skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I was reading this, I kept chanting "charge... back! charge... back! charge... back!" in the back of my mind. I was happy to find that that's exactly how he resolved the situation.

Never do a big company a favor, especially when they won't return it. Sure, he could have gotten his money back by faxing stuff and mailing stuff and being glued to the phone for a day. Or he could fill out a form on his credit card's website, and now Greyhound has to do all the dirty work. Which would you choose?
Definitely. The chargeback is an underutilized feature of credit cards. A couple of things about chargebacks:

1. In my experience, you don't need to provide any documentation unless the merchant disputes your chargeback. So you should keep documentation, receipts, screen shots, notes, but not worry about filling out a detailed initial incident report.

2. Some people have claimed that you risk running afoul of your credit card if you use this feature too often. I'd say I use it twice per year and I've never been hassled.

3. Morally, I think you're just obligated to make a single attempt to rectify a misunderstanding with a merchant.

4. My credit cards let me fill out a report online, which makes this extremely convenient.
I don't use Github yet, but they seem awesome.
This is a nice feature of credit cards. But no, I don't think credit cards are "great". They hurt small businesses, and because they refund to the customer so quickly, businesses usually take the loss in identity theft and similar situations.
I totally agree. But why use word "Hacker"? Let's make up a new word for such state of mind.
When I've first read Hacker's manifesto (http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=7&id=3&mode=...) I wanted to become a Hacker, but never did, although everything written there is very close for me.
But I've never called myself a Hacker.
Science 2.0: The community for the advancement of science
What do you need permission to create badly?
Your hand-transcription matches my hand-transcription, so I'd call it good. :)

Edit: yep, 24th character is an "oh", not a zero.
There is indeed ADODB, and I have used it. It still more or less requires writing queries, though — and most ORM systems — redbean, Kohana's ORM — still seem to interact directly with MySQL instead of using ADOdb.
Any doctor would recommend most of those as well. The effects of exercise and reduced stress on overall health are very well documented, along with the effects of eating properly.

Of course, that's not going to accomplish anything if my immune system has decided to destroy my thyroid gland, or if a stray gamma ray or two has turned a lump of otherwise-useful tissue into a malignant tumor, or if my breathing passages are shaped in just the right way to obstruct my breathing at night.
puzzle[24] is O (capital o) not 0 (zero).
I'll recommend two books: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition and Puzzles for Programmers and Pros. Especially the latter is a great resource to sharpen your skills on puzzle type questions. Also, there's the classic How Would You Move Mt. Fuji about puzzle questions.
I love reading these in print: can't wait ’till the next one comes.

I wish someone would publish a magazine on programming like this. I’d buy that as well…

Keep up the good work! Can't wait to see number three.

One thing I'd like; to be able to subscribe to a year of it.
This was started by a friend of mine. It's really young, but it seems like an interesting venture.

The more informative "about" page:
http://www.science2point0.com/about
This is excellent news. We will upgrade as soon as we can. Well done github.
If you meditate on the correct things for an hour you might realise that actually it's your 50 hour-a-week job that is wasted time and taking a time-out to contemplate the bigger subjects is a far more useful pursuit.
Having traveled by Greyhound a few times, that is definitely the case. Most travelers are poor, and many of them don't even have credit cards (either because they are poor, or illegals, or both).
How, exactly, do you seize a domain name? Take away it's DNS entries?
Your mom was teaching you more about responsibility than anything else.
Greyhound service is terrible, but they can get away with it because they're the cheapest way to get from one side of the country to the other. It's a 4 day ride, the seats won't recline, it smells like someone crapped in their pants, the terminals are scary, and your luggage will get lost, but you save a few hundred over the next cheapest option.

(I did toronto to vancouver and back a couple years ago. It's 8 days you won't soon forget!)
And if you don't bother telling your manager ahead of time - you run the very real risk of his ire and wrath...

