skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's 72% of the approximately 4~5% that smartphones represent of the Japanese phone market.

http://whatjapanthinks.com/2009/05/30/smartphones-not-impres...

As others have pointed out, virtually all "dumb" phones in Japan support email and network. The clamshell form's keypad is comparable, if not superior, to mobile querty keyboards for typing Japanese language text. A sizable number (perhaps even a majority) of "dumb" phones also support streaming television, a contact-less payment chip, GPS, music playback, an app store.

I find the 4~5% (mostly foreign designed) smartphone percentage a lot more interesting to think about.
It's definitely an example of what can happen to your financial info if a website you give it to makes a mistake or gets greedy. It's why I'd never use a service like that or mint, et al...
You've never heard of brokers that will go from one VC to another trying to find funding for a company

I would think in these cases, the broker should have a signed contract before the deal is made.
Biking drunk should be an offense. Looks like the guy who got the BUI almost hit a small child. That could be serious.

I hope that the courts find a way to treat it as a lesser offense than driving drunk, though. I'm not saying it's good, I'm, just saying that if a drunk guy wants to get home and is looking at his bike and his six ton SUV, I would hope that the law would say "both are illegal, so call a cab or use your feet - that said, we'll punish you much more severely if you drive the six ton SUV."
I like it!

Too bad it doesn't scale ^_^.
See elsewhere in this thread, no point saying the same stuff twice.
Because when you rebill a client you have to give the number again.

You can use a 3rd party gateway that acts as an intermediary between you and the bank that issued your merchant account and the 3rd party gateway will offer services such as scheduled rebilling. The gateway has to store the number though because the APIs at the highest level have no clue how to deal with internet and subscription type billing. They're still stuck in a very brick-and-mortar mindset. In this case it's the 3rd party gateway that has to deal with PCI compliance, not you.

If your transaction volume is high enough to justify it you can save a lot by cutting out another middleman and writing your own gateway. In this case though you generally have to be PCI compliant and have regular security audits to stay compliant.

PCI compliance only makes sense when you store CC numbers since PCI is a set of requirements on how to store them. Saying you don't store CC numbers and are PCI compliant makes no sense. EDIT: As andrewf points out below I'm wrong about this paragraph.
If your definition of rational includes no authentication or security.
Concur. I find it easier living in Quebec having had French in grade/high school. Can't really speak/understand it, but I can read a fair bit, more than enough to get by. But then my hearing's shot, and the accent here isn't what I learned (Parisian).

So I guess we're in agreement - start them young with a second language when they're better able to assimilate it.
even if it is test data, we must wonder, why did anyone ever build the system such that credit card numbers were visible to google? Why did someone include the credit card number in the select clause, add it to the html template, and put it on a public server that could be crawled by Google?
Marc Faber who predicted this and previous crises
So, after reading, it appears this is more of a Citibank failure than a Blippy failure. It makes Blippy look horrible though (even if it is unfairly).

Is this just an accepted danger of using 3rd party APIs for information, or can they (Blippy) do something that doesn't look like they're just trying to shift the blame?

I wonder what other awesome bugs are lying in wait in Citi's API...
The Changes at Facebook: The Good, The Bad and The Very Ugly
hah. Same to you :)
Cash compensation is out of the question. The start-up needs it/will need it and will create more value out of it than Charlie could.

2% goes to Charlie if he is willing to continue to support his friends as an "advisor" and promises to bury the hatchet.

1% goes to Charlie if he wants no part of it, but promises to bury the hatchet and buys beer.

0% goes to Charlie if he's being a douche bag about the whole thing.
Doesn't Readability still require the whole thing to be downloaded, which takes ages? Wouldn't it be better to have an option to use the Google reformatter?

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http://news.ycombinator.com/
> "only a problem when Google does it"

Not necessarily. But it is MORE of a problem.
Google like to scale. They also scale problems. Globally.
Blippy users’ credit card numbers found on Google
Perl 5 also suffers from the "reference implementation as specification" problem, which is why Perl 6 is actually being quite careful to avoid designating a "reference implementation".

I think our (Perl 6's) notion of "standard grammar as specification" is more of a temporary designation than a permanent one. For now we need a rough guideline to follow when the prose description isn't matching the implementation, both of which are still undergoing a fair bit of revision and updating as we work through the implementation details.

The ultimate arbiter in the Perl 6 specification is the official Perl 6 test suite (http://perl6.org/specification/), which is to be shared among all implementations. Basically, if something is to be considered "official Perl 6", it has to appear in the test suite, and any implementation that then passes the test suite is considered a valid Perl 6 implementation.

