skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Duh, but that doesn't really contribute to the discussion."

The idea that storing often requested data in something other than a database and that being a simpler solution than tuning the database was a revelation to me at the time when I learned this. The overarching point is a database is not a panacea for data storage.
It's currently free. How much would you pay for a service like this?
It's sort of like those bizarre outfits you see on catwalks, parts/details of which actually filter through to mainstream clothes eventually.
"In a classic study, Cialdini and colleagues manipulated the signs that were displayed in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, a site often plagued by tourists who end up grabbing some of the petrified wood to take home as a souvenir. In situations like this, the first inclination of well-meaning environmentalists might be to set a strong prescriptive norm — perhaps by saying something like, 'Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest. This is bad, don’t do this.' The idea here would be to invoke a sense of shame and severity before asking visitors to refrain from taking the wood. But read that prescriptive message once again. Is there anything descriptive in there? Yes, of course there is. That message is not just telling you that you shouldn’t take the wood — it’s also telling you that most other people do. In fact, people were actually more likely to steal wood from the forest when they saw the sign telling them how many people tend to do it themselves, even though the very next sentence was asking them to refrain. But when the researchers simply tweaked the message to read that 'the vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, helping to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest,' the thievery plummeted. [1]

Not a parent, but I would guess that kids are the same way only more so. The smart parent will make sure their kid sees other well-behaved kids most of the time.

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/03/28/ma...
The Disney shows are just evil - they give kids horrible stereotypes to emulate. I know several girls that are walking little Disney show characters. They are mean, snarky, and talk in zingers like the punchlines of Shake it Up or A.N.T. Farm. It is kind of sad.

We see a change in behavior when our 7 year old daughter sneaks off and watches some of these show. Instant attitude. Our clever daughter decides she wants to be a famous dancer.
I've seen this bleeding over happen fairly regularly, actually, not just in the LUG. It seems to be fairly common in groups where people interact heavily online and less heavily in person.

(Also, hi spiffy!)
Actually what i find to be the core question in deciding to use a database or not, is whether all data can be loaded at program start into memory or not. Loading all data at start is pretty simple and efficient. In this regards, there is another problem, getting the changes from memory back to the disk. Writing all data to disk, and even overwriting existing data is out of question, so such a system is needed which saves the changed data incrementally. Is there such a "database", which: a. loads up all the data at the start + loads the incremental changes, b. writes the incremental changes in transactional manner to disk, while not messing up the OS paging? I wonder if there is such a "persistent paging file" library available?
child pornography - please remove
...at least in C# regexes.
I find the comparison suggesting, but otherwise useless.
All human endeavors have a political factor, but "political party" evokes something else. Many ads promise to make our lives better, yet they aren't call political.
Immoral according to what ? to whom ?

There is only the law , the rest is b.s.
All Drupals aside, I think Python and PostgreSQL were wise additions. Aside from the friendliness of the projects to newcomers, think of what being a regular contributor to either project will do for your job prospects. I don't want to hire the person who knows PostgreSQL - I want to hire the person who's helping to write it.
The power differential involved can make it very sinister, at least from my perspective.

If everyone could be equally resourceful in avoiding taxes then I would agree completely. If everyone is able to avoid paying taxes with equal ease (or difficulty) there is no problem. However, I don’t think that’s the case. Some can throw lawyers at the problem, others can’t. That makes it problematic.

Yes, it’s a systemic issue, too (and that is likely the place where it has to be fixed), but I don’t think there is anything wrong in thinking that using more esoteric tax avoidance schemes available only to the few is deeply immoral, if not illegal.
I suspect though that that US Supreme Court ruling has little impact and no jurisdiction on an HMRC (HMRC = Her Majesty's Revenue and Customers, the UK's equivalent to the IRS) investigation into the tax practices of Google's UK subsidiary.
This is like Highdeas without the "hey weed sure is cool" posts.

I'm not sure if that's an improvement.
It seems to me that using the same device to access banking website and receive SMS Tan is asking for trouble. If your smartphone is compromised you are toast. If you use 2 different devices than the hacker has to compromise both of them to get you.

My bank offers hardware tokens for authentication and I am glad to pay 1-2 additional euros a month for enhanced security.
Couldn't we do a practise run on earth? I'd expect an underground colony built to specs to survive indefinitely on Mars or Mercury could also do so on Earth even in the event of a large impact (assuming it isn't a direct hit on the colony itself).
It should buy Yahoo.
I'm interested in the databases that support more complex types. Pointers?
Recursion is how you implement a sum without mutation (an imperative loop is how you'd implement it with mutation). You've merely given me the function written in a declarative notation.
What is the margin of error for a statistic like this? Seems like 2% could be within measurement error, unless the DOL data is counting every single software job in the US.
ext4
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8#head-372b38979138cf2006bd...
What's up with C++ in 2002 and today? If you knew C with classes in 2002 (MFC style) you were good, if you knew GoF patterns you were elite.

