skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, it would be 'use by', not 'best before'.

But you don't really mean 'use by' either, you mean: 'consume within n days of opening'.

How about a simple, lo-tech solution: when you open it, write the date on the label -- then check how many days have passed when you want to eat it. No blue-sky RD, or complex industrial production needed!
Searching for Mentors...in Sweden?
I checked the link to the digg case myself, and then I found this:

Computing the intersection with a JOIN is much too slow in MySQL, so we have to do it in PHP.

If they claim that doing any heavy computation is faster in PHP than in MySQL they are obviously 100% incompetent at dealing with databases. And I say that as someone generally laughing at MySQL compared to other database-engines. They actually prove this in their explanation:

Query Friends for all my friends. With a cold cache, this takes around 1.5 seconds to complete.

With proper indexes this should take 100ms at most.

Not saying that non-relational databases don't have uses, but every single case I've seen the specifics of where a NoSQL solution is proposed as a better alternative with regard to performance and scalability has so far been rooted in incompetence. Make of that what you like.
A company can sue you for anything. Don't be intimidated in your color choices. The only way they win is if you don't fight!
FruiTunes
NSFW is the name of Paul Carr's column on TechCrunch.
Interesting. I did not even think of that. I don't see many incandescent bulbs these days; the idea that a recently-switched-off light bulb was hot had begun to fade from my memory. I suppose that at the time of the question's heyday, however, your assumption of this second channel of information would have been a reasonable one.

Thanks for sating my curiosity though - I was reading this thread just to see if anyone had an answer to that seemingly impossible question. So that was the answer.
Choose Your Own Adventure: Deconstructed
Having too many choices is a mixed blessing.

I think that the number of choices we have in life are a measure of our welfare, if you are near starvation you have 0 choices, you need to get some water&food, and you need to get it now.

As you go up on the welfare ladder you get more and more options on how to spend your time and your choices seem to multiply.

To quote Joe Jackson ( http://lirama.net/song/226232 ) "They say that choice is freedom, I'm so free I'm stuck in therapy", too much choice is definitely not a good thing.

I try to find a good mix between the stuff that I like to do and the stuff that I have to do.

What I have to do is mostly driven by the need to stay afloat and to stay 'current', what I like to do is usually somewhere off on the fringe, learning languages just for the heck of it (human languages and programming languages) simply because it interests me.

I like to work on stuff that has a clear beginning, a middle and an end, open ended things are less of an attraction to me.

Probably because I can never 'check them off' one of my lists :)

As for the many eggs theory, I think you need at least 6, 3 that you currently depend on (less than 3 sources of income for a business and you're fragile, it's like a chair, it needs three legs to be stable), and 3 waiting in the wings as 'plan b' in case one of the other ones fails so you can get back to 3 legs relatively quickly.

If you try to do much more than that it is my experience that the quality will start to suffer.

Re. washing your dishes, that's a really nice thing of you, to invite me! I'm no longer traveling to the US like I used to, I think your immigration department & TSA have become too much of a nuisance to be dealt with. If I were I'd definitely take you up on it.

I've had to give them my fingerprints, a photograph and my boots on my last tour to the US and I ended up late for a meeting on the west coast because I had to go buy new shoes...

Since then I've avoided the US completely on my travels. (the boots were confiscated because they had steel toes and plates in them, they were supposed to be handed back to me on landing but they forgot to put them on the plane...)

Should you make it to this end of the world then please know that you're invited as well, I'm about 2 hours away from Amsterdam.

j.
if you need to blow off steam and have a feeling that you are not as alone in this: twelve.truetech.com:6667 #tmc

But don't let it keep you from your work ;)
Not easily, not at all. I know a few people in that range, they are seriously good, it took them many years to get there, and they're not paid for their C++ skills (which are taken for granted at this level) but for their domain knowledge (usually very exotic financial instruments). What they do is translate what the quants want into code.

The average IT contractor in London probably makes 30-40 GBP/hr.

The other group that has insane billing rates are (top) photo retouchers. GBP 500/hr is possible in that field.
[Edit:

Having just read the paper (really, a few screens of a presentation) I feel confident that it's safe to ignore these "findings". Something is amiss. No way memcache is slower than MySQL for inserts/writes, and on-par for queries. Just doesn't make any sense.]

Hard to tell. You can "speedup" MS Access to Redis speeds, with sufficient RAM and a good caching strategy.

If CouchDB is slow in one benchmark, the developers can just go out and do something "nice", like, memory mapping all the documents in the "database", and serving them with a tight epoll(2) dispatch system using sendfile(2).

