skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, there is no protection like that in the US and that was what the article was basically stating. If you allow direct debits you're basically trusting the receiver with full access to your account. If they dick around and wipe you out you have no recourse accept to ask for the money back. If you want to stop payment you have to close the account to be absolutely sure. As long as they have your account details they can go in and take whatever, whenever they want.

I learned this the hard way when I let my mobile operator take payments directly. Someone stole my phone and called fuck all. In the end my rent, car insurance, and utilities weren't paid because the operator took all the money available. And the bank didn't care one bit as the dinged my account for NSF fees for weeks.
http://garlicsim.org
Depends on the font. In many cases, a default font is selected such that it shows Latin characters rather well and other alphabets ok, but support for non-alphabetical unicode characters may be spotty. You can see all these characters if you use a font which contains a wide selection of unicode characters, but you may not want to switch to it as the default. Alternatively, you may see some of these characters in fonts which are designed for specific portions of unicode.

All this has little to do with the browser or operating system. As long as you have a font installed and a browser that can use the font you select.

Another way to control the looks is, of course, to specify the fonts on the web page in html or css. (See font-family.)
Have you worked in the porn industry?

Edit: This was a sincere question, not sure why it was voted down.
But then what would he use for the voltage source, + and - 4.5V? It appears he wants the + and - 9V available for the amplifier. But my EET is extremely rusty.
Talker is more extensible, we're focusing on API and plugins http://talker.tenderapp.com/faqs/api, has inline feed notification for eg.: github commits, twitter search results, tickets updates in the chat room. And a lot more to come.

Talker also has a free version (4 concurrent users) https://talkerapp.com/signup/free
turned http://thatpoll.com into a twitter only site to create/answer polls. about to add a feature where if enough people respond to a poll with an answer that isn't included in the original answer set, it automatically gets added.

the funnest part is the deployment method with git and capistrano. so fun that now I have to create some deployment method for my real job. winscp'ing php and swf's onto a production server doesn't feel like the best way to go about things.
All well and good until some kid dies because his mom gave him Obecalp instead of his Cancer drugs because she thought it was "all in his head".

I seriously hope they've had their lawyers do their homework on this one.
Putting up boxes in the local area with free stuff to give away in it. This is one of the projects of the SocialBar in Hamburg, Germany.

To separate this from my worklife no hacking is involved.

http://www.zu-verschenken-kiste.org/search?lang=en
"..but I assume it's simply a matter of practice"

The book "Talent Is Overrated" cites some interesting studies on chess players that support the idea that this is probably the main factor. Basically a combination of improved training methods, long hours of deliberate practice, and starting at as young an age as possible. There isn't much in the article that would lead me to think otherwise. The comparison to Mozart is interesting as the book goes into much detail citing evidence how much of Mozart's "talent" was due to his father's efforts to deliberately train him to become a great musician.
I am writing a maze generator in Haskell.
No, computer forensics (so, yes, that is a relatively expert opinion)
"Joshua, dude, I just want to go to lunch. Can you put the phone down now, please?"

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/01/nexus_...
Released http://runroot.com/ today. Give it some upvote love at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032688 (apparently "OMG! AMAZING UTF-8 CHARS!" is more popular than my paltry attempt at making something useful).
You may have already considered it, but I believe that the zoho suite will take care of a lot of your requirements. They have different components, so you may have to pick and choose what you want your employees to use, but (based on the quality of their docs system), I'd imagine their overall quality is quite high.
Well that's not true. It's not as good as a blackberry keyboard, but it's still much easier to use than an onscreen keyboard
My startup, CloudFab, is doing well. I'll have more to say about that in a few weeks.

In my spare time, Hackety Hack is coming along, got a release out for Christmas, hoping for 1.0 early next month.

Then I have one more small project that's still secret.
All features work all the time

That's the key. Even features which you may not need in particular scenario will add their overhead.
Starting with the UI is a good idea, but completely ignores the functional requirements that aren't embodied in any UI elements - business rules, automated processes, workflow, behavior related to integration with other systems, etc.

User stories are great for fleshing out (and flushing out) many of the business requirements, but for applications of any complexity, a more complete requirements gathering and review process is required.
They allow you to cancel for $50, so you're never going to lose more than that much money. What's the point?
http://freeciv.net
>A lot of e-reading, that is. Reading continues as it has for centuries...

Perhaps not, unless he's reading on a cell phone. You read a lot more with a dedicated device. I find myself pulling out my kindle & losing myself in a book whenever there's any down time.
US official: Broadband regulation may be needed
I'm writing an iPhone musical instrument with an emphasis on just intonation (as opposed to equal temperament).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Intonation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
http://adzerk.com - first beta customer starting this month.
ESPN to launch 3D TV network
It would probably be fairly simple to do this to most Western tonal music (at least now that someone else has done the hard part and written a tool that automates the process!), as the biggest factor I see in keeping the sound coherent is the timbre and texture of the sound, not necessarily the actual music.

