skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the last weeks since the new Facebook api and policy change you can see the outcry and the security problems being reported frequently and so many places.

It is getting to a nightmare and I am not sure how well in general consumers in the social media can keep track of it.

Here is my business idea. My assumption is that a website helping people to understand and simplify the security issue on the social media places plus a clean how to instruction on setting the security levels will generate some good traffic. Anybody wants to build it?
Ever wonder why Dells, HPs, and Gateways come loaded with a lot of crap software? It's because ISVs know that your typical user won't spend more than he has to.
You are forgetting that Dell, HP, etc get kickbacks from the software companies.
>I can't afford to go with Braintree, and I'm not quite sure they even deal with Canadian companies.

There's a link (it's an ajaxy modal window or I'd give the link) on their pricing page for people outside of the US. If you don't have a legal US presence "you can work with one of their partners for a merchant account" but you have to be "processing at least 3 million in volume or will meet those thresholds within 12-18 months." So even less of an option.
Etherpad Foundation
I installed and applied for the dongle yesterday. It's pretty quick and painless--the credit check is a little much, but if it keeps the quality high I'm ok with that. Plus, this service is just too damn cool to pass up.
I will get random companies or strange sites following me if I have tweeted a keyword that they monitor.
Silentale goes public today
SR-71 Blackbird Flight Manual
A question I've been meaning to ask but didn't want to make a completely new post about it:

If you could write a server (not a plain HTTP webapp necessarily) in Clojure, Python, or Node.JS, provided you know all three, which would you choose and why?
I Interviewed To Be Google's "Head Of Social" And It Was Terrible
This is arguable, and relative. The 25% figure is almost certainly inflated, and is much lower than World of Goo's usual piracy rate, estimated at 90%+.
"I picked strawberries, and though I can't recall what I got per crate for picking, I remember that after working hard all one day, I wound up with about a dollar, which was a whole lot of money in those times. I was so hungry, I didn't know what to do. I was walking away toward town with visions of buying something good to eat, and this older white boy I knew, Richard Dixon, came up and asked me if I wanted to match nickels. He had plenty of change for my dollar. In about a half hour, he had all the change back, including my dollar, and instead of going to town to buy something, I went home with nothing, and I was bitter. But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I found out later that he had cheated. There is a way that you can catch and hold the nickel and make it come up the way you want. This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating."
Risk-taking and (a Woman's) Touch
So you're saying from the Fall of 2007 to Fall of 2009 he was a full time hire as opposed to a contractor like it says in the transcript?
> Think that would have been significantly better?

Yes!

That way the barrier is '0', now there is a barrier.

No barrier is always better.

You could have asked them outright to add their address to a list because this is 'beta' software and you'd like to warn them when there are updates, better still have your software check for updates and warn the user instead.
By the same logic, a crasher because you forgot to check for NULL is an oversight rather than a bug. Both are cases of checks that should have been done and incorrect behaviors caused by failure to perform those checks. I say, if a piece of code does something it isn't intended to do or fails to do something it is meant to do, that's a bug. The bug might be the result of a poor design decision, but unless the behavior is intentional, it's a bug.
If you actually ask a lottery customer, you'll find that they have a basic grasp of the math. I prefer to think of the lottery as a tax on people willing to pay taxes, and that's as moral as taxation can get.

Anyway, the real motivations of the lottery customer are not as stupid as people think. Consider:

1. Odds of Joe Beercan getting rich through the usual methods (years of hard work, inheritance, rock stardom): Zero. And Joe knows this better than anyone.

2. Odds of Joe Beercan getting rich through the lottery: One in 600 billion. He knows this is a longshot, but that it's better than nothing.

If you want even the merest shot at getting rich, the lottery's not so bad. (Though hoping for 10 blackjacks in a row is probably still better.)
If that was an advertising-created false-need, as with, say, a Slap Chop, you'd expect the four-weeks-later stories to all read: "As it turns out, I didn't really need it."

It would be some powerful advertising indeed, that could trump a month of actual use.
How To Read A Press Release
I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

Eh, this is arguably bad. Cryptpography is only secure with massive peer review. The United States manages because the NSA is one of the largest cryptographic organizations in the world. Very few governments have the specialty mathematicians, cryptographs, and computer scientists to establish a suitable internal peer review process. India may be one of those countries, but I'm not sure.
Tatiata Kozhevnikova
Wintergreen mint
I've never noticed an issue with mog sound quality. AFAIC it's great. I'm sure other services are on par with that. While the difference between a CD and a stream are noticeable, it's like watching a netflix movie on your xbox and watching the actual DVD: I prefer netflix for the convenience and price and my friends do too.
I don't want to offend pharmacists, because it's possible I entirely don't understand their job. But every time I pick up a prescription I'm stunned at how long it takes them to count out 30 pills, even when it seems there's no one else there. Find the big bottle on the shelf. Count out 30, put in smaller bottle, glue on label. Time: 1 hour.
And here's a picture of 21st century political action:

http://imgur.com/Zr9il.png
Then how do I tell them I've improved the product? How do I know how big the install base is (as opposed to just the download stats)?