Speeding up databases for a benchmark is easy; scaling them for the real world is the tricky part.
300 per day, perhaps. 300 per hour, no.
HN needs to get private messages.

I can not continue this thread without appearing as a 280n hater and i didnt find a way to reach boucher directly.
Now this makes sense : http://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shirts/fuck-the-colorblind/
Ask HN: Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation?
I'm thinking of using Amazon's EC2 to run my database and web farm but I'm concerned about the intense IO that's required to run the database. I've shared resources on a vps in the past and it's been a nightmare. I know they offer high IO servers that have limited sharing but it's still sharing.

Has anyone had good or bad experience running a high IO operation using EC2?
As a professional programmer, I'm torn between the upside of open source software (primarily that I can use it without getting budget approval and a nightmare enterprise sales cycle involved) and the downside of it making it harder for programmers to make a living building software tools (although support contracts come close).

I admit I'm just as guilty as the next for saying "I won't use X unless its open source" but I really do hope the 280north guys do well with Atlas. As a profession, I think it would be nice if they were able to build great tools and actually, you know, get paid for it.

Case in point is Hibernate--I'm less of a fan of it than I used to be, but the insane number of projects using it for very real higher-productivity/lower-development-cost gains to me means its author, Gaven King, should be very well off right now, not just landing a nice salaried position at JBoss-now-Redhat.

Co-workers and I have occasionally mused about how to help open source developers get income from their work in a non-invasive way. E.g. not having to pin your hopes on being the next SpringSource-type acquisition. Nothing ground breaking yet. Has anyone seen good approaches for this?
> I could slap a post-it or something like that on the containers when they were opened, but I'm a lazy person and wouldn't mind having this automated.

I knew someone was going to say that :)

It's just that I'm aware that I can do that, but in practice it doesn't happen.
It's an Uncyclopedia article - fake Oscar Wilde quotes are an established meme:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Making_up_Oscar_Wilde_quo...

"Officially listed as the National Sport of England, making up Oscar Wilde quotes is widely regarded as the greatest spectator sport ever invented, with the possible exceptions of Sudden Death Twister and Sockey."
Another point of experience: out of the box it is pretty poor if you work on the macintosh; by default there's nothing mapped to "command" and there're not enough "keys" on it to remap anything to command without giving up something else you probably need (like shift or alt or control).

You can work around this with a footswitch but it's another point to keep in mind.

Mine suffered a similar fate to yours: in a box, awaiting some future period where I have enough downtime to ride out a month or two of reduced typing speed to train myself.
There actually is a faster solution. Using the relay method:

People Minutes

10 & 1 10

1 11

1 & 5 16

1 17

1 & 2 19

Best solution (that I know of):

1 & 2 2

1 3

10 & 5 13

2 15

1 & 2 17
Built in link-bait.
Copenhagen climate summit hopes fade as Obama backs postponement
Nice writeup. My current favorite is MongoDB (I blogged a few days ago on an easy way to index and search text in MongoDB docs), but I still also use CouchDB (and covered CouchDB in my last APress book).

I have played a little with Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant but find it a little too 'low level' - would probably be great if you only need a fast hash. Cassandra is also worth a good look: if you are a Ruby developer, the Cassandra gem can auto-install all of Cassandra and manage it for you - very elegant, really.

I admit that one reason I like MongoDB is that it is so simple to use, and the documentation is good.
Deperate  please advise a student about to start a startup
hi i am a extremely passionate guy currently pursuing my bachelor degree in electronics , i am very much interested startup and during last few years at college i have started and successfully completed some tech startups (based on local needs) , i am interested in coming to usa for making it in a big way . i have decided to do ms in CS from any us college and meantime start a startup right away (as i dont want to waste time and might have visa trouble afterward) , what advice you guys would give me regarding :
a. how much effect does the college`s reputation has on finding co founder and investment ? and which college will be best in my case (money is concern here)
b.should i be attending any college near bay are or any other would also work fine
c. any other tip you would like to give me would also be nice

please advice , i am finding it quite hard to find information as many people here are not interested in startups
thanks for your valuable tips .
The hardest part is: if Hibernate came with a license that was not completely open and free, would it ever have been adopted as the standard? Probably not. So you can't really charge developers directly.