As the trunk poster said - you can only pull this off if you are really good at what you do, and prepared for the negative consequences if they happen.
Still far far from usable to us. Assembla offers free unlimited git/svn repos, and it works great.
Have you heard about Sencha? Looks promising on highly-interactive CSS features for iPad and Android.
Yes, of course. But still, if I had an 8-character password, it's been effectively reduced to the entropy of a 4-letter password.
Certainly the existence of the KDE-specific virtual file system is a terrible thing...
So you're still paying a 2x premium to get organizations, but at least you can do it at a lower price point.

Small plan: 10 private repos, 5 collaborators, $12

Bronze plan: 10 private repos, infinite collaborators, Organizations, $25.

Similarly, the Medium is $22, and the Silver is $50, both for 20 private repos.
What are you going to do? Design your logo or your icons in HTML5? Make adjustments of your photos with HTML Canvas?

Of course, layout designing in Photoshop always seemed a strange habit to me, ever since I tried it 8 years ago ... because fonts rendering doesn't match; many HTML designs have fluid elements that aren't properly captured by Photoshop/Gimp; and in general you tend to make overly complex designs when working in an image editor.

Good practices transcend fashion IMHO.
Stock options may be taxable, depending on your jurisdiction.

Talk to your lawyer/auditor.
Just to add a data point, I did get mine ok.
Nigerians angry at oil pollution double standards
Please add a way for me to subscribe rather than buy these one by one. I don't want to "buy" monthly, I want to receive monthly. ;)

Editing to add: Even if Magcloud doesn't have a way to do this, it might be worth your while (especially for cash flow!) to use something else like Paypal, buy them in bulk from Magcloud at a discount and send them out yourself. You could require a 1-year subscription to make it more worth your effort (and the bulk purchasing might mean you make more money on the sale of the magazine itself)

2nd edit: Thinking about this some more, the magazine is 40 pages long (yay!) but at $.20/page you're making only $1/sale in gross margins (boo!). If you were able to accept yearly subscriptions and fulfill from the US (I know you're in Malaysia) you could boost gross margins to $3/sale, in addition to the cash flow benefits. You would be adding fulfillment costs, but it might be worthwhile...

AND you could ship internationally if you wanted! :)
For what it's worth, I had a 'drag' score of 7 when I founded my startup. Without a wife and a child to motivate me to try harder, and without 10+ years of experience in technology, I would never have been able to accomplish half of what I've done.
Well, you could try. But you'd be fighting a lot of history and inertia. The "Hacker Subculture" has been around for quite a while and that usage of the word is pretty commonplace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28programmer_subculture...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...
Nice. I like the new comments section. I that printing the comments adds to their impact, even without the other comments or original article. It also enhances the sarcastic value -- although I didn't read Dave Winer's entry about how online advertising is dead, I immediately knew what he had to say when I read tptacek's "summary".

Anyway, pretty cool.
BackendFu the big plan
If you're going coast to coast in the US with advanced notice, a plane ticket can often be cheaper.
I just do what feels good, and it's not dealing with governments.

My web sites appeal to students, teachers, and others all over the world -- and they earn me a check every month.
This is probably the best stat of the article:

"According to Amnesty International, people living in the Niger Delta have experienced oil spills on par with the Exxon Valdez disaster every year for the last half century."
"Don't Worry When You Are Not Recognized, But Strive To..."
"Trying to compete with the existing school system is idiotic because it is paid for by taxpayers."

The catholic church's offerings manage just fine, as do Montessori schools. Just two examples off the top of my head.
Woot To Be Acquired By Amazon
I am not sure if this data is right or wrong, but I think AdMob has a severe conflict of interest reporting on this issue.

