skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I knew visa had their paywave, which IIRC is being used in all the coca-cola vending machines at the Olympics. I have noticed visa's logo on some PayPass machines, however I believe, here at least, MasterCard offered incentives on the machines marked with MasterCard logo's only.

I know PayPass hit the market earlier than Visa, so I believe visa is still playing catch-up. I have read Visa's started trailing its paywave in cell phones, however its first trial was 2 years behind MC's, so I believe it's still 2 years behind MC in its usage of paywave. If paywave hits the market big in say 2012, it'll likely be 2014 until people are using it with visa's.
Linux replacement for TuneUp, ubuntu karmic howto
Just a thought - if you provide an interface just after "scanning" the bill where you can easily tap line items to get a total it would make splitting a bill much easier.

You might also provide a way of tapping the number of people who shared the meal to split the bill (quick and painless divide) or an easy way to calculate a tip.

Finally, being able to tag line items then and there could be useful - say you purchase some stuff from the supermarket and a couple of those items are business while the rest are personal.

Looks like a beautifully simple first step. Well done.
Another great interview from Mixergy.
Thanks for the feedback. Some companies are not as "lucyphone-friendly" as others. We are working on this as we get the word out. Your tweets on twitter can help us spread the word and make these companies more aware.

Why this problem has not been solved before is a mystery to us. It is a HUGE customer frustration. Some companies are using an internal solution called VirtualHold - Southwest, T-mobile, and other utility companies -- but Lucyphone solves the problem without any internal integration.
Definitely not in the general case of points in n-dimensional Cartesian space. For instance, in the 1-d case, consider points at 0, 10, and 12. 10 is the closest point to 0, but not vice-versa.

Put another way, it seems as though the algorithm considers tptacek more distinct (from all other HN users) than cperciva.
Yeah, there's really two issues here.

Most of the techniques for this sort of thing don't work that well for sparse datasets. So given a choice between showing bad results for users with relatively few comments, and not showing any results ... especially when users can search not just for themselves but also for folks they know and enjoy ... Also, scraping the full history of HN is not cool.
What’s ‘ramen profitable’ mean?
"I disapprove of what you submitted to the Android Market, but I will defend to the death your right to submit it."
And here’s the answer, for anyone curious: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
Would love to chat and exchange ideas. It's validating to hear that others have been pondering a solution to this problem.
Just keep her away from too many pink toys: http://contexts.org/socimages/2010/01/09/socialization-and-g...
Yahoo is the Online Version of the Paper Box Manufacturer (Marksonland)
Thanks for this constructive feedback! We will be tweaking the signup process to get rid of this issue.
Web apps in Objective C --- the second-least safe programming language on the market. Oh please, oh please, build your next huge application in this. College tuition for my kids is freaking me out.
Never really got past the "Wouldn't this make sense? Why isn't anyone doing it phase?". Congrats on the launch/product though! Looks great.
In my own informal experience, running identical CPU-bound tasks on Rackspace and EC2, it's just a lot easier to get good performance on Rackspace.

Instance size on Rackspace does affect performance (as their FAQ explains), but it affects minimum guaranteed performance; there's bursting up to the capacity of the entire machine you have a slice of. I know there's something unsettling about relying on excess capacity, but in practice any Rackspace instance will tend to beat any but the most expensive EC2 instance in terms of raw CPU.

The sweet spot of EC2 really is offline processing where hundreds or thousands of machines are spun up by software. If you want to manually fire up a small but flexible number of fast Linux machines, I would recommend Rackspace.
ha ha ha... good one.
Aesthetic. User-experiential. However you want to put it.

Which is it? I'm asking you because it's your argument. You're craving a justification for developing a web application that isn't inherently social--that is clear--but it isn't clear why you think there needs to be a reason or what answer could possibly suffice.

There is a public, status-seeking mindset inherent in using email—that's why it works so well on the web. It's actually kind of useless to make it a desktop application; it's just a historical accident that it was first incarnated through the desktop metaphor at all.

