skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have had this experience many times when I tried to use a library where every function was tailored for a very specific concrete situation. The perfect example here is finding an extremely complicated mass of code to read a cert from a file, but no way to read a cert from any other source, not even from a buffer in memory. So if you read it from some other location, or read it from a file yourself, or constructed it yourself in memory as part of a test, you're out of luck. People who write code like that tend to be pretty incredulous and insulting when you explain what you're trying to do. "I mean, if you want to read a cert that isn't in a file, obviously I need to educate you until you stop wanting to do such a stupid thing. Not that it's stupid in itself, but you are probably solving your problem in such a dumb way that you should stop right now and start over when you understand what you're doing. If you're super-polite I might even help you." That kind of thing.
> I can imagine that components such as this making it easier for more engineers and hobbyists getting into electronics, embedded systems, etc.. because of this.

Easier ??? If anything it will make it unbelievably much harder, just like VLSI chips are harder to interface to for hobby purposes than TTL and soldering SMD is an art, but 1/10th" pitch can be done by anybody that isn't legally blind.

As tech has steadily advanced over the years the entry level skills required have gone up dramatically.
This is always how I've done multiplication in my head as well. Just seems natural and pretty easy to do up to 99x99, after which it's too annoying to track.
As a parent, one of the things I fear most is DCFS. I live on a large area of land with many natural resources and my children are free to do many things. I inform them of dangers and protect them from realistic dangers. But not every other parent thinks that way or agrees with it. It only takes one fearful parent to place a call into DCFS about their opinion on your parenting style. Once DCFS is involved you are at their mercy with little or no oversight.

So beware implementing some of the ideas presented here as things you shouldn't fear. Because not everyone will agree with you, and those other people can make your life very difficult.
Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs
Very interesting stuff. I really like articles like this that dive into to the technical side of things. We need more of this on HN. Keep up the good work
How did they get away with this? Did the 9th circuit court of appeals just throw out the entire Right of First Sale doctrine?
FML: My Boss is Younger than Me
I work at PayPal, though not in fraud detection, and it always seems interesting how much bad publicity the company is getting lately. I personally wish they would address the social part of doing business on the web.

There's a reason why the hold explanations are vague but it has nothing to do with questionable intentions.
Considering they offered him a job (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1680265), I don't think they'll block it.
Apple will reportedly use baseband chipset from Qualcomm in 5th gen iPhone
Microsoft's Stephen Elop moves to Nokia -- what a waste
Movex Reviews - Moving - Myspace
I think the point is not that drugs will kill them. The point is drugs can cause serious problems with their lives, and as such still warrant concern. Whether they warrant more concern than something that might kill them is up for debate, but I think it's safe to say if the risk of a certain kind of death is orders of magnitude lower than the risk of drug abuse and life problems because of that abuse, the drugs are more important.
I think the "unfair" is tongue in cheek. It's not that there's an element of fairness, it's just so beneficial that there's really no reason not to do it. Sure, some people might not be able to for personal or family reasons. I think it's like how pg referred to accepting a slot in YC as an IQ test - if you have the opportunity, there's no better possible choice than taking it.

Side question for pg: has anyone ever been offered a slot and declined? At this point with the track record and well-defined nature of the program, I don't see how you could get invited to interview and then not accept.
1) Bug: occasionally, when I mouse over a section, the box that says "5 listings for $61" goes off the edge of the screen for me. [Windows Vista, FireFox 4 beta 4]

2) As a fan of a particular team, I would love to be able to navigate between that team's games without going back to a menu. Maybe have little arrows in the title area next to the team name that say "next home game" and "previous home game".

3) Similarly, on the team list, a checkbox for "home games only" would be nice. I'm not likely to go to away games for my hometown team, but I am likely to want to look through several home games.
Twitter - Movex Reviews - Moving
My local library has an interesting book called "Pure Ketchup" that covers all this and more. Among things that Gladwell didn't talk about is that before tomato ketchup became standard there were dozens of totally different savory sauces called ketchups. From the number of recipes in the list in the back of the book, anchovy ketchup was one of the most popular. One that actually looked good enough that I tried making it was grape ketchup - sort of a runnier, not as sweet grape jam - it is good on turkey instead of cranberry sauce. Judging from the list, our ancestors made ketchup out of nearly anything they could get a hold of.
Oh... right... he doesn't know...

Mark, is that you?
Thanks, that's very good to know. I've made excellent progress on the Perl implementation, doing everything in terms of combinatorics. Much thought has gone into this.

I think before I put up the sandboxed interpreter at fexl.com, I'll just release a tar.gz file of the Perl code. That way I can release something even earlier. Also, it will give me more time to take a look at a case that causes a segmentation fault. One of my test cases is a "metastasis" function which runs forever using an increasing amount of memory. That function is:

Y S f g

Where Y is the fixpoint function, S is the fusion function, and f and g are any functions.

