skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why? In a matter of days even the most computer savvy of folks will have put this behind them. McAfee will still be bundled with Localtown-ISP or installed on the new desktops. Mom and pop will see that their "subscription" is about to expire and won't even wonder if this was the program that broke something with svhost.exe.

While you and I may agree that it would be good business for them to go out of their way to fix this and clean up their image, I just don't think it really matters in the long run. I would be surprised if they do anything other than, "Whoops. The next signatures are here".
If I told my then colleagues at Engineering school I would have a multitasking, UNIX-based, RISC machine with 64 megs of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage and a fast, full-time, connection to the internet in my back pocket I would be locked up in a loony bin. If I told them I would use it to listen to music, I would end up burned for witchcraft.

Even my humble netbook is a good couple hundred times more powerful than the my Apple II. I am quite sure it can accommodate NetBeans and Eclipse quite comfortably, apart from the screen real-estate limitations.
To sleep, perchance to dream, perchance to remember
But not with your name and address attached to them, as well as a fee to help in processing them.
He didn't, however, do so well on the your/you're thing.
I think it should be mentioned that even in the last 3 or 4 years some really awesome software has been made and hasn't been sufficiently introduced into the education market.

The time sounds about right for something innovative to change the game; it's just a question of having the will to do it. We'll try a few things, see what works, and iterate.
It looks like the credit card numbers are included in the Blippy section starting with "The purchase appears on your statement as:", followed by the actual text of the line entry from the statement.

From that, I'm guessing that Blippy lets users automatically import their credit card statements, but they didn't anticipate that the entries in those credit card statements would occasionally include full credit card numbers. Embarrassing but a corner case.
Hacker News, for iPhone and iPod Touch
My idea of a semantic web is when the data on the web has value added to it by being able to tie disparate pieces of data together. The thrust of what Facebook is doing seems to be tieing my identity to data on the web. That's a different value prop.

One makes the web more usable to me, the other makes me more usable to other people.
Is anyone using this? Is it any good?
How to do an AJAX search with jQTouch
Well, thanks for putting words in my mouth, but your rewriting is not synonymous with what I wrote. If I had wanted to write what you wrote, I would have done so. For example, "a perspective from the other side", implies opposing viewpoints A vs B, whereas "nuance" implies a stance accepting parts of A but balancing or supplementing them with qualifiers drawn from B.

As for "bilge", contrary to your pleasant assumption I am trying to show off how many books I read, I probably chose that word because it was at the top of my head, having been widely in the news here this week: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7608422/Genera...

Ironically, this notion that you can freely swap NEAR-synonyms with no change of implications and associations of what is meant is a rather maths-y perspective. Someone with more of a liberal arts background would be more aware how far from the truth is. Human natural language, English especially, is not like simultaneous equations where terms can be freely reduced with no loss of accuracy. The range of "big words" and "small words" signify similar but not identical concepts... but of course, if you follow the thoughts of my other responder, the work of Saussure, Derrida et al on signifiers and signified didn't involve any abstract thinking, just reading and regurgitation.

I do admit that my initial post was perhaps rather bullishly worded, and in that sense, the downvotes perhaps deserved. However, it is a bit ironic how hostile a reaction from HN members it recieved, considered it was intended as a compliment to HN members. What I was trying to get at was that the linked piece was essentially a very cheap shot - a cheap shot understood by reading the headline alone, at that, with the rest of the text offering little or no further insight or interest. On the other hand, the comments of (for example) cousin_it, jlc, olefoo were far more intelligent.
And you thought the new Facebook API was intrusive...
Title correction: Patterns for use of Ruby's #method_missing

Ola is an incredible programmer and language enthusiast and this is a really great writeup on one of Ruby's most interesting dynamic language features.
Don't give Wired too much credit:
"Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone"
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/why-the-iphone/
PCI compliance is something mandated through merchant agreements upon credit card processors. Blippy is not processing payments on those cards, and PCIDSS is not a law.
Django's orm seems to aware of some of it's weaknesses, you can actually write your own queries and return the data as a queryset (with your models) instead of just a dictionary or list of data. I use that to filter some records on a many to many join that was based on a shared field instead of a 3rd table and was happy with the results.

Before trying that out I actually built the 3rd table which while it only has 3 columns (id, fk1, fk2) is probably the largest tables I've ever had to use with around 10 million rows. The django orm spent many hours building those relations, my custom sql spent about 5 minutes. Sometimes when you have hammer....

