skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the mail he uploaded from PayPal, it sounds like this is the direct result of a Singaporean financial law. PayPal has to obey the laws in each country it operates in like any other business. If Singapore doesn't allow them to collect donations for non-charity organizations, then they can't. It is neither fair to blame PayPal for that nor to generalize it as a concerted effort to damage all open source projects.

This is the same kind of reaction people had when India blocked PayPal from operating normally (in terms of bank transfers) until it complied with some bank regulations there. Indians blamed PayPal when it was their own government creating the barriers.
Where did they specifically detail that it is an AES cookie encryption attack?
So if you want to claim "fair use" you have to pay for the bandwidth instead of having google pay for it for you. Seems more then fair.
Love this. Well written too.
I disagree. Most of my karma has come from submitting good articles.
My 4 year old had a very strong reaction to a vaccine this year and had to be transferred by ambulance. We have an appointment to special center where they test the vaccine's different components separately. Maybe that could be another option in your case too.

His next vaccine is only at 12 so we could just do nothing but we want to know if tetanus shots could be the culprit because they are often administered following an accident.
Google submitted a native, official Google Voice application to the App Store in the first half of 2009. That application was rejected, though Apple told the press and FCC that it was still "pondering" whether or not to accept it (which was clearly bullshit).

Last week I asked Google if they planned to resubmit/release the official app, and was told that they had nothing to announce at this time.
See Rob Pike's talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE to understand Go in relation to Java.
I apologize for my flippant remark above. People aren't getting what I'm trying to say in this thread, and my remark reflected that.

The key part here is that it's not sustainable long term. It would be silly to optimize for long-term productivity with launch looming and features unimplemented.
That's the other way. The alternate way is to just watch /newest early in the morning for the really good stories.
Maybe it's time to rerun this poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688053
Yeah, that's funny and all...but I'm rather embarrassed for HN's analytical skills right now.

Fifty percent of firm founders are foreign-born you say? OK. What percentage of valley residents are foreign-born? Or, hey...what percentage of foreign-born residents outside the valley start businesses. Without answers to these questions, the 50% stat is just a sound-bite.
Sure, self-awareness is good, usually. He might've been a lot more successful if he had stopped a time or two and really considered things like his strengths and his weaknesses, and figured out that it was good to get people that were good at his weaknesses, and that sort of thing.

But the tongue-in-cheek point is that I'm really beginning to get that all that consideration is just consideration. You still have to do stuff, and the people that I think of as the greatest examples of getting lots of stuff done don't seem to spend too much time dwelling on what they can do different, or on whether it's healthy, or on whether people appreciate it or not.

I can't imagine him wondering anything about his achievements -- even though he probably did occasionally -- because he always seemed to not have the time to wonder about it. He was busy doing stuff instead.
why would anyone in their right mind use a native gmail app when you can use it in to iphone mail client for multiple accounts.
Your first employee is almost closer to a founder than to an employee. It wasn't "HIS" product, which was precisely the problem.
this post is just AWESOME, and i would love to see more things like this on HN.
Ironically, the lack of substance in this article make it seems this it like a "linkbait" rather than the original article the author calls linkbait
Varnish is very attractive, and it is something that my organization is beginning to look at.

But, this appears to be a new blog from Posterous, with this submission being it's first post, and it comes to HN just after Posterous had some, well potentially negative press about their traffic.

Am I off base in asserting that this blog post is a marketing play? And if this isn't their first blog post, please let me know of my grave error (and down-vote me accordingly)

Edit and follow-up: This blog has been around for a while, so I guess I'll sit back and relax. However, I'll still stand behind the marketing assertion.
While there is always room to create your own role depending on what you bring to the table, in my existential struggles on this topic recently I have come to the conclusion that there isn't really a very satisfying role to be had unless you're able to really fill a niche well, or have excellent timing.

People for non-technical roles for startups seem to be much more fungible -- still hard to find great people, but a much larger pool to search from than just for developers.
Running a successful VC firm or at least writing a blog about them seems to help too.
And just to be clear, Apple still hasn't approved Google's GV app, which is what spawned that investigation. Will we see the official GV app approved now as well?
I would love to see this integrated via an API into other sites, as it is definitely the fastest/cleanest image uploading & gallery I've seen to date. Some probably obvious suggestions: different views, display filesize/type info when mousing over an image, zoom in/zoom out, paid-users could have subdomains and gallery names instead of dropmocks.com/XXXX, etc. I envy your sweet design skills and attention to detail in the implementation (left/right/up/down keys work to go through the gallery, nice!). I would imagine you're aware, but be warned that trying to profitably monetize an image hosting site will be hard. Take a look into the guy who started imgur (mrgrim -- http://www.reddit.com/user/MrGrim) for useful insights on image hosting (assuming that's the route you're looking to take, and not a "YouTube Instant job offer").
Most of the VCs who end up on here have yet to generate any really significant returns, some are even under-water.