Most pop/rock/etc music has (at most) a single key change, which means that 75-80% of the song uses the same 8 pitches over and over again. Add to that the rather homogeneous sound of modern pop/rock/etc instruments (not to mention the limited range of vocal styles usually applied within a single song) and I'd guess this would work with most "popular" music written over the past 50 or so years.

There would certainly be exceptions (Bjork, for example, probably has enough textural vocal changes within a single song to make this much more difficult), but by and large, I'm guessing the output of this experiment is more a commentary on modern pop music theory than it is the specific stylings of Nickleback.
The 5 V from the USB.

Leave the opamp with it's ground connected to the joint between the two resistors, choose the bias so it drives the output from the -2.5 V the opamp sees (which really is the 0 from the computer) to the +2.5V (which is the +5 of the computer).
Is campfire really in development any more? Seemed a bit of a dead project last time I looked.
I think it's one part of a larger strategy. No crapware included is part of it. What about a great looking case? What about support that comes with it? What about the post purchase things that matter ie- what apps do I use?
I vaguely get the point here that user stories aren't enough, you need pictures too. Maybe the bigger problem working this way is that you end up wasting a lot of time creating stories for the whole project, when you should use more of a just in time approach and only thoroughly define and then design those things that you are about to work on, with consideration of the eventual overall conceptual design in mind.
We're lucky we don't get half the government we pay for.
Sounds like a Jacob's Ladder or some variant thereof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh-Tt09IC8M

My grandfather built one in his basement. It zapped him once and sent him clear across the room.
the site needs screenshots/info about builtin feed integration and APIs, which are the core differentiators from campfire

(this comes from someone who contributes to and writes plugins for a campfire bot:

http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot

)
'Amazing' is unjustified hype. They're much like Wingdings font characters from ten or twenty years ago.

Particularly unimpressive are the pound sign £ (UK currency, available anywhere anyway), and ı which renders as a featureless vertical bar on that page but a subscript bold number one when I paste it here. Which is about the kind of awkwardness I expect with unicode - I don't know what it is or how to pronounce it or which services will accept it or which clients will display it in which ways. Unicode is a proper fallen log in the road, it's like someone dumping a Курица word in the middle of a sentence - I don't know the language or the script, I can't pronounce it or remember the shape accurately and can't mentally work with it in any useful way. Except it's worse because while ♌ might be a word or character or sound in some human language, ✺ and ❀ are not.
I've been working on a codepad.org clone for .NET languages: http://dotnetpad.net

It's been a ton of fun. I do CMS development in my day job and it's nice to build a site that actually does something instead of corporate brochure-ware :)
Nobody has a million Twitter followers
I'm really excited about applications that provide JavaScript-based APIs.

DabbleDB is another app that does this: http://dabbledb.com/help/guides/jsapi/
Does anyone actually think that this will help prevent terrorism ?

Its quite astonishing that we seem to be willing to submit ourselves to every kind of invasion of privacy as long as it "protects" us from terrorism.
Reminds me a bit of Oval's 94 Diskont album, where they scratched the hell out of a cd, and then sampled the bits that would play into strange-but-compelling songs like 'Do While':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYU-zUEdZvE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWU_Nrwe10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/94_Diskont
Congrats. Nice to see more entrants to the webchat space :)
I have the following domains: http://blackhatsystems.com, http://bluehatlabs.com, and http://policyworkbooks.com. Does anyone have ideas for them or want to collaborate? Drop me an email.
I'd suggest trying to use computer vision, exclusively. It seems to me that removing the person (and the display) and not recording images would help dealing with the legal and moral problems.
That's why there are two parts to Congress.

The Senate = Everyone gets equal say
The House = Portion of say is equal to portion of population
I've got joytouse.com and notlit.com

(I agree, the first one seems like it would sell devices for hedonic pleasures).
It will work, but probably not very well for the very low VHF frequencies (E2, E3, E4).

The higher channels will be fine, not great for E5-E12. E21-E69 should be great.

You can (and probably should) adjust the size of the antenna elements for the stations in your area. If you make it bigger you can tune the lower stations.

You should register on the forum I linked, they will do a much better job of helping you. Get a list of which stations are in your area (and their frequencies, and relative strength if you know it).

PS. I got the frequency numbers of Europe from http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/tv/tv.html#tvchan - I hope they're right, and they seem quite similar to the US ones.
Yah, we looked at it a long time ago. Didn't like the disparate applications aspect to it. And for us the Company -> Project -> Task structure in a PM module is highly desirable.

Thanks for your suggestion.