Pm

(Yes, the test suite is also evolving. But the test suite certainly gives us something that can be reasoned about without having to also adopt all of the quirks of a specific reference implementation.)
If you build a house by having it done by a professional, you're going to be paying more to have it completed. There's usually contract clauses and insurance to ensure that you're not left with a half-finished house.

When you hire that professional, you're not only paying for his experience, but all those other things, as well. There's a premium attached to those clauses and insurance. You could choose to forgo those assurances, and save some money, but you have a higher risk. Not to mention, a lot of better professionals would refuse, thus limiting the pool of candidates.

The author of the article wants it all: the assurance of the higher-cost option without the premium.
There are three countervailing forces: the residual desire for privacy, the availability of cloud resources, and the ubiquity of personal mobile computing.

There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks.

The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.
> I think this is a pretty good example of how "Enterprise Software" will continue to quickly lose favor with customers. My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery.

How so? According to McAfee, the problem only affected less than 0.5% of their non-enterprise customers. I'm sure only small fraction of those affected will decide to switch their vendor; the rest of non-technical crowd will simply ignore this.

> My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery.

> Just look at the release budgets for enterprise software - sales and marketing are at the top, while R&D and support are at the bottom.

We have actual data to debate this: McAfee's annual financial statement, http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MFE&fstype=ii.

In 2009, McAfee spent $839mn on SG&A and $325mn on R&D. Sure, the R&D number is less than SG&A, however:

- SG&A number includes administrative expenses, paying rent for buildings, providing customer support etc.

- $325mn on R&D is a huge number. Assuming fully-loaded annual developer cost of $200k, it's 1.6k developers working full-time on this product. I'm not sure how many open-source software project have similar number of at least part-time developers involved. Even taking into account "A Mythical Man-Month" etc. is still a significant resource.

Having a decent anti-virus product requires, among other things:

- Having full-time dedicated security experts - and by experts I mean people who literally have decades of experience in the field. You cannot become a security expert overnight.

- Dealing with thousands of different software/hardware environments at customer machines

- Regularly updating virus databases, monitoring threats 24/7 and providing rapid updates for every new virus/trojan

- Providing decent customers support to all of your non-technical customers who don't know much about computers.

I don't know how well McAfee handles all the tasks above - I'm not their customer, and not affiliated with them in any way. I just want to emphasize that anti-viruses are non-trivial, and there is no existing open-source business model today that can handle this complexity.
If you can send a screenshot to paras@wingify.com I will get it fixed ASAP. Though as others as commented, you should really not see a horizontal scrollbar at 1400. The maximum width of site is 1000 px.
Raising funding is hard work, especially if you do not know the circuit and are busy keeping your start-up afloat. To have someone that will take the 'leg work' out of it in return for a small percentage on a no-cure-no-pay basis can be very good.

People like that usually have a reputation to protect, they'll pre-screen the start-ups they represent and they'll do their best to bug their VC network only with those start-ups that they themselves deem worthy of funding.

Y combinator is 'minor league', we're not talking 5 to 15K here, but roughly up to a million or so.

Paying to be in a modeling agency is paying up-front, this is a construction where both parties win if a deal can be made.

There are sleazy variations on this scheme where the broker demands exclusivity or other tactics to gain control of the start-up based on their inexperience but that's definitely not all of them.
I don't mean this to sound snarky but I'm having a hard time understanding the basic utility of blippys service.

It's the easiest way to share your credit card information with the world.
Clojure: make your libs 1.1 and 1.2 compatible
Great project! I'll be using it for sure.

I noticed that on the privacy page you use plural pronouns like "our" and "we", even though it seems from this post that it's just you. I used to do that too with my personal projects. I've tried to stop, but only been half successful. So now most of the stuff I write is about half and half; which just confusing really.
Nah. I've tossed ~7k lines in my current project. It's like putting on a new pair of socks, it feels good to get rid of the older stuff.
I use it - not the credit card part - and its fun. I don't check it often, but every now and then. I guess the appeal is that its unique, new, and has potential.
Blippy users' credit card info exposed on Google
On games (like Farmville) that imprison people with external reward systems
Not dead, only marginalized. Don't forget that there's always been power in the marginal.
Ask HN: Does comment editing on HN cause bad habits on the web?
Hacker News is the only site I know where you can edit your comments... this has trained me to be a little sloppy in the initial post and make edits after submitting. I've noticed that I'm starting to do this on other sites, only to find that I can't edit posts! Has anyone else had this problem?
They had a verbal agreement to do this together, after the initial try at getting funding fell through they decided to bypass Charlie and go it alone. I personally think that even if there are no signed contracts they're doing the right thing by looking for a way to compensate 'Charlie' for his contribution, after all without him they might have gotten funding, but not this funding.
It's a tiny bit more than 10 years old now, but one of my favorite algorithms, period, is John Platt's Sequential Minimal Optimization. (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299094.299105)

