metamemetics

Well my platform is n number of $20 linodes to start. I'm clustering the python application across them using uwsgi+nginx (all I have to do is add an IP address in the config to scale), it's going to be a given that I shard the database across them as well. If you feel I should avoid Mongo would you recommend Cassandra instead?

Regardless, I think my initial question regarding when to denormalize data applies to any database including scaled MySQL, but perhaps was a better question for stackoverflow.

>Please ask yourself why.

Looking for a way to hands-free scale very cheaply without vendor lockin. Would be nice if I can simply add another machine to the database to the cluster. And not have to generate the ids in the application layer, use hashing algo to select correct machine, and have everything stop working when a single database goes down. Seems like it should be a solved problem by now. Investigating new tech won't set me back much time, and my MySQL queries aren't going to disappear if I don't like it. Furthermore looking at large sites such as Flickr that massively scaled MySQL it seems like they stopped using its relational features anyway.

I am investigating replacing MySQL with MongoDB in my model layer for my next prototype.

My mind is still thinking in 3NF though. I understand dernormalization and avoiding joins will be useful from a performance standpoint. However I am unsure when to either go ahead and include a foreign key, retrieve it and perform a second query from the application layer, and when to go ahead and duplicate\embed all the field data. I'm leaning towards just making 2 simple sequential key lookup queries, the 2nd on the retrieved foreign key, rather than duplicating fields everywhere and keeping track of massively cascading changes. Instead of performing 1 MySQL Join. Although I usually think in terms of minimizing roundtrips to the database server.

Wondering if anyone has a heuristic for this or suggested reading?

Do HNers still watch TV? I stopped paying for TV ~ 2 years ago and find it mildly nauseating when I visit relatives and they want to have it on in the background.

Anyone engaged in military\defense contracting is a legitimate target of war under the Geneva convention.

> wealth would be 'the ability to follow curiosities and interests, whatever they may be.'

How would you differentiate between the terms wealth, freedom, and happiness (or do you consider them interchangeable)?

I think from those 3, 'wealth' has the heaviest connotation of objective comparability and applicability to organizations in addition to individuals. (ex. a wealthy company or a wealthy country)

Wealth is the ability of an entity to create change.

Skills you know, your business network, your emotional support network, assets you can exchange.

People with great wealth can affect the world in profoundly positive or negative ways. In other words, wealth is closely tied to the notion of power.

A member of congress who has relatively low networth could have as much financial influence as Bill Gates. While this power is not as liquid or easy to exchange as cash, it is still exchangeable and a store of value.

[ To directly answer the OP: No we should not exclude speculation, everything is speculation to some small degree. Even holding everything in cash is a speculation on that nation's currency. We'd have to use other measures to estimate expected security\longevity, like liquidity of assets. ]

> their backers were betting that Mr Obama would push through an energy bill that would force America to embrace alternative sources of energy more aggressively.

Give him a break, getting healthcare reform passed already involved flame-baiting half of congress to the extreme. There's a thing called filibustering that massively slows down all legislature once anyone bill becomes flame-baitable enough. There is no way any president could have halted the greatest financial collapse since the great depression, passed education reform, passed healthcare reform, AND also gotten to a new energy\immigration policy in 18 months, while filibustering exists, without assuming dictatorial power.

> non-monetary gains like prestige or autonomy

"Gains" obviously did not refer to strictly cash. Gains refers to anything you value. Cash is just a tool. I would go further than you and say the vast majority of entrepreneurs seek autonomy. Use occam's razor when interpreting the statements of others.

I meant the human species as a collective has no single consciousness. And also that individual humans do not have metaphysical consciousness.

I studied cognitive psychology not economics ;) I'm familiar with the topics your bringing up and agree they're interesting but also think they are irrelevant to the issue of correlation vs causation and the red herring of "risk" when looking at what motivates entrepreneurs.

If you want to go to Kahneman & Tversky, yes different heuristics people may use for estimating risk and reward are probably biased estimators (although I hope all pirate-entrepreneurs are using a little math and obtaining feedback ). That certainly does not mean risk, independent of gains, becomes intrinsic utility for the non-masochistic.

