skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.

One example I can remember:

I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue

It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.

As for DDG:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue

It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.

And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...

with:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...

In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.

Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.
That value may never have been created otherwise. If the acquisition turns out successful then not hiring him may absolutely have been the right thing to do, even in hindsight
I have two nearly-identical tables, both shaped like (foreign_key some_data_type, name varchar2, value varchar2). (Before you say "that means you should use No-SQL", this is a staging environment for loading data into a claims handling system. Which is built in a language that comes with a relational db built in.)

They both have about 50M rows, with statistically identical data. I was running near-identical large queries on both, with the same execution plan (nested-loop join with index lookups), and getting vastly different timings.

This being a staging environment, these tables are re-populated by truncating them and running an ETL tool. What turned out to be happening, is that in one case the source query on the ETL tool was sorted by the foreign key, and in the other it wasn't. So in one case all those fetch-by-index-lookup operations added to to essentially a partial table scan, and in the other they added up to what you'd expect where blocks would be fetched in random order and probably re-fetched after falling out of cache.
Speaking of J2ME, $16B is more than twice what Oracle paid to acquire Sun in 2010.
I've been in wonderful first world apartments in Europe, and wonderful old apartments in Europe. Many old original flats are beautiful and great places to live - I agree.

But many old flats are not like these. They're weird semi-renovated things with modern amenities shoe horned in wherever they can fit, water heaters in living rooms, hallways snaking their way around, clothes washers in hallways or kitchens, aggregated bits of older flats glommed together to make new ones resulting in stairs in the middle of bedrooms or living rooms, tiny tiny kitchens so small that if you put a mini fridge in you can't open the door all the way so the fridge ends up in one of the bedrooms, or bedrooms which consist of a door that open to a wall, but if you look up there's a crawl space big enough for a mattress so it's called a "bedroom" (and so for privacy you get a full size door) and on and on and on.

I've been in flats that were the result of gluing two or three different flats from adjacent buildings together, only the floor heights were off by a meter, and you end up with things like an extra half bath down by the bedrooms, which useless so it gets used as a closet, so if you want to shower you walk down a half flight of stairs to the en-suite full bath that's in the bedroom-converted-to-a-living-room, or where the old door was for the second flat, it's been painted over and nailed shut, but if you open it, it opens into your neighbor's kitchen (which used to be part of the hallway in that building).

Or the one that had a fully renovated kitchen, but they didn't put space in for the fridge and oven at all, so you end up cooking on the coffee table in the living room on hotplates and the fridge is by the front door.

Why bother designating rooms for anything if they're just going to be used as semi-all purpose rooms?

You can get all the modern conveniences, sorta, but they might be in weird forms or stashed away in strange places.

These are not in poor areas, but in central parts of Paris or Barcelona or Rome or wherever. Decent areas, and some of them were multi-million dollar places that simply wouldn't be acceptable, or up to basic safety and construction codes in the U.S.
See Laurikari's paper on Tagged DFAs. It solves exactly this problem without impacting O(n) matching performance.
Inspiring TED Talks Every Entrepreneur Should Watch
He's Canadian, he won't "lose" anything, it would be waiting for him upon his return. I'm sure Google's health plan is more than generous.
This looks really nice. I wrote something similar for personal use during the NFL season. Selfishly, I hope no one finds out about this.
I agree, the criteria are highly questionable. I can understand that low crime rates are important for everyone, but for the most part the quality of life is determined by what you want to do in a particular place.

Is Vienna a great place if you want to work for a Hedge fund, if you are a jazz musician, an opera singer, a tech startup founder, a chef, an industrial electrician who fixes oil rigs, a UN diplomat? They don't ask these questions at all.

I can tell you what this ranking is about. It's a completely pointless PR gimmick by an HR consultancy.
Which probably means we should be using a NFA-based engine for routing, rather than PCRE, because I don't think "don't backtrack" is a very serious restriction for routing. (Yes, of the hundreds of developers who may read this, one of them may have used backtracking in a routing expression. But in general I don't think it's that serious a restriction.)
Core Location Beacons Podcast
I'm from the UK, age 18 and never heard of WhatsApp outside of HN.
ETA how long it will take for the transfer to be completed? I know that editing host records usually is instantaneous (unlike other providers), but we're talking about changing the DNS servers here.
I do the same but with one twist for better results. I go to Google and search like this:

site:reddit.com start a garden

Google is a much better Reddit search than Reddit is.
The Path Not Taken by Simple to Remake Finance
Drone Surveillance should require a warrant: CA help pass AB1327
Exactly the part I came on here to quote. It will be back; these things always come back. Democracy requires eternal vigiliance.
Joining Bitly Engineering
http://www.7netshopping.jp/food/detail/-/accd/2110181641/sub...
Another piece of the puzzle is that a single new bank isn't going to have it a whole lot better when it comes to interbank stuff (probably they have it worse, having to build useful relationships).
> unauthorized use of WhatsApp APIs

Does that actually have anything to do with copyright or trademark, or are they just very takedown-happy lawyers?
He is also a serial founder, and, among other interesting things, wrote one of the very first web crawlers. See http://www.textuality.com/ for some of his fun stuff.
git-annex would be great!