I can't take credit for the clean app boundaries, it's either python or django that lends itself to it. The apps I've written have to have clean boundaries if I want to use the community apps. But thank you anyway, it's been a lot of fun learning all of this and the community has been very helpful.
It really gives their article much more weight.
So we shouldn't mind the internet becoming a corporate-totalitarian mining town because there's a bright future ahead to be built on the initial infrastructure brought in by the corporate rulers?

I would ask why companies lose or relinquish control of such company towns, and would the same factors work online?

To get the ball rolling, I would posit that the same factors won't work. Data can't be relinquished in the same way that land or mineral rights can. For example: once the graph of my college friends is out there, there's no way I can ever reliably take it back.
> As a result, people are more often looking for, and more socially comfortable using, coupons.

I think the coupon argument is a red herring. The way I see it, there are two types of coupons: the price discrimination variety and the early-adopter-advantage variety. The former category includes things like grocery flyers and has a certain stigma associated with it -- which is why it works (if everyone clipped grocery coupons, the store would be making less money, not more). The latter category is where Groupon fits in, and I don't think it has the same stigma as the former, nor do I think the recession will affect it as much.

Flashing your iPhone to save 60% on surfing lessons sends different social-status signals than clipping newspaper coupons to save 25 cents on canned soup.
That grocery store cannot then tie it to not only who you are but who your friends are. They have your name and address, but they don't have your entire social graph at their fingertips. Or your entire digital (or, with the rfid, real-world) historical travel data.

If this goes tits up, it could be just the kind of surveillance needed for a 21st century locked-down police state.
But with the Open Graph protocol you do get the ability to tie disparate pieces of data together. For instance, let's say that I examine someone's tweet stream for links. If I fetch the OG data for each of those I can tell you whether they tweet most often about people, or movies, or whatever. I can show you a thumbnail display of images representing the things they linked to.

Open Graph is most definitely semantic web. Liking is just one possible application of that semantic data.
Not all online credit card processors require a CVS code. I don't know if you can try enough different expiration dates before it gets shutdown for fraud.
Twitter acquires Cloudhopper
it seems like this is old test data in the google cache, not current data
Apple Preparing to Issue Developer Seeds of Mac OS X 10.6.4?
What's the point of participating in a community when you don't care what others think? Seems pretty pointless to me.
In the US, it depends entirely on the merchant. They tell the CC processor how secure they want it to be. A lot of them only need the CC number and any expiration date in the future.
I don't mean this to sound snarky but I'm having a hard time understanding the basic utility of blippys service.

Why would you want to automatically share information about every purchase you make with your credit/debit card with the world? It just sounds like a recipe for disaster with very little upside.

Can anyone who uses this service (if any HN members do) explain the usefulness of it to me? I might just be misunderstanding the purpose.
The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy.

If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it.

If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free.

Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
Yes. Here's the epic.org link shared in another Facebook thread here on HN yesterday by another HN participant:

http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/
Yelp.com Stands Accused of Acting Like a "Modern-Day Mafia"
As an experiment i followed up 5424xxxxxx number to check if its a test number. I could track down the card's owner and a little judicious googling gave away the owner's home address as well.

Doesn't look like a test number.
I don't agree. Python is also suffering from the "we don't need a specification because we have a reference implementation" problem. A very small part of the problem is mitigated if the reference implementation is frozen and is self-hosting (a plus). You really want something you can reason about, otherwise all you have is "that didn't work because the reference parser barfed" versus "you need a close brace."
It works because they can't put the genie back in the bottle. They've now committed to supporting this open protocol and for them to try to take it away would mean breaking thousands of websites. Therefore others are free to build on top of their work without fear of the carpet being pulled out from beneath them.

As to relinquishment, it's a non-issue because Facebook owns nothing to begin with. Users pay attention to whatever suits them best, and when something comes along that does it better than Facebook, well they'll just use that instead.
Alfred and Brian should make Charlie part of the original deal on the condition that Charlie will pull his weight as originally envisioned. Having one or two investors does not make a difference.

The investment should have been in 'newco', but since that's a done deal and no longer possible you can work out the ratio of shares that Charlie had in 'newco' and how big a chunk of the post-investment old-co that is.

If Charlie prefers to stay outside the whole thing his introduction to the VC should be worth about 1 to 2 % of the amount raised, payable as a consultancy fee from the money actually invested.
NerdRant - A place to rant anonymously
Just bought 2 kits at 10:02AM PST, so offer is still there.
I keep trying Netbeans and Eclipse but always come back to vim + terminator + mvn/ant
As a historical fact, corporate mining towns are a thing of the past in the United States, and the great-great-grandchildren of the miners enjoy a prosperity that was unimaginable even to the mine owners back then.
I'm glad I never trusted them enough to give them my information.
> The startup world is full of intros and I've never heard of anyone being compensated for one.

