertheless.

This is all about modules. It is a good programming practice to turn piece of code that can be used in multiple projects into the module, so that it is easier to load them up in the next project.

You can check node.js docs on the example of modules and how your code should work so: http://nodejs.org/api/modules.html

In node.js it is trivial - just like loading external modules in python (if you ever worked with it).

RequireJS is a tough nut, I give you that. That's mainly because of the asynchronous nature of the script loading on the web. Can't really recommend anything on the topic. I myself spent quite some time before it clicked.
Subduction is not the end
I don't understand why MBAs seem to think of developer as lowly worker bees, and developers seem to think of MBAs as overpaid snobs.

But two things I have noticed:
1) many of these opinions come from people who are one or the other, but not both

2) people who have both skills are lethal and awesome people to work with.
"Many judges like to use their powers to make rulings on what the law should be rather than is."

This is by design. Its checking the powers of the other branches of government so we don't end up with "tyranny of the majority." Without judicial review, legislators are free to pass any law they'd like without taking into consideration the constitution. No constitution or law can interpret or enforce itself. Without enforcement laws are just pieces of paper. Someone's gotta do it.

Judges have the hard issue of interpretation of laws. Someone is probably going to disagree no matter what they do since every layman has an opinion and laws can sometimes be unclear. Just because your interpretation is different than theirs that doesn't mean that they are nessesarly wrong or trying to legislate. They may even thought they were right at the time but then time proved them wrong and then there must be reinterpretation.

"Judicial activism" is, of course, entirely subjective.

The other thing is times change. One interpretation might have worked 100 years ago but not today. The ethos of a populace are subject to change. New technology comes along. Interpretation can change with it.

Sometimes legislatures go back and try to change the wording of laws after judicial review to make the meaning clearer or to come into compliance of the construction. Or even implement new laws for various reasons.

It is an imperfect system. People are imperfect. They are subject to bias and the accepted values of the time period. The constitution and laws can also be vague.

Some people even think the Constitution is deliberately vague in many area in order to allow it to be a "living document" so it evolves with the times, so to speak. Of course, like most things, this is controversial.

Congress has the power...

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8

This is so vague that it practically begs for judicial interpretation.
Append-only means that every fact is timestamped and nothing is ever thrown away. (Actually, Datomic provides excision, because some regulatory use cases require it, but it's a "black magic" feature.) The idea is that you should never use UPDATE or DELETE, unless it's a hard requirement or a well-studied optimization. The fact that it's 58 degrees today doesn't invalidate the fact that it was 45 degrees yesterday. New facts may replace old ones relative to time-sensitive queries ("what is the most recent temperature?") but you never get rid of the old ones.

This means that queries often have an additional parameter, which is the time. So a type signature for a query type (in a Haskell-like language) would be:

type Query a = ([Fact], Time) -> a

where the typical use case would use all stored facts and the current time. (Obviously, the DB itself isn't going to do a full-table scan for typical queries. There are optimizations involved. But, conceptually, a query is a function over all facts.)
So why do you believe Rod Canion is somebody expected to be in this list? It's a letter signed by the people who made some significant contribution to the "scientific" not to the "business" aspects of computers.

Although I can imagine the "letter from the companies that are competition from both Oracle and Google" would also at least have some impact in media.
Good lord, no! Hoon has no reserved words at all.

The nonsense words are all names. This is entirely a style choice. The actual name syntax is roughly Lisp's - for instance, (my-long-function arg1 arg2) does the same thing (roughly) in Hoon as in Lisp.

In the "lapidary" Hoon in which most of the kernel is written, facets (variable names, roughly) are meaningless TLV strings, usually CVC (consonant-variable-consonant).

The user experience is much the same as with Greek letters in math: you remember the binding between symbol and semantics if you know the code you're looking at. If you are learning the code, your first task is to learn that binding. Once you know the code, there is no quasi-semantic intermediary - a meaningful name - between the symbol and the concept.

I think our small sum of experience with this daring idea is that sometimes, it works better than other times. Basically, TLV naming is appropriate for code that is simple, but not trivial. (Trivial code, like "++add", is "ultralapidary" and gets OLV names - like "a" and "b".)

