skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The PayPal of X" is not going to be a good sell, no, but it's probably more of an explanation than a sales pitch.

PayPal by itself is a good metaphor for explaining concepts that would otherwise be difficult to grasp; WePay isn't doing that good a job of explaining exactly what it is about. I find that their cornucopia of usage examples do more harm than good - especially with "13 more examples" JS drop-downs in some categories.
Actually, you now get one page - this one. Isn't there some prize for doing a google search that nets only a single result?

Incidentally, these homoglyph attacks are pretty hard to catch. Even Vim (which normally chokes on 8+ bit characters in my setup) didn't seem to show anything different until I checked the hex codes.
>Demand, and you should get.

The mentality of a mugger.
I completely agree that pulling the app was justified, given Apple's stated rules, and also that it was incredibly stupid on taptaptap's part. They've managed to get their cash cow slaughtered for no reason other than perhaps getting some buzz -- though the people this buzz is reaching most likely overlaps highly with people who've already heard about the product, so I can't imagine it helping too much.

What I don't agree with is Apple's Iron Fist on products, and how they assume all of their users are fairly unintelligent and easily amused. My brother gave me an iPod Touch and I've just started using it. There's no icon to download apps, and to re-sync it (or whatever the hell I need to do) I have to download iTunes + quicktime + The Entire Archived Internet and go through an agonizingly long and painful process of clicking "no" everytime it tries to do me the favor of downloading album art for thousands of albums so that when I browse by album I will be able to see the ALBUM COVERS and it will look SO COOL. It "just works" entails iTunes spending days "determining gapless playback information" yet mysteriously having the "App Store Button" not present on the device and not telling me why. I found the answer on Yahoo Answers by somebody who I suspect was typing with their feet.

Assuming I go through the process of upgrading the Touch, which I probably won't, I'll need to provide my name, address, 3 credit card numbers, tag myself with a GPS transmitter, and fax them scanned fingerprints in order to download free Apps which they can assure me will not ever let my volume buttons be used for any other purpose, no matter how convenient.

Sigh. It's turned into a rant. The decision they made affects users as much as developers, it ultimately says: "You may want this feature, but you can't have it. Trust us, it's for your own good." Long story short, I personally don't care for that type of mentality. I won't deny the market loves it, but I'm not really sold. They're starting to appeal to me as the McDonald's of computers, only it's like the McDonald's in other countries where it costs more because it's a novelty and you're cool as long as you buy into the commercials and sports sponsorships.
Oh, but they are in the phone business; every phone that includes Java pays license fees to Oracle... except Android phones aren't paying.
Indeed, impressive on Google's part. There are surely dozens of other plausible homoglyphs that might work for a short time, though. Stay wary!
A unique application for Websockets
So now we can't patch a security hole in a library without "recompiling" every application it's linked to? That seems like a huge step backwards to me.
I think you're not giving Sweeney enough credit. He basically invented modding with ZZT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT

Additionally, post Quake 3, the team at Epic routinely chose better design tradeoffs for real world games. This includes both performance tradeoffs and spending of engineering effort on production needs (like a solid level editor). Hence the popularity of the Unreal 3 engine.
People seem to think the hard part of programming is the syntax. Remembering your semicolons and so forth. But logic is logic. If one of these is to succeed, it will be because it has made it easier for more people, or more kinds of people, to add the skill of programming to their toolbox.

The essence of programming is describing a desired result in a precise and repeatable way. People have been doing this for centuries and it's always been difficult. Computers only seem special because for most of their history, you've had to employ a fair bit of arcana just to get to the central logic. But now matter how much of that you brush away, there remains a nut of irreducible difficulty that no tool, no matter how powerful, will ever get rid of.

A WYSIWYG Word processor certainly makes writing easier, but it can never make you a writer.

We teach children how to write. Why don't we teach them the rudiments of programming?
"WePay isn't doing that good a job of explaining exactly what it is about."

I agree. We have struggled with this since the beginning.

