skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily true. You have to challenge it to find out if it's enforceable in many scenarios, and it might act as a deterrent as well. Even a widely known unenforceable clause can deter someone who doesn't previously know that it is unenforceable from doing the action that the clause prohibits. So I can definitely see plenty of reasons to include these types of things in a contract. Plus, what does it cost them to include it in the contract?
Here you go: http://commonmark.org/
Condolences about the condition - happily the diet works. I definitely agree. I don't see it as crazy at all, even though I admittedly haven't been in a similar position.

If you don't mind me asking, what else was at the bottom of your list?
It's the cash advance fee (different from the normal interest rate on the card).

Source: I used it once to get money out like a debit card... without realizing there would be a fee, and got charged the nasty fee. For the card I tried it on at the time, the fee was somewhere between $10–20 on a $100 withdraw. Never tried it again.
See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11925103
InputStreams are not seekable (see https://developer.android.com/reference/java/io/InputStream.... ).

You can also have a look at a zip file spec to see that they can be streamed: https://users.cs.jmu.edu/buchhofp/forensics/formats/pkzip.ht...
> This is efficient so long as the bargaining power in the market is not highly asymmetrical.

An asymmetrical legal and financial balance isn't even the real problem, it's that contracts from large companies are on paper non-negotiable with the real negotiation occurring is in court when the terms of the contract are contested. We already have some protections for people who agree to take-it-or-leave-it contracts but, to me, it's not terribly clear whether those protections extend to private arbitrators who might blindly rule on the letter of the contract.
[HW Startups] 2 Methods That Can Get Your Functional Prototype Production Ready
Everything about this is for regular JS developers:

Exponentiation operator:

2 ** 32

is much friendlier to write than Math.pow(2, 32) or

x **= 2

versus x = Math.pow(x, 32).

Array.prototype.includes: if (['jim', 'bob', 'dave'].includes('bob')) { console.log('We have a party, now.') } versus using for/in, for/of, map/reduce or much more commonly importing JQuery/Underscore/Lodash/some other random npm package for this functionality.

Both are small improvements, but both are squarely for "regular JavaScript developers".
> Why ban it?

Because it prevents creating a class action to group together impacted customers. Individually it may not be worth it for a customer to proceed with a claim. En masse, there is an economy of scale.

Now I'm not in favor of frivolous lawsuits and these clauses are clearly intended as a defend against them, but if the response to that problem shouldn't be binding arbitration everywhere. It should be tort reform.
Does the Chip and Pin really afford that much protection? Surely it doesn't help with the underlying payment network, i.e. internet payments. The only thing that would really help here would be something like a credit card 2fa required for all transactions (which, to my understanding, the chip provides).
For U.S. Parents, a Troubling Happiness Gap
"George Soros wasn't (afaik) breaking any law or contract when he drained a billion dollars from the Bank of England in 1992."

I also like this analogy. I am also reminded of the Hunt Brothers and their (successful) attempt at cornering the silver market which was then thwarted by a rules change by COMEX[1]:

"But on January 7, 1980, in response to the Hunts' accumulation, the exchange rules regarding leverage were changed, when COMEX adopted "Silver Rule 7" placing heavy restrictions on the purchase of commodities on margin. The Hunt brothers had borrowed heavily to finance their purchases, and, as the price began to fall again, dropping over 50% in just four days, they were unable to meet their obligations, causing panic in the markets."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
>so it would appear that there is little leeway in the choice involved.

I think we agree on this. The reality is that an active choice will still have to be made by a consensus group, though. It's not a matter of something being forced down the throats of a majority by an oligarchy, it's utilizing the existing consensus mechanism.

I think OP should be well warned here as to what is binding with smart contracts, for sure. This isn't any different than risk calculations in Bitcoin, though -- early days advice was to wait six blocks for transactions over $20, because the cost of subverting the network was very low. This is part of the give and take of mining and distributed consensus with current technologies.
First of all, remember that, just because it's in a contract, that doesn't mean it's enforceable. Plenty of contracts have legally nonenforceable clauses (or clauses which are questionably enforceable), which is why almost every contract also has a clause that says, 'if any part of this contract is deemed unenforceable or invalid, the remainder shall remain in effect'.

There are also other reasons that a clause might be legally enforceable in the general case, but still struck down in a particular suit given the context of the specific contract in question.

> We live in a society that has created a system in which you must have money to pursue legal recourse

Depends on what you mean by 'legal recourse'. You're welcome to, for example, go to small-claims court and have both sides represent themselves[0]. That's as close to free as you can get.

The problem is that legal recourse for large matters must cost money. You wouldn't want to go to trial for a large civil suit without a lawyer, because there's too much at stake for you to risk it by representing yourself. But lawyers cost money, because they have the opportunity costs of their own time to worry about.

