skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: POS Systems w/ CC processing
I know very little about POS systems, and my parents have asked me for advice on one, produced by Intuit, that they are considering for their small retail shop (right now they are keeping inventory by hand). I'm not sure exactly what the quote they got was, but I'm quite sure it was over $1000 up front, along with some monthly fees.

Their needs are pretty simple: scan items into inventory and assign prices (cost and retail). Then to sell they would scan items to produce an order, select payment method(s), process any credit card payment by physically swiping it, log the transaction, and update inventories/sales totals/etc.

I feel that with the proper knowledge and hardware (e.g. an atom board, card reader, upc scanner, keyboard, and display), that system could be produced pretty cheaply and easily. Unfortunately, I don't currently have that knowledge, and I just started a new job that has me very busy. Does anyone have a good suggestion for a reasonable provider of POS systems? The optimal solution would also account for future expansion into web (non-POS) sales.

Secondarily, if I (or someone else) were interested in building such a system, do you have any recommendations for resources or for good POS credit card merchant/gateway/whatever (I know nothing about POS CC transactions) providers? While I was looking into building a retail website, BrainTree looked like an elegant solution to a difficult problem. Is there a similarly-simple solution to handling POS transactions?
Prism and the Open Web Store
What, he's not the one snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer. ;P
Is it really so hard to just put your OS and apps on an SSD drive and keep your big media files on a regular HDD? Unlike a disk, I can predict with 100% accuracy what data seek times will matter for.
ASCII porn :)

Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if they started filtering links to adult content, as they already to do avoid being a malware vector.
A more delicate way to handle the situation would have been to acquire one of the ad networks or at least launch their own service to compete with the others instead of making such an aggressive move. Facebook has been working to take marketshare from their platform's ad networks with their own credits and offers system, but it doing it in a slow, deliberate way that is not traumatizing their platform ecosystem.
Download youtube videos via command line
Jonah Lehrer: The stress of family life?
The prenup - fine. The tortuous logic that brings you to creating a 2nd contract, solely to relieve you of the burden of communicating meaningfully with your potential spouse - there's where it crosses the line.
The nipple is absolutely intuitive - it's instinctive. All baby mammals suckle for it. Though, of course, maybe less instinctive for adult mammals :-)
No. All that work predates both, in some cases by several years.

In fact, a good friend of mine is working to put scala bindings over all the clojure data structures so they can be used transparently in scala. They're that good.
BitTorrent Open Sources ‘Improved’ BitTorrent Protocol
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/viper-in-more-modes.el
Self-interest?

Why would fire a good employee for something as stupid as sex or age?

Yes, there are people who would do that, but if they're that brainless I don't think their business is going to be long-lived.
Dropbox has done quite well. The beauty of the dropbox program is that they offer usage (more space). The affiliates already use/like the app and are much more effective affiliates.

Nate, shoot me an email: jeff@zferral.com. We are in private beta and may be able to help
What exactly does "typed" mean? Clearly there's a difference (in every language I know of) between True and 3.5 (boolean vs. float). Unless the language treats all memory locations equally and doesn't know anything about a memory location other than its pattern of 0's and 1's, I would consider the language "typed."
The Right Tier for the Job.
LittleDog robot learns how to traverse rough terrain
Space bar mirrors the gates. Also, the conveyors are allowed to overlap in a + shape and they will do what you expect.
I don't have any specific numbers, unfortunately (it's hard to find mpg ratings for oxen, for example). However, if you can provide an example of a 1 horse power wheeled vehicle which can take 1 to 2 passengers plus moderate cargo across more than 20 miles per day of rugged terrain including shallow streams and rivers and can be powered entirely by resources obtained in situ then I'll cede the point.
Creating Custom Modules - How To Node
Makes for cheap R&D ;)
I hope this is a better device than the abomination that is the Pan Digital photo frame my mother in law bought me for Christmas.

Crappy hardware, ugly, difficult to use.

I'm looking forward to a profusion of great (and open) tablets to compete with the iPad, but I'm betting this won't be one of them, sadly.

At $200, I doubt that's a capacitative screen, which is a deal breaker for people who are buying the machine to use themselves.
Yeah, I watched it on the stream, and it contextualizes a lot.
The interview was not full-on jokey, but it was dry/acerbic and friendly. I would call it "playful sparring."
Twitter development is transitioning into a hobby. As a business opportunity, it sucks. Anything of real business value you create will get sucked into the platform, so, really, there is not much point to it.
"Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?"

