skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You raise some very valid points, most of which we also identified as key questions to our enterprise. As to the social issue: we anticipate the chicken-egg problem on an even broader scale. Our target group are not companies who already do sell a lot online, but the ones who did not even start doing so, missing a suitable solution to acquire payments. So we focus on projects where the direct selling of goods or services starts from the ground, which we expect to work to our advantage, in regard to convincing companies of using our service, even without an exisiting customer base.

We will not pursue the customers directly at first, and concentrate on finding partners for integration. These will be probably startups themselves, willing to try unorthodox methods to get ahead.

In regard to the digital wallet, our strategy is to aggregate the most important existing payment services to allow charging of accounts. With suitable integration, this de facto pre-paid approach can be turned into a nearly-instant experience for the customer.
“For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine–it’s the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.”

If you look at the bottom of the water reservoirs for New York City, you will find entire towns! Yes, the state government of New York disappeared whole towns so that New York could have enough drinking water. There's a lot of use of the "Eminent Domain" in the US too!

I have an unfavorable impression of Han Han for this quip.
Snapshotted backups which allow me to restore to any day in the past 3 months, any week in the past 6 months, or any month in the past 1.5 years; in a location 1000+ miles away; and yes, I have restored backups recently.

Oh, and my backups are encrypted, so someone with access to them won't be able to steal my data; my backup client code doesn't trust the backup server, so someone who compromises the backup server won't be able to leverage that into compromising the backed-up systems; and my backed-up systems don't have the necessary cryptographic keys stored on them to be able to delete data so even if someone compromises said systems, they won't be able to damage their backups.

And yes, I am using Tarsnap. :-)
I gave up at that point, too, but I don't think I shrugged. More like, got pissed about, yet again, being tarred as unethical by the FSF. Then I shrugged. :-) Bring on the downmods.
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Still, YOU having that choice is strictly better for you as a user than having the choice be dictated by the original author with you having no alternative, right?

In the GPL case, if it's important enough to you and you alone, as defined by being worth you trading some resource you have (time and talent, or money) in exchange for the work, you can get the software modified. In a closed source case, it must be important enough to you to make the case and convince someone else as well.
>I don't think America is without problems, and I think the direction it is going, especially w.r.t corporations is alarming, but it cannot be compared to China.

Can't it? Bush was basically a criminal who used a convenient (for him) tragedy to make billions for his pals. Then "change" came and now Obama is making billions for his buddies on Wall Street. The corruption is open and obvious. It's not the same kinds of corruption as China, but it's hard for me to call one evil and the other a beacon of hope.

>The point is you have to trust systems, and the only systems you can trust are ones that are self-correcting, with independent actors and oversight.

True, but my point was that most people simply trust someone somewhere is doing this due diligence. Some of us may even bother reading up on it enough to satisfy ourselves that it's happening. But without actually being involved you can't be certain. Maybe people in China and North Korea think their government also has these kind of due diligence mechanisms.

>Some of it we have already heard about, some of it we'll hear about in the future. For that reason, it doesn't bother me.

This is actually something scary that's happening world wide. Gradually locking down the Internet so you wont hear about these anymore. I hope someone comes up with some good peer-to-peer technology to combat this soon.

>No, that would be impossible to prove. I can claim that I currently believe that I believe very little, but that doesn't really help. I mean, I don't actually know China exists at all.

But you can easily prove China exists by going there and spending some time there. But as long as people aren't willing to look for themselves, what I describe will be very possible.

I used to believe the US was the greatest nation on earth. Then I came to Europe and found it to be much better in so many things.

>Can I also suggest reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society Obviously there is a trade-off with levels of crime, poverty and so on, but I'd rather live in an albeit imperfect western open society, or even India, than China.

Agreed, but what one has to keep in mind is: what is the end state? How do you want the world to be? Personally I want to live in a world where people only have to work on what they find interesting. Everyone knows that people who love something produce better work in that area than people who don't. This whole site is (or used to be) based around the idea of making a start up and getting rich from it some how. But why? So we can work on what we're interested in, of course. Wouldn't it be nice to just skip that middle part and start working on what you like from the start, without having to worry about financial independence?

Now, which government is getting me closer to that? The US? No, they seem to be rapidly going the opposite direction. China doesn't look good, but they are still in development. Who knows what kind of society they will end up with. Given the track record of humanity, probably not with a very good one, but no other country has anything to offer them.
The Right to Link: The Right To Create, Forward And Follow Links.
I don't know if this is a unique view, but I'll put it out there:

I don't use MySQL because it's open source. I couldn't care less if it's open source or not. I use it because it's free, in active development, and pretty much works well in the main.