I can limit the evaluation to let's say 3,000,000 cycles, so it does terminate just fine. But at that point I've built a deeply nested data structure in Perl, and when I drop it and the reference count goes to zero, Perl begins freeing that structure recursively. Well, that causes a stack overflow and hence a segmentation fault.

My workaround was to store a pointer to the big structure in a global variable. That way the structure stays live until the program terminates, at which point Perl simply abandons the structure instead of trying to free it recursively.

Of course, I easily avoid this problem in the C implementation because I free structures lazily.

Another workaround is to write a destroy routine which frees a structure non-recursively. I did try that, but the problem is that it goes all the way down, even destroying my standard structures for the Y and I combinators. So it's only something that could be used once during a program run.

In any case I'd rather not put up the sandboxed interpreter until I can get a good handle on the metastasis case. I just need to work around this one issue with Perl.

I think the code will illustrate how easy it is to augment an existing programming language such as Perl or C with a high-order functional interpreter. I'll keep you posted.
Apparently he got a job offer from YouTube: http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/10/youtube-instant-job/
Issue 54028:	Tim's watch is broken
Which of your possessions are manufactured in the US? Not many of mine are. No electronics I can think of, and not my cars or my furniture or 95% of my clothes.

When economic measures seem out of whack with observed reality, one should question what the numbers really mean.
Zooming interface works really well. For example, I like that when zoomed out tickets of a section are grouped together. But performing is a bit slow with a cold client-side cache.

Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled bitmaps)?
HN discussion from when the lower-court ruling came down: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864521
Pay for it.

Seriously -- build an iPhone app that takes pics from seats. Pay people a buck per pick.
No, they observed that First Sale never meant that content couldn't be licensed instead of sold, and applied the test from Wise, which basically says "if you call it a license and your contract treats it like a license, it is in fact a license".
I've been using a slightly different version of that gridding method to multiply numbers since I was in grade 5. Some guy came into school and showed us some "novel math", and it just clicked for me where long multiplication never really had. These days I can do either, but I'm far quicker doing my grids once I learnt how to draw them fast.

If my experience teaches me anything, it's that if these children progressed up through a higher education system similar to what I have, where the people marking your work seem to have some kind of outright fear of the new and different, they're going to take a beating on their grades. At least until it becomes more widely accepted. Would suck to go first.
Apple to end free case program for iPhone 4
> You are assuming that "better fraud detection" means "fraud detection that isn't triggered".

It means "fraud detection that catches actual fraud and doesn't bother me otherwise.

> Credit card companies aren't as concerned about as fraud because they don't lose money, the merchant loses money.

Wrong. The merchant is indemnified against fraud and the CC company takes the loss if the merchant can show that they followed the guidelines in the merchant agreement (essentially: check that the card is signed and the signature on the receipt matches the signature on the card).
I definitely wouldn't consider EA2D a startup, but fortunately the OP left it open ("startup/company").

That being said, I do think we (EA2D) have a lot in common with later-stage startups. Three big factors are our autonomy (near-complete), self-sufficiency (product, dev, marketing, ops, etc. is internal to our studio) and size (just 27 people across all disciplines). I bet our stack more closely resembles that of a startup than that of an enterprise.
Side question for pg: has anyone ever been offered a slot and declined?

I'd be surprised if nobody had ever picked another micro-VC over Y Combinator (in particular, I'd guess that there must be some people who have gone to TechStars). I think YC is fantastic, but it would be crazy to think that YC is the best program for everybody.
The 2.2 stats were updated today:

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

28% on 2.2 and almost 75% on 2.x
TL;DR: Caffeine is apparently

SELECT * FROM BigTable WHERE `Keywords` LIKE '%$query%';
You're forgetting intermediate goods - the fact that your computer monitor is made in China does not imply that all of its internal components are also made there.

You're also forgetting that consumer products are but a portion of total manufacturing output - industrial goods are also an extremely large segment of the market, and one where we have not yet lost the lead to the Chinese.
DynDNS now limits new accounts to only 2 free subdomains.
It is not the first time I read that there's no way to read a certificate from memory in OpenSSL, but it's not true. Here's how to do it: http://gist.github.com/574388

I agree with the opinion, though, because it took me a lot of time to figure this out.
The article says this ruling came from US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Can the case still be appealed, e.g. to the Supreme Court, or what? (I'm not a lawyer.)
"Unfair advantage" is sort of a term-of-art in business. It doesn't mean what it literally suggests. What he is trying to express is that given two equally situated firms, the one in YCombinator is more likely to succeed, and that this advantage is durable against easy attempts to duplicate it short of joining YCombinator yourself.

You will occasionally be asked "What is your unfair advantage?" by business type folks. They are really looking for defensible sources of competitive advantage.