>What I think is wrong is to take only a single terminology

Utility is a basic textbook economics term and the context of Arrington's article. Also, Arrington was an economics major. I think sticking to one terminology is highly preferable over acontextual obscurism.

>or else your definition of sane is very limited

or else your definition of gain is very limited.

You seem to be implying a mountain climber makes no gains by tackling Mt. Everest. The risk is not what is preferred, the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment is what is preferred. Without gains to be had, the mountain climber would cease to choose decreased lifespan unless they intrinsically enjoyed suffering.

> What if exploring the boundaries of your capability, your talents, was its own reward?

Then you're gaining something (discovery of new assets, freedom, happiness, sense of accomplishment, self-actualization, etc.) and seeking to maximize gains. Risk does not magically become utility. If gains are held constant, nearly everyone chooses the one with less risk because it has a higher expected value. Entrepreneurs are gain maximizers. Risk is only _ utility _ in the case of masochism.

> They don’t need to be rewarded for risk, because they actually get utility out of risk itself. In other words, they like adventure.

Completely flawed. Every sane person seeks to reduce risk. What entrepreneurs also seek is to maximize gains. Increased risk is merely often required to do so.

> which will raise the general discourse level

On one hand you want to avoid trolls, but on the other hand you want to avoid a circle-jerk and "my boss can google everything I wrote" timidity and un-hackerish conformism. Tending toward either extreme can disincentivize thoughtful discussion and negatively impact a community. So I would be hesitant to declare that a safe assumption.

Seems unnecessary considering some of the most thoughtful discussions come from throw-away accounts doing Tell\Ask HN. It could also exacerbate other issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]

keep track of submission karma and comment karma separately. People should not be able to downvote in comments unless they have earned the karma threshold required to do so from comments.

Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.

> a sort of wildly self-improving problem-solving algorithm that has no real consciousness and simply goes on an optimization rampage through the world

That sounds pretty similar to humans.

Ever since Frankenstein was written, I think we have always been unfairly predisposed to think our creations will turn on us. Probably due to the ubiquitous nature of inner-guilt or as a social legacy of Christian sin.

Facebook has not built any robot cars that can accelerate onto highways, so no. For innovation, Google is practically grad school in comparison to Facebook. [ I'm not sure if Facebook has invented or done anything new rather than just make small improvements. Google was founded on algorithmic invention. ]

As google tries to improve the semantic search capabilities of google bot, I wouldn't be surprised if they are investing heavily in AI research, they have the money to look at a lot of future tech.

Also how Google has scaled to the point of treating datacenter as server has been pretty revolutionary.

An additional problem with subsidies is the detrimant to international trade.

For example, massive subsidies make corn in America TOO cheap, that everyone in Mexico City buys American corn! Yet comparative advantage would say Mexico, with a higher proportion of unskilled laborers, should be able to put corn on the marketplace in their own country cheaper, and build up their economy.

Subsidizing exportable domestic goods has similar negative effects to tariffing imports.

> I have no means of predicting the political state of the world in another couple of centuries. Do you?

We can look at futurists who claim they do. We can look at big trends that have occurred since the Big Bang. And the "futurists" all say we are "globalizing" and becoming more "interconnected". Transforming from provincal economies and governments to world governments and super-national economic trading blocks. And that everyone in the world is learning English. All the world's elites speak English. And the other member's of their community, when they see that the elites know English, force their children to learn English because they want them to grow up to be like the current elite. In Indonesia, there is currently growing concern that their local language is dying off as parents overencourage their kids to learn English from a young age.

> You're forgetting prosody and gestures

Which are also not present when written down. Natural language has to have a verbose enough in syntax to be compressed to the intersection of bandwidth features present in both Oral and Written. Without suffering too high of information loss. In other words yes prosody and gestures are important, by they are supplementary to the core feature set. The syntax also has to be verbose enough to not loose too much information when transferred back and forth between paper and speech. This is not an important requirement for programming, which can exploit its single medium more extensively.

> The differences between spoken languages are vast.

The differences in brain anatomy between those speaking different languages is not. [ A function could contain infinitely many points. Yet it is possible for all these points to all have exactly the same derivative. And once you have modeled the derivative, you have a certain degree of predictive confidence in all future positions of the function. LISP is similar to an underlying derivative of a function generating programming languages, while still being usable as a language itself. ]

>and voilá, you've got your NL parser.