I expect the fact it's open source means that the odd bug gets fixed that wouldn't otherwise get fixed, simply because there are more eyes looking at code (Although I do wonder how many people actively go through open source projects looking at code).

Open source is sort of nice n'all, but I don't think it's the reason things are successful or not. If MySQL changed to closed source I don't think it'd change much apart from for open source zealots like the author.
The first scenario happens quite regularly.

As for the second scenario, it happens quite often too, just that it's less visible: the software is still there, people use it, just that it doesn't get all the work it could because the main developer(s) have to make ends meet in other ways.

Nothing 'theoretical' about it, it's something many open source developers face, and is, in part, why there's such a big hullabaloo around Mysql: Monty doesn't think it's possible to pay for (enough?) developers if they don't sell GPL exceptions. Of course he's angling to get back control of the project too, for free, using the European Union as his hit man, but that's another topic. In any case, paying for open source development is absolutely not a solved problem.
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I can see your concerns, most of which are of course valid. A lot of people failed doing this kind of thing, though there were a lot of failures during a time when the internet clearly was not ready for that kind of thing in general. Nowadays, thanks to people like Rupert Murdoch the thought of paying for something gets at least a little attention (I do not think that news content is suitable for this approach).

The companies we will focus on are providers of exclusive content or services, many of which already sell their stuff using the freemium model. I am not saying that all of these will embrace micropayment, but I am saying that there are a lot of people worried about improving their conversion rate. If the lowest option you offer a customer for buying stuff is a 20$ monthly membership, of course you lose a lot of them. Being able to easily acquire small payments, whole models could chance.

As to your second concern, the whole point of this post is being agile, to get customer feedback before everything is set in stone. We do not want to impose our great idea, currently we have a basic understanding of how a simple and flexible solution could look like, and would like to validate our approach with the help of some cooperators.
Ask HN: Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider?
I've been reading up a little on Node.js and I was just wondering if there are any hosts out there that provide preconfigured Node.js hosting options that I could just start dropping code into and playing with and load testing without messing with too much configuration.

My other question is, if the options for this type of hosting are few to none, do you think there is or will be a market for this type of hosting?
Oops, that's me. I'll get that app tweeting again. Sorry.
Not if they take lambda to extent all the way to the right, I guess. I'd rather there are too many parens Like around the last (f (x x).

I'd prefer a graphical representation along the lines of (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/mockingbird...) on my skin.

(The image is taken from the excellent article http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/mockingbird...)
I'd agree with you if I were just building a weekend project in my free time using only clojure and jetty.

However, we're building things with an eye towards deploying in a standard Java container (e.g. war packaging), so there's more moving pieces than just clojure and jetty.

FWIW, I can do what you describe using enclojure (which is a netbeans plugin, not eclipse BTW) when I want to as well.
Even more new C++ features
My hero!
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rms has always been of the opinion that the quality of software is less important then the freedom of software. He has admitted that open source software _may_ lead to better quality, but it doesn't matter. His ideal is freedom for the users of the software.
I think it is very clear that he is saying, some software wouldn't be free at all if not for dual licensing. So if dual licensing allows more software to be free, then it is good.
I'd guess that next-day or same-day delivery is simply a consequence of efficient HR and not a goal in it self.

If fulfilment takes n minutes on average pr. order, they need n x number of orders staff-time. Unless they execute the order immediately after its placed (or at least all stocks are available), orders will pile up. The efficiency is simply to match staff with order, and with a large volume of orders and a large staff, that's quite simple to pull off. With rolling shifts, you can ask one shift to stay on for 10-15 minutes and instantly have 10s of hours of added capacity.
law of averages means I have to be 'right' at some point in the history of HN ;)

The other culprit here of course is the media who whip up hate campaigns, scare parents and generally enforce the idea that pedophiles are worse than serial killers, and that there a thousands of them ready to strike on YOUR kids when you least expect it.
For C++ it would be nice to know what compiler is being checked against. At least in the demo question I would use a 64 bit int to hold the sum if the arrays are really "large" but MSVC names the type __int64 vs G++ using long long and other such minor details. Same for the other languages aka python 2.x or 3.x etc.
How is a blog post different than websites in this respect.

90% of the posts here speak about improving conversion (A/B testing and such) instead of adding features.

How much value that adds ? _ZERO_. But you accept that.

Now explain to me how that is different than iterating/engineering your blog posts ?
If there are any restrictions on redistribution, then it is not copyleft. A company could sell GPL licensed code but there would be nothing to stop the buyers from distributing it any way they wanted, including freely.
I think that's the reason why most teachers in the UK are now female. Which is a sad state of affairs.

