skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was very much not the point of my post :)

I was talking about Tel Aviv and used Budapest and Prague as off hand examples - if you wish you can replace them with Cracow and Bratislava.
Sashay? I want a window manager that wends, ambles, perambulates or meanders, dammit.
I think the problem being described here is he is using a database where he doesn't need to. This is the problem things like cassandra were made to solve. Effectivally he is not storing things to the DB he is logging them to the DB in case of a program crash. To speed things up he stores his entire data set in RAM client side. Writes are buffered and written to the DB, after they have modified the client side data. I assume the point is when the program crashes or dies it just rebuilds the client side data from the DB and then proceed to continue to log to the DB. He can get rid of a lot of his code and add in features but using something like MongoDB, Casandra , or Riak
I don't know how Daniel manages to do it, but every week he seems to post something that relates directly to what's been weighing heavily on my mind.

Over the past year and a half, I've really let both my health and social life slip from under me because I put my startup above all else. And lately it's really been catching up to me. For the past month or two, I haven't been able to get much done. I can't focus anymore and it takes me a week to get something done because I'm tired of looking at my screen at the same few hundreds (thousands?) of lines of code. I've known for a while that this is a result of eating poorly, lack of daily exercise, and lack of social life; but I kept telling myself to just get the startup done first and everything will turn around.

Now I'm finally realizing that I'm going to have to shift my priorities and make every decision the best one, which includes the simplest things like what I eat or what time I go to sleep and wake up... or the startup won't succeed. At some point, I seemed to reach a breaking point where my level of happiness began to directly reflect on the quality of my work on my startup. I won't stop until I succeed though. It's now just a matter of making all the right decisions, I think, which includes prioritizing my health and happiness over my work.
A bit more than that: "Group, convert and collapse your DB commands!"

insert 1, insert 2, insert 3 == insert [1,2,3]
insert 1, delete 1 == [no-op]

As the author pointed out you need to know a bit more about your domain to make this really efficient, for example:

insert user1.dob, delete user2.dob = [2 discrete ops]

while

update user1.dob, delete user1.dob = [1 op - delete user1.dob]

Cool idea; lots of opportunities for enhancement. The one thing you would have to look out for is effectively re-implementing a query optimizer inside of your application code and eating up too much CPU time on a busy system prepping calls.

If you are not I/O bound, then this strategy isn't going to help you that much. If you are I/O bound, it is a great way to help get yourself out of that hole.
How do they get the carbon nanotube in the correct position and orientation like that? I suspect it will be difficult to do it reliably and cheaply for billions of transistors at a time.
Not necessarily. Keeping 95% of the world irrevocably hooked on MS Office would have been an equally good (if not better) outcome. The OS market is irrelevant if you've got the one software package everyone in the business world needs.
Check out the repos of the Geeklist API Hackers #mtlstartup
I put in the batching point at:
1) over a certain time-limit, e.g. 100ms
2) over a certain number of commands, e.g. 2000
3) encountering a specific 'flush' command, that I injected sometimes to simply the logic

Those were the numbers I, by trial and error, determined for my server. But remember, I didn't do SELECTs; I put everything I might SELECT into memory. So my numbers are rather application-specific perhaps.

Its important to measure the average and worst case response times, not the best-case. Under light load, best-case times are from blocking calls, which is why conventional ORM looks good enough in prototyping ;)
In the US, it's easy to do a contract-to-hire. I know at least a few companies that bring in most of their new people this way.

I've always admired the 37Signals approach of having potential hires do a short contract.
It's not as possible as you imagine. There are billions of people on earth. The notion that each of them, even after accounting for geographical location etc can provide something unique, seems incredibly far fetched. Almost all life is marked by incredibly similar lifestyles at the species level. This is true of all of human history too.

However attractive it sounds, we will NOT all find special ways to add value that escape automation.
I know for sure Montepio has them. Probably others too but that's the only one I use. I pay all my bus tickets with it directly from the bus company website.
IIRC that's not true. Office for Mac has always been a pretty big cash cow for Microsoft, even if it doesn't seem like it should be. It also helps keep the Office-or-die ecosystem in businesses intact.
German European Parliament facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/EP.Informationsbuero.fuer.Deutschlan...
We're already praying to have some time to integrate Geeklist API into our platform, such a fun one. 7 wrappers available already...
When your customers money and your businesses reputation are at stake trust is a huge issue. The website doesn't look great and gives hardly any information on the services.

