skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say both yes, and no.

My experience in B2B is that medium to large companies will want to pay you via ACH. However they have little to no interest in entering their online banking ID and password into something like what Stripe is providing.

They already make ACH payments, using their own tools, and all they want from you is your routing and account number so they can do so. Assuming you are a US company, with a US bank account, you've already been able to accept ACH payments in this way for some time.

This setup from Stripe seems to be targeted at consumers, or maybe small business owners, as the purchaser. I'm sure that's a need, but probably not a huge one. Many of my customers that are medium/large businesses want to make ACH payments, almost none of the small businesses have an interest in that.
Done.

Darn posting from mobile...
I like the browser plugin here which lets you generate these e-mails easily.

An open source version would really be handy for people who
host their own domains.

I could use a FireFox extension which lets me click next to some e-mail field to generate an address by talking to some web shim on my server at home, which generates the alias and binds it to my e-mail address via /etc/aliases, and restarts Exim.

The generated e-mail could actually be a cookie which contains not only some random ID but an encoded version of the domain name of the site against whose page it was generated. So later, when that address is being abused, you can tell where it came from without looking up any association in any file or database.
Ask HN: What's the best welcome you've ever had when you first started your job?
Since we're in the process of hiring our first employees, we want to give them the best welcome possible to our current team of 3.

What's the best way you've ever been welcomed at a new job? Think about activities, swag you've received, the general process or anything else.

I'm curious what the best stories are and hope to incorporate some elements into our own company culture!
Google takeout is not nearly good enough, but an acceptable first step.

For captcha, the system has been broken for a long time. Specifically, you can outsource captcha solving to people in third world countries for tenthousands of captchas per dollar.
video of this material here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg5onp8TU6Q
Powerball Math: A Statician's Explantion on How Much You’ll Really Win
In what way is attribute precedence over-engineered? You can ignore most of it for most cases and just use default for everything, but when you need it, it's there for you. I don't see how it's more or less simple than what Ansible has defined: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#var.... I count 16 precedence rules in Ansible 2.0.

Every time a new configuration management utility comes out, everyone loves it because of it's simplicity or some arbitrary measure of "lightweight," but once Systems Engineers need to solve real automation problems in the real world, they start adopting features to work around the illusion of being "lightweight."

I like Ansible for automating my home network where I have simple problems and no need for environment separation. For professional work, I stick with Chef or Puppet.
Yes, please try it out! I'm also planning to add a "rapid compose" version using markdown (for some people point and click is slower than typing).
Ansible and Salt were both huge steps forward for provisioning. However, after switching to immutable resources I've largely replaced the need for such services.

I don't mind that there's a panoply of bash scripts to configure docker builds. It's simple and it works and nearly every engineer worth anything knows how to read and write them.

A good bash script never goes out of style.
Can this be used, or setup in a way that supports the standard invoicing model?

i.e. I want an api call to email a .pdf to a customer, and then have them "click this link and enter your info to pay via checking account". Several kinds of customers, including consulting, would be much happier with a "push" model of paying, than a "pull" model.
I am going to open source it :) There will be a license for the first few years at least, but the source will be public. I'd like to figure out a way to do it with no license at all.
Indeed I always liked Ansible, but the input format does occassionally get a little awkward. They've basically designed their own simple language semantically, but they constrained it to be expressed with the syntax of a data serialization language.

I think the choice of YAML is because Ansible is supposed to be declarative and a serialization format makes sense there, but some of the "metaprogramming" features they've layered on top like loops can feel a bit strange. Like I said I still like it, but I do feel occasionally that it might be nice to have another frontend that is more like a proper programming language.
Ask HN: How do I evaluate a recruitment agency?
I've been receiving messages from recruitment agencies through e-mail/linkedin. Usually, I dismiss them because doesn't fit my profile or the ad looks too generic for me to look into.

Sometimes, though, I can find some job description that catches my attention. At first, the company doesn't list their client or says something generic like "such as Google, Facebook and Twitter".

How can I check if the company is "telling the truth", or if it's credible enough that I can waste my time looking into it?
Thanks.
But that's trivially solved by just buying some oversized futuristic pauldrons and a ridiculous-looking Space Belt.
Markdown style links (like reddit uses, and like you used above) do not work on Hacker News.

