skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the first real sign of troublesome fragmentation in Android.

As an Android developer, I've always been amused that people trotted out the fragmentation boogeyman. As a practical matter, if you stick with good app designm it's really not a problem. Like desktop operating systems, it doesn't matter if the OS is running on hardware with differing screen sizes or device inputs. Properly designed apps can handle that.

However, the fact that Amazon has been able to make a popular fork of Android is potentially disastrous. The question is will Amazon continue to track baseline Android or are they going to diverge their fork from here? The latter will result in Android developers having to choose whether they want to concentrate resources on Android proper or Amazon's Android. That would be fragmentation worth worrying about.
Just a personal incident. They took the cash out of a connected bank account following the classic "I didn't receive the delivery" scam dispute where I was the seller.
Haha I knew the fact but heavn't quite heard it put like this :)

I don't really like the EU I would rather have a free market zone and travel zone without all the other stuff, Europe should not become an Empire.
It appears so from this example, where there is a usage based fee

https://gocardless.com/docs/api_guide#pre-authorization

I can't see any guidelines about how you are recommended to approach these types of situation. In some ways pre-setting a max limit is nice for the customer if you warn them when they approach. I know people who have been billed huge amounts on AWS without really realizing. SO long as you hand hold the customer and your pricing model is simple to understand you should be able to make it work out I would think. For upgrades there is probably no reason not to get explicit agreement (presuming it is just a checkbox really, no need to give the acount details again after all), it is variable usage that is more complex I would think.
When I think of IBM, I still think of consultants and guys in blue suits. ...but more than anyone else out there, these guys are building the future.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30/embargo-ibm-develops-inst...

http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/14/ibm-stores-bits-on-arrays...

I hate to think what their patent portfolio looks like.
It's really simple. I did it back in 2001, when I did it I used XML and a stored proc to read the XML and write directly to a cursor. It probably takes an hour to do it the first time and about 15 to 20 minutes once you're used to the idea of it. (on SQL Server 2000)

With something like SQL Server 2005 it's super simple (< 5 mins) you can basically write an XML file as a stream to your DB server and it eats it and writes directly to the table. (SQL Server supports transforming XML into a table using XPath). You can basically treat the connection like a filehandle and dump XML directly to the stream. Just make sure you open/close the connection often enough not to cause the lock optimizer to grab a table lock. (Or just grab a table lock if you really want it to scream)

All you need to ensure is that you don't hold the steam open too long. If you don't mind a little logic in your DB server you can even consume complex object graphs. If you go the XML route you can max the CPU on your DB server which is generally a bad thing for the most part on modern systems it won't matter unless your DB server has 200+ disks.

You can use this type of system to stream 200 or 300 MB worth of data to your server in a few seconds. This assumes your DB server isn't a piece of crap. (If it can't keep up with a gig ethernet card on random IO or is virtualized it's most likely a piece of crap).

The more generic version is to take advantage of the INSERT syntax and use multiples sets of values.

eg.
INSERT INTO foo (id) VALUES (1),(2),(3);
instead of
INSERT INTO foo (id) VALUES (1);
INSERT INTO foo (id) VALUES (2);
INSERT INTO foo (id) VALUES (3);

Now because MySQL is one of the most retarded (I mean that in the literal sense of the word) databases in the world it doesn't support prepared statements so you get huge overhead when you issue SQL to it, compared to a prepared statement. Also, make sure you explicitly start a transaction before you issue a bunch of inserts, else each statement becomes its own transaction.

Also on the readside to increase performance use something like MARS and issue multiple SELECT statements.

eg.
SELECT * from parent where id = 5;
SELECT * from child where parent_id = 5;

If you have to do more than a few levels consider a SHAPE query. Or use map reduce and 'fold' your join back into something sane.
Which bank has those APIs?
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Yeah, but who hears Cory Doctorow, when he writes on his blog, which is read only by geeks.