Cheers
Yeah, I was using it in the hyperbolic sense. I am not actually offended by PB's Amazon purchases.
Even paginating it would help in the readability, i think.
TDD wins in a simple experiment
Been working on open sourcing a PHP framework I created a while back. Uses MVC, but the primary goals are to be lean and schemaless. It pulls columns from the database and assigns them to variables dynamically so you don't have to update the schema and then worry about the database (most frameworks require you to flush and rebuild). More to come in the next week. It can be found here if you're interested:

http://github.com/terryjsmith/jaxified
quick project/task tracking app. something easy & simple so we can replace the current system we're using (sticky notes and excel ftl...). hoping to open source it.
"As someone who has always used free software,"

This is why you haven't success with MS stuff. For people who have always use MS stuff, it's faster and easier to stick on the stack.
Doing It Wrong
Neat tips. I especially like the idea of joining Turk-worker communities and asking what they prefer. Good customer service to your employees, too ;-)

Solid numbers for times and prices are also welcome.

And "ask open-ended questions" sounds like good advice, especially early on when you want reviews and ideas rather than very specific, closed tasks.
Yes! That's what we're working on now, we just decided to launch before we had video/tour on the site. Thx for the suggestion.
Ask HN: Best scalable way of storing sessions?
Like many, our startup began by storing sessions in MySQL (InnoDB). This has become inefficient -- basically requiring us to write to the database on every page load.

Many people suggest using Memcached to store sessions but one of the core memcached developers recommends against that here: http://bit.ly/dZCT

Storing sessions in a cache is not really what they were designed for: caches can evict data, and if you only have one memcached instance, your sessions would be contending for space with the rest of your cached variables.

My question is: what do you use to store sessions on your high-traffic application where speed matters? What is the very best solution to this problem? What do places like Facebook do here?
I'm working on an e-learning platform for low-income students in the United States.
A Java library for Tumblr API access with a focus on making it usable for development of a Tumblr Android application.
To me, this seems like another reason to buy a Mac. It'll cost you more than the PC (even after optimization) but you don't have to deal with either the mysterious optimizations or uninstalling a bunch of promotional garbage and running endless updates. With the Mac, you open your computer, run Software Update once and you're good to go. In my opinion, that alone justifies the higher price.
Success & Motivation: A Lesson & The Worst Sales Letter Ever..
Well the prices didnt look very great to me.

For example I rent a few UK based dedicated servers which cost me (converting in my head here) $150-$190 a month. Specs are similar to their Fast package but with 8GB of RAM and unlimited bandwidth.

That is around average price here in the UK; I assumed things were similar in the states, but I guess not?
pygame does a lot of its threaded graphics, and sound work entirely in C world, because python threads are so limited.

Some of us have been using mmapd surfaces with python/pygame for years though. For graphical work, it's not all that hard to share data with python. You can use the same approaches with numpy. See this cookbook example: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/MmapSurfaces it's only a dozen lines of code to share data via mmap. There are lots of issues with the python, and numpy mmap modules though... and mmap is very different across platforms (eg, linux, windows, macosx have quite different behaviour).

Another approach good for some graphics problems is forking. Forking is pretty fast, and it allows you to share memory in a fairly nice way. However mixing forking and threading is a quite tricky with python. This is also not so good on windows - mainly its a good method on *nix.

cu,
To me, this feels like a boss that screams up and down about security, then insists that his workstation be able to bypass all of it.

That actually is literally true - according to the leaked TSA documents heads of state are completely exempt.
Wrong breed. I've got a food-motivated wiener dog that'll destroy any roomba in a floor cleaning contest.
Just because your frontend uses XY,000 KB of memory doesn't mean that worker processes have to too. The working set size for a fresh Python 2.6 run on my Windows 7 box is 6,620KB. See Chrome for a good example of this approach :)
HN is a good place to feel inferior, nothing has ever made me feel more so than: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976
As someone that ran a company for a number of years that sold solutions for session storage, the best solution is not to store them...

Encode your state in cookies instead. Of course, that's much easier said then done, especially given the size limits, but if you can, then it's an awesome approach.

A good way to make this work is to identify what in your session is a cache of other data (e.g. your user record) and what is actually true session data (e.g. the user id). You only need store the former, the latter can be cached in memcached.

Cookies are sent on every request, so you probably need to use an asset domain for best performance.

Don't forget to make sure that your cookies are secure. That's been pretty well covered recently, but I think it involves typing A-E-S or something like that :-)
mobile coupon site for local merchants. It will be live in two weeks on http://dealbk.com
It does have a quantum ambivalence operator which isn't found in those Perl modules. It is similar to amb by McCarthy but extended into quantum computations.
even if that works, i feel like you kinda need a person to fire when the system misses something.
I'm working on a collaboration tool built to help government agencies and aid organizations coordinate during emergencies. I helped start it this summer as part of the Humanitarian FOSS Project (hfoss.org).