There are few options for formatting. [1]

Above is an example of how HN users typically link. The "[1]" above will correspond to the first in a list of numbered links at the end of this comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Try it and tell me (please)! You can embed youtube and vimeo very easily. I'm planning to use an API like oembed (http://oembed.com/) to handle a greater variety of media soon. You can also control your slides using a tablet, which can be pretty slick.
> You implement a formal spec for a requirement and/or high-level function that takes plaintext as input and outputs ciphertext.

this misses the relationship between the size of the plaintext and the ciphertext...

edit: part of the problem is tooling, to deal with stuff like this you need dependent types and those do exist, but not in a way that "the programmer on the street" can use...
Taller buildings with complex and highly trafficked elevators still do this only using electronics. Employees swipe their badges at a podium which reads what floor they work on and indicates which elevator they should proceed to. The system can intelligently schedule the elevator for that person to use knowing where their destination is.
It's insane how expensive financial transactions are in the United States. In the UK, the equivalent of an ACH transaction would be a BACS payment, which costs roughly 30p ($0.45) for a small business per transaction, although some banks will do them for free. Many smaller businesses however would just use Faster Payments Service for payments under £10K, which is like wire transfers in America, except they rarely cost more than 25p ($0.35) and once again, many banks will process FPS payments for free for small businesses.
As I said, the decision is somewhat justifiable. But there are plenty of comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888145 which show no awareness of how policy actually translated into economic effects.

I believe that you should either make the decision with full awareness of consequences, or else make the opposite decision. But don't make the decision and then be dishonest about what the consequences were.
Daily Telegraph Installs Workplace Monitors on Journalists' Desks
California regulator rejects Volkswagen’s plan to fix 2.0L diesels, EPA agrees
Somewhat offtopic- is there a way to use Stripe to hold payment in escrow or to authorize a payment more than 7 days in advance? I really like Stripe, though I am not sure it can do what I need.
I hate ansible and swear at it regularly. That bastardized YAML syntax is the main reason. Unfortunately, it's still better than everything else I've tried.
> AWS is world-class engineering and operations that can be summoned by a single API call.

Are they still doing world-class ICMP filtering, breaking PMTUD?
In many households the mother manages the father's wage down to the last penny. Father has little to no saying on what it is spent on. It may not be the rule but it is relevant enough not to ignore it. I would even dare to say it is more common than working mother / stay at home father combination, but I have no data to back it up.
And where the purchase price is large, those customers don't want some 3rd party interface to send the ACH...they typically already know how to send an ACH. They just want your account+routing so they can do it.

In short, this solution from Stripe fills a niche, but it's a very narrow one.
The perennial example of an electric guitar soloing in a big band setting is "Solo Flight" (1941) with Benny Goodman's big band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IID2JPnGF00. Charlie Christian is featured all the way through and in that sense the tune was also a departure from the usual format for big band arrangements.
sucks for this guy that his brother died but his brother was a fuckin faggot who couldnt handle doing time for the crime he commited. fuck aaron, goddamn pussy.
Should You Share Your Secret Sauce?
For those interested in more, please also check out the demo video: https://youtu.be/Sc6cIAJBkmU
It's been awhile since I studied middle eastern politics but isn't the consensus still that once the KSA oil money runs out (which could be a long time if oil prices rebound), there is a good chance of violent revolution?
If you do that, you'll get more single-owner homes, and less rental units, but you'll kill the ability to have apartment buildings (or, at most, one per owner). More single dwellings and less apartment buildings doesn't sound like the path to "more affordable housing".
There are bombs: https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/627118562629386240 :)
This! In fact, I know a couple of researchers who started as programmers in research groups and research labs, and slowly transitioned into PhDs and later, faculty positions. Especially if you have specific skills. I think the kind of labs that would hire you would be: biomedical research, energy research, some national labs. You will even be a coauthor if your contributions are important and substantial. Though admittedly, in some fields, nth coauthor with n != 1 or N where there are N authors doesn't mean much.

Edit:

To make it explicit, here are some ideas:

1. Medical research institutes: Weil Cornell, Salk Institute, Mayo Clinic, U Texas-MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic, UCSF, U Pittsburgh Medical Center, Oregon Health & Science, U Wash Medical Center, U Minn Medical Center, University of Penn, Harvard/MGH, etc.

2. Energy-related labs: Argonne, Oakridge, Pacific Northwest, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos National Lab.

3. Other national labs: Defence research labs, Army Research Labs, AFRL, Office of Naval Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic, Naval Research Applied Research Labs Austin, TX/Penn State, Georgia Tech Research Institute.
I would encourage you to start by learning Ansible's yaml syntax, which really goes a long way and which represents a lot of best practices in the devops world, such as immutability, configurability and config file templating. I have yet to run into a situation where I had to reach for python, calling the API directly or even extending ansible itself.

However, sometimes you may want to mix local actions (say, spin up ec2 instances) and remote actions (provision said ec2 instances). In these cases, a simple wrapper bash or python script to combine these has proven helpful.
I don't doubt that demand exceeds supply. San Francisco also is not really a representative sample of US (or global) home ownership vs rental and so on.

