skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is indeed more focused on some of the ideas you liked most. But I think one lesson learned from Tipjoy is that merchant acquisition is the hard part about making a payments system. Increasing conversion rates is nice, lower overhead from micropayments is nice, but does is drive higher revenue? You have to prove that (or something else, like great customer service) to sell to merchants.

I also think this focus on pay later doesn't necessarily work for those new to the system (i.e. everyone that matters) who could still be apprehensive and hesitant to commit to a transaction.

The use of reputation isn't new. Spare Change had a system of reputation for those who reversed transactions. They let merchants block those with low reputations. A fun anecdote is that they needed to make a reverse-reverse transaction for those that wanted the reputation back.

But let me bring it back to merchant acquisition. Amazon and Google are both having a hard time with this too. People don't want to spend development resources on a new payment processor unless they really, really need to.

That's why solutions like http://wepay.com are awesome, because they have a payment product designed for a sizable niche that really could use their services.
If I were him, I would pull an Arthur Dent and lock myself to the house on demolition day.

(The hyperspace bypass is another issue altogether, however.)
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Codes exist to benefit the homeowner. Nobody should have the right to force you to tear down your newly built home because they think it's not up to an arbitrary standard.

There's also nothing in the article to suggest that it's not up to code. I'm sure the electricians did their usual standard of work...
Massive install base, yet no hype. There's more hype for Nokia's Linux phone than for any random Symbian smartphone. I coded for Symbian many years ago -- it's a dead end. The OS literally has no future. Open sourcing it is just part of the death spiral.

At least this might give some of the dedicated developers, whomever are left, a chance to actually fix some of the more annoying bugs.
This thread is making me feel very poor.
We did do this, but for twitter. Fighting fraud with a social graph is awesome. We planned on doing it with Facebook too, but never made it urgent. We probably should have focused more on commerce instead of P2P and non-profits, and gone for wherever the transactions were. We expected the twitter platform to grow with the usage, but I still haven't seen that. There are very few companies that build on top of twitter that ask you for money.
Symbian isn't open sourcing any of those things either, AFAICT. Symbian will still have many closed source components similar to Android. Symbian also has components that are not open source, but whose Android equivalents are--e.g. its fonts and the font rendering code. In fact, the Symbian fonts have a very restrictive license--no redistribution allowed, usage for R&D purposes only.

Further, during the open-sourcing process, Symbian created new ("open source special") implementations of some components; that is, the open-source implementations of some components are not the same as the implementations that real devices have been using. It will be a long time, if ever, before these open-source versions catch up to the production-quality versions.

The Android license (BSD) is a lot easier/safer to comply with than Symbian's license (EPL). And, if you actually want to read the source code, Android's code is a lot easier to jump into than Symbian's is. (I'm not saying Android's code is better or that Symbian's code is bad; I'm just saying that there are many layers of indirection and unusual, Symbian-specific idioms in Symbian's code that makes it difficult to read.)

Anyway, I don't understand why Symbian is so eager to start the "who's more open source" debate. On many points, Android clearly wins on open-sourciness. I'm sure Symbian wins on other open-sourciness points. Open-sourcing was a smart thing for Symbian to do, whether Android exists or not, and I think Symbian should emphasize the positive aspects of this change.

That said, it would be very cool if somebody created a table that detailed which parts of Android and Symbian are open source, component-by-component, side-by-side.
Not long enough, offer a license that doesn't expire until 2030, then we might bite.
It was posted 6 hours after my post. :)
I honestly think those who clicked up, have no direct or indirect experience of war. If you had the slightest iota of experience you would be writing a comment like this.

War could possibly be the most crude type of expression a human being can display. If you wish to experience such experiences, by all means head on out and do it.
For those cooped up in school, playing video games, a war zone is not a form of gap year, lets go holiday in France effort.

If you into startups, head on out to China, where you will be blown away at the types of experiences and connections you can make. Life is much cheaper out there, connections made can set you up for life, learn a new language with a most powerful form of abstraction.
I am pretty sure the chance of making decent business connections, in a once beautiful country that was Iraq now turned cess pit by corporate greed is pretty slim.

It is possible; if you wish to set yourself up as a most brilliant entrepreneur for single handedly transforming Iraq into a haven with your innovations, the world stoop before you, those odds are hard.

A place like China is far more advantageous for you, and if you want it... it can be dangerous too.
I found this secret code while geocaching. What could it mean?
Nobody should have the right to force you to tear down your newly built home because they think it's not up to an arbitrary standard.

