skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between a 'TV-pro', the type of 'pro' that appears on the WSOP, and a real pro poker player, someone that makes their living off profits at the table. These aren't mutually exclusive (Phil Ivey, for example), but it seems that your impression of pro poker players is of the 'TV-pro' variety.

Players who rely on winnings for their livelihood do meet the author's description. In particular, for online poker players, the # of hands per year can total in the millions, and you can get pretty specific about the types of strategies/decisions that will alter your bottom line. I played poker online pretty seriously (and profitably) for about 2 years, logging over a million hands, and I definitely did no self-promotion.

Check http://www.pokertableratings.com/, a site that logs all hands played at the major poker websites. A major statistic is BB/100 (big blinds won per 100 hands), which is an oft used metric for profitability. The online poker community has a very good idea of the expected BB/100 at various skill levels/stakes, and the associated variance - it's very much a 'science'. The impression of self-promotion that you have is an unfortunate result of commercialized poker TV.
"... No, not really the primitive one is quite good ..."

Does make me wonder why a negative comment about the readline was included if this is the case?
Yes.

(1) This flaw doesn't hurt your service, and you do more with TLS than most people here.

(2) It doesn't hurt most TLS services, which don't use client auth.

(3) "It has no security flaws" is a straw-man argument. There was a much more serious implementation flaw this summer: common SSL implementations could be spoofed by embedding NUL characters in certs. Every time something like this gets found, the protocol gets stronger, not weaker.

(4) The odds of you or me or anyone else on Hacker News developing a crypto transport for which an attack as slick as this would be required are basically nil.

(5) This isn't so much a TLS problem as it is an HTTP + TLS problem. The core issue is that HTTP doesn't really understand how TLS works; it looks like TLS appeared to give HTTP the ability to "upgrade" a connection, when in fact that TLS really does is "tunnel a new" connection. HTTP could have had a "369 PROVIDE CLIENT CERTIFICATE" error code instead of trying to reneg connections.

I should end with a question. Questions usually seem to stop you cold. So here's mine: name the widely-used cryptographic transport protocol that someone invented that didn't subsequently have very serious flaws uncovered in it.
If you care about salary in addition to job security, the chart on p. 16 of this OOQ makes a good case that a computer science degree is a defensibly practical choice:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2008/summer/art02.pdf
I got tired of that argument before I even read it. If you're coding non-stop, without distractions, for the whole of your work day, teach us how to do it.
lines of code is very dependent on the language. I have one rails app that's in the 5k range, excluding tests, and it's been running for over a year with no restarts and no need for bug fixes. I think that says something about the effectiveness of my process.

I question the design decisions of any code base with tens of thousands lines of code.
How about "a lot?" Keep it simple.
I think it's only a matter of time before this NoSQL movement morphs into a SPARQL movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL
Whats with that title "Queen of Scams" on the page? Old habits??
no your not missing anything. And I can speak from experience that RAC doesn't even help. We are in the progress of migrating from a RAC system to a NoSql system. RAC doesn't scale either.
Watch Discovery TV Channel Live | Discovery TV Online | Discovery News USA
I kind of liked it the way it is.
IPhone - The World's Worst Phone Ever
I don't know about in the general case, but walls work well when your enemies are fierce but disorganized nomads.
It's also about available suites of tools to support development, not IDEs.

Gotta figure someone was going to chime in with the Microsoft IDE love though.
Sounds like British humour to me - if you don't get it that's fine - but don't start feeling aggrieved about it please.
As I was reading, I was so sure the big lesson was going to be: Pros don't want to all-in coin flip against a no-name amateur. Therefore, a startup should compete against big companies by taking the battle away from the incumbent's comfort zone.

I guess I was surprised to see for once an article advising us to act more like the Goliaths and not the Davids.
As a Linux users from 1996, Macs seem all the time more enticing. But, but... the interface still sucks -- in comparison to modern X11 window managers such as awesome and xmonad -- and what's worst, it's not so easily replaceable.

