skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Now it's emerged that those very same confirmation emails contain a web link - ironically intended to direct customers to Argos's security page - which contains the customer's full name, address and credit-card details in the URL itself."

I'm speechless... I may not understand PCI compliance fully but surely anyone with any brains could see that is a bad idea. I mean why would you reveal someone's credit card details in the URL. Not to mention emailing it. This beggars belief.

Edited for typos and readibility.
The interface is nice, but about the results... I typed "visual basic" and it redirects me to "C" :P
From the article: "I’m picking on Google today because I ran into an article written by a recent Google applicant who walks the reader through an interview process that appears to be designed to exclude the most qualified applicants for a marketing job."

He concludes google excluded their "most qualified applicants" because they declined to hire someone who can't apply that complicated mathematical practice of division:

“Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it.

“Um…well, ok. So, 20 out of 100 people click on the ad. Every ten clicks make one dollar…and you need 20 of them…” That’s as far as I got before I resorted to guessing answers, none of which were right. I was panicking and I couldn’t do a thing about it. My nerves were taking over. Anna could sense this and began to give me hints. None of them helped my frazzled brain.

After five painful minutes the annoyed interviewer gave me the answer. “100 people make two dollars, and two times ten is twenty. The answer is 100 people times 10 which is 1,000 people.” She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron. As if she enjoyed my misery, she immediately fired off another math problem.

FAIL.
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com
It isn't. Storing CVV is not allowed under any circumstances.
That's funny. I am fluent in Russian and can read/understand and speak some Polish and that text is understandable as-is.
So at least one way it works really well.
There's already a totally unambiguous domain for this -- why not alias *.localhost?
You've essentially set up a dummy corporation to shuttle money outside the United States to avoid paying US tax. Not only that, but I read in the comments that the friend who you've set up as a director is also not in the States?

You should contact a United States accountant and tax lawyer immediately and talk to them. I'd avoid email, and instead stick to using the telephone. You're not entirely up shit creek--many countries have taxation treaties with the United States that lessen the burden to those who have to pay double tax, though I doubt it applies in your situation.

I should also mention that your friend is, from what I can see, liable for you.

I am not a lawyer. Please, seek professional advice!
No, PCI/DSS is similar to the Better Business Bureau: many people think its an official (i.e., government mandated agency/law) but it's not. Many merchant account companies require it, but it's entirely possible to find a merchant account that does not require you to be PCI/DSS compliant.

Some people say PCI/DSS compliance is a scam, because you generally have to pay someone to say you're PCI/DSS compliant, officially, if I remember correctly.
I wouldn't describe VMWare ESX as slow or buggy.
It's cargo cult science, "algebra-based mechanics and practical physics" for AP Physics B.

Feh.

(No one but the educational community does mechanics with algebra; there's a reason Newton invented his version of the calculus for his work in classical mechanics.)
With Artificial Photosynthesis, A Bottle of Water Could Power A House
Danish and Norwegian are dialects, Swedish qualify as a separate language. "Nynorsk" ("New Norwegian") is a new language designed specifically to qualify as a new language, mainly for political reason (Norway was a colony of Denmark).
Prior art, surely.
Yet Microsoft sees no problem charging customers outrageous amounts for Visual Studio. I am appalled at just how much Microsoft is charging for the top-level VS2010 (try 20 - 40% of the salary of a good software engineer).
That is very detailed. I have a limited understanding of Russian, but still managed to learn more about RSL than from any article about it I've seen so far on HN. Thanks.
I don't know about the IRS, but if you were counting on the benefits of liability limitation, you shouldn't. Based on your description it would seem straightforward to "pierce the corporate veil".
> no one has yet built a nice, usable and newbie friendly UI yet

The Lindows Click'N'Run store (from 2004 or so ?) didn't look too bad, what with "product aisles" and so on. It mixed the free and commercial apps, too, using the Debian 'apt' tools underneath.