What if companies that make money using open source software created an endowment that rewarded developers who produced widely used open source software?
The word 'pitch' is a little overloaded in my experience. Some people use it to mean 'product demo' and others use it to mean 'investor presentation'. I'd say most of these were product/company demos aimed at the press and potential customers, with a sprinkling of investor hookage, as in 'if you're an investor think this is cool talk to us to find out more about the business side'.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with demoing the product as a first step to getting an investor's interest, but a lot of the 'pitch training' or 'how to pitch your startup' type posts, seminars, workshops etc focus on what an investor wants to hear. Which is also called a pitch. One of the most common mistakes to make during this type of pitch (based on my experience, er, making said mistake) is to talk way too much about the product and tech and not enough about how the investor is going to get rich and retire to the Bahamas if they invest in you. Of course this varies tremendously by investor. The "pitch" at a YC interview is not going to start off with "Well, our total available market is $25 billion, and...".

The reason I mention this is because the two types of pitch are just commonly confused. For example at FOWA London, there was a pitching session on stage where three companies did a product pitch to the audience (the session was called Launch! iirc) and the judges made comments as if it were an investor pitch, which was a little unfair on the companies. They all took it gracefully, though.

tl;dr - Pitch can mean more than one thing. Know your audience (and judges if necessary)!
http://www.heinzketchup.com/Products.aspx
http://www.huntsketchup.com/products.jsp
http://www.anniesnaturals.com/organic_condiments#jump207
http://www.tropicaltraditions.com/organic_ketchup.htm
http://www.muirglen.com/products/product_detail.aspx?cat=7
Value is derived from demand and supply.

I suspect that the post you are responding to disagrees with this (at least hypothetically). They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument.

To say that more people "should" go through the effort of learning to like the advanced content is pretty elitist

Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust. The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue.
Scientists hope to turn coal into clean energy
do they all look the same?
500k was based on a 80% utilization rate which is reasonable given most IT contracts in London are for 6 months typically.
what about a non-commercial use license for free, and a commercial use license for a fee ?

- the software's author get money from his work and thus can go on provide good software to people

- only the ones with money needs to pay

- people without money get your product for free... you dont loose money as they wont buy your product anyway and they give you community and adverstissement for free.

http://www.longtailvideo.com/ jw player seems to do well with this schema.

am i missing something ?
Ruling for Apple against Psystar means clone-makers have no legal recourse
ross at 280north dot com
The link above has a typo:

here the correct one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess_paradox
I definitely use the same "big picture" approach to get through some less than fun tasks - and especially to stop doing things, for example, eating healthily (i.e. stopping eating crap) is part of the big picture of a thinner, fitter me.

A great piece of advice someone gave me, in line with the "If I truly don't want to do something I put myself in a situation where I don't have to", is simply "You don't have to do anything you don't want to". In context, of course. I don't have to eat healthily, but I want to, because I desire the end goal. Even stuff like paying taxes or cleaning my flat - I want to live in somewhere that's not a pigsty, I want to achieve the state of having done my tax return, etc. It's certainly led me to make much better use of my time, with regards pointless meetings and so on. I'm not being very erudite today but I hope that makes some sense.

However, small goals definitely work for me. On big-picture tasks where the end is far away, and there are unpleasant steps on the way, it's good to have smaller things to work to that enforce the belief that the goal is achievable in the first place.

On a side note, I love doing the dishes. I'm not married, so it's not the domestic bliss motivation, but there are two things I like about it. Firstly, somewhere over the last few years I mutated somehow, and I actually get a kick out of seeing a lovely clean kitchen with dishes all done (possibly boosted by the fact there are no dishes left to do!). Secondly, I find it's actually great thinking time, and my sink window has a great view. :-)
I'm kind of the opposite. I love to work in secret and have others underestimate me, so that when I do go public about a project, I deliver a nice shocking punch. Then I brag the hell out of it at that point.
Being completely colorblind, I'm a little bummed they didn't have an option to look at sites from that point of view. Almost every site I visit has some little thing that's hard to read.
How did he make the graphs?
Piracy becomes a concern with this model.

The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation operating environment) software away for free but charge for the polished chrome and low-response technical support.
This has inspired me to launch my own service. Here is how your site looks to someone that is just plain blind:

http://imgur.com/ToRW6.jpg
The other scam those referral schemes is having your upstream / recruiter person give sales pitches to your friends and family members as "training". In reality, all they're doing is milking your best sales prospects (and offending your friends and family).

Run away.
I have this problem because I have one eye. I do a few things.

1) Make sure my monitor has a high refresh or response rate. Either greater than 75hz or less than 4ms (2 is better) respectively

2) You may be making things worse by setting the contrast down. Your have to do extra work to discern what it's seeing when the contrast is too low.