Besides, if I would replace the OS with Linux anyway, what's the point of buying an Apple?

It's still lightyears above any Windows setup, of course. Especially for the common guy.
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Editing isn't modal for everyone. I've used vi and Vim for years but I don't use them for more than a quick edit in a file these days.
Maybe I should put my location (Sweden) in my profile and hopefully it's just the cultural differences that make you come across as arrogant. I do think there are some organization (ISOC, "IETF", IAB) who might not share your opinion and I guess the last time I checked was back in 2005 when DNSSEC was first implemented for the .se TLD.
Dashboard isn't a great name for this, but it's probably better than "Google 0wnz0r j00r s0ul", which is what I'd have called it.

On a more serious note, this doesn't take into account the shedloads of information stored within a Google account, or accessible with that account information in other sites. Be wary of complacency - oh, that's all Google have stored with this account? - as previous HN threads have made me realise, Google pretty much does control my soul at this point. Organise the world's information? One person-bit at a time.
Also, Fiber High on Commercial Ave in Palo Alto.

www.fiberhigh.com
I see nothing wrong in citing your own work. He does make a disclaimer at the end that he is involved in several RDBMS technology startups.
Now you're conflating 'network effect' with things like 'viral loops' or population dynamics.

Again, they're distinct. 'Network effect' is the term to use when you're emphasizing that each new adopter increases the value of the installed base. A 'decay' factor doesn't usually come into such analysis.

To say that any product with enthusiastic users has a 'network effect', because the users tend to influence other potential customers, robs 'network effect' of its specific meaning.
I don't want videos, I don't want sheets or screenshots or anything at all like that. I want to _use_ your _product_ which is supposed to replace Word.

There shouldn't be an 'easy' signup process, there should be _no_ signup process to use it. It's already easy - I could have entered my google info (apparently) if I wanted to. I don't want to link my google account to yet another service.

Make me sign up if I want to save something that I made. _THEN_ you know I'm interested enough in your product to overcome the hurdle.

The best analogy I can think of: right now you've got window shoppers that see interesting things inside. But you have someone standing at the door asking them to put their name on a sheet of paper before they come in the store, 'So we can better serve you.' How many people are likely to walk in the store? Of course SOME will, but a lot wont.

And my point with the "random third" is that it becomes a great way to figure out what the market is looking for. If you put up, say, CRM, and get 30% clickthrough, and you put up, say, discussions, and get 1% clickthrough, that's valuable data.

A small usability nit: someone else (odd) linked a 'try it' page. Since you're capturing right-click, any misspelling that my browser detects can't be auto-corrected since your right click menu doesn't have spell checking.

Oops.
I like this guy's witty banter, and his substitution of acronyms. But I particularly like this:

ICBM System z is the Stonehenge of computing platforms.

You go to the wiki page and look at the picture of the system and think "I can actually imagine a circle of these systems being set up and seeming very very much like stonehenge".
Photo wire
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Not only will it not work with T-Mobile phones (which use a completely different 3G frequency), it won't even work with AT&T phones that aren't registered with the device.
s/leader //

Fixed that for you.
I suppose you're right. I shouldn't have said "anyone." But I don't think there's any example of a good monarchy.
The title is correct, the article confused and somewhat pointless. NoSQL is about the systems, not the query language, but it's not about RDBMS minus atomicity and consistency, it's about saying "this not SQL, don't compare it to RDBMS that you are used to querying with SQL".

Anyone talking about how you can implement SQL on top of NoSQL systems is missing the point. KV and Document stores are a different way of storing data.

SQL: express what you want to happen using relational notation, and it will magically happen. There are no real-world performance issues.

