skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I accept all major credit cards when not based in the US?
I would like to be able to accept all major credit cards in USD, and have the funds transfered to a local bank account (Jamaica).<p>I have tried Paypal, but they send a check. They don't offer instant transfers to Jamaican bank accounts, only US ones.<p>I have a US bank account, so I guess I could have it transfered there, but am not sure how to get it from my US bank account to my local one without writing a check (which takes 45 days to clear) or without flying to the US and wiring the funds myself.<p>What options do I have to streamline this process?<p>Assume I will be earning recurring income from a subscription-based model, so I would need this to be a sustainable solution.<p>All suggestions are welcome, including setting up a US company and doing some sort of standing order transfer. Specifics to do the above would be greatly appreciated.
Weight Lifting for Hackers
I think the author really means "comfortable". He is intending to say that entrepreneurship and "comfort zone" are contradictory.
Essentially, Rupert has made a large amount of money throughout his business lifetime from newspapers. Newspapers, particularly Rupert's have worked because they gain a monopoly (or oligopoly) position in a given town as a daily distributor of content and advertising. [1]

Unfortunately, the internet has made distributing content on a daily basis to every household a much, much cheaper prospect and hence Rupert is looking at a business with much less value present.

As a result, he doesn't like the Internet much and is a) looking for a scapegoat and b) trying to employ what little leverage he has left, in the form of legal threats.

[1] It's worth noting that in most cases newspapers do not have a competitive advantage based on the quality of content they distribute, as short of things like the Wall Street Journal the quality is uniformly lackluster. [2]

[2] Interestingly one of the strategies that newspapers have used to boost profitability have been to decrease the quality of their original content (investigative reporting and the like) and use cheap, easily sourced content (ie wire service stories, reprints of PR distributions and gossip). This has worked but has had the effect of eroding any competitive advantage the paper has held over other providers of content, like blogs. Essentially they've made rational short term decisions which have royally screwed them in the long term.
It has to do with the titles and snippets that Google provides in its search results. Murdoch is saying that their using the titles + blurbs without permission.

More here:
http://www.corporate-eye.com/blog/2009/11/news-corp-wants-to...
Yahoo performance guidelines advise 3-4 domains per site.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/04/11/performance-research-part...
WoW authenticator tokens are single-use with a 30-second lifetime. On one hand, it's a testament to Blizzard's effectiveness in pushing them on the playerbase - the fact that enough accounts are protected by them now that the bad guys have to target them specifically is pretty impressive. On the other hand, it's scary that we're at the point now that the bad guys are developing attacks against hardware token-protected accounts.

I've read the same thing about a WoW account - it's worth more than a stolen credit card, and is significantly easier to get ahold of. Not what I'd expect, at all, but given the lengths the bad guys go to in order to steal accounts, it seems like it lines up.
Dangers of virtual when there is not enough real
How would checking to see if the terms match help? Usually there are as many ways to translate something as there are translators.
Three words: network, network, network. You'll never find anyone with a printed ad or by posting flyers (I know, I've tried that too).

I'm gradually turning my small town into a startup hub, and it's great. So far my efforts have helped launch a co-working space and have helped a bunch of creative and technical people meet each-other. There are some money people in my area too, and they should be getting interested pretty soon.

Even if those meeting suck, go to them. Get to know anybody worth knowing. Suggest creating a new group or club (make sure it has a specific purpose and some direction). Go to chamber of commerce mixers religiously -- even if the first four send you home empty-handed, the fifth might get you a curious entrepreneur. Pay close attention to the items in the local newspaper. Start keeping a list of who the "movers and shakers" are in your area.

I wasn't real fond of the YC process, or of living in the Bay Area, and I already had some things going here. So ... why not keep pushing things here and create the environment I wanted?
Good thinking. I think the best way to "fix" this is to remove the authenticator from the account, you are given a 5 minute timeout and must put in another code generated by the token after that period. That way, the original code stolen by the keylogger is no longer valid.
Are you saying that if your content doesn't have a robots.txt, then everyone is allowed to copy the content of the site with no restrictions whatsoever, and that copyright law doesn't apply?

I'm not a big fan of Murdoch, but it's an interesting discussion that should go beyond the obvious technical arguments.
Icons for Web Designers
The vast majority of infections are due to Flash-based ads targeting older Flash installs, which are then targeted to be run on gaming sites. The days of opening emails with attached .SCR files are long behind us.

Blizzard does require that you provide two consecutive codes when removing an authenticator from an account, so I'm not quite sure how you'd coerce a user into providing two codes back-to-back, unless they just keep spamming tokens into the system. You could get around that by introducing, say, a 15-minute email-based delay that asks for a second auth code:

1) Log into account management (token required), request authenticator be dropped.

2) Request authenticator token. Validate token.

