I belong to a minority community in Pakistan target of regular state backed oppression.In addition to violence and flagrant discrimination the community representatives are also targets for abductions. The community has a rule.It never pays ransom to the kidnappers because this sets a precedent and exposes the representatives all over the country to even more kidnappings. This strategy while it may seem brutal is a necessary one and over the years kidnappings for ransom has gone down. Again, computer security is different, but the principle is same, you dont want to send out the message 'We'll give you money to make you go away' because it just goads even more to resort to such tactics.
We are building a music streaming website. Think of it as a Spotify for Pakistan and Mongo has been wonderful for the kind of Data Structure we have. Its perfect for a catalogue like structure where objects can very easily nest inside each other. Each Artist has multiple albums, and multiple artists have multiple songs. All of this nestles very neatly inside eachother, and when i want a song, i almost always need its album and artist data, so i can very easily get that. Mongo is blazing fast on such kind of nested data structures. The only slight problems is where you have playlists and need to reference songs for a certain Artist. That could be countered by Data Duplication, since the song artist data etc once entered will very rarely change. So for us it makes perfect sense. You really need to understand what your data model is, and what you want from it, and then Mongo will be your friend, other than that it will cause you a world of pain.
How does that hierarchical model work when songs or albums have more than one artist?
Why does a traditional relational db fail for such a well-defined data model? I mean, there's nothing about 'given an song (id), retrieve artist and album' that would make mongo inherently better.
I sleep. Its going to sound really weird but over the years i have constructed this alternate reality. A whole universe over the years i have built up in my mind, and whenever i am angry, or depressed, i lie down on a bed, pretend i am in this alternate reality and it helps me relax and slip into a peaceful slumber :)
I was a bit surprised to read this, I've been running a story for nearly 20 years now. I greatly attribute this lingering bit of my childhood to my consistent ability to reliably detach from life's problems and enjoy my sleep.
When i was very young i would act out the stories to distract myself from fear of the dark at night before i slept. It had utility in college and high school because i sometimes got tied up in knots of regret if i thought too much at late late hours. In industry, it made a great way to force my brain away from stress and thoughts of work. I just pick up roughly where i left off and play out the story until i am asleep.
Wow. I always thought i was the only crazy one around . The reasons you mentioned are exactly the ones for which i have been running a story for so long (Not as long as you though, i started 5 years ago). I weave my personal frustrations, pain points and unfulfilled wishes into this universe and since i control that universe it helps me feel more in control of myself. Another very important aspect of this is that i am extremely hyper-active, and my brain is always, always thinking. Escaping into this world is the only way i know to shut out all the external thoughts and let me my brain loosen up a little.
I just had this dream where I was up in Syracuse and trying to catch this bus and things kept going wrong and when I finally got on the bus I argued with the driver and said I shouldn't have to pay and he kicked me off and then when I got on the next one it went to the wrong place.
In the middle of all this I was waking up and falling back asleep so I knew it was a dream and then I saw my kid running and thought I had to chase after him and some women said, "Just go do what you want" and instead of chasing after him I went and did what I wanted.
And why would you do that ? I can see why the must-register roadbloack is annoying in theory but It takes a few minutes to register, and then its an absolute gold-mine of knowledge, with an extra-ordinary community, which is very positive, constructive and helpful. I find it way more engaging than HN Actually to be honest.
If you want to have your private answer community, that's fine. Don't go whoring it on Google and other search engines as if the results are publicly visible when they're not. I'm also opposed on principle to sites which require registration and (in theory if not in practice) log all of my interactions -- what I read and how I interact with it is very personal information and data. It's why I'm opposed to the idea of logging in to, say, read The New York Times. It's one of a very small number of sites I'd subscribe to, but even then I'd prefer to access it without logging in.
I've created throwaway accounts a few times to see if there's anything sufficiently worthwhile there. I'm largely convinced that 1) there's not and 2) the dynamics of the site work against it scaling or surviving.
As expected, i am getting downvoted because of my pro-quora stance. You clearly haven't spent much time on the site. The beauty of it is, that you can reach people, and ask questions who you normally can only dream of reaching.Nasa's engineers, Phd Doctors, Entrepreneurs, famous bloggers, Actors, filmmakers,World class athletes, they are all there. If you have a specific question , ask away. I once needed to find out how Gana.com the biggest music startup in india operated, i asked its CEO a question, and within a day i had a response. For all this amazing value, i dont see why taking a few minutes to register is such a big deal.
