skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you have two options. First, to become a payments aggregator as Dan Manges pointed out. You would essentially be performing the same function as Paypal does on ebay today: facilitating payments between buyers and sellers. That's a very difficult model for a lot of reasons.

The second option you have is to use Paypal's adaptive payments. I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it would fit your needs but it's the only solution out there that potentially provides enough flexibility to do what you want and get you out of aggregation.

I don't think Amazon's FPS has the flexibility or the international reach to do what you need.
Has anyone tried advertising on Facebook? Is the CTR and conversions better there compared to Google? I lose money on Google adwords.
Good to hear Bazaar speeds have improved. When I tried using it, it was painfully slow, taking 20-30 seconds for a simple 'bzr log'.
Absolutely. Please be very careful who you trust when adding 3rd party JavaScript. They don't even have to malicious themselves, just get hacked on their end, and then all of their customers are compromised as well...
Emiller's Balls-Out Guide to Nginx Module Development
I think one of the biggest hinderances to "augmented reality" is the currently available viewers. Holding up an iPhone or some other smart device to look through its small screen doesn't cut it. The concept is powerful, the usability is awful.

The smart device needs to be used as sender / receiver of data, not as the viewing tool. If there were glasses that could synch with your smart device and semi-transparently overlay whatever augmented reality layer you wanted to currently view, then you have something that is very powerful AND usable.
I've had my mum on Ubuntu for 3 years now, she's fine with it.

Because of the package manager and repositories I think Ubuntu is the best OS for mums: all the updates happen automatically.

What special needs does your mum have?
Abstract:

Since the mid-1990s there has been a growing body of research on the causes of civil wars. One of the most surprising and important findings is that natural resources – in particular, oil and gemstones – play a key role in triggering and prolonging these conflicts.

This paper summarizes recent findings on natural resources and civil war. It explains four ways that resources increase the hazard of civil war: by harming a country’s economic performance; by making its government weaker, more corrupt, and less accountable; by giving people who live in resource-rich regions an incentive to form an independent state; and by helping finance rebel movements. These patterns help explain the unusually high rate of civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region with many resource-dependent states.
He doesn't mention Darcs. Is this system so irrelevant? That would be too bad, I love relatively independence of it's patches. (Plus, the UI is really good at reminding you what you could have forgotten.)
I voted you down because I was on a 2 hour long conference call and didn't have time to refute your argument.

You can reminisce about British/Euro colonialism all you want, but we as East Africans didn't want them. When given a choice between accepting the super power, or fighting them off, we chose the later and paid for it dearly. Independence didn't come to us cheap, we had to bloody the nose of the empire and send it packing :-)

Neither you nor anyone else has the right to dictate the fate of a people. Sovereignty above prosperity my man.

You say self governance is not high on your list. Nearly everyone on earth is either from a colonial power, or from a former colony. Unless you're from one of the few places on earth that escaped colonization; you're either implicitly rejecting your country's fight for independence, or you're a colonialist yourself, or a direct beneficiary, and have no right to speak for your so-called "subjects".
I made the switch to Ubuntu a bit ago and I know I'm not the "typical user" since I do design/dev work, but I see nothing about the OS that the average person couldn't pick up on in terms of its operation vs. Windows, and it's even more similar to OS X with regards to how it functions.

From my limited experience talking to people who've tried linux, what confuses them the most is the linux file structure, which can look a bit confusing until you come to understand it.

The average person probably doesn't need to know a whole lot about that, though.

Also, the UI and font rendering aren't quite there yet, but they're getting better all the time.

The biggest problem that I see, while I love Ubuntu, getting it to a point where I'm totally happy with it as an OS has taken more work than the average user would be able or willing to implement, i.e. doing things like cleaning up the UI and improving font rendering, and fixing some issues I had with Flash out of the box. I had to ditch Pulseaudio because it performed very poorly with my HD audio off my motherboard. Disabling that and installing/configuring ALSA was a bit of an ordeal that anyone not really comfortable with computers probably wouldn't want to undertake.

For me, the attraction to Linux (other than having a more productive work environment) is that I can customize the hell out of it and make it however I want. Most people won't want that flexibility and will want it to "just work" perfectly out of the box. Ubuntu doesn't quite do that yet.
It disproves the claim that Linux is unusable.
Java has been in the repositories for years. Also Ubuntu has an "App Store" for commercial packages now. I haven't tried it, though.
I think that when you contract a senior consultant from iSec Partners or Leviathan to test, I don't know LiveMeeting?, you're getting a high-quality "deep" fuzzer and you're getting the dumb fuzzer too. They are getting both. They're spending many tens of thousands of dollars per release cycle to get people to write and run these tools. They evaluate projects based on whether they find things. They find things. They keep the tools and the run them on future releases.

