skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This doesn't bother me. If my website got delisted from Google, I'd find traffic in some other way. If my ads didn't get run by Google, I'd just advertise somewhere else.

Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, and they sell you their product, and it's often a good deal for both sides. Google is just like this, except smaller.

In the IT industry, we like to think that Google is important. We see their logo a lot, we hear how nice it is to work there... but they are really small potatoes. Advertising is nothing. Giving people money, giving people drugs, selling gasoline, shipping books to your house overnight, and making light bulbs and jet engines is a lot more profitable than sending clicks to your website. Sorry, that's the reality... there is a lot more evil to be done in the world than Google is capable of. (Look at the number of Fortune 500 companies that are primarily military contractors. Their corporate mandate is to cause people to die as efficiently as possible -- Google manages your RSS feeds and cat pictures! Sorry, not evil.)

(Why isn't Google as heavily regulated as banks? Because they really don't matter that much. Yeah, you can search for your name on Google and see content that you put up on the web under your name. But the banks collect information about you, to make business decisions, without you ever even knowing. Right now, their computers are deciding whether or not you are a credit risk, and if they decide you are, they are canceling your credit card. That vacation you wanted? Gone. That house you wanted? Never. That's power that Google simply doesn't even come close to having!)
What disagreement? There are two package formats in large use, rpm and deb. Many software are distributed upstream as .deb or .rpm and you're free to use them that way. But this fly in the face of ease of administration and easy maintenance. It's OK for personal machine, but it simply isn't acceptable for any professional setup.
> I'd rather use languages and techniques I'm used to

This makes you sound incredibly unmotivated and lazy. FYI.

Running a scripting language VM is massive overhead on little devices like these. Consider that the Arduino, last I checked, has 16k of code space, and most microcontrollers are in the same range. The Python VM itself is already measured in megabytes. You're going to have to take several steps up the ladder in terms of hardware.

For further information:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/EmbeddedPython
Maybe RedHat, but it's about it. Even Debian Stable comes with 2.5.

BTW this rant about impossibility to upgrade is a classic one and nonetheless wrong. You're perfectly able to install new versions of python, or perl or whatever given that you do that in /usr/local to keep the official version alongside the new one. I do this all the time, my system comes with perl 5.10 but I regularly install the newest releases in /usr/local, or even development versions. No problem.
Hyderabad Tourisam
Dialuz, local search engine, a provider of B2B2C features services through a user friendly website www.dialuz.com . Get contact address, phone number, mobile number, mail address and more by this local search solution.
Their name is well-established, it is true. However, I gather the hope is that an actual brand image (e.g. "Pepsi") rather than a household word (such as 'a coke' referring to many different sodas, or "Kleenex" referring to all things facial tissue) will help combat the clones and rip-offs. Perhaps if only because customers will expect to see the company logo stamped on 'quality' hardware.
According to http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html most people use Twitter's web client.
What an exceptionally helpful tool! thanks.
Yeah, totally irrelevant. Today's servers are powered by pixie dust and rainbows instead of batteries and circuit boards. I learned nothing from this article!
For the people who are unhappy about the lack of "attribution", it seems almost as silly as complaining you can't see what web browser was used to submit a tweet via the website.

While it may have been interesting to see, I think there is a perfectly reasonable argument to be made for simplifying an interface and removing as much noise as is possible (especially as they've added so much information/noise to the new interface).
Show HN: an order-preserving JSON encoding (so byte-order == value-order)
If you're selling physical goods make sure that the intended recipient and the shipping information they give you are one and the same entity.

This makes it harder to ship presents and stuff like that but when shipping goods the majority of the fraud is done by redirecting the goods to a 'drop' and then making off with the loot.

Make sure you use a delivery method that asks for a signature of the recipient, make 100% sure that they will honor your request to ID the recipient and to make sure that the names match.

Don't leave more balance in your paypal account than you need.

You can't really say how long it will take paypal to detect fraud, that's more up to you than up to them, if there is no fraud to detect you'll be fine, if people start using stolen paypal accounts and/or cards to order your stuff the ban hammer would come down without any warning whatsoever.

There is no hard knowledge out there what it takes for paypal to block your account but typical merchant account checks include < 1% of total charges, anything over that and you're suspect / liable to be axed.

I hope that helps.

Oh, and it's 'courses', not 'curses' (that goes for 'crash curse' too ;))
On a somewhat related but more "accessible" possibility, I recently discovered you can do a trick with register_shutdown_function, remove the execution time limit and then disconnect the web client entirely, while continuing processing.