I think it should be compulsory for schools+nurserys to have the same ratio of female:male in staff, as there are in pupils.
Why not just use a cheap Linode (or slightly less cheap Slicehost if that's your thing)?
I think your sarcasm filter might be on the fritz
Again, the FSF never claims that GPL creates better software. RMS has said time and time again that user freedom is more important to him then high-quality software. And that if someone were to prove that proprietary software was over higher quality then copyleft software, it would make no difference to him.
Here's the funny story: this was invent by a Chinese developer (rinick of www.goozo.net) in a filesharing discussion board (TLF). Then it was popularized to avoid keyword censorship systems everywhere in China.
The spec was clear, but the fact that the test dataset used for the test was the very one given as an example wasn't. plus, it was a bit frustrating not being able to fiddle with the test dataset. I would have done it locally with my compiler, but the necessary boilerplate would have lost me time. So, I didn't test enough, and made a silly error which went undetected because of the trailing zero. I still got 75%, but that looks quite miraculous.

EDIT: It appears I can customize my test dataset, and I didn't see it. Silly me.
Aww, I was hoping you strap it to your head
Well- I'm not impressed. This post provided no insight to me besides the message "Interesting posts get lots of views" and "I can get as many posts as some guy who spams on my website by being me"

Those two messages seem very irrelevant to my life. The post didn't even have an interesting story =/

If anyone got something better than that out of the post, please tell me because this is at the top of HN and I don't know why. No rudeness intended.
>> "His ideal is freedom for the users of the software."

sure. But I think 99.9% of people just don't care if they're "free" by his definition of free.

If I buy a laptop, I consider myself free, even though I don't have the schematics, the moulds used to make the plastic, the development details etc.

But what if the laptop co goes out of business, and my laptop case gets a chip! How will I make a replacement case if I don't have access to the moulding details etc! Well, I don't really care that much.

It's just an odd thing to strive for IMHO.

I think one of the problems with open source is that it assumes anyone can just 'take over' some source code and fix bugs etc. The reality however is that it's not that simple.

Just like giving me plastic moulds is nice in theory, but pretty useless in practice.
I guess, in the past I upvoted too often, since I've been waiting a month.

I was wondering that it may be so because I gave away too much upvotes compared to my karma.

I say 'Thanks' to you, instead of an upvote :)
5 minute version of the demo problem in Ruby - 100%:

http://codility.com/demo/results/?id=demoMPC2W9-JDG
why is this at the top? Great you had a post that everyone liked. Do we really need to re-validate that it was a good post?
I'm not arguing that a mistaken execution is equal to a mistaken 20 years in prison. For a person with 40 years left to live, I'm arguing that 20 years in prison is half as bad as killing them (ignoring the fact that early years are probably higher value than later ones).

Extra scrutiny matters because the goal is not minimizing execution of the innocent, but minimizing punishment of the innocent. I don't see how wrongly making a person live out their life in jail is significantly worse than killing them. Extra scrutiny matters because it would reduce our error rate. I'd prefer one mistaken execution to two mistaken life imprisonments.

Note that this latter point is strictly a utilitarian one, not a moral one. In a world without assorted lawyers/activists/etc working to prevent wrongful executions, the argument would not apply.
I discovered how RSA works only recently, but I wonder how long would it take for NSA to decrypt a RSA cypher. If people can do that in an academic environment, then I think we don't have to worry that NSA can't decrypt messages, because they are probably doing it more quickly.
I think the work of Dan Lyons really did a lot to expose Pogue's toadyism, and the reaction probably stems (in part) from that.
Absolutely right.

And child care workers are 100% female, almost without exception.

update:

I think it should be compulsory for schools+nurserys to have the same ratio of female:male in staff, as there are in pupils.

Man you got no idea. Rationality has completely departed. I know someone who recently completed a child care qualification. She was instructed that it was the law to ask the baby's permission to pick them up prior to doing so. They are babies. They cannot understand, let alone answer. And yet the students were instructed to go through the motions anyway.

It is totally insane. This is in NSW, Australia, but don't gloat, all the western democracies copy and try to one-up each other - if it's not like this there, it will be soon.
regarding your python code: do you know about 'enumerate'? It returns an iterable of (index, value) pairs of a sequence. :)
This is quite nice, even if the exercise isn't all that difficult.

It would be nice if the boundary conditions were better specified (people seem to have been bitten by overflowing integers). This could be inferred if you told people that you're using a 32-bit machine (the sum of elements is at most SIZE_MAX * INT_MAX; if int and size_t are 32-bit, SIZE_MAX * INT_MAX < INT64_MAX.)

