skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes and no. (That's my blog post btw.) Mongo is a young database, with some super obvious flaws and growing pains. Some of its bad rep is self-inflicted, when Mongo reps make massively overinflated claims about its reliability, scalability, and performance, and then don't back down when the entire internet laughs at them.

But there are some genuinely amazing things about MongoDB and some places where it really shines. Like flexibility -- we run over half a million different apps and therefore half a million different workloads on Mongo. Schema changes and online indexing are painless. Elections are pretty solid. And the data interface layer really can't be beat.

With the pluggable storage engine API, mongo is really growing up and becoming a real database, much like mysql did many years ago when it graduated from MyISAM to InnoDB. I'm excited about the future.
People have a blind faith in the watch guards and a natural tendency to hand them the rope necessary to be hung with.

I have a friend in the middle of a divorce. Her husband works for their cell provider. He has harassed her with allusions to "keeping tabs" on her because of his position of power.

When you point the panopticon inwards you realize just how scary unfiltered communication and location data taken out of context can be and how dangerous someone with malicious intent and access to that data can be.

No one should have that power over someone. It certainly shouldn't be consolidated into the hands' of any group of people, either.
One way I think about Clojure is as a language for writing Java macros [in the Excel sense of "macro"]. Sure it's not exactly that, and it's much more besides. Yet. it helps to have a model of Java's type system in my head because the type system leaks into interactions with Clojure. Clojure also relies on Java interop to be 'more general purpose'.

Clojure's documentation reflects the decision to target Clojure at the big fat segment of software projects. Not fresh faced grads, but grey hairs. Not pythonistas but Lispers. Better than hyperspec, not better than Racket.

The reason it has grown is because it focused on solving real business problems rather than being beginners friendly. The tradeoffs are consistently in the direction of what will make Clojure better for experienced programmers.
Your comments in this thread continue to be rude and judgmental. Telling the moderator that they are being overly sensitive is not a good plan, and violates the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, particularly in "Be civil"
The latter is somewhat true, and probably unavoidable at this point. "The cat is out of the bag", so to speak--markets can't just go back. The problem is that the incentives are so wildly disproportionate. If a really smart guy works for the SEC or some surveillance body, he might $200k a year. That same really smart guy might make $200 MILLION trading. It has to be awfully damned unlikely to not choose the latter. And in reality, you're probably pulling $100k somehow or another while you wait.

With respect to the idea that this guy is the culprit, that's literally laugh-out-loud funny. It's possible he was spoofing, etc., even with decent size. But the clearing firm (Hi, MF!) controls the throttles on those pipes. But there is what is called "sponsored direct access" in these markets, and that basically means the clearer wants your business enough you can just hook up directly so you can go really fast, and they (the clearer) will just pretend that they're looking at your stuff.
Yes and no. Though I don't disagree with any of the criticisms or other comments at this level, for some of us MongoDB has been pretty good in production and we haven't experienced data loss. It all depends on your use case.

My first experience with it was for a social game running off of 3 mongo servers in a replica set & here at a large healthcare company we use it for several internal CRUD applications (again in 3-server replica sets) which we continue to iterate. In these use cases, Mongo's flexibility and ease of making changes trumped it's shortcomings. My understanding is that many social games still use Mongo to store player data as our studio was told to use it by a large publisher.

My take is that it's good for building prototypes and it's pretty flexible to both change & migrate data in and out & Javascript devs pick it up relatively quickly. But I also think one should be well aware of it's shortcomings and be careful not to use it where those things are of importance. More often than anything else, I recommend PostgreSQL when other people ask for a general-use db but I'd likely would pick up Mongo myself simply for speed of development.

Lastly, being part of the "MEAN stack," we can point junior devs & interns to one of the many books that cover the stack & they can learn best practices get up to speed quickly. There's an advantage to having books & a slew of SO answers to refer to in that other devs aren't pulled off of their work to teach. We literally had interns committing code on Day 1 of their jobs last summer as they came in having read up on our stack.

Regarding claims MongoDB has made, which I've only been made aware of the last two days, I don't think there's any defending that & it makes my itch to checkout rethinkdb a bit stronger than it was 2 days ago.
10-tonne fatberg removed from west London sewer
Hello from Messenger
Ask HN: How to evangelize your startup idea amidst overwhelming negativity
I read a lot on HN that talking to lots of people about your startup idea is great for a lot of reasons (making connections, learning from folks who understand the market better, finding people with similar interests etc.). I agree with this. However, what do you do when a vast majority of the people you talk to offer nothing but negative comments?

Some background:
* I do not believe my startup idea is terrible, but just for argument sake I would like to hear your thoughts with the assumption that the idea isn't terrible.

* I dont talk to just anyone, I mostly speak to community organizers (meetups etc), mentors at incubators/accelerators, and a few high net worth folks.

