midhir

That was an awesome fiver! It was also made of plastic. I remember it well.

It was recalled after the Northern Bank robbery and discontinued. The biggest bank robbery in UK and Irish history IIRC. Crazy times.

The bank is now owned by Danske, so we use Danish fivers now :p

Interestingly Belfast just agreed to name a street after John Bell. It's significant because there's a rule here about not naming streets after people. They got around it for Bell by naming it Bell's Theorem Crescent.

Pretty sure Lord Kelvin made it onto a Scottish note too.

Me, I'm all about the Punt with the stag on it.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_%28Irish_coin%29#medi...

Same here.

Never used Node or Rethink but looks like the DB treats undefined vs null values differently (errors on the former, inserts the latter).

That's cool, I've never seen anyone recommend The Hydrogen Sonata so left it to last, along with Inversions.

For all the fixation on his comment about American Libertarianism, Banks's politics seem fairly standard post-Thatcher Scottish to me. After what that PM did to Scottish communities many Scots apparently feel they have little in common with the direction English conservatives are taking the UK.

Banks was a supporter of Independence and famously cut up his British Passport and sent it to Downing Street in protest of the Iraq invasion.

IMO you can see his politics all over the Culture; from the entire tragedy of Look To Windward to the wee things.

That's really interesting, thanks!

How are they getting such low write times with Postgres relative to Redis with comparable datasets and throughput? It's been a while since I used Postgres, are they implying that they're using a particular add-on or that they've optimised their queries for it?

Fourthing the Culture series.

I've read most of them now and the highlights for me are Look To Windward, Player of Games and Fearsum Endjinn (stick with that one). I also rate Excession and Matter though I know a lot of other people think they're weaker.

Atlas Shrugged has been called the 'second most influential book in America' so I can understand why it gets mentioned a lot. I found it an unimaginative, tacky bore. It's at least three times the length it should be, the characters speak in diatribes and are impossible to empathise with. At best it's interesting as a thought experiment and it did affect my outlook on life but, really, I read it because I thought I should, not because I wanted to.

I also found Red Mars a bit of a struggle in this way too. It seemed similarly ideological to Atlas Shrugged but from the other direction. It was worth reading for the sheer attention to detail and imagination though.

Pfff. I can make my own carrot FOR FREE by hacking a raised-bed and hooking it up to my local water provider using a polycarbonate pipe and standard spray head. Why would anyone need to BUY ONE?!

Kind of reminds me of Sublime Text's tabs, which auto-close when you visit another tab unless you double click the file name or interact with the file in some way. Works well for taming the workspace.

Might be adaptable to browsers but I'm not convinced it's really worth it.

Interesting article. Worth noting that Stiglitz is more bullish about the economic possibilities for Scotland after independence - though I understand he's an advisor to the Scottish Government.

I'll be glued to the count on the 18th anyway.

Ah cool! Starting to see some colours over here now.

Belfast voting Yes and Dublin voting No.. Now there's a turnup for the books.

Looks interesting, congrats on getting it shipped!

A couple of things:

1) At any kind of scale, with smaller data-sets, the blue and red are overlapping in places to form purple and the user has to work out from the hue which is doing better. E.g. Edinburgh looks like it has a high blue content but I need to zoom in to see that really it's dominated by a massive blue blob on Grassmarket.

2) (Wonkish) The YES and NO buttons are stacked vertically with no margin. If the order isn't randomised already I'd consider doing that and separating the buttons.

3) I'm not from Scotland, but I did vote. If you're collecting that data also, why not show it? It'd be interesting for sure. We can often see Scotland across the water from our town, there are plenty of people here who consider themselves Scottish and others besides who have a dog in the fight.

Looking forward to the 18th anyways. Yes or No, it'll be a hell of a party!

It's begging for captions!

So cool, congratulations! I made this in a few seconds - http://share.gifyoutube.com/lin.gif

I can't help but make the assumption that the protagonists are machines and then wonder that they weren't 'invented' by a meat species at some stage in their history.

The arrogance of the meat-species, eh! They could be cells of phosphorescent algae, communicating by radioactive emission, or collections of electrical charge in balls of substrate. Who the Hell knows.

Great story!

SShhhhhhuddup man. I'm halfway through Excession!

I can't help but think the creator's genius would've been better applied to practically anything else. But so what, it's fantastic!

I doubt this will extend to the North of Ireland. We have a disproportionately large evangelical Christian contingent that extends to the (current) largest party in the Executive, which would aim to block it. The education ministry is held by Sinn Féin, though, who would pass it.

    Where are you from?

    > I live in a big Ukrainian city called Odessa. It is on the Black Sea shore.

    Oh, you're Ukrainian. How do you feel about Crimea joining Russia?

