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It would probably be more fair to attribute the Nobel prize "nationality" to the university/country at which the scientist was working at the time they made their discovery.

In both cases in the article it's almost certainly down to "stop word" removal.

The titles contain "the" and "and". These kind of words get filtered out because they make indexing incredibly difficult, ie. you search for "the" and get every single book containing "the" in the title (and sometimes description, depending on how deep the search is). So they exclude extremely common words to get eg. "catch kill". Then they have to rank the results for "catch kill" by some other heuristic - like popularity - and you get a list of books that people weren't looking for. Not to mention the first two books in the list were actually exact matches, so maybe they were more popular on the site.

Big search engines do try to correct for this, but it's not an easy problem. Usually results in some hard-coded exceptions for names like "The Who", but it's not trivially scalable.

In the case of your google maps results, I imagine it'll be something like (popularity * distance), which isn't necessarily the best heuristic.

The problem is that you can't please everyone with heuristics. Give power users the option to adjust the search to distance-first, popularity-first or any other of a dozen different combos and you end up with a confusing mess of a UI. Simplify it and give them your nicely hand-crafted best guess and there will always be someone complaining...

It's fairly standard Physics jargon. Physicists don't like saying the word "impossible", because there's always someone out there that can't stand hyperbole. So they often refer to something as "not likely to happen within the age of the universe" rather than "impossible", hence the 13.8bn year estimate here.

Just for reference, as of PG11 it no longer locks or rewrites for default column creation.

It's one of the nice things about Postgres, they're always improving. A few years ago, concurrent index creation wasn't a thing either. Nor were "CREATE/DROP IF (NOT) EXIST" statements for various bits and pieces, but they just keep adding to it over time.

In the upcoming PG12 there is REINDEX CONCURRENTLY, so we'll finally be able to fix corrupt/bloated indexes on the fly without having to drop and recreate them.

Yeah I couldn't quite get into Pillars in the same way as BG or the other old infinity engine games.

I feel like the writing, quests and general world building was really quite good - but the overall gameplay was a bit of a let down.

They abandoned the traditional d20 system in favour of a custom model which really didn't feel right. For instance, barbarians needing high intelligence because that was the stat that extended area attacks. Or mages being fine with heavy armour and high strength, whilst your fighters were seriously hindered by armour...

Just felt like a really weird system that they never quite worked out. They were trying to be different just for the sake of it IMO.

Whilst Java the language has progressed, Enterprise OO is sadly far from dead :(

Thanks for the info, had a quick look but couldn't work out which were Disney.

So it really becomes a question of whether people are buying Netflix just for their kids content and will cancel one for t'other if Disney pull all their content, or whether they're happy to buy both.

If they only want to buy one, then maybe they'll switch.

If they're happy with both, then it actually helps Netflix bottom line as they no longer have to license expensive movies from Disney.

It's a balancing equation between whether the people they lose outweigh the licensing costs for Disney. Which is exactly the same situation they've always been in anyway competing with traditional cable offerings.

I see a challenge, but not a considerable Netflix killer like some people try to make out.

The sport is probably the most interesting out of all of those mentioned. There will always be a market for sports subscriptions, so they could have a very competitive offering there that Netflix aren't even involved in.

Marvel, Lucasfilm, etc. I'm still not seeing it. Two or three movies a year that I can pick up on DVD/Bluray cheaper. And that's if they're even worth buying on DVD after having watched them once in the cinema. Marvel movies have been wearing fairly thin, and Star Wars is showing similar fatigue.

I'm not saying they won't have a big market, Disney are huge afterall. I'm just saying that I really don't see them as strictly a direct Netflix killing competitor. They're in a slightly different game, content-wise, and Disney's biggest enemy will be itself.

Marvel and Lucasfilm are still very much in my "I've already got the DVDs" territory. The Marvel TV shows never really lived upto the hype for me and if Disney need to PG'ify everything, they'll have a hard time.

I'm probably underestimating some of the Disney kids TV shows that I've never heard of, but are they even on Netflix right now? Isn't Disney just going to cannibalise their own existing TV market?

I honestly don't think a Disney streaming platform should scare Netflix that much. You can get the entire classic Disney DVD back catalogue for ~£200, why would parents buy a streaming service for £10-20/month for years on end?

And that's the whole classic catalogue - when you bear in mind that kids will happily watch the same old Frozen DVD over and over again, I don't see it as a huge compelling offering. Even adding all of Marvel, I still believe people will prefer to pick and choose their favourite individual media over an expensive subscription.

It's the continuous flow of new and unique TV/movies that is really working for Netflix. Disney just don't output anywhere near the same content hours to make a subscription worthwhile, and kids probably wouldn't care even if they did.

We've had flying cars for decades... they're called helicopters.