Today you have to know STL, auto/smart/shared pointers, all kinds of right casts, you have to know boost (a huge code base) and on top of that you are expected to know C++0x (or how is it called?) with its lambdas, autos and stuff, while still understanding the whole "classic" C++.

(But at least nobody cares about MFC and ATL anyway)

And don't forget templates of templates of templates which crept into many code bases. And 64-bit (or ARM) is now reality which you should account for.

If anything, you have to know ten times more in C++ in 2012 compared to 2002.
That's a fair point, for many scenarios this stuff doesn't matter, like a video-game. However, most apps fall into either the "serialize a bunch of crap to disk" category, or the "multi-user data changes all the time category". Nearly everything in the second category works best with a proper database.
I'm pretty sure if you replace "Google" with "Microsoft" or "Apple" it would change the number of people dismissing it as b.s.
I've seen a similar bifurcation where most minecraft videos are either really cool how to demos that focus on the game, or are extroverts trying to showcase their swearing and drinking abilities where the game is kind of a screensaver in the background as they act pretty much act like fools.

I've learned a lot from some minecraft youtube videos such as how to build an automatic chicken growing factory with water conveyor belts. Frankly I'd rather have spent 15 seconds looking at a blueprint than 15 minutes tediously watching a build, but still..
An extinction-level impactor on earth would opaque the skies for decades. Unless you have a power source that's going to last that long without refueling, and that's sufficient not only to supply the direct needs of the human occupants, but also their indirect needs, in the form of light for their crops, then no; probably not.

That's one of the more compelling points about Mercury, according to this argument: pretty much nowhere else in the solar system is power going to be that cheap and abundant.
I think that when you find a bug, you are obliged to all the users using the service to report it, really arrogant not to report any more bugs and wait until the wrong dude finds it...
Floobits also uses a centralized service with a web editor where as this vim to vim only.
Moral philosophy doesn't really work that way. You may live in a lawless no-man's-land. Even though murder may not be "technically illegal," that doesn't somehow make it any less wrong.
There's no foolproof way to know what will generate value ahead of time. Sometimes in order to use their skills to generate value a developer requires resources ahead of time that only a large company can provide.

If you work on a failed project as an employee, then at least you got paid a salary during that time. As a startup founder you walk away with nothing.
Floobits works with Sublime Text 2 and 3, emacs and vim and a web editor and Google Hangouts and integrates with GitHub + a permission model and a shared terminal.
Hi, from an expat in Japan.
Currying is like air in functional programming.

Here's a small example:

map (+ 3) [1, 2, 3] == [4, 5, 6]
If the impact is big enough, the resulting worldwide earthquake and volcanic activity would destroy the colony, surface or underground. Given underground colonies _rely_ on equipment just to stay alive, the destruction of this equipment would have greater damages than surface colonies. Then, if the main power source of an earth underground colony is solar power, then they would not end up much better than the surface one. Getting closer to earth core as seismic insulation and power source may or may not solve the 2 problems mentioned above.
How is your case identified?
I believe the poster intended to quote the Justice to speak to the principle of the matter, not to imply that the ruling had jurisdiction.
Deep underwater colonisation hasn't been properly tried yet and we are thinking of Mercury and Mars. Sounds a bit unreasonable when the best we've tried is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Would you prefer Lord Clyde in Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue?

No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue
Is that actually a good thing? If I'm using \d to validate numbers (for example to check before string to int conversion, or IP address, phone number, or any other use), other unicode digits are not helpful to me.

It's great to support unicode, but I don't think the \d should have been extended this way. Add a \ud or something.
So you solved the question of what’s right and wrong. All we need is some people, elected using a byzantine voting process, who, with weird rules and centuries of inertia, come up with the Truth. That’s it, everyone else can pack their things and go home.

Why do you elevate the law in such a way? It’s possible to have a perfectly productive discussion about whether and why something is immoral without even so much as mentioning the law. People define what’s moral and what’s not just how people define what’s legal and what’s not.

The discussion about whether something is immoral or not is one that is completely separate from whether something is illegal.
Agreed. I've read a lot of SF, and whenever a Mercury colony has appeared, it's always been in the context of, "Well, now that we've figured out this colonization thing on Mars, and some of the gas giants' moons, and the asteroids, and, and, and... we'll try the hard places, like Mercury."

This article makes a powerful case for that thinking being exactly backwards.

(Well, except the asteroid part. I've thought for a very long time now that the easiest set-up for an offworld colony, in terms of overall expenditure of effort and resources, would be to tow an asteroid to a Lagrange point, hollow it out, and spin it up for centripetal "gravity".)
Anyone know if this happens in other languages?
Semver is explicitly ambiguous about versions < 1
Every time people say "What's the problem if they're obeying the law?"