* I find maybe 70% of the time the subject doesn't fully understand the pitch before dishing out the negativity - I accept some fault here, grooming the pitch is a constant learning experience but maybe I expected that if you don't understand something you ask more questions as opposed to making negative comments.

* For those who care, examples of negative comments: "you're too late to market", "company xyz already does this", "nobody is going to pay for this", the list goes on.

* I am a software developer based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (if you don't know where that is, Shopify is our golden child)

* I have had lots of prior failed attempts, most of which never made it to market. I have never sold any. (This is the main reason why I try to talk to lots of people so I learn more)

To be clear none of the negative stuff deters me, and there is always something to learn, but I sometimes wonder: why bother pushing hard to talk to folks in search of insight when it seems like a largely discouraging experience? And what is the alternative if any?

I look forward to hearing your responses HN Community!
Show HN: Mortgage Refinance Calculator
I somehow got stuck upgrading from Rails 3 to Rails 4. Nightmare...

I've been through 5 Rails upgrades. Rails 2 to Rails 3 was a nightmare...

Rails does not scale well with complexity & is a pain to maintain...

There are a number of reasons for that. Rails started off favoring syntactic sugar over architectural integrity. They are gradually iterating toward a solid architecture. However, that required some significant api changes, which causes upgrade pain.

Also, the prevalence of monkey-patching (largely due to an unsound & overly complicated architecture), exasperated these issues.

Rails architecture is still overly complicated & misses the mark, IMO.

DHH's infamous "golden path" direction put the blame on the developers, when Rails itself had some major architectural flaws.

Rails Routes + Controllers are horrible. Why do we want an extra level of indirection? Sinatra/Express.js are easier to reason about RESTfully.

Asset Pipeline is horrible. The Node.js ecosystem (i.e. browserify) is much better. Client/Server separation of architecture scales in complexity more readily than the Rails monolith monstrosity.

I'm kindof bummed that Rails became so big. The "Rails Way", while being a step forward from what was there before, became too prevalent; sucking up too much mindshare; inhibiting further evolution of the broader ecosystem.

It's time we let Rails slowly die. There are many better libraries & frameworks out there.
Yeah, I've always been of the mindset that until your programs get over 1000 lines of code, you probably don't need OOP.

Thanks for the pip3 tip, I'll post it on the website as I get content up.
> Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during investigations.

Doesn't it also make it hard for terrorists to access the authorities' materials as well? A tool is a tool.
I'm going to stick with this comment style:

function initializeDevices(c) {
// initialize the necessary devices:
// listener, translator, etc
c.go();
}

initializeDevices(c); // this call cannot be moved down

bool ans = process_test_request();

if (ans)
report_success();
Hey guys,

I just built this refinance calculator after reviewing what's currently available. On thing I felt is missing from current refi calculators is an automated calculation of your remaining loan balance based on your original terms and the month/year you took out the loan (assuming you've stuck to scheduled payments). It's also mobile friendly.

Really interested in hearing feedback and what can be improved. Thanks!
Charlemagne didn’t know how to read for most of his life, and was studying assiduously in order to become literate at the time of his death; nowadays that would be unthinkable. But today we’re in the same situation with most of our political leaders and programming: Obama was able to remember at least that bubble sort was the wrong way to sort a million integers, but didn’t even come close to the constant-time radix sort you’d want to use (if we’re talking about fixnums, not bignums). A lot of people will use this situation to argue that dictatorship is better than democracy, since Singapore has dictatorship and smart leaders, while the democratic world generally has programming-illiterate leaders (except Merkel, apparently), but that seems to be more a coincidence than anything else — Lee’s level of competence is as much an anomaly among dictators as it would be among democratic leaders.

Political leadership (whether in a democracy or in a dictatorship) is about persuading people to cooperate with each other, not about reading and writing, except perhaps as a means to that persuasion, and not about programming, either. But the extent to which you can rightly aim your cooperative efforts depends crucially on your understanding of the world in which they will play out, and when it comes to that, political leaders lacking basic informatics competence are as mentally crippled in the 21st century as an illiterate political leader like Charlemagne would have been in the 19th. Nobody really occupies the role of “history’s actors” that Karl Rove believed he was in. We are all constrained to be in the reality-based community, or fail as he did.
Some historical context for considering why bills proposing to compel greater collaboration or coordination or cooperation from companies storing private communications might be problematic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
Hadoop is insane. The elephant is fitting. Is it really the best choice, or has someone done something cleaner in golang or c++11?
To strain the analogy further, the employees have rebelled and no longer listen to the board of directors, and they've limited the hiring pool to people just like them.
Author here. Yes, I can confirm that if you order the ebook now you will get the full ebook. The physical books have also been printed, so they'll probably get shipped before the 25th (don't quote me on that).
God yeah, the write locks have been a pain in my ass for so long. Fortunately the storage engine API delegates locking to the engine, so we get document level locking in RocksDB or WT.
A legend at one company about 5 years ago is that the company's next world-shaking product was being built partially with a single computer that was shipped around from office to office, because no one knew how to build the build environment again. Again this was circa 2010. :-)
This is pretty cool for projects where I want to register the domain, but don't have any content yet.