The really successful VCs are all retired or retiring -- or at the very least, don't blog. :-)
I'm not going to upvote any of these comments just to prove the theory false!
Google Voice app back in the app store
I just received word...

"We just received the latest word that BillMonk is targeted to be back up and operational by Monday (9/20/2010) afternoon. We have done some upgrades and modifications to the software that will make it better than before."
Flexible dates is HUGE, I would plan vacations around cheaper airfare (as long as other circumstances line up too), but in the early stages of vacation planning, cost of flights is a major factor.
This whole process is too self-absorbed for me. There is this urge expressed to focus on things that cannot be measured. So the proffered solution is self-reflection. But just as it is easy for me to conflate reading technical stuff with working, it's also easy for me to find myself reflecting instead of doing.

The solution is measurement. If I want more of X, I need to understand the values of X at time Y such that delta X is always positive. That's where the author and I differ. Without a fuel gauge, I would not know whether or not my car needed attention. My life works like that too.
Snowflakes are all the same melting inorganic matter as each other.

Beauty and uniqueness are simply not automatic for humans.
There are a lot of ways to get karma:

- Be a good, early commenter on a good story. (A bad early comment might get you a ton of downvotes, and a mediocre early comment is likely to be ignored as better comments overtake it.)

- Submit good articles

- Consistently say insightful things. Even if you're not the first to comment, if what you say is really helpful, it'll rocket to the top.
Great story! Impressive that you were able to pull it together all the same.

Two questions:

1) At what stage did you realize that you really wished you had some help?

2) Looking back, what capacity / role do you most wish someone else had been able to fill? All of them, or maybe someone especially to do design for you, or something else...?

Very cool project, followed on Twitter to track those beautiful photos.
writing a Rocky's Boots clone has been on my TODO list for like 10 years, among other things. note to anybody else thinking of making it: I'd buy a copy!
Apple Finally Lets A Google Voice Application Into The App Store (Again)
I think Unix aged better.
Tornado isn't good enough for you? :D
There's no trick to it, it's just a simple trick!
You could do that as an Web-scale HTML5 app with a RESTful API using a NoSQL DB and an awesome MVC DSL, assuming you're doing this all BDD (using Bacaon, of course) and have some ninja Ruby skills.

But I'm betting YAGNI.
> Currently, if I want to use some Microsoft technology i'm forced in to the rest of the ecosystem

You are missing the point. While you won't be persuaded to lock yourself in, countless businesses are already locked in and won't be able to switch from Microsoft precisely because of the way the whole stack is dependent on all of its pieces.

> I want Microsoft to compete for my business with technology that I can deploy without the worry that i'm perennially locked in to one ecosystem and one vendor.

They want the exact opposite.
It doesn't seem like all hot air. Problem is, how to actually apply? Their jobs page doesn't have any links or email addresses.
"Listen to your instincts".

That should be the stock response to just about any question here on HN as you're absolutely correct.

To me, it doesn't "feel" right. I've done the maths, and can see it is certainly more about profit than getting products in front of people.

In reality, I'm not sure that we're even looking for investment...we need mentoring more than money!
We don't shun bikers but we make them pay higher insurance premiums. They mainly endanger themselves anyway. If I take a very selfish viewpoint and I can choose between a collision with a biker vs a car driver I'll pick the one with the less mass.
From 1921 to 1965 immigration was practically nothing.

Uhm, what? Perhaps in raw numbers, but the world wars drove vast numbers of european intellectuals to the US.
They didn't; this commenter has decided that he can easily infer the details of a presentation he hasn't seen from how it's reported in the trade press.
I've seen this nonsense for a few years now in all kinds Architectural publications. One such example: http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity.
Unfortunately, many architects and architecture students would buy any green (or otherwise hyped) BS thrown at them without questioning it.

I think the most prohibitive aspect of the "vertical farming" is the enormous cost (in materials, labor and energy) of building highrises or even buildings of more moderate heights, compared to the cost of growing any legal kind of crop on farmland and shipping it. Structure will have to be significantlly more massive to carry the loads of some soil and water. And not a word about competing land uses in Manhattan... But let's assume we can afford to ship the crop 10 or 30 miles into the city from a place with cheaper land, rather than a 1000 from far far away.

