skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are in the process of mitigating a large scale DDoS attack against our global DNS platform. We expect service to return to normal very shortly. Stay tuned and let me know if you have any questions. ted@namecheap.com
I've been using Simple for well over a year now can say that the software and website are absolutely amazing at monitoring and tracking your money. It has its flaws though: transferring is pretty much limited to automated mailed checks and accounts you own (they recently added simple to simple instant transfers), and no B&M banks to get things like large cash withdrawals (I do fee-less cash advances at another bank when I need money) or cash deposits.

With that said, I'd actually prefer a quicker integration with BBVA with hopes that their backend banking infrastructure would improve, but I wish they had done it with a more prominent US bank with more branches (BBVA has very few).

Edit: want an invite? Email in profile.
First and third. The shield is the Ukrainian police's riot shield.
Ask HN: ClickTheVote.com – What do I do with it?
I've owned this domain for a while. I am now looking to do something with it. As an experiment I thought I'd put it out to HN and see what surfaces.

Due to HN submission length restrictions I am going to break this up into multiple posts with six ideas. Reply where appropriate.

Basic ideas:

[1] Political discussion forum aimed at a younger audience
[2] Political blog, again aimed at younger audience
[3] Build something that Democrats or Republicans can use
[4] A platform for voting and survey taking online
[5] Sell the domain
[6] Hold on to it

I think that's it. There are certainly combinations and permutations of the above that could be worth pursuing. One could start a site useful to political parties for upcoming elections while, in the background, so to speak, one is really building a voting-as-a-service platform of sorts.

If you want to comment about one of the above six options I ask that you do so under the relevant comment where I expand details for that particular approach.

I am eager to read your comments.

Thanks!
By the responses I got, I was starting to think that I am the only one who noticed it.

I wonder why it hasn't caught on with other racial groups though.
Everybody is missing the point in this discussion.

While devices might be affordable, the real problem is service.

In most countries you can get a cheap android indeed but having a data plan is really expensive or it's just not possible because of how plans are structured.

The iPhone was in part revolutionary because it came along with a $30 data plan as an obligatory add on. Before that you had to be in the most expensive cellphone plans to have access to data.

In the developing world you either don't have a data plan or you have a REALLY restricted plan and I mean like you get 300MB a month and if you go over you get hit with a huge bill.
Ask HN: Can companies use crafty language to alert on data collection?
It appears that some of the surveillance "reform" has included the ability for companies to issue statements such as "0-250 requests for data have been issued." I am curious if there are other ways that companies can alert users of targeted surveillance with crafty language such as "your latency of access has increased"?
11. Never, ever get any kind of sick.

Our medical care is of lower quality than in most OECD countries, inefficiently delivered, and catastrophically expensive. (Rates of medical error are quite high, because younger doctors-- esp. residents-- work extreme hours.) An ER visit can run you $5,000 or more. Appendicitis goes into the $50,000 range.
[1] Political discussion forum aimed at a younger audience

- Relatively easy to setup. vBulletin or phpBB would do.
- Needs seeding with lots of posts in order to even begin to pull
real people in.
- Fighting spam posts is a daily reality.
- Site depends on converting enough eyeballs into posters
(not just lurkers) in order to gain position and value
- Monetization through AdSense
- If it gets real traffic you can sell advertising space directly
- Some affiliate potential
- Liquidation is far more likely to take the form of selling
through a site flipping service
[2] Political blog, again aimed at younger audience

- Also easy to setup: Wordpress
- Seeding with posts happens more organically than forum
because one or two people write
- Probably takes just as long as [1] to build an audience
- No need to depend on members for content, which can be
a big advantage
- Possibly better SEO ranking due to issues with user generated
content sites and how search engines treat them
- The easiest ways to gain traction are the extremes:
- Be the voice of reason: analytical, research and fact based
- Be an asshole at one or another extreme of any issue
(Howard Stern "shock jock")
- Far more people will levitate towards extreme views than
sit there and read through well reasoned arguments backed
with facts, calculations, models, etc.
- Have to be comfortable with this reality and be able to
consistently be that persona under a pseudonym
- Still competing with biggies
- Monetization: AdSense, affiliate, etc.
- Maybe even crazy ebooks
- Not an appealing idea intellectually speaking but have to
recognize that in today's political climate the extremes
probably convert better than a reasoned middle ground
- Not sure about liquidation. Could be a flipper site.
[3] Build something that Democrats or Republicans can use