3) Stick request on the queue.

4) In 15 minutes, email the user with a link that includes a URL token validating the request. The link takes them to a page that asks for another token.

5) The authenticator is dropped upon receipt of the second valid token.

Most players, no matter how impatient, aren't going to sit at their computers for 15 minutes punching in auth codes. They'll give up after 3 or 4, max. The additional email ownership verification step, with the time delay between code entry should at least buffer you against authenticator-drop attacks.
I don't know that memorizing the facts will prove to be important, but I suspect that having been exposed to them at some point will be. In the article she talks about early US settlement. Her daughter probably won't spend a lot of time as an adult working with those facts, but having context about where her society comes from will likely make her more capable in reading news and forming political opinions.

Suppose that the point of her daughter seeing this in school isn't so that she'll know about shipping in Baltimore, but rather so that she'll have a gestalt sense of colonial America. Now suppose that teachers are required to test in some way that students were actually exposed to this material. Since we pretend our school system can measure students objectively, we have to pretend that some facts are the important facts and test recollection of those.

Memorization might actually be a sign that 'real world' use of the facts isn't going to happen. If the facts were applicable in some way, you'd be able to test that children had actually been exposed to them by having them apply the material, not just regurgitate it.

I dearly hope that one of you guys is working on the next great startup that has a solution to this. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways you might be able to 'test' that a child was exposed to the material:

- tests where you write down n things you remember about the topic

- spend five minutes talking to a teacher about what your favourite part of the reading was

- prepare a short presentation, web page, essay, video, poster, whatever about your favourite part of the reading

If we can do that and make it take less teacher time, it might have a chance.
Hooray for having a Mac, a platform it's relatively unprofitable to develop viruses and malware for!
Imagine the world with strict copyright. Search engines would be illegal!
You get moderated downwards for that comment? What is this, Slashdot?
I'm not sure there's anything one could say about focus/productivity that's particular to software engineers. When it comes right down to it, the sort of work we do is susceptible to the same procrastination pitfalls as any other knowledge worker, and so it can be avoided in the same ways.

The most helpful advice I've gotten on productivity has come from Merlin Mann of 43Folders (and other projects), and he mostly writes about writing.
re: "steeping time (not that long, else you'll get the bitter flavor bits that no one like)"

As a tip to those who might want to give tea a try, the pattern of increased bitterness with increased steeping time is highly dependent on tea quality. Not necessarily price, but quality.

Don't be afraid to do some research, talk to local tea lovers, etc. to find the best quality (not simply the most expensive, as that is a sure way to just get ripped off) loose tea in your area. You'll be rewarded for it in terms of the freedom you have in steeping time, as better tea can be steeped longer and to stronger flavour without developing bitterness. (Higher-quality tea can also be reused for another steeping or two (gasp!) and still deliver great flavour, making it an even better value.)

For those coming off of a strong coffee habit, you can have yourself a nice, strong (but almost never bitter!) replacement in no time.
I'm sure he's grasping at a legal way to make it illegal for Google to index without paying and at the same time make it illegal to drop them from their index. Even if his lawyers find some crazy way to finagle that, I doubt it could stand up to appeal due to the amount of pain it will cause to everyone who's not a major newspaper.
Ask HN: How can you make a user experience addictive?
What factors and techniques contribute to making a user experience addictive?
Amen to that. Great stuff.

Just curious, in what part of the country is this small-town startup-hub?
That's kind of a red herring, because Murdoch wants his stuff to be copied by google regardless of how that argument is resolved.
It's not a particularly onerous requirement and far cheaper than calling your lawyers.

If you're making the argument that the company that is automatically spidering your content should stop then your case is somewhat undermined by failing to take the simple steps to prevent aforementioned spidering.
Uh, Google doesn't do just "anything" with the content, they index, summarize, and link back to the original article. There's no obvious copyright violation there.

The GP was hyberbole that doesn't add anything to the debate. Ironically that's exactly what happens all the time on Slashdot.
It's not the first time this type of attack has been seen in the wild: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/how-hackers-snatch-.... This article cites a reported cases in 2008. The first case was probably even earlier. It's not a novel attack; what's interesting is that WoW accounts are valuable enough to attract this type of attack.
Very interesting that they have 17,810 collections (aka tables). I wonder if it is common w/ MongoDB to design a data model in this way? Anybody have more info on this tradeoff vs. a smaller but larger size collections?
Thanks for writing redis-node-client!

For pure proxies, there are definitely more appropriate tools. However, this gave me a chance to play with node.js. And I may develop it into a more full featured proxy.

I haven't seen the new continuations stuff in node. I will have to check it out.

BLPOP looks great. I will check it out.

I've thought a little about scaling to multiple frontends. I thought multiple response queues might be the easiest. Along with a request number, the node server could tell the backend which response queue to use.