The point I'm making is, even if you do an amazing job fuzzing your software, you will clearly still miss things.
I personally don't care if X is 1ms faster than Y, I wish though the developer of X and Y would agree on common command-line arguments and workflow (and hide the details from me) so that I wouldn't have to write my own wrapper.
I tend towards the "Charlie is just better than most of us" view of the world, too.
solari.com, narconews.com, and fromthewilderess.com are good resources to learn about this.

charles stross's "the merchant princes" series also has a subplot about this.
By the way, the whole world has improved in every measurable aspect, and that alone (education, life expectancy, house hold income, nutrition, etc.) will render your colonialist argument moot.

What you're calling "better" was a cosmetic superficial metric of success; you had a ruling class that had a life-style comparable to that of the colonial masters, but the great unwashed masses had no such fortune.

You, and many others, use Britishness or Europeanness as a metric of progress. Things are good as long as they resemble comparable things in London. I read that bullshit in travel literature; Saigon is great because it has French architecture, and Eritrea is lauded for its Italian "heritage".

I swear, I could write a dissertation on every news headline, magazine article, ad, or a forum comment I come across everyday. Propaganda strikes and runs deep, methinks.
Here's how I ended up fixing my low volume level issues in 9.10: http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/447122874/alsa-in-ubuntu-...

And here's how I fixed Flash: http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/451068353/while-were-on-t...
DSLs in JavaScript
It sounds like you are suggesting teaching children only the things they are interested in and ready for at the time.

Compared to teaching on arbitrary set of topics at arbitrary times, you should have big gains in learning efficiency and enjoyment, since it is inefficient to spend time attempting to convey a concept the child is not ready for or is uninterested. The child will be spending a greater fraction of the time learning.

Sounds sensible to me.
The only thing that matters is CPC and LTV (lifetime value of your customer). If you know your LTV is $50, you can afford $50/click.

You get NO value from raising your bid except better placement and more clicks. I'd first try going long tail and bidding on MORE keywords (with low bids). Exhaust that option before you raise your bids.

Work on your copy, too. Adwords makes it easy to test different ads. Test a lot. Steal shamelessly from the #1 ad slot in terms of style.
The odd thing here is that you and your critics appear to be arguing different points as though they were opposing, and they're not. You're both right.

British colonies are indeed more peaceful, prosperous, and educated than similar non-colonized areas. This is generally accepted as a fact amongst historians, if any of the stuff that I read is an indication.

However, there were also abuses of power, and although it might be hard to claim that they were truly systematic, they were also widespread and common.

Unfortunately, cheaper labor makes fast reconstruction and monumental development possible; slave labor makes it even more so. Does anyone think the pyramids could have been built by a free population of well-fed and prosperous peasants?

It's a shame you got downvoted at all. A carefully-researched and made point shouldn't be getting downvoted here in all places, even if people disagree with its conclusions.
Exactly. I don't even use hosted libraries like jQuery from Google, I always host them myself. Also because it exposes my visitors to yet another tracking server if I use external sources.
So You Signed A Term Sheet? You’re Not Out Of The Woods Yet
Writing Musical Essays: How Do they Sound?
Music is life. Music is an artistic combination of sounds which can transmit us feelings and thoughts. Ever since the man was man, we have been making music. No wonder we have a lot to say about it. However, if you were requested to write a music essay, you may feel like you don’t know where to begin.
People To Avoid Dating
I will be interested in seeing how this series pans out.

There's been too many SQL vs NoSQL debates, and not enough fleshing of NoSQL vs NoSQL, and how to actually use it.
You're not getting a statistically significant volume of clicks to make any decisions. Don't raise CPC too much until you know your exact CPA/conversion rate for that traffic source, you'll be burning money.

It seems that your campaign is poorly organized- you need to start with broader keywords to get more volume and then zero in on the profitable/high CTR keyphrases.

Be sure to try the content network as well, way more volume there.
Covert Paper & Pencil Programming for the Employed Startup Founder
Don't raise your bids to try to get more clicks - work on your ad copy first. You can get over 1% CTR even in the 9-12 slots, so don't throw money at an ad until its working.
I would add CTR.
That has been unnecessary for a long time. The only time I edit config files is for things that an average user would not use (vim, shell, etc...). Which file do you feel are necessary to edit by hand in Linux ?
Have you ever used Ubuntu? You never need to edit a configuration file on Ubuntu when used as a typical consumer OS.
Looking at the battery management on the 10.04 beta, the options seem very similar to the ones on my mac book. What do feel is missing ?
> I voted you down because I was on a 2 hour long conference call and didn't have time to refute your argument.