NoSQL: certain operations are fast, other operations are slow. This fact is reflected in the API.
Reminds me of working on HP's MPE OS (I believe I was using an HP 3000) in COBOL to keep a couponing system up and running. I won't say it was a terrible experience, but I certainly wasn't a fan of MPE or COBOL by the time I left.
agreed. i think his C# code is intentionally obtuse or something. and the 'refactored' version of the Clojure code with the gnarly bits removed is missing the logic to actually perform the calculations.

speaking of functional, i'm new to Haskell, but wouldn't it just be

f x = sum [v | (y,z) <- x, let v = y*z, v >= z*2]

assuming the argument is a list of tuples in the form (SDFactor, productionCost)

you could also foldl if you don't trust the compiler to optimize the extra list iteration away.

i didn't really like the article. the tone was really grating. probably look elsewhere if you want some inspiration on functional programming style
Time to get computers out of the classrooms
Stop whining. Don't use Google. End of story. Its not like they force you to use their proprietary platform and charges you a boat load of money. Its not like there are no alternatives.
No, I haven't. It's been some time since I've seen a halogen torchiere. I would suspect the compact fluorescents are dimmer and, depending on the bulb, less "pure white" in perception. The Verilux compact fluorescent bulb I am currently using has a fairly "cold" tone, despite being advertised as "Full Spectrum / Daylight Spectrum:. I have an OTT "Natural Light" bulb and a GE "daylight" bulb (6500K) that I haven't tried, yet.

If nothing else works, I'd follow the recommendation of another commentor here and try an incandescent bulb that achieves a full spectrum effect via a rare earth element coating. Note that GE has some incandescent bulbs whose glass has a blueish cast -- "Reveal", I believe they name them -- that are cheaper. However, the Reveal bulbs do not achieve the same effect.

I have had such coated incandescent bulbs, of higher quality -- Chromalux is the brand name I seem to recall -- and was quite pleased with their appearance. I did not use them in a torchiere, but they were in a flexible lamp twisted to shine up and provide indirect lighting off of the ceiling.

Maybe just get a candidate bulb first and see what you think. Stick in in a desk lamp or similar and bounce the light off the ceiling. It's higher power consumption, but you may just want to try the Chromalux first.

If this is fun, wait until we lose the incandescent bulbs... ;-) Sorry if my follow-up sounds less definitive than my original reply.
On commit bits
Maybe coding C. I never use C. For dynamic languages, Objective C (obviously), and web development, Macs work great for me.
Guys, please check his Wikipedia page before starting some random rambling. This guy is a living legend and has several of the most prestigious awards. He also is/was an entrepreneur and large DB corp CTO. Oh, and a very early open source advocate and developer. Among many other things.

Don't say something stupid just because you like NoSQL. In fact, he was an early and strong critic of the one-size-fits-all commercial RDBMS solutions.

[...] These papers presented reasons and experimental evidence
that showed that the major RDBMS vendors can be outperformed
by 1-2 orders of magnitude by specialized engines in the data
warehouse, stream processing, text, and scientific database
markets.

1-2 orders of magnitude, that is in the range of 2-99 times faster.

And in particular, if you didn't read at least 5 of his papers you can't pretend to have a clue about how database engines, and in particular the major RDBMS, work.

Thanks.

[A n00b DB engine writer, currently working on a non-SQL database]

PS: If I get to achieve 10% of what he did so far in his life I'd consider my life amazing. And he is still making new things. Respect!
Especially if a third-party or a competitor provides a relatively easy conversion tool to take your data from one product to another
Ask HN: Building a portal with features supporting community participation
What tools, platform would you recommend if someone were to build a portal ground up with the following features:

a) Ability for users to upload (or share, link) user generated content (say, audio, video, images etc)

b) Ability for users to comment, rate and provide feedback on user generated content

c) Ability for portal owner/ admin to do analytics (page views, visitors from different countries, downloads etc)

I don't want to write everything from the scratch but instead want to leverage existing tools/platforms as much as possible.

