skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have absolutely no doubt that the most evil words in the english language are "I'm just doing my job". It speaks of the profoundest moral cowardice, a complete abrogation of personal responsibility.

Zimbardo showed that the inevitable consequence of unchecked authority is abuse. Milgram showed that a large proportion of us will do just about anything to our fellow man because someone with a clipboard says so. Asch showed us that we will swear that black is white if we are surrounded by people who tell us so.

This isn't about emotion or politics, it is about some basic psychological facts. If you give a man a badge and a hat he will start beating people down the moment you turn your back. If you give a man the authority to do "whatever is necessary", that authority will be extended to dominate and control as far as is possible. If you tell a man "You have no other choice, you must go on", he will kill in cold blood.

All preventable deaths are unfortunate, but deaths due to terrorism are incredibly rare. Even in the most violent and chaotic places on earth, road traffic accidents dwarf the death toll due to terrorism. If we cared about the preservation of human life, we would spend the TSA's budget on eliminating malaria, tuberculosis and infant diarrhea. If we cared about saving western lives, we would spend the money on public health education and support, road traffic safety, school meals and so on.

It is clear that we're not acting rationally. In response to an extremely rare risk, we are spending countless billions on largely ineffective responses and sacrificing civil liberties on a grand scale. This isn't just about body-scanners, it's about extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the criminalisation of photography and who the hell knows what else. Whatever argument might be made for the TSA, it is absolutely bogus to suggest that they are in any way a rational or proportional response to risk.

Every dollar that we spend on building scanners or spying on students is a dollar that we can't spend on feeding schoolkids or preventing diabetes or making roads safer. Government spending is finite and every dollar of the TSA's budget is money that could be spent much more effectively and save far more lives.
OpenStudy To Help OCW Users Study Together
Technically, this is true. Being based in Luxembourg, however, effectively abrogates the effect of the regulatory aspect of things. I am not au fait with the ins and outs of Luxembourg's banking laws, but I do know it is a grey area of banking in the wider scene. Countries that tax worldwide income (e.g., US, Germany) routinely decry Luxembourg as a tax haven. I suspect, therefore, that Luxembourg does not regulate or apply its laws to commerce that occurs outside its borders. As I noted in the last round of "Paypal-was-architected-by-robber-barrons", Amazon in Europe is also incorporated in Luxembourg. Aside from its proximity to Brussels and being at the centre of western Europe, this is almost certainly for tax reasons. That is, they don't ship (or ship pitifully little) to Luxembourg itself and so pay considerably less in taxes than they otherwise might. Similar, though considerably less convenient, havens also include Jersey, Gibraltar, and Cyprus, all semi-autonomous regions belonging to the UK that attract businesses by taxing only commerce that occurs between two parties within their borders.

FWIW, I wouldn't touch PayPal with a barge pole. We use RBS WorldPay because
1. we get favourable terms as we have an account with RBS,
2. we get 1% transaction costs with no monthly fees,and
3. we get fraud protection by RBS WorldPay for free.

The tech folk at RBSWP are not the sharpest tools in the shed, but RBSWP itself has proven to be good for us financially. Another one that is quite popular but whose breadth of availability I do not know is SagePay.
Don't get me started on stupid quasi-legal disclaimers!
Hey all, What do you think of this as a summarizer/speedreader? What in your opinion would be good applications to such speedreading?
>> Google does not really understand language

I used to believe, like you do, that the ability to parse and make decisions based on input was not the same thing as understanding.

Then, I wrote a chess bot for a CS lab. The thing plays better than me, better than it's peers. My partner, who was good at chess (or at least very literate in it) could identify what strategies it was going for. We had a visualization of what moves it was considering, and you could see that it was essentially playing chess by swinging a baseball bat around and seeing what looked nice.

Does the chessbot "understand" chess? It sure seems like it. We like to think humans are special, and have some kind of unique understanding that computers can't, but I think it's only us lying to ourselves.
This may help: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/employee-equity-options.html
Sins of a Solar Empire, Mount and Blade, or an RPG - I loved the Neverwinter series, and I can't wait for Fable 3 to come out for PC....
Talking about Ancient Gods: http://www.cthulhu.org/
We're talking pre-launch here. From the sounds of it, the value created thus far is negligible in the larger scheme of things.
personally I feel like the whole threat of terrorism is overblown. If they were a real threat we'd see more attacks on U.S. soil. There are a ton of soft targets like malls, subways, schools that aren't protected.

Instead the only attacks on the U.S. soil, seem to come from people who think they are joining a movement. It's always some incompetent dumbass, who got brainwashed by the media frenzy, with no actual connections to actual terrorists.

Hell, the reason 911 happened was because everyone in this country was told to just sit down and wait to get rescued. If someone tried to hijack a plane now with box cutters, they'd get their asses kicked by everyone on the plane.
There are more significant issues than just losing face. Being at the head of a company is a huge responsibility because you have to deal with your employees welfare. Now, it may sound like anywhere else, but Japanese society takes responsibility very seriously. It goes both ways, but it means that the whole idea of having a small company for a couple of months and scrapping it if it does not work is not really doable if you need other people to work with you. You will look like a joke.