So using ajax on the client side, you could say open a dozen connections and purposely disconnect them while continuing processing, technically in parallel (though not in the same process).

Can't fathom a practical use for this at the moment but it's still an interesting ability.
I don't understand this perspective... I was confused at first, but I read about the first third of the couchDB book and then got it, and now I am excited that a "distributed map reduce system in erlang" (or javascript) is a much better solution- essentially my query results are pre-computed by mapreduce and this should make performance much better.

This is a lot easier than trying to figure out how to make SQL queries that will be performant or optimizing them later... in a previous startup we lost about 18 months solving this very problem. In fact, I see map reduce as a competitive advantage.

Maybe I'm a fool... I hope not.
How often have you heard or read about a piece of software that someone developed only because it could be protected by a software patent, about a software innovation that would have been too costly to develop if it couldn't be protected by patents?

And on the other hand, how often have you heard or read about programmers and companies worrying about unknowingly infringing on software patents, about companies getting sued by other companies that turn whole fields of software into minefields, or about developers or companies that couldn't (afford to) implement the best known algorithm for an application, because someone else had been granted a monopoly on using that algorithm.
I'm sure most of their operations are still running on this hardware.
That's a very misleading graph. It's not about how many people read tweets through the different channels.

There are many reasons to log into twitter.com, and so the graph needs to break out (or at least explicitely state) how many people read tweets on twitter.com.

Another, more important, point: there is probably a long tail effect here. I have a hunch that when you aggregate all reading via API vs reading via the web, the breakdown would show a huge API to web ratio.
I think a lot of hackers may think they're programming for 8-hours straight, but if they actually measured it, it wouldn't be anywhere close. RescueTime did a survey of YCombinator companies once, and nobody hit 10 hours a day of pure, typing-in-editor coding time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195

Now, it's now 1:00 AM, and I'm still coding stuff for work, having been at it since about noon. But that wasn't even close to continuous coding time. There was a break for the massage chair in there, and a break for beer o'clock, and a break for snacks, and a discussion with the Dojo guy and the GMail guy and the Docs girl about JavaScript, and a break for air hockey, and a break for chinese take-out & D&D, and a few Hacker News sessions. I find that the most I can do in a continuous stretch is about 2-3 hours. I can fit a few of those into a day, but I rarely manage more than 7 hours of actual coding time per 24-hour period.
IIRC, I think I analyzed and organized those pages in 2007. Looks like the big ones (XSS, injection) are still pretty much the same. In fact, looks like most of my work is pretty much the same, but some shiny new graphics have been added. :)

You'd be surprised at the number of pages I come across that still have these basic insecurities. Thankfully, automatic checking is making really basic CSRF attacks less prevalent.

I'm sure tptacek or someone more familiar with the current hotlist would have more to say, though.
Also, sparkfun has much more compelling hardware offerings that have much smaller and useful form-factors that are pin-compatable with the arduino hardware (just not form-compatable).
No, just broken.
We're planning to use the shipping address returned from Paypal as-is (and not querying from our side), mostly for stripping the funnel to it's bare minimum -is that kosher?

Definitely signed-for. Other than Nigeria (which I'm quite keen on blacklisting, as a whole), any particular countries which we should be careful about?
Twitter.com uses their own API now. Shutting it off would be a bad idea. :)
The Infocom games are just as good as ever. And the graphics are still top-notch.
No, it isn't universal, even in our universe. If you go and draw a circle on the surface of the Earth, with a 1km diameter, the ratio of the diameter to the circumference will not be pi, due to the curvature of the Earth's surface. I suppose that you could say that I wasn't measuring the right diameter in this case, and that the true diameter passes underneath the surface of the Earth. But there is an similar deformation introduced by the curvature of spacetime caused by the Earth's mass, so you still won't get pi as a result when measuring the ratio between the circumference and the diameter.

That said, I would very much like to understand why c = 2 x pi x r actually works. pi itself can be derived from pure mathematics, knowing the relationship e^(i x pi) = -1. So why a circle should have such a relationship with this constant is to me a fascinating question.
Home Contest
SMS is the ugly step-child of international communications, a thing that should cost $0, and should be easy has been made in to a nightmare to deploy and a patchwork of carrier related troubles.

I can fully understand their decision to go US only for now, but I really hope that at some point they'll be able to roll this out reliably world-wide, that alone would lay the world literally at their feet.

