skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you query geonames for "Boston, Massachusetts, USA" it can do it correctly but only because it's data is manually hard-coded as Boston being inside Massachusetts. If there was some other administrative region that Boston fell inside than geonames wouldn't be able to handle that.

For example geonames fails for "Southsea, Hampshire, UK" as even though Southsea is in geonames and falls within the regional boundary of Hampshire, geonames doesn't have that knowledge. OSM has the regional boundary data which can be used for that purpose.

Also once you have that you can do looser matching. For example if you search Geonames for "Bosten, MA, USA" it won't find anything. If you used soundex for an approximate search for "Bosten" you'll turn up lots of unrelated locations, but if you did it restricting it to places in "MA, USA" you'd have a much better chance of getting an accurate match.

While this isn't such a big issue in latin-alphabet countries, in the rest of the world latin-spelling of smaller town and city names is often completely unstandardized so using exact search often misses the town/city even though it might be listed in geonames under a slightly different spelling.
Signs that you are no more an amateur photographer
The following links might be of help:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/355-hacking-with-arel

http://railscasts.com/episodes/354-squeel

http://railscasts.com/episodes/215-advanced-queries-in-rails...
Learn SQL beyond simple statements. For instance, did you know that you can write this in SQL: "SELECT * FROM marketing_promotions WHERE 201205 BETWEEN month_from AND month_to" ? There are a lot of interesting things you can do with SQL which Rails isn't necessarily provide a good API into. For instance, did you know that you can create a custom crafted join view at the database level, with a sophisticated where clause, then instruct ActiveRecord to treat it as a real table? (This by the way sounds like what you need to do for your particular problem.) Also have a look into SQL subqueries, they are a very powerful tool.
Both are anecdotes. I would question if Mr. Frantz would have found himself in the same situation as the author of Nickled and Dimed, perhaps even just based off of the fact that he has black skin he may not have been offered a job or promotions.

As explained in the article, Mr. Frantz has been promised promotion many times only for the company to renege. Is this because he does a poor job? I can't really say. It sounds like he is at least somewhat ambitious in getting ahead. Also it sounds like his employer isn't above being unscrupulous.

I've also found myself moving up the chain only to suddenly have the position eliminated and demoted further back down the chain. One job I worked at, getting a promotion was the first step to getting fired what with how often they fired managers. In some cases it's better to keep your head down, but it all depends on the situation. I think it's a bit of a fairy tale to say you'll start in the mailroom and end up an executive in 20 years by "working hard". Does it happen still? Probably, but rarely.
As the numbers I provided demonstrate, the rich do pay to maintain it. It's the poor who mostly don't pay.

The US is already more progressive than the rest of the world - how much more progressive do you believe it needs to become?
Magnetic paintings created using ferrofluid
We run a few decent sized social games and we have survived all the major AWS region outages in the past year. He's what we do and what I would suggest.

1. Use Rightscale. You can get away with the free edition, but for $500/month the basic paid edition will allow you access to arrays and all the excellent scripts available on the marketplace.

2. The front end. I would strongly suggest moving away from ELB. We are using it and are about to get rid of it. The main problem is what exactly happened last night. If a whole AZ goes down, the ELB for that zone can get screwed and the DNS was not updating the CNAME to remove the bad zone. Instead of ELB, we have our own LB solution we are going to roll out that will use Rightscale server arrays and will handle the updating of the DNS names itself. We also aren't going to use Route53, because we learned last night that the API for that can go down and you can get stuck with bad DNS records.

3. Application servers. Use at least 3 AZ and have them evenly spaced. This is easy to do in Rightscale with sever arrays. Make sure your voting ration for scaling isn't 50% because you might not scale correctly if you loose 2 AZ. Keep the vote to 30% and you will be happy (if one zone votes to grow, let it grow).

4. Database. This is the fun one. We have been using MongoDB with pretty good success. Our multi-shard DB has 3 servers per replica set and has them distributed equally between AZs. We use 4 EBS drive RAID-0 drives for storage which have had problems in the past due to the outages that EBS sometimes has. Our best bet has been a watcher process that will kill the mongod process if there's any problems writing to the drive array. By doing this, the replica set will automatically failover to the next server and we won't get stuck with a primary node that can't write back to disk. For backups, we just freeze the writes on the secondaries and do EBS snapshots even 15 minutes. Rightscale has some great EBS tools for managing this for you. If you loose a server, we can deploy a new server in a matter of minutes and it will rebuild the RAID array from the last backup so we have a warm spare.

5. Monitor, monitor, monitor. Rightscale has some great tools for monitoring everything. Use them, and use more monitoring on other infrastructure (ie Pingdom)

Doing something like this will cost a lot more that just sticking to a single AZ, but you should be able to survive one, if not two complete datacenter outages.
> replace it with taxes on capital gains

The reasons capital gains taxes are lower than income seem sound to me. You want capital formation and savings.