Thanks!
Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals
Linq is indeed nice. The Clojure code can be made easier to understand using a list comprehension:

(reduce +
(for [{:keys [productioncost sdfactor]} assets
:let [liquidvalue (* productioncost sdfactor)]
:when (> liquidvalue (* productioncost 2))]
productioncost))
Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search For Retailers
In their position, you would do the exact same thing: protect your market share.

The burden isn't on Microsoft to play nice; the burden is on you to come up with a better product and unseat them.

Sure, they make it difficult, but I will reference you to the success of Apple and Google alone as indicators that it can be done. Firefox is another example. *sp
The biggest missing feature is good email integration

I would suggest looking at RT: Request Tracker. It has excellent support for creating and managing tickets with email.
> Google pretty much does control my soul at this point

No, you gave it to Google when you started voluntarily using their service.
29 technical lessons learned from recent experiences with socialmedian
Some of the following may seem somewhat “basic” to the experienced software developer but in the era of “ship it” early and often, you often have to play catch up and learn even the basics as you go. Comments and further thoughts and advice appreciated!
WTF? Talk about a totally obvious paid blog entry... that "iPhone app" is just a Safari wrapper around the Google Wave web client URL. The author of the stealth ad even tries to defend it. Pathetic
"... Reasons to stay at three founders ..."

One reason not to have odd number of founders where n>1 is pair-ups. When people work in groups they tend to pair up and form dyads. Especially when times get tough. This is a very natural and stable psychological work configuration. An odd number of founders means someone is left out. It's no co-incidence the most basic army formation, a brick is 2x2.

I'm wondering though, would it hold true for 2 extro and 1 introvert founder?
“Every line of code, whether it be PHP or Clojure has roughly the same potential for a bug. But 20 lines of Clojure may sometimes translate into 1000 lines of PHP.”

Not PHP, but C:

int x = 6;

I'm pretty confident about that one. A lot of those 1k lines of code will be "stating the obvious". I don't think it's fair to imply that the probability of a fault in a line of C code is anywhere near the probability of a fault in a line of Clojure.

I doooo like Clojure though :)
More flamebait from lau. See also Clojure vs. X.

There is a place for mutation (certain algorithms absolutely require it), in spite of the obvious advantages of immutable+functional programming.
Mind the Tools
Create an MP3 player with Adobe Flex
I know Paul personally and he's a pretty reputable guy. Plus, he used my little Stammy head rating graphic at the end of the post, so how could I not appreciate that :D
I did for a year. I went back.

Running.
"... This guy's a class act. That level of professionalism is something we don't see often enough in this industry ..."

I'd tend to agree with you here. I remember Don really getting stuck into YC, not in a negative way but fundamentally questioning the reasons for the niche b/w Angel and VC. Once explained what was going on and the reasons (benefits to Startups, VC's, customers, companies). Given the evidence and seeing the advantages Don changed tack. So it's not the first time I've seen how well Don has behaved in the sometimes bitchy world of Tech.
Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass
Indeed Stonebreaker is a living legend. Entrepreneurs may find it interesting that he is currently pitching VCs a commercial venture to augment his latest DB project, http://scidb.org/ (much like Cloudant is to Couch)
Well they are graphical IDEs for mainframes. Java is also running very well on mainframes, as well as many web/appservers. This article makes a simplistic, though a bit funny image of the mainframe. Yes, the core and old stuff looks like that - no, there is also modern software running on the mainframe, else companies would stop investing in it.
Litl's technical details revealed
Sears: 2009 Black Friday Deals
> So, here's what's up: applications that rely on client certificates (where the client had to have a valid, accepted cert to make a request) can, on most servers, be coerced into accepting unauthorized requests.

Am I right in thinking that if you configure your server to always request a client certificate and verify it for every connection to the server, before it hits the web app, then you're fine?