I have a different take on it. Patents, copyrights, and intellectual property increases the rate of new technology because people are forced to be creative (companies have to put R&D into something new and different that isn't already protected).

If Google could just copy the iPhone, do you think we would have ever seen anything like the new Android phones?

Open source is another example of this phenomenon. How many Linux distros do we have out there that are just copies of the same thing? Even look at apps like VNC. I've seen so many companies just use VNC as a base for their remote viewing app rather than engineer something new. This results in the same bugs, slowness, and overall bad technology rather than a fresh, new approach.

Everyone complains about Mysql, yet nobody really has an incentive to create something to replace it (because it's easier to just use it).
Twitter makes the world smaller (and a neat idea for the music industry)
Lab-on-a-chip detects actual food allergies
> It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development

so just the fact that humans now dominate the planet is by itself something positive, despite wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ...?
I have a friend who is an engineer at a wind turbine startup here in the US and he has told me that most of their prototypes are bought by big names in Hollywood for "eco-bling" as well.
I find the addition of the final sentence to be pretty bold. It was entirely fabricated by Mr Adams.
That, and we're still getting our act together in the Clojure world. Stay tuned :)
"You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant."

Clearly there is a lot you don't know about human psychology. Try reading "Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. Gifts, even trivial and unwanted gifts, make people feel obligation to the gift-giver.

Face it, whatever Android's merits, Google is leaving nothing to chance by buying a lot of good will with shipping containers worth of expensive gifts.

As for your rant about the AT&T relationship's cost to users: If Apple hadn't done that deal, what would the mobile device ecosystem look like today and how would that be for users? Before the iPhone, the carriers were so firmly in control, it was obscene. You think Apple's app store terms are draconian? Try getting in to one of the old mobile application stores. You think Google would have any leverage in the mobile space without the iPhone?

Look, AT&T sucks (not that my prior experience with Verizon was great), I'm reminded about that every day when 1/4 of my commute is plagued with slow-ass Internet even though I have a nice strong signal, but your cynicism is giving you selective blindness.

I'm reminded of all the "wintel" hate among Linux advocates a decade or so ago. There was a lot to hate, but without the economics of the Microsoft/Intel world, its pretty damn hard to imagine the cheap & powerful computing hardware that made an open source OS anything but a curiosity for academics and a small number of hobbyists.
I'm aware of the counting limitations, and I believe I'm allowing for them in the rough and ready analysis I'm doing of the numbers I get. I have already seen that certain places get virtually no return, others get a lot. Adjusting my presences accordingly has increased my flow substantially, and while I'm aware that further tuning will require more detailed analysis, and more careful techniques, what I've done so far has been very useful as a first step.

I believe my points stand - bit.ly is useful for this context. I also believe you over-estimate the world's reactions to shortened links. My target is not the technically able, or even the technically aware. They see a link and click, unknowing and uncaring as to whether it's short, long or something in between.

I've done that analysis.
It is an unwarranted assumption that patents actually increase promiscuity of ideas.

Rather, patents probably impedes the progress of industries as varied as steam engines and software.

There is at least two economists in the world who dispute patents and copyright having place in the natural order of the free market:

Examine the evidence and decide for yourself:

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. -- Against Intellectual Monopoly

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

The book is free to read online, but you can also get yourself a dead tree version of the book if you like.
So ~200 minutes per month for 10$

~3$/hr
I hear a lot about this vim vs emacs war. But I have never seen a battle, so to speak.

Where can I see videos of people actually using this text editors? A side by side comparison of interesting/useful features?

I really would like to choose, but the most I managed to find was a guy playing snake on his emacs.

I'm currently using the very basics features of vim, but just because I felt like it and it came with a tutor file.
30 / 2 * 20 / 60 / 10 that comes out to $2 per hour.
I usually kill Office Start and all the other "fast startup" applications that various bits and pieces install, but Word is damn fast to start. I've had occasion to use Word 97 on modern machines - it starts about as fast as Notepad.
Specifically, this is the definition used in Computer Science research. Unfortunately, the communication between that community and the larger community of programmers is so poor that it was several years after I finished my CS bachelor's degree before I figured out why some people insisted that languages like Python were "untyped".
I think haskell is worth watching. If projects like repa and dph are able to deliver parallel performance speedups, then haskell could become a top choice for machine learning and related algorithms.