There's only a problem because the government inflates the currency and manipulates interest rates down. This subsidizes speculation. The solution is just higher interest rates.
I think that your responses to the reviews would only be seen by a fraction of unsatisfied users. Wouldn't it be much better to be able to inform your users via an unobtrusive push notification that Instagram is down and that hopefully everything will be working again in a couple of hours/days? This could prevent bad reviews in the first place and would be seen by more users. I am not saying that you should have built in something like this but what do you think about it - for your app and in general?
Summer reading list recommendation
This article is not claiming that /you/ should solve the root cause, but that Google should: that the real problem is not "reply to reviews", but that users use the review system as a crappy support forum.

He explicitly states, despite his title, that replying to reviews is important and useful, but would be better done in private, not in public, as that is a more appropriate place to solve an individual issue.

In this particular case, it shoulds like what you really need (the root problem here) is that Google should provide the ability for you to add an important-banner to the top of your package description (such as in a different color).

(For disclosure, Cydia, the software marketplace I run, has "depictions" rather than descriptions, allowing developers to customize how their packages are seen an marketed. In practice this is used by repositories to show ads, but for the more savvy developers it solves your use case and provides a lot of power.)
Proposal: use SQLAlchemy Core for query generation
Yeah, the compiler will probably force it to work.

On the other hand, some of the the popular PIC microcontrollers have an instruction pointer that is wider than the data registers. Good luck doing functional programming on that!
> Indeed. Source code is speech, and speech cannot infringe patents. (Not saying this is logical, that's just what the case law says.)

Are you sure about this? So I could write any patent-infringing code I want, distribute source-only (or even write it in a purely interpreted language) and then nobody can complain that I've violated any of their patents?
>>Google understands that, but they’ve (as usual) chosen an odd and poorly-considered mechanism of encouraging app devs to air dirty laundry in public, and burn out due to having an additional public support forum over which they have zero control. That’s horrible. Count me out.

It is true that some developers may not be able to engage in a constructive conversation. It is also true that some other developers may not want this "additional public support forum".

However, for other developers (and their current/potential customers), a 2-way conversation will work out much better than a 1-sided conversation (i.e. app store review) where the other party isn't able to respond

Many developers are capable of providing a constructive reply to user reviews and imo Apple shouldn't deny them the chance to respond to a user review. I certainly wouldn't describe Google's attempt as odd and poorly considered.
Yes, if it leaves in its wake massive income inequality.

The middle class is the engine of wealth generation. It both spends high proportions of its income and has enough income to start new enterprises. A middle class drives an economy.

What you are asking is if it's OK for the middle class of merchants to shrink because many are now rich enough to be lords and kings. That may be, but it still leaves a society with no merchants: only the very poor and very rich.
I believe humanity is; however, we are discussing the subset of humanity that leaves comments on packages, which is a skewed distribution. People who tend to be more civil in general might have tried numerous other means of solving their problem or getting support before leaving a "verdict" in public; in my experience this causes the sample population of comments to be people who fall into these categories, as they are, at best, "at their worst" (stressed, angry, or confused).
I expect that Wilson will enjoy your writeup, definitely forward it to him. He's a Googler you should get to know anyway...
I love Rails, but I strongly disagree with its philosophy of the DB as being just a dumb data store. Two things I would recommend.

One, the book Enterprise Rails. It's a few years old, so all the examples are from Rails 2, but the meat of it is about proper database design, including the stuff that Rails doesn't believe in (composite primary keys, foreign key constraints, check constraints, triggers). Chapter 4, about the importance of data integrity, was probably the single most useful thing I've read about web development in the past few years.

Most of it is on Google Books (although sadly, chunks of chapter 4 are missing): http://books.google.com/books?id=thTju-4duY4C&printsec=f...

Second, the best thing I did was replace ActiveRecord with Sequel. Sequel has built-in support for all of those things that ActiveRecord doesn't (I couldn't live without its composite primary key support), and is in general a much more robust library than ActiveRecord. It also supports more exotic SQL features like CTEs and CASE statements without forcing you to drop down to writing raw SQL (though you can certainly do that if you want).

It's not a necessary upgrade for everyone. If your app has fairly simple models and relationships, ActiveRecord will probably be just fine for you. But if you want to get better with SQL and get closer to your DB, I think Sequel is a much better choice.

More info on Sequel: http://sequel.rubyforge.org/

It also integrates very well with Postgres - there's a C extension for the Sequel postgres adapter (https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_pg) and support for adding common triggers in migrations, counter columns and whatnot (https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_postgresql_triggers). It also supports the more exotic datatypes - hstore, arrays, even the json and range types that are coming in PG 9.2.
Uhm can someone explain what I’m missing?