With all due respect, this is a giant pile of bullshit. Every bit of it. You're just taking what I said and turning it around rather than actually explaining how the web has an inherently social cognitive model. Of course email is social--I pointed that out myself--but it was social long before the web even existed. You've made no connection between the task and the supposed cognitive model. That's the big gaping whole in your argument that I was pointing to.

(The bit about desktop email clients being "kind of useless" is just ignorant, and a pointless tangent, so I won't waste words.)

The user should be able to download a desktop application and not know that there's a web application sitting at a URL somewhere that it's just accessing and displaying.

...but why? And more specifically...why should this developer do that for this application?

the iTunes Music Store. It's all HTML

It isn't, actually, and the degree to which it does is more likely due to technical reasons than people somehow inferring a social or asocial cognitive model. It also helps that, y'know, iTunes is a desktop application, and that for the first several years the store existed, iTunes was explicitly required to play the music the store sold. Incidentally, it also is not accessible from the web, except in a different form, making it a poor example of a web application.

I'm not clear on what this is supposed to be a "perfect example" of, other than something completely unrelated to the site in question. Yeah, yeah, I get that desktop apps and web apps are different, but please, get to the point.

you can change how the user thinks about your service

...but why? Do you have usability studies to back up the idea that only 'social' applications should be on the web, and that 'non-social' applications, even if they are web-based, should be desktop applications?
I think I was filtered out.
Links London Jewelry,Links london Store
which is in tune with tptacek being no. 3 on the leaderboard and cperciva being no.34.
Unless I misunderstood he's talking about making copies of the translation. He'd be hired to perform a single translation, the copyright for the translation would remain with the publisher (work for hire).
This is actually a really interesting idea I can't believe I haven't heard of yet. No matter what the angry neckbeards might say, just because content is a number doesn't mean copyright is invalid.

Obviously, we can generalize this approach to more than primes. Still, I imagine any idea would be extremely hard to scale up to mp3/video/game sizes, so it looks like those content industries are safe for now.
Yes! Just the sort of thing that Computer Scientist Barbie would write.
Oh, I must have misinterpreted what he said, then. My mistake.
Dreaming of an Apple Tablet
Page says I need to graduate from starter edition to standard edition to try it. Instructions can be found "here". Click here and I get "page not available". Some other page says there starter editions no longer even exist. Maybe the error message is wrong, and should say I cannot use it because I'm not in the USA.
You're correct. I feel terrible. There is no question that you're the posterchild for controversial-interesting. I will fix this.
Yeah - we've gotten some good feedback that the UK is even more notorious for poor customer service - that's a market we're eager to roll out to soon.
That's a different idea rather than looking at the same idea in a different way, but it's completely dissipated the annoyance feeling.

That is, as long as the main focus was on the overall scoreboard and the filters were optional. If the main focus was on the celebrity board and removing the default filters was optional that would be annoying again (although less so than a completely separate board).
Not sure, but I thought Barbie already had a job. Selling her body (literally).
thanks, done.

EDIT: actually I guess it's deleted in 14 days. KInd of like a divorce, there's a wait period.
Want to launch at DEMO? Join us at an open house at Kleiner Perkins
Where is Counterstrike 2?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be fairly trivial to create a phishing iPhone application (even one that got accepted to the App Store?) My understanding is that nobody is combing through your code line by line, so you could sneak something in there that wasn't activated until after the app was accepted, right?
This scenario was discussed in the most recent Cringely post, I guess someone got inspired to start hunting.

http://www.cringely.com/2010/01/when-is-your-bank-not-your-b...
How in-depth is the iPhone app review process? Would they catch something trojaned into an otherwise legitimate app?
This question is kind of general. It depends on your niche market and luck. I do suggest you follow Seth Godin's blog as he gives a lot of insightful advice you can use as startup.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