The problem is breaking through to the wider public, to the mainstream media. We managed to do that in Poland.
Isn't this what forums and places like HN are for?
It upsets me to hear this. I always wondered how Amazon handled abuse on EC2 as it's an insanely large service. At some point it has to become an issue? Does anyone have any experience with other types of abuse on EC2?
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Fair enough, but I doubt that adds up to enough that there's a real impact to the spending ability ratio of the two companies.

You're paying negative $5 for cable, but how many other people are doing that. I don't know the going rate for Comcast cable, so I'll use the $25 basic service fee from Eastlink in Canada (my service) as the exemplar.

Assume there are only two possible monthly payments for Comcast. You can get the basic service for $25 or you can get the "they quit the service but we're keeping them on the books" service for $-5. Given these prices, you would need to have 3.4 subscribers at the latter price for every one subscriber at the former price before Comcast and Netflix would be making equal money off subscriptions alone. I seriously doubt 77% of Comcast subscribers are ghosts like you, so I stand by my argument that Netflix is massively financially outgunned by Comcast.
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From Satori to Silicon Valley (Computing and the Counterculture)
Just move your SSH off the port 22, hide it behind another instance and/or use fail2ban. 99% of problems with SSH scans/attacks sorted
good comment, your east-block insights are fabulous!
Some people consider driving a means of unwinding the same way. Personally I'd consider all three a waste of time compared to actually being at the desired location. Couldn't you unwind more easily at home?
tldr: Group your inserts ! "Together we are stronger" – Spartacus
For example, UK Road Tax is now heavier on "polluting" cars, which mostly means "old". After two years, all cars have to be officially checked every year, forcing old vehicles off the road when the cost of mostly-optional maintenance becomes higher than the actual car value. Several cities block access to certain areas depending again on the "environmental impact" (i.e. age) of the vehicle; the European Emission Standards have been changed on average every three years, so anything linked to that standard changed accordingly. Most countries run, or have run in the past 10 years, "scrapping" schemes where people trading in their old car would get a direct government subsidy when buying a new one.
This is all fairly useless, considering how study after study demonstrated that the largest threats to air quality in cities are old heating systems and industrial activity, and 90% of accidents are not due to mechanical breakdowns; but it does push people to get newer cars.

I'm not saying this is a negative thing (in theory it's quite nice), but in practice it's just another way to help car-makers.

Most countries also dish out subsidies directly to struggling car-makers; companies like Renault and FIAT are seen as "national champions" and treated accordingly -- although this is now illegal under EU competition law, nobody complains because every manufacturer based in Europe will have enjoyed some "public love" at some point. After all, car manufacturing still employs, directly or indirectly, a lot of people.
It's true that IBM does incredible research, but their results never seem to break into mainstream.
Partial list of people who have declined a British honour
It goes even further if i'm not mistaken, you have to prove you have TWO parking spaces, one at home and one at work.
Adyen don't look very professional.
Or just disable password-based authentication. These "attacks" are little more than log spam and are meant to prey on systems that host novice users with weakpasswords. Require PKI and the log spam goes away.
Super cool, and thanks for sharing!

Are you familiar with APL/K/Q/J ? These implement column store databases which a programming language significantly more expressive and usable. K and J are also significantly faster than any other SQL database -- it would be interesting to compare K's ultra-optimized in-memory processing to the GPU -- I'm not at all sure GPU is going to win here in practice.