I'm sure if they smartened up their website and offered a REST API they'd be in a much better position for web based startups to consider them, otherwise I'm left searching for signs that its a professional and trustworthy company to try and balance my initial impression.
Facebook to Live Stream International Data Privacy Day Event
McDonald's Twitter Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum (1996)
Then why did he pressure congress into making the rules even hazier so he could detain Americans as well?
You'd be covered by the direct debit guarantee scheme which, like credit cards, refunds any disputed transaction as soon as it's reported.
That's what I would do if I had billions of dollars. With millions of dollars, it's better to invest in myself so I can generate more wealth in the future.
How to become a prolific blogger
In Poland probably everything. There's services that handle the integration, so you don't have to implement all of their APIs.

My banks service is called mTransfer, and the integration providers are e.g. Przelewy24 and platnosci.pl. Basically all the polish websites connect to one of those.
Old news? http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-07/microsoft-is-sai...

Also, it's 250M/quarter.

The real news is that Nokia sold over a million Lumia phones over 2 months of launch in Europe and is launching the Lumia 900 in March on AT&T for $99 on contract.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/01/26/nokia-rall...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/01/26/mic...
When you live in a city, most merchants deliver.
Quite simply, no. Without Apple, Microsoft would have an unquestionable monopoly over personal computer operating systems it was (and is) actively leveraging to gain competitive advantages in application software. That would create lots of restrictions Microsoft wasn't comfortable with.

The best scenario would be a niche-player Apple. In personal computers, it still is, but the "post-PC" products it introduced have a good potential of turning Microsoft into a niche-player as PCs go the way of the dodo.
Yeah, but they've broken my middle-mouse-button and I can't open new tabs on the links. Which is s shame. That seems to be happening more and more.
Hey Brador, I'm one of the founders at GoCardless.

Consumers are covered - Direct Debits come with a very strong consumer guarantee. You can find out more about it here: http://www.thesmartwaytopay.co.uk/directdebitexplained/pages...
The observations presented in the article are interesting, but as you suggest, the problem lies with the attribution of these observations to the broad and sweeping set of "[all] people."

We can consider the fitness example in the same light as your analysis of the gift-card example. My corporate gym -- and pretty much any gym to which I've ever belonged -- gets deluged by New Year's resolution newbies every January. By mid-February, most of them are gone.

At first blush, we may be tempted to suggest that "most people" sign up for gym memberships in January, then gradually lose interest. But in fact, we are simply observing one subset of people at one touchpoint. The set happens to have a dramatic impact, so our minds assign it unduly high weight through a cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic). But this subset, in fact, may not even be significant in the overall set of gym users and non-gym users. Perhaps "most people" use the gym on a regular basis. Even more likely, perhaps "most people" don't set foot in the gym at all, New Year's or otherwise. All that we've learned, by observing the New Year's subset in isolation, is how the New Year's subset behaves.
Right, but I didn't say the products you like are shitty now did I? What you like isn't bullshit. Your overly aggressive opinion on Apple is what's bullshit. Anyone with a reasoned opinion would never brand Apple's products as shitty. They might not like some of the philosophy behind them, but they aren't bad products in any light.

We may not all value the same things, that doesn't mean we need to be deliberately ignorant about the appeal others see in a product.
I might trust Riak's reputation, but it also has a reputation for being slow.

MongoDB and Cassandra both seem immature and unstable at the moment; all you hear is horror stories.
Easy tiger. Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary (non-native english speaker here) with "People favor doing things at the very last possible moment." ?

What I meant was that of all days, people buy on the very last. Which makes sense according to our intuition indeed. I didn't mean to imply that (number of people buying the last 5 days) > (number of people buying before during the whole year) as you seem to argue against. I was only observing that absolute numbers increase day by day starting 5 days before Christmas.

Your early buyer-late buyer model is interesting but as you said, it would require more thorough research to set it up and was not in the scope of the article.

I thought the data was interesting and wanted to share it with the community, and I had no ambition to draw a complete buying model from it.
But my point is: there is no such thing as "me". Now I do this (programming) and an hour later I do that (cooking). Then my daughter comes along and she wants to see pictures of puppies -- but I personally could not care less about puppies.

False problem. For one, your daughter can (and eventually will) either get her own Google account, or she will get her own computer.

But most importantly: ok, so you're not just "you", but your whole family uses the computer.

You still, as a person, get better results by Google using its knowledge of your family search habits --which include yours--, than just blindly guessing.
German EU parliament contacts page: http://www.europarl.de/view/de/Service/Anfragen_Kontakt.html
SQL came out of IBM research and its quite mainstream.
This is a common misconception about direct debits. Direct debits can be used to charge people varying amounts at varying frequencies (including one-offs).
I recently interviewed with a startup. They had all 6 engineers interview me one by one. Each interview had a whiteboard/tech question component. At no point in time was I restricted to a language or expected to use an API. The questions measured an understanding of algorithms (data structures and big-O notation), an understanding of operating systems (concurrency, memory allocation, etc.) and object oriented programming.

