skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the point you're trying to make?
One could use your argument for any single entity in the world. "I'm not implying that Coca Cola's CEO does or would put poison on the beverages, only that some non-null set of employees there, probably including the CEO if he were really determined to do so, could."
Replace Google/review private email with anything and you'll have a meaningful sentence: Obama/release nukes, kindergarten teachers/child abuse, etc, etc, etc...
TSA response to posted training manual
Great, with Apple, Mozilla and now Google innovating in the browser sphere, it looks like browser will be evolving at a much more rapid pace.

Gah, let's hope Microsoft gets some vision for IE too. (or ditch it like Bing ditched Live)
Just worked through the first two sections, really enjoying the balance between 'learning' and 'doing' so far.
If HIV infected surgeons are allowed to operate, why shouldn't HIV infected persons be allowed to act in a porn movie?
I guess an example of what I am talking about is a user's profile. Say I have a user account, which has a profile. That profile data is stored in a NoSQL document store.

Now I want to get all of the profiles that are over 30 and match them with (for example, I'm reaching here) interests that are indexed by age bracket. How do I find and match my over 30 users with their interests?

The example itself is a poor one but illustrates my confusion at how to go about building an entire app in a NoSQL db.
I cannot thank you enough for this comment. I've been hearing non-sense comments over this quote for a week now, including the original post on this thread.
It has also lead to more software than would exist otherwise.
I am sure they do. Ever since the "You should follow me on twitter" post (http://www.abtests.com/test/19013/other-for-dustin-curtis), I see that phrase everywhere.

It could just be that I am noticing the phrase since I read about it, but it would be a strange coincidence to see the exact wording so often.
I upvoted this article because I think there are some neat lessons in it about 'cooperative entrepreneurship' for lack of a better term. I am surprised, for instance, that more groups of American startups do not self organize into the kinds of 'business cooperatives' that you see a lot in China.

Having mentioned that, I understand that this guy is cherry picking facts to fit his particular world view, or narrative. Liberal and Conservative academics are known to do this in their work. Especially the ones who work at think tanks dedicated to espousing a given world view.

I think it is important, however, that we are able to read through a lot of these works picking out useful lessons. Seeing an example of farmers (entrepreneurs) working together, and what that model eventually morphed into industrially in places like Ningbo is useful. I have always wished for an in depth analysis of these formal and informal Chinese business structures. There is probably something we can learn from that.
Ask HN: Access alternatives?
A friend of mine is computer savvy, but not a developer. She helps run a nonprofit organization with a bi-monthly gathering; it has an entry charge that is cheaper for members of the organization. She wants a way to keep track of attendance, memberships, renewals, and so forth, for the eventual purpose of doing some basic trend analysis.

When she said she was thinking of using Access, I cringed and reflexively barked, "ACCESS IS EVIL!" Wisely discarding my knee-jerk evangelism, she asked me for alternatives. After Googling around for a while, I didn't really find anything that seemed like it would fill the same niche for her.

The web developer in me is thinking, "She just needs a dead simple CRUD app, like rails on top of a simple sqlite scehma." But, that's probably outside the scope of her computer skills to set up. Is there actually something out there that I can suggest to her without implicitly obliging myself to weeks or months of here-and-there tech support?
You are absolutely right. You cannot expect to be able to replicate someone else results. Results are very dependent to your business and context.

We at ABTests.com are simply trying to get more people to incorporate A/B Testing into their development process.

Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it.
The main reason is that almost all flash websites are a huge pain in the ass to use, you can't link within them, you (usually) can't copy text out of them, and they generally put whiz-bang visuals above the users' ability to, y'know, use them.
It's been in and out of print on and off for years, I buy a few copies whenever it's back at the regular price. I've given away 6 copies now to various people.
As others have said, no sane country will permit China to outsource this problem to it.
Man loses $127 million
in one year! thats ~350K a DAY!!!

certainly makes for a good pick-up story...
From your link (Mapleoin); Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting NEW phenomenon.

The green energy topic is 100% political and it is not a NEW phenomenon. It is a push point for the Democratic Party in the United States and the opposing party is actively campaigning against it every day for months on end. It is one of the main contention points between the parties.

It seems as off topic to me as if someone were continually posting articles about how Sarah Palins choice of handbag and dresses affect her media coverage and saying it is posted because it might satisfy someone’s intellectual curiosity.

A single post by a poster on a non IT topic in the forum might be viewed as possibly satisfying one’s intellectual curiosity, but if you look at the posters history you will see a distinct pattern focusing on this one political hot button issue. So since it is political and is not a NEW phenomenon it seems it falls under an Off-Topic Political post.

