sheff

"The Mind Illuminated" ( https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Complete-Meditation-... ) is very good, and contains all you need for your practice.

The author is both a long term meditator and used to be a neuroscience professor. The book teaches meditation in a stage by stage way which is very easy to follow.

Another excellent book is "Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook" (https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Bliss-Beyond-Meditators-H...).

One of the great things about Ruby at the moment is the number of Ruby implementations around, including several Ruby like languages which attempt to do things slightly differently.

Crystal is one language with Ruby like syntax and the goal of compiling to efficient native code. ( http://crystal-lang.org )

Mirah is another statically typed Ruby like JVM based language, although its development is a bit slow. (http://www.mirah.org)

I wish, instead of adding new features, they had a release which dealt with all the problems from previous versions.

Its generally a good product, but one thing that I find really annoying (with the Rubymine branch of the product) is the way tabs randomly reorder. It is frustrating to have to search for a tab when you have more than about 6 files open and find that it has moved to a different place.

They don't seem to have been able to fix it since 2009 ! http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-22546

This looks great! The upcoming developer edition that will work with templates sounds really useful as well.

Any plans to support the SASS version of Bootstrap ?

Looking at the Sibdo pricing page, it looks like much higher pricing (compared to the more established competitors) at $95 a month for use on a SINGLE website with a confusing limitation to "50 users" whatever that means.

Not only that, the example graphs and charts look very basic.

The linked post says : "I think we shouldn't release 9.4 unless it goes in."

I haven't been following the PG developers mailing list that closely recently and the article doesn't go into any details as to why it may be delayed.

From the link that @masklinn posted (Thanks, very interesting!) to a hstore presentation, it looks like the hstore side was developed by November last year, so I'm wondering why it wouldn't be ready for release by this September or whether its just the integration of hstore/JSON side of things that is the hold up.

For me, the new PG feature - although its an outside project - which I am most looking forward to in the 9.4 time frame is a newer JDBC driver for Postgres ( https://github.com/impossibl/pgjdbc-ng ).

Another very simple thing I use when procrastination strikes is Seth Roberts Magic Dots technique. ( http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/procrastination/magic-d... )

He came up with it based on reinforcement studies in pigeons. There are more details on the linked page, but basically whilst working you just put a dot on a piece of paper every 6 minutes in the shape of a square, then join all the dots with a line. Something about doing this essentially meaningless thing improves motivation and throughput for me.

Continuous archiving (WAL) is something quite different from incremental backups.

Incremental backups involve taking a full backup once in a while and then making interim backups of the changes since the base backup. WAL ( or archive logs in Oracle terminology) are still used for point in time recovery for changes that have occurred since the last incremental backup. One advantage is that if a row is updated 100 times between the base and incremental backup, you will only essentially be backing up the last change in your incremental backup versus WAL which will have all 100 changes. For big DBs, this can be very handy.

"somewhat harder to swith back"

Thats my point exactly. In Oracle switching between primary and standby is easy and you can do it back and forth as needed with no need to worry about rebuilding the database. In Postgres this is not yet the case, but most of the infrastructure is there already so its surprising it hasn't been done.

I'm also looking forward to logical replication. RAC is different however from master-master replication. Essentially its a specialized cluster with storage thats shared between all nodes in the cluster (so there is no replication going on) with "cache fusion" to share in-memory data between nodes .

PG lets the OS do the stuff it does best versus RAC which is largely a OS cluster solution specifically tailored for a multi node DB - so its unlikely (in my opinion) that the PG developers will ever produce anything similar.

Postgres is a fantastic database.

That said, I've also used Oracle quite extensively in the past when clients have needed it and it has some features that would be great to have in Postgres - as well as some features which we won't see in Postgres as they don't match the Postgres philosophy. Lack of one or more of the features below have driven the choice for various clients to use Oracle despite the cost, so having them would help grow the Postgres ecosystem.

Features in Oracle I'd like to see in Postgres :

1) Flashback. This name encompasses lots of ways to see data as it existed at a previous point in time.

If you drop a table, make a big (wrong) change etc, being able to flashback to just before it is brilliant. Or if you have a multi-terabyte sized performance test database, running a test and then a flashback to before the test is much quicker than restoring from a backup.

2) More robust partitioning - Postgres is quite lacking in comparison here.

3) Better backup options. PG really needs an in core incremental backup to start with, with something like Oracles block change tracking for backups thrown in to do quick incremental backups of a large database.