Personally, I have found haskell to be hard to program in initially, but once you get started, refactoring and feature changes feel "easy".
Supreme Court: NFL 32 teams, not one entity
I mistyped a single letter in an email and offended a coworker for life. He was on the road; I was in the office. I argued persuasively about a difference in design, ending with "When you get it, we can talk some more". I had intended to say "When you get in, we can talk some more".
The screenshot made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. I will stick with the Kindle -- I enjoy the minimalism. I don't want my electronic book to have an explosion of colors, or music, or videos, or photos -- "do one thing, and do it well". I already have a laptop and mp3 player.
How does 3rd-party ads add value to twitter?
Well that's what APIs are for. Why release an API and publicize it in that case?
That's a screenshot from DiffMerge http://www.sourcegear.com/diffmerge/ , but I typically just use Git or OS X's built-in "FileMerge" program. I was going to use GitHub's diff via a gist, but turns out GitHub Gists don't support diffs.
The terms [1] were just updated to reflect these changes. There are some interesting tidbits under the commercial use section, including: "In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us..."

[1] - http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms
Wow, that's way more elegant. Mine looks obfuscated by comparison :)
We're not that good at telling people what they should eat, but we're pretty damn good at telling people what they should not eat.
Totally true, that's why you're better off building your own Twitter or Facebook to support your advertising efforts.
I bought a $2,000 laptop from Dell a few months ago with a 128 GB SSD and 500 GB Big Dumb Drive. Guess which one had Windows installed on it when it arrived. grumble grumble Scratch one day.
I haven't yet met any inventor worth a damn that wouldn't invent and innovate for the heck of it. There are really only two things I see patents incentivizing: innovation in otherwise unattractive fields, and development of further innovations due to money won from licensing. I'm not familiar enough with each to comment on how well this works in practice.
We have a couple of other companies lined up but there's no schedule yet. Hopefully we'll start getting a steady flow of suggestions for companies that fit the profile and do something every couple of weeks.
I used to manually type bit.ly links in from a tweet via SMS all the time. I didn't have a smartphone until a few weeks ago, and it was easier than opening twitter, typing in my password, finding the person's tweet, and clicking on it.
You would encounter less frustration if you engaged others' arguments rather than dismissing them out of hand. That doesn't mean you have to argue with every crank on the internet, but there's not much point in writing a comment which declares an argument wrong without giving an explanation for why.

I'd very much like to hear what you have to say, because even when I've discussed this with academics who work in nanotech (though I've never spoken to anyone working directly on replicators), I've never heard a better argument than "it's really, really hard".
What "typed" means depends on who you're talking to. There's the definition used in CS research papers, and the definition that programmers actually use.

Very few languages lack a strong notion of run-time type. C and friends are the only ones I can think of where you can treat a block of memory as more than one type without the compiler or runtime throwing a fit.
I used to use those Buy.com 'first time buyer' £5 coupons (in about 2000) to buy mice, etc, using a false name and altered address. They eventually cottoned on, by which time I had notched up about 5 coupons!
> it “seems to be more intimate/fun/terse than intellectual/useful/detailed.”

woo, FB invented user polls, one more thing to Hide
I think it's important to specify that Linux Mint is fully compatible with Ubuntu: the repository of Ubuntu are used (and specific ones).

See for instance my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ isadora main upstream import

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ lucid partner

deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free

#deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu lucid-getdeb apps

#deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu lucid-getdeb games
So here's what I really want to know. What is my absolute risk of malignant brain tumors, and what does that risk become with heavy cell phone use? "Double the risk" means absolutely nothing to me. Twice almost friggin' none is still almost friggin' none.

I accept the fact that regular use of automotive technologies drastically increases my risk of death from blunt force trauma. I use it anyway because the convenience afforded by the technology outweighs the substantial risk.

Every action has potential health risks. If you're going to sensationalize a story about how X is bad, I'd really like to know how bad.

I don't care of she has witch-like tendencies, I want to know if she weighs less than a duck...
So inspiring. Reminds me of the Disney movie "The Brave Little Toaster":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbBEfZ8fK9Y
I'm still looking for the actual paper, but I'm pretty sure these are done with a scanning tunnelling microscope, not a mask.
Population density increases more than "collective brainpower". It increases free time, as laborers specialize and increase efficiency. The author doesn't seem to credit this at all.
sounds like an argument for release early, release often

be crappier and cheaper and as you gain marketshare, improve
What I like about this is that its a special case of BSP tree projected onto the sphere. If you think of the tiles as projected half-spaces...

