skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My two cents:

As you point out in the question, you're never going to receive a set of rules that you just have to follow like a checklist, because the same behaviors can be consensual and encouraged between one pair of people, and non-consensual and creepy between another pair of people. That's normal.

The only definitive rule is: don't hurt people. If you hurt someone, even in a small way -- and you will -- apologize sincerely when called out, and try harder next time. No-one expects you to never make (non-huge) mistakes; just to learn from the ones you make.
Yea, I'm going to check out PostgreSQL's json storage.

>But at the end of the day, what matters is that your product works.

With my requirements, I could just write to a flat file and be fine... I seem to like complicating things just enough that I no longer understand how what I'm building works. LOL.
What I don't fully understand is, usually when scientists try to preserve rare species, there is a critical mass under which there isn't enough genetic diversity to preserve the species (I've seen ~30 quoted for some rare mammals). But in this case, just two individuals were able to start a viable population. Why are these insects different? I can only think of a couple reasons...

- since these insects have a r-selection curve, it's ok if 90% of the offspring are genetic defects, you can always produce another 1,000 eggs

- the insects had maintained such a small population for so long that any critical defects had been bred out

But I'd be interested to hear from a real biologist.

Edit: oops, meant r-selection, not k-selection
I referred to EMR radiation, obviously. Too bad HN readers took it literally.
Am I alone in thinking that if a programmer writes a code that allows a string to be sent to an integer field in the database the issue is not with the DBMS?
See a video demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOJ3yCK8pI that shows these various different kinds of projections (from this code).

The video dates to 2011, but the repository has taken a lot of additional commits since then.
> They do have the same value, and that value is "do I want to pay for this channel?"

By that logic, all items in the world have the same value and that value is "do I want to pay for this item"?

They each have a different value based on "what do I want to pay for this channel". It is not a binary option of "I WILL PAY NO MATTER THE COST" and "I WILL NEVER PAY NO MATTER HOW CHEAP".

> The argument the above poster made was incorrect, internally. That's all I'm pointing out.

And all I'm pointing out is that your argument is incorrect.

> We've now spent the better part of 3 hours talking about this.

Which is odd, since all I've been saying is that the choice:

More expensive & more channels vs less expensive & fewer channels

has no clear winner without agreeing on what each particular channel is "worth". This is a classic case of multi-objective optimisation. I'm quite interested in finding out why this is such a disagreeable concept to you.

> Consider for a moment the possibility that this isn't a very important distinction, and that your continual insistence on the issue is perhaps detrimental to the greater conversation and HN in general.

And yet your continual insistence is beneficial? I'm a little confused, it's worth your time to try and point out a problem in someone's thinking, but not worth anyone else's time to point out problems in yours?
Ask HN: 150K + RSUs or 120K + 1.3%
150K base + RSUs in a pre-IPO company or join as the fourth employee to a startup for 120K base + 1.3% stock options.

Which one would you choose and why?
"Security groups (which define what IPs can access what ports, similar to basic IPTables firewall rules) cannot be shared between EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC,"

That is no longer true. In December 2014 Amazon launched ClassicLink, which lets you add EC2-Classic instances to VPC security groups.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/classiclink-private-communi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HexrVfuIY1k&t=33m33s
How did you guys ascertain the reservation price of the customers?
Has anyone really ever been persecuted for price discrimination? (that term also confuses a lot of people.) Student and senior citizen pricing at the movies is clearly the same strategy yet no one sues AMC theaters.
Dogma Driven Development
He did nothing in public. From what I've heard he spent a lot of time puttering around the town he grew up in and painting. Maybe there'll be a show/book/whatever of them someday. Maybe not.

When he retired, he'd also shaped a generation's ideas of what a comic strip about a kid should be. Hell, of what comics should be, period - wander around a comic book convention asking people what their big influences are, and a lot of people will mention his name. He'll probably be remembered for another hundred years by anyone who cares to skim the history of the Great Comic Strips of the Twentieth Century.

You do something like that, I think you're allowed to retire and do work solely for yourself.
There is no true Scotsman!
I read this article and was just like "ya. types are important" and reflected on how I used to love Ruby, but now swear against it for serious projects. Glad to see I'm not the only one who made the analogy in their heads.

Right now though, I have to write a script to pull some crap out of an Excel file and into my database. I use Scala with the Play framework, but what a nightmare getting typed information out of an Excel sheet is. No thanks, I'll just pull it out magically with Ruby and construct the JSON requests to my real server to create the data. It's a smart business decision and I would defend it all day. I'm sure there's corollaries for "dynamic databases" such as MongoDB.