See https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona for an open source K implementation (the wiki has docs). Same language, newer version (with database integration) and english language instead of ascii chars is called Q see http://kx.com/q/d/ (kdb1, q1 if you like longer, kdb, q if you like terser), and http://code.kx.com/wiki/Main_Page
True enough. While you'll still have some overhead due to the walking in between, you'll probably end up with something comparable to a 5-10 minute commute. Still not ideal (due to the working conditions), but not a complete waste of time.
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ThinkRelevance: Episode 004 - Aaron Bedra's Valedictory
Its patent portfolio is huge -- the biggest in the world. They have registered the most patents per year for, like, the last 10 years. More than 5,000 per year! (Next biggest is Samsung and MS, which have averaged around 2k-3k per year, I think).
sure, I hope nobody is using password based authentication for SSH anyway :)
Is there a recording of the talk anywhere?
81% of all smartphones sold by AT&T in Q4 were iPhones
All Muslims Must Watch This video ... ~ Daily World News
While numbers don't lie, the conclusions you draw from them can still be incorrect.

Look at the second graph (website visits peaking on Dec 24th for giftcertificatefactory.com). The author concludes the following from this peak: "People favor doing things at the very last possible moment."

But this is nonsense. Such a conclusion would require a model for how people's preferences affect web page statitics. If you don't have a model, your intuition is going to fool you. Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

Assume that in our model world you have two kinds of people: Early-Buyers and Late-Buyers. Early-Buyers buy presents on a random day from Dec 1 to Dec 20. Late-Buyers on the other hand buy presents on a random day from Dec 21-24. Assume that 80% of people are Early-Buyers and 20% of people are Late-Buyers.

If you looked at the number of presents bought per day, you would see that the rates are 25% higher in the days from Dec 21-24. Your intuition will tell you: "People favor buying presents late". But that is not true, because in our model world 80% of the people are actually Early-Buyers!

Now, to explain the web page statistics shown in the article, we would need a more elaborate model; but constructing such a model and working with it is difficult, and that's why people avoid thinking about models, just post raw numbers, and then write whatever their intuition tells them, and then claim that it must be true because "numbers don't lie".
I take public transport for exactly this reason. I have also found being on public transport somehow makes me feel incredibly focused and productive.
We only launched this feature last week, so it's hard to say whether it's a "one-off" case.
One of the reasons the author is complaining about AV is the very reason an AV will likely catch a browser exploit that runs local code. The program the author tells you to write in C doesn't have a definition either, but the code matches an signature that the AVs will look for, same with browser exploits. Native code running without the OS knowing why will usually end up being flagged.
Perhaps "1 seat left at this price" would be a less confusing.
Questions:

What shows on the bank statement?

Is collective payment taken once a month or on a per transaction?

When using a credit card, having a keylogger trojan on my comp is a minor deal. if I'm entering my bank details, it becomes huge. Am I covered?

The UK is one of the financial scam hotspots of the world. CS told a family member it's why BB left the UK. This after the family member had an order for £5,000 worth of iMacs cancelled repeatedly for no apparent reason (even after confirming three times with the CC company that the card was okay to go ahead).

I hope you're ready. There is a huge demand for a solid payment solution though, so if you hit it right, you're on to an easy exit.
Update:

ACTA was the topic of two parliamentary committees on Jan 25th, and on Jan 26th the leader of the main opposition party has called for a referendum on ACTA. (Probably just political grandstanding, but keeps the topic in the headlines.)

Also, ACTA was criticized by official government watchdogs, including the General Inspector for Personal Data Protection and the civil rights ombudsman.

Around 60,000 people participated in protests against ACTA across Poland on Jan 25th. In the city of Kielce the protests have turned into small-scale riots that resulted in 24 arrests.

The government kept its promise and signed ACTA on Jan 26th.
The treaty still needs to be ratified by the EU Parliament (soon) and the Polish Parliament.

The EU vote is more important, because 90% of ACTA would apply at the EU level. (Even if the Polish Parliament rejected ACTA, Poland would still be subject to 90% of ACTA as an EU member.)
offtopic: are there any direct sql to binlog async translator?
Except, most people asking white board questions are asking for code.