Otherwise, I actually believe the problem of lighting is solvable - for crops that require perhaps 3-10 times as little light as available in an open field on a certain location. Light can penetrate from the sides of the building. A structure shallow ebough compared to the floor height might suffice, say 10-15 meters for a floor 3 meters high. Close to the equator sunlight is abundant so even having less light by an order of magnitude is probably enough for some crops. Further away from the equator it's trickier: the sun is much lower in the south and so more direct sunlight is gained so perhaps only two thirds of it are lost compared to an open field. But then, the structure casts very long shadows which may prevent the land "behind" it from being used for farming (vertical or otherwise).
Journalism Student Won’t Leave Steve Jobs Alone
> He wanted to change the fucking world, and he did.

No. That was Jobs.

> He put a PC in every house.

I believe that would be Jack Tramiel

> it was effective in making and securing Microsoft's dominance.

Sadly, it wasn't nearly as effective in helping people use computers.
I don't get what's wrong with this. At least the requester has some idea of what they want, and it makes sense to me. They just don't understand some basic things about our industry (like "blacker blacks"), nor should we expect them to.

A few minutes on iStockPhoto, a few more minutes in html/css, and you could be done.

Maybe I'll email them, I've already found a couple of candidate images on iStockPhoto.
Write the comment everyone else was coming to write. They'll just upvote you instead.

Not that karma gets you much of anything. I wish I could trade this stuff in, like tickets at the arcade.

http://imgur.com/K9F3a.jpg
It's not enough to simply decide to keep up with "maintenance" and then do it, because if you are the type of person who lacks the discipline to stick to things, you will unconsciously resist any attempt at change. You need the ability to hack your habits.

I've been trying Giles Bowkett's system for building habits based on the "calendar about nothing" for a couple weeks. It seems promising (for example, two weeks is longer than i usually stick to things), but it's too early to tell. I think the key is to change only one thing at a time, until the habit is locked in.
No Reason to Change the Oil Every 3,000 Miles
That doesn't sound like the philosophy behind the Free Software Movement.
Exactly - how to find answers to new problems is huge. That's probably the question that makes or breaks interviews I give to new programmers. If they can't tell me how they'll figure something out on there own, yeah not good. In fact, even just being honest and saying you'd not consider this and weren't sure would be fine too. But you'd be surprised how many people how no real answer or scramble something out that doesn't quite cover it.

The funny thing is - esp. depending on how old you are - it is incredible how much easier it is to learn/find answers now. Pre-google it was tough - I frequented Barns & Nobles often to see what new books had arrived, or just to go find an answer in a book I knew they had.

But I digress... google/stackoverflow/etc have all made our lives so much easier.
Where there is a will there is a way.

You need a good lawyer, an investor willing to commit $200,000 (you might be able to get away with less) to the business so your cofounder can file for the visa for you, and the willingness to put your future in the hands of the cofounder, since they'll have ownership of the company on paper until you get your green card (You need a separate business agreement governing the business setup after you become a citizen)

Also do yourself a favor and get a Master's degree so you can file in the EB2 category (speeds up your green card process).
I think it is. Never before have I seen a company's website with so much pomp and so little substance. Going on and on about your name and typefaces, things which appear to have absolutely nothing at all to do with the main business, tops it off.
Here’s the best way to value your startup
Apple's Guide to Developing with MacRuby
You have their deck or their paper? URL? I'd be interested in reading the actual material.

You have it, right? You sound like you do.
While JavaScript is now a bit faster than ActionScript in some browsers, I think most benchmarks are still showing that Flash Player renders graphics faster than Canvas.

Is there any part of Logicly in particular that felt slow to you? Please note that signal propagation does intentionally limit the speed of the simulation at the moment. However, dragging objects around on the design canvas felt exactly the same to me when I tried it in both Logicly and QuickFuse in Flash Player 10.1 and Chrome 6 respectively.
It seems to me that in a world with absolute freedom when it comes to software, it would be perfectly fine to conceal source code. If not, that would imply that the string of bits encoded onto your personal hard drive in your house would be an infringement on others' freedom to have access to that data. Free software in that regard is incompatible with privacy and property rights.
Wow, I have to say, that's pretty nice. It doesn't like me trying to drag images around that are already there. I expected it to let me re-order them.

But for a 'weekend' project, that's pretty impressive.
I wonder how I might have any details about this. I mean, I'm just some random guy on the Internet just like you. Surely we must come to our convictions about things, like CBC padding attacks or web frameworks or the best internal temperature to cook meat to, the exact same way.

I think it's classy to call out two people you don't know as grandstanding opportunists based on zero knowledge of what it was they were doing and then argue with the guy who calls you out on it. I'm weird that way. I'm going to get downmodded for being a snarky asshole here, but they'll be negative karma points well worth it for my sanity.
So do those 8 machines and the code on it represent the system before or after the Wamu merger, or something in between? I've heard many of these banks such as Citigroup have something like 13 different databases or systems, many of which duplicate functionality.
Not exactly apple to orange, but more Facebook to LinkedIn?