Even if they were not acquired by google, the upcoming existence of the iAd system (and its restrictions) means that they have a strong incentive to downplay vendors like RIM and Apple.
Ironically, it's quite commonly in use in Google's code base. GWT in particular.
Microsoft Files Patent for New ‘Dual-Display Device’
It may not be exactly what you desire, but Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) presents a series of mathematical problems of variable difficulty. Working out solutions in code is a great problem-solving exercise, in my opinion.
I love the idea because I don't always have time to check HN daily and am sure to miss out on some great stories. This is the opportunity to do some catch up.
why don't you publish the results of your benchmark?
Travel as much as you can, in your country and abroad.
Learn to appreciate other cultures, experience deserts, jungles, frost and balmy beaches.

Try to learn at least one other language, just enough to get you by. Try to live in different places. Major cities, small towns, every environment will teach you something.

Learn to appreciate the arts.

Avoid cynicism as much as you can, it is often a mask for inexperience, apathy, and fear.

Enjoy a good argument that challenges your assumptions, be prepared to change your opinions when faced with new facts, do not seek information just from the sources that feel compatible to you, cultivate media literacy.
It probably depends a lot on the industry. If your ticket purchase works, you never need to speak to a human being to ride a bus. Contrast this with cable companies - to sign up, you must have at least two customer service experiences: one to schedule the appointment, one to have the service installed. I think this accounts for their generally poor public opinion. They're not actually worse than most companies, but their customer service footprint is frontloaded and big.

I bet Greyhound receives an extremely low call volume in comparison. After all, by default, you don't talk to a human. Most callers with special complaints are probably routed to people with scripts that have most arrows point to "I'm sorry, but I can't help you. Do you have any other issues today?", and Greyhound has made the calculation that this will not impact their bottom line.
Not sure why that applies... The stock options here (Y amount vested over 4 years) are no different than the ones you'd get at any company. The interesting part is the Z amount of shares bought at full price.
Thanks for the links,
I've somehow missed new description of a Hacker - "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary."

Looks like now you can learn Ctrl+S (which is above the minimum necessary, File -> Save) and call yourself a Hacker.
I fully agree, but replace "much confusion" with "compiler warning".
FYI, I think you mean http://www.wayfindermobile.com/ instead of wayfinder.com.
Features cost money, news at 11.
x2 on the remote and even on the Colorado.

Is the job interesting? Stable? Are you running things?

'Cuz I like hard problems and can write beautiful code in a dozen languages all along the spectrum from Fortran to Perl, C++ inclusive. Skim my HN comments if you want to verify that I've got a head on my shoulders, or send me an email and ask me to brag. I'm in the market for a job in Denver, Colorado, and the location's about the only part that's not negotiable.
Awesome! Really excited about this.. Stackoverflow hasn't been that great of a place to ask ML/IR/NLP questions and expect good answers

Maybe this site will bring together all the ML people and do a better job.

Visually, the site is not that great. The logo is unreadable at first attempt
At that point you might as well use the "personal" accounts. For me, since there's just two of us on something that doesn't require that much disk space, we've been using a micro account for a year now. (I guess Github doesn't have space requirements either now too.)

The true benefit of this Organization feature appears to be for managing large teams, thus their "premium" for infinitely large collaborators. You don't really need those features for five people.
Sounds like you bought issue #1, so I'll ask:

How's the print quality?
They are still too expensive by limiting you on the number of private repositories and not on storage or something else (requests, etc).

If you are a small business or a freelancer you have a lot of small projects each into a separate repository. So with each new customer you use up another private repository until you have to upgrade to the next plan.

I won't use GitHub until it's either metered (like Amazon EC2/S3) or until they only charge for "active" repositories -- meaning repositories where I had commits or some other form of activity during the billable month.
A serendipitous negotiation technique that not all witty and lucky interviewees would like to share. Great input, nonetheless. =)
Zapping Titan-like atmosphere with UV rays creates life precursors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4#History
This is very unlikely to happen because:
1. When a startup sells shares (i.e., you purchase stock) it sells them not only for money, but also for advice and connections. Most of the time these are more valuable than the cash. Since you are likely (only) an engineer/geek, your part of the deal is short.
2. Even if they would want your money, evaluating a startup's worth (for pricing your shares)is extremely difficult and/or expensive. So the won't go through this process for a few thousand dollars.
While you're right that the main problem has to do with sharing resources between different threads of execution, the difficult part is not actually doing that sharing. The simple act of sharing data is very simple, and can be accomplished via many different helpful abstractions (try looking at Wikipedia's description of "shared memory" or "message passing"). In the case of shared memory, sharing can be accomplished just by writing data to memory in one thread and reading it in another. Easy!

