skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do business with your bank. You have a person you meet face to face whenever you need and who's going to crawl within the organization to fix that kind of problem.

What PayPal did is pretty logical given the number of fraud they get everyday. e-mail has got no legal value and from the outside what they did wasn't very rigorous.
This is a grave oversight, but often it isn't the military that needs convincing of the intelligence of the enemy it is the politicians. These politicians and often news pundits have often said things such as why are we spending so much money on this war when we are fighting people who use sticks and stones.

So it is a catch 22 when you have to cater to the politicians you are often enabling your enemy. Not that I think we shouldn't have government or politicians and internal opposition, it is just that I wish politicians would do less grand standing and more actual thinking.
OK, now I have read most of the Wikipedia entry on DDT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

I have to say I am speechless by the stupidity of your comment.
Can you tell more about "money market option"? I'd like to try it but I can't find it anywhere in my PayPal account.
> e-mail has got no legal value

How's that?
If they really manage to optimize it for conversations, then it could have a future. I'm one of those crazy people who think that NNTP was the greatest thing to ever hit the net, and still hold that nothing has yet to come close to match in the ability to let people actually converse over longer periods of time. Most web forums seem, by design, to actively discourage long running conversations. Some even go so far as to forbid posting to a thread that is more than X days old. Everything seems to be geared towards hit and run postings and a quick question-and-answers format.

I've often pondered why NNTP and newsreaders was so much better at this than HTTP and web browsers, and haven't really found an answer. The pessimistic part of me sometimes thinks that it's simply because people on the internet where better and smarter in 1999 than in 2009, but I doubt that's completely true. If someone else can solve this problem and make it work, I'll be the first to shake their hand and use their product.

That being said, based on the article, Gravity doesn't seem to be it.
I'm in Amsterdam and interested....
The problem is that the people in charge of deciding what to approve/buy for the Military are not qualified. They get the position of authority by being successful in the military not by proving they understand the technology of the things they are buying.

I can see how this happened. Say the military guy had two choices of what to buy for video feed products.

Product 1. Fully encrypted video 15 frames per second and a 5 second delay.

Product 2. No encryption video at 30 fps and 1 second delay.

At the demo he says "product 2 is much better lets get that". When product 2 is questioned about security they say something like "we have proprietary codecs". From the miliary guy's point a view a codec is just as good as encryption.
Please guide what should be shared? As what i understand is, we can share anything we like. Is not?
I've had one account closed down, but luckily I hadn't registered bank account details etc., only one of my credit cards. I recommend only ever registering the bare minimum of details with any given PayPal account, so that you can open up a new one with a different email address and different set of details.
This is a great point. I always forget how easy travel is here...
That poses an interesting technical question - how do you achieve military-grade encryption over a communications line with heavy packet loss (assuming the drone->satellite connection is like that)? Most self-synchronizing ciphers would have too much of a lag for real time operation.

Perhaps two synchronized pseudo-random number generators, driven by synchronized clocks, could be used for variable key generation for a symmetric cipher.
That's funny, I feel that exact same way. No one has ever understood this view point. I'm glad to know there's another like me out there. I always figured it was just me.

I can appreciate music sometimes but I just can't imagine sitting down to listen to music as a pastime... or paying for it.
No signature.
> I can't even remember the last time I used them to do anything where it wasn't a hassle.

I can. It had never been a hassle to me. If there are several payment options available I choose paypal—it knows my shipping address and saves me from filling the same borring form again.
It's been working pretty good for me.

Maybe I got lucky -- I got an excellent account rep when signing up for the API. She gave me a direct number to her desk and whenever I have a problem I call her and she fixes it.

I actually sent an email to PayPal's Executive Customer Service department telling them how great she was and how there probably wouldn't be so many paypal horror stories if they had more reps like her... and they wrote back with a generic apology for the problems I'd encountered.
Google Chrome OS: koncepcija
2, but its usually near 10.
Gábor Melis' () blog - Introduction to MGL (part 2)
The later is true. There is a large, high througput, revolving door between DoD and large contractors. Yesterday's generals are today's board members and C*Os of large defense contractors.

When something is purchased, or a bid is chosen, it is often because of those conections not because a product is inherently better.

The result is a lot of overpriced, under-performing equipment. The amount of waste is just ridiculous, even for a $650 billion market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...).
Algorithm Tutorials
I don't see your point. If you're not paying for music and you're not consuming music, you're a zero who's not detracting and not contributing.

I mean, I think it's pathetic that you don't like music, but that's an argument not worth having on Hacker News. We're not exactly bright musically.
This is bad and I'll tell you why. If you do client work (ie build websites for business owners) they will occasionally get obsessed with cramming all of their content 'above-the-fold'. They key distinction is that instead of logically placing important things above the fold (and still keeping the rest), they want EVERYTHING above the fold which leads to huge compromises in design, layout and functionality.