These companies are using very complicated schemes, bought from well funded well staffed multinational accountancy companies (any single one of the big four has more staff in an off shore tax haven than the HMRC has in total). Don't forget that law consists both of statute and case law - a bunch of this stuff has never been before a judge so we don't know if it's legal or not.

These schemes are not normal tax planning. While they're not tax evasion (use of clearly illegal methods to not pay tax) they're borderline, and may not actually be legal. For these schemes to be legal requires a suspension of disbelief - for example, Starbucks doesn't make any profit in the UK[1]. (Baffling if you've ever bought a £4 coffee.)

Forensic accounts investigation is complex, time consuming, and expensive. It's not surprising that overworked under funded understaffed tax offices can't spare the resources to investigate companies who are trying to obfuscate their tax arrangements. When companies are caught they negotiate deals to repay some, but not all, of the tax. Not paying your tax and risking getting caught is just a cost of doing business.[2]

A company using English staff, in English offices, to sell English products to English staff working for other English companies, using English money through English banks should probably be paying tax in England, even if the company have arranged for someone in an Irish office to sign a bit of paper at the end of the chain.

And we've got ourselves into this weird situation. The big four firms lend staff to HMRC to help draft tax law. The big four firms then use their inside knowledge of these laws, that they helped to draft, to create schemes on the edge of legality[3ab].

What I'm gently worried about is an employee of Google (apparently from an accounts department but maybe I got that wrong) siphoning off 100,000 emails, and keeping them for years before coming forward. That feels like a significant fail, but I have no idea of the law around that kind of thing. I trust that Google has much tighter controls around user data.

[1] (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/starbucks-is-...)

[2] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/20/inland-revenu...)

[3a] (http://www.ion.icaew.com/TaxFaculty/26745)

[3b] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/26/accountancy-f...)
in C#
oh wow I had no idea that "full width digits" can actually be handled properly. (U+FF10 ~ U+FF19)
I was a bit surprised that Perl does not seem to be matching Unicode digits. Anyone know why?

$ echo '0' | perl -pe 'print "yes: " if m/\d/'
yes: 0
$ echo '੧' | perl -pe 'print "yes: " if m/\d/'
੧
> Unless you have a power source that's going to last that long

Geothermal, nuclear, tidal. Perhaps wind, I'd think heating the upper atmosphere would still cause turbulence?

I'd say the main reason is that it's not as cool. Which at the end of the day is why we do stuff. Living on Mercury would be dam cool.
> "honestly"

Which generally precludes lying before Parliament.
Ask HN: PRogramming Language for 2013?
I've been reading articles to see which programming language is going to be most promising this year. It seems like every blog I read is different. Some say python is first or others say C, or Java, or Ruby and Go. PHP seems to be in 3rd place for all the blogs I've read. Im wondering what HN thinks?
I'd also point out that the expansion of SaaS, open source, and mobile app marketplaces impacts this.

Look at services like FreshBooks and Basecamp. The engineering effort to implement comparable solutions used to be immense; now you can buy into online services for less than the price of lunch, with no long-term contracts.

Similarly, look at open source solutions like WordPress. An afternoon with a $5 hosting account and a few plugins will get a site that would have cost you $100K+ in 1998 feature-wise.

I'm also amazed at how often a few minutes searching for an app will get me something that fits the need perfectly - and costs less than $4.
Not very difficult to tell how I use my computer :D

139 vim
137 coverage
135 ls
105 cd
98 git
98 fg
52 clear
25 sudo
19 ./manage.py
17 grep
16 mysql
14 source
14 find
13 python
11 rm
10 ssh
8 mv
8 go
7 ps
6 rsync
6 pip
5 xargs
5 mkdir
5 cp
4 xclip
4 sed
4 pianobar
4 man
3 vi
3 touch
3 pkill
3 deactivate
3 alsamixer
2 time
2 tar
2 startx
2 ssh-add
2 sprunge
2 kill
2 java
2 ./build.sh (script to build a Go program)
2 ./bin/api_server
1 xbacklight
1 which
1 s
1 rmdir
1 redshift
1 lesss
1 less
1 jobs
1 history
1 hg
1 export
1 dmesg
1 date
1 cat
1 ./all.bash
1 acpi
I did indeed, very much so. Thanks for saying that!
Because he likely has 9 figures in Bitcoin that - by design - could not be recovered were they ever stolen from him.
There is a difference between being humble and forcing yourself to be humble because it's a noble thing to do.
Big difference.
Same difference as between being and doing.
Being is born from within, doing is a result of it.
Be-ers are writing books about what they "do" because do-ers are buying them en-masse thinking they can repeat doing-ness and succeed.
When they fail - they think they need to get a list of "better" things to "do" to succeed.