All that aside, I don't really see the line of argument that links my proposed idea to "more restrictions". My initial thinking was something like (basically): current market forces (especially in SF) favor the consolidation of ownership in the hands of the few people who can afford the large capital investment required to build new housing.

IOW: home prices are ridiculously high at least in part because the future value of rent extraction makes these homes good long-term investments for people who don't live there. See also: removing units from rental for AirBnB service in the long-term (sources differ on how many units in SF are lost to permanent AirBnB hotel status, but they seem to all agree that at least some are off the market for this reason).

So, what happens if this element of the market is removed? I know, I know: it's central to capitalism, I'm becoming a communist, etc etc. What happens when the supply - demand relationship is between residents and other residents? Do home prices trend upwards? Does the current bloc of owners and rent-controlled residents stop acting to fight against further expansion?
To put some numbers on this, about 600 million Indians rely on open defecation. Some researchers think that this is a key to the "Asian enigma"--the problem of why Indian children are shorter on average than African children even though African children are on average poorer (which normally correlates well with height).

Researchers have found that open defecation leads to stunted growth, and also higher child mortality rates. The later could explain another puzzle of India--why Hindu children have higher mortality rates than Muslim children, even though Hindus are on average richer and more educated.

It turns out that Indian Muslims are about 20 percent more likely to use toilets than Indian Hindus, regardless of income level.

Here's an article on this: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/06/open-defecation-solve...

Here's a research paper on the connection between open defecation and stunted growth: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Thanks, I appreciate it! I'm from Romania and I did get a job. Not the one I really, really wanted but the one that came after a few interviews when my interviewing skill got better.
> shown that some technical types just don't understand other people.

And other people are better? Writing clear instructions that random people can follow is _hard_.
Using a real programming language doesn't preclude a declarative programming style.
Why Is Comcast Interrupting My Web-Browsing to Upsell Me on a New Modem?
Threadflip shutting down
we have a commercial banking platform (from a brand name bank) with ACH origination. did that not work/was that not available to you?
Someone should make a real contest (maybe a Kaggle contest), with real data and all. With well-chosen metrics I think it could be a lot of fun and a great success.
Pulsar Hunters
> Where did you get the idea that this software is "made specifically to protect users and their computers"?

Read the marketing copy for it.

http://www.trendmicro.com/us/home/products/software/password...

Note also

* that TM charges $15/year for any non-toy use of the software (that is, if you want to store more than four passwords)

* the language that describes the "Secure Browser" feature, which is really an ancient version of Chrome/Chromium that has sandboxing turned off.
High-performance engineering simulation code (think Finite Element Method) is pretty much all written in C/C++ due to performance reasons.
Check out https://www.polleverywhere.com/
Too bad transportation infrastructure is completely verboten in America.

New York has it grandfathered in (was built before the car era) and New York does not have this problem. The simple reality is that cars don't scale beyond a certain density because, well, cars can't pass through other cars. Cars work fine for light to medium density but beyond that you must either build trains or stop growing. (Or waste billions and countless hours every day with millions of people stuck in traffic.)
Not really. I mean, open source code is definitely preferable in addition to any other security guarantees, for multiple reasons. But an open source spec of a closed source implementation, together with a machine checkable proof (that works on the binary itself), would be equally if not more valuable as assurance that the system performs as intended.
> We have had a code stability promise for months now in 1.0. So what you are saying here is that you do not believe that Rust will adhere to what it very publicly planned to do. Do you have specific reasons for this?

Since 1.0, Rust has in fact had multiple significant stable-breaking compiler changes, not to mention that, among other things, adding any new method to a trait or type in the standard library has the potential to cause breakage. The official code stability promise has not been violated by these changes only because it's riddled with exceptions.
Thanks. Would love to discuss with you further about 6 .. and the customer journey automation piece. Maybe something we could collaborate together.

Would love to know what's out there for 4.
Hopefully. I've had to integrate with that in the past and it was not a fun project.

I faintly remember them passing back html to inject to the user that contained iframes and a bunch of other junk javascript.
Sounds like an idea that the Google Search PM should pick up on :)
While others have rightly pointed out pollanywhere, I'm looking to go beyond just polls. I have text based discussions and will be adding audience annotations (useful for small meetings, brainstorming, etc) in the near future.
I'd wager the only thing you're missing is the high friction involved in setting up a bank account. I've got my credit card stored in my password manager vault, and even if not, I've got that sucker memorized. Contrast that with digging through the clutter on multiple horizontal surfaces in our house to find a checkbook so I can find the routing number and account number, waiting for the two deposits to show up (because I use a small bank that hardly ever shows up on these "automatically authenticate" lists), and then trying to remember what I was trying to spend $1 on...