- Make it a useful get-out-the-vote tool for young people
- Aim squarely at providing it as a service to one of the parties
- Perhaps even look at selling the site to on of them
- It still requires articles and becoming an educator of sorts
- Lightweight content that is easy to digest by a younger audience
- Not much effort in terms of immediate monetization
- Focus should be on content and tools that bring that younger
audience to the table
- Not an easy task
- Two major election events coming up in 2014 and 2016. These
will be highly contested and are potential opportunities for
a brand like "ClickTheVote" to rise to the surface.
- People getting more of their news and info online. With elections
taking place constantly a brand like "ClickTheVote" could be
positioned to be the party-independent go-to resource for
relevant information
- Probably easier to liquidate than [1] and [2] but just as hard to
build and position
Doing user studies and paying attention to my own behavior, I grow more and more aware how rare consistent, no-error performance of tasks is. Stupid mistakes now seem more the human norm than the exception.

What's especially sinister to me is how long it took me to really get that. And how much my self-perceived skill is more about my ability to recover from error than my ability to avoid error in the first place. Especially when it's over time periods long enough for fear to wear off.

I'd never take up flying, because I know my attention would wander during those long periods of apparent calm but actual risk.

Regarding why aviation attracts the wrong sort of people, if you haven't read about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think it'll ring some bells for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I have been using this since the beginning for my open source project https://github.com/pksunkara/alpaca. They provide very good support. And the features are awesome.

Short story, Gitter is awesome!

https://gitter.im/pksunkara/alpaca
[4] A platform for voting and survey taking online

- Not necessarily limited to politics
- Site provides the tools to organize voting for whatever purpose
- Embeddable voting forms
- Possibly self-hosted solutions
- Free and a couple, or more, paid tiers
- Mobil integration
- Aimed at C2B, clubs and any instance of needing to get people
to vote or opine on something
- Provide analytics, etc.
- Not a new idea; many competitors
- The engineer in me likes this far more than any of the above
- Monetization is based on actually selling a product
- Could also have ad-based revenue in the free tier
- If approach is unique, intelligent and hits a nerve the service
could be an attractive acquisition target
I would assume that the FAA is perceived to have a lot more power than a city's taxi licensing department. Especially given the amount of time that a pilot will have put into learning to fly, I doubt many would want to risk it.
And some memorable Reservoir Dogs dialogue.
That isn't really what aircraft autopilots do (intend to do a full point A to point B without human intervention). Texting and reading won't become legal if the driver is still responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle.
[5] Sell the domain

- Less work
- Far less money than a successful site could generate
- Currently working on other products, including:
- Redoing an existing mobile app to start monetizing
- Planning another mobile app with a partner
- Chipping away at two web projects
- Only the right person or organization is going to put the right
number on the table not to make me feel like a moron after
selling it. My guess is that this is somewhat unlikely to
happen but you never know.
"Plus I find the Bay Area congested, racist, incestuous, and overpriced."

I like this guy.
[6] Hold on to it

- Do nothing right now
- Elections and voting will never go away
- Keep thinking and look for other opportunities to build a
product or brand around the domain
Why would any sane sniper shoot medics to death? What are they, instantly healing combatants to full hp? Even if snipers would be so evil, it's much more demanding for the enemy to have wounded people because it distracts and takes off resources.