I've come to depend on it heavily for managing all my media files (pictures, music, video, etc.).

I currently maintain the git-annex-bin package in the AUR[0], which uses the official binary, but that's compiled for Debian and has issues on Arch.

For people who want to use git-annex on Arch, the choices are either (1) use this buggy binary, or (2) install cabal and a bunch of Haskell stuff[1], just to compile from source.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/git-annex-bin/

[1] which requires adding a separate repository, since Haskell is no longer in the main repos, and also installing a bunch of Haskell libraries that aren't in the AUR.
Compared to other countries, Austin is a paradise of calm, reasonable drivers. For example, it's fairly common in Asia (though not in Japan AFAIK) for a traffic light to be viewed as a suggestion rather than an absolute command. I've been in a taxi that was rammed and pushed through an intersection by the truck behind it when our driver didn't react quickly enough to a gap in oncoming traffic. The taxi driver wasn't even particularly mad. It apparently happens all the time.
They've been posting updates 30 minutes before your post buddy, and still are now. https://twitter.com/Namecheap
Small correction: in the US you can deduct mortgage interest. At the beginning of a mortgage, and probably for most people the entirety of their time in any given house, that will be the majority of your payment.
Awesome job Zach!!
I did a feature comparison to mobile messengers a while back.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtWoXGrBr42pdDl...
The article did not say the bay area is uniquely, or especially racist, it was just stating that there is noticable racism here. Which there is. More than Vancouver I have no idea.
> Remember that "tips" is an acronym for "To Insure Prompt Service".

No it isn’t.

http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/tip.asp
Ho quickly will the switch to v1 execute?
If there is no God, if all there is is the physical universe, then we are here only by chance. The universe doesn't care about us, because there's nobody there to care. All there is is matter and the laws of physics.

Therefore, all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be - nothing more.

In particular, it is impossible that we have any kind of free will or real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics.

Love (in the real sense, that of choosing to do what's best for the other person) is impossible, because choosing is impossible.

And you can keep going down the list. Everything that we think of as making us human is dead, and we are just machines made of atoms biochemicals, and neurons. We're slaves to the laws of physics.

If that's the case, then what kind of meaning is possible? Even meaning that we make for ourselves, we're making as robots.

There lies the horror of modern humanity. We have all these human aspirations, including the longing for meaning, but we don't believe that what we long for is at all possible. The impersonal universe, creating us by chance, has made us with desires but with no way to fulfill them. What a horror we are trapped in!

You have asked that we not bring God in. But at this point, you kind of have to, because the existence of God would totally change this picture. If there is a God, and if God is a He rather than an It, then personality can a real thing, rather than just a "ghost in the machine". And if He made humans, then human personality can also be real rather than just a facade that emerges from complex mechanistic behavior.

So that's the alternative: Either you were created as a cruel joke by an impersonal, mechanistic universe, or as a true personality by a God who is a person. Now to my point: I assert that your desire for meaning is not just a cruel joke. It is evidence - evidence that you are more than the materialist view says that you can be.

Commence hellbanning in 5, 4, 3...
Vancouver is a real city.

Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it. Californians who've moved there almost unanimously agree with my first sentence, and crack up at the latter.

(Sadly, I lived in Seattle for 17 years. The Bay Area before that, and New York now.)
Maybe now Overland Park, KS and Google can get fiber installed without acting like preschoolers.
An example is worth a thousand words, take a look at this conversation with a strong AI machine: http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog
Whatsapp has revenue in the double digit US millions per year. Their profit might even be in that range.
Beautiful Maps, and the Lies They Tell, An Op-Ed From Runkeeper
Certainly not the case for me. Facebook shows up as the top result.
The Nineteen-Billion-Dollar App
Ask HN: What keeps you off of Postgres?
In my mind, the future of relational databases is Postgres, in the same way that Linux now dominates the server market. Or rather, I want for something like that to happen, and the only viable candidate seems to be Postgres right now.