I was also somewhat surprised to see that my code compiles without #include <stdint.h>. I'm not sure this is correct (it could be solved by putting the code written by the candidate before the test code).

Finally, I assume you have proper sandboxing set up?
Right, but maybe not down to the second. I personally didn't mind, but counting seconds causes a distracting flickering. Maybe you should consider activating it on the last minute only ?
Just be careful, if you're considering doing something like this: Make sure the tattoo artist is sufficiently lazy, as Y diverges under strict evaluation. Nontermination is typically undesirable in a tattoo (except in some subcultures).
But sex determines hand size, so sex does determine sense of touch -- just not in the brain like they thought it might. </nitpicking>
I'm waiting for WakeMate.
Not that being female guarantees anything:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/15/vanessa-george-jail...
... if you reached the level where you could spread your company all over the world in order to take advantage of good VC, human and fiscal incentives.

I assume it all depends on the scale and finances to start with but the "average" startup doesn't look like this, at least in the folklore I read on HN. Imagine just the cost to manage 2-3 branches in different countries with different legal / fiscal systems.
It gave me a test concerning finding the "equilibrium index" of a sequence. It said to assume that the sequence is very long. (The question is repeated here: http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=676596&start=...) This problem seems underspecified, because it doesn't state whether you can iterate repeatedly over the sequence in question. If you can, it's easy. If you can't I'm not sure how to do it.
I cant recall how long it took for mine to come back.. it could have been a month or two.

(this was on about 2500 Karma I think too; so I dont know if that does affect it).

It turned me into a "mostly reader" anyway :(
I think it's a response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038779
Often times, when I must use proprietary software in the course of my employment, I run into some issue with the software that is incredibly annoying. I'm sure there are many other users who feel the same was as I do about a particular piece of proprietary software. I feel frustrated that I can't fix what is seemingly a simple issue, or even see why it's happening because it is proprietary.

When I use copyleft software, this rarely happens. I can only assume it's because some other user has experienced the same annoyance and fixed it already. But when I do run into something that's broken, I am able to look at the source, make a patch, and submitted it back upstream. This is usually with software that has a smaller user base.

I value this freedom and am glad that RMS and others have worked so hard to spread it.
Also, he had no idea what "earth" means.
This is bizarre - works just peachy in Vista under IE7. Go figure!
Reminds me of the Roz Chast cartoon.

- SPF 1000 - spend an afternoon in a kiln
- SPF 43*10^23 - take a walk on the sun
You can charge for GPL software but as I understand it, you can't charge something extra for the privilege of a GPL'd version of your program.

If you structured your licensing in such a way as to require this, it probably violates the GPL.
There may not be a single person on Hacker News, including Colin, who knows enough to implement ECC safely.

Yep. ECC is messy. I don't use it, for the very simple reason that I wouldn't trust an ECC implementation that I wrote. I might trust DJB's ECC code; but I'd be really uncomfortable with using it unless I had spent at least a few weeks checking it over.

It's got at least as many easy dealbreaker pitfalls as RSA.

s/at least as many/many many more/

You don't need OAEP to make RSA work for signing.

No, but you do need PSS if you want to do things right; and PSS is basically the "natural" translation of OAEP from encryption to signing.
There won't be a market. Yet. It will take a lot more momentum before it happens. Ruby has Heroku and Engine Yard. But the Ruby ecosystem is much larger.
Quite the contrary [1]: The assumption that proprietary software is "immoral", "unethical" and "evil" is very much the heart and soul of the Free Software Movement.

To say it's not, sometimes, would contradict this assumption and make it invalid. So, it would indeed kill him.

[1] Strickly speaking, he's OK with non-GPL software as long as it's "free" according to his definition of "free".
Intel launches Wi-Di but says 3D is the future
The fact it's open source means you can't get the rug yanked out from under you by the copyright owner.

- They can't suddenly change their mind and make the next version for-pay.

- They can't impose pushy conditions, Bitkeeper style.

- They can't cease development, while sitting on the copyright.

- And if they go bankrupt the code won't be left in legal limbo.
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> ... the program will, irrespective of the password, always send the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations -- and this is the case for _all_ USB Flash drives of this type. [emphasis mine]

Does that mean what I think it means -- the password is not actually used during encryption? Was it a deliberate back-door or an honest mistake?

I can imagine the commit comment for that "feature":

[commit 24ebc...]
Couldn't figure out how to parse and encode the password.
Always send "123456" as the password.
Can you explain a bit more in detail? This looks fantastic and am interesting in knowing more about it but didn't really get what you mean by diacritic marks.
Factored != Cracked

768-bit RSA is no less safe now than it was last week.