It may now be run by Xandros, who bought the company; I haven't looked. (I bought a couple of Xandros releases back in 2003 or so, but didn't like the tight leash they seemed to intend for the customers ;-)
As a Dane I have not no problems understanding Norwegian and Swedish, but with a bit of getting used to it, and an open mind(1), it's my experience that most Scandinavians will be able to understand each other perfectly well.

1: Especially young people will switch into English immediately, and I find that I have to force myself to not do that when talking to fellow Scandinavians. It's a shame since there's often much meaning lost in the double translation + our languages are quite beautiful, IMHO.
It all depends on your transaction volume. If you don't run that many transactions then all you have to do is fill out a form saying you're complying.

If your transaction volume is high, for example let's say Walmart, then the level of scrutiny goes way up. There is the option of not complying with PCI, but Visa and MasterCard wouldn't authorize transactions for them anymore. In a case like that there's a pretty big monetary incentive to comply.

PCI isn't perfect, that's for sure, but its probably better than nothing.
Dataflow in the Physical World
Why Apple can't control its Chinese factories
The income for the company is $0 because of the expenses, which are payments to overseas suppliers (you). You should pay a small amount to the CEO perhaps.

Do not classify them as royalties, since they have required with-holding rules and are a mess to deal with. Far better to classify them as software purchases.

It will matter which country you are in, look up the tax treaty between the US and your country, if they have one.

IANAL, YMMV, etc.
Definitely. I also believe you get a discount per transaction if you're compliant.

We had to become compliant for the merchant we use, and because we don't do a lot of transactions, it was only $80 a year. Small price to pay, I think, to keep my ass covered somewhat.

I suppose I came off as not liking PCI/DSS. I do like it, just wanted to clarify some things about it.
What's your price?
Hello,
thank you for your reply. What do you mean by "shuttle money outside united states"? There'a license agreement between me and the company - where the company pays for the right to redistribute the software. This can't be legal?
As the article notes, the offending e-mail also contained a link that included various sensitive data. Anyone following that link hits your server log, leaves the link in their browser history, etc.
Am I the only one who, watching that video, feels a powerful urge to start speaking with an Italian accent, climbing up walls, throwing guards off rooftops, and stabbing unsuspecting people in various gory ways, with a blade hidden in my sleeve?

Umm, yes, I probably am. But those of you who know what I'm talking about, know what I'm talking about.
Hmmm, another example of the end of Microsoft's "cult" of backwards compatibility which we first saw with the capping of Visual Basic in the transition to .NET. (Joel S. has a lot to say about this.)

I'm not sure it'll work well in this market, where from what I've heard the one thing Microsoft has going for it is IT department buy in, although Apple just helped with its legal assault on Android.
SSL is based on trust anchors (PKI), not web of trust (web of trust is PGP).
They keep changing their minds, like a cat always on the wrong side of the door.
How To BackUp  Your Firefox Profile
Dan Goodin is one of the good guys. No tech pub, Ars included, is staffed with people who can independently validate stories about crypto. Goodin at least tracks down multiple sources for his stories.
Oh, he talked about learning effects from other competitions. The fact that you could use other languages here doesn't interfere with the argument. (Though you are right, of course.)
The IRS is less likely to "come after you" as they are to send you a bill.
True; but they do have a tendency to big up these vulnerabilities more than other sites (in this case only in the title, it seems, but still...)
IPad Will Be Available In The U.S. Starting On April 3
When you've (a) got a bunch of UMich researchers telling you it's big, (b) got the OpenSSL team telling you it's important enough to merit an immediate fix, (c) got Karsten Nohl telling you it's big, and (d) it's in SSL, then you're going to run a story saying it's big.