But once I'm ready to move to my own server, there should be a way to update DNS records (and manage renewals).

I wish this were a feature of an existing registrar, than a product itself.
Generally, yes, because hell-banning is for trolls, bots, and those who routinely make bad posts. However, sometimes someone gets hell-banned for one extremely down-voted comment, but in general are making decent comments. It's a common courtesy to inform these people if you run across it.
It seems like the real fix would be to have a cancellation fee. If an order is canceled within 60 seconds, penalize the trader .1% of the total amount of the order. That would make all this gamesmanship unprofitable, and the order book would actually be a collection of people wanting to buy and sell shares.

It seems very wrong to me to make an activity feasible, and allow it to be profitable, but then arbitrarily drop the hammer of criminal penalties when a trader crosses some murky line.
> If Wikipedia charged for editing, it also wouldn't exist.

While I understand the obvious intuition behind your suspicion, consider that people pay money to participate in running races (which also feature volunteers who donate their time, and spectators who don't pay anything).

If there was no such thing in the world as a runner-funded running race, you might think, "come on, who would pay to run in such a thing, when you can just put on your shoes and run for free?" Yet it turns out that people do!

There are incentives: competition, having your time publicly noted. There is also the intangible benefit of just being part of the event. The entry fees are justified as paying for the expenses, and charities. (Some races have cash prizes for the winners, though obviously that's not an incentive for anyone who has no such hope.)

It's also a matter of how much. If the site asked people to pay $100 a year for accounts, then that would likely be dead in the water. At $5 per year: definite maybe! There could be built-in incentives. The best editors could get cash rewards, so end up in the green.

> What actually surprised me about your comments is that you seem to show a money-centric view, i.e. the only things that are worth something are those someone paid for.

My view isn't that extreme, but I believe that connecting some systems with money in the right way can fix some of their problems.
I think the majority of people 55+ don't really understand what these bills actually do.

https://www.senate.gov/CRSReports/crs-publish.cfm?pid=%260BL...

> The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 113th Congress was 57.0 years; of Senators, 62.0 years.

Literally, every person I know that is a "oh, this is okay with [insert cybersecurity bill]" freaks out when I point out how I could find out X about them without knowing them and show them how.
Hum... No. It's trivial to use those scripts to do all kinds of harm. A strong passphrase only protects against this one example.

For example, it won't protect against stealing the .ssh folder and installing a keylogger at your computer.
Researchers Uncover Method to Detect NSA 'Quantum Insert' Hacks
"And on top of that developers don't necessarily know how to set up a PyPi or a RPM index or whatever so that the storage is reliable and you've got the right security settings or whatever else. (I know I sure don't and I'm not really "

Setting up RPM is shockingly easy. It can get more complex, but the basic system is:

REPOBASE=/srv/www/htdocs/
createrepo -v $REPOBASE
gpg -a --detach-sign --default-key "Sign Repo" $REPOBASE/repodata/repomd.xml
gpg -a --export "Sign Repo" > $REPOBASE/repodata/repomd.xml.key

That will create a repo from all the .rpm files in the REPOBASE. Also you will of course need a GPG key pair, but that can be generated with `gpg --gen-key` where you give it a description of "Sign Repo" (or change the above commands to the key description you used).

Then you get to decide on the deployment machine if you want to trust the repo (or you don't trust any and import the key via some other process, aka direct gpg import).

Of course you can find a bunch of more detailed explanations with $SEARCHENGINE, but if it takes more than a day to figure it out, your doing something wrong.

Building a set of RPM's isn't that much harder if you have a proper build system. But these are the kinds of things you give up when you decide to grab the latest immature hotness created by someone on their day off.
The New Neocities
I can use these apps but in order to be able to recommend it to my friends as an app that can replace Whatsapp or Viber, it should have a comparable UI/UX. I too was concerned about their source availability approach. What will you suggest that meets these criteria?
It's also the recommended way to install Kubernetes.
I agree, I think accessibility made it popular. Security and ease of use are usually opposing forces.

The article has some interesting discussion points. I don't understand the absolute fear of | bash installers. It's open source, read the script. That's the argument people make for `./configure; make; make install` programs. I think it's because it's new, or it's too easy.