And it's not like you can't get decent representation for free. You can get a lawyer on contingency, which basically means that you have to convince them that your case is solid enough that you're likely to win. In that case, you don't have to pay much (or anything) up-front.

[0] In some states, you cannot have a lawyer represent you in small-claims court - both sides must represent themselves.
Not over the contactless interface, part of the data is different every time the card is tapped. It becomes worthless to 'clone' contactless cards because of that.
You always need another book about Sherlock Holmes
In over a decade of life in NYC, never had a problem with taxis incorrectly refusing cards. Happens 90%+ of the time in Philadelphia though, which is why I take Uber or similar whenever possible there.
The stock market has always had a high gambling component.

A lack of dividends is hardly the stock market's problem, though. Assuming that is actually a problem (I'm not sure it is), it would be a problem of company managers and investors not understanding fundamentals.
Yep, stalled for sure.

There are only so many 'issues' that a framework can solve and make things easier for you. Why not take advantage of a few basic features right? Why re-invent the wheel?

Perhaps this is the answer.

You can only rely on the framework to get you so far. These frameworks have become a crutch for developers.
Annotating All Knowledge
No. Soft or hard forking the currency is not breaking the smart contracts' terms, and anyway the people doing that aren't necessarily the same as those who agreed to the contract.
And it's not as if the courts are blind to this fact, there are protections when there is a power imbalance and the contract is take it or leave it, but I doubt any of these protections will extend to private arbitrators.
He could, but it's unlikely he will close the site over improper downvoting behavior (which is rampant, but unimportant). And what I think people here should (and do) respect is the general spirit of civility; we respect Paul Graham's wishes because he asked for civility, not vice-versa. If Paul Graham asked us to be pointlessly cruel, we would not respect that (or we would be congregating elsewhere).

Therefore, what matters most in practice is the mass opinion of users of the site - what do we think is most useful and respectful in daily usage (following Paul Graham's lead to be respectful because we can all agree that this is a good idea).
Well, their language is disappointing. They allow programs to ignore function return values, a misfeature inherited from C which has no place in a contracts language.

Then there's the possibility of forcing early program termination via stack overflows.[1] Having to protect against that inside each program is just silly. The contract engine should have been designed so that if a contract program crashes, anything it did is rolled back.

[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ether...
It's not that simple. In the end it's what users actually use that matters. Mining on a fork that sees no use would be suicidal. So miners need to follow users, or their investment is for nothing. And users tend to follow developers, at least until there is a contentious fork.

So while there is no clear single party that makes decisions, active developers have the most say.
I agree that GP's perspective doesn't match reality, but for a different reason. The reality is, I think, that consumers do not care what is in the EULAs they sign. And this isn't just due to ignorance, lack of resources, lack of bargaining power, or any of those things. (Note, that I'm not saying these issues don't exist--just that they aren't the actual reasons why most consumers sign EULAs.) It's because, for the average transaction, the likelihood (and magnitude) of any real dispute is regarded as so low that most people are OK signing pretty much anything. This, I'd venture, is almost always a rational decision from a consumer's perspective. but the problem is that these individual decisions can add up to more than the sum of their parts by insulating companies from the broader regulatory goals of certain privately enforceable laws (i.e., laws that an individual has to sue to enforce). The freedom-of-contract defense GP is giving doesn't properly come to grips with the fact that many legal claims serve purposes other than vindication of personal rights (or, more broadly, the right to bring any claim in court, especially class actions), and therefore should not be so easily waived.
Is 15% really that extreme? This is a game; nothing of real value in the world is being created or destroyed (that wasn't already during mining). I personally hope the ethereum community decides to play this game out and not bail out the DAO. It's way too early in the social experiment to change the rules.
> Yes, she wasn't able to save a sinking ship

Why do you think this? Based on the WSJ article [1] she created a mobile ad revenue (non-existent before Mayer) of 1.5 billion. Mavens is a huge success. She does need a little more time. I honestly thought Mavens was a wash until this article but she's followed through on what she said and it's working. A 4 billion dollar company that created a 1.5 billion market...I'd call that pretty awesome. She needs to do better though. Double that and the public should see the turnaround as well, which she's on track to do with 1-2 more years of aggressiveness.

[1] https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BX746_YAHOO__9...
We must pass a noble law...
The fact that the web link is on the comments page makes it pretty difficult to find. Took me quite a bit of wondering what people were talking about until I finally found it one day.

Moving the web link to page where the main link is would be an obvious solution.
In the UK and Europe, didn't governments essentially force banks into the modern age in terms of electronic payments that your contactless and contact cards use?