Thanks for the feedback; we will definitely keep working on our messaging.
This Is How I Read TechCrunch: Without Comments
Mostly people who are not and would not like to be famous. Sorry, most of the code is proprietary.
Migrating from Twitter Basic Authentication to OAuth Credentials
Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET
I believe its already possible package python programs as .apk bundles right?
Well, there would be no reason to build a defense in the first place if NOBODY ever went on the offense.
Is DragonFireSDK for iPhone a good product?
Is DragonFireSDK a good alternative for iPhone development? We need something quick and don't have an iPhone programmer in-house. Any links to useful information would be appreciated.
Yeah, I don't think there's any question that Epic owns id in the production department. That was true from the beginning.
The Most Colorful River In The World
LiveScribe pen: Draw a piano, then play it
Seeing this made me think that TC should go with the approach of charging a one time fee of a couple dollars to create an account to comment (thus forcing them to use their real name) as discussed on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1518925.
except for all the high quality libraries for doing hard things
Insight, "Google, Verizon, FCC: Epic Neutrality"
Which is the sort of thing that did the other JEDEC members a fat lot of good when Rambus (spit) went on the warpath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits
That's fair - I'm sure I am biased by my experiences working on this stuff in the DC/Baltimore area, but I still think my first point, about the danger of becoming merely a gatekeeper, applies widely across all those sectors.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison are good friends, best man at your wedding kind of friends. Ellison was once on Apple's board of directors after Jobs returned to Apple. Oracle suing Google over Java patent infringements in Android sure plays well for Apple...

Apple vs (Google vs (Facebook && Oracle))
The current TV console generation has lasted longer than most, by the design and general consent of all the console makers, and the interesting question there has been what will convince them to do the next generation of hardware for the Wii, XBox 360, or the PS3? And now I have my guess: A portable gaming system that can hook up to a TV and push 720p that is effectively indistinguishable from the current generation of console.

By "portable gaming system", I mean either a dedicated gaming console, or a cell phone. The interesting thing about the cell phone option is that while dedicated gaming systems come out rarely, cell phones are increasingly on the PC-style plan of coming out as rapidly as possible with as much hardware stuffed in them as possible. So while guessing when the dedicated portable gaming systems will pass the XBox 360 requires reading minds, guessing when cell phones will actually pass the XBox 360 is not so hard.

Using this logic, I think we can expect the PS4 and XBox 720 by 2013 at the latest, not because the cell phones will be quite there by then, but because the cell phones on the horizon in late 2012 to 2013 will be able to exceed them. And especially for the PS and Xbox line, that's an embarrassment I don't think they can put up with and still maintain their image, no matter how unhelpful the next generation of graphics will be to their market or how expensive it makes the games. Unless they just throw in the towel, which, honestly, isn't necessarily a bad bet for the PS5 or Xbox 1080, but I think we're going to have one more conventional generation of consoles whether or not it's a good idea, after which we may discover they don't have a niche anymore.
According to this thread on the Android mailing list, Oracle tried to settle privately with Google but Google refused. This may mean that Google has a strong case against those patents:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thr...
No I'm pretty sure they aren't. The CLR is totally different to the JVM.
Good question. It's got to cast a bit of a shadow over anything based on the VM.

This seems like a catastrophically stupid and short-sighted move on Oracle's part. The reason Java is as big as it is today is that it's been an open playing field for all comers. Start tossing the odd hand grenade into the party and the room is going to clear out fast. The timing could hardly be worse too - Scala and Clojure seem to be building some real momentum lately.
I'm just happy I stuck with you after the massive amount of mentions of the site. I don't know what your bounce rate is, but I think you are making a very compelling product a very complex sell. :)

I'm by no means a UX expert, but I think I would prefer that you just break down the options into ones that work differently from each other; for instance, I just figured out that group collections display how the transactions are spent, whereas charitable donations don't. I didn't even get that from watching the usage list.

Your home page generally does a great job of addressing most of my thoughts, but the collect-manage-spend doesn't really translate into anything by itself. The "I want to" doesn't either - especially since I usually choose an "Other" option.

Keep it up, I love to ditch PayPal and Google Checkout whenever I can.

PS: The "More" link for the customer testimonies doesn't work in the most recent version on Opera. Maybe it's on my end, maybe it's not. :)
BankSimple Announces API Plans
I feel this poem has not been upvoted enough. If this does not reach 1000 upvotes in the next few days you are a disgrace to the interwebs!
Great. That would land Google in the hands of Microsoft. Great move!
Speech recognition has been stuck at a high but not good enough plateau for some time. 90% accuracy sounds nice, but is actually totally useless. 99% might be good enough, but no one is there. More likely, 99.9 (for some number of repeating 9s) might be necessary for people to really trust these systems.
This article from 2007 might be of interest:

"How Google routed around Sun's IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME": http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

It's apparently not a complete surprise, this guy in 2007 predicted that

... in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits
on this.
I'm surprised apple isn't more frequent.. I feel like it's only that on HN.
Which could be rather bad if you need a JVM tuned in a non-standard way.

Anyway you look at it, Oracle has enabled a lot of FUD to be thrown at Java, and if your observation is correct, andyone who's working on any sort of non-Oracle derived JVM (and there are a bunch) had just been handed a lot of legal uncertainty.

Side note: I don't need hearing this shortly after learning about the RightHaven atrocity factory.
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And needless to say, at least patent 6,125,447 has prior art.
>> Isn't there some prize for doing a google search that nets only a single result?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack
Do you really think this is helping them more than it is hurting them?