There was even a gross bithack, which I really struggled with. After a half hour the interviewer was laughing, saying "I love this problem because everyone just goes bananas with it". It wasn't to make me look stupid, it was to see how I approached a problem that was apparently unsolvable.

With each question I was free to ask any questions, whether it was a clarification on pthreads or a question about problem constraints. I did not feel like my "off the cuff" knowledge of programming was being tested, but rather my experience and understanding of programming.

My only complaint with the interview was that it was long (11am - 7pm with a lunch break). That was mostly due to the fact they wanted me to meet with the entire team one at a time, as well as the fact that I was only in town for the day.
Also, taxis work well here in my hometown. About £8 will get me to the other side of the city, and a weekend hire costs about £50. I found owning a car, all-in, cost about £200/month (adding up tax, insurance, repair bills, etc) so it's cost-efficient to hire a vehicle when I need it.
This is exactly how our service works. We never share your banking information with anyone.
Were you using XFS at the time? Search has never been a problem for me even on multi year old installs, but there was (is?) something about XFS that made pacman slow to a crawl.
Do they use the same API? Or do I have to code each bank? Can you pay to other EU countries? Is there a good documentation source?
The yum stuff is missing parts...

Use some magic to fix broken dependencies in a system:
yum distro-sync or yum check and decide.

Remove dependencies that are no longer needed:
package-cleanup --orphans

Downloads the corresponding source package(s) to the given package name(s):
yumdownloader --source PACKAGENAME

etc.
The problem with that is the asymmetry between the US and New Zealand in terms of power and trade. Having both parts being able to opt-out effectively means that the smaller part will be free to do exactly as they're told, or else.

I hope New Zealand deals with this case and does so fairly and ignoring external pressure. Sadly, this looks unlikely.
I was waiting something like that for a long time.
(take 4 arnoldo-jose-muller-molina)
Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012
Does your startup need a Product Manager?
So, I have to wonder, does this mean Microsoft makes more from Android royalties than Windows Phone royalties?
Brador, can you answer his other two questions?
Fantage recruits schools one by one for kids online virtual learning world
No because after making an interpreter you have a nice language to work with. That makes it very different than BF.
They do end up into the mainstream. IBM is not a B2C company, though, so there is no hype behind the unveiling of a new shiny gadget. So the tech community at large seriously underestimates IBM's contributions to the field.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone dowry to net Nokia billions
Corporations count as people don't they?
Slated aims to disrupt Hollywood as the AngelList for film funding
CloudTweaks all set for HP’s Master The Cloud  | CloudTweaks.com
CloudTweaks all set for HP’s Master The Cloud | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community
Not to be argumentative, because I really appreciated that link :) but POTS stands for "plain old telephone service". It's still in use all over the place today.

The distinction is in the type of phone attached to the POTS line. It looks like it requires a combination of a carbon mic and an old, non-integrated-circuit switchhook. Something like you'd find in an old Western Electric 2500 [1].

A carbon mic has some pretty unique properties. Base output is very high, such that output is easily detected at a distance without amplification, and they're very low impedance. Even slightly newer telephone designs would use an electret style microphone. The most basic electret circuits require a capacitor, which is noted to defeat the frequency flooding attack.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Model_2500
Didn't want to sound like someone scorning other people's work, I'm sure you did a lot of great things for 1.0.

However I have the gut feeling we're far from squeezing out all the juice from today's hardware.
I live in Amsterdam (I'm an American used to US-car-culture).

I have a bike. It lets me go almost anywhere in Amsterdam, cheaper, more easily, and generally faster than any other mode of transportation. Sometimes you get a bit wet.

There are a few distances inside the city which are not handy. For those I use the wonderful tram/bus/metro network.

Occasionally I'm lazy and don't want to bike, or need to go somewhere strange. Then I grab a car2go (electric smart car, €.30/min, including electricity, insurance, parking anywhere). When I get to my destination I park it anywhere and end the rental.

Since moving here, my transportation costs have gone from many-hundreds-of-dollars per month for a car/gas/insurance/repairs/tolls/parking/fines in the US, to around €40 month for a bike, public transport usage, and short-term car rentals.

It is much cheaper, and much more convenient, to call a taxi or rent a van when the above options don't fulfill my transportation needs.
I don't want that. I don't mind having to work a bit harder to get results, so long as those results are excellent. So, for your example, I want to have to type an extra word (either programming or snakes or herpatology or whatever) to provide the context that Google would otherwise get from wherever.

I'm all anti-Google, but this makes no sense to me.

You want to type an extra word?

"I don't want to be tracked and sold to advertisers", or "I don't want to be second-guessed" makes much more sense.
Ask HN: Can you recommend a graphical designer?
I need a graphical designer for occasional - mostly Drupal - projects. Do you have any recommendations or advice on this?
Thanks mattmanser.