Is it only when your server allows anonymous clients and a subset of requests require a client certificate that you have problems?
I get the impression that moving away from COBOL, "Big Iron", and such dinosaurs has, after the initial wrench, made companies more productive. All of which makes me wonder what part the army of salesmen that go with these things play in their continued existence. (And the executive-ego-stroke of having an impressive room dominated by a bond-villianesque monolith.)
Make a Big Noise on The Web This New Year...
I don't wish to be rude but did it not occur to you to check they could handle your dog when booking?
No health insurance, I take it?
Scamville? Not Exactly.
I would urge those who think fiction a waste of time to read Thomas Jefferson's letter[1] to Robert Skipwith. In particular: everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

1- http://www.sheilaomalley.com/archives/007403.html
Blind Clojure love. I like how right as he starts to approach the specific problems that Tim Sweeney and Epic have to deal with in handling what is fundamentally a mutability problem(unified game state), he sweeps them under the rug so that he can go back to talking about how functional code is beautiful, disregarding that it is insufficient for the problem at hand.
Great read and good "best practices".
Just don't agree with #3:
"3. Queries: avoid joins. No exceptions to this rule."
If you have a complex data model but need fast (mostly read-only) access to huge data sets, consider adding an additional layer using a search engine. Check out this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_oriented_architecture
Founder Institute On Track To Graduate 300 Startups Per Year
If your app has been running for over a year, you might want to look into this (before someone else does)... http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security/msg/7f57...
...but the EP is a puppet compared to the ECs (Council and Commission)
Can't say I agree with #10 - "Files like (sic) Srciptaculous and Prototype should be loaded directly from the Google Ajax Libraries API".

Remember a few months ago when Google and all sites using Google services were really slow? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608866)
BTW Pledgie ia great idea for a site, pity there's no voting/sort by donation amount to weed out the good causes from the bad ones.

Say this good one http://pledgie.com/campaigns/159 from this dubious one http://pledgie.com/campaigns/249
I disagree. We spend a considerable amount of time writing our behavioural tests (we have around 1,700 for our large web app), but they have saved us countless times from having to track down bugs after deploying code.

There was an article published in the last few weeks which showed that teams who write tests spend 10-15% longer in the development process, but they also save 25-30% of the development process time by not having to fix regression defects. Unfortunately, I don't remember which site it was linked from or what the article's title was. If I can find it, I'll link it here.
I can point to a Clojure line that has similar characteristics (and I don't even know Clojure):

(+ 1 1)

Done. Clojure's awesome, right? No errors. That rocks, huh?

No. Even that line has the potential for errors:

1. You could have a typo (int z = 6; int x = 7;)
2. You could have misunderstood the requirements (it should actually be float x = 6.5)

The only possibility you excluded with this trivially simple line is:

3. An error in how you used your own tools (easier to imagine if the line involved pointers).

Part of the difficulty of debugging is, you don't know which lines have errors in them. If you have 1000 lines, you potentially have to review them all to find the bug. If those lines are poorly compartmentalised, so that you can't heuristically find your way to the likely location of the bug, that is doubly the case. Conversely, if you only have 20 lines of code, then you only have 20 lines to read before you've definitely seen the line with the bug (whether you recognise it is another matter, which has more to do with experience, capability, and the clarity of the code).

Intention-revealing code does tend to be much, much clearer, though. (although I'll grant you it's possible to obfuscate code with malevolent intent).
> The only way Win32 stays as stable as it is is by just not changing anything or even adding new APIs.

What the hell are you talking about? Vista (and to a lesser extent Windows 7) have tons of new APIs.

Apple does not have a 64-bit version of Carbon. Name one Win32 API that is similarly broken.
I completely agree with that.

All I want from my phone is the ability to talk, send sms and a clock. If it can take pictures that's nice but not a must. All the other stuff is just 'in the way' for me, I don't use any of it.

The issue is that everybody uses their phone in 'their' way, so which bits are useful change from person to person and we end up carrying all the functionality that we don't use along.

Some way of stripping out unwanted stuff might be the way to go here.

Or a basic model that you select those parts on that you want which then get downloaded.