    > Oh, you possibly know all these three Slavic countries -
    > Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that constantly entertain all
    > the World community by their funny scandals with stealing
    > gas, dividing military ships - like children that in 
    > "divorce".

    If you're Ukrainian you must have a view on the legitimacy of the referendum though?

    > I'm just a boy from Ukraine. Actually, I am Jew, if you are interested.

    You're Jewish?

    > I'm Ukrainian. At least, I was born and live in Ukraine. My nationality is Jew.

----

Not TOO worried about a Skynet-style geopolitical intervention by machines just yet, anyways.

Depends on your perspective I guess.

You know about the corporate lobbying. I don't think any of us have the slightest idea what influence the Royals have over the wonks, men in grey suits and senior members of the Government.

Sure.

The picture shows the President queuing behind a member of the public to use the ATM.

As far as I know he's not required to do this, of course. He could have someone go for him etc.

In the UK it's very unlikely the Head of State would queue for an ATM and people who prefer the pageantry, pomp and ceremony of Royalty might feel this kind of behaviour demeans the office and is not worthy of a HoS. On the other hand, people holding more republican values might feel proud of their choice in electing a person who lives as they do.

I hadn't noticed the security thing. Ireland is neutral, guns are stringently controlled and no existing paramilitary group has a motive to assassinate the President. The security is probably there to mitigate the slightly increased risk of a 'lone nut' attack and not much else.

"The monarchy aren't that rich or powerful at all by modern standards."

"it really isn't that actively harmful"

How can you be sure?

It's a great article and the insight into the symbolism of the event is fascinating.

I always wondered what the guy banging on the door of the houses of Parliament with the huge ceremonial stick was all about when I was a kid.

Nevertheless, so long as power is concentrated in an utterly unaccountable and inaccessible elite we'll never know if it is indicative of the true state of affairs, an elaborate coverup or somewhere in-between the two.

Where I come from to question the British Monarchy is not only unpopular, it's potentially offensive to the section of the community that considers themselves British. Compounding that, republicanism is a dirty word with violent connotations. Change is unlikely to come from this particular part of the world.

Yet with the Irish Republic right down the road we have context on what a Republic really means. One looks at the picture of President Higgins standing in line for an ATM [1] and makes a decision right away. It either fills you with pride or with scorn.

It looks like there's a nascent movement towards Republicanism over in the UK but it'll be a long time coming.

1: https://twitter.com/AwningsIreland/status/448436785220452352...

The guys I know who stuck with this stuff got themselves involved in the modern OTO or gnostic ceremony or whatever. They aren't exactly what I'd call focussed people, they might not make great programmers. In all honesty, I couldn't get my head around it. They vocally rebel against their Catholic upbringing yet replace it with... dogmatic rituals based on Catholicism.

It's notable about John Dee that he was doing this stuff as part of the British elite inner circle, royalty, rather than of a rebellious clique (Crowley, Yeats) or of privileged, decadent society (like the Hellfire Club).

His life was pretty tragic though. His partner in scrying was clearly a chancer and serial bullshitter, who used Dee's obsession to take everything from him - including his wife.

In fairness, Scrubs is way funnier in German. [1]

Interestingly, when Elliot actually speaks German in the episode they dub that into Italian.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_AMLQ2QTA

So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored?

It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.

I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.

Great initiative, I've shared & supported it. But is compiling a database of (full) names and email addresses of internet dissidents really wise given that that's the very medium these organisations are abusing?

And would it be enough to deter a significant number of people from putting their details in and showing support?

"Cloudflare did not return a request for more information..."

lol.

A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality.

I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it.

Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1].

Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming.

A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point!

There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function.

It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game.

In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess?

[1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/

This is actually well overdue, Curtis is a genius whose work will appeal to a lot of people here.

It's not considered his best stuff, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is probably most relevant to HN and all three episodes are well worth watching.

IMO his best stuff is on the coincidence and movement of political power. Check out The Trap and The Mayfair Set. The Power of Nightmares is good too.

Read this with interest earlier. Personally, I think the author is spot on.

We've been launching a new product quietly, building a simple landing page[1] that asks subscribers to tweet or share the page by email after they enter their business name/email. I thought I was wasting my time but didn't want to just leech away the engagement.

The very first business that signed up immediately brought others.

We hadn't even got a prototype yet, it's how we framed the problem and offered a solution that made it compelling enough to share. OK, it's important to make it easy to do so but if you're not compelling who'll bother?

I wish I'd done this the first time round. Of course not every business in every industry can do it with social media but the principle applies. Looking at some of my friends launching businesses in competitive sectors I immediately started wondering how they could do it and, if not, why they weren't already. I suppose it's good peripheral validation as well. If your product isn't enough to make people talk what can you do to make it so?

1: http://events.shiftdock.com