I havent been involved in data centers since 2002 but in my last data center project we were carrying minimum 5 days diesel power with supply contracts in place for a further 10 days.

WTF? a few days of heat and half of the internetz gets shut down?

I thought the advantage of EC2 was they could re-route computing power on demand around the world etc? eg SF was carrying heavy power loads they could switch it to geothermal in Iceland and stuff like that?
I've always thought that the most damning part of the UK-US comparison is this:

The United States government spends substantially more per capita on healthcare than the UK (a number which, to be clear, excludes people's private spending and if anything understates things because it doesn't include the cost of tax breaks for employer plans), but fails to guarantee healthcare to everyone and has developed an underclass of people who have substantially worse healthcare than many second world countries.

The UK system is, in many ways, unique, in that it's severely underfunded but gets outstanding bang for buck. I wouldn't recommend it here, because I'd be pretty skeptical we could transplant the necessary consensus political support and willingness to say no to stupid treatments.
I agree with trying to understand your options to the fullest...except the casual mention of mental health issues. Most PhDs I know are still sane :)
Well, if your app doesn't properly identify the root cause of its problems, why do you think it shouldn't be getting unfavorable reviews?
Since just a few percent of the US population make 40%+ of the money in a given year, increasing taxes on those relatively few people would have more effect than taxing any other group of citizens. Also, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples', bringing their tax rate into line with the rest of the country seems like a no-brainer way to increase tax revenues substantially.
Saying "it's all bits" is too simplistic a view of file formats vs. APIs. I'm thrilled that MP3 files have ID3 tags, unfortunately that's an unacceptably small subset of the meta-data that I care about.

File formats evolve at a glacial pace and suffer from immense historical baggage. No one benefits from pretending that file formats are as accessible, agile or powerful as proper web APIs.
I don't know how the UK system is funded, but the Danish system is funded with a flat 8% income tax (the sundhedsbidrag) applied to all income, with no deductions or exclusions. Pretty good deal overall imo, especially considering that it's not dependent on age or preexisting conditions.
Apple patent case: Samsung Galaxy Nexus banned in US
Instalaciones deportivas
¿Qué es Reydelapista?
Es la web de encuentros deportivos entre jugadores de toda España. Encontrarás usuarios con diferentes niveles de juegos, edades y sexo por provincia y zona.
Es muy sencillo y fácil de usar, inclúyete a la competición o encuentra un jugador con el que quieras competir a tu deporte preferido.
También dispones de diferentes servicios como: Búsqueda de Polideportivos, puntuación de pistas, comentarios de Club Deportivos, escribir artículos , inscribir torneos, etc.
Y todo esto GRATIS!!
¡¡Cuanto más seamos más jugamos!!
It seems to me that any system or API you imagine or make up that associates a particular stream of bits with some sort of identifier is pretty much a file system.
I am extremely skeptical that more places will start imposing an IE tax. It's simply too unfriendly toward customers. And rational people drop browser support based on usage stats, because it's a cost-benefit decision, which means that this clamoring will never happen.
Hey,
absolutely, yes. It is something I should have implemented, and will implement in one of the next updates, but this doesn't help the users right now.
How to implement social features in your webapp
While I agree that up/down voting for individual comments would be a good step forward, I don't particularly care for talking to support. If I am already in the App Store thinking of leaving the feedback, it is all too late to try and steer me to the support. I came to speak up my mind, not to find the solution. If I wanted latter, I would've gone to the app's site directly.
Emurse is shutting down
My point was that Virtualbox with the free images is still vastly cheaper than VmWare Fusion + a bunch of Windows 7 licenses.

(And your internal network is all wifi? Seriously? With designers shuffling big files around? Then you have bigger problems)
Periscope: a new Ruby gem for skinny, powerful index actions
Dear Ben | Authspot
It's less about the reviews, more about the users that won't update to the new, better, version because the reviews state something wrong.
In hindsight, I should have added a mechanism to explain to users that Instagram is down. I'll also add such a mechanism, but that doesn't help the users right now.
Crunching megapixels in WebGL
You are making large omissions of quality when claiming things like "more" food and "more" education. America's educational rankings are descending rapidly. More HFCS is not more cane sugar.

"go ahead and find that single category."

Income expectations for their offspring are lower now for contemporary Americans than 1970s Americans.

If you want historical comparisons, you will be hard pressed to find a single successful society that has maintained income equality at anything like current US levels without collapse, economic devastation or massive human rights violations. Which of those three are acceptable in the quest to be the richest-ever?
Also, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples'...