4) Replication - the lack of something like Oracles switchover which is used in a lot of architectures where you have a application and DB replicated across two sites, with one site being the active one at a point in time. When you need to take one site down for whatever reason, in Oracle you can just do a planned "switchover" to the replica DB and then switch back whenever you want without having to do anything as the DB knows it was a clean switch.

5) The diagnostic and performance monitoring built into Oracle are more extensive than those in Postgres.

The one other really useful feature Oracle has which will likely never be in Postgres is RAC (Real Application Clusters) which lets you create a multi-node active-active DB cluster quite easily.

If you make a low enough offer that they can't accept, they will tell you and they have told me in the past that its because its below the sellers reserve. Whois may also give you a clue as to who owns the domain.

They have fairly decent margins for discounts - I used to get marketing emails offering 20%+ off prices in the past.

Something else to look forward to in 2014 for Rails performance, along with the planned arrival of JRuby 9k !

I have bought domains from them in the past.

I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and they may not have another buyer for years.

If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or whatever they have come down to.

IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for negotiation on those.

This sort of thing is happening increasingly frequently. I really like the idea of AskPatents ( http://patents.stackexchange.com ).

It seems to me that as developers we need a similar site where people can start objecting to overly broad trademarks, especially single word ones which are targeted at web service and application name related trademark classes.

There are probably much fewer trademarks issued that patents, and they are easily searchable online, eg the UK Trademark Journal is at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/t-tmj/tm-journals/2014-006/index.html .

A trademark is also much easier to object to than a patent ( http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-other/t-object/t-afterpub/t... ).

It would be a great weekend project for someone to create a web app which does some of this. You could even charge businesses a fee to monitor words that may affect their businesses.

I'd definitely pay for a tool like this but as a desktop application with perhaps an annual license fee, rather than as a hosted SAAS which needs access to Github repositories.

The FAQ ( https://www.pullreview.com/site/faq ) mentions some of the open source tools its based on, a couple of which I hadn't come across before.

Instead of scraping HN directly, have you looked at the HN Search API, from the old HN search engine ? ( https://www.hnsearch.com/api )

The current search engine looks like it also has an API ( https://hn.algolia.com/api ). Presumably they have a full dataset on hand, which you may be able to get if you contact them.

I personally would love to be able to donate more to open source (specifically Postgres and some of its related projects) but I haven't found a way yet which meets my few simple criteria.

* The money has to specifically go to developers or development and testing related costs, not general advocacy or evangelism.

* It would be nice if donations could go into specific pools, eg in the Postgres example, I might be interested in contributing funds for performance enhancements but have no interest in logical replication.

* Variety of payment methods supported, with annual, repeating donations allowed.

Bountysource (https://www.bountysource.com) comes close, but rarely has many projects for funding.

Its surprising that in 2014, one of the best ways to supporting open source is still to select a company which does work on your favourite OSS project and buy a support contract or something, even though it's not a very efficient way.

On a happier note, here is a list of authors whose works will be entering the public domain tomorrow in various parts of the world.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/12/10/class-of-2014/

Have you looked at Rubymine ?

I have used its model diagrams in the past to get an overview of models, and it also has class diagrams.

http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/webhelp/viewing-model-dependen...

For any HN'ers based in London the British Library in St Pancras is a fantastic resource, and their Business and IP Centre ( http://www.bl.uk/bipc/ ) has an easy signup for a Readers Pass for entrepreneurs.

Your testing VM setup sounds like it might be really useful for the pgjdbc-ng project (a project to create a new JDBC driver for Postgres).

I was looking through the project issues on Github yesterday, prior to starting to play around with it and your comment reminded me that one of them was a note from the main developer asking for suggestions on automated testing. Perhaps you could send a pull request ?

See : https://github.com/impossibl/pgjdbc-ng/issues/31

Translation rights for books in human languages are a well established thing.

I wonder if there's any analogue for technical books using a particular computing language, ie the base explanatory text is kept the same (as much as possible) but the code samples are "translated" to another computer language ?

For example, if I didn't know Python, it would be great to be able to pick up a "translation" of your book with the code written in a similar language such as Ruby.

Obviously, only a subset of tech books could be treated in this fashion, but a way for authors to license their existing content for uses like this would be interesting.

I agree - one of the areas it would be great to have some development work done around is making replication administration simpler and easier.

One feature which would be really nice to have is the ability to do a manual switchover, ie making the existing master into a replica and an existing replica into the new master.

Another poster mentioned repmgr which looks good but hasn't had a release in sometime ( https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/repmgr/blob/master/HISTORY ) with 2 new Postgres releases since, although there does seem some sporadic work on a new beta.