Ideally all of the Arvo kernel and Hoon self-compiler would meet the TLV standard of quality. All of it is written this way, though. In general, if you should be writing lapidary code, you know it, and if you don't know you shouldn't. (And should use more or less normal names as in any Lisp.)
Skype is still not doing two factor authentication
Sorry, I didn't realise it wasn't ok to delete and repost. Won't happen again!
It is far from given that Microsoft has had a positive impact on the world's economy!! It shouldn't have to be stated but you cannot measure contribution by the economic size of an organisation, or even assume it is a positive one (counterfactually).

It is all speculative, but in my opinion by being a monopoly provider they have held back innovation by several years, and effectively taxed large amounts of money out of the rest of the economy.
'Notice how there's no API in any OS for "is now a good time to interrupt the user?"'

PROMPT_COMMAND isn't exactly this, but it can be useful in a similar way.
Missing 'the Death March'.
What is the threat model for government knowing your fingerprints?

There are clear issues with communications - words taken out of context could paint you as all kinds of illegal/disagreeable things and land you in jail and/or destroy your career. Metadata is pretty much exclusively useful for guilt by association.

What bad things can happen if the government knows your fingerprints? What makes fingerprints any different from the other information on your passport? If the objection is that they are more difficult to fake... well, that's sort of the point.

Are we afraid that someone is going to take fingerprints from the passport database and plant them at crime scenes? Use them to unlock your iPhone while you're in custody? If you already warrant that kind of special attention, authorities will have no trouble getting your fingerprints anyway.,
In my more cynical moments I think there is some sort of Conservation of Worry law. Human society is designed by evolution to be worried about stuff. If you render irrelevant all the more traditional threats such as starving or getting eaten by a lion, people just focus the same amount of worry on ever-smaller threats.

From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.

It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.
Java XML Parsing, Transforming, Printing, and Validating Done Right
Mostly that just seems to show that "guys" (plural) is taken as mostly neutral but "guy" (singular) is not.
Thanks for sharing this. I had started reading about Philosophers years ago and almost completely forgot about it. This sparked my interest again.
Yeah, people who think Moldbug is opaque should try reading a little Carlyle. A few years back I spent a week powering through Carlyle's main political works (Chartism, Latter-Day Pamphlets, Shooting Niagara, and the Occasional Discourse), and it took a couple of days just to get acclimated to his writing style. By comparison, Moldbug is a breeze.
Seems like the Kindle link on that page is to a different version, this looks to me like the correct Kindle version: http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-New-Translation-Modern-Lib...
I disagree - there is no way to securely store security tokens (both the client secret and the access token) in client side code.

There should always be a server side proxy so that this data doesn't leak
Virgin Galactic pilot Peter Siebold speaks after tragic crash
Seems as if pretty much every state is a steady state. Would be interesting if some were predators and others prey, with some feature that allows them to "starve"
I agree that this should be the follow up. But it should not be the only course of action (not that you were suggesting it should be).
> I use the Sherlock Holmes method of debugging software.

Everyone does, surprise! Finding a cause by effect is exactly what the debugging is :)

That said, does anyone else remember the "Undo Step Forward" command in TurboPascal 5.5 IDE? You could un-step through the program being debugged, essentially moving back in time. That was an incredible feature, a true engineering curiosity.
> What bad things can happen if the government knows your fingerprints? What makes fingerprints any different from the other information on your passport? If the objection is that they are more difficult to fake... well, that's sort of the point.

A database of fingerprints[1] should contain the prints of as many criminals as possible and as few non-criminals as possible.

This reduces the possibility of false possibilities which carry a real chance of death if the police turn up to your house with guns.

Those false positives also distract efforts from the actual criminals.

And then there's the risk of feature creep - see also the vast misuse of social security numbers in the US.

Finally: a fingerprint is pretty much the definition of personal info and so anyone collecting and storing that information should have clear regulation about the use and storage of that information.

[2] also DNA. The English DNA database is scary.
I didn't find the UI intuitive at all. The text boxes are great, though.
Decentralized marketplace
You claimed that point of view was useless, but you didn't argue why it was useless. My point of view is that none of "AI/Machine Learning/Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Numerics/Simulation, Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture or Cryptography" can be implemented (or even well conceptualized) without figuring out how they are to store, retrieve, encode, efficiently memoize, guarantee consistency or atomicity, or apply bulk transformations to their data.