I would love to share this data with clients but I'm not looking forward to the resulting fallout.

Anyone know of a good way to handle the client who demands their entire website be ATF?
Well, yeah. But that doesn't change what I was saying, which is simply that I sympathize with people who're attempting to charge money for their music, and I can understand the lawsuits against those who'd violate those rights, even as I find them a bit extreme.
The Exceptionally Tough Politics Of Cyber Power - The Atlantic Politics Channel
Google isn't exactly easy when it comes to dispute resolution.
OK, so they shot a smaller, faster moving target. The original point still stands.

It was an F-117. Yes, most "F" aircraft are air-to-air fighter aircraft. However F-117 is mostly used to attack ground targets, so it's "F" should be more like an "A" (If you want to nitpick that is ;-) )
I asked a few days ago - here is that thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975840
Thanks it's good to hear.
I believe that if you ever find the time to actually look into it, you'll find that most artists do not do what they do because of "compensation", but because they love it, because of the social and cultural value they see it creating, and because of the effects it has on other people. In other words, what you describe as "retarded" is in fact one of the primary motivations of artists.

I speak from my own experience of growing up in a home with a theatre actress / community theatre director mother and songwriter / playwright father, and their wider social network. An intellectually stimulating but extremely frugal existence.
I like this idea alot. I do have my doubts that someone who has stolen a bike is going to take it in for servicing. Though they may sell it to an unsuspecting person who subsequently takes the bike to a shop so maybe it does have a shot of working. Good concept either way.
Because obviously, left to their own devices, businesses generally won't make terrible long-term decisions to gain short-term profits. Especially when decision-makers have no long-term obligations and are smart enough to cash out before problems become apparent.
This is really tragic. I rely on VLC for all my video viewing needs. It loads video much faster than QuickTime w/ Perian and is much more responsive, not to mention the vast array of file formats it supports. I also like being able to tweak the buffer sizes to optimize playback from my NAS. I'm a little shocked there aren't any Cocoa devs wanting to work on this. Do I need to try and learn Objective-C now? I fear I would only damage the code base.
The way I see it, for something as critical as payment infrastructure, it is simply not an option to go with someone who doesn't have a phone number where you can speak to a real, intelligent person who can act beyond the confines of a few support call scripts.

This is largely why we use a merchant account with a real bank (which has a dedicated account manager), and a gateway with quality support staff that always pick up the phone.
39, typically anywhere from 25 - 75 if I'm working on something that requires me to do a lot of web research.
There seem to me to be too many places to go from the home page. Don't Features, FAQ, About, Tour, and Guides all just really mean "Tell me more?" My first thought when landing was, "What does a typical coupon look like," but I had (and still have) no idea what I would click to find that out.

Also, the blog is a dead end. Once you get there, your back button is the only way to get out (the logo doesn't even link back to the home page, which is never ok). The back button is not navigation.

There seem to be too many pricing options, and they are confusing (not to mention the confusion of "pricing" and "free account" being right next to each other on the home page). What could one possibly do with 1 coupon for all time and emailing it only 3 times a month? Do you pay for the emails you send in "included emails?" Why mention a setup fee at all if you don't have one? Instead of repeating things which are in all accounts, put them in an "all accounts come with" section so the user can actually see what the difference between the accounts is (same goes for the feature comparison).

Actually, I think something like this would make more sense to be priced by actual usage.

The FAQ page does not give any visual cue that the questions are items in a list. It looks like a single paragraph.

And wait... someone from Pixar gave you a testimonial and it's hidden with poor contrast at the bottom of the page?

Don't get me wrong. The site looks great. It just simultaneously has too much information and too little (because it's too hard to find anything).
The deal with fish oil is walnuts?
launching a startup, i.e. beginning to create something? Absolutely. No time like the present. "Launching" the startup, i.e., going public with something you've already created? Depends on what it is.
> Iran has nuclear technology now, so they're no longer idiots, just evil dobaddies.

As opposed to other "smart" countries that have nuclear technology but are noble dogoodies?
I'm an artist myself. Otherwise I'd have avoided this whole discussion. I like having some idea of what I'm talking about.

I make art primarily because I love the creation, and I absolutely love when my work creates a response in somebody else. But that's my love for my work and for those people, not for a vaguer society.

I could see myself being really pleased over a lip dub of a song of mine. I could also see myself hating that something I'd made had leaked out without my receiving anything for the trouble. I mean, if I'm out to make a living with my work, then having it taken without compensation might not be what I'm looking for. But the point I was trying to make was that it would be my choice either way, that the work I make serves me first and society second.
My mistake, there is a plugin for colored/styled fonts.