To be clear though, I'm with the grandparent. I really think decisions for MongoDB are made out of a combination of laziness and eagerness most of the time. I mean honestly, if your data is going to be relatable, why would you employ a scheme that forces you to make those relationships manually? So you go to a relational databases which ironically lacks relationships, but hey there's plenty of support and libraries that will do it for you. But really if you had to ask me my personal opinion? Graph databases where relationships are FIRST CLASS CITIZENS are typically the best for serious projects containing lots of relationships.
When there is no free variable, there is no sum, just the loop.

But you are right the the notion does not work as is because complicated subscript support is not implemented yet. But the equation is listed before the programming part is mentioned and it is an illustration of idea, so I believe it is ok.

It is not difficult to add the implementation, although it will be tedious (but still behind the surface). It is matter of how useful it is. And you are probably right that implementing a Levi-Civita syntax might be more straight forward.
A chap in our office runs to work each day, changes and leaves his damp sweaty clothes around his desk to dry. This means people give him lots of space, and practically his own office.
Elasticsearch (now Elastic) acquires Found
Doing nothing is self-evidently viable. Virtually no business transactions in the world are protected by DNSSEC today. None ever have been. The onus is on you to demonstrate that DNSSEC is viable, because "no DNS security at all" clearly does work.

You keep walking face-first into this rhetorical brick wall. If you're going to say "doing nothing isn't viable", you need to have a ready response to the extremely obvious observation that the Internet seems to function pretty OK without DNS security. It's not 1994 anymore. You can't wave your hands and suggest that the Internet is going to get more serious in 10 years and need better security. It already needs the best security it can possibly get. It's just that DNSSEC isn't part of that mix.
18th Century Taxes
One solution to damage clean up is free and available to everyone right now. It's actually more popular with the extremely poor than the affluent. It's called fasting.

http://jdmoyer.com/2012/02/01/death-will-eat-itself/

https://www.qiagen.com/us/spotlight-pages/newsletters-and-ma...
Leverage a Little Content for Big Impact: Content Marketing Made Simple
Movie theaters, theme parks, etc have all been using price discrimination based on age for years and never been prosecuted. I don't think Tinder's lawyers are afraid. They know it will cost a bit of bad press initially, but long term has little risk.
I really don't think that "Well, Russia's Doing It!" is a very good justification for clearly unethical, and probably illegal, actions.

The reason for mass surveillance is control of the populace. Mass surveillance clearly doesn't prevent terrorism: most of this 4th-Amendment-violating dragnet surveillance was in place well before the Boston Bombing, and nobody caught the Tsarnaevs.

So, I'm not a little torn, either: the CIA shouldn't be looking to crack iPhones, they should be looking to beef up iPhone security to keep those other nations from doing unethical stuff. Exploiting vulnerabilities for surveillance purposes is a bad thing all around. Close them holes!
Counterfactual. An octogenarian in an old man's body might be ready to die. An octogenarian who looks and fucks like a 25 year old? Maybe not.
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I think it is unfortunate that you leave DNSCurve at the end. I think securing the DNS is a good thing regardless.
People make this mistake all the time. The rich are paying the vast majority of all taxes paid, whether by income or property purchases. What isn't taxed is accumulated wealth and it should not be. The US has one of the most progressive systems in the world, one that harms competitiveness of businesses as well.

The simplest solution is to move from income to taxing spending. We have had the technology for tens of years where we can send people assistance, pension, and medical payments. Hence the technology to refund a percentage below the tax threshold exists.

I am loathe to use the name Fair Tax as it has been demonized by many, but note the bulk of this resistance is through political parties sponsoring groups and "think tanks" to do so. The reason is simple, a single flat/fair/etc tax on all purchases and service buys removes a lot of power from government. It would not be easy to switch too but in the long term it would remove the biggest burden to the countries economy which is the whimsy of those in charge.

Estate taxes are just evil. You got me when I earned it, how dare you take it from family just because you decide it was no longer ours once one person dies. Hence a consumption tax replacing all these taxes would be far better.
Estate tax in the US only hits the upper-middle class. The rich avoid it entirely.

What makes my blood boil is that politicians that support raising the estate tax use trusts to avoid paying it. People like the Clintons:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/wealthy-cl...

They're not alone... The Kennedys, the Pelosis, even Noam Chomsky is set up to avoid paying the estate tax!

http://www.hoover.org/research/noam-chomsky-closet-capitalis...
Seasteading FTW!
Daily chart: The market for wearable technology
And if this is the kind of problem they're wielding that power/money/prestige/knowledge to solve at 40, imagine what they could be working on at 400.