That's not very nice, nor constructive. It doesn't improve the conversation at all. I really wish people wouldn't do that.

> Sovereignty above prosperity my man.

There are a few hundred thousand women in Africa that might take issue with your absolutist position.

One of the points of the article here was that, absent any governance at all, the violence in some areas of Africa has gone from being about anything to merely being violence for violence's sake. How can that possibly be considered a better outcome?

To badly quote Bertrand Russell, once you begin to think about human suffering, it's hard to think about anything else. It is hard for me to fathom how anyone could see the actual condition in these areas, and conclude that their ideology justifies those conditions!

I have every right to speak for my "so-called subjects"; I have the right of a rational argument, which is this: colonial rule is a lesser atrocity than the rule of anarchic violence.
It was during troubleshooting, I couldn't get my dual monitor configuration to save unless I launched the config menu as sudo from the command line. Of course it didn't tell me this was the problem either.
The author claims that a 10x speed differential is inconsequential. I don't agree. Note that in his sampling, things were already taking 2-3 seconds on a relatively small repository. What happens when you get to the size where a git diff takes 2-3 seconds? Does bzr take 20-30? Surely that's not acceptable.

I understand that people can go overboard on the optimization, and can ignore more important things because of misleading or unimportant benchmarks, but there is something to be said for speed when it's taken on balance.

This article didn't point out any reason I would trade git for the much slower Bazaar, just said that Bazaar is not as bad as it looks on the Git is Better Than X website. That's not really a very convincing argument if I'm already using git.
Note that the laws in this area aren't limited to BAC; if any substance including prescription medicines makes you incompetent behind the wheel that's enough.

We just focus on BAC because it's easy to measure and we're pretty damned sure alcohol to excess is the biggest current problem.
No. Consulting on the side allows me to keep my skills sharp on the development side. I am a coder and entrepreneur at heart, and being a CTO by day doesn't provide a lot of hands-on coding opportunities.
This seems mostly like a way to avoid creating evidence more than a way to avoid the legal problems of working on a side project at your employer.

Is the law simply that you cannot use your employers resources such as computer and internet connection to create your side company, or does the law state that you cannot also use time your employer thinks is theirs for your side project?
"Please legalize all drugs while banning all middlemen with prior convictions and requiring they be US-made."

Unless we have tort reform, I don't think this is a good idea. People still sue the cigarette companies even though it is a well known fact that cigarettes cause cancer. Drugs like heroine and meth are very addictive and some people might decide to blame the government, which will tie up our court systems.

I also find it a little funny to want the government to legalize substances which have more negative health benefits than positive.
You're right; we can look at the post-Prohibition history of the US to confirm it.
> Neither you nor anyone else has the right to dictate the fate of a people. Sovereignty above prosperity my man.

I think you and I are closer together in perspective than you might think. I don't care about having a say in how the roads are laid out or the standardization of weights and measures, but I do expect freedom and will take it over promises of prosperity yes. As soon as the ruling authority, whether internal or external, starts mandating how I run my life we've got a problem. But I don't care if the guy choosing the layout of the roads looks like me and has the same bloodlines or not - I do spend the majority of my time abroad in countries where I have no vote, and the ruling authority looks differently than me, speaks a different language, and has no common ancestry. I'm comfortable under another person's rule if their rule is good. I don't need a say or someone with shared blood running things as long as whoever in charge is doing a good job.

> Unless you're from one of the few places on earth that escaped colonization; you're either implicitly rejecting your country's fight for independence

That's correct. Two-thirds of the masterminds behind the revolution in my country were complete thugs, brutal men who incited the crowds to mob violence, who burned down buildings, who tortured largely innocent representatives of the Crown, who even condoned the killing of those men's children! We were very fortunate to get some anti-revolutionary anti-"will of the people" types in my country to moderate and put safeguards against mob violence and oppression, and there were a couple exceptional leaders who didn't fully buy into the "spirit of revolution" nonsense. Of course, I live somewhere with public education that pumps you full of patriotism and winner's history, it's only been my detailed studies of primary sources and the opposing point of view that's gotten me to my opinion. Probably less than 1% of my countrymen feel the same way, as they've never seen or heard of the documents I've read and gone through. Again, give me individual liberty, I don't care if the governor looks like me or if I had any say in his taking his post. If he gives me a fair shake, leaves me to my business, and generally keeps the peace, this is fine with me. I'm not a nationalist, I don't think my people are superior to anyone else's, nor anointed to govern somehow. Good governance to me is what I want, which is why I'm just fine living abroad in a country where I can't vote and I'm under the local law of people who look differently than me, have different bloodlines, and speak a different language.
I'm not projecting anything on others. You essentially called Linux unusable rubbish. I merely posted to state emphatically that it's not.
As far as I am concerned, ubuntu releases have gone downhill ever since 2006 or so. A lot of old issues which have been reported, and are easy to fix, have been hanging forever.