If it were an article regarding the code to do whatever for the wind power station, or IT hiring patterns in the green industry that would seem on topic.
There's also the notion that people pick up in grad school that any job outside of research is somehow failure.
Pants on Fire - Why Buyers aren't Liars
By "telephony," he is referring to "in particular, dedicated lines and switched services."

Note that he isn't saying that mobile devices are a fad, but that the iPhone in particular is a fad. He is recommending not to develop apps for it. As we have seen on countless articles on HN, betting on a single app's success is like playing the lottery.
Yeah, well Google Earth isn't. This is where Microsoft and Apple have a clue. Let sysadmins have a central internal update server that can be controlled.
OpenOffice has something similar, I think.
"If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing that in the first place."

maybe != definitely.
I'm sorry but can you tell me how asymptomatic Herpes has a negative effect on one's life? Most people who have Herpes don't know it. Frankly the scare over Herpes and HPV has a lot more to do with shaming people who are sexually active.

I don't think you realize exactly how common these "diseases" are. Roughly 50% of the population carries HPV, sure some strains are linked to cancer but it's quite insignificant compared to the number of people who actually carry the virus. As for Herpes, for it to cause a problem you must be symptomatic, which as I stated earlier the vast majority of the population is not. To use these relatively harmless viruses as a way to scare people away from sex is disingenuous and dishonest.

Whether or not it is OK to be promiscuous in the modern world is a moral discussion, it is perfectly possible to be healthy and have a lot of partners.
> Building a car

You would be incorrect - having worked in the industry for a short while, I can attest that modern automobiles are at least an order of magnitude more complex than something from, say, the 60s.

They still operate on the same mechanical principles, but we exploit these in vastly more complex and efficient ways. If you want to make this argument, then you also have to accept that computers are "just" current running across silicon.

No, the reason why we get away with this is because replacement is easy. You get a car right the first time because a large recall can cost in the hundreds of millions, and be logistically impossible to execute. For us it's a simple "Hey! We has update! Yes/No?" dialog box.
I wonder how quickly $20 will be way too low of a bid.
He said there was "only one major outbreak." I don't know what they consider major or minor, but that does not mean there have not been other minor outbreaks and I am scared to think how many people are going to die because of that "only one major outbreak." I think when you are talking about AIDS, "only one major outbreak" is a rather dubious safety record.

I think that is better than any college campus. I have no been aware of any major AIDS outbreaks in college campuses in the last 10 years.
The game would be significantly changed if employers stopped offering it as part of a benefit package. I'm sure the housing hazard insurance industry would look much different if it was a standard employment benefit.

Ultimately, insurance of any kind is a financial risk mitigation pool. The financial risks are spread over those in the pool instead of just one. Everyone in the pool shares the cost of everyone else. I don't want the government creating a super large public pool that I am required to pay for, even if I'm allowed to choose not to be a member of it.
In addition, it's not as if those other activities actually exhibit many fewer mistakes than software does. Cars get recalled all the time for small things that slipped through the design and testing phases. Your average book has a number of typos on first printing. The difference is that cars are usually designed with enough redundant features that they can deal with minor flaws and book typos inconsequential enough that people are willing to accept them without any coaxing.

Software is different not just because it is more complex, but because computers are much more finicky than roads and people. A logic flaw in software can cost millions; an equivalent flaw in a book will likely never be noticed.
I appreciate how polite your title is.
Does the WebSocket spec allow for gzip/deflating streams as well? I can't see anywhere if it does or not.
Do you RAID them? What size instances do you use? EBS seems susceptible to poor performance when there is contention on your instance's shared network card or contention on the EBS device itself.

Vacuums use sequential IO, so it makes sense that you max out pretty quickly.
'this stuff' := The Singularity - The idea that we will be able to design systems with enough 'intelligence' (a difficult term to define itself) as to be imbued with novel creativity that surpasses all human understanding...in turn, these systems create ever more advanced creative systems until (insert your dis/utopian idea of preference here).
I'd love to see an auction for ad space once they're saturated.
Islamic countries have already had this problem - what do you do when rich, powerful men have 4 wives, and female children are lower priority for food, medical care, etc, so there are already fewer of them and extra-marital sex is frowned on?

Well, many of those young men band together and go and live in the mountains... We call them Taliban.
Chirp, chirp, chirp. (That's the sound of crickets).
I heard about that, but, is it actually any better than MS Access, or is it just an alternative for an alternative's sake? I'll have to keep Googling...
They should be. But producers should be able to choose not to hire them.
Doesn't work in Opera. The background image appears and the music starts playing, but that's it. In FF i noticed a loading progress bar and it proceeded to a welcome screen and I can play it as expected.
I can abandon Flash sockets if this becomes mainstream.
Just tried Crystal Galaxy out on IE7 (at work) and it works great. I actually didn't expect it to work at all but I was impressed.
I'd hand code a tagging system. I'd create arbitrary tag/category pairs, associate them with users and sort them into persistent maps stored by user, category and tag.

