skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MySQL scales for reads pretty well since it has a well understood and mature replication system. In contrast, the PostgreSQL replication landscape is somewhat muddy. Scaling writes is a challenge of course, and PostgreSQL might be the better choice there for getting the most out of big hardware. Scaling up can really cost though, as the price-to-performance ratio gets outside of the sweet spot when the hardware you're buying gets more exotic.
I don't think it's a failure--obviously other countries are using the social networks that are on open social; however, with facebook in hyper-growth in many countries (primarily south-east asia), this distribution may only decrease in the coming year(s).

Is there any way to combine open social with Facebook?
When function (of manliness, say) is removed, the form is free to be expressed in exaggerated and grotesque ways. Including a more gangsta Luke Skywalker.
I've had a lot of success using the FlexBuilder plugin for Eclipse. Also, you can just use the straight up open source flex compiler and write all your actionscript and mxml by hand using your favorite text editor.

Also, I would just use ActionScript and MXML instead of HTML/AJAX. Actionscript is basically just javascript anyhow, and MXML is a lot easier to work with than HTML.
I've personally found that people who got into programming before the dotCom boom don't need to worry about a lack of degree, people who got in after absolutely need a degree.
Really? I'm pretty new to Capistrano, but 'deploy' was just kind of built in or something. That's very strange.
A meta-analysis of 85 years worth of studies on the subject places IQ as the best predictor (conscientiousness comes in 4th)

See here: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...
Cool, but sad they went with MySQL instead of PostgreSQL. Can't blame them though.
For more fun, check out the Esolang wiki: http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Main_Page

FukYorBrane is a great Branfuck variant.
Would you Tweet to support Bloomberg?
I find it funny that he only has 12,000 followers...
Peter Eastgate
uh, surely all this involves is extending DNS to be unicode compliant? not really a big deal is it?
You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the point. The fact is, a lot of computer science students intend to go out into the world and become software engineers. Likewise, many software engineering positions require computer science degrees. Because of this, you'd expect that a computer science degree would prepare you for a career in software engineering.

Many (if not most) university computer science programs do attempt to prepare you for a software engineering career, but the point is that they're failing in several areas. You could call it a software engineering degree and they'd still have the same issues.
Oh, sure, just make it sound like this is no big deal!
Twitter most certainly can be a trending engine. Twitter.com actually has trends on the right hand side, but there are tons of sites that do other things with trends, too.

As for JetBlue/Delta, I've bitched about Verizon on Twitter, and within about an hour, had a follow and an @reply from my local division's Twitter account. They then followed up with phone calls, and took care of my problem.

And now I tell you that story, which also furthers their image...
If I had learned C, Lisp, and Java "in depth" when I was an undergraduate, much of the effort to learn them would have been wasted.

My first programming-ish job involved documenting C++ libraries (in an era where C++ templates had just started to be supported by mainstream compilers). Then I had a job involving Perl and Java, and even though I had no experience with Java I had no trouble getting up to speed with it. Then I had a job involving J2EE; I hear that the "enterprise" Java world is doing a lot with Hibernate and other lightweight frameworks these days, so what little I learned about EJBs on that job is now stale. And now almost all of my coding involves some combination of shell scripts, Python, and SQL.

There's a place in every software shop for the language lawyer who really knows a programming language's subtle tricks and traps, but not everyone needs that coming out of a CS program.
But it's installed by default and doesn't require the user to download random code or say "yes" to running it.
What RiderOfGiraffes said so far is what I also know about the subject. To summarize:

- Worked produced while employed as a programmer belongs to the employer. "Signature from a painting" doesn't apply: they have not only ownership but authorship, too.

You have two ways to beat this, and both depend on the specific law where you worked and the specific employment contract you signed:

- First, whether you were hired as a programmer or not. This could be a big deal, but you need to dig into the text of the law or talk to a (specialized) lawyer.

- Second, whether work done outside official working hours is yours or theirs. It could be either way, but it's definitely written somewhere (law and/or contract).