> allows you to see how some one approaches a problem

I've never jumped to a whiteboard. Rather, I've researched the problem. If they really wanted to see how you'd approach a problem, they'd give you the problem before the interview, and then when you come in, ask you to explain it, allowing you to use the whiteboard.
In Sweden—all major banks.
Analysis: Wall Street puzzles over Google's new direction
I agree that the site doesn't look great, but their platform works pretty good (well, apart from the abysmal SOAP API) and they offer support for lots of different payment methods (including direct debit, in lots of countries). So I truly don't understand why everybody is suddenly getting so excited about direct debit payments?
Same number of cars as today. Granted, each car will be driving a little more but pickup and dropoffs could be made more efficient with taxi stand pull-up lanes, for example.

I think the commuting option doesn't seem to work for many people. Seems like people spend too much time on the lawn, but sure it does work for some people.
Fantastic 8000x8000 NASA photograph of the Earth
That's interesting. Netflix keeps recommending me Cashback too, even though I don't normally watch that type of movie. It's been recommending it so consistently for so long that I've been curious too, but I still haven't watched it.
That's a lot of development time for an MVP. Are you guys launched? I should note that you should throw away your 5 year plans. Things change so much from so many angles in a startup's lifecycle, I'd be very amazed if your 5 year plan actually play out exactly as you plan. I am very weary of any plan over 6 months not shifting or changing. A LOT can happen in 5 years. You should focus on great detail for the next 6-12 months at best and a grand vision out there. Any other plans will more than likely shift.
Article:

http://mashable.com/2012/01/26/hi-res-image-earth/
>You know what really shows human behavior? Speaking to someone face to face.

Well, not really. People lie all the time.
It would have been an excellent investment if Microsoft had only kept the shares...
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I think that a more reasonable explanation could be that the attackers were careless about building the dictionary. If it's built by parsing files and you feed the wrong file or the parser does not work correctly you end up with a dictionary with lots of bogus entries. That seems a simpler explanation than:

"The best guess is that these passwords were collected from an unhashed password database, or from a trojaned SSH server or client."

or

"This might be due to the brute force tool not properly interpreting comments in the dictionary file, or the attacker not understanding the comment notation"
Is there an active exploit? Or are you just saying that this is the weakest form of auth for SSH?
Also, lupus.
For those times when a car is the only practical way to get somewhere, car-sharing is a much more sensible alternative to universal personal car ownership.

Most cars sit idle and unoccupied for 90-95% of the time. That represents a huge opportunity to increase the productivity of each car while reducing the price of access and the cost in money and wasted space of storage (i.e. parking).
MySQL has had server-side prepared statements since 5.0.
The opposite, of course, is true. I've never been in a situation in the real world where, given a problem, I jumped immediately to a white board and felt I had to come up with a solution while being tested by people I didn't know. I have, however, had the joy of being given questions that could literally not happen, with requirements that cannot be met, all with the intent on seeing how I can think. Oh, and with no time to think, either.

If you really want to test how someone thinks over questions like that, actually give them time. Give them the questions before they show up for the interview. Then go over their solutions. They aren't under pressure, they give you a thoughtful answer, and you get a better sense of what they can do in the real world.
Yep. A nice bit of statistical obfuscation there. This might mean that comcast actually has less subscribers than netflix.
Seeing Apple dead would be the best case for Microsoft. The investment accomplished the opposite.
I remember being absolutely amazed after seeing the same number of unique visitors hit my site two days in a row.
The Ghost Of Mark Twain: Why Smart People Fail
So, is 4.7 at the level of a genuine RC then ... /flamebait

FWIW I'm a long time user of KDE and having used other DE have gone back to it; it's quite low in my dependency tree now!
Here's another example: The Texas Department of Transportation's 2010 budget was $8 billion. Its 2009 revenue from gas taxes (after diversions) was about $1.5 billion.

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-transportation/transportat...
A simple Android app to debug Bluetooth protocols by showing incoming raw data
100 User Experience Design & Evaluation Methods for Your Toolkit
And I hope nobody is using key based authentication for SSH without storing the private part of their SSH key on an external smart card only, which is unlocked by an external hardware pin pad.