So many services are now hard to impossible to implement because there is no easy way of doing this, in my own site I would have several applications for it right away but only if I can guarantee international delivery.
many people learn many different ways. once you've attempted to try and teach/show people, you'll hopefully see this first hand. there is no such thing as a single pedagogy that applies to everyone with the same effectiveness.

everyone is always at a different level, and people pick things up at different speeds as well. i learned to snowboard in less than 8 hours. yet i've gone off and on with ruby/rails for over a year and still can't get the hang of it with any fluency. different strokes for arnold and willis.
Jack London for older boys? Maybe his later works... I re-read The Call of the Wild last year, and it practically reads like a children's book.
maybe this? http://www.stackfoundry.com/beagle_hardhat/
Kind sir, have a look at http://www.python.org/
It's a too little sample to be statistically significant in any way, but I find interesting that no two men have the same favorite symbol, while both the women coincidentally chose infinity and what its symbol represents.
A lot of our client contracts include mutual "no poaching" clauses. Obviously we are a lot smaller, but what determines when this is OK and when it's not?
The Spectrum came out in 1982, immediately rendering my almost-new ZX81 obsolete, even though it had a full 1K ram.

Colour! It was almost too good to be true. I had to live with my ZX81 until the family purchased an Amiga on their release in 1985. Now that was an upgrade.
> We're planning to use the shipping address returned from Paypal as-is (and not querying from our side), mostly for stripping the funnel to it's bare minimum -is that kosher?

Yes, it's kosher, but there are a number of checks you can't do like that (such as doing geo verification of the IP, email verification).

Those go a long way in screening out fraudulent charges.

Presumably paypal has already done a bunch of that, but if the shipping address paypal gives you does not match the geolocation of the IP and residential information of the account holder (not always the same as the shipping address!) within reason that would be a great reason not to ship.

> any particular countries which we should be careful about?

Yes, but that's going to make me a lot of enemies here ;)

Until you have the fraud angle worked out and have ways to monitor and predict risky transactions I would stick to the US initially, the roll out in Europe, one country at a time, after that Japan, and I'd leave it like that for a long time to come.

This is not because I do not like people from other countries (rather the opposite), but because combating fraud is a percentage game and one fraudulent transaction can eat up the profits of 10 or more good ones if you're in to physical goods (depending on your margin of course), as well as cause you to be banned, which is a risk not worth taking.
I like the style. How do you get the news - just what is entered into the system?
I think the real real problem is that assuming a "package maintainer" must exist for every single goddamn software package for every single goddamn Linux distribution has very obvious human scalability problems.

Just because an infinite number of monkeys appeared to create Debian does not mean it is a safe assumption to assume that there are many other groups of infinite monkeys out there to support every other software ecosystem.

Eventually, the Linux community will figure out that they've run out of bodies to build the same crap over-and-over and 'binary compatibility' will stop being a dirty word.
I don't use any, but I expect to see more of them in the future. I think GMail is an offline web app? I am not a GMail user.

It hasn't been so long that browsers come with the necessary APIs. GMail used their own plugin in the beginning (Google Gears).
This is going in a great direction, everything worked form me.

I would like to suggest a future direction: be inspired by the Windows 7 Phone and Playstation 3 interfaces and make different branches for different topics. For example, All tech stories would be on the right of the centre, all current affairs stories would be on the left of the centre and pressing some button would bring me back to the beginning; better yet would be if there was a simply a grid for website types, so all stories along a particular line would be of a particular field and the user could customise this and moving arrows up or down would change website type.

Check out the BlueBottle OS (A research OS at ETH zurich) that a zoom based window manager. A video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU
I can understand your frustration. I've had nothing but great experiences with Odesk though. Quite scary hearing your story though.

Hopefully you'll get your money back
It bothers me a little bit that they are not opening the KDK for all people at the same time. Nevertheless, I expect to experiment with Kindle apps in the future (if they ever let normal guys into the developer program).
A second strike to Twitterific, whose name wasn't mentioned in the #newtitter newsletter, instead some clients less known were listed.

Twitterific is Twitter for iPhone and iPads biggest competitor, so I see why, but it still is kinda evil.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but get a new hobby.