Sniper tactics is completely different from shooting non-priority targets, it's usually enemy leaders, machinegunners, other snipers and so on. Medics are civilians and only provocators would choose them as targets.
Two Things Everyone is Missing about FB Buying WhatsApp
Nothing odd with that. Comparing a country you are visiting to your own (or some other country you've been to) seems perfectly reasonable. Of course, if you're only complaining you probably shouldn't travel.

I love a lot of things about the US (I'm european) and I'd love to go back there soon, but the tipping system is annoying none the less.
Ask HN: Parse vs AppEngine for backend?[Android] 
Im working on an app that involves; dp-storeage; chat; feed;user details.

What would you suggest for a 1-2 person team?
It's much simpler than that. The first query only has to reference the index because the data is IN the index. The second query has to access the table. That's it.

It's called a covering index.
> but they don't spy on you

How can you be so sure of that ? A few months ago, pretty much anyone would say "but the NSA don't spy on you". From a paranoid (ie security) point of view, DDG is not better than Google et al.

Now, I do believe they are more respective of everyone's privacy, but there's absolutely nothing more than words to back this.
I watched an American gentleman helpfully suggest that to a Distinguished Professor of Statistics from a top 10 university in Japan. It took me 10 minutes in the car ride home to assure him that it was not an insult to his intelligence.
Show HN: I'm self-publishing my first book on LeanPub
The State of LTE – USA record the second-lowest speeds worldwide
Mt.Gox is finished
Natural gas is relatively clean-burning AFAIK -- not perfect, but better than other fossil fuels -- so that seems like a bit of a red herring. He's an advocate for awareness of climate change, not a Mennonite. You can't attack him for using electricity.
Thanks for posting here!
Tipping puts the burden of service quality feedback on the customer rather than the business manager. It also encourages the server to increase the customer's bill total. Most of the benefits of the practice are exclusive to the business, with no benefit to customer or employee.

Restaurants could pay servers a commission or bonus based on the bill total or for specific items on the customer's bill. Customers could be asked to rate the service they received on a scale from 0 to 10 instead of calculating a percentage of their bill total. But tradition is a tough thing to fight.
I missed #2. I wonder which case assigning sort order(ASC or DESC) to columns in index gives performance advantage.
Yeah. I'm curious. Does it look out of place on iOS, out of place on Android or out of place on both?
Comcast, Time Warner rivals may see opportunity in mega-merger
The Comcast-Time Warner merger may be embraced by industry rivals who see an opportunity for their own deals.
Why Bitcoin currency is here to stay
Show HN: Fantasy Sports Solved through Dynamic Programming
That's why us being in a simulation is one solution to fermi's paradox.
Cups and USB cables are tools, a means to an end. (I do buy fancy sugar, because I bake as a hobby). Beer is supposedly something you do for fun - it's not like it's nutritious - and if you're just drinking to fit in or using it as a way to get drunk, you might have a problem.
Yep. I had been hesitating on moving more domains over to Route53 because I thought the per-zone pricing was fixed at $0.50 per domain, but it actually scales really well. I'm going to move the rest over to Route53 as soon as I have a chance.
Boo hoo. If broadcasters don't like the rules, they should go cable-only and give the public back its spectrum, so that it can be put to a use that best serves the public.
Good. Although I have no reason to believe this particular coin will succeed, the more projects and attempts like this the better. The sooner governments around the world lose their corrupt and illegitimate stranglehold on currency the better. Every new coin gets us closer to the day when people can be free of parasitic, incompetent governments.

I do wonder how this will work though. Will people want to use it if their allocation of Auroracoin doesn't reflect their pre-existing share of wealth. So the appeal of this coin should be in negative proportion to a citizen's relative wealth... so poor people will want to use it most, and rich people least... so the only people incentivised to use it will be the people with the least to trade.

Hmm.
"They decided to hold a second funding round, in secret. Sequoia would invest another $50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion."

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
I just clicked the big 'Publish' button on LeanPub, and version 0.3 of my first book, Ansible for DevOps, is now available for sale.