If you built that home illegally, then someone most certainly should have the right to take action. Also, building codes aren't exactly "arbitrary", ya know?

I'm sure the electricians did their usual standard of work

But you don't know. You can't know. Nobody knows and nobody can know, because -- by hiding the construction -- this guy almost certainly also hid it from the routine checks which would have provided that sort of information. Most work done by most contractors most of the time is probably fine, but inspections and other checks are there for the cases where the work isn't fine, because we've decided, as a society, that it's worth that overhead to avoid the nasty consequences.
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Your domain name is impossible to pronounce and probably impossible to remember. Is there some rationale behind it?

Ah, I see - n-syght - interesting.
Also, hotlink http://www.nsyght.com
I have the N900. It replaced my E71. The Skype integration is amazing. :-)

I agree that Symbian is a dead end. I have two books on Symbian development, and Symbian's bizarre form of C++ and their relatively complex code signing system drove me away from the platform.

With the N900 as a vanguard, I'm excited to see just how far Nokia can take its open, Linux-based smartphones.
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Absolutely agree - manufacturer dictated end-point pricing seems almost anti-competitive and prone to price-fixing and other monopolistic practices.

It seems that Amazon is selling these ebooks as a loss-leader in order to get people more on-board with the concept of an e-reader. I know a couple people who have one, but I only see them maybe once every couple of months on the train (I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes daily on the train, usually in full cars).

I still think the iPad is going to be successful, but for very different reasons - eBooks are not going to be the driving factor for that product, therefore Apple is allowing publishers to charge whatever they want. Amazon didn't have something as big as the app store available, and the differentiating feature they chose was a mid-line pricepoint for ebooks (more expensive than a $6 paperback, but less than a $30 hardcover).
>>Questions that show an undue interest in time off or avoidance of overtime. It may be that the job involves no overtime per se, but I still never liked getting the impression, early in a job interview, that the person was already looking for opportunities to take time off. (The first question out of your mouth should not be: "When do I get to take vacation time?") It speaks to a certain work ethic.

If you are sensitive about overtime, you save everybody a lot of bad blood by being up-front about it. Relationships are about setting expectations.
You seem to forget: The older you get, the more you forget. With ten, you know pretty well what you did last summer. With 80 you'd say: What summer? It's snowing outside.
Yea, from my perspective the "company man" doesn't exist anymore for the most part. There are people who buy into the cool-aid, but most people treat the company they're with with the same loyalty it treats them: almost none. When a better opportunity comes along they tend to jump. I can't recall more than one or two cases where the person announced they were leaving and got a counter offer good enough to make them stay.
For those also having trouble with the link, the actual address contains a period at the end.

I assume HN believes the period was punctuation and is removing it when it converts to the link.
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Why would you "cring" at nytimes.com when they linked to that tweet in the 6th line of the article?
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How long until there are Kwlection agencies?
So they can go back to themselves and their family having almost literally nothing.

What is offensive about your post is the suggestion that the US is somehow "not good at" production because we don't have the option to utterly disregard human rights and abuse the employer power to give people an "offer they can't refuse".

We all buy, indeed rely on being able to buy, this cheap stuff, so I didn't intend to single you out as evil for also doing so. One just has to remember we have such low prices now because humans somewhere far away are being treated inhumanely. It is unlikely that this will continue indefinitely.
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While this conforms to the popular 17 syllable rule, I would argue it is not technically a haiku because it is weak in providing an evocative image (related to nature) which in turn conveys a sublime mix of emotions.

The 17 syllable thing is more of a guideline. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English

Apologies for nitpicking, the bigger story here is obviously the resignation of the CEO of Sun rather than the manner in which he did it.
In Perl, people make a game out of doing as much in a single line as possible.

Wrong. It's not 1995 anymore.

Experts do things that are mystifying to a beginner.

And this is a Perl thing? What I've found from listening to beginners is that they accuse every programmer of intentionally mistifying them. OO is too hard. Macros are too hard. Monads are too hard.

Unfortunately, the experienced programmers use these features because there is a significant productivity advantage in doing so. They don't use the features to intentionally confuse beginners. The good news is that the beginners can use these features too, as soon as they are willing to admit that maybe the experts aren't actually out to subtly screw them over.

In Python, an expert would be expected to produce a solution that is comprehensible to a less-expert programmer, spanning however many lines as are necessary. It would be un-Pythonic to write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand.

<picture of lolcat>.
What is the purpose of a textbook?

To inspire a mode of thought. Ideally, a book then becomes a companion for life.