No. The people with the highest incomes already pay a disproportionately high portion of their income in taxes, far more than the poor or middle class.

Bringing their tax payments into line with the rest of the country would cause them to pay a lot less in taxes than they do now.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay-greater-...
That is not the wording of the patents so your post is nonsense.
If I were trying to get into this market I'd try to find something I could sell to United 1Ks and AA ExPlats. I'll take ten of them over 100 leisure flyers.

That market, however, is probably booking directly through their respective airlines or a corporate TA. Makes it tough to break into.
Tax rates are only [x]%. The corporation is a distinct legal and tax entity from its owners. The corporation may use its income for any purpose without ever paying the income to its owners as dividends.

Most corporate income will not go to its shareholders as dividends (or otherwise). Hence, it is inaccurate to say that the tax cost of limited liability is [x+y]% except in the very limited circumstances where all corporate profits are dividended up to the shareholders. When measuring the true total effective tax rate on a shareholder, you must exclude any corporate income which will not be dividended up from the calculation, so the effective tax rate becomes [x-z+y]%, where z is usually equal to or greater than 95% of x.
I'm hopelessly naive about taxes in the US (I'm not from the US). How much more money (in dollars) are we talking about here?
From CMU's Application Design and Development course which uses rails:

Sample projects with good comments:
https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12 (project management app the professor created)
https://github.com/profh/PATS_67272

Slides from the class: http://rook.hss.cmu.edu/~67272/schedule.php
The Gambian man who made millions without a business plan
I hope that if I ever find myself making $625,000 per week, I'll be a bit happier with my life, and less angry about poor people getting too much, than this Wayne fellow is.
ID3 supports arbitrary key/value pairs, so it can store any metadata you like.
Top Gear is highly influential both in terms of viewing figures and general perception. Of all the people I know who saw the episode, they all had genuine reservations and believed it to be about accurate journalism, not comedy.

Second, as another reply points out, they did not really point out genuine shortcomings but rather fabricated events and used strawmen. If you analyse existing usage of sports cars, you will probably find the vast majority are used for short and medium distance driving on the road, not cross-continent or highly intensive race track driving. Hence the design and marketing of the Tesla.
Impressive, but seems like a really, really bad idea.
> If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass around data

Like the resource forks of classic Mac OS files?
These sorts of weapons move the balance of power to where the only reasonable defenses against the US are nuclear and bioweapons, and therefore that is where you should start investing your research efforts in if you are not an ally.
Ask HN: Best anti-virus for Mac?
I totally get what you mean. When I started with Rails I felt the same way. First I've completed some tutorials and read Agile Development With Rails but at that time i could only build "standard" applications - I couldn't think out of the box.

That happens probably because you don't yet understand much Ruby and how Rails use it to do all its "magic". My suggestion is that you keep trying. But here are some tips:

Learn more Ruby; watch every episode of Railscasts; dive into the source code (even if you don't undertand it); read open source apps on Github like Spree; build as many apps as you possibly can;
The 2008 edition doesn't seem to have any video lectures or am I missing something?
You're right there, a facility from Apple or Google to allow for urgent messages would be the best solution for the type of problem that I've outlined.
Heroku's Service Level Agreement
It both spends high proportions of its income and has enough income to start new enterprises.

Why can't a middle class person who became "rich" (although most people don't consider >1.5x median to be rich) do the same thing?

Suppose my income dropped dramatically and I suddenly entered the "middle class" (by Alan Krueger's definition - I'm actually middle class by the definition of most people). How would this make it easier for me to start new enterprises?
Google understands that, but they’ve (as usual) chosen an odd and poorly-considered mechanism of encouraging app devs to air dirty laundry in public

My reading of the announcement is that this is a way for developers to respond privately & directly to individual users, not in public for all users to see. Is that not the case?
A reasonable argument can be made that responding to reviews has helped improve yelp.

While some slice of humanity exhibit those article mentioned qualities, there's also a review process that goes on the person reading the review. When I read a review I asses the likely educational level, their domain specific knowledge and the way they phrase their words. This then brings a 'reviewer rank' to the equation, so I automatically weight the reviews positive or negative comments appropriately.

I think adding the developers voice adds an Interestimg dimension.
Money quote:

"Have files outlived their usefulness? Only if you think reusing data across multiple applications has."
Hey I'm the OP: Ran out of bandwidth in the middle of the night (blog is hosted on a very old hosting account) and am waiting for the host to get back to me so I can fix the situation. Will be moving to a Linode later today to prevent these issues in the future.

Here's the Google Cache for the time being: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.lay...
The point of the post was about the degeneration of government that can lead to, and allows, these kinds of things. MU and healthcare are very different topics but the underlying issue is the same: government does as it pleases.