The difficult part is in how the threads actually coordinate. The problem is extremely application-specific (what exactly do threads need to share? When do they need to share it? These cannot be answered in a general way). It's generally accepted that concurrency bugs (examples: data races (colloquially "race conditions"), deadlock, atomicity violations, locking discipline violations) are extremely difficult bugs. This is probably either because (1) programmers are not accustomed to thinking about coordinating between parallel activities or (2) people are in just worse at thinking concurrently than thinking sequentially.

So new libraries/methods for accomplishing communication between threads are always welcome and can help reduce the complexity of parallel programming. However, nobody has yet found an abstraction that both works for most kinds of parallel programs (MapReduce is very simple to work with but also very restrictive) and is simple enough for people to program in without fear of hard-to-solve concurrency bugs (message passing and shared memory are both quite general but considered somewhat unsafe).

So, the problem is not that a good abstraction layer would be too computationally expensive -- it's that no one even knows what the abstraction should be! Hope this makes the issue clearer.
It's the Windows OS effect, this time in the smartphone market. Except that Android is free, so it could potentially gain an even vaster userbase.
Quoting from "The Practice of Programming" by Brian W. Kernighan & Rob Pike:

Finally, and most important, a portable program is a better program. The effort invested to make a program portable also makes it better designed, better constructed, and more thoroughly tested. The techniques of portable programming are closely related to the techniques of good programming in general.
look at the end of the original link
http://metrics.admob.com/2010/06/may-2010-mobile-metrics-rep...

Generated by "Harsh S" AdMob Marketing
this explains everything
Love it! In the process of switching my startup over from unfuddle now.

Thanks guys!
This is really a snapshot of Admobs ad-network traffic, which is really low on RIM devices that don't support a particularly robust app market.
Features which by definition segment your customers into "for profit businesses" and "everybody else" should probably cost more than anybody here can stand charging. People who complain are beautiful snowflakes who are out of scope for the product.
THE iphone reception problem solution
A 4-digit campaign is really not that big, and billboards absolutely work for some companies. Just like TV ads, Adwords, and pieces of paper on cars.

It is far too common to think that less measurable = always bad. It's just not true.

I've never used Foursquare advertising and have no idea if it works, but there are a lot of unfounded "conclusions" here. Think about a restaurant that makes $20/customer, servers 200 customers/day and is open 30 days/month. That's 120k/month. Let's say the 4-digit campaign was $5k and had a 150% ROI, so it generated $7.5k in business. That's 6.25% of the monthly revenue, an amount I could certainly see being hard to parse out due to normal variations.
I found a Google Linux search addon for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13925/). It works but it's only about half what I was looking for. If there is a way to add something along the lines of "searchtype:linux", as site specific or filetype searches work, then it isn't documented anywhere as far as I can tell.
I have to admit, I was really down on this before #1 came out, now I love it. Keep it up!
So hard not to rage in sympathy-frustration while reading this
Great purchase on the part of Amazon. Woot! has been an amazing pioneer in impulse purchasing on the web and was the first of many companies that got me excited about starting my own.

Congrats guys!
Infinite collaborators is worth that small premium i think
The thing is -- Apple can toss something out with nothing but a "customers-will-buy-this-just-because-it's-so-cool" marketing plan -- and customers will buy it, just because it's so cool.

No other manufacturer can do this.