It might help though if you give more details.
AFAIK, the biggest problem with California budgeting is the initiative-driven pre-allocation of huge amounts of money that would otherwise be discretionary income. Pensions may play a part, but not nearly to the extent claimed by certain partisan interest groups.
Let's evolve music | DarwinTunes
hey thanks!
Running on Mac OS X is a pretty tough sell, though. Ultimately, it's far more expensive than comparable servers running Linux or even Windows. Most of this is that there aren't many people offering OS X based server solutions, but even if you're willing to run your own hardware, Xserves are on the expensive side of things.
Great article. "Amish as Luddites" is a notion of which I was disabused when I was going to school in Indiana. I worked in the Electronics department at Walmart. The Amish would come in by the van full, driven by a local farmer (who kept a van for this purpose, and was well paid for his services).

The boys and younger men would come into electronics and buy just about anything that took batteries: CD and cassette players, lots and lots of country music, Gameboys (the original black and white model), etc. Our bins of developed photos were full of packages labled "Schwartz" (in that are, the most common Amish last name) as Walmart electronics was the cheapest place to get film developed.

I had many friendly conversations with the older men, who loved to talk. The women never talked to outsiders at all, and always kept to themselves.

I once watched them build a car audio store with installation bay across the street from the college. It went up remarkably fast, and I've never seen anything built quite that way. I could not figure out what they were doing at first. They sunk all sorts of posts in concrete footings, before the slab was poured. The posts were all over the place, seemingly random, and all of them different lengths. When that was done, the cement crew came in and poured the slab (not an Amish crew, obviously). After it was set, the Amish were back with chain saws and hand saws. They cut off the posts at precisely measured lengths. Floor and ceiling joists quickly followed, and that sucker was done in short order. I don't know if this is how they build their own barns, but I'm guessing yes.
ARM chip converts video to 3D on the fly
I suspect she'll have a Batman-style utility belt of mobile devices.

Really, though, that's just as true for the other options. What does an Environmentalist Barbie look like? Does she come with a Prius covered in political bumper stickers? etc.

I'm pretty sure that Barbie has gone through all the occupations that have easily-recognized uniforms and/or props, like a white coat and stethoscope for Doctor Barbie. Indeed, the fact that Computer Engineer is a choice even though it isn't a natural fit for creating a doll with colorful uniform and/or props is probably the most interesting part of the contest.

What kind of Barbie children will and/or should have to play with is probably the more important half of this equation, but I also think it's anthropologically interesting that a company is trying to make toys that earn more cultural respect from critics of the company's previous work.
Dunno, I use Moose for my small scripts and find them to be significantly more maintainable than they would be if they were a bunch of code in a file. Hence MooseX::Runnable.

"Procedural programming" is a generally meaningless term (even less meaningful than "object-oriented programming"), but I find opportunities for abstraction even in small programs. The procedural makes it difficult to exploit these opportunities.
Microsoft did something similar in 2006, but with virtual billboards.

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping-goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6...
I don't think he was implying otherwise.
You partially cover the finger holes on a whistle, sort of rolling your fingers over them, or sliding them on or off the holes. It becomes second nature fairly quickly.

On a flute, you can do the same, but you can also bend the pitch a fair degree by changing the angle of the airstream across the aperture.
LOL! There was an actual amichail filter?
If you actually want some advice, you might need to divulge some more information. Start with how much do you need in order to be ramen profitable & how you plan to make it.

Example: Some people mean doing some consulting on the side. Timeline's don't really apply to them.
Why is Objective-C so unsafe? From what little I know about it, I see no reason why it should be less safe than, say, Smalltalk.

If Objective-C is the second-least safe language, what is the least safe language?
I love it! My results were very encouraging:

S W G W einstein

newton
+------------------------+
| edw519 | liebniz
+------------------------+
turing
===========||=============
carnegie
Co-Commenting..SEMANTICS..
Word Choice tesla

godel
=====||===================
escher
Leaderboard.....KARMA.....
Diamonds in the Rough..... bach

edison
This site has no
affiliation with Hacker galois
News or Y Combinator
patio11
Thanks for the positive response.