I suspect the buzz they are gaining overlaps highly with people who have already been exposed to to taptaptap. This buzz isn't going to reach Grandma and cause her to buy that "rebellious software from that tappy place". Meanwhile, their app is no longer earning them money and Apple is going to be keeping a watchful eye on all of their subsequent releases.

Not to mention, the decay on this type of buzz probably has a half-life of 12 hours after it reaches its peak in one or two days. In two weeks nobody will think much of this story, and I doubt they'll have released anything to take advantage of the buzz.

Now, their buzz about earning $500k+ on the app, that was pretty helpful. Nothing sells a product more than press about how people can't get enough of it. Just ask Apple about that one.
Notion Ink Adam Blog - Launch and Pricing Details
Thanks, it naively hadn't occurred to me that Android would be using a non-Sun JVM, and given what you've said it seems that would be a viable route for an IP lawsuit (though it still seems in pretty bad faith).
You can probably sue somebody who uses different software that infringes your patents, which is what this lawsuit is about.
The letter he wrote for the Giving Pledge website actually shows a bit of him being a saint and an asshole:

http://givingpledge.org/#larry_ellison

To whom it may concern,

Many years ago, I put virtually all of my assets into a trust with the intent of giving away at least 95% of my wealth to charitable causes. I have already given hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and education, and I will give billions more over time. Until now, I have done this giving quietly – because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter. So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to write this letter because he said I would be “setting an example” and “influencing others” to give. I hope he’s right.

Larry Ellison

On one hand, he is giving a lot, on the other, you can tell he couldn't care less about the pledge and the letter.
s/cybersecurity/government cybersecurity/
Price is Not Value, and Other Reasons Metrics Mislead
Are the names discovery-system, user-interface, my-actor important?
This is such bull shit.
An Absolution Exchange and Mechanical Turk
And then get a patent lawsuit from Microsoft as big as this one. Double Fail.
That is why you would license it under the Apache License, because it has explicit patent clauses, rather than something like the BSD license.
To be fair to the journalist concerned, if you read to the bottom of the complaint you'll find that there are 7 claims of patent infringement and 1 of copyright infringement.
As others have said, it sounds like you misinterpreted the comment. The open-source software Seldo is referring to seems to be Java, not Android.
"He also says that Banks are more conservative than PayPal - in that they can't go after a business model where there is going to be fraud - and the game is to minimize the losses."

It seems to me that deal with fraud is an important part of any bank's business.
The link misses part 1. Start here:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/europe/100724/swiss-banki...
Back of the napkin speculation:

1) facebook - 500 million users
2) Use facebook groups for random money collection
3) WePay => fb ~= PayPal => eBay
4) YC gets nice payout and WePay mafia fund a hot YC startup that solves micro-finance problem
WHO finally coughs up flu committee’s identity and conflicts of interest
The BSD license would be useless here. Preventing this kind of thing is the whole point of the third revision of the GPL; to my knowledge there are no other software licenses that do this.
What about the internet and hand-me down computers?

It's about 40 bucks a month for a decent internet connection right? Maybe the computer is worth three furniture pieces.
I think you might be surprised at the amount of enterprise software in Java these days
How in the world has PayPal managed to not be perpetually in court fighting off class action law suits?
I can't speak to early computing, but starting around when business applications emerged (60's/early 70's?), developers were very involved in gathering requirements, designing, coding, testing, etc. Shortly after I entered the field, circa 1992, I started hearing about software development as an assembly line process. The developer role started being split: BA, architect, coder, sometimes a QA staff, etc. Whenever I've worked on projects with teams split out this way, it becomes a nightmare of communication overhead and miscommunicated requirements.
Maybe the only thing keeping Java relevant to consumers. It's also the de facto standard platform for just about all recent enterprise software projects.
Wow, I did not know there was so much bad karma for Paypal. Does anyone know of alternatives for businesses not located in the US?
I like this headline because if we sent it back in time 30 years it wouldn't make any sense at all.
Health Care Web Site Design 
Medical Doctor Website Design - Health care web site design and development for physicians, medical practices, medical groups, medical centers, hospitals and other medical health care providers. BizMedical.com
You shouldn't ask for a SSN for group accounts? Maybe an EIN?
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It would be interesting to live in a world where a library is just a storage of e-reader made to look like books.

Just pick up an e-reader and it will sync to your phone looking at your wishlist and selecting the first one off the bat. Or use your phone to choose the book you want to read on the spot.
Maybe there's a back room deal between oracle and someone else like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, etc.
Awesome stuff. Just used it for my website's startup. Took me 5 minutes :)
What would the widget on your site do? Suggest other website that are similar to yours? Seems kind of counter productive if your goal is to retain visitors.