It's been an interesting experience so far, and without a service like LeanPub, I would've never pulled the trigger. I loved hearing others' self-publishing experiences here and elsewhere, so I'm happy to share mine as well.
Plus I find the Bay Area congested, racist, incestuous, and overpriced.

Isn't Vancouver equally overpriced or worse? It's a beautiful city and seems like an amazing place to live, but I thought Vancouver's house prices were into the millions as well.

In what way is the Bay Area racist? I'm not a fan of that region, but I've never had that particular impression (except among upper-tier VCs, who aren't specifically racist so much as they hate everyone not like them).
For what it's worth, Review Board has a way to visualize multiple revisions in a single code review request. I think it is primarily intended for the patch writer and reviewers to go back-and-forth (like "ok, here's my fix based on you comments"), but with some scripting you could make your own tool that uploads a whole series of revisions to Review Board.
It does seem that he left on better terms that Brian Reid, but possibly for similar fundamental reasons...
This particular plan may be a pipe dream but I think everyone is vastly underestimating the roll satellite comm will play in the next 20 years.

Access to space is going to get much much cheaper and I suspect this kind of thing will become a major competitor with terrestrial wireless services. For instance, Iridium has 500 million in launches on the SpaceX books for Iridium Next starting in 2015. This is global constellation in LEO providing 1.5mbs wireless data connection anywhere in the world. [1]

http://www.iridium.com/about/iridiumnext.aspx
I love the sarcasm how-to, but I wonder what the Japanese think of western European meal practices if they find a 40-minute dinner to be extravagant.
I am also of the same opinion. Plus he probably doesn't want to lose his Canadian healthcare.
you find that people often omit large swathes of Africa and parts of the Caribbean?

that's a bit depressing, given the importance of colonialism in those areas.
Unfortunately, it's a total non-starter for me if there is no desktop app.
Was introduced only recently to Jim Weirich. Fabulous computer engineer and talker. RIP.
Tesla stock jumps on Q4 earnings report
The copyright part is.

Also, I wouldn't describe the DMCA safe harbor as an obligation to comply. More of a benefit to complying that doesn't apply to trademark (with the default in both cases being susceptibility to hypothetical lawsuits).
Another good source on human-scale urban design is Nathan K. Lewis. He has a great set of postings on traditional cities. An interesting point is the surprising commonality of organic urban building throughout the world, with the exception of the US.

His recipe is mass-transit, "really narrow streets," and mixed-zoning.

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.ht...
If you visit any of the links in the request they state "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown"
Ditch WhatsApp for more secure service, German privacy regulator urges
Hackers Exploit Bitcoin Vulnerability in $2.6 Million Theft
A source close to Simple tells The Verge that the company, which had raised $15.3 million, had been shopping itself around in search of a buyer since business wasn't progressing as quickly as it hoped. "They had kind of run out of steam," said the source...

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/20/5429916/bbva-acquires-simp...

Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure isn't really that innovative. The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology. Unfortunately, the investment required is higher than VCs seem willing to risk.
Are Your Apps Oversharing? 2014 Mobile Security Report Tells All
Yeah, I don't get it either and I'm American. I've spent some time in Japan and the lack of tipping is among the things I love about it. Not only do I not have to worry about it, but I generally feel more confident that the worker is getting a fair wage.

I worked as a delivery driver in Boulder, Colorado for a year. They paid me $4.00/hr because they expected me to make up the difference in tips. Though I often did, not everyone does and the accepted practice of tipping temps employers into thinking they can get away with paying ridiculous wages.
Wasn't he doing PR on the Android side?

Another one biting the dust.
I had to look up the whole list, and found it on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_quality_of_li... (link to PDF at the bottom). It's for 2012.

Judge for yourself.
Wow. I closed my Bank of America account and have been depending on Simple alone for a while now. I was really looking forward to seeing Simple flourish on their own, but hey, congrats to them! Let's hope for the best here.
Mark Zuckerberg's statement on the WhatsApp acquisition, annotated
I also answered "about the same", and no I didn't notice the bookmark lookup (so-called on MSSQL), but even if I had I'm not sure I would have changed my answer--well maybe I would have because I would have noticed the "trick", but putting my test-taking adaptations aside....