What keeps you on <insert RDBMS here>? Is it "our developers only know X"? Is it, "the data would be too hard to migrate"? Is it, "the queries would be too hard to rewrite?" Something else entirely?

What about manpower? Would you be willing to pay a consultant to make a clean sweep through your code base and servers and just make the magic happen?
Yes, we are actively posting updates on Twitter.
If you scroll all the way down, there is a special footer just before the comment box.
Should you use bribery to grow your audience?
Thanks! I just did the switch and the website was up in few minutes.
If namecheap chose to stop assigning all customers the same list of DNS servers, it would benefit namecheap as well. There's 200+ people in the queue for live chat right now :)

It's not DDOS mitigation or H/A, or some other high end feature.
We're not talking about worst case. We're talking about 100 rows and 10 rows, which is what @pradocchia means by "selective".

Indexing shouldn't follow the theoretical worst case, it should follow what's actually in your table.
it has significant impact because first case is "take 100 rows from index" and the second is "take 100 rows from index _and_ for each row go to the row in the table - do the random IO and with 1M rows it is probably 1 IO/row - and check for the value of 'b'"

Such 100 random IOs will cost 0.5 sec on 1 iron platter HDD for example. So the query performance will degrade significantly until either the table is already preloaded into memory or you use SSD drives.
Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, and Blue Moon can come in large packs. I know I've gotten 24 packs of those, along with some much more local brews that aren't nationally distributed.

But if you're talking about American beer overall, Budweiser is much more common and therefore a better indication of mass-market American culture.
Show HN: Chat Simply – Group chat for everyone
Today my friends and I are launching a project we've been hacking on for the past few years. It's friendly web based group chat (with apps for Mac, Windows, and iOS) that's not limited to a single business. It basically offers the power of XMPP with a simple UI.

chatsimply.com

Please check it out and let me know what you think!
How-To: Continuous Integration with TeamCity and Behat
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1734130?hl=en might be useful for you.
Utah Lawmaker Says We Should Emit More CO2 Into The Atmosphere
Mobile is Still in a "Pre-PageRank" Phase
I'm a Simple customer, and I'm getting married in March. The lack of joint accounts has been a concern for me for the past few months. I was really hoping they'd announce something soon about their plans on that regard.

But with this news that they're being acquired, I now have even less hope than before. I love Simple, but I'm now wondering if I'm going to have to find a different company to give my business.
+100 — NODE_PATH actually ends up being an anti-pattern because all of those internal modules are still not versionable. Instead, use a private NPM registry and just publish everything separately.
BBVA client here.

This is surprising to say the least.
The BBVA online banking is a prime example of a forgotten service to their clients. The .pt website will often output errors in Spanish.

Not sure if I should expect the tech to trickle into existing services, one can hope. It seems to be a nice deal for BBVA to expand to the Americas and for Simple to get in Europe.
Expressiveness? SQL is quite verbose for what it does achieve and if you look at an SQL with some JOINs, I'm not sure you want to uphold that opinion of its expressiveness.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with SQL as such but it has some shortcomings. Probably most things can be blamed on its age.

Why is the syntax of INSERT and UPDATE statements unnecessarily distinct? They do almost the same thing. Why are the values and column names in the INSERT statements' syntax separated and not with an UPDATE statement.

Why are there keywords that consists of more than one word? (Maybe the same ill-guided idea as with COBOL that being able to "read" SQL would make it easier to write/maintain?)

The syntax of SQL is in many places not tight enough, so you often have to hunt down a missing comma or typo, because the SQL parser is just not able to find out what you've done wrong.
I wonder if postgres higher scores come from the excellent visual explain that is inside pgadminIII ?
Frost's UI/UX is no where near Simple's, IMHO. My girlfriend was using Frost for a long time, saw me using Simple, and wanted to switch over immediately - super happy since. Since then every mobile banking app I've had to use (ATFCU, Chase, Citi, and BofA) is ridiculous. Bad design, limited functionality, no concept of UX (BofA's mobile app at least has it together but their webapp is stupid).
It was an awkward circumstance where I'm sure I majorly screwed up. The problem is that I can't remember...which is why it's my default....just in case. :)

All I know is there was some stash dropping and checking out involved and somehow I lost a couple day's worth of work...oops.
Clarification is necessary I suppose.

The concept being discussed is the limited scope of simulation. However, it can be assumed that everything affects (or can affect) everything else. The only way to know whether or not one thing may affect anything else is to simulate it.

How could you know the sphere of causality without simulating everything?

An object's light cone is not a property of the object; it is the result of the properties of the object as they related to the light shining on that object. If the source of that light isn't represented in a simulation, then unless that object produces the light itself, the object must be dark or the simulation isn't accurate.