But the article does have a point about trusted containers. But security isn't a download or a product anyway. Security isn't even guaranteed.
Go forth…and automate – 5 Key Components of ARA
EFF: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
Go for C++ developers (video and slides)
> I would even argue that some anime easily top non-animated
> TV shows. It baffles me that so many TV shows are critically
> acclaimed for things anime has done a decade ago.

From one fan to another, I'm curious: what things are you specifically thinking of?

For me, one of anime's most engrossing qualities was the multi-episode stories. Back in the 90s there weren't a lot of American TV shows (outside of soap operas) that had the multi-episode story arcs that were common in anime; typically everything was always wrapped up in a single episode.

Today, the American TV shows with the most rabid followings (like Game of Thrones) have latched on to exactly that addictive quality. I'm not entirely sure we can give anime credit for innovating here, though - after all, American soap operas were doing multi-episode stories since literally the dawn of television.

> Ghibli accomplishes what Disney/Pixar seems to have forgotten:
> Creating a story that is entertaining (and enlightening) to both adults and children

I'm surprised you named Pixar here. I think their movies have almost all been great for both kids and adults.
T.H. Tsien, 105, Dies; Scholar of Chinese Books Rescued 30,000 of Them
> This is mainly advocated because subclassing core classes (e.g. Array) can lead to weird behaviour

No. It is advocated because it produces simpler code in the long term in most cases. It is a quite different question to inheritance from core classes.
Thanks for that snapshot. Unfortunately it's missing a lot of the content that was available there. It's only around 1/3 of the full content.
There is also _addcarry_u32 and _subcarry_u32
Thank goodness for Matt Levine. I read three other articles on this earlier today that didn't even raise the questions that he answered.
Christ it's annoying enough just using a credit-card to fix bent pins. Hats off for reconnecting them!
GitLab engineer here. Let me know if you have any questions.
I'm sure it was a collection of Sarao's that did this, rather than Sarao alone. He probably just stood out and was easiest to prosecute. Hopefully more prosecutions are coming.
The current state of the art prevents this technique from working on Sky's highest value HD channels. (HD channels require a newer set top box with a later generation of decryption abilities, and these ensure that any liftable keystream is specific to that one receiver, so it has no value if distributed, and no ability to activate other receivers.)
This is the price of devops.
That is horrible and I'm sorry for your friend.
Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
The appropriate question shouldn't be "Why does Africa have so many languages?" but rather "Why do developed nation-states have so few?"

High levels of synchronic linguistic diversity should be considered the pre-modern norm, even aside from the usual troubles of distinguishing languages from dialects. And nation-states are very common these days.

The answer is probably mostly language standardization, promotion of elite lects, network effects, and official promotion of the standard language, often alongside the abuse of minority language communities.
I dunno, we know they like Italian cartoons, westerns and opera, so why not?
Paranoia is always influential, but it's not all-powerful and it's not valued over everything else like you imply. Reality, and education about that reality, is also very influential. That's not wishful thinking. Look at cannabis legalization and gay marriage.
> Not sure why this guy is being prosecuted.

You have to start somewhere / make an example of someone. Lone wolves trading from their houses have fewest friends and are easiest targets. Hopefully they go after bigger fish as well.
You... probably aren't the book's intended audience. :)

But seriously, Python makes easy things easy. In bash, just to extract a substring you need to do something like echo someletters_12345_moreleters.ext | cut -d'_' -f 2 That's not very beginner-friendly.
Command line is modern day voodoo. There are ton of commands, each with a specific use, each with own their specific incantation, which can mixed in extremely powerful ways. But my theory is the main reason people would prefer not use it, is that improper usage can be harmful and sometimes destructive.

The same reason people prefer to use garbage collected and dynamically typed programming languages.
If it is wasteful, I wonder how much is caused by corn subsidies.
This is a good example of how competition is contribution.
Belle Gibson claimed to cure cancer with diet and lifestyle, admits fraud
This is also pretty much what happened with OpenSSL. Which is why I'm amused by the holier-than-thou attitudes in here.
Tesla to Announce Home Battery This Month
> The RocksDB engine developed by Facebook engineers is one of the fastest, most compact and write-optimized storage engines available.

Will it fix MongoDB's data loss issues? I'm hoping that is what "write-optimized" is partly implying.
+1.
Agreed. I'm tired to read about startups/success stories/failures.
Nowadays most of younger generations' Chinese use 3 letter names again.
This crashed my browser. Firefox 37.0.2.
>I would have liked to see more analysis on the ultimate reason for the lack of demand for workers.

The simple answer is: because state economic policy has been systematically configured to keep inflation low and asset values high. Any economist can tell you that low inflation and high asset values, as goals, conflict with full employment, and tend to suppress the price of labor. Somehow, it has become a Thing You Don't Say to actually admit this fact, because that would mean low wages are a social problem rather than an individual moral failure.