You're not the first to stumble on this issue, but unfortunately here you'll find mostly hackers, less lawyers. When you look for a lawyer though make sure he knows about IP and employment law.
Cool! Wonder where he is in Oregon? I sometimes have dreams about moving somewhere remote, but to tell the truth I think I'd get bored pretty quickly.
Does anyone have any details? Is ICANN declaring a single true text-encoding for URLs? There isn't much room in them for metainfo.
madlibs anyone?
Or maybe do the same with some kind of internet forum where people blindly click on the links.
Things are different outside Canada, specifically in the U.S.. I've found in the U.S. that there are vastly inconsistent definitions for the different programs. In Canada you tend to have Computer Engineers who study in a real engineering program. Some schools may split this into Computer Engineering (emphasis on hardware) and Software Engineering (emphasis on software). Then you have Computer Scientists that range from "Software Engineers" -- in quotes because it's not a real engineering degree but a science one. They study lots of programming, more math than other CS students, as well as processes. On the other end of the spectrum areManagement and Information Technologists that do less programming, less rigorous math, but more business and management education. Having had to interview candidates that have CS degrees from schools all over the world (Canada, Cuba, Russia, the U.S.) I've found that for some reason the U.S. has a weird sort of wild west situation with respect to computer science. Students in community colleges who take one course in Java consider themselves to be studying computer science the same way a student at a top notch program in a place like Stanford would. Here in Canada if a student is studying programming at a community college they're more likely to declare themselves as studying just that, "programming" or "IT".
No, but respectful is.
Shouldn't you want to give teachers more freedom with their curricula?

I don't recall that I have said that I wouldn't do that, although I suppose you are concerned about my posting the link in which a third-party organization advocated that student achievement should be one element of teacher evaluation. Yes, I think teachers ought to have great freedom in curriculum design (in particular, they ought to be free to choose their own preferred textbooks and supplemental materials within very broad limits). But I also think that if a teacher announces "I teach English writing" that there ought to be some independent way to show that the students in the class made some progress in English writing by the end of an academic year. Or, at the very least, that students ought to be able to shop for preferred teachers who make them feel honored as learners and who make all the students in the class stay on task in learning. Different teachers may be a different fit for different students--that seems quite likely--so teachers shouldn't be assigned to students by administrators who never enter the classrooms to see what is going on.

In general, I advocate policies that deregiment and unossify the school system we have, but perhaps that has not been apparent in the threads in which you and I have most recently interacted. I'm very much in favor of providing more choices to more learners and more teachers.
Yes, but when a shortener dies, neither the linker nor the linkee can fix the problem, making the problem worse.
As a note for anybody else who is following along, looks like Adobe wants $250 bucks for Flexbuilder.

Is it just me? Or does Adobe try to screw you out of every penny possible the minute you move beyond their free stuff? It's like they have a grudge against giving anything away for free and need to make up for it in the pricing of everything else they have.
Legibility is mostly a consequence of training, i.e. habit (see the famous article by Rudy VanderLans in Emigre magazine, in the 90's). For example, the fraktur typefaces of Germany (the ones you see in nazi movies), they seem unreadable to our eyes.

For a more familiar example, programmers seem to prefer aliased or antialased fonts in their editors depending on what they are accustomed to see. When I switched from aquamacs (antialiased) to linux emacs (aliased), I found it unreadable. After some time, the reverse became true.
So what exactly is that?
I wonder which type of Go player I would be. Sometimes I do something like this with development, where I spend too much time feeling ignorant and try to ramp up my knowledge by reading. Once I jump into the coding I still feel underprepared as things stick better when you are intimate with the context, and I end up feeling like I should have just jumped into coding first. I think most of us have an easier time learning by doing.
I must provide a counter-point in the argument. Whilst only 1-in-5 Young Adult readers are male, the actual reading rate for males is only ~10% lower than females. So with such a small margin of difference, what are the males reading if not Young Adult?

I know when I was 12 years old, I wasn't reading young adult. I was reading LotR and Discworld novels. I think I had a brief period of reading YA before I was reading adult fiction. There weren't many good YA fiction when I grew up, most was targeted towards girls and I stopped reading YA before good books like Cirque Du Freak (which I narrowly missed) and Inkheart (which I missed by a few years) appeared.

I personally read Terry Pratchetts YA books, but quickly progressed into his adult fiction with the Discworld (there was no Tiffany Aching YA discworlds until the same time of release as Inkheart and I was already well into Discworld by then).

Does it not say that if boys are only reading slightly less than girls, but not reading YA, that those boys who do read books are more advanced readers?
PHP Frameworks & Libraries Survey
For current latin-alphabet DNS, domains are case-insensitive. Will that still be true? Will Google have to buy gooGle.com separately? How do you do "case-insensitive" Japanese - don't they have 3 separate character sets for different situations? How do you distinguish among identical-looking characters? It's technologically simple, but there's more than technology involved.
People though the same about the web in general, but things change when you build around this infrastructure. The first time I saw the web I though nobody would stay much time around a computer to look at crappy web sites. But the really good web sites came in, and we are here 15 years later.
I don't care what you know--tell me why you know it.