If you're going to say that people ought to keep dying, by the billions, as they are today, go ahead and say that; don't dance around it.
NASA MMS Launches This Thursday, running the open source RTEMS operating system
Is this where someone points out the more functional intermediate SSA that imperative languages often get translated into at some point during the compilation?
Xcode Compromised
Let's say you have a product search screen in your application. There's a text field for filtering on product title (WHERE title LIKE), one for filtering on UPC (WHERE upc LIKE), a couple range filters for min/max prices (WHERE price <= and/or WHERE price >=), and then on the results screen the user sort on a few different columns (ORDER BY) as well as paginate and set number of results per-page (LIMIT + OFFSET).

How exactly are you going to just write SQL if the actual query statement needs to change based on the user input? Are you going to hardcode every possible permutation, or are you going to use a query builder? Or are there some advanced Postgres features that I'm not aware of that would allow all these combinations in some kind of prepared statement?

edit: The question I'm asking is pointed towards the people who are implying that you can "just use SQL" as static statements that are not dynamically assembled. Like a static function or prepared statement that takes some parameters, and at runtime you only pass in those parameters - not rejigger the actual SQL statement fragments. Your ad-hoc query builder implementations with SQL injection vulnerabilities are not relevant to what I'm asking.
It would be great if you put more details on actual artwork - how did you make it, what tools did you use, etc...
A Startup Launching a Startup?
The business numbers from digital comics
"The old syntax was meant to be only deprecated, but it was accidentally completely removed."

How could Oracle have possibly "accidentally completely removed" the old syntax for setting a password even though it "was meant to be only deprecated", without being completely incompetent?

I can not in my wildest imagination come up with a scenario in which a competent developer could possibly "accidentally remove" something like that. If they made such a huge "accident" with that security feature, what other terrible negligent "accidents" lurk just beneath the surface of this new release of MySQL?

How can you "LOL" away such an incompetent "accident" like that?
No, it's not acceptable. I'm assuming you find the contact info by looking at interview records in the scenario you gave. You can't ever use any privileged information for personal purposes.
High scale public references and links to their presentations are maintained here: http://www.mongodb.com/mongodb-scale

I think scaling any system takes careful planning.

IMHO, this is an area where MongoDB has improved a lot in the past two years, especially with 3.0, but there is still a lot of work to do.
Okay, if you insist..

Amazon (significant amounts of the infrastructure run on Java, take a look at their jobs board: http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs/ref=j_sq_btn?jobSearchKeywords...)

Google (http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-prefer-the-Java-stack-f...)

Twitter (They started out entirely Ruby, but converted pretty much their entire stack to the JVM through use of Java and Scala, due to scaling issues http://www.wired.com/2013/09/the-second-coming-of-java/)

LinkedIn (https://engineering.linkedin.com/play/play-framework-linkedi...)

Yahoo

Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=grad&req=a0... https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=grad&req=a0...)

Salesforce (http://salesforce.careermount.com/candidate/job_search/quick...)

The list just goes on and on. It's fast (okay maybe not as fast as carefully hand-rolled C++, but used the right way it can get near to it), has lots of mature tooling, and most importantly of all is absurdly stable.

If you're worried about start up time, you're likely worrying about the wrong thing. Amazon, for example, is well known to scale up and down their infrastructure on demand, and yet they're running on Java. They wouldn't do that if application start-up time was a problem.

It's rare to see java applications that take more than 5-10 seconds to start up unless they're insanely monolithic and pulling in large numbers of libraries (aka enterprise stacks like Websphere), and once they're running you leave them running.
Java start up time should be the shortest part of the whole 'spin up a new instance and start handling requests'.
One option that's missing is "gaming", although there's some overlap with "notifications". I've heard serious interest in applications for augmented reality games and team-based games.
What do you fidget with at your desk? Scientists want to know
So true
Wow, great writing, thanks for sharing!
Some main differences:

- LLVM/Clang (it's a matter of taste, but it's also the feature :-) )

- FreeBSD Jails and Mac (These are extremely strong security features if implemented correctly. Especially jails are really undervalued/misunderstood IMHO.)

- State-of-art network stack (faster than any other BSD or Linux. Supports technologies like NetMap)

- ZFS support (important for both desktops/servers)

- PF version runs on multiple cpus (OpenBSD's version is more advanced though)

- DTrace (although not mature enough IMHO)

- Better hardware support (e.g. wifi cards)

- BHyve (virtualisation)

- Capsicum (security)

Other little things like:

- Unmapped VMIO buffers
- Variable symlinks (used under jails)

Now generally speaking, choosing an operating system due to bigotry and what-not is stupid. Most of the times, engineers go with what they need: If you need a secure bastion, OpenBSD gives you more although FreeBSD can be turned virtually impenetrable as can Linux. OpenBSD comes with more bells and whistles on this particular area though.