>computer systems comprehending natural language were just a stone's throw away

I completely agree is it nearly impossible to write an authoritative model of processing system of the brain from top-down conjecture. Because semantic association is defined by its relation to other chunks, we will NEVER have a perfect database of these relations, unless we map the human brain. That's why we have computational neuroscience, and are simulating cortical columns on neuron emulators, which will be able to map long before we would armchair philosophize it due to the complexity. I assure you I can very skeptical\pessimistic of "intelligent design".

I think what we can agree on in relation to the OP is that when he says LISP is the last language he'll ever learn it's kind of cheating the question he imposes on himself because it's flexible enough tool to morph into any language depending on the problem domain. And a specie's flexibility and capacity for adaptation is the best measure of survivability.

[ please hit me up via email if you want to drop links to journal articles so I'm not as ignorant to your field of research ]

[ Also please check out this article: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jz3FEk2KJ... "Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan" . English by evolutionarily choosing alphabet over characters has proven more adaptable and survivable ]

>being more natural to people

My argument was actually that things modeled after genetically evolved structures share in the advantages of increased genetic fitness inherent in that design. i.e. Survivability and future-proofness. [i.e. the OP may indeed not need to ever learn another language before he dies] It was not an argument that genetically evolved structures are easy to grok.

>I wouldn't be drawing diagrams of synapses and how the chemical signals flow

I actually think that's a pretty good analogy for what programmers do. You program the give function to accepted the variables nominative (you), accussative(hot dog), and dative(me). Now lets say you want to create multiple functions (give, send, take) that are operators on nominative, accussative, dative and want to reuse code easily. Or you want to use your "give" function to define what a "gift" is. No problem in LISP.

> but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

Sentences yes (figure 7 chunk limit), semantic associations tokened by words, no.

> Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions

I tried to clarify the proper analogy at the end. LISP is not directly analogous to spoken language (the surface level), LISP is directly analogous to human thought (that interprets language internally). This was really the topic for an article and not a comment rant, sorry.

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk

English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed by most people, and not overly worth arguing

> But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential.

The initial input and output of [spoken] language is sequential by definition and structure of the ear and voicebox. I simply meant that you can not speak two words or hear two words at the same time in the manner that you can see two words at the same time. You can see indentation in a text document\program, but you have to add extra syntax in spoken language to convey this.

Internal language recognition\parsing is incredibly LISP like. I'll try to add a more detailed explanation of what I mean by this in the future when I have more time.

[ basically when the human brain processes information, there are limited resources, right. The working memory buffer for the human brain can only hold 5-7 "chunks" at the same time. You have to resort to the phenomena of "chunking" to process more information. You should find this article very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) So basically we use "operators" to chunk things together. We could have a "phrase" operator that chunks a noun, verb, and object together. What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. This is the "big deal" about LISP. It's similar to in the human brain, where everything is a "chunk". As long as you have processed sub-ideas into a chunk and have given a name for that chunk, you can start wielding bigger ideas. ]

[ Spoken languages are all GOOD and reflective of human thought. Anyone is GOOD ENOUGH. The differences between spoken languages are small. The differences between LISP programming languages and non-LISP programming languages are vast. LISP is to thought as Python is to English. LISP is the most similar to an evolutionarily evolved structure (human thought). Therefore a LISP implementation could also share high survivability. And could survive longer than a human lifespan. ]

Exactly, English isn't perfect, yet it's still a great example of how something that's "good enough" can become dominant. I'm not saying it should be dominant, but that it is and will inevitably continue to be (there are more students taking SATs in China in ENGLISH than in the US+Britain). Also I would argue it's not just due to Britain's empire, but Rome's and Germanic tribes creating a long evolutionary path up to American web pages.

Regardless LISP variants are still closer to all spoken languages you mentioned than other programming languages. The main difference why the linguistic languages don't look like LISP variants is that languages can only be processed sequentially\linerarly one sound\word\morpheme at a time, this restriction isn't strictly required for a programming language that is primarily absorbed visuo-spatially. LISP is more similar to ALL spoken languages, so there is a lot of evolutionary indicators pointing to the possibility of long term [ > avg human lifespan ] dominance by a LISP implementation.