Cisco is trying to sell a hamstrung, not-quite-an-iPad at considerable markup. Won't work.
base64 decoding of the text results in:

m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt

That's all printable ASCII, which I don't suspect is a coincidence.
If it's about rewards, isn't blippy in a better position? They see the actual transaction data and not just physical proximity. Foursquare is in a interesting position to extend the value of physical property (similar to augmented reality startups). This challenges the notion, 'god's not making any more land.'
Solved! http://github.com/blog/675-organizations-for-small-businesse...
Ask HN/YC/PG: Dealing with tax and accounting
(Focusing on the US) So, how do you deal with tax (and on a side note, accounting?) If I remember correctly, YC companies are incorporated as C corps (which means both double taxation and a bit of hassle with IRS forms and such.)

More specifically, what does your company do with the profits at your company that are distributed to the founders? In other words, do you keep all the cash inside the company accounts and pay out a small living salary? Do you pay dividends based on the equity table of the startup (and thus dividend tax comes in?) Do you have an accounting firm or just do it all yourself and throw it in EFTPS?

PG, if you're reading this: what do the YC companies do in terms of tax? Does YC have accounting firm connections, or do YC companies manage it by themselves?

Why am I asking this? Albeit being really important for startups that are incorporated to consider, I don't hear much about tax talked about here, for something that takes a minimum of 15% of your cash to the FDA^W IRS.
There is a second peak of entrepreneurship for folks in their 40's that this does not model accurately at all. Supportive spouse is a plus. Deep domain knowledge and rich social networks are both a plus that come with age and work experience. I agree with his advice to the newly minted MBA but I think his rules of thumb break down for older entrepreneurs.
> "various needs": what, for those times when you don't care whether your data gets silently corrupted?

I never had data-corruption in Mysql. Of course, I'm always working with InnoDB, maybe MyIsam is weaker

And if Mysql would have been such a weak RDBMS, maybe it wouldn't have been used by companies like Google or Amazon (especially Amazon RDS, which are already configured Mysql instances offered to clients in Amazon's cloud).

> "various needs": what, for those times when you don't care whether your data gets silently corrupted?

Ebay is using the memory tables engine in Mysql instead of Memcached. According to their benchmarks, the Mysql client is more stable, and the combination is more scalable.

There's also a whole ecosystem of third party storage engines. Like when Adobe developed an in-house distributed storage ... they also had an (internal project) storage engine for Mysql that interacted with it.

Also, the soon to be replacement for InnoDB is Falcon ... http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Falcon (optimized for multiple cores).

Or RethinkDB (YC startup) ... a storage engine optimized for solid-state drives ... http://rethinkdb.com/

And I don't really care about what others think ... Mysql served me well.
Pretty fantastic. The paper is thick and the ink doesn't come off on your hands. It feels a little bit like a collectors item, at least for geeks like me.

His simple design aesthetic is so good that my other magazines feel jarring and cluttered. It feels like how a magazine should be.
Indeed. Title ought to be: "Android Gaining on Apple, Says Report From Google Acquisition"

I can't believe this isn't in the first bleeding sentence. Unprofessional, ReadWriteWeb!
That was a very engaging read.
I agree.

One question: Isn't the "organization"-feature also used for open-source stuff that's not for profit? Or doesn't this cost?
I liked the logo, especially the Idea behind it, I think a darker color or thicker lines in the circles might help though
Yes, this is a lot like AI approaches used for playing games. We examine many and nested what-if scenarios involving reordering of memory communications to identify problematic sequences. Note that we operate at the memory level and so we don't have problems with particular OS or threading-package constructs. If your code can run in parallel, Jinx can explore it.
Yes. The main issue with concurrency is preventing threads from stepping on each-other's resources. Also, getting threads in sync can sometimes be an issue.

EDIT: Whoops, beaten to the punch. Methinks refreshing the page before posting might be a good idea :)
Woot On Being Acquired By Amazon: Woot