I shell out to redis-cli purely for ease of development. I was already familiar with the cli, so I used it. I will definitely switch to a real redis library if I continue developing.

And finally, I used the term spike to mean a non-production quality programming exercise to prove out the solution at a high level. See http://c2.com/xp/SpikeSolution.html for more details.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Circa 1986
I guess I'll ask again, differently. What do you mean by strict? Are you saying that today, there is an implicit understanding among a class of people (judges, CEOs of web 2.0 companies...?) to not apply the law strictly? That doesn't sound very likely.

If Google started copying a full news site verbatim and offer its content when people search for news, that would definitely be wrong, robots.txt or not.

Strict copyright includes fair use exceptions and so on. Where fair use stops and infringment starts is an interesting discussion for me.
Using Cortado as a Fallback for HTML5 video
Game. Check out this talk from Amy Jo Kim at startup2startup: http://startup2startup.com/2009/01/09/jan29-amyjokim-shuffle...
StackExchange's karma points and badges have made me quite addictive.
As a student of bioinformatics, I would be interested in this.

Perhaps it could be a more fitting venue for those in the DIYBio scene.[1]

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/topics
LuaJIT 64-bit Available
Opera Mobile 10 Beta | Opera Mini 5 Beta
No, it's different. In second life you meet with and talk with someone. You do a little mini-interview, and then typically you test one sample of his work (I have a native speaker friend for each of my languages).

Then he does the work, we proof read it, then pay.

mturk you put it out, people translate it (mostly machine), then you have to reject it, put it again, same thing happens. Etc. Quite different beasts.
Need advise on compensation for non-technical employee.  H1B Visa-related.
What is a fair compensation package for a non-technical "second" employee for a web start-up?

He's been working on a part-time basis for the last couple months as he finishes his last semester of grad school. This guy has already shown that he'd be an exceptional asset from a non-technical (web design, brand positioning, social marketing, PR, etc)perspective which is fine because I can focus on the technical side.

Tricky part is that, though he can first exhaust his OPT time (12 months) post graduation (May 2010), he would eventually need an H1B Visa to stay in the US to work. He offered to pay all H1B processing fees.

The main caveat for sponsoring an H1B is that you have to pay market salary. This startup has been self-funded so far so I can't pay much though he may be fine with a title that warrants $30k or so. We would probably generate our first $ in 2-3 months. A couple investors have offered to provide some funding which may be an option.

Should I pursue this seemingly awesome non-techie second employee even with the H1B hangup? What would be a fair package in terms of H1B sponsorship, salary, equity, benefits? Thanks in advance for your time.
I also know they are good because my iPhone app went
from unknown to top 20 ranked in many countries

This does not mean that translations were good—merely that
they were just good enough to make some sense. People tend
to have error correction built-in, so it is possible to get
what translation meant to say and then laugh at what it does
literally say.
"Humans are risk-averse..."

Exactly. I think that's his point. That is what he means when he talks about the lizard brain. Our aversion to risk leads us into doing things that do not matter.
I guess I shouldn't say "good."

These translations were "effective"... I don't care much if they are good :)
Hobo 1.0 released - Rapid Rails Application Builder
Any "reward" for interaction will help.

- WOW: experience
- T61: karma for hearting songs you like
- Every forum ever: titles for number of posts
- HN: karma for comments / submissions others like
- StackOverflow: practically everything
Asking an unusual "favor" of the hacker community...(Healthcare IT startup)
Hello -

I'm CEO of a young healthcare IT startup that hopes to work with the forward-thinkers at Y Combinator. We're still in quasi-stealth mode (rounding the business plan competition circuit to raise early-stage funds), but could use your help if you're up to a challenge.

Our technology is designed to remotely transmit vital data to emergency rooms while patients still in an ambulance en route to the hospital. Data security and uninterrupted service are therefore absolutely critical. The system is being developed even to work on the battlefield -- one of the highest-stress medical environments imaginable.

That said, we’re looking to assemble a team of tech experts who would be willing to help us "BREAK" the system before we release it - thereby identifying any weak points that need to be fixed before beta. (Basically, we need people with the skills to counter our programmers.) This seemed like the ideal place to find such talent. Would you be willing to help?

If so, please visit www.mediviewdx.com and email me so that I can reach out to you personally as we get closer. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Jonathon Feit
"I can tell you, I did my fair share of hacking."

This is a fair response. I didn't feel your essay brought out that aspect of the game very well, but I have no reason to doubt it happened. IMO, the use and abuse of the game's rules are the most interesting bit of Nethack, and I wanted to highlight that.

"I'll go up against you in a hacker dick-measuring contest any day."