It's silly to dispute that databases touch all areas of computing by simply declaring that databases touching all areas of computing is meaningless, because it's obvious that databases would touch all areas of computing, because computers are data storage, retrieval, and processing devices.

Maybe you're restricting your definition to RDMS (while mentally drawing some arbitrary sharp distinction between data structures and databases.)

>Really, we all know what a database is.

This is simply a declaration. If you know what a database is, define it, then make your case about what areas of computing that it is irrelevant to. Argument by common sense is empty.
Every time I add (pink) cells, they are always immediately killed. Is that intended?
I'm glad he loves databases, databases have been the bane of my existence.

However, the torment they have given me has also lead to a similar fascination - and now I'm writing my own database! So I've become very familiar with the topics he writes on, and they are very good points for anybody interested in the subject.

Why would I write my own database? Because databases are hard, and I am determined to make them easy (even if that means me sacrificing years of my life into doing all this crazy research). Check out http://github.com/amark/gun !

- CAP Theorem, he is correct, P cannot be sacrificed. GUN is AP with eventual consistency. The beauty of this, though, is that you can always build strong consistency out of eventual consistency (it just requires knowing X amount of peers in advance, and doing a trivial lock until you've heard back from all of them - in fact, I do this in one of the example apps) but you can never go from strong consistency down to an eventually consistent system.

- Distributed Systems, this is incredibly incredibly important. I cannot repeat this enough times, there should be no "master" or "single source of truth" in any database. If there is, you're going to have a nightmare of a time being woken up at 3am to fix it when it crashes (my personal experience with other databases). Why? Because single points of failures will fail, centralized systems suck. Solution: Distribute and Decentralize! We make this easy for you.

- Correctness vs Efficiency, as he says, Paxos is difficult - all of them, Raft, Quorum, leader election, etc. DO NOT USE THEM unless you are Google, Amazon, Walmart, or what not. Even then, do not use them. Instead, I've solved this challenging problem by developing a new Conflict Resolution system that (very poorly) can be summarized as Vector Clocks + Timestamps, you get the advantages of both without either of their weaknesses. What his means is that data integrity is guaranteed because every machine is using a deterministic algorithm, without any extra gossip between machines. Let me repeat, you'll get the same result on every machine, eventually consistent, without any multi-machine coordination. This means every peer is a master, and that is awesome, even if you are running it on an ephemeral server/cloud - completely resilient to failures, terminations, restarts, and reboots.

- Empowering the App. Yes. Databases should serve you, not the other way around. Answers to his questions about abstractions are at http://github.com/amark/gun .

- Operational Challenges. This is where I diverge from him. If something seems wrong, like things suddenly becoming slow, you can easily just restart it without any damage/harm/failure occurring. And then you can look through your logs, taking your time, to see what went wrong.

- Basic Building Blocks. Because GUN is a graph database, you get key-value like access, as well as documents and relational styles. That is because mathematically graphs are the superset of relational algebra and hierarchy trees.

Happy to answer any questions!
I've actually recently been thinking of extending this logic to my Anki geography deck. Populations change, but population at some specific point in time shouldn't.
Try pausing it, then adding a larger clump.
Thank you for the advice. I will forge on as I suppose that is the only option!
The voice in this article is very familiar. Is this the same author of the woman that wrote about high-worth dating in New York? Living in a hotel room with multiple women while going on dates with rich guys... I can't remember the details and I've done some initial google searches but haven't found the original.

The voice, the situations, etc in this article feel similar to what I remember of this other article.
Reverse execution has been available in GDB for five years now:

https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Reverse-Ex...
Pause it and add a blob. My pink blob made blue go extinct ):
If you head over to wallstreetoasis, you'll hear a few of them comment on how software engineers have it made. Grass is always greener on the other side and what not. There's a lot of not so nice things about being in finance, like the work conditions and hours. You have to pay your dues and work like a dog for quite a bit. Outside of high finance, you can go work for F500s, but then you take a significant pay cut. The last option is strategy consulting, which has often been described as more miserable than investment banking due to the travel and the fact that hours never really go down even as you rise up.

Also, the median total compensation is $181,500 USD for an MBA graduate of arguably the best business school in the country. They have a median of four years of work; Assuming they started at 22, and the MBA took two years, they're 28 when receiving this compensation. Unless they have corporate sponsorship, they've also paid around $185,000 for that degree, most likely in loans which will increase the cost. I wonder if a software engineer of similar caliber (smart, dedicated and possessing competent social skills to get into GSB) could pull off a similar compensation at 28 and how his life time earnings would compare. I'd be willing to wager the difference isn't that drastic; if it isn't, it's probably better to just pick the path where the work suits you better.