Be humble. But start with cleaning up inner garbage that drives you to think that "doing" humble things is the same as being humble. It is not.
Realizing it is the first step toward being.

Yourself.

The rest is secondary.
Am I the only one driven crazy by reporting that states an ambiguous "average" for something asymmetric like salary, when the choice between median and mean as a measure of centrality makes all the difference in the world?
Except that Judge Learned Hand is an American judge, dealing with American cultural norms and political ideals. British law may have rather different ideas as to what constitutes legal obligations.

As with many things, power defines the limits of society; the question being can google take on a thousand-year old theocracy and win?
when I was growing up I was sort of forced, sort of coaxed into reading a lot of books. So maybe I am biased, but it seems like reading books is the most educational experience a young mind can have. I also built a lot of legos, which is kind of like a real world analog to Minecraft (correct me if I'm wrong on that), and that helped develop my spatial reasoning I suppose. But it seems like literature has an almost endless potential to educate and expand your mind, whereas at a certain point minecraft/legos/etc will reach a state of greatly diminished returns. So why is the only other option for this woman's child a TV?
Perhaps you should market more towards a co-founder then just a programmer. Or market as looking for a CTO? It's not really your fault that underfunded CEOs often think that they can lure someone in with the potential of a mega-exit, when that isn't the case.

I'm wondering if equity-only positions actually ever even get filled?

Good luck though, you're probably on the right track by not just hiring the first person in your lap (happened a lot at the last company. Bad move).
'Secretbook’ Lets You Encode Hidden Messages in Your Facebook Pics
This is the time to start the next Tumblr, as the last Tumblr is now dead.

For the same reason that Flickr was replaced by Instagram (and missed the entire mobile wave), Tumblr will lose traction over the next couple of years and be replaced. They'll stick around, but their traffic will fall by half in 24 to 36 months. Flickr for example has been losing traffic for two straight years.

Nothing less cool than using a Yahoo blogging site if you're a teenager. That isn't going to change soon.
'egrep' is the first on my list.

I guess the future is all about regular expressions :)
I'm hardly representative of "HN's opinions", but describing Nelson's ideas as "unfocused" and "vague" is kind of like the student who complained about Shakespeare's works being "derivative and full of cliches".

Sadly, Xanadu never became the success that Nelson forsaw, but "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" was full of all sorts of incredible new ideas, some Nelson's, some from others that he just collected in one accessible place. Keep in mind that the book was first published in 1974, two years before Jobs & Wozniak formed Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, and seven years before the first IBM PC.
All this kid wants to do is make zombies. That's adorable.
I wonder what kind of security vulnerabilities could be looming in validators not expecting non-ascii 0-9 digits and using this regex?
I figure if people are claiming for individually purchased termite treatments or bug extermination on their insurance (which I assume they can and do on some policies) it's more cost-effective for the insurer to buy direct, and in bulk, for all the bug treatments their policyholders are likely to claim for. The insurer adds "same day bug treatment service included" to their insurance product offering, you get paid for xxx callouts per year without having to market your services direct to the homeowner, and potentially can ask for some of that revenue up front to help you expand you team.
On the off-chance this is not a troll,

> but most could if they were pointed in the right direction

Also, I could make a killing investing in this here penny stock...
Very true. What % of developers are writing C++ however? I'd think it's a reasonable assumption that they're going down (and a cursory glance at Indeed shows this).

So some jobs will always pay well; the average salary should go down if the average skill need goes down however. (Ignoring for the moment that some lesser skilled development jobs actually pay better as a result of demand)
This is a very fair response.

I do however think that there is a group of people that have seen early success based purely out of just being smart enough to achieve certain things, and as a result, over relied on that.
Here are some results in Javascript: http://jsperf.com/digit-regex
I am angry that the law is so flawed, that the authorities are so slow to act, that the accountancy firms employed to write the laws were not impartial, and that companies negotiate special deals with HMRC.

I cannot blame Google (or any other company) though. In the same way I don't blame them for filing software patents to be used defensively. The system is broken - either through case law, reformation, or deterring windfall taxes - we must do something about it.
Given that the category is specifically "decimal digit", I think it's good, so long as the number parsing code accepts them all too.
Or improperly. If you expect \d to be a shorthand for 0-9, your string can also contain junk.
> Mochizuki doesn't use the conventional scientific peer review process. Rather, his habit is to publish, and leave it to other mathematicians to sort their way through his reasoning

Wrong: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=Shinichi+Mo...

I see a lot of papers there in ordinary peer-reviewed journals.
I just tried it on RHEVH the other week, and it -runs- well (easy to setup, just works, virtio works as expected), but on shutdown, would jump to kernel debugger.

I didn't get shutdown issue sorted, or benchmark performance, but it's really easy to setup and start playing with.
Try:

utf8::upgrade($string)

And/or:

use feature 'unicode_strings'
It does. See http://ideone.com/Q1lf1M