Hopefully you'll like our implementation. We are working hard to make sure it's done right.
One of the greatest insights I've taken out of the last few years is to discard this idea of sacrificing today for tomorrow.

Sure, there's always a bit of give and take, but my conclusion is that successful businesses come out of successful people. That may seem like a flat statement at first, but what it means is that if you really want your business to be successful, you also need to take up the daily habits, behaviours, modes of thinking, etc, that will make you a successful person. The success of your business will then emerge out of that, rather than the other way around.

In your case, if you do what you need to make sure that you're a happy, healthy, pleasant individual, your business will do better as a result.

To put it in simpler terms, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, etc - were exceptional people before they started their businesses. They didn't become exceptional because of their businesses - their businesses were exceptional because of them.
You probably also don't see the point in home cooking when you could eat out, or growing your own vegetables when you could just buy them in a grocery store?
Poles Take anti-ACTA Protests to the Streets
I have two little kids (I know that's not three) and public transit or biking (I can fit both on my bike) is great for outings. It turns the journey into an experience itself. Driving with the kids strapped into car seats the whole time is much less fun. I live in a very bikable town within walking distance to light rail, but that was by design. We bought our house by drawing 1/2 mile circles around parks, rail stops, and grocery stores. Bought the first place that intersected all three. I was just thinking recently about how my kids likely be autonomous much earlier. By age 11 or 12 they'll be able to go all around the city on their own.
If Soros is correct, IMHO the best investments to own will be "off-grid" ones that are under one's control (partially or completely), and can generate recurring profits for its owner(s) under all but the most dire of scenarios. Examples: profitable businesses that provide necessities, rental properties in areas where demand outstrips supply, sustainable farms.

The worst investments to own, also IMHO, will be financial assets that are not under one's control, produce no cash flow, and whose value to one depends solely on what _other people_ might be willing to pay for them in the future.

As to protecting your home from damages, the only thing I can think of is: consider moving to an area where police/military protection will surely be outstanding (e.g., Northwest DC, where the Washington elite lives), or to a more remote area where the riots won't reach you.
Microsoft kept them for a while. Had they kept it longer, it would be an astonishingly good investment.

It's funny to imagine investing in Apple would yield better results than, say, investing in PocketPC...
Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard By Computational Complexity Theory
New Skyrim patch coming, will actually fix stuff
Yeah, saying that and also, you know, providing very insightful statistics related to DVD use and some historical data on the matter. The part of the article you somehow missed.
Nope. The problem happened on multiple systems (i386, x64) regardless of filesystem (ext3, reiser), although problems only start after a few months. I found a bug in the bug tracker for it with multiple people confirming it and the "solution" was to wipe the package database manually every once in a while.
Probably, given that Microsoft has never made money on Windows Mobile -- minuscule licensing costs coupled with a high engineering price. In their brightest expectations I don't think they see themselves making money with it.

Microsoft's mobile efforts have always been about the ecosystem. Office, Exchange, Windows security technologies, and now the xbox platform (though I still marvel that having your xbox achievements available for perusal was thought to be a big feature of WP7). Given that approach, Android can serve that purpose even without royalties.
Build Up Your Phone’s Defenses Against Hackers
I don't think "all you hear" is accurate. Mongo and Cassandra have some truly huge deployments and the "horror stories" are a function of the number of deployments.

Search "MySQL sucks" or "Oracle sucks" and you'll find much the same thing. It is a result of being (successfully) deployed so many places.

As an aside, if you want confidence in your NoSQL solution, reading either the Mongo or Cassandra mailing lists is an excellent way to realize how focused, efficient and powerful those companies and communities are. Of all the NoSQL db lists I read, Cassandra is one of the lowest incident levels and when there is, no matter how esoteric, it seems like one of the Datastax guys or someone from the community is able to help them out.

As for Mongo, the fact that Eliot and team still replies 100s of times a day to all the questions, even complex reports, is beyond impressive to me.

I am just trying to frame your comment a bit; these projects have left the "cool, large-scale toy" category a long time ago and have many companies better their existence on them. Netflix currently has one of the largest global Cassandra deployments (US east-west and UK) and continue to move out of SimpleDB and move more and more into their own custom deployment.
Ask HN: recommended premium web mail hosting?
Can anyone recommend a good web mail host that is has a strong privacy policy and will not go through my stuff?

More than willing to pay a nice monthly fee for such service.

Essentially the Gmail experience, plus a few $$$ a month, minus the privacy issues.
It could be more haste than incompetence. Anyway, if you think about massive brute force attacks like this, they are 'silly' easy no-brain attacks more likely to come from script kiddies who downloaded a tool someone else wrote than real attackers.