It means something radically different if you are asked the question on a college campus.
No kidding. Accidentally signed up for a 3-year contract once.
Geez, you're still not answering my question about how one was worse than the other, you're just responding with unwarranted patronization and innuendo about "certain people".

I'm the one arguing they're both in the same ballpark. You're the one trying to argue Pinochet was worse.
I used Paypal's Merchant Account. I was already familiar with their consumer version, and the rates are relatively in line with what you'd expect. Most importantly: it was easy to do, I didn't have to talk to anyone on the phone, and it took very little thinking.

I decided I'd do whatever the easiest option was until I was actually making money; then I could switch to the best option. Don't optimize too early - every minute research merchant gateways is a minute not spent selling.
Check this out:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.ht...

http://gulfblog.uga.edu/
Having had to reverse engineer the way openssl generates keys from passphrases for certificates I can attest to the general f'ed upness of openssl.

Why did I have to reverse engineer it?

Because the documentation was both lacking and wrong.
For other people who don't know who Chad Hurley is, he is the CEO of YouTube.
Individual income vs. government borrowing/spending are not the same thing.

Your analogy, corrected:

Today Bob's parents borrowed $100 from Alice and Bob earned $5 on his own. Bob thinks he became $5 richer, Alice is owed $100, and Bob's parents now have more debt.
The sad part is that as far as dictators go that puts him somewhere right around the middle. The "very bad" ones kill hundreds of thousands and the "very very bad" ones kill millions.
There's a difference between delusional psychosis, being socially awkward, and talking to yourself to debug computer problems. However, some might believe it to be a very thin line between psychosis and debugging computer problems aloud.
I've used Fever for well over a year, and I love it. It's much, much better than Google Reader.

(for those who don't know where it is: http://www.feedafever.com/ )
Well it's brilliantly done.
Would like to include it/link it with other stuff at
http://www.irunmywebsite.com/raphael/raphaelsource.php
This is definitely an extremely well-tuned system.
I'm pretty sure you can compute a contour from the raw data much more efficiently.
Unfortunately crude oil at $70 a barrel is probably expensive as fish food.
One thing you want to keep in mind is that it is a pain in the ass to store credit cards. If you handle credit cards at all, you will have to follow the PCI requirements (available at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/). If you are not storing cards, but just passing them right on to some other entity (a third party checkout service, for instance), things aren't as onerous as they are if you are actually storing cards in your database.

If you are going to accept that card now but not charge it for 4-6 weeks, then it would seem at first that you would have to store the cards. For short delays between receiving a card and charging it, one can do an AUTHORIZE first (which returns a reference number from the gateway/processor), and then later do a CAPTURE to actually get the money. For the CAPTURE you specify the reference number of the AUTHORIZE, rather than give the card number, so you can forget the card as soon as you do the AUTHORIZE.

The problem is that AUTHORIZE transactions time out after something like 30 days. Oops.

Some gateway/processors support doing a new charge on a card that you have previously done a transaction with by giving them the reference number for that transaction. They store the complete information for the original transaction, and copy the relevant fields to your new transaction. Payflow Pro (now part of PayPal) supports this, and pretty much any kind of prior transaction can be used. Thus, you could get away without storing cards using Payflow Pro by doing this:

1. Do a $1 AUTHORIZE.

2. VOID the AUTHORIZE. (So as to not tie up $1 of the customer's credit for a month...although I doubt the customer would actually notice that).

3. When you are read to ship, do a new charge, referencing the AUTHORIZE for the cardholder information.

I thought that all the gateways/processors supported something like this, but in a quick (very quick) check of Authorize.net's documentation I did not find it.

If we were selling physical products, I'd do something like the above to avoid storing cards. However, we sell a subscription service, and so need to be able to re-bill customers. The problem with letting, say, Payflow Pro handle the card storage is that it means we are locked into re-billing through them if that's where we did the initial transaction.

BTW, the reason I say "gateway/processor" in everything above is that even though I've been involved in dealing with our payment handling at work for a few years, I still am unclear on just how the payment industry is actually set up. There are a lot of companies that provide multiple services related to payments (gateway, processor, merchant bank, etc.) that things get muddled, and a lot of writing on the subject mix up the various roles. (I think some of this is on purpose to make people think that they need to get all the parts of payment processing from the same company).
Youtube Instant creator gets instant job offer
Same story, but from Wired: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679906
I think people are catching on that building a company that's totally dependent on an third party whose interests aren't intrinsically aligned with yours is dangerous. Sometimes it works out, but it adds a lot of risk.