Look, it's not big. We probably all get that. But there's nothing negative you can really say about the Register for how they ran this story. I think they do a better job with security than almost any other tech pub.
Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again
I always scan the comments first. I'm usually much more interested in the discussion than the original post.
Microsoft's tax-for-hacks a 'horrible' idea, say security experts
"Soft" skills are for weenies
Looks like pre-ordering starts March 12 - http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ipad-available-in-us...
The Origins Of Facebook And Its Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
Nvidia 196.75 drivers causing graphics cards to die
Gave it a brief thought. What I see is a TSP on a grid graph. Maybe I missed some detail. Do you see a better idea?
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked ConnectU
Regarding Danish, have you tried reading it? Spoken Danish can be pretty hard for Norwegians and Swedes too at times. There's a common expression in Norway that Danes speak as if they have a potato in their mouth - a lot of sounds in Norwegian (and Swedish) are a lot harder/sharper than in Danish.
Pretty obvious that BPs stuff is just greenwash
I can't say for sure what the GP post was thinking, but consider this: you set up a US corporation that had income of $100,000 and was controlled by you (as you state, you wired the money out whenever you wished). Hence shuttling money. You are asking how to avoid paying US taxes on this, but it seems that either the corporation or your person would owe US taxes. I am not an accountant or lawyer or owner of a multinational corporation. Best of luck.
Not saying this is deliberate, but I wonder if there's an advantage to launching a new device around tax season in the USA.

If you're crunching numbers and discover you're getting a few hundred back, are you more inclined to spend it on something like this if the hype syncs up with the money?
Good points. I hadn't thought of the potential to brute-force the CCV based on having the encrypted and unencrypted CC, but I had only spent a minute thinking about it. Perhaps in minute #2 I would have realized that. I was thinking of using the CCV in combination with other user data as the key anyway; it was just a piece of data that wouldn't be stored in my system, so that the data in my system wouldn't be sufficient to decrypt the CC.

To brute force the CCV, you do need the clear text CC. You wouldn't get that from me because I wouldn't be storing it. If you got it from someplace else, there's a good chance the game is up already. But you're right; if my database got stolen and combined with some other data sources, the customer's info could be matched up to get both cleartext and encrypted versions of the CC, and if the person doing this knows my encryption algorithm (a disgruntled developer, for example) they could brute-force the CCV. Maybe encrypting the other user data is appropriate as well, based on the user's password which also would not be stored anywhere in my system. Now, you need to brute-force the password just to get the name/address info from my database records, then you need to match that against someone else's cleartext CC numbers, then finally you can brute-force CCVs from my encrypted CC if you know my algorithm and what I'm using for keys. That's a fairly high barrier.

For what it's worth, my company does do CC transactions, and we do use a service provider for this which I 100% agreed with. Our user's address and payment info never touches our system at all; we send them off to the payment processor, and the payment processor sends us a token to tell us the transaction went through ok.
I think avinashv is trying to give you perspective on how it might look to the IRS in the worst case scenario, not suggesting that there's no way such an arrangement could be legal.
Hmm, you're right, I misread his comment. Sorry for the confusion.
It's not a formal part of the martial art. But it is used as a training demonstration related to watching the body line for attack.

Of course when your teacher tells you that it can even help you doge bullets they are hounded to prove it... :)
Honestly, I read the article that this article mentions. To me it seems like the person who took the interview probably isn't cut out for google. Thats not necessarily a knock against the person, I'm probably not cut out for google.

I think the reality here is that there is nothing about googles hiring practices that is slowing them down to me it seems that google's hiring practices are very deliberate and they get exactly the type of candidates they want.
MIT's emphasis on teaching foundations means that 5 year old content is generally going to be just fine (and if it uses a prior edition of a textbook, a whole lot cheaper as well).

One thing you're not considering is just how expensive doing this is:

The content has to be captured. If you want video of the lectures, that and most of the subsequent steps get a lot more expensive. And for a lot of courses lecture notes just don't cut it.