EDIT: Anybody know of a good article or book on how to remove obstacles for web users to download software?
In summary: work with us, don't go off in your own corner and work by yourself. This was roughly my experience with GSoC. I could easily have tackled the technical challenges on my own. But learning to work with a team is the most valuable thing I learned.
That device would be very useful for crooks.

[EDIT] Combined with some custom software, that device could be the easiest way to copy someone's CC information. A waiter could swipe the card on his iPhone, before running it on the restaurant's POS machine.
I'm an Android handset owner, and I'm considering expanding my skills to develop for Android.

My answer is that it depends. If Apple don't object to your app or business model, then the iPhone is probably the better bet, for now, and until and unless the number of Android handsets greatly outnumber iPhones (i.e. even with a lower customer conversion rate, the absolute numbers then tip in favour of Android).

Factors that limit the money available to Android app developers include a) lots of free apps to choose from; paid apps need to offer something special - even many trivial apps for iPhone seem to be paid b) handset manufacturers' lack of co-operation with Google in getting their firmware releases approved by Google for copy-protected Market apps makes it more likely that potential customers will just download illegal copies of your app because it's actually easier than buying it. Fail.
Flash still needs to die or have its runtime open-sourced. I'm glad to see Apple taking a stand on this issue, even if it's for selfish reasons; someone needed to push web developers to put Flash back in its place as a marginal web tech for edge cases, nice to have but not critical. I browse the web with the Flash plugin disabled in Firefox, and it's been great to not have all the excruciating Flash ads. I still run into the occasional Flash video I can't watch while browsing on my iPhone, but they've been getting rare lately. It's well-worth the inconvenience knowing that I'm helping to kill off dependence on Adobe Flash for good by using these iProducts. So great job Adobe, now get off my lawn!
Ways to repay the debt &#8211; a step by step guide on how to get rid of debt
I'd go with Clojure if you need any of the following:

1. Concurrency
2. The most (largest qty of) available FOSS libs anywhere
3. Speed
4. The ability to extend the language
5. WORA
6. Text/string processing

Python will win in scripting/*NIX integration, though.

Don't really know enough about Node.JS
Microsoft uses anime to sell Windows 7 in Japan
Saw this the other week (I think its been posted to hacker news before). It's actually surprisingly easy to understand, even for private barely-trained pilot's.
Just to be clear this isn't the first US patent, just the one assigned #1 in the current numbering system (I think?).

More info on the "first" US Patent.
http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-33.jsp
I agree, it looks like he didn't see 32...Qe8.
But are they only "spending a few dollars a week on lottery tickets"? $645 a year comes out to a little over $12 a week on lottery tickets. I make more than $13k a year, and I'd notice $12 a week. Much more so if I was only making $13k/year. Lottery tickets are a dollar a piece, that's a lot of hope insurance.
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Like the line numbers in the margin.
Just tested, change goes through.
I think it only looks gross because they're methods on an object, and you're used to that meaning "imperative mutable thing." Compare this:

employees.AsParallel().AsOrdered()

to the more-traditional-C-style

MaintainOrder(Parallelize(employees))

or the admittedly more attractive

(maintain-order (parallelize employees))

and suddenly it seems perfectly sensible. I thought it was ugly first, too, but now I'm used to it.
But the logic that I have successfully used LINQ on:

- operates on lists of objects, not database queries.

- operates on small quantities of data. It doesn't matter if there are only five items in a list. If you have to filter them, you have to filter them

- is not that complex.

We use foreaches as well, or a combination. LINQ is great for automating simple things, e.g. turn a loop to find an item into a .FirstOrDefault(x => x.SomeCondition). It would be interesting to see if, as our grasp of LINQ improves, we run into any of these supposed corner cases. But it hasn't happened yet.
"People working 10 or 11 hours a day ... The finding, from an 11-year study of 6,000 British civil servants ..."

From a study of what?!
>The original buyer already covered the cost of online services provided.

No it didn't

People don't constantly play games. They play them for awhile after purchase, and then their playtime peters off. If that disc stayed in the hands of the original player, the cost to EA would be near zero for most people, who might bring the game out every couple weeks when friends are over.