Also, as someone kindly pointed out in an email: http://www.clairvaux.org/ColorCoded.html
Apple's Safe Society
The protected ecosystem that Apple has created is both pleasant and dangerous.
Indeed, especially in the long run when the others find out the hard way that you were right. The most interesting thing I read in the Antipatterns book was the author's claim that only 1/5 of programmers "get" abstraction and therefore "democratic" project management processes tend to result in very poor architectures.
.. only an electronic paper trail a mile long.

Email is absolutely of legal value.
I dug around a little. Apparently PayPal's problem is that some folks are selling pirated stuff (dvds, etc.), while advertising them as legit and using PayPal to do so. Under these circumstances they have to use any means they can to verify that the seller is legit and the software (whatever) is not pirated.

Apparently they were trying to do this here, but a bunch of emails wouldn't cut it. I can actually understand that.

However, there should be a channel for companies to pursue to expedite the process. If I were the Apparent Software, I would send a letter from an attorney- perhaps an affidavit- testifying to what I was trying to do. This would at least take PayPal off the legal hook for anything they are trying to do.

And it's a lesson for all of us. If we want to partner like this, we have to make it easy for our "silent" partners (PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon-- they are all in the same boat here) to play along. I'm grateful to the blogger for posting: this problem wouldn't have occurred to me.
Odd to see Microsoft's PR guys get it (quick, sincere apology minus any defensive legalese), while the injured party, a startup, doesn't.
Test Drive And Learn Windows 7 Features From Your Web-Browser
A one-line change to new-item-id is asking for trouble?
Why would the world have a lower energy budget?

Solar cells are getting cheaper about as fast as Moore's law. Nuclear power (and if we're really lucky, fusion) can solve most problems.

As usual, the probably real danger for people is... other people.
I'm just glad to see that most of HN isn't riding the conspiracy train with them. It's like they imagine Bill Gates personally copying their code while cackling maniacally. I think it was fairly obvious that the whole thing was an accident (meaning it was not Microsoft's intention to have developer's steal Plurk's code). Microsoft gave a surprisingly refreshing apology and took the site down.

This is quickly becoming an object lesson in how crowds can turn against you.
Guys in the article recommend FastSpring.
Snowtime - push the button and see snow fall a member of Torchbox
Why you should not pay for extended warranty if you use Linux
It's the sad case of the amateur statistician, who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.
I have 5 tabs open, including this one.
I would love to see a videogame that included solar system battles that rely on using orbit dynamics as opposed to the deep space feel of a game like Asteroids.
Goo.gl URL shortener web app in action
I once got told off by a very senior person in a company during a client meeting for presenting data where all the values were positive but the mean - 1 sigma was negative because he claimed that could never happen.

A few days later I emailed him three numbers: 1, 2, 100.

He apologized.
Be real, don't be redundant. When I used to interview contractors, I got so tired of reading "enterprise Java developer experienced with all aspects of the SDLC" blah blah blah followed by globs of alphabet soup.

Just highlight the most relevant points of past projects, related to the position for which you're applying.
This is a very cool library that is going to be abused far more often than used correctly. In particular:

* In online Internet applications, it can only be delivered safely on pages for which every resource is delivered over HTTPS. Most developers aren't going to see the point of using both HTTPS and JSCrypto. The ones who choose simply to use JSCrypto have totally insecure applications.

* For the task of creating applications with Tarsnap-like insulation between the server and customer data (ie, a backup system where the server can't read your data), this library won't work; any application that delivers this library can in a myriad of subtle and undetectable ways sabotage its security.
A computer scientist looks at ICBM security
Absolutely.

I wonder if any of these guys have ever done any business before. This is business (startup, technology or otherwise) 101 , you have the crowd support/goodwill, you have the apology from the bigger party, they obviously like what you do.

Shut up,sit down and talk money.
I grew up in an area populated by Minutemen Missle silos. While in High School, the Airforce took several of us on a tour of one of the control centers. It was rather sobering to see the sites scattered around the farmland.

And there was a little recruitment for the Academy going on at the same time as well.

They are all decommissioned now, of course.
There is a big difference between aggressive fraud protection and pooping on your customers. Being polite and handling mistakes intelligently doesn't mean they can't combat fraud effectively.
BBC News - Cheques to be phased out in 2018
Review my site megamsg.com
Puerto Rico's biggest flaw, in my mind, is the poor scaling. It plays extremely well with exactly 4 players. With 3 players, there's too little competition for scarce resources (esp. buildings, market access) and it can feel like multiplayer solitaire. With 5, there's so much competition that turn order/table position can be brutal on noise alone.
JavaScript has come a long way.

It feels weird that these days when I am trying out some fun projects or algorithms, I prefer using JavaScript to build a prototype if possible. JavaScript is fast enough for my small computing needs & It does not require anything else to run other than a browser.