In other words if you look through the details of projection and coordinate systems the spacial partitioning scheme used is the familiar BSP tree.

I'm going to remember this the next time someone tries to tell me they can't handle large open areas effectively... "what, you mean like THE WHOLE PLANET!!111 lolz"

:D
Obligatory appendix to this article:

How Far from True North are the Avenues of Manhattan?
http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/AvenuesOfManhattan/index.h...
There is no such thing as free lunch.

It might be more economically efficient to put effort into old technologies rather than trying to come up with novel technologies that does the same thing a little bit better. Sorta like how Linux was able to run on anything and everything.

Google chrome, Firefox, and other browsers do not seem to suffer from too much duplications even though they are open source.
Interesting. To me MA's headline gave me the sense that Bartz must have signed off in disgust or something. But who can explain the motives of "stringers" (or whatever the title of blog employees who write headlines today).
I think most businesses are built "on the back of somebody else". That's the way commerce works. Think of things in the real world:

- A store in a mall... depends on the mall operator to maintain and promote the mall
- A auto parts manufacturer... depends on the auto manufacturer to sell parts and maintain the brand
- An MacOS developer... depends on Apple to sell Macs to supply a market.
- A franchisee (e.g. McDonalds)... depends on the corporation to promote the brand.

The list goes on and on. Of course you have to assess the risk / rewards in any case before you decide it's worthwhile to move forward. But rejecting any business that depends on a platform (software or otherwise) eliminates many many business opportunities.
Nowadays your best bet is to find a smaller subreddit with a tight focus, essentially starting a new community. The main community has major issues with quality control, but the splintered subgroups are generally much better overall. Really, it does seem like small size is the best quality control, unfortunately.
I'm troubled by this line:

* ARM processors are cheaper and worse [than Intel chips] *

Beyond the fact that they have a very different profile and are optimized for mobile, I don't think of ARM chips as "worse" in any sense. Their instruction set is beautiful where Intel's is... not.
Thats exacty what I did. But my SSD is an older one, so doing disk intensive things like Windows Update can make the whole system sluggish (mainly the system restore points I guess).
This is based on the number of items shipped. B&N needs to outfit every one of their stores, while Amazon only needs to supply a few warehouses. Also, Amazon has a headstart on production and may already a large number of kindles on hand. The numbers just aren't comparable.
I had to read that sentence twice to find out the mistyped single letter but oh boy, that single letter changed the tone in its entirely.
The best thing to do with the internet has always been to treat everything as public.
The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
Web Laureate Insight, "evite: tonight — EXCLUSIVE party"
I have never seen a legal contract protected by copyright. Most contracts use very similar language because--although it looks like English, it's not--you want to use wording that already has settled definitions in case law. I am not a lawyer and spending 1% of the value of the contract on legal fees is a reasonable rule of thumb.
Britney  Ashton Twitter.  Shocker.
Should be easy for Twitter to put a limit on the number of ads that will be inserted during a period of time. Like build it into their API. API ads.

Kinda lame though. They could have just made it part of their TOS. Only X number of ads can be shown after X tweets.

Twitter must have $$ in the eyes.
However these risks might be entirely mitigated at little cost. Shield the phone; reduce emitted harmonics. With the increasing density of towers, power levels go down so maybe the problem is diminishing anyway.
Several people I know have told me that Word on Mac was even better than Word on Windows, but that may have been 2003 or 2007.
Fabulous Fabbers
Food spending in America. Dining out vs buying groceries
Frankly, dinosaurs were much more successful as a species. They were around for about 200 million years. Humans have been around barely 20 million years and time during which civilization existed is even smaller (5000 years?).

Hardly a triumph.
Creativity and the Neuroscience of Slumber
You preempt your spouse from any part in the discussion. A spouse is different from a business partner, in that they are supposed to be party to important decisions.
In a smallish form factor laptop, 2 drives might not be an option..
I throw up in my mouth a little every time someone refers to Zuckerberg as "Zuck" in a public forum.
Most of this list is from anything research.com. This list fascinates me more:

http://www.anythingresearch.com/Top-Industries/Market-Fragme...