Ultimately, if you want to add relational features to a non-relational store, you need to model the relations explicitly rather than relying on the underlying features of the store.
I've had the opportunity to work on much smaller 'elite' teams before (7-10 people), and if I didn't have to eat and pay rent I'd do it for free.

The amount of productivity, support, and "you grok me"-ness is so extreme that it's really a wonder to behold. As a regular dev now I really do look back on those days and wish I can do it all over again.
Susan Boyle and Entrepreneurship...
that entirely depends on the precautions taken.
I agree, but I'd rather have users get some vision. You'd be surprised how many people still use IE6, even though Microsoft wants them to upgrade. Less-savvy users don't switch unless:

1. They have to (meaning their current methods no longer do anything or the software or hardware no longer works).

2. Someone more savvy does it for them and teaches them the new software. Usually this happens after #1.

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's much we can do about this kind of user. We shouldn't (and won't) have to hold ourselves back because they refuse to upgrade.
"The largest number of overseas Chinese, most of whom were refugees from China, resided in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and China’s first lesson in global exchange was from nearby Hong Kong. Before communist rule, the inhabitants of the capital of Guangdong (adjacent to Hong Kong), were considered city slickers, while Hong Kong was full of country bumpkins. As Hong Kong surged, several million Guangdongese escaped to Hong Kong, where they participated in its economic miracle. Friends and families lined up in long queues in Guangzhou to receive hand-me-downs from their Hong Kong friends and relatives. Young urban women wanted to marry only men with overseas family relations.15 When the Chinese government first set up Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), Zhuhai (near Macau), Shantou (the hometown of Hong Kong refugees), and Xiemen (near Taiwan), the Chinese borrowed their new rules and regulations directly from Hong Kong. Guangdong entrepreneurs copied the Hong Kong model of 'Front Shop, Back Factory,' while others set up joint factories together with Hong Kong small business owners."

I watched this process occurring in the 1980s, with the later participation of business persons from Taiwan (noted later in the submitted article). Having a culturally similar alternative model (Hong Kong and Taiwan with different political rules and different economic structures) was crucial in helping China make a smoother transition to sound rather than irrational economic policies than Russia has been able to achieve thus far.
Hopefully soon!
"Americans let the Patriot Act be passed into law, not Google. Stop blaming Google and start blaming your democratically elected government"

Just like Google is putting their lobbyists where their interests are in cases where government intervention (or lack of it) is hurting their business (net neutrality, open mobile applications, visas, wireless spectrum, etc), they should also fight against the Patriot Act.

If people don't feel comfortable using Google's products due to fear of government spying, they will restrict their search, clean their cookies, block adsense/analytics, etc, all of which will impact Google financially.
Thats my first gem ;) Thanks for the help!
It's not obvious to me that this is necessarily a good place to advertise. Reddit's community is very fickle.
Hi, which demo were you trying? and what version of Opera and FF?
Because the surgeons aren't spraying their bodily fluids into you.
Another thing to consider is that EBS offers snapshot backups and is therefore not functionally equivalent to the ephemeral disk which is not durable.

Ephemeral disks offer more predictable performance, especially on the largest instances, however they will not provide the random iops of a raid set of EBS volumes.
> Do you RAID them?

No

> What size instances do you use?

Databases are m1.xlarge.
While I empathize with the difficulties she surmounted, I think it not good to be ashamed of where you came from. To the contrary, attaining the recognition that she did starting with the humble beginnings should be something to feel proud of.
While I agree with you that the real solution is better privacy protections enshrined in law, I have to point out that you can't really derive an "ought" from an "is". In other words, the fact that corporations are amoral doesn't mean that Google ought to be amoral too, especially given their claim that they "do no evil". I think that's the author's point: he's not saying that they're doing anything illegal, just that they're failing to live up to the standards they've set for themselves.
NoSQL and the future of cloud databases
I've seem that too. Non-savvy users can and will update their MSN-messenger client if it stops working, for instance.
The financial risks are spread over those in the pool instead of just one. Everyone in the pool shares the cost of everyone else. I don't want the government creating a super large public pool that I am required to pay for, even if I'm allowed to choose not to be a member of it.

This uniquely American attitude is honestly one of the very few reasons I occasionally consider moving back to Britain.
Most IE6 installations are in corporate environments where IT doesn't want to switch because it will break internal applications.
But what if you're selling the shiny new object of the moment?!
Ya, I think there are definitely cases where it becomes very burdensome to use a NoSQL setup. Certainly anything where you are wanting to do analysis in the DB doesn't work very well.