This is ridiculous and in no way appropriate. I meant nothing personal by my comment.
Date bug crashing PlayStation 3 systems around the world
The single most important factor is one I'd take from gaming, a medium where addiction is a frequently sought-after element: Playability. Do things flow in a pleasing way? Do your actions feel like they have weight? Is the environment responsive? Do you feel like you can explore?

Strive for a "playable" UX and addictiveness will come naturally.
Isn't the BBC funded by the taxpayer? Is it even legal to block the public from receiving something they paid for? Seems like flash is forcing them to go against their charter.

EDIT: Yup, definitely against its charter. I think its reasonably practical to provide a streaming method other than flash. Right now there is one way to access streaming content, not a "range of ways".

"The BBC must do all that is reasonably practicable to ensure that viewers, listeners and other users (as the case may be) are able to access the UK Public Services that are
intended for them, or elements of their content, in a range of convenient and cost effective ways which are available or might become available in the future. These could include (for example) broadcasting, streaming or making content available on-demand, whether by terrestrial, satellite, cable or broadband networks (fixed or wireless) or via the internet." [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_...
The story is still developing, but people are speculating it could be a leap year bug. Console dates are resetting to 12/31/1999. Here's a few news sources:

http://kotaku.com/5482328/ps3s-suffering-from-global-network...

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/28/psn-is-down-some-titles-ex...

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/13244-pre-slim-ps3-units-exper...
Pure speculation, and in the typical techcrunch way, all three theories are about Google wanting Twitter...
It didn't work out so well for Hitler in the end.

Lets go through the many ways in which Israel is being punished for this:

* Twenty five agents have had their identities compromised. Bear in mind that agents you can send into a foreign country to participate in an assassination do not grow on trees, even if you're Israel. This has not just impaired Mossad's supply of agents, it is also a blow to the morale of the organisation.

* These twenty five are at a real risk of reprisals in the years to come. If a video of one of them turns up with a bag over their head this will do further damage to Israel's prestige and Mossad's morale.

* Worse still, the identities of foreign nationals have been stolen. This has angered nations that actually matter, ie prosperous Western nations. Israel is not in a strong geopolitical position, it relies on the goodwill of it's allies.

* The goal of the exercise, to eliminate a threat and strike fear into Israel's opponents, has been poorly accomplished. It's caused Israel no end of diplomatic troubles and made it's victim a martyr. Actually eliminating an arms dealer isn't much cause for celebration anyway as there's an almost endless supply of them. You'll run out of wetwork teams long before they run out of arms dealers.

* Finally, footage of Israel's incompetence have been displayed on TVs all around the world. You don't strike fear into the hearts of your enemies by cocking up repeatedly on TV.

Essentially, this was a political, not a military, operation, and it's failure has punished Israel politically.
Reduce friction. Make it as easy as possible to do any given task.
This guy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
Pure tripe, as usual, from TechCrunch.

This is a site I would like to see docked algorithmically. TechCrunch stories always reach the front page because all the karma whores are voting each other up by racing to submit the story. All this voting activity is no reflection on the merits of the story though.
I really enjoyed reading Carnegie and he really makes you think about changing your behavior. Though his book is more like a story telling with a bit of advice. If you're looking for a more "scientific" book, you should probably try "Crucial Conversations" and "Influencer" (both on amazon) - those are great books with a lot of useful information, which, by the way, support all of Carnegie points and extend them to a certain level.
I thought you could do a wire transfer over the phone. Is that not the case?
WPF Menu Databinding
Yeah, I use Google Wave to 'sign off' on informal agreements
What Happens to Your Credit Card Debt When You Die
Finding Untainted Jurors in the Internet Age
Lamps By Evi Style « Lighting Universe
Err, I had nothing to do with the creation/implementation at all! I'm just a knowledgeable hanger-on.
Why would stuff about a particular OS's filesytem be taught in a beginning computer science class?
What are the Equipment Needed to Make VoIP Phone Service Work?
A call management system. Call management delivers the functions usually provided by a telephone system, such as call setup, call routing, placing a call on hold, etc.
I liked what the author posted in the comments section:

Sigh. My silly rant about ponies gets to #1 on Hacker news, while my serious, carefully researched 3000-word post on host-proof hosting languishes in obscurity. Oh, the humanity. ;)
Education may be a tricky thing don't you think?

If you charge the lesson creators they will want to charge the students to recoup costs/make money. This is fine but it changes the entire dynamic of the website. The "web 3.0" example lesson plan becomes a moot example. All this information is free and the target audience most certainly is not going to be compelled to pay for this type of content. So your new target market becomes people looking for and creating "marketable skills" type of content. Content like lynda.com etc. Content that makes it clear students will get a return on their money.

I can see you building for traction and a lot of people setting up free lesson plans. Are these free lesson plan creators necessarily going to be the same market that would have a need for creating paid lesson plans?

I think the concept is solid, just doing some off the cuff thought exploration - good luck.