So, "things built on Twitter" isn't more popular because you're throwing yourself at the whims of another company which isn't a very solid foundation for a business.
Thanks! If anyone sees another FB, twitter, or Google worm spreading send it over to me and I'll be happy to see how that one works too.
It's amazing how much simpler things get if you just rely on Google's already-awesome web search. Allowing apps to be installed over HTTP is the key here--if it can be found at the end of a URL, then it fits into a system we've spend decades refining and are already really damn good at searching.
Or, maybe, just maybe, it's because the average per capita income in China is $6,567, compared to $46,381 in the US?

No, that can't be it. Surely the order of magnitude difference in living cost, lack of safety and labor law has nothing to do with it. Surely it is the "weird pretentiousness of American workers".
Yes, the advantage of gridding seems to be that it decomposes the multiplication into simpler steps.

I would suspect, however, that if you habitually had to do long multiplication, the old method would be faster (precisely because you do a bit more in your head and less on paper). Multiplying two 5 digit numbers involves adding up 5 numbers instead of 25.

But what has changed over the last 40 years is that NOBODY does habitual long multiplication anymore, because calculators are ubiquitous. Therefore, the technique is purely a building step for further understanding, and picking an algorithm optimized for casual users of multiplication is appropriate.
Well, my 'Built on Twitter' micro startup (a twitter client for feature-phones) hasn't been quite a success I was hoping for. It has attracted some users, and still hovers somewhere at the bottom of top 100 clients, but after I realized I don't have a good way to monetize it, I decided to leave it and move to a greener pastures.
The first thing I find interesting is that the iPhone is pretty much the only apple product which you don't really pay a premium for (outside of AT&T's current iphone only phone and data plans). I think this makes it much more competitive in the market place, as opposed to their PCs.

Second is that the iPhone still has a slim apps edge (though its narrowing quickly, Android is very close to parity. One thing that kept many folks on MS products were the apps built for that specific to Windows (Office primarily). I don't think you're going to see the same phenomenon in the mobile app space.

So assuming you see the iphone on another carrier (and soon) I think you'll see the marketplace pretty evenly (50% +- 10) split between iPhone and Android for some time.
WePay is a consumer product that bridges the gap between Paypal and something like BillMonk (https://www.billmonk.com/) or Expensure (http://expensure.com/). With WePay, you can both keep track of and calculate group expenses as well as actually exchange money among a group and make use of it.

You would never want to use WePay to process or receive payments for your product or service.

Braintree serves as a combination of both a merchant account and a payment gateway. For examples of traditional merchant accounts, you could peruse Fee Fighters (http://feefighters.com/ - formerly transfs.com). The most common and most widely known payment gateway is Authorize.net.
I found a site that does this this summer when buying Sounders tickets. It has one panoramic seat view per section rather than per seat, but was fairly representative. I wish I could find it again....
BIAS: I'm an editor on undeadly.org

If anyone is interested, an overview/interview with Marco Peereboom was recently published on the OpenBSD news site.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=201009072...
Agree. He goes from "elite" to "Ivy League" to "Harvard" and stops there. I'd like to see numbers from a broader spectrum of universities.
Ask HN: Are your friends also in the tech space? Do you wish they were/weren't?
I'd say about 75-80% of my friends are teachers. While they are definitely smart, interesting people, they're not the least bit interested in the area of startups, entrepreneurship, emerging technologies etc. In fact, I'd be surprised if they even knew what I really did (I run two startups). None of them know what 'VC' or 'Angel' means. Again, not a knock against them, they are smart, it's just not their domain of expertise or interest.<p>Sometimes I wish I did have a social circle (when I say social circle, I don't mean twitter followers, FB friends etc. I mean people I grew up with, went to school & play hockey with) that was interested or involved in my area of interests because it'd be nice to bounce ideas off people you really like & trust. On the other hand, I guess I also like the fact that I can dis-engage from the world of startups whenever I want and I'm not trapped in a 24/7 echo chamber.<p>Curious if others have similar feelings or thoughts.
StatusNet pass Social Web Acid Test, fully distributed social networking (video)
I wrote 88 words, could you please do me the favor of reading them all? Honestly, there's no need to skim. As I said, manufacturing output has been increasing, but that's in spite of (or perhaps even because of) manufacturing jobs diminishing due to increased efficiency. That can lead and has led to areas of the country that used to be heavily dependent on manufacturing jobs being left at a disadvantage if they fail to adapt to changing circumstances, but that's always true regardless of whether the economy or a particular industrial sector is growing or shrinking.

Moreover, the problems of Detroit and Flynt are not entirely encompassed by the decline of local manufacturing jobs.
Free Stuff: Weekly Freebie Roundup
Medal of Honor Given to Living Soldier
I'm curious: how do you get around crossdomain XHR limitations using <script> tags? Thanks!
I can roll with that, definitely. Take my statement then as a more forward appreciation of what Y-Combinator does as a whole.
Stanford student creates YouTube Instant, gets job offer from YouTube CEO
Top Ten Linux Applications | Top Ten