A social network's content is its people. I think Tumblr did well targeting the casual crowd. Posterous blogs that I come across, on the other hand, are very "merit-arian," so to speak. Lots of industry focused minds on there that is famous not because of Posterous, but because they are also high in some other circle. In this case, Posterous is only providing them with the tools, with a small Posterous ad attached.

I wouldn't want to see them sacrificing that just to beat Tumblr.
Mckarthy Online Shop
Anyone know if there was originally an official Google App and any scuttlebutt on its likely return?

I use Google Voice heavily and with the gtalk integration it is getting more and more useful. I still use Skype more though - probably from habit more than anything.
No. I won't even tell my current employer.

I wrote a simple site with a very sketchy name. Many of us work used the site, even at work. My immediate boss knew of the site (and used it) but it went no further than that... And only because we knew he'd be cool with it.

If I ever put it in my portfolio, I'll change any of the code that references the name and not say where it's currently hosted. But I probably just won't mention it.
hey sabj email me: sumon@quid.com if you want to fwd to the right person. We're working on some serious data crunching, and algorithms.
Two Startups Point To Semantic Search’s Future
Mean Center of U.S. Population Over Time
It might be appreciated, but it doesn't go without saying. I used to spend more than that each month on dedicated servers and the hosts (I used a few at the time) generally had a policy that you had to cancel a few days before the renewal to get out that month. If you missed it, then you could still cancel, but you had the server till the end of the month. Seemed quite acceptable to me as a customer.
Hilarious. Only issue is that it doesn't let you click on the text (or giant star) and you have to click on the background. Took a second to figure out why would sometimes take a click and sometimes not.
The Second Serve Problem
Tolls instead of traffic jams
Indeed, we're building, so we (the devs) didn't spend too much time polishing the jobs page. Email (ben|jobs)@quid.com
Sounds pretty serious.
In a talk last year at (I think) the business of software conference, PG said, among other things, that business schools are useless because successful business people don't waste their time teaching business in business schools, and instead either run their business or enjoy the fruits of their success (another song to the tune of "those who can't, teach").

His depiction of university professors accurately describes most bloggers.
I'm driving down from SF, room for 3. tim@mixpanel.com
Video demonstrates server compromise with new ASP.NET platform vulnerability.
The question about Diaspora is about their requiring assignment of the copyright. That is, the project requires contributors to give away their ownership of what they wrote, so that the project owns it and can re-license at will.
That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions involving bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people it, I'm certain that the total number of people infected is at least an order of magnitude higher. 500,000 people in the US is about one in 600, making it an uncommon but not especially rare disease.
The U.K. phone-hacking scandal is Rupert Murdoch's Watergate
Is there a way to send the results of a search to someone via e-mail or post it on Facebook/Twitter? I'd love to be able to send an itinerary to my Mom for her to purchase (she foots Thanksgiving trips home) or be able to say "hey, everyone, these are the flights I'm considering taking to NYC/SXSW/whatever - what do you think before we all book?"
I'd want to know where the company is located before applying, but I cannot find any mention of the location the website. Perhaps that's a test and I failed.
Extremely cool, and the speed is more than impressive.

He also seems to be suffering from 'death by HN', the server is more 'down' than 'up', keep retrying and it will come up.

That Aphex Twin face is on a log scale, not a lin scale, on a log scale it looks much better.
Going on about the typeface is probably overkill, but I think we can assume there must be a serious typography geek involved.

There isn't much substance there, but the company appears to be in a pseudo-stealth mode where they don't especially want to tell you exactly what they do or to sell it to you. They do, however, want you to know that they're all very clever, and that's exactly the impression which their site manages to convey. They use the word "lacuna" on their front page, for crying out loud! Who uses the word "lacuna"?

Actually, I thought that this:

Oh, and I almost forgot, good news for those who have recently finished their Rhodes Scholarships in Classics/Particle Physics and are looking for a gig in between singing in an Art Rock band, learning their 16th language and joining the French Foreign Legion! Quid is hiring.

sounded sufficiently enticing that I thought about applying, but turns out you also need to know Javascript and Rails.
Philips and Fraunhofer have a whole pile of patents on audio fingerprinting, it would be hard to not violate any patents in this subfield.
You can conceal any code you write from scratch, but you can't build onto GPL code for free without agreeing to reciprocate. It seems a fair exchange to me.
Good point. We're in SF.
What makes you think he wanted to add humour? Granted, the previous clip was from a comedy, but it was there as inspiration for commentary. It wasn't a tack-on joke.

The clip in question this time appears to have been an excerpt from The Last King of Scotland regarding actionable advice. It was denied by Fox - I got the impression that it's a group-wide policy.
Not as serious as a certain satellite radio company.