If three things were to get added to this, what should they be?
single founder, for the simple reason that i like to be in control.

imho, it is always a mistake to make somebody not strictly necessary for the business a founder. dishing out vanity co-founder titles at employee level equity stakes is debatable.
Asp.Net Ajax CheckBoxList [ Visual Basic Knowledgebase ]
How is that different from desktop apps, from web apps, from an OS even? Any program you trust in whatever way can do bad, bad things with your banking details, private data, list of contacts, etc.
I'm curious, has anyone ever seen a software patent novel enough that it could be considered a "non-obvious" solution to the problem that the inventor is trying to attack?
Ha, yes, that confused me, too.
Same story here..Is pg is added to all users by default?
Wow. I have to think that once this goes live, the lawsuits will start flowing.

My prediction is that some of the billboard companies will freak out and demand revenue sharing, claiming misappropriation of their advertising assets.
What I meant was: I doubt that advertisers can be talked into buying swap-in advertising on Google Street view. The number of impressions is just way too small. The value of these ads will be very hard to quantify.
My girlfriend and I have almost the exact same lists... smokey_the_bear and andrewljohnson.
Smalltalk is garbage-collected. ObjC deals in raw memory addresses. It's actually less secure than C, as I see it.
Apparently tumult is most similar to me no matter what I select, so clearly I can just stop posting entirely. (Thanks, tumult - more time in the day!)
The music is pretty bad but I like the idea. I attempted something similar with poor results. Maybe it could be done with samples.
excellent choice setting the defaults to give very flattering results... there's a lesson in that.
If you don't mind telling me the user you're thinking of, I can take a look as well.
Sure. Cryptography is littered with them.
Adobe Pixel Bender launched offically
Play guitar in a band, it's one of the things that truly relaxes me and allows me to not think about business and hacking.
As an angel investor, I despise convertible notes. Mostly for the same reasons. I am taking my bet now, so I would like to invest at the valuation now, too. I suppose this is mainly just the perception of risk after the check has been written. So caps are necessary, if they are reasonable (I just imagine that that is the price at which I am buying the equity.)

Things I've seen that also bother me: Notes with embedded Preferred terms, in case there is no conversion event (now I have to negotiate preferred terms; the point was to avoid doing this now) and notes that allow early repayment without recourse (you buy out some early investors before a funding round.)
Looks pretty MVP-ish to me, especially given the comments here so far. Hope you'll share some data on what you've learned and some stories of what you experienced. Was it scary to put up the MVP? In retrospect, are there features you could have cut and still learned the same amount?
These studies aren't randomized interventions, but I think it's a bit of a simplification to say that all have failed.

"Dietary and lifestyle determinants of mortality among German vegetarians" found that "A longer duration of vegetarianism (> or = 20 years) was associated with a lower risk, pointing to a real protective effect of this lifestyle"

"Vegetables, fruit, and cancer prevention: a review" states that "the evidence for a protective effect of greater vegetable and fruit consumption is consistent for cancers of the stomach, esophagus, lung, oral cavity and pharynx, endometrium, pancreas, and colon. The types of vegetables or fruit that most often appear to be protective against cancer are raw vegetables, followed by allium vegetables, carrots, green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, and tomatoes"

"Nutrients and food groups and large bowel cancer in Europe" found that "most vegetables, including pulses, were inversely associated with cancer of the colon and rectum."
I was wondering the same thing. I don't show up in the lists of any of the people that show up in my list.

I take it that means I am the cheese.
> They pick on startups because undercapitalized small companies cannot afford to be ideological. When faced with the prospect of extensive legal fees and a huge distraction, they do the pragmatic thing - they settle.