What kind of answers would you be looking for from well educated students?
I immediately think of how I did not understand Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".
Should Nav and Map App Makers Fear Google?
The article seems to echo the "people who don't do TDD are not professional" cant from Bob Martin.
Ask HN:Is there anything like Word of God?
Several people belonging to vast variety of religions have met me arguing that their "book" is the word of god.

I wonder what does a modern community. People of kind who visit HN think about such an concept. Recent surveys have indicated that over 40% Americans and over 60% graduate students do believe in this statement.

I want to know the opinion of you guys!
Unstructured Search for Amazon’s SimpleDB
I'll note that, at least in business, some research indicates that women do not earn less than men:
"Women executives who do not have children follow career paths that closely replicate those of their male peers. Successful M.B.A. couples have similar work patterns, said Dr. Bertrand. Women without children married to high-earning spouses are just as likely to work and accumulate post-M.B.A. work experience at an almost identical rate, she said. Call a woman without a child a man."

Rather, they work less than men:
"When women executives return to the office, after several months of absence, they typically start to work shorter hours, the study shows: 52 hours per week, compared with an average 58 hours for their male peers, as they adapt to their new double task."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/business/global/29iht-ried...

This is not brushing away the problem, but pointing out that wages are a symptom of an underlying cause.
I've consistently had problems deploying Rails apps. I can usually work through them, but it has never once been smooth.

It must be me, though, because every time I mention it, someone accuses me of being an idiot or trolling.
Girl Photo Gallery Super Hot Girl Pics Hot Teenage Girls Pictures
Learning to really use Eclipse or Visual Studio well takes a surprising amount of time. So, IMO it's reasonable padding for a resume, but people don't call themselves Visual Studio developers.

What people most often identify with seems to be the frameworks they are using. So you will see someone call themselves a .Net Developer not C# .Net coder even if that's what they do. They don't know all of .Net but they feel confident they know how to approach most .Net issues and they happen to use .Net and Visual Studio.

I could have looked at the Spring stack or Coca, but I think the point still stands. Even if someone is calling themselves an OX X developer they are talking about knowing the same type of thing as a .Net developer.
Has technology completely replaced human interaction?
I think Martin has started a whole new movement of browbeating developers when they don't follow whatever arbitrary policies you think are best. Instead of showing them the benefit and getting out of the way, the new strategy seems to be to label them unprofessional until they submit to your way of thinking.

(sigh)
What will be the future/or most imp. advancements of video on web?
my guesses:

mining data from videos
creating a video web/graph of all online videos similiar to a www.
Google Groups is Dead
This actually lets me responded in a threaded way, rather than your blog, apparently? So my bad, I'll just respond here.

Do you feel that your experience or mine is more mainstream? When I read Joel's "The Perils of Java Schools," I felt that it described my school to a tee. I had just assumed that that's how most programs are, given my school's size. Obviously, Ivy-leage schools should be better, but I just kind of assumed that my own experience was average.
How I built my minimum viable product
"First thing I tried Jost Hochuli theory that we need only upper half of the letter in order to understand the text."

And then he's comparing the top quarters of C's and O's in different fonts.
I use Ruby and I love this language, truly. I wrote my framework, play with Sinatra, and so on, like you. But we are in hacker news and are in some way a closed ring of people a bit smarter than the average programmer.

Then there is the mass of programmers that could witch from PHP to something better. All they want is a mod_please_make_ruby_simple that is, like mod_php but for Ruby. You install it on Apache, and all the pages called .rhtml will get executed with the trick of things outside <? ?> being translated into echos.

This module should also provide, automagically and built-in, support for all the obvious stuff like file uploads, MySQL bindings and so on.

I understand that PHP got this right for the masses, but can't understand why no one is trying to do it the right way for other much more powerful and elegant dynamic languages.
How to count to a zillion without falling off the end of the number line
What's Hot, What's Not: IT Skills You'll Need in 2010
Laws of Power: Machiavelli and Sun-Tzu brought up-to-date
I guess since I have never played d and d I would skip straight to distributing porn?
Yes. 65537 is commonly used.
Tool of the Day: Create Online Resumes With Praux
It used to be way complicated, but Passenger has made everything orders of magnitude easier. Tried it?
Actually, Spotify Premium was the only option of accessing the service in many countries' IP ranges (including mine) anyway. Currently though it doesn't show even Premium as available for me...

I also know of many loyal listeners that are quite likely to pay for the service.

Is there enough paid users to support recent Spotify valuations - that is the big question.
So is this link.
Amazing! As I found it a pain to go to the University RPG club in town, this should be a good alternative.
"So we need approximately 15,000 Googles, hiring exclusively within the U.S., to clear out the currently unemployed and make room for the Americans who graduate high school and college in 2010."