But that's literally the only problem. The fee structure is AWESOME for micro-payments, so for the right things (small subscriptions?) this could be amazing.
Theoretical Flaws of the Admissions Process
Awesome company and CEO.
that's a proof that the system corresponds to a specification though
We Could Manipulate Gravity with Current Technology
It's because of all the fraud on the backend they have to fight. I'm sure banks would like nothing more than to have a simple system where they only charge half as much but net 2x the transactions. Lots of overhead with fraud.
Also the Chef server is more complex and written in more languages than the stack of an entire early-stage startup https://docs.chef.io/chef_server.html

And the server uses its own versioning, because what I really need is something competing with my DVCS

Too many things to count, really
Except that with the current reality people are commiting patent infringement for replicating objects based on obvious and trivial patents. And unlike large corporations with their war arsenals of patents, the little guy has little hope of overturning these patents.
Easy.

Feature: print function.

Implementation: from __future__ import print_function

Yes, that magical, backwards-incompatible, print function has been in Python 2 all along!

Feature: unicode strings

Implementation: from __future__ import unicode_literals

Amazing! The magical, backwards-incompatible unicode strings backported to Python 2 with one single line.

I could go on and on.
Please don't give away ideas. You be surprised how well these things would resonate with layperson.
Could be because they don't care too much about patents and licensing issues?
The Recommendation Problem
Is there a solution "Attach R2D2 to computer terminal"? ;)
> It's like python never existed.

Whitespace / indentation used for scope delimiting in Python is a bad idea. No, thanks. I'm glad Rust isn't using anything like that.
As a programmer who works in a building with one of these -- I've often been quite sure I could code a more efficient system.

It would be pretty fun if someone were to make a version that supported this. :)
Lost 19th Century Whaling Fleet Found Off Alaska's Arctic Coast
Teenager invents system to stop bacteria traveling around planes
Some companies layer external fraud protection on top of stripe. Have you tried any of those, or do you know if other payment processors (braintree, adyen, etc) have better built-in fraud protection?
The "International Earth Rotation Service" is a thing that exists [1]. It's where leap seconds come from.

[1] iers.org
One of my college physics professors had a more low-tech solution: hand everyone a set of cards labeled A, B, and C and have everyone answer powerpoint questions that way.
Vial and Error: Revisiting the “Whig Interpretation” in the History of Science
Reverser laments crypto game protection, says wares dead after 2018
Our startup, Invoiced, does exactly this. You can easily send invoices through our API [1] that customers can pay from the email. Now that Stripe ACH payments have been released we will be supporting it in the near future.

[1] https://invoiced.com/docs/api/#send-an-invoice
Everyone who sends email has to be very careful about upsetting email service providers, because they'll mark your messages as spam if they suspect you of misbehavior. Email providers use many metrics, and one of them is the number of bounced emails.

It doesn't take much to be marked as a bad actor, so companies will quickly remove you from their lists if you're jeopardizing their ability to get into the inboxes of their other users.

Source: I've worked at a couple of companies that used email as a significant part of their strategy to keep in touch with users.
Awesome Ruby libraries, tools, frameworks and software
It's a big deal once you can easily predict who is punished for ToS violations, and who gets to skate, by checking to see who has the right political views and/or friends at Twitter.
http://codelift.org/ is an elevator challenge a friend of mine[0] built that'll throw scenarios of various numbers of floors and elevators at you.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=silvamerica
There was a time not too long ago that nobody ever said "C++ remains", what they said was "Nothing can challenge C++". It was the "business programming" language. The fact that it's now "surviving" and "remaining" is a testament to how far it's fallen, not how successful it's become. It didn't rise from 0 to "used" over the last 5 years, that's something a new language Go can claim with pride; no - it went from "used everywhere by everyone" to "still used, somewhat". C is still more popular, at least according to TIOBE.

Java stole it's crown for "enterprise" programming and Microsoft even pretty much abandoned it in favor of .NET. I'm not sure their massive push for "C++ is back!" that happened 'round C++11 has really met with that much success - the world moved on, honestly.

There's fewer and fewer niches for it - the web could care less for it, heavy-duty "enterprise" programmers aren't giving up their safe and GC-based Java/.NET languages and giant 3rd-party eco-systems, and even video games now can be written in a higher-level language where only a small core 99% of people never interact with is in C/C++.

The problem is, IMO, that it's too late for C++ to be a decent language. If the first iteration of it was C++11, then sure. But there are vast code bases out there written in the horrible mid-90's or late 80's dialect of C++ that aren't going anywhere. Even something like Qt isn't true "modern" C++, and don't get me started on MFC. Look at Google's official C++ guidelines - they barely allow any modern C++ into their code-base.