I was being pedantic of course. Password based SSH authentication is fine for 99% of the cases, as long as they use a "secure" password and don't leak it by writing it down or reusing it elsewhere.
Someone should mention package manager performance. Searching for a package in an Arch system will take a long time (10s or more) except on relatively fresh installs. It may have been fixed by now, but it was a serious point of irritation.
* As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. *

And I call BS. Nobody asked for results to be more relevant by going THAT particular way.

On the contrary, people have asked for more relevant results by eliminating this kind of artificial results.

I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience.

Really? Because it looks like it's all about competing with Facebook and improving the bottom line.
Be careful to compare apples to apples. Sure, the memory-only crowd (e.g, redis) will post higher numbers, but Cassandra is the performance leader for scalable, larger-than-memory datasets. See http://www.cubrid.org/blog/dev-platform/nosql-benchmarking/ for example. (And this tests an old version of Cassandra; we did a lot of optimization on the read path for 1.0: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-1-0-...)
Do you have statistics on this for the United States? It's quite a claim, I'd like to see actual numbers.
IANAL, but it doesn't work that way.

See specifically sections 7 and 11 of the Extradition Act 1999 (http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1999/0055/latest/w...).

Further, the Extradition Treaty between NZ and the US ( http://newzealand.usembassy.gov/uploads/images/o16y8MOyHW2l-...), Article V, which states:

"Neither of the Contracting Parties shall be bound to deliver up its own citizens under this Treaty, but the executive
authority of each shall have the power to deliver them up, if, in its discretion, it be deemed proper to do so."

So there's a bilateral opt-out for both parties, at least in the case where their own citizens are involved.
Pac-Man is NP-hard, same as traveling salesman problem
Our Dwindling Food Variety
Can you provide some source?

I don't have a source, the impression was based on my subjective knowledge that my Czech friends earn significantly less than my Israeli friends.

I know a lot of people in both countries - 1000 euro/month is a nice middle-class salary in Prague, in Tel Aviv that's just barely making ends-meet, if at all (it's quite possibly that your rent alone will be close to that much, and not in a particularly nice apartment either).
Your Financial Stress Is Changing the Way Your Kids Interact With Others
Eventually yes I guess, but I think it might be a while before Nokia end up paying Microsoft (in net terms anyway). Microsoft are probably more interested in gaining market share at this point, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's more money flowing Nokia's way in the coming quarters.
I always thought it was "oa". As in boat vs båt (the swedish word for boat). It is pronounced kinda like "oa", essentially a big round long "o" sound with the mouth muscles relaxing just before the sound is completed, making an OOO-a sound.
Working Overtime Doubles the Risk of Depression
Anyone have a good idea of what threshold should be introduced into the Coalescing Queue?

For example, on a slow server you could imagine a command coming in every second; you likely don't want to hold onto those commands for a second artificially to find out there are no new methods to try and combine it with; so you just want to answer right away.

Now your server is getting busier... 4 commands a second... do you want to artificially hold commands for 250ms+ or longer to see if there are new commands to combine with it?

I imagine not...

In the scenario where you are getting 500+ req/sec it makes a lot of sense to coalesce them, but at some point your queue needs to decide when to make a cut in the queue, take that slice of commands, process/combine them THEN send them to the server and it is that heuristic I'm curious about.
I thought it was some sort of new 'micropayment' service aswell from the HN title of "Direct Debit API for 1% max £2". Twas only after reading the website that I realised the max £2 is for their fee.
Yeah, I am.

Not that I have children, but this seems like there's got to be some sort of statistical indicator about this if they know how to look at it.
You can provide a virtual keyboard the way E-Gold does it in order to fight key loggers.
Interesting idea. Assuming competence on the part of your attacker isn't as dangerous as assuming incompetence, but it can be just as mistaken.
Totally read this as 'British humour' first.