By which I mean, if your life as you're living it isn't providing itches that you need to scratch with software, a new hobby might provide some. Or, you might spot an unserved opportunity or market.
This may be a little off topic, but it occured to me that Nethack is probably the most fun a blind person can have with a video game.
www.tropo.com and www.teleku.com does both international voice and SMS I believe. There's also www.cloudvox.com, but I'm unsure if they also support international.
I'm not tired of 2D side scrollers. I was so happy with the New Super Mario Brothers Wii. A trend I've noticed is that games who want to be modern but also 2D, simply render sprites in 3D but keep the game play 2D. (kirby 64 crystal shards, super smash brothers). It's great to see 2D gameplay is not dead.
It's funny to me to see people prizeing their tweets so highly.

I reviewed mine a while back and realised they were inconsequential drivel, so I deleted them along with the account. Now I have a read-only account for reading the tweets of some folk who tend to be funny to read. No techies trying to demonstrate value, no not-that-interesting acquaintances, no naive political rants from relatives - much better.
Indeed. I think google might be falling into the trap of believing that the better search is the one with more results when in many, most?, cases the exact opposite is the case.
Today is your last day to apply to Startup School
The general idea is that an identity can have credit applied to it in many different ways. Loans would probably be pretty tough to exploit, since it's the bank's money you'd be stealing and they would take measures against that. The government, however, is much less efficient and just plain terrible at countering fraud.

Medicare fraud, for example, is pretty huge right now. Of the $500,000,000,000 that government pays out annually, it's estimated 10% of that is fraud. Pretty insane stuff.

Scammers will set up a medical equipment storefront (to collect checks... they are never open), signed off by a crooked, made up, or identity-stolen doctor. Then, they'll buy lists of information online (SSN + DOB + Medicare ID), and issue fraudulent charges to that person's Medicare account. Expensive things, like prosthetic arms and such. Medicare is required to reimburse the storefront the cost of the item within 60 days (it used to be 30 days, until Obamacare passed). The fraud detection is so bad at Medicare, that even when people actively report the fraudulent charges (imagine getting a Medicare invoice that says you've required 4 new arms this month), the crooks still get away.

The thieves run through a few of their stolen identity lists, cash those checks, close up shop, open up a new shop down the block, and repeat.

This is essentially a summary of what I saw on 60 minutes a month ago, so you should do some fact checking. I would also imagine a similar process would work for any government subsidized program, like welfare.
A tangent on doodles. Apparently doodling has been shown to be a mental self-defence mechanism. By engaging some small part of the mind in a boring situation it enables you to continue paying attention at the same time rather than check out completely into a daydream.

Wired article summary with citation of the research paper:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/doodlerecall/
> Why [should] a circle should have such a relationship with this constant?

Because the "circles" we talk about in mathematics are found in Euclidean space—which is defined to have simple metric properties. Our own space is non-Euclidean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_space
People don't search facebook much. If anything, facebook is hostile to search, seemingly by design.

The secret of ad dollars is that not all visitors are equal. People who use google search are already looking for something, often something to buy, such users are the most susceptible to ads because the ads can actually be helpful. In contrast, ads inserted into the UI of a social networking site are far less valuable. In order for facebook to compete with google they'd have to reinvent themselves substantially.
Guys, I need to back Jeff up on this.

SMS is just a huge pain in the ass. The carriers have a strangle-hold over this and can cut messages off on a whim. We had an experience once with Verizon where they "accidentally" cut-off our short-code to Poll Everywhere on a Friday evening due to some "clerical errors". 72 hours later they finally had somebody "fix" the situation (support doesn't work on weekends there), and in the meantime we were left in a really bad place trying to explain to our customers how Verizon screwed us over.

I've dealt with some total dopes at Celltrust (I need to call these guys out, they're atrociously bad. Please don't do business with them unless you absolutely have to) where our service to Canada was entirely out for a week because they changed how their API worked. They failed to communicate that to us and nobody at their company could tell me how it worked so I had to fire up nc -l, point their gateway at that server, find somebody from Canada who could send a text, and see what came in. After the fact, I told them how horrible the experience was and provided recommendations on how they could improve it. They threatened to cut us off as a client because they felt I was being mean to them instead of acting on the feedback that could have made their service better.

Twilio thinks this is assine and are trying to change how this all works. We've shared with them the pains we've experienced with SMS aggregators and they share the same thoughts with us that its a totally unnecessary amount of pain that developers face to build SMS applications. They're really trying to make this easier and lower the bar.

Anthony, while your experience wasn't that hot, it was far and above what you'd experience elsewhere. At least Jeff acknowledges that Twilio could do better. That is so far above and beyond anything else in the industry. Throw on top of that an amazingly well executed API and the drive to make a difference in this industry and you're in good hands.