No, seriously? You've never heard of brokers that will go from one VC to another trying to find funding for a company they represent based on a success fee?

I don't know or have any affiliation with this company but these guys are working just like that: http://www.intelligentfunding.com/

There are numerous others.
I agree with your sentiment in general, not your specific arguments though. First, they're only talking about research, not about selling data. Secondly, I don't think your comparison to AOL and Netflix is valid. AOL users were identifiable by googling their own name etc. How is one supposed to identify you when all there is is your DNA and nothing else, which has never been saved anywhere else at all?
I was always curious about this. How are compile times for large projects?
This makes no sense to me at all. Almost no one uses iPhone in Japan in my experience. Just about everyone is using the standard long-rectangular clamshell form factor.

This article has to be wrong.

Update: Aha, probably comes down to "smartphone" semantics. Meh.
I was talking to a VC the other day about Groupon. According to him, every local business he's talked to that's used Groupon has universally had a bad experience with it. Groupon customers rarely turn into repeat customers, which is the main incentive for a business to use Groupon. This shouldn't be too surprising given that most Groupon customers are probably very price sensitive and in deal hunting mode.
If I downvote to -5 and then reload the page, it's back to 4 and I can downvote again. This doesn't actually cause another downvote does it?
I hope someone writes a technical post-mortem/case-study on this.
This is the sort of thing that leads to exploits.
I've never heard of a deal that actually happened because of one of them, no.
Because then you can waste even more time on very fine things like cinematography or literature in original Language. Translations just don't cut it, no matter how good they are.
English is my fourth language and I would gladly add at least one more—I am seriously considering learning Swedish.
Stack Overflow and DVCS
The same argument applies to many other things. For instance:

"People have been spilling oil and gasoline in their driveways, where it gets washed away and makes it way into the oceans, for years. Or is it only a problem when Exxon does it?"

Badness is not all or nothing. It can depend on how widespread something is. Google operates at such a large scale that many things they do can be bad, even if they are not bad when done by individuals.
I don't use the service, but I see it as a blog like tool. If you have one, you only use it in scenarios you'd like to tell everyone about. If you're at a baseball game, you use it to buy beers and they automatically post something like "John Doe bought 4 beers at the Giants game".
Charlie should get nothing. Such is life.
Whoops, my mistake! Just updated.
Don't get too excited. iPhone is not very popular in Japan. You rarely see one there.
Wow! That was really neat!

As someone who witnessed the events of 9/11 in NY from across the river in Hoboken, NJ this was fairly terrifying too. I was not expecting to have that association when I clicked the link!
The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.

No way will I or most people I know be happy with a significant resource (like a Semantic Web) being owned or subject to the whims of one or a few people or organizations. Open Access controversies gives a hint of how much unhappiness will result if Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any one entity looks to have a lock on such a vital web resource.
Pay with a prepaid credit card. They're handy for all sorts of things.

http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/visa_gift_card.ht...
PCIDSS is as good as law for a credit card processing company, though. If they are not authorized by the credit card companies, they cannot process the cards. If they cannot process the cards, they are out of business.
European Cybercriminal Society - Open Letter
Really depends on whether the sidebar is navigation or not. If it's extra stuff like RSS feeds and graphs (as in his example) then right is better. On the other hand, I much prefer navigation sidebars on the left side.

Why? I don't know, it just feels more comfortable that way.
Uploading directly is a pretty neat feature, unfortunately the base pricing is higher than we're looking to pay. Our monthly is pretty low with encoding.com right now.
Being pedantic, it's often called a CVV code, or a number of different acronyms, but none of them are CVS afaik.
You have got to be fuck*ng kidding me, Venturebeat:

"VentureBeat reporters deduced that all are Citibank-issued MasterCard numbers. We’re reluctant to publish further details yet." http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/blippy-credit-card-citiban...

Yet they're showing a screenshot with the exact Google search term to get all the data.
You've never heard of brokers that will go from one VC to another trying to find funding for a company

That is minor league C-lister stuff that only people who read blogs like ReadWriteWeb get involved with. It's the tech world equivalent of paying to be in a modeling agency.
Indeed. My company even does this semi-formally, with an 'alumni' network, events, and stuff like that. This works out insanely well in our field (management consulting), as the philosophy of the company is that our consultants will eventually leave and we want those people (who we thought were great enough to hire) to hire us as clients at their new firm.
It's done fantastically well, and fostering a culture of (not exactly) assumed transition and migration does wonders. It's not looked down upon at all to take a full time job with a consulting client, for example.
The Ten Oil Powers Of The Distant Future
I was wondering the same thing, it just seems like a service where they'll be able to sell your data to companies down the road, or advertise you stuff you might be interested in.