I've toyed with the idea of making a similarity service for publishers, or perhaps a wordpress plug-in. Moreofit would receive a set of URLs, and you could query it with a URL and receive the most similar amongst the set. I imagine this would be very useful for large sites such as SmashingMagazine, where finding similar articles on keyword alone will fail, and the site is so big that manually digging up related articles would be a pain. Instead, just drop in an iframe or script and moreofit will show a list of n most similar articles from your domain (or set of links).
Ah, when I spoke of your personal desires, I wasn't talking about what you desired from your carrier. It's rather strange that you'd interpret it that way, since that obviously doesn't make any sense. However, you do have a reputation for being uncharitable and holding irrational grudges against people, which also explains your weird "whole company" assumption.

Whatever the case, you are strangely attempting to justify carrier pricing schemas through customer costs alone, as if the carriers were driven by sheer necessity rather than the desire to exploit their leverage in a deficiently competitive market. Maybe that's not what you're suggesting. If it is, my breaking even point still stands. If it isn't, and you agree that the pricing schemas are driven by leverage exploitation, then my larger point that carriers will abuse their power to the detriment of the public still stands.

I'll grant you one thing, which is that your "usage models" argument is sufficient to explain why tethering restrictions exist at all. But it's neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the specific pricing schemes, which I chalk up to leverage exploitation. And don't try to tell me carriers would never exploit their customers--they have an established and unambiguous record of doing exactly that.

I'll be leaving this conversation now, since I'm pretty sure you're in this to attack me rather than have a genuine discussion. Take care!
My regrets in life are extremely few, but one of them is this: If I could go back in time and do things differently, one thing I would change would be my attitude about debt when I was young[er]. My kids are growing up, but the months are floating by, and my time at home is eaten up with contract work I'm doing on top of my day job. I look forward to the day that our financial footing is firm enough for me to go back to just one source of income. To me, being a father is the fullness of manhood, and it kills me that I am not always there for my family. So, my advice is this: Don't let yourself get significantly into debt. From my vantage point, it is completely not worth it.
The irony is that the font used in this article actually renders to be really unattractive on my Windows machine at work. I've always noticed that they use this font at BusinessWeek online, and it's always bugged me, personally. It looks like someone took a notch out of each of the letters or something. It looks a lot better on my Mac. Screenshot on Windows: http://imgur.com/hWzXN.png
I'm still scratching my head over why everyone else seems to support ePub but Amazon can't be bothered to add it to the Kindle.

It's the reason why I went with the nook.
What if the Kindle is the library? Instead of checking out a book, you borrow a Kindle locked to the library's Amazon account. Instead of paying for a Kindle, you just put up a damage deposit.
Sending the link about to marketing/seo sites is a good idea. I suppose it would do them good to encourage people to see what their competition is up to; and even better that you can sort by popularity to give you some insight as to how your more-popular counterparts got where they are.

As per the bookmarklet... that's coming shortly. My next project is going to blow up the bookmarklet space.
The IP address is a possible clue to the identity of the commenters but surely it would take some kind of corroboration to be conclusive. For example, would you not also need to show that the person using that IP address also logged in to a particular bank account or email address at that time?
But Italian migrants did continue to go to US right through to the late 60s (indeed most Aussie Italian families I know have a tale of a great uncle/aunt in Canada and a couple more somewhere on East coast of US or in Chicago)... I'm intrigued by the theory though...
WePay (YC S09) collects $7.5M in Series B round led by Highland
Market share != revenue.

China only represented 1% of Google's revenue when they pulled out. They saw the writing on the wall - China would not allow foreign Internet companies to be successful in the long term - and decided to pull out before corporate espionage transferred all of their technology to Chinese competitors.

It's a bit much to paint that as some bold moral stand. They were fine with censorship for four years - why did it suddenly become so objectionable?
You can't write a good JIT overnight. You can't adapt an existing JIT for a JVM-like VM to Dalvik either. I don't think working around patents had much to do with it, especially since they got sued anyway.
It has an API so people can develop new applications for it. I didn't find anything like that in my quick scan through it.

Link to their developer page:

http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/De...
Pretty cool, but you might want to do some more filtering to allow for more meaningful words.
This Jugaad sounds very similar to what we Kiwis call the "Number 8 wire" approach. (New Zealand is a long way from anywhere, so a tradition developed of making running repairs using whatever was at hand - specifically, farm fencing wire - in lieu of shipping out spare parts.)

I personally find the mythology around this to be both a blessing and a curse at times.
Oh, that does look tasty...
64-bit Operating System Released
… and if you rearrange the letters of "spicy acorn" it even spells "conspiracy"!.