3) Lighting /fundamentally/ important. Use good lighting, which first means nothing that "flickers," like the average over head office lighting is terrible. You need to use soft lights. I have a rope light strung up behind my monitors so there's a nice soft, yellow glow coming from behind them at all times, plus a larger lamp pointing straight at the back of my central one. That back lighting helps a lot. For overhed, I generally use dilluted sunlight from the windows, but failing that a brightish floor lamp with a nice blub witll work fine.

4) Sit far enough away from the monitor. I sit between 2 and 3 feet back.

5) I use large fonts for everything. When I read web sites, I hit CTRL++ all the time to make the font larger. In my IDE, I use 16 to 18pt font.

6) Whenever possible, /especially/ when programming, I use inverted colors, so black background and light colors for the text. White text generally works, but you might find a light gray to be easier on the eyes.

If you do all that, you'll be fine.
Good luck so far using EBS for MySQL, logs etc. I/O costs not significant yet.

You can Raid EBS devices btw.
You wouldn't want to use the virtual hard drive they provide you, but rather EBS (Elastic Block Storage). With that you can setup a mirrored RAID (redundancy is a given already) of as many devices as you please.
I actually think the way they are doing it is now is quite good. The underlying framework and API are all open source and free to use, but they charge for what seems to essentially be an IDE.

You're free to develop apps with their framework for free using your text editor of choice, and if you really want you can write your own IDE and other tools on top of their framework to ease development. However if you want to use their IDE you have to pay.
As the author of the article I can categorically refute this.

The title of this article was never edited.

And WordPress has obligingly saved all of the post revisions so I can quite easily prove this, if necessary.
A surprising number of workplaces still do not understand the concept of accountability - I can say that they are frustrating places to work.

I agree with the original poster; there is no better way to get your goals accomplished than by publicizing them.
I can't answer your question from personal experience because I always just use plain old EBS volumes with my EC2s.

That said, here is a good writeup on RAID use with EBS by someone at Heroku: http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs...
I am using MySQL on EC2 c1.medium instances. I haven't noticed an IO limit yet, but that could be how I'm using it plus the data set is still under 2GB.

I use the database as a raw data source and have a cron that generates read only data sets for the web servers to use. This works for my application, but probably not most.
Submitted recently and discussed at length:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936569

including a reference to the software used.
I do this sometimes, but it doesn't work that well. My problem is that the sort of people that matter to me, the people I'd tell about these goals, are exactly the sort of people who believe in me and support me and won't actually be that disappointed if I fail because they know I'll have tried my best. (Even if I haven't.) So I don't really fear looking like a fool in front of them at all.

Having to eat a nice serving of humble pie after you've told loads of people something's going to happen and it doesn't is unfortunate, but in my experience it mostly happens with things out of my control (job interviews and the like). I can't really empirically say if I've tried harder in a job interview because I told my mum about it or not. :-)

Another drawback of this system is that people really close to you care about what you're doing, so can get too intrusive and keep asking you questions about it. You end up resenting the questions because things aren't going well and you haven't actually started the task, which makes you resent the questioner, even though they mean well by it. It can drive a wedge between friends and obviously depends a lot by personality (one of my friends was like this and after a period of estrangement he learned to back off and I learned to not associate the resentment with him).

Having said that this auto-blackmail does work in specific situations for me, with specific people, but I think with more 'life' stuff than 'work' stuff.
Seconding the EBS Raid0 option. Some comparison here http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-mosso-vs-linode...

Also, if you have a part of a DB that just requires unholy amounts IO, there is of course the new 68gig instances, move that part and run it purely on memory with a combination of frequent dumps to disk.
Doesn't Amazon already RAID the storage they offer you? Is drive failure something I need to worry about? I thought they had a beefy RAID system already in place.
Bruce Schneier Action Figure
While I agree with the general thought about the interview, the last example question has nothing to do with riddles and falls into a completely different category: designing with constraints.

In a job where a significant part of your responsibility is figuring out how a feature should work, and balancing that with a variety of obligations (accessibility, security, resources, what partner teams need), asking a question like 'how would you modify a bicycle to make it suitable for the blind?' is a reasonable way to see a person's approach to working through various aspects of a design and weighing different features without relying purely on domain knowledge of a specific area of software.
It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example).

It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy.

selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
They do, but I think he's talking about doing a raid0 just to leech more io, not safety.
Or maybe for the apple tv?
Not a fair question precious! No, no! Nasty cheating Hobbitses...
Yep, that would stop the app being open source.

Lamson and ghostscript have two novel approaches:

Lamson: gpl or paid license without lgpl version

Ghostscript: 6 month delayed OSS release, immediate proprietary license release.
Do you have any recommendations for web developers/designers?