Note that as the parent of your responses, I certainly can't downvote. And from the HN Guidelines: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Regarding Quora: its behavior runs counter to good netizen behavior. Clearly, people have an issue with that, and among those people is Paul Graham (as several others have cited and referenced in the discussions over the past few days).
Regards who you can encounter on Quora: in my experience the level and quality of conversation reached on a clueful but open site tends to be generally higher. You'll find quite expert people on HN (I've run across Charlie Stross a few times), and I've been online long enough to have seen numerous highly-qualified participants on Usenet, Slashdot, reddit, and even G+ (there are still numerous techies there). President Obama is among those who've run reddit AMAs, and I'll routinely find very qualified people within various subreddits there.
And again: the conversations are visible to whomever wants to view them without restriction.
I've found the Quora community to be great, but the register-walling and the robots.txt is very close minded, especially to the Internet as whole. Most of the time I find a link to a Quora I am turned down by the fact I can't read more than half an answer without having to sign in. Imagine if Stack Overflow did the same thing? They'd be dead.
The whole benefit of online discussion in general is to create as wide and persistent an archive of both questions and answers as possible. To that extent, I applaud StackExchange, even with its aggressive moderation (not too different from better-managed subreddits such as /r/askhistorians or /r/askscience): the audience isn't the person asking the question but all people who might want to know the answer to a given question. And they're better served by having a canonical response.
Quora blocking (explicitly) TIA means that that knowledge stays locked in their silo. Pretty much forever. Fuck that.
Just yesterday I was musing on energy (something I do a lot) and the fact that even in such advanced energy systems as nuclear fission and fusion powerplants (real or theoretical), all this advanced energy, provided directly in the form of electron volts, is degraded to heat, used to create steam, and then to spin turbines. That's fundamentally a technology that's hundreds of years old (and I think early steam or heat turbines go back further). Windmills date from the 1400s.
So I checked AskScience on reddit, and it turns out the question's been asked a few times. And I could read the responses. And, while, yes, I've got an account there, it's not necessary for that purpose:
Stack Overflow was created in response to a site that was doing something similar to what Quora is doing with search engines, except that site required a paid membership to see the answers. I recall one trick that people used before SO was around, which was to spoof the User-Agent to be GoogleBot. Doing so would show you the answer(s) to the question. :)
DISCLAIMER: I'm one of Experts Exchange's volunteer administrators.
Google penalized sites that redirected from SERPs or buried content below a lot of "sign up here" stuff very heavily; you can even make the case that it could have been called the "EE Penalty" instead of Panda, if only because Google's web search team (i.e. Matt Cutts) collaborated heavily with the Stack ownership in developing the algorithm changes and consequences.
That's not to excuse EE's management's behavior -- quite the contrary. From the perspective of longtime users, EE's string of decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and its reactions to those consequences starting not quite a decade ago nearly destroyed what had been a vibrant community.
If there's anything good to have come of it, it's that EE has finally moved -- about six or seven months ago -- to a business model that allows the non-member to see what members see: the entire question and solutions. Joining for free does have a few minor advantages; paying (either with a credit card or by answering questions) has more.
But it took a long time for EE to learn those lessons and begin to implement those fixes. Whether Quora will learn them is a whole 'nother story; like so many other sites, it built its systems and market-share without much thought given to how it was going to monetize.
EE made that mistake too, in 1997. Quora has a lot of money backing it up, so it can maintain its facade for a long time... but I wouldn't be placing any bets on it being around 15 years from now if it actually had to depend on income.
At some point they switched to a slightly different model where you would see the normal obfuscated answers with a request to log in at the top of the page, but if you scrolled down far enough, the answers would be there in clear text.
They were certainly walking a very fine line, but Google seemed to give them a pass with this system for quite some time.
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I am from Pakistan, and this damn island is all everyone is talking about. My facebook feed is flooded with people planning to go visit the island :P. Personally, i dont see what all the fuss is about. Might just be the rise of planet of the apes people :P