Exactly. If the president vetoes everything unless he gets his way, then you might as well get rid of the other branches of government entirely and have him write/pass all the bills himself.

Otherwise known as a dictatorship.

Oracle says "Haha, no."

True, but MSSQL style clustering has it's own performance trade-offs in terms of slower writes, fillfactor bloat etc.

Effectively you can now do this; a PK index + INCLUDE all other columns in the table. This will be kept upto date without any need for manual reclustering.

Sure it's duplicating the table data, but it's functionally equivalent to the reclustering or rematerialising a view of the table methods that people use now, just without the hassle.

Only if you've got a homogeneous workload that can scale out.

More typical is Team A working on Project A spin up a test DB + test app server. Team B also spin up a test app server + web server + DB for project B

Then Project A gets productionized and you have SIT/UAT/Stage copies of all of that sitting mostly idle.

Then project C comes along and the devs need to test on a 3 node C* cluster with 3 kafka brokers...

Suddenly you have a whole bunch of dev environments sitting mostly idle. No-one would ever fork out on reserving a t2.medium, but they all add up to $$$$$ every month. With k8s you can reclaim all that idling power, reserve some beefy instances, whilst also gaining easily deployable artefacts, CI/CD, production scaling, etc.

Except taxes are almost explicitly not the free market. If hotels want to raise their prices they can, if not, then not.

Taxes are the definition of market distortion. It would be a crying shame if all the world's greatest sights were restricted to the rich due to government interference.

EDIT: It would also be a shame if all the world's greatest sights were destroyed by mass-tourism, so who knows? But pretending it's as simple as an Econ 101 problem would be naive.

True, but nonetheless, fraud is fraud. Even rich board members get scammed sometimes. Fraud laws protect people from scams after the fact.

The interesting thing is you can still use pretty much that entire stack today. The only one that stands out as outdated is tbnl which changed name to hunchentoot.

The stack I used for a website just the other day:

hunchentoot

cl-who

postmodern (prefer it over clsql-postgresql)

cl-smtp

ironclad

drakma (fuller featured than trivial-http)

The general solution to that is to have a debug compiler setting to turn off TCO when debugging.

Of course this leads to its own problem if your now unoptimised recursive blows the stack...

I suspect that the AML and KYC regulations will start to be enforced for bitcoin in the UK at some point. Bear in mind that London is one of the biggest financial centres in the world; if they can't trade it due to AML laws, then we'll really see if they have an influence

Serious jail time if a business is caught in any of the stages of the money laundering process.

I agree, but trying to say that you're a market leader when really you've just exchanged tit for tat is highly misleading. Claiming that you are beating Amazon at cloud when all you've done is move exchange licenses to a hosted solution is hardly amazing.

I think the article is potentially misleading. Just because a large number of traditional enterprise customers switched their on-prem exchange/office licenses for cloud licenses, doesn't mean that MS is leading the way. Cannibalising your own market is meaningless.

By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge resources.

Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can make it good.

Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to suck.

I agree, so many of the AWS products feel almost abandoned. Like they did the easy 80% of the work, released, and then coasted.

Yes, it's the perception that is concerning me a lot. To the physical doctor in A&E the prescription for anorexia is "1 cheeseburger daily" to which the patient says "no". To the doctor, this is then self-inflicted and less deserving of sympathy.

I agree completely that the NHS is critically underfunded and preventative mental health treatment is the ideal course of action. I didn't mean to imply that completely refusing to treat is an option, more wondering if there's a point at which a doctor can turn around and say "You say no, therefore I say no".

No I don't think we should deny treatment to anyone; I wasn't advocating for that.

The question is more, is there a theoretical end to care when the patient has failed to respond to treatment? Is there a point at which we prioritise those resources for someone else who is also in need?

Yeah, I think that the mental health part confounds the issue. When it's a chronic physical illness, it's a lot easier to give someone pills to take for the rest of their life. Whereas mental health is vaguer and potentially much more expensive.

There are plenty of cancer drugs that the NHS will refuse to prescribe due to their expense. If you want them, you'll be told to go private. If mental health is so expensive, do we say the same thing?

Personally I don't. I was trying to imagine the thoughts going through the doctors and nurses heads when he reported their apparent callous behaviour (turning him away from A&E, poor treatment on ward etc.)

Thank you for the reply, I was a little worried that people would think the question too unpleasant and just downvote to oblivion!

I was trying to think of explanations for the apparent callous nature of the emergency doctor who tried to discharge him from A&E and the nurses who gave equally brusk treatment. The first thing that came to mind was that they treated him effectively as a self-inflicted "slow" suicide case and it must be some ethical resource allocation issue. ie. hypothetically "Why am I treating this self-inflicted injury when there's a kid in the next ward who's been hit by a car and needs 24/7 monitoring"