By comparison banks in the US use the debit card & ACH system which has many issues compared to credit cards and European payment systems.
No he can't, so no offer for him.
I run Nomad List (https://nomadlist.com) which is not exactly a SaaS but it is a subscription revenue based company. It just passed $300k/y
NASA unveils plans for fully electric X-57 experimental aircraft
I've gone to cash whereever possible. I needn't monitor my CC accounts so closely, reconcile them at end-of-month nor worry about stolen cards. Sellers love cash.

Best of all I spend far less - I am more parsimonious if I pay with cash.
You think stackoverflow has too many good questions being closed? If anything I think more could be closed.
Ask HN: How do you find a good corp-to-corp tech recruiter?
In my experience, most recruiters are leeches on the system who only have short-term goals -- place as many as possible, no matter whether they fit, long term reputation be damned. I've experienced this from their telemarketer like calls as well as when I was leading a large project and needed additional help. The recruiters weren't saving me any time -- if anything, they were costing me time and I finally demanded that I interview the candidates that my boss was bringing on. I've never had to work with them on the other side as in 20 years I've never had to search for a job and only interviewed once when I moved to a new area and didn't have existing contacts trying to recruit me.

I recently left very profitable employment to form my own company and to start doing consulting/contracting. So far I've been busy enough just through word of mouth, but eventually I expect that well to dry up since I live in an area without a huge number of tech companies, so I'm starting to put out feelers to build new relationships and find new potential clients.

I imagine there must exist a subset of recruiters who take time to fully vet their candidates and only promote them to companies who are a good fit. It seems that finding one of these could be a win-win. Just like on the hiring side, I don't want to waste time dealing with carpet-bombers. I would love to build a meaningful relationship with one who can get to know me, get to know my skills, seek high quality matches from companies who also value this person's selectiveness and talent pool.

Do such recruiters exist? How does one find them? And on a related note, are there particular recruiting companies (who place corp-to-corp contractors) that have a good reputation in this regard, and any that you would caution me to watch out for?
The vast majority who refused were, in fact, not executed:

http://imgur.com/T0gHUTh
Madness is the rule rather than the exception
OK, makes sense. The headers at the end of the file are only required if you want to extract specific files out of order. Love the clarity of that spec, btw.
Which is why he actually said it could be cited:

>I am the reference, having been part of all of that. This post could be cited in Wikipedia as an original source.

His post on SO is the reliable secondary source.
Other than a green bar with a white box on the left side and a grey box to the right side what am I supposed to be seeing here?
Oh, on my card it's a 1% fee with a $5 minimum. Still totally worth it if they're doing the 0% interest promotion.
> There's so little quality news information left on the web

And these hacks are a reason why...
> Consumers have not been taught how to properly negotiate and enter contracts,

Did you negotiate your ISP contract ? you can't negotiate if every ISP have the same policies.
I wouldn't as long as it was just the chat window and was used for formatting. Native apps generally perform better, tend to be lighter. (The slack client takes up 400mb in 8 processes.. it's basically a web app within a containing application)

Steam uses a web widget for the store, but the entirety of Steam isn't built in HTML/JS. It makes sense to do it that way.

If steam was entirely written in a web language you would never have the platform support that you currently have, the ability to download at the speeds that you currently have, etc.
It's fascinating to find issues like this. I do wonder if it's a coincidence or something really is dying/changing on the same day each year and causing search to stop? We're not quite to the 365/2th day of the year. Today is apparently the 168th day, so it's not something obvious like that. (Like some queue set up to hold 6 months of data, but assumes each month is 30 days, or something dumb like that.)

Reminds me of the stories of servers dying every night at exactly 11PM and it turns out it's the janitor unplugging it to plug in the vacuum cleaner.
Ask HN: How do we replace our POP3 email solution?
We are a medium size company and our aging POP3 solution is becoming difficult to manage. It's a shared hosting setup that has to be administered via CPanel, what are our options? Any recommendations on how to tackle the monster that is mail?
It's an inherent risk of being publicly traded. Imagine a company with perfectly stable profits, unlikely to change in any direction. If some part of the market develops a collective delusion about that company being a prime growth candidate, then that part will buy out the realists. When that has happened the new owners will reshape the company into the growth-or-die-trying experiment they where expecting to buy.
> “Our research shows that [the skin microbiome] is remarkably stable,” said Julia Oh of the Jackson Laboratory. “We’re always showering, and washing our hands using antibiotic products, and being touched by people [in different environments].” And for all of this, our microbiome doesn’t actually change very much, she explained—in the same way that, just because you encounter a virus of some kind on the subway, you won’t necessarily pick it up and get sick. We’re good at fighting off the invaders.