It was a huge advancement to the state of the art in training SVMs.
What's the threat if someone has your MAC address?
That's not too unreasonable of an approach for an online news source: avoid republishing info that could be wrong, but allow readers to observe the same primary sources, unless/until Blippy and Google change things.
Purchasing ceases publication today
I thought ebay had a system to bid up to your maximum amount anyway while placing minimum bid interims? Doesn't that make this obsolete?
NY Times Harangues Microfinance Banks for Making The Poor Richer
Visa, AMEX, Discover. Those guys will do anything...
Cfengine Revs Up Configuration Management
Every business has good and bad interactions with customers. For most businesses the bad ones are unfortunate but isolated cases. For those where it's a pattern, they'll eventually lose enough business that they'll change or die.

What yelp has done is to artificially magnify the effect of an individual complaint. Most people don't bother to write publicly one way or the other, and (I think) people with a negative experience are more likely to complain publicly.

The effect of yelp is "world changing" in some sense; they make it easier for perfectly good businesses to go out of business. Not really what I'd want my life's work to be, but to each his own, I guess.
The First Church of Grady Booch: "It is a superclass of the people"
Only about 220 left to go. Let's see if we can reach zero by noon.
"At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Charlie should get a pat on the back, and feel good he was able to help out his friends.

He should be ashamed for feeling so greedy.
What a horrible idea! This forces drivers not to look far down the road. But it's the long view that provides a smooth, stable, SAFE ride.

As a go-kart racer, by the time I'm half way into a turn, my eyes are done with it. I'm already looking ahead, locating my turn-in for the next corner.

It seems to me that I'd need to view the road one segment at a time, without the ability to scan ahead to plan my path.
The company, which has yet to turn a profit despite astounding popularity

Really? How is this possible?
I don't know Warnier/Orr diagrams.

I do, however, draw pictures and diagrams to help me reason through stuff. It is one of the big advantages to writing code on paper. I find tools like visio tend to get in my way (I spend too much time fussing with getting lines connected and not enough time sketching my idea (it also never quite looks right)).

I actually like it so much I was considering buying a bamboo tablet so I can include diagrams in my documentation (and not kill so many trees!).

Of course, then I'd have to write an emacs plugin to call up inkscape (unless anyone has a better 'sketching' type of program) and insert a hyper-link to the saved file in the docs folder.
This has been in development for well over a year. Very disappointed it's going to hit at a whopping $600. That's way overpriced for an Atom CPU. This was supposed to be $400 originally, I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YcZ3Zqk0a8
I’d wager close to 80.percent of kids taking foreign languages in high school do so because they have to.

Funny. I'd wager that percentile is true for high school as a whole. People rarely do what's good for them (long term) on their own.

Personally, I think we should be exposing kids to languages much earlier, because they're more capable of learning them and it sets up your brain for not-everything's-one-language pathways, making picking up other ones easier in the future.
A more valid criticism of the perl 6 development model is that it's a big-bang approach. They have sunk enormous resources into the components of this system with limited capacity to test either the compatibility of the components they're generating or the utility of the features they're implementing. Sounds like a recipe for disappointment.
True, but the "CRU Circle" and largely overlapping (proper subset???) "IPCC oligarchy", plus old hands like NASA's Hansen and Schneider are the foundation of it. Many others have of course joined the bandwagon, you can't spend billions in "research" on small entities like the CRU and the part of NASA's GISS, etc. that are in this field.

Schneider, I should note, is famous for this quote from Discover magazine in 1989:

"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements
and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."

(And yes, it's in context, I read the original article on paper.)

He's old enough to have been on the global cooling bandwagon before the fashion changed to global warming.
It's not possible to do it anonymously?
In what way is this product open source? Can I download the software and modify / run / redistribute it free of charge?
No, but that's because the story fundamentally isn't interesting. It's the epitome of dog-bites-man, and we're only hearing about it because Apple anti-fanboys are hyping it.
His thesis seems to be that he didn't like language classes very much, and that some colleges don't require language knowledge anymore, so we should do away with them.

Why 'waste time' with languages? I can rattle off a few reasons: the goal isn't to teach only subjects that people enjoy, but to help create productive and responsible citizens of not only our country, but of the entire world. Particularly in this age of globalization, it's increasingly important for people to have knowledge of languages other than English.