It is already a highly selective query. Adding a 100 bookmark lookups will not cause a material change in performance, unless this query is being executed 1000s of times per second, in which case maybe your real problem lies elsewhere.
The OP has said that he doesn't trust scientists.

So, is he saying that scientists are part of a conspiracy.

And before calling others obtuses, read what the OP has said.
Thanks for all the brilliant support Pavan!

In fact, Gitter uses Pavan's excellent Octonode library (https://github.com/pksunkara/octonode) for all it's communications with Github.
Thanks for the update, guys.
Oh shit, he just accepted a patch of mine into Rake a few days ago too!

Damn, that sucks.

What was his cause of death?
Global Forest Watch
http://blog.globalforestwatch.org/
Facebook to Pay $19 Billion for WhatsApp
[5] or [6]

If you have four build possibilities that you're putting up for a vote, then I'd argue most likely you shouldn't be doing any of them. It probably means you're not on to something particularly interesting, you don't have a particular interest in any specific one of them, and I'd consequentially argue your time is too value to treat that way.

Better to spend a little more time and find something you really, really, really want to do; or something that you've thought of that serves a pent-up need that isn't being well serviced (or similar angle).

Don't do something with this domain just to do it. That's a good way to lose six months, or years, of your life you'll never get back.

I don't say this to imply that you shouldn't do anything, but rather, that being selective about serious time investments is important.
Shutting down in 1..2... Despite what the CEO says, I don't see how Simple is going to see the light of day in a giant that manages $800+ billion in assets...too bad, the prospect of a new type of banking was something I was actually excited about.
>4. Nobody is impressed by how much you can drink. In fact, shame on you.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case in UK. People love to talk about how much they can drink, and love to reel off an exact list of everything they drank the previous night like a list of achievements.

(in my experience of my peers throughout my life up to and including the age of 32)

Binge drinking in the UK is a huge problem.

http://www.alcoholpolicy.net/2012/06/statistics-on-alcohol-e...

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/02February/Pages/Binge-drinking-...

https://catalogue.ic.nhs.uk/publications/public-health/alcoh...
The bit about laughter surprised me the most. I had no idea it was considered embarrassing to laugh publicly in Japan.
Yes please, thank you :) All my domains are down now but I understand how shitty (the panic!) it feels to have things going down. I'll be checking this.
are you dense? this has already been posted 523432 times
Ever plan on visiting Vienna? Why not live there and build tools for other developers. We are hiring at Codeship (https://www.codeship.io) for our Vienna office.

And if you ever come visit the city let me know at flo@codeship.io. Happy to show the HN crowd around town.
I signed up for Simple because of the pretty video and app and I was hooked. I now spend everything from Simple and just use my old Wells Fargo account for recurring bills. It's a beautiful app, has a cool goals feature, and alerts you right away how much you just spent, which is helpful for verifying your receipts. Their customer service is like WP Engine status and you can chat them right away. Their transaction categorizing it 10x better than Mint. Mint puts 1/3 of my stuff as uncategorized.

I only hope they don't go the way of Mint, even though they're two different products. Has Mint improved any features at all since they were acquired?
I went to grad school in Boston. Many foreign students complained about how homogeneous American culture is, how there are no restaurants besides McDonalds and Burger King, etc. But most of them formed these impressions by driving, or taking a bus, to NYC and back. If you don't get off the freeways, you really don't see what real life is like.

Similarly, I visited a friend in France once. On the way there, I took the TGV from Paris. I don't remember anything special about that leg of the trip, and learned nothing about France. On the way back, we drove, and passed through a bunch of little towns. I have a fond memory of helping a boater open a gate to a canal lock, and I still have a strong impression of how contained French villages are compared to American ones.