This should frighten us (or invite us to move to Denmark). I wonder if this will mean that most Americans will become underpaid part-time contractors for larger foreign corporations.

Edit: Learning HN markup.
I've read this and it's an interesting book, but it is very, very long and could really do with an abridged version.
Ha. That's great. Too bad I didn't have gmail back then, because my site names would totally be archived.
IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others:

1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour

2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout

Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc.

http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie...
Equal pay for equal work, I absolutely believe in, but it goes both ways. Taking a year off - for any reason, for anyone - should mean forfeiting a year's seniority and pay. The truth is that men have always had to choose and to compromise between work and domestic life, there are many men who rarely see their kids not because they don't love them but because they need to earn to give their kids a good start in life.

Incidentally here in the UK, deputy PM Harriet Harman (known as Harriet Harperson as she's so PC) had her figures on pay savaged by the National Audit Office - she compared pro rata salaries of women working part-time to those of men working full-time.
A mash-up of Jay Z and Black Keys - do you like it?
Facebook becoming big friend of small businesses
Symbian Foundation releases microkernal source code
gonna be hard for that to work if your friend updates their status message in the time that you reported them deceased and the days it takes facebook to get around to looking in to it..
It's a custom order, they don't list everything they offer, you have to ask.
Is the 404 a meta joke?
Kernel Summit 2009: How Google uses Linux
That was true when Dijkstra said it, but just as mathematics is increasingly using computers as they go into realms that mere humans can't completely explore without them (and this will only increase over time), computer scientists are increasingly being called upon to actually program more things.

Theorize about a P2P system to your heart's content, but until you've implemented it, you don't understand it well enough to write more than a preliminary (and nearly worthless) paper. And it would be nice if said system wasn't a steaming pile, because those actually take longer to make, you know. Theorize about a computer vision algorithm to your heart's content, but until you try it you're just imagining things. Theorize about how wonderful your robotic control theory is to your heart's content, but until you actually put all the pieces together and see if it actually works you're just dreaming.

Sure, in a world where "Dijkstra's Algorithm" is a genuine breakthrough, you can live without a computer, but that world is disappearing for many disciplines, leaving computer scientists who really do need to program.

(I italicized that because I am aware that there are computer science disciplines that can still get by without computers, like complexity theory. But there are other things that are quite thoroughly computer science that can't do it without computers anymore. Stuff that Dijkstra would never have been able to do in a world where a megahertz was precious.)
I bet they're applying for the YC W09 round!
So is his entire web site: http://ejohn.org/
Thank you so much! I first encountered this article back in 2004 or 2005. I just remembered it again about a month ago, and have been fruitlessly Googling for it off and on since then. You've really made my day!
hahah, at least it's a good demonstration of the possibilities. Honestly I think the best personal use I will find is with my morning emails exchanges with a few friends on the east coast (about 25 emails go back and forth every morning, including links, videos, etc.). We just to do it with a blog but that didn't fit. Chat is too time consuming, but Wave might be just right.

At least it'll make procrastinating more efficient.
deputy PM Harriet Harman (known as Harriet Harperson as she's so PC)

What a delicious sample of British wit.
Sorry everyone, my server has completely fallen over. Feel free to delete this post and I can re-post when it's back.
From my collections:

Review of Mnemosyne vs. Anki vs. SuperMemo
http://nihongoperapera.com/mnemosyne-anki-review.html

Open Source Anki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki

Open Source Mnemosyne:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne_(software)

Some science:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

-----------------

And my favorites for language learning: http://www.smart.fm/
Since you teach Go -- you probably teach it well, but I thought I'd share my experiences as a Go student who gave up after a couple of years.

My problem, and Raganwald's, is that I can generally read the rules of any new game and, based on those rules, formulate a strategy. I might not expect to win, but I at least have enough understanding of the mechanism of the game that I can pick a direction and run with it. (I was going to say, "that I can play passably well", but that really isn't it at all -- it's the formulation of strategy that's important to me, and, I suspect, Raganwald.)

So what happens in Go? Well, you're told the rules, and then you're given a few hints that don't make any sense to you, like the 3-4 stone. Either way, it's impossible to form a strategy. You might as well stand above the board and let stones loose from your fingers to fall randomly upon it.

And my teachers, bless their hearts, took it upon themselves to win by extremely large margins repeatedly, which I would not have taken personally if only I had finished each game with the feeling that I had learned something.

In the end, I became an "eh" player, but found myself dreading Tuesday night Go club, found it occupying too much of my mind space, and found that it wasn't really giving me anything positive in return.

There were very very few long term new recruits in the local club.
it avoids the smell and the cheetos are all yours...