Further, the earlier one starts with language education, the better one is at learning _all_ languages later in life. It also makes traveling vastly easier.

It's also usually the case that by learning the language of a people, you begin to have a much better understanding of their culture. Even for people who have no intention of leaving the borders of the United States, it's becoming harder and harder to count on English being spoken in all parts of the country.

Or, shorter: because it makes you a better person. Screw getting into college.
That's good advice. For anyone interested in taking it, see "How to permanently delete your Facebook account":
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703
Only in USA learning a foreign language would be considered a waste.
Does this loop ever end?
It is back up
it appears to be a cloud-frontend to their open source software at http://pandastream.org/
It's ok. I wish he would do some updates though. There are some annoying bugs and I haven't ever seen this updated.
this has been my experience. if it runs like crap on one of these things, it will probably run like crap elsewhere. plus how much computer do you need to ssh into a 40 box farm of ec2 servers?
Mail to the future
Well, they just could have refrained from publishing the exact "hack" at all. Which would have been the right thing to do, making it at least a little bit harder for people to find out which CC #s exactly are compromised. They could have stuck with reporting about it, not sharing in spreading it all over the internet.
And here it is in PHP:

echo "Hello world";

One line. Just saying....
I bought an Asus Eeepc 1201t 12 inch netbook from newegg a few days ago and the experience so far has been very pleasant : http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220...

* AMD Athlon Neo MV-40(1.60GHz)

* 12.1" WXGA

* 2GB Memory

* 250GB HDD

* ATI Radeon HD 3200

Not bad for $380 I think! Also Ubuntu 9.10 runs fine on it except the wifi driver which has to be manually installed but only involves an extra minute or two.
I was just thinking on the way into work this morning that not enough people have my Discover Card number.
I'm not sure I buy this argument. The author seems to be arguing that it's a fatal design flaw for a language not to be implemented in itself. But as near as I can tell not that many languages are implemented in themselves. I'm pretty sure Java and C# (as examples) are implemented in C.

Also, his argument that the compatibility issues between JPython and CPython are because python isn't implemented in itself also don't hold water. One very simple counterexample would be Ruby and JRuby. Ruby isn't implemented in itself, and like JPython and CPython, JRuby and MRI are two different code bases written in two different base languages. Despite this, JRuby has kept very close syntax compatibility with the standard Ruby 1.8.x interpreter. The secret in their case isn't self hosting, but rather a very comprehensive unit testing suite for the language. (interestingly enough, developed initially by yet a third implementation of Ruby).
There is a lot of "gaming the system" that happens on ebay (typically to the disadvantage of the buyer), but this site has a lot of reasons to snipe as opposed to just using ebay's proxy bidding.

http://www.moyen.org/snipe/why.html
I'm really not sure on how to make this even more clear, but your DNA is your identity, so when you give it to someone they have your identity and no amount of anonymization is going to change that.

All you're missing is the metadata of 'name, date of birth, social security number' and so on. But that's just a system we've placed on top of 'who you are', which is your genes.

Your fingerprint, your retina scan, your full lifes history, nothing in that list will identify you as good as your DNA does.

So once you have someones DNA you can reconnect it with the rest of the information at any point in the future by simply checking to see where that DNA turns up again, including fractions of it in your descendants.

You can't really anonymize it.
I built a very thumb friendly HN interface: http://mhm.gd/hn/ It takes the HN RSS and formats it with big links and text, all loading very quickly.

I use it on my Android all the time.
Thanks for another reiteration of the OP premise. No one disputes history here. The devil's advocate position and the question raised are about the reasons why and how well those factors would work online. If we can figure this out, then this might give us a clue as to how specifically this might play out.
Satellite finder + mob phone or iPhone
$11.2 million in funding down the drain
Poll: Which Microcontroller is Your favorite?
I'm currently looking at various microcontrollers for new products at work, and I'd love to hear what everyone is using and what the pros and cons of the various uC families are.

The ones that are looking best at the moment, for my purposes, are the Atmel AVR XMEGA A3 chips - if you've used them and have an opinion please make yourself heard!

I'm interested in all aspects: hardware, software, compilers, debuggers, etc. I've spent the last nine months or so writing firmware, but I'm very much a newbie in the embedded world.
68HCxx
I spent 15 years in Silicon Valley startup scene and respectfully disagree. Anyone advertising themselves as a VC matchmaker for a fee is looking for chumps.

The good VCs have their own people on staff whose job is to go drinking with the cool startup kids. (they are usually classified as an EIR)