I think a good grasp of programming combined with being business-savvy and being able to communicate confidently with people can get you pretty far monetarily if you seize the right opportunities; its a useful skill that has the potential to create significant revenue/cut losses for businesses. It seems like some people manage to become well off by becoming consultants and doing just that, but I'm just speaking from second-hand information.
Hmm. You are not thinking in business terms.

You run a software house: do you want your developers reinventing data storage on each application? Or using a fairly decent data storage that is RDBMS.

Most of the time RDBMS is a very good choice. Think about the tooling, support, hiring knowledgeable people etc. Lets face it RDBMS are good at the very small (single table, replacing a text file) up to the very large.

In the RDBMS/SQL world you have everything from sqllite to save as a single file, to Oracle for your Enterprise app.
China developing world's first hack-proof computer network
> In other words, it may be the case that physics, just like mathematics, cannot be both complete and consistent.

Interesting line of thought. So if that premise (let's call it A) is true, then any theory that is both complete and consistent is ruled out.

Therefore, we better found out if A is true (!) That's perhaps a more specific version of what I was saying before.
I think in the future there will be advanced text analysis libraries that summarize discussion forum threads and quotes the most useful and interesting information therein. So, instead of having to read a sub-thread with 30 comments, you will be presented with a text block that summarizes the thread including the most useful information therein. And it'll also be clarified for you if the thread is about something everyone agrees about, or if it's something controversial. And the most useful links to other Web pages will be provided to you.

This would make it possible to quickly get something interesting out of a 1000+ comments long discussions here at H.N.
Sex, Dating and the Expectations Trap
Specifically:

http://lists.simtec.co.uk/pipermail/entropykey-users/2013-Ju...

"Paul Martin pm at simtec.co.uk

Tue Jul 2 14:19:37 BST 2013

On Tue, Jul 02, 2013 at 08:11:13AM -0500, Robert Lee wrote:

> This is unfortunate. I do hope they are not going out of business.

We've gone through a major crisis, but are still here... just. To say
any more in public at this stage might be unwise from a legal
standpoint.

We currently have no manufacturing capability for ekeys but are
working towards getting things up and running again. There's no
timescale on that yet, I'm afraid.

--
Paul Martin <pm at simtec.co.uk>

Simtec Electronics

http://www.simtec.co.uk/"
Shame this only works with GitHub. We use stash at work. And I would LOVE to have this. I'm very sensitive to this stuff, and I always have to be that guy :/
Use a "NoSQL" database when you have very large amounts of data (so you need 1000s of separate disks) or large volumes of queries (so you need a 1000s of separate servers). Otherwise MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle etc. is probably fine.

NoSQL has an learning and 'new technology' overhead that isn't worth paying unless the pain of using traditional databases is too high.

Don't forget SQLLite too - nice for the very small applications.
That's an interesting point of view, to think about what things to discourage / remove / hide, rather than what to show.

Thanks for the link to Discourse — I haven't noticed the words "you must suppress discussion" until now when you pointed them out.

The only ways I could think of implementing that, was by collapsing threads with relatively few upvotes, or that people flag as off-topic. Hmm..., S.E. actually does it also via making comments smaller, via community guidelines and by removing formatting. I wonder if that can make sense in forum software.

Your mentioning "suppressing discussion" made me think about something, namely removing the discussion completely: collapsing long sub threads, and replacing them with auto generated summaries of the most interesting things therein, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581040

Actually I don't understand "What subject matter do you wish to approach" (not a native English speaker). Could you please rephrase?
If you know any of the back story of those names you would have known that none of them would need to affiliate with any company. They are basically the deity of our age. Without them we would not have modern computers and the only handhelds we have are rocks.
Context should be established by headlines on news sites like Hackers News.

I know we're a technical audience, but I'd be willing to wager more than half of this site's audience has no clue what that title is talking about.

Prefixing it with something like "A faster algorithm for [purpose]" is helpful. Otherwise it can just sound like technobabble.

I don't think it's inane to point out that jargon sounds jargony to those not in the know.