The discussion is about simulating a universe. Unless there are truly discrete systems within that universe, you can't do that simulation within a limited frame.

I think what the author was alluding to, though, was to say that the actual rendering of the view, rather than the calculation of the view, would be limited to the current frame of reference.
Ermm. Neither. Honestly I prefer C# over PHP. Decent open solutions over C#.
As a Simple user, I want them to stay exactly the same, as the contrast they offer to almost everything else out there is outstanding.

But as an outside observer, I hope they grow like crazy. The amount that the banking industry needs to be shaken up to the point of near-destruction (preferably without the taxpayers having to bail them out) cannot be understated.
This criticism is silly - they are a startup and you should know what you were getting yourself into. Plus, credit cards in the event it's down?

I myself never experienced downtime and they've only gotten more reliable, better customer service, and more features.
Been waiting for this launch for a long time! Very proud of the team for sticking with it!
I had heard so little from them that I assumed they were in the throes of dissolution. I guess I was wrong.
Wouldn't want to spoil your enjoyment but why isn't it a problem in the Antarctic?

As a scientist brought up to value Karl Popper's writings on the practice of science, it's disturbing to see a hypothesis (CAGW) making a whole series of failed predictions and each time some new excuse brought out to explain that failure together (from some) with choice epithets for those who remark on that failure.

Feynmann made the point here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

"If it (theory/hypothesis) disagrees with experiment - it's wrong"
Looks to be up around five to ten minutes after executing the change. Not too terrible.
Thanks pwgustafson!
Congrats Team!
Rapid Mobile Prototyping and User Testing
Chat Simply allows me to stay in contact with both my friends and co-workers from both my phone and my computer. It's nice to be able to continue a conversation from my office to lunch and back.
No query optimizer would look at this and say "1M rows? Let's group and aggregate before filtering." Not to mention, the question specifically states that a=? would return 100 rows and a=? and b=? would return 10.

Regarding O(1), the first query would be some form of O(n log n) or O(log n) depending on the table/index data structures.
Seems reasonable since they do well on low tech phones. Facebook is limited by the amount of internet connections and smartphones.
Facebook buys Whatsapp for $19B: Value and Pricing Perspectives
How is Quasar vs Akka?
Is it really that unheard of ratio for the backend? Some of those developers must be client engineers, so their ratio is probably a wee bit better than 14 million to 1, but really the backend service is rather simple and shouldn't change much whether you have 5 million or 50 million users. Further when you control the client and the server, hiding downtime is stupidly easy.

The same is true of client engineers too I suppose. One developer putting out an app to 1 person is identical to putting one out for 100 million. The work is related to the number of clients, not the number of installs.
And what's the answer? :)
FWIW this is the news story that triggered the SAT comment: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/national_worl... the folks at Pitzer have been running the 'ignore them' test for a while now.
Datalog.

I honestly love SQL...I consider it a noble language:) It is the only declarative language out there that is still used today, and there are some solid reasons for that.

However, I believe the biggest mistake that was made in the creation of SQL was to try to emulate natural language flow patterns. This makes it hard to format and edit, and when people optimize towards writability, they kill readability (such as the use of leading commas. The lack of any real standard indentation practice makes it cooperative work frustrating. And the natural language flow actually confuses the writer/reader into thinking that order of operations is linear, as opposed to the FROM->WHERE->GROUP BY->HAVING->SELECT->ORDER BY->LIMIT order. This makes for really annoying logical bugs, such as how filter conditions in the where clause on a left-joined table can effectively turn your left join into an inner join.
Python.org redesign
Based on the last ten years of coverage of Venezuela in the US media, I no longer believe the hype.
Hitler lost the election. He used the political backing that he had to force the winner, incumbent Paul von Hindenberg, to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Hindenberg died in office, and Hitler seized the powers of the President and fused them with the powers of the Chancellor.

Hitler was not elected democratically. Please stop being wrong on the Internet.
I've enjoyed looking through that Github repository. Lots of snarky comments in the commit log about requests from Sony.
Isn't it possible to use private git repos to install packages? Why not just install packages from git instead of publishing to npm.
Yasp – Web-based emulator, assembler for students learning assembly language
That isn't at all what the H-1B Visas are being used for in practice. They are being used for cost cutting and facilitating outsourcing.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h...
May this have been a problem lasting for a week?

I am monitoring a few servers with DNS records. And the last week I have found all the servers unresponsive (by DNS, not tried directly) from time to time. And after an extensive amount of troubleshooting I am unable to find a problem.