Publication rights have to be ironed out. You're got to iron this out with the professors involved, which at the very least will cost you some lawyer time plus political negotiations etc. etc. What's Fair Use (real or practical) for a classroom may not work for the web, and this kills some courses where the reading consists of a bunch of research papers. Etc.

The content has to be prepared for the web site. E.g. convert various word processor documents into PDFs.

Running the web site costs money.
The 22 minute meeting
In Australia, I see a mixture of:
1. reasonably priced games - often cheaper than physical copies, and,
2. ridiculously overpriced games - same price as RRP for a physical copy, even months later when physical copies are going for much less.

These days, less and less games fall into category number 2. At the moment its mainly Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands.
I'm in Miami where almost every accountant/lawyer has to be familiar with international rules/laws. I can recommend some professionals if you decide to go that route.
How do I uninstall it on Chrome and OS X? I can't find a way to do it. My main pet peeve right now is that once Rapportive loads, I can no longer unlabel an e-mail by clicking a little 'x' next to the label. (Yeah, it's relatively minor, but breaking host functionality isn't nice :D)
At some point the user has to fill out a form and provide the CCV. I happen to log form fields in addition to GET urls, so the CCV would wind up in my log if I didn't filter it out.
DNA test 'could predict most effective diet
An Experiment with YouTube's New Auto-Captioning
This is why I never use ATM debit cards outside of an ATM (e.g. for groceries) I've read reports of software along the path of the transaction caching PINs. Throw this unauthorized caching concern into the murky waters of bank liability for fradulent transactions, and I would go to an ATM (ideally one that has anti-skimming provisions) and withdraw cash before trying to pay with ATM at the POS terminal.
Thank you. Can you please send some contact info at thisisthemail12@yahoo.com?

Thank you again.
The fallacy of work-life compartmentalization
Django Advent - Small Things (Mar 5, 2010)
I wonder if the source is available as required by the GPL?
Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program
It will be interesting to see whether the publishing industry, and particularly Old Media, will be able to leverage the Ipad and start making some money on their content.
I read this when I was a kid and had a subscription:

http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=rAAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=...

I've still got the paper copy. Though it was perhaps another year before I actually touched a Mac in person (at, I believe, a department store -- they sold computers in those days) and five years before I could afford one.
For me (Polish) it is very understandable, but if I were to say what it seems like - I would say that it is like Slovak/Czech with some Russian (mostly verbs).

However, these are the three slavic languages I had most contact with. I can speak some Russian and I can recognize Slovak and Czech (but I wouldn't be able to tell one from the other). And I guess this might be similar for other slavic HN readers - they might speak one or two extra languages, they might have had contact with two or three more. This means that similarities described here ("sounds like ...") will be greatly influenced by the level of contact between nations.
> you can rise above this challenge too, and become wise as well as gifted

That's the essence of what ESR was saying.
I think this PR is a fake. It doesn't read quite right.

EDIT: well, looks like my bullshit calibration was off this morning. I still cannot believe they threw "magical and revolutionary" into the first sentence instead of into Steve's pullquote.
I'm not too familiar with C corporations, but years ago I did consulting work as an S corporation, and one of the rules was that if the corporation doesn't show a profit in 3 of the past 5 years the S corporation status is revoked and the activity is treated as a hobby instead. That means expenses can't be deducted from earnings. There might be a similar rule for C corporations, where you can have non-profitable years without losing the C corporation status but if that goes on for too long your expense deduction might become limited.

One thing I do know about C corporations was that it's not enough to just establish one; you also have to run it like a real corporation. A single non-paid CEO is not sufficient; you need a board of directors with regular meetings and proper paperwork evidence of the meetings and business operations. If you haven't got that and the IRS does come investigating, they're much more likely to disallow the C corporation status and treat you as an individual instead. Then it comes down to the tax law treaties between the US and your country to determine whether or not your US-derived income is taxable to the US. In most cases, you have to pay taxes to whichever jurisdiction wants more money, and you get a credit in the other jurisdiction for the amount they would have taxed you on the same income.
The graph in page 25 is thought-provoking (tup-vs-make on a change-one-of-N files test, N = 1 to 100k).