So all in all, it boils to what you need. The major reason why people choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD is because the 'security level' of the OS is more than acceptable while retaining a much better hardware support.
That principle (from The Mythical Man Month) applies to team size. If you have multiple independent teams competing they will not have that increased overhead.
Though still far fetched a brain transplant, or body transplant depending on your perspective, is not out of the question. Why fix all of the problems of an aging body when you can just grow a new one? It has also been suggested that a partial brain transplant may be sufficient to transfer a living mind to a new body.
Esprima 2.1 Released – Official JQuery Blog
How often do you really reuse bits of a SQL query? SQL is the language that an ORM will generate. The question is, how much work is done to avoid using SQL and is it worth it?

The only time that I've found ORMs useful for composing queries when I have to dynamically create a query at runtime based upon user input. And even in that case, today, I'd probably still just concatenate strings for a proper SQL statement.
I know. I haven't heard people using this phrase with different results either.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...

This post elaborates on the topic a bit more, and after reading it some time ago I ended up agreeing with its conclusion - that the phrase is OK from theoretical standpoint, for perfectly rational actors, but not for humans - hence the heuristic, "end does not justify the means".
We're not all on the same team. No way.

When a certain portion of the 1% seems intent on seeing the populace as cannon fodder (Kissinger's ideology), or as idiots to be manipulated into submission (Bernays's ideology), or as any of the other indsidious descriptions that the 1% use for the rest (welfare queens, leeches, etc.), we are certainly not all on team humanity.
All of their computers reminds me of 70's stereo systems and appliances. The only thing missing is some wood paneling.
Portraits of Pets and Their Owners by Zach Rose
"As a company grows, the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts is time consuming and expensive. By having desks in an open plan and telephone rooms for quiet time, the idea is that you can solve the cost and flexibility problems while still offering a quiet place to retreat if needed. From a growth perspective this is smart. If I planned to add 30 employees to our office in the next 12 months I might not have a choice otherwise."

Well said. Some people like to blame it on founders too cheap to buy decent furniture, but rearranging people every few months is time consuming and disruptive (It can also kill morale when someone loses a window or gets stuck under a vent.)
That certainly raises the question of whether we'd want to make a sharp legal distinction between violent and non-violent coercion in the specific case of rape...times when it is and isn't useful to go into a philosophical discussion.

Take it up with rayiner then. Once you stop discussing what the law says in favor of what it should say, you've already gotten into moralizing. But when it's pointed out that the moralizing is probably flawed, it's no longer the time for moral philosophy?

I.e., I need to turn off my mind the minute it goes against your emotional conclusions. "Won't someone think of the children/women?"
In my opinion, a good office should have (a) shower(s) -- unless it's right next to a gym, a spot to take naps, and a spot to take private calls. In addition of a layout fit for the way teams are organized.
I am not sure I find your syntax intuitive, but I understand that takes individual experience.

The main point (I am the author btw) is to have a lexical layer above the programming language layer, and give the programer control on how to write code that is most fit his mind. For example, how about give you the ability of use your +/+*\: when you are programming in C?

You may not buy it, but the idea is to separate the syntax layer from language layer so programmer can have a sliding context just like the way our mind deals with daily life.
Leaving one of the most successful startups in history isn’t easy.

Interesting sentence. Isn't it a bit early to say that MongoDB is "successful"?
I want some of whatever their investors are smoking.

Edit: Is it the smoke from all those dollar bills going up in those flames?
As soon as you have more then 1 app talking to your database its time to either create a common library that talks to your database that can be shared or wrap it in a service. This has nothing to do with NoSQL vs SQL. It has to do with architecture composition.

Plus your problem with checking if a field exists is because Ruby doesn't support property attributes. This is easily solved in C# using attributes.
Which you can fake in Ruby.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1085070/how-do-i-fake-c-s...

Data consistency is what your models are for. No data should be inserted before being assigned to a model.

Again it sounds like you needed a shared library or just a service wrapped around your database.
This is fascinating, but difficult to respond to because it is itself a "weird" way of seeing - it is both curiously analytical and vague in it's purpose. Which, ironically (inevitably) is exactly the kind of weirdness I (and many others here) really need to address.

Another point entirely missed in this essay is the fact that in general, rare is valuable, not bad. Even if you think the world is made of faceless corporations with insatiable appetite for people who snap together like Lego, there are always a few odd, special-purpose pieces in a Lego set. No, they don't fit in everywhere and you can't make a kit with just them, but they are badly needed.
I found many of your criticisms of DNSSEC reasonable and well-informed, but the "do nothing" part puzzled me. The information security status quo isn't exactly excellent or ideal. DNS attacks (including monitoring of DNS queries) often form a part of other attacks. Many of those attacks are perhaps best mitigated at other layers, but not all have been, and at least something like query privacy can't be.

(Yes, I know DNSSEC doesn't try to address query privacy, so that problem isn't an argument for DNSSEC itself.)