Wow. What a brilliant distillation. Also a perfect description of my experience with the first computer science book I ever read, SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html).
There's a fine line, and I suspect the iPad is on the right side of it.

What you probably want to shoot for is offering features that will leave 90% of your customers 99% satisfied. If you only offer the stuff that the bottom 50% needs, too many people will feel crippled (and that's what a dumbed down product will look like), whereas if you try to please that top 10%, you're going to have to make the UI far too complex. If you please 90% of the target audience, you'll likely end up with a clean interface without pissing off too many people.

I'm all but certain the iPad will fully satisfy 90% of the people that buy it, especially since it's not being positioned as a desktop replacement.
This is exciting. Congrats, folks. I'm really looking forward to what you cook up. I'm a big fan of Flavors.me.
You say things like "investor experiences a real loss of assets (decreased net worth) whereas an unemployed person merely ceases monetary gain" and say my logic is terrible? The investor, in most cases, lost some number in a computer somewhere. The employee may lose his home. How can you possibly suggest that the investor lost more? In fact, if he's properly diversified it is possible that while this investment failed, he made extra somewhere else.

If you think the investors losses are more damaging to the market as a whole I still disagree. The employee was likely injecting most of their income right back into the economy. An investor is probably just buying stock from other stock holders (much safer way to make money than a business venture). Unless the stock holder is the company, this is just money changing hands between rich people, i.e. zero gain for the economy.
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Many of us spend a lot of time thinking how to decorate or homes and offices. We drive around to several auctions around the city hoping to find nice collection of decorative items and products at cheap prices. Sometimes we turn lucky whereas at other times we only end up wasting our time without finding anything useful or something that fits our budget.
This reminded me of the pork futures warehouse :)
Try most of Europe, where Nokias are still way more common than iPhone or Android.
"[S]eems only fitting to end on a haiku" seems a rather generous interpretation of the meaning of the cliche "seems only fitting".
User A: I want $5 worth of <stupid thing> for my facebook profile
<stupid thing>-r-us: Here it is, you owe $5 Kwedit
User B : <Sign Up>
User A : Pass the Duck to User B
User B : <disappear>

7/11 scanning is a nice idea, I don't care for the name
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I think that takes much "free" from "free market". Why can't buyer do whatever he wishes with the item after purchase?
I guess I could have left that out. Sometimes they ask for login, sometimes not; but I cringed and came to the comments hoping for a direct link myself.
$3.30 per sheet, but assuming you get 1000 uses that's $0.0033 per use.

Staples has InkJet paper online for $8.79 (500 sheets per ream). That's $0.0156 per use (single sided print).

If my assumptions are correct, that sounds cost effective to me.

I'd be more worried about the paper getting damaged before you can get all 1000 prints out of it. I'd hope the paper is sturdy.
Open source project wants feedback: seotoaster
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With SEO Toaster you log-in and simply surf your live website and edit content right onto the page itself, and building, importing or customizing a website theme takes as little as 30 minutes for a web designer. Unique search engine optimization features include automated re-directs; onsite SEO, onsite optimized linking, link sculpting using Java script, and even point and click links silo building and everything is ready and easy-to-use out of the box.

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Thanks a ton for your time
Welcome, new Cocoa or Cocoa Touch programmer.
Under the arrangement, the NSA would not be viewing user searches or e-mail accounts, the sources said. Google also would not be sharing proprietary data with the NSA, they said.

Riiight. So the NSA is helping Google for the good of the world?
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Am I the only one who thinks "Tweets his Resignation" is sensationalist, link bait bs?

On Jan 27 he tweeted a link to "likely my last blog at Sun" - http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611

And that blog made it clear that with the Sun / Oracle transaction having closed he was on his way. Even that's hardly news - you can't really have two CEOs, so someone was always losing that title, and Sun was the one taken over.
Yes, there are many forms of influence already, lobbyists and the such. My intent was to say - there is now one more way that large multi-national entities can directly shape opinion by marketing spend. This makes the contribution of the individual without money less and the consolidation of power (influence) in the hands of those with money greater. By the people for the people moves towards "by the corporation, for the corporation".
to be fair, in San Fransisco its not going to go as far as it would in other parts of the country.
Hmm, more like:

Financial crisis / The last nail in the coffin / CEO no more

It seems disingenuous to blame the fall of a company that's been floundering for a decade on the present climate.
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Sorry fellow hackers, just couldn't hold myself back. :-)
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Nonsense. It might be 'too little, too late' to take on the iPhone, but it's timed perfectly for the real market for mobile phones. It's easy to forget that there are an estimated four billion GSM subscribers worldwide, most of whom neither know nor care about Android or the iPhone.