Interesting quote: When a single C file is changed in
the 100,000 file case, make can take over half an hour to figure out which file needs to be compiled and linked.
How Topeka Became Google, Kansas: The Mayor Speaks
This is sad. This case has 100 claims. The Examiner on the case is writing 50 page actions, the attorney is writing 20 page responses.

Both their time and energy can be used on better things.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/03/05ipad.html
5 reasons businesses still hate enterprise software
The 3-D Approach to Creating Opportunity
Entrepreneurism: The Age Gap
This monster.com article picked a terrible example, since the person complaining on Business Insider wasn't so bright. But there's plenty of other articles out there to choose from if you're looking for critiques of the Google hiring process.

In my personal experience, Google was weak on follow-up and internal organization: "we'll get back to you in a week" was actually five weeks, and three months after that a different recruiter called me up to interview for the same job. I came away feeling like they didn't have their act together.

Of course, this was a few years ago.
"Ecce Homology" is an interactive artwork that visualizes genetic data.
Co do języka, to nie mam wiele do powiedzenia /bo przecież kieliszek wódki i każdy się doskonale porozumie/, ale cieszy mnie niezmiernie, że mamy tu tylu słowian...
"... the language makes almost no difference in actual productivity, it's just personal preference."

If that were true how can we explain the results in this paper

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~trinder/papers/ICFP2007.pdf

which compared writing the same large application in Erlang, Haskell and C++ and showed the C++ program needed 40 times more code than Haskell and concluded:

"The high-level constructs dramatically reduce application size, thereby reducing development time and aiding maintenance."
Sorry to hear about that bug -- we will look into it. For now, you can disable Rapportive by choosing Window -> Extensions from the menu, and clicking the 'disable' link on Rapportive.
OK, first thing: calm down.

Second thing: Taxation in the United States, as in many other countries, is based on a variant of the honor system. The IRS accepts over 98% of all returns as written. If you are one of those 98%, that is pretty much the end of the analysis.

If not, the IRS is going to probably send you a letter asking you to justify what you have put on your return. Here is where your competent legal advisor comes in, but the answer is likely to be "The American corporation exists to pass payments to me in Nation X, where I am a resident. I pay taxes in X. My understanding is that, owing to X's tax treaty with the US on the subject of royalties, I am not subject to American income tax on the payments at issue."

Then one of two things happens: either a) the IRS says "Oh, OK." or b) the IRS spends a lot of time and money having their experts think it over and then says "No, actually, we rather think you are." At that point you have a bunch of life-not-nearly-over options: you can just pay the money (you will be charged interest and may be assessed a penalty if they believe you were not acting in good faith), you can work out a payment arrangement with them, you can litigate the outcome, etc etc.

Third thing: Go get competent legal advice. Sadly, it likely won't be cheap for international legal issues. However, it also isn't cheap for the IRS to worry about this, and at $111,200 you're probably beneath their radar most of the time. (Always remember there are millions upon millions of corporations much bigger than you moving trillions of dollars through America's borders. Many of them will screw up on their taxes this year in some way -- there are often multiple competing interpretations of the relevant laws. Keep copious records, file honestly, and don't worry about it until they tell you you have a reason to worry about it.)
Brother. I knew this would happen in the popular media, but even the industry pubs are screwing this up with alarmist headlines.

Sidechannel, people SIDECHANNEL! This is NOT an RSA crack. Not even remotely close. If you have physical access to the encrypting hardware, you can probably get at the private key by other means. Causing voltage fluctuations in the power supply is an interesting attack, but it is more of a curiosity than anything else.
I'm getting sick of these articles. Waiting for Brother Bruce to weigh in and silence this alarmist nonsense.