While there certainly are original players who keep playing games, they're dwarfed by those who stop playing, or stop playing and sell the game.
Man, the beginning of the patent makes this sound like the greatest invention ever. Let trains brave mud,rain,ice and anything. Except I think the US postal service has some prior art to the whole mud,rain and ice thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service_cr...
"without the ability to buy lottery tickets, [these people] would feel they have no possible way to become fabulously wealthy. ... For these people, there's no sense of hope for breaking out of where they are, and the absence of hope is very painful."

Which leads me to wonder, if they didn't have that ability to hope, and lives were more painful because of it, what might they otherwise do to try and improve their lot?

I.e., what is the true opportunity cost of the lottery -- not just in financial terms, but in terms of the future? More than anything, the lottery has always seemed to me like another ingenious way for the powerful to placate the doomed, and at their own expense.
Note - they are addressing this in iPhone OS 4.0 - but the security on contacts given to iPhone native apps is non-existent. Any app has full access.
Yup, my not very techie friends, and their friend, seem to be the most bothered.
Essential Clickbank Traffic Secrets You Need To Know To Achieve Monster Sales
The motives, technology and sound of the death of the music biz
It's that way in almost all patents, I think. It may be a style requirement.
I was referring to the semantics being easier to understand. Whether Lisp syntax is easier or harder to understand than C syntax is just not a place we should go.

All programming languages look more or less like words interspersed with line noise if you're not familiar with the syntax.
You could have summed this up by saying, "Reddit is fundamentally broken, at a technology level. Move along." ;)
Fun! My only suggestion would be instead of having to click next, the page should automatically refresh after choosing.
"I read the whole 480-page book a few years ago and I currently remember less than the outline given in that single article."

It sounds like you're implying that the value of reading a book can be measured by how much of it you can consciously recall at some given instant after you've read it. But what if there's more to it than that? You also mention enjoyment of the experience of reading the book. But is there yet more?

I propose that reading a book can stimulate thought that a mere summary would not. Reading a book can generate ideas that a summary might not. Reading a book can change you in ways that a summary would not. Summaries also frequently omit critical details. Summaries are often biased, unfair, and inaccurate.

You may not remember much about a given book you've read, but that doesn't mean that the most you got from it was whatever enjoyment you had of reading it at the time.
Have you ever integrated PayPal in a way that requires a PayPal account for purchase (ie: turning the "PayPal account optional" setting off)? How many people bounce when they have to pay with their PayPal account? I was looking into their Adaptive Payments API, but it requires both sender and receiver(s) to have a PayPal account. I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
Groupon overwhelms San Francisco bakery
Node is pretty interesting and seems to have pretty good performance, but I wouldn't build anything critical on it until at least version 0.2.

As far as I know, there are semi-frequent breaking changes. Ryan Dahl has said that API stability should come with version 0.2.
http://www.deliciouslogic.com/. Here is a startup my friend launched. He automatically plans your meals and sends recipes on a weekly basis. This might be a good complement to this site.
I got frightened by all the PCI DSS fear that permeates this board. I assumed you guys had it all figured out, and to a man, you seem to all be of the same mind on this issue. Fear, fear, fear.

When I actual Read the F----ing Manual about this ...., actually read that what was required was peanuts compared to the thousands of posts and comments I've read here pontificating on how to safely store a freaking password to a dating site, I am perplexed. How can a group of people who can talk your arm off for two hours about salts, rainbow tables, hashes, and password entropy, be frightened of PCI? https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...

I store my own credit card info. Exactly how I do it is none of your business, as, while I don't rely on obscurity for my security, I'd be foolish to deny myself it's added protection. I don't just meet PCI standards, which are easy, I greatly, greatly, exceed them. Why anybody would use a third party billing company is not mysterious, but why somebody who reads HN would do so, is strange to me.

I already know the comments I'll get for uttering such blasphemy. I would respectfully request that you actually spend 10 minutes reading actual PCI DSS guidelines before doing so, however.
Even if you don't see that specific move you see that your king is going to a corner. The bishop in a8 controls the long diagonal and is pointing directly at your king. Your rocks are uncoordinated while black's will soon be doubled and will control the d file.
I like James Ernest's version better, where a time machine gets patent #1.

http://www.cheapass.com/products/boardgames/cag034.html
I'd say that the title is intended to strongly imply that Google are evil. Also, the vibe the article is trying to create is that if Google don't re-add the api, they are probably doing it to block competition (why else would they start with their Microsoft rant at the bottom?)

Also.. Privacy issues with Google? Just because they are capturing details you put into their system, doesn't mean they are sharing it, or changing their privacy policy overnight to make all your details public (as Facebook does). Or are you complaining they take photos in public areas?
I'm not aware of how exporting the credit card data stored in the databases of these companies could ever be valid under PCI compliance rules.