WebSockets, HTML5 (Canvas + Web Storage etc)... Really exciting.
The real danger is that most of the world will become unsuitable for agriculture, e.g. the Sahara expanding to Southern Europe, the Mid-West becoming one great dust bowl.
I think most people here agree that your business should be based on making innovative products, not imitation nor litigation.
Pandora up and running on the Nook...using 3G?
Cutthroat Caverns is also a good RPG spoof.
I'd like you to exhibit cases where e-mail was ok to grant a copyright permission.

My lawyers always told me the following: everything formal must be fax, snail mail or signed with an electronic certificate (I declare and pay my taxes with the later for example).

Copyright handover is not just "ok we're going to buy you 2 computers" kind of e-mail.
Private Company Valuations: Zynga Game Network, Inc.
~200 ^_^, all in Firefox: On my 32 bit XP system used for email (Eudora) and Flash/video, 17 in 2 windows.

On my 64 bit Linux system, two instances: ~80 in 4 windows for system (e.g. BackupPC console) and technical stuff (e.g. HN, Clojure development) and ~100 in 8 windows for general news, politics, recreation, etc.
The problem is such visa issuances invariably involve working closely with IRS (to ensure the person actually runs the business, makes enough money, employs all the people he/she claims, etc). And I don't think these two parts of the government have great communication or the infrastructure to have a good communication.
So, is an email "signed" agreement valid or not?
They mean personal checks, right? Because businesses still use checks all the time, despite being more sophisticated users of money than consumers.
This has been thought about for quite some time: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
They're labeling them "pirates" so that the MPAA and the RIAA will get on the case. Those guys are relentless.
Fascinating read, thanks For the share.
Pretty sobering to realize how thin our survivability is today with the threat of nuclear destruction quieted but not forgotten.
Try this
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-toot...
If people would prefer to use something else than pay for VLC, then VLC is literally not worth it.

It's quite possible that's the case; I think most people on Mac would rather use Quicktime (w/ Flip4Mac [1], which is Microsoft-supported) for free than pay for VLC. But if there were a trivially easy way to pay a dollar, I think a lot of folks would. Ultimately, open source projects that aren't fun to work on will live or die by the micropayments problem.

1 or whatever; I'd never heard of Perian before this thread, and I just switched back to Linux from OS X.
Display the H-index of users on the leaders board:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
Testing facts and principles
Yes - there are times when you absolutely must speak to a human being, make your systems as easy and automated as possible but when i am stuck i need to be able to pick the phone and talk to a person.

FirstDirect - are very good at that.
Apparently the specialists were incompetent to distinguish between standard pirated software sale and a software vendor's niche product.
It would end up being an interesting battle to see who starved first out of the copyright holders and the music/video sites.

The day after this perfect enforcement came into effect users would still flock to Youtube/etc hoping to find the latest content. So if the a copyright holder decided to block all their content they would lose a lot of attention in the initial stages.

However would the users continue to flock to youtube/etc without all that copyright content? No doubt the copyright holders would soon revamp the 'official sources' of their content. These would most likely still be restrictive/costly/sucky but as the only source of that content they might stand a chance of drawing the audience back from the 'free' sources.

I'm not sure who I'd bet on in an 'all out war' but it most likely wouldn't come to that with copyright holders forced to allow a least some of their material on the sites with the existing audience. I do believe however that it would shift the balance of power back towards the copyright holders.
For the first time in my life, I see what that quote meant.
nope, as far as I am aware (my parents use them a lot in their business so they have a particular interest) it's all cheques.
Is this an "ad" for Intel's processors' capacities for graphics or physics?

I still don't know, but this reminds me of this German DIY sore ad (which is a fake): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyv3q_yr8tI
All cheques. Cheques are not accepted most places now. They're still used a bit, like to pay window cleaners :/

I won't miss them.
To be honest, the journey of PURE started trying to reproduce what we knew from XSLT: http://beebole.com/en/blog/pure/generate-html-from-a-json-wi...
Actually, they are both subsonic aircraft and have a very similar top speed. The F117, however, has a larger radar cross signature, which makes it appear as a larger aircraft than the B2 in a radar return.
Conversely, it seems to me currently that businesses are here primarily to make money

A corporation is a machine for making money. The corporation doesn't "own" the money - the owners of the company do. Similarly the corporation doesn't "want" to do anything with the money - the owners (who may also be the employees) of the company have wants, as they're not machines, they're people!

Unix philosophy says "a tool should do one thing well". Well a corporation is a tool that takes raw materials on STDIN and emits money on STDOUT and you pipe that to whatever you want, be that a roof over your own head, or vaccinating the entire population of a third world country.