Patent trolling reminds me of a game of chicken. I wonder whether chicken strategies have been tried to combat it.

For example, if the start-up could position themselves so that it is profitable for them to defend themselves if they are sued by a patent troll, and the trolls were aware of this (and rational), the trolls may be scared to litigate. This could be in the form of "insurance" that pays out when the company successfully defends itself against a patent claim. Ideally, the fact that the company is insured would thwart off trolls, so the premiums could be lower than what companies currently pay out in settlements.
So... why work for Accenture then?
You're right - my bad.

My startup is a niche dating site (myzamana.com), I make money by selling subscriptions to members that want to message people they're interested in.

Ramen profitable would mean paying food and rent for an average apartment/ food budget in Boston.
I like the idea, but thiss caught my eye:

> Next, imagine an iMac sans the internal computer, just a screen with some extra storage, extra RAM, a stronger video card, maybe even an extra processor, and a docking bay for the tablet.

What part of the internal computer is missing from that list?
Hmmm Barbie The Venture Capitalist?
Giles Bowkett: Liking A Lot Of Structure
- explanation about what it does and how

- username has period afterward, for self-linking back to site

- various ratios next to each user name in a table, maybe linking to searchyc ie http://searchyc.com/user/riffer
It might be better if you don't think of it as "music" but as "loops". These are micro-scale compositions, not final compositions. Arguably, a second or two of silence between the bits would make that more clear.

The standard I'm sort of using is "could I imagine this showing up in the middle of some other song?" and so far all ten loops I've heard so far actually meet that bar. Granted, that is certainly a reflection of my tastes and prior experiences, but it's not as bad as I feared.

That said, while I could imagine any of these loops showing up in the middle of a composition, hearing each of them in a row is immensely tedious and tiring; the lack of instrument diversity, lack of macro-scale structure, and near total similarity in intensity gives you almost nothing for your brain to work with. Really great idea generator here, though.
I'm no crypto expert, but just thinking this through:

In Diplomacy, all that's required is that you commit to your orders before seeing anyone else's; once everyone has committed, all the orders are revealed.

What if, for every turn, every player:

1. Generates a new key
2. Uses this key to produce an HMAC of their orders
3. Publishes the HMAC
4. (once everyone has published the HMAC) Publishes their orders
5. Publishes their key so that everyone can verify the HMAC

Would it be feasible for someone to generate two alternative sets of orders that - given different, carefully chosen keys - produced the same HMAC, and then choose which combination of orders and key to publish based on what other moves are revealed? If so, is there some kind of limitation that could be placed on acceptable keys that would prevent this without allowing the hash to be brute forced?
1) If I understand correctly the first slider ranks greater similarity in commenting on the same threads the farther left you go and similar word choice the farther right you go. Why not make this two separate sliders?

2) For each of the matches could you show some of the data used to compute the matches... e.g., for semantic matches, show the top X (maybe five?) common words or phrases you matched on. For threads, show the parent or OP of the five most recent threads... something like that.

3) Really neat. I like this. It's quick too. How did you do it? Did you replicate the entire HN database? Third suggestion: post the source or just post an explanation of how it works.
Exactly how much of the actual code is examined as part of Apple's app approval? What's to keep someone from creating a time-bomb app, that is benign until a certain date or signal is received? A game app that keeps a centralized high-score list on a server somewhere could use that as a back-channel to send flags to enable some kind of malicious mode.

In that case, Apple could remove stuff after the fact, but everyone who had already downloaded it would be affected. The only advantage is that Apple keeps developer documentation about who submitted which app, so the guilty parties are potentially traceable, but there's a chance even that could be social-engineered.

The openness of the Android platform actually allows the marketplace to meet the demand for verified apps, the same way SSL certs are supposed to be (but the market for SSL cert signing is geared toward the server end, not the consumer end, and they keep screwing up the high verification certs by making people jump through stupid hoops when they want them).