Even if this turns out to be test data, it's still pretty shocking and will tarnish the service forever.
And the article has Facebook connect button below it to sign in to write comments!!
Well that was a stupid typo for me to make. Fixed.
yah, Value is by definition subjective. And here the security is not "trading". It is "one time, in band camp, I bought some stock". So, the buyer's value is "the value", until some other buyer (not blogger) steps in with their subjective "value". Discussion is sort of useless.
Twitter Buys Cloudhopper To Bolster Its SMS Service
I am comfortable in 3 languages ( English / Indian Language / Kswahili ). The interesting theme was the seeds for these languages was laid @ < 3 grade . I still speak all the 3 languages in a good order of comfort.

I did try and learn french in high school and it turned out to be a waste of my time.

My learning of languages is influenced by 2 themes
1. I learn t each of these 3 languages in environments where they were used extensively practically.

2. I learn t them young

The reason i failed in my efforts of french : were precisely the opposite of the 2 points above.
It's only for the most exhibitionist type of people. Think of sci-fi books with people being "life actors" or some such where people can tune in to them 24/7 and see what they're doing. It's basically just a stepping stone to that. I don't see this ever becoming even close to mainstream.
Oh yeah - I definitely agree.

I guess my thought was just that the semantic lens is focused in a different direction that I imagined. The mental model I always had was that the semantic info would let users make connections between datasets that model our physical world rather than datasets that monitor users themselves and how they use the web.

This is just a different use case than I imagined.
Community? I know nobody here. Everyone, like me, is hiding behind a screen name. People get to 'downvote' anonymously, which to me is absurd. Yesterday, I make a near meaningless remark about Apple fan-boys, and got 7 points. Today, I make a more meaningful remark about how this really is a noteworthy failure -- and I'm losing Karma right and left. To me, this is comical. Community? How do you define that word?
Python's Original Sin
Why on Earth am I being downvoted?
I seem to recall Charles Ferguson (Vermeer/Frontpage) let a guy invest $50k when he raised his Series A, as a reward for his introductions/reference. I think he also gave some equity to his headhunter, in part for the introductions he made.

I suppose neither of those cases were "finder fees" though. Some consideration seems fair though.
Your DNA is half your parents', and your childrens DNA is half yours. Given a sufficiently large number of datapoints you can work out the DNA of those in between. And given a few 'confirmed' identities you could use that more complete picture to work out the identities of the rest, even if you did not know their names.

Your DNA is your identity. It just hasn't been tied to the meta data of your name, address and social security number, but again, with a bunch of confirmed identities of relatives that is a job that is probably doable.
I'd assume the inspiration for the service is grounded on the idea that your social circle influences things that you buy.

If you buy something and then a number of your 'followers' buy the same item a few days afterwards, that information is very valuable.
"To date, the legislative process has worked better than we imagined it could."

I hope it didn't/won't cost too much money sent to the members of the Senate Banking Committee. I didn't get the impression this was a "juice" bill, but fixing it could have turned into that sort of game.
There are a lot of reasons to participate in a community other than to seek consensus or approval. Has nothing to do with Blippy though.
There are lots of alternatives to accepting credit cards for payment by the way. Lots of restaurants take cash only and online, there are many third parties like Paypal to move to.
C doesn't deserve compensation for the introduction alone. Maybe he could get something if he had some part of OldCo's intellectual property (e.g. he wrote some code, etc.). The "startup world" is still just business. Consider the same situation in another industry:

Imagine A, B, and C were members of a rock band and C goes solo. C later meets with Record Label 1 who is interested in a country trio. A, B, and C reunite as a country trio and pitch their demo to the record label who declines. A and B then return to the rock band, and C goes solo again. Record Label 1, now well-acquainted with A and B, introduces them to Record Label 2, who, along with Record Label 1, signs A and B's rock band. I doubt any band would ever be expected to give up a portion of future royalties to a former member (unless he had rights to songs, recordings, etc.).
I personally know a guy (formerly very high up in ABN AMRO) who makes a very comfortable living that way.

His fees are either a %age of the money raised or a small %age of stock in the company.
I'm tempted to believe that companies that prefer long term employment are the ones that need to train employees for their specific needs. Companies that make use of transferable skills instead increase their chances of a new hire quickly picking up where the previous employee left. e.g. a web dev, in a FOSS shop that uses well known best practices.