Mightn't it be that the bacteria found on a modern soap-using human's skin are remarkably stable with respect to soap usage, while those found elsewhere might not be?

It also wouldn't surprise me if it turns out the re-establishing bacteria once exterminated turns out to be extremely tough, while keeping the proper proportions constant might not be too difficult.
There is definitely an opening in the retail payments market right now. The chip thing is a major problem for high volume retail. That extra time adds up in a very big way, just like latency in a network.

-Instead of getting quicker, payments just got slower

-Apple and Google have the credit card companies on to their payment platforms now

-Minimum wage moving toward $15+ an hour means cashiers need to double speed/efficiency

-Interest rates are extremely low, which means cash flowing transactions is cheaper for any party

The payment terminal is already being leapfrogged at Starbucks with mobile ordering. Retail stores could require identification and payment method in order to enter the store, and then bill you as you walk out using mobile sensors. This wouldn't be any more unusual than needing a membership to get in to Costco. The membership contract could over ride traditional payment transaction rules.

There are tipping points in terms of costs vs lost revenue but I suspect things are going to move away from cash and physical cards really quickly. Like Uber, rather than being a negative, this will be seen as a huge positive by the majority of users.
Perhaps, but:

a) It is being bailed out by referendum, not mandate. Everyone gets a vote, if you don't want to install the patch, don't do it.

b) The funds to bail it out are those stolen by the attacker. Nobody is asking people without DAO tokens to suddenly contribute their ether to restoring the DAO or take debt.
You should start with the first one in the trilogy, "Three Body Problem". Both great reads, I'm excited for the third book to be translated in September.
In retrospect, a declarative language might have been a better choice. There's a tendency in open-source projects to make things Turing-complete because it's too hard to agree on what the declarative primitives ought to be. (Hence JavaScript.) This is not what you want in contracts for substantial amounts of money. It's passing the buck to the users.
First I've heard of this incident. It's incredible, the things people say. I don't understand how said anonymous investor made it this far without ever being admonished for speaking in that way.

Unless he knew what he was doing? That raises a number of other questions.
Uber points to profits in all developed markets
The USA Today article hints at another gender equality topic that came up in this meeting, with poor results: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/06/08/google-al...

"Minutes after Alphabet shareholders rejected a proposal to disclose more information about gender pay equity at Google, a shareholder stepped forward to ask whether Alphabet's stock price was under- or over-valued by Wall Street."
Patent examiners don't have discretion. The special patent court (CAFC) is filled with patent lawyers that decide cases based on their own personal interest in a more expansive patent system. Except where the Supreme Court reviews their cases, they have total power to set precedents and those precedents always favor trolls over creators and innovators.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appea...
Uh, I'm at least 70% confident that Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to sufficiently strong systems of integer arithmetic, and extensions to those, and doesn't need real numbers.

That being said, saying it can't be bulletproof or watertight is too vague.

There is both a first and a second Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

The first shows that a system T which can do arithmetic has some statements that it can express, and which are 'true' , but which cannot be proven to be true by T.

The second shows that a system T which can do arithmetic cannot show that it is self consistent, unless it is not self consistent.

Neither of these seem to be a problem for smart contracts.

It is possible for a system to be self consistent. The smart contract or the system that the smart contract uses does not need to prove itself to be self consistent, so the second theorem is not a problem.

If there is some mathematical statement that can be expressed by the system that the smart contracts use, which the system cannot prove whether it is true or false, this is also not a problem. Which, Ethereum doesn't even have a proof checking thing built into it yet, so I don't see how this would be applicable.

I think that you are probably over-applying Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Also, I don't think its so much complexity in the "wow these laws are complicated" sense, so much as "strength" in the "how many things can be talked about / shown to be true" sense.

You /might/ be able to do some weird program/proof analogy there, but I really don't think that applying it to law (by a law/program analogy) would really show all that much.

I would think that the law can be understood as being sort of like a function (these inputs result in these outputs), and a function can be both be complicated and total. The law doesn't really do much with formal proofs, as it is now anyway.

Keep in mind that there is also a Gödel's COMPLETENESS theorem.
Very cool, but this definitely worries me a bit

> Commando.io is SaaS that helps companies and people manage their servers

I'm not sure if I want the tools I use to manage my production servers to be managed by one guy. What if things start breaking and you're not around?
That could end up being fun inside google.

"Prithee Lady Developer, whilst thou gander at user story 493 and comment on it before the morrow?"
Mark can turn the whiteboard upside down, mic drop the marker and walk away.
Do you not deal with other people? Sexism is pretty much normal all over the place. It's sort of why we have this problem in the first place.
My bank and college allowed credit card payments, but there was always a percentage fee that was much higher than what you would get back from credit card rewards