It was used successfully in beta for Thanksgiving-day feeding coordination and we're getting very close to our first non-beta release.

http://collabbit.org
http://github.com/elitheeli/collabbit

If you'd like a look around the demo or are interested in contributing leave a comment or send me an email.
Chrome's approach was not chosen because of its general purpose suitability as a multi-core processing model, but because of the security advantages of relying on OS process separation in a web browser.

Chrome is a very specific use case with unusual requirements. If you take anything away from the Chrome example, it would be that securely replicating the functionality easily available from shared-memory threads in a multi-processing model is both very complicated and not very portable.
10 skills I look for before writing a check
Although the holidays clobbered my productivity on it, I've been working on a management app for WoW raiding guilds: http://srsguild.com/

But I did start hacking on a fully email based todo/reminder system over the break that I hope to have functional in another week or so.
JSpec - JavaScript Unit testing how it should be
Nexus One Live Video Stream
In which country? In the US, that's my understanding of the law, but this is in the UK.
Official Google Nexus Event
Working on Wikispaces. Thinking about how to make it even better for teachers and students.
Live coverage of Google's Android phone announcement
http://docley.com
You fire the developer of the vision software
This becomes a lot cooler, too, when you take a look at that PaSH project: http://pash.sf.net
Besides a small SaaS (that I use internally, but making public to gauge interest), I've been having fun with namespacing Mootools (http://github.com/ericclemmons/mootools-namespace) and using Rhino to generate dependency maps for simple concatenation (which works on most frameworks' dependency scripts so far).
Changing shirt colours would be a fairly straightforward segmentation problem. Applying patterns accurately would require some kind of 3d reconstruction, which is obviously harder.

I like the gesture controlled UI idea. Understanding sign language is probably several steps too far - I think it relies heavily on facial expressions to give the gestures context, and it almost certainly isn't a straight mapping from gestures to words.. Will hunt around for literature though, as even understanding a small subset would be fascinating and I'd love to learn to sign.
All Unicode characters do have actual descriptions. And always a reason why they are in there. If you don't misuse any character you won't have any problems. Why the Unicode hate?
How To Configure a "Draft Mode" Printer
Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags don't claim to prevent accidents. People aren't likely to say "Ah well, it doesn't matter I don't need to pay attention, since I have an air bag".

Radar etc though does claim to prevent accidents. Which will likely mean people pay less attention.
I have been working on a health\food tracking site www.eat.ly as well as one other unlaunched project.

A simple blog project that has been going well is www.multiplayergames.com which is in need of some buddypress\wordpressMU and design help, but since it continues to perform well I am hesitant to change anything.

Outside of those a handful of other smaller projects:)
Quitting cigarettes increases diabetes risk
Just wondering, do you ever get users/companies concerned about the security/safety of their documents?
Making our e-commerce platform http://www.enstore.com available to everyone. With a nice frontend built in Cappuccino/Atlas.
You could always boot straight into a Windows install CD and blow away the vendor's OS install entirely. The problem with doing that, is that often (particularly on laptops) you need a bunch of special purpose drivers to get everything working. Finding and downloading these can be a hassle.
I recently finished a decentralized content API for my own personal website and for a future community that is planned to be an article publishing portal. It is only a private console with an API, so there isn't much to look at.

I tied up a number of loose ends with my own personal website, integrated the API from my decentralized content web application and my google books library.

My current project is to finish reading The Little Schemer and doing the exercises alongside it. I've been learning a lot and thoroughly enjoying it. My next programming project will probably be to move my decentralized content API from PHP+MySQL to an Erlang backed key-value store and a Scheme powered content API; I may still use PHP for the web interface.
Workflo - A microblogging platform for your company.

A "ask hn: rate my app" will be put up soon
I agree, very simple.

But there are N thousands of popular Linux commands and programs. Surely even the best hackers can't memorize all of them?
I donated a bunch of books to the library, as well, but that was problematic...I don't have a car, so hauling boxes worth of books to the library on my bike one backpack full at a time was time-consuming.

If I'd thought to donate them immediately after reading them (as though I were simply returning checked out books), it would have worked better. But I never trained myself to think that way about books I bought. But, the library here in Mountain View is extremely good; it was very rare that I wanted a book that they didn't have, though sometimes I had to wait a week or two for a copy to show up.
ErrantX is from the UK and probably has more expertise in this area than anybody else here.
So, let's say you are a manufacturer. You take money from all these software products and install their wares on your computers. Margins are tight, and this seems the only way to make a profit. Let's also say you are one of the brands sold at Best Buy.

At some point, isn't one of the software providers going to want their money back from Best Buy sales since Best Buy is removing their "advertising"?