In your particular case I guess you'd have to do two queries. One to grab the users in the range you have, then another to grab the interests for that range. One interesting bit is that you could fire those off in // if you so wished, then do the merge.

As I said earlier, it does kind of require you to really think through your access patterns ahead of time before going the NoSQL route. And at least in SimpleDB there is no doubt not being able to query across 'tables' can be a big letdown. But really it is those kinds of queries that eventually turn into problems, so to some extent it just forces you to think of the right way of doing things first. (I know, and agree that optimize last is usually a better strategy)
It never gets saturated; "advertisers get a proportional amount of exposure based on how much they bid compared to everyone else" [http://tjantunen.com/2009/11/26/reddit-homepage-advertising-...]
I'm pointing out a double-entendre, not making an "argument".

But, the double-entendre can also serve as a reminder that when you choose Google as a webmail provider, you have also chosen a set of people for whom your communication is potentially transparent. Yes, when you choose to drink Coca-Cola you've chosen a set of people who can potentially adulterate your food; that's a fair analogy.

Those reminders alone aren't anything profound, except to emphasize: pay attention to the values and incentives of those you delegate these powers. Google occasionally seems casual or dismissive about privacy concerns, as with Schmidt's recent statement. Until something blows up on them, they actually make more money (and more friends in government) by being lax about privacy protections.
If you want me to buy something, I want a queue, damn it
Good article and quantified my own take, making me feel justified for setting up RAID0. Lately, I have spent 5 to 10 hours a week doing setup/experiments on EC2 + EBS (about half on customer projects, and about half for my own stuff). I expect (hope!) that this time spent per week will decrease drastically since although I have been having a lot of fun, this is time spent not doing development.

I continue to be a big fan of Heroku because it saves me so much time, but I have been having limited success getting customers to go with Heroku - they seem to want to pay for custom EC2 setups.

BTW, one huge advantage of running on EC2 is that it is so easy to run an old version of a system to test against. I moved my own reserved instance from booting on an ephemeral drive (out of S3) to booting off of EBS. I only deployed what I currently need, and will always have the old version around to test against, check a bootup script, etc.
This makes less sense since the parent fixed his spelling error.
Even people who do have an intellectual understanding of the immune system (for example, these researchers) can't tell you what level of exposure is optimal.
IBM's Chris Valesek explains a complex Win32 heap corruption attack
The Psychology of Climate Change Denial
You have a point. I am not an expert on the topic, but it seems to me that an asymptomatic HSV carrier cannot infect anyone and, thus, there's no health problem, and no negative effect on one's life.

Yes, it's possible to have many sexual partners and be healthy. One only needs to compare the rates of HSV and other STD's in Sweden (where sex education is serious) to places like rural U.S. (where religion, not common sense, dominates).

Yes, there's a stigma associated with HSV and other similar virus. Epstein-Barr causes mononucleosis, but there's less stigma associated with it, perhaps because it's the "kiss disease", and kissing is apparently more innocent than fornication. On the other hand, I think stigmas are there for a reason. A legacy of a not so distant past where STD's where non-curable and non-treatable. Promiscuity is a moral issue, so I won't discuss it. I think one's sex life is better without any haunting STD's, and that's why I think it's not responsible to say that herpes is totally kosher. If one catches it, it's not the end of the world, but it's not a pleasant experience either.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

No. Consensus is invoked when science becomes a political issue. This is because politicians and their voters do not have the time or the inclination to examine data. Instead, the battle is a political one where the playing field is about who has more authority.

In political issues (evolution, global warming) politicians (and scientists that are political) try to use the authority of science, not the science itself.
> I don't want the government creating a super large public pool that I am required to pay for, even if I'm allowed to choose not to be a member of it.

This may seem innocuous to Americans, but for us Canadians this sentence epitomizes why American health care is in the mess it is today. The lack of concern for your fellow man is disconcerting at best - and based on people I've talked to here in the US people generally don't feel that other people being sick and dying will negatively affect them.

IMHO this is the big difference: in socialized medicine countries we acknowledge that when a large swathe of the population goes without basic medical care, we all lose - lost productivity, general misery, etc. There's at least the general notion of paying up "for the greater good".

In America I get the feeling it's more treated as "meh, maybe you should work harder". The level of apathy demonstrated for people less fortunate is frankly the one thing that has shocked me ever since moving here, and nowadays is part of my "definition" of the American consciousness. It's always someone else's problem, not our collective problem.
I know that this is nitpicking, but it's highly doubtful that some random Obama staffer could just launch nukes willy-nilly. Actually, on that matter, it would probably be an order of magnitude more difficult for Coka-Cola to get away with poisoning cokes than for Google reading private emails.

Actually, I'm not nitpicking, I agree with the first guy. If Google were to violate out privacy in such a way, it's quite possible that we would never find out.