They say it is, but I don't think it is up to braintree to say that it is, it would be up to the issuers to say that it is, and as long as they don't come out on the subject nobody is going to risk getting fined 10 million bucks or so by VISA or MC (or worse, to get shut down) to find out.

Braintree should probably do it's best to lower the barrier to entry to their services rather than to try to create a portability layer with competitors that don't care. And then braintree could give the right example by allowing merchants to take their data with them to other providers of payment services.

Note that just as you can't 'export' from Paypal or authorize.net you also can't simply 'import', the reason for that is that bulk import with random 3rd parties is extremely risky, it bypasses all the safeguards that have been installed to prevent all kinds of fraud.
I really have a hard time seeing Python losing to Clojure on (2), (5) and (6). What kind of software/library would you find on Clojure but not Python? How is Python not WORA? Where does Python lack in text processing?
Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way
Like others said, this has nothing to do with advertising. In fact, everyone interviewed in the article were already self-admitted Apple fanboys meaning the advertising probably wasn't all that important; they were going to buy it the second Steve Jobs got up on stage.

The important part is that after the initial "magic" has worn off, early adopters still love the device. They are not returning it or selling it. They take it everywhere they go and prefer to use the device over their laptop or desktop when it's possible to do so.

This is simply the effect of Apple building a really awesome product, not advertising.
The problem: not many people actually switch payment processors. Once you get with Auth.Net, you spend a lot of time negotiating better rates with different companies, but your Auth.Net gateway stays the same.

I could see data portability being an issue in the long run, but for now, with Auth.net being basically one of two gateways, not enough moving around happens for their to be a "call for portability" (that will actually be heard).

I do, though, applaud a forward-thinking move like this. It may be looked back on as the small spark that got the fire going.
If someone's got your credit card--Square isn't going to make it any easier to make unauthorized purchases. It's probably more work given how easy it is to use someone else's card in retail and restaurant POS.
I can't wait to hear about all the copy-cat tablets with crappy UI/UX, horrible battery life, and operating systems that were not meant for the form factor! Oh, oh, I hope they have flash too so I can get angry and throw it at the wall when it crashes constantly. Give me as many features as possible. Kill the iPad!
If done right, you could also start a nice strong community, which would certainly help. I can imagine different users competing for the "best turnip of the month" spot. Love your users, and they will love you back.
The coming melt-down in higher education. ~Seth Godin
Even if they are creepily relevant most users ignore them. I got some ads for something that was only mentioned in my Facebook chat with another person, not posted on a wall or anywhere public.

It annoyed me that they were scrapping my Facebook chats for keywords in an attempt to get me to click on their advertisements.
I am enamored with the spokesperson in that video. He's very mellow, seems trustworthy, and non-marketing. More companies should use people like this in their commercials and web videos.
It's not 30 messages per day, it's 30 additional messages per day above and beyond what he is able to respond to already. (It's not like he went on holiday for a month and came back to 1k messages.)

Imagine if you write and respond to e-mail constantly, and you still get 30 more than that, and you've described what Fred lives with. :)
Everybody wants to be Michael Jordan
Java & the JVM give me 2 & 5. While Pythons text processing is great, I think functional composition & juxtaposition give Clojure and edge. Plus, strings are simply sequences, so the core language works well with them too.
I've also had a good experience with paypal. I've also tried google wallet (much cheaper) but google does not allow for subscriptions which I need for my business.

The only thing with paypal is that if they decide your business is somehow in a legal gray area they will take your paypal balance and you have very little recourse. At least this is what I have always heard in Paypal horror stories.
I respectfully suggest that you undergo a 3rd party Type 1 PCI audit....

The amount of legal and policy documentation you are required to have is by itself a massive undertaking. The 3rd party audit will cost $150,000-$300,000 and a huge amount of man hours.
The solution to what problem? Financial firms not making enough money during calamitous times?
I think it's the loyal fan base that allows Apple to define new products. They listen to Apple, because Apple has repeatedly delivered great experiences in the past. Very few companies have this power.
I've looked off and on into using App Engine's Java interface. But even the "hello world" app looked much more bureaucratic than the Python equivalent (it's due to Google trying to do things the Java way).

Do you still have to deal with Java's baggage even if you run Clojure on App Engine? How much can you abstract away? Any libs?
I think he means, "Keep your site simple." He even alludes to that in the last paragraph.

Clean and simple is beautiful.
So all the Perl programmers are going to find other jobs like the VB guys did?
Bio-char FAQ
I keep wondering what they could have become if they didn't get bought.

Maybe the new printing press?
i'm on chrome and it's up for me