The global mobile OS market is currently dominated by Nucleus, OSE and Series 40 - these three platforms have a combined market share of 90%.

For Series 40 users, the obvious upgrade path is Series 60 - of course Nokia will lose many of these customers, but they will keep many more.

That leaves us with the myriad manufacturers using Nucleus and OSE. These manufacturers, many of them completely unknown in the west, are producing featurephones for customers who are highly price sensitive and are staggeringly fickle and fashion-led.

When looking for an upgrade path to a full smartphone OS, the main concern of these manufacturers will be cost - of implementation and of Bill of Materials. Symbian has clear advantages over other smartphone platforms in this respect, being royalty-free and having significantly lower hardware requirements than Android. An open code base will open the door to these Chinese manufacturers and their dizzying diversity of hardware and software designs.

I reckon that the Symbian Foundation has played an absolute blinder here - it may have lost North America, but it still has a dominant position in EMEA and has set itself up perfectly to launch an aggressive assault on BRIC.
It's kind of a combined attack from anyone in the SEO space.

Mahalo was built up going by Google's search guidelines and has made itself an authority online. They're at a level where almost anything they publish gets picked up immediately and ranks fairly well in the SERPs. What they're doing currently are practicing grey/black hat tactics of which almost all are frowned upon by Google (ie. acting as a content scraper with no original content). Because of this authority they've built before, they currently get away with it.

Small sites would be banned or punished for some of the things they're doing, but they haven't even received a slap on the wrist.

Another reason this gets a lot of us SEOs fired up is because Mahalo is doing the same thing Jason preached against. He called everyone in the SEO industry a scumbag and preached about how Mahalo would put SEOs out of business with their 'human powered search'. Mahalo as a destination site failed so they switched to become (essentially) an article directory who get most of their traffic organically through search. The problem is they're creating low value pages with nothing but ads and scraped content. Those pages are what Jason claimed he wanted to get rid of in the first place, one of the reasons he started Mahalo.

The SEO community is pissed about this because it gives us a bad name, building on the bad PR we got when Jason went on this gigantic anti-SEO campaign a couple years back. We're just trying to point out the hypocrisy here and the only way to do that is to present our argument and hope that Google hears us.
Determine your risk-measuring ability (Risk Quotient)
Also check out Hans Rosling's Ted Talk on HIV:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv.ht...
I understand our point - it's really a trade-off between things; and as well the situation is definitely more or less tough, depending on your area.

I totally agree with searching for jobs that actually teach you things does bring money on the long run.

Sidenote: I put an emphasis on 'actually' because it seems to me that it's difficult to know which job will teach you the most beforehands... It could be the CRUD one, if I use your example :)

For instance, in 2006, I had already been moving heavily from .Net to Ruby. Yet someone called me back with a .Net project in mind. I went there just by principle - and ended up doing data aggregation, continuous integration at a scale I had never done before! This has heavily influenced what I do today.

As well I was working as a consultant for a large bank, promoting application infrastructure (services, ioc etc), continuous integration, testing practices. Before that, I could possibly have told that bank was boring and I wouldn't learn anything - it was the other way round in the end.
People who go to that amount of trouble to not pay probably wouldn't have bought anything directly anyway. If nothing else they're advertising <stupid thing> to their friends for free.
I don't think you get that cultures differ, or that Perl one-liners capture something about the Perl culture. There's nothing wrong with the Perl culture, and the Perl language is well-suited to it. It's certainly different from the Python culture. Not only that, the "Python culture" in the sense of people who write about and influence Python is not synonymous with Python programmers, not by a long shot. Programmers are different -- "programmers are programmers" only if you define programmers fairly narrowly as professional programmers who measure their worth by their ability to use programming languages in the most elegant and powerful way possible.

Among software developers, Python programmers are of course keen to demonstrate that Python is just as awesome as other languages. That isn't really the point of Python, though. Python's value was never in how it served people who could afford to devote a lot of time to mastering it. You wouldn't judge a Prius by how fast Michael Schumacher could drive it around a track, would you?

There is a whole population of programmers out there who really don't give a damn about programming languages and who rightly don't invest a lot of time in mastering programming. They exist, they do important work, and Python's ability to serve them is important -- that's the bottom line and the truth, even if this audience isn't eager to hear it. People like that are sensitive to the difference between Ruby and Python, and they've mostly never seen decorators.