But when I had to reluctantly install the 10.04 beta on my new netbook because it was the only way to get support for the crappy broadcom chipset, I was very pleasantly surprised. Everything works, including suspend to disk, sound, decent battery support (last as long as officially reported on windows).
I took it as inflammatory and libelous. Should I rephrase it for you or can you grok what "they were better off under British rule" really means?
That's a good point. From personal experience, I strongly suspect this is mostly due to lack of power-management in the GPU drivers. In fact, on machines with Intel integrated GPUs I've seen battery life as good as on Windows.
I guess like with everything, it's about practice. It's difficult to be good at something if you never do it. It is a bit of a pain since you never actually HAVE to do in your normal work. It is however worth practicing if you know you're going to be put in a situation where this will be an issue (such as an interview).

If you practice enough, you will get better at it and I do believe that it is certainly better to practice on your own rather than failing multiple interviews and using that as 'practice' :).
The lxr link to the nginx source code is not working...
Where could I find it?
As another homeschooler, there is a fine line between gauging interest and imparting self-discipline. Of course, such "hard work" looks radically different at home than it does in the classroom. It's important to teach your children that there are times when they need to focus on things that don't necessarily interest them, but, again, how this is carried out in the home would likely be more positive than a classroom setting.

That said, I agree with the parent, and the original blog post. Our older son picked up reading and writing quickly (without much prompting from us, but his younger brother is less interested in those things, but is showing greater creative ability, so we're running with that.
This is an infuriating problem that would be relatively simple to solve.

The U.S. mandate for its incursion into Iraq, and the justification for the predictably subsequent civil war, was to end human rights atrocities in a foreign country. While there were human rights problems in Iraq, there are many more countries in Africa where the abuses have taken on truly astounding proportions.

And, more maddeningly: a mission to the Congo or Sudan would have been simple, or at least far simpler than Iraq. The predators in those countries are not very well armed; they are not well educated, most of them. There would not had to have been a great loss of life. Merely installing a peacekeeping force, and then concentrating on the reconstruction of those countries -- the building of schools and hospitals, and other infrastructure -- would have stabilised the regions.

Those would have been actions that would have lessened my distaste for my taxes.

But, instead of spending the resources on stabilising a region, far greater resources were spent to destablise a different one. It's very, a very disappointing incrimination of human tendencies.
I agree. And the folks at that blog don't typically do the blogspam thing, at least in my experience.
Apple acquires iPad trademark from Fujitsu
The concept of failed simulation is very interesting. I wrote a post about how the capability to simulate is important to programmers and designers, where the failure to simulate is produces bad code/products.

http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-...

This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at all.
Your demo is less than obvious. I thought the help bubble was just your site's logo. The "Try It" button takes all the fame. You need an arrow pointing at the help bubble that says something to the effect, "This is the demo. Click this."
A regular user doesn't have dual monitors, though.

That said, I've had some issues with previous versions of Ubuntu that took some mucking around to fix, especially with sound and occasionally with wireless (though the latter has always worked fine on my laptops).
"But it is mostly the money from the monopoly prohibition has granted to that criminal class that perpetuates its existence."

It's not prohibition, it's illegal. I love how the pro-drug people use this word when you wouldn't say we have a prohibition on rape, murder, or burglary.

"If you replace the criminal drug industry with a legal drug industry, you will encourage the growth of the non-criminal-classes, people working on the drug industry will become law-abiding-tax-paying citizens that will have an interest in the rule of law, instead of criminals with an interest in undermining it by corrupting law enforcement, criminals, and the whole fabric of society."

I'm okay with that if you're okay with knowing that we will encourage people to sell substances that will destroy lives through addiction and kill people. The difference is that the legal drug companies are selling drugs that actually have some purpose besides getting you high.

I really don't see how a drug like crystal meth will help anyone in the long run.
If that's the situation look at Germany population of 81 million or Japan population 127 million (Wikipedia).

Germany has the fifth (CIA factbook) largest economy in the world and Japan is third.

Japan has a very high percentage of elderly who probably don't work so Japan's workforce may only be half or a third of the population (excluding babies, children, prisoners etc). That's pretty humbling when compared to 300 million or China's 1.2 billion, of course adjusting for elderly, children too.
HOW TO: Support Earth Hour With Social Media
Linode LAMP Stack Script for Fedora 11 and CentOS 5.3