Also, being fired is still a significant stigma in Japan. Not just socially (which matters a lot), but also practically because most jobs openings in Japan happen twice a year, and because most big companies hate people who have "hole" in their career, even if that's only a few months.
Let me provide an equally anecdotal, opposite preference:

Please please please, don't make me create an account on Yet Another Website. Your little website isn't compelling enough for me to do that. I'd much rather just use my Facebook or Twitter account.

(note, this is actually exactly how I feel, I'm not playing devil's advocate.)
Machine Vision Software for Water Measurement
Getting the young to have the experiences of the older and wiser is never going to happen. It is more productive to retain or regain whatever you consider the value of being young into old age. Personally, except for some aches and pains in my joints, I haven't noticed any real decrease in any of my abilities as I have gotten older.
After a few bad experiences with Paypal, I always use wire transfer when paying someone else or being paid as a freelancer... It works well, it's more often than not cheaper than Paypal and anyone who has a bank account can receive wire transfers.
(time (my-function))

is a pretty horrible example because i can instrument my java code with a single annotation, which is far less brittle.
My pat down did take 20 minutes. It was done by another person while the original person kept their original job. There was a backlog of people who refused to go through the "naked machine". And, yes, the whole line did bottleneck.
I would honestly answer "It's good at removing complexity from your programs". People adopted OO because it eliminated certain forms of incidental complexity from their applications. People adopted GCed languages because it eliminated a particular serious form of incidental complexity for many applications.

Clojure is good at taking the elements of OO that are sound and ruthlessly removing the ones that introduce complexity. Especially those problems which cause incidental complexity to explode under concurrency.
Great looking app. I'm having trouble adding users to a project after it has been created, using chrome 6.0. Later, it would also be useful to add users without an account via email invites from within a project to people that don't have an account yet.
That's never happened to me. Sorry it happened to you. I invariably refuse the strip search.
How do the madmen reach me?
Re-read the question. It is early. The code hasn't been written. The risk is still astronomical.
I don't think that's good advice.
Does this percentage include other applying co-founders in the application, or just the lead applicants?
Beautiful app.

It would be cool if you could assign an arbitrary numeric value to a "post" and display a running total. For example, set the value of a post to 4 and ask the team members to check in twice a day.

This gives you a rough idea of the time spent so far (and perhaps time remaining) without any additional effort on the part of the team and lets you dial-in the granularity on the human side of things.
CSS grids are trivial to write. They consist of three major declaration types:

.row { width: ?px; clear: left; }

.col-1, .col-2.... { margin: ?px; float: left }

.col-1 { width: ?px; } .col-2 { width: ?px; }

Why do I bring this up? Because it is so simple to write these, it almost never makes sense to use a framework. If I ever want a grid for a particular project, I write it custom with a little help from excel.

This allows me to build mini-grid frameworks for whatever container width I need. This way I don't abandon separation of content from presentation across a whole site -- just on a particular page.
Immigration about to kick Hackers for Charity out of Uganda
Thanks for your feedback! We can be contacted at contact@splendidbacon.com
Plus: Shannon, Claude E., The Synthesis of Two Terminal Switching Circuits, Bell System Technical Journal, 28: 1. January 1949, http://bstj.bell-labs.com/BSTJ/images/Vol28/bstj28-1-59.pdf
Here's the thing though: when the bank made a mistake, you had recourse. You actually had someone to complain to - you could go to a branch or otherwise deal with a human. With paypal, you have no recourse, except to hope your case gets voted to the top of Reddit and some paypal insider takes pity on you.
Fares are slightly higher than PayPal

I wouldn't mind paying slightly more than what Paypal charges, but 5.9% + $0.95 vs. Paypal's 2.9% + $0.30 (or less) isn't slightly more -- it's more than twice as much.

If you look at how much of a cut they take after covering credit card interchange fees, fastspring charging as much as 5x as much as paypal.
You mean, like a homepage?

But seriously: I can understand people use URL shorteners to twitter ephemeral links, and pastebin for syntax-colored code copy&paste. But special-purpose hosting for something slowly-changing like contact information?
I have a workaround for this. My sig is three lines, of which I often omit one on the fly as I send emails:
1) My full name and email user name
2) One organizational affiliation (deleted as needed)
3) Another organizational affiliation (deleted as needed)

For some emails I write for the organization in line 2 on its internal email list, I add a standard disclaimer in one line in place of the organization mentioned in line 3.

If I'm writing a personal email to a person who for business or personal reasons may need to contact me again, then I paste in the BODY of the email a text file of a few lines that gives my full name, postal address in standard format, and telephone numbers (land line and mobile), and also repeats my email address. That reduces the number of emails I get from people who would just be looking for my phone number (for example, from other parents whose children are on the same soccer team as my children, or from new business clients).
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4c2d972868f17cdc
That's an interesting idea! We'll think about it! Thank you!
> Certainly PayPal has never gratuitously deducted money from my account.

I'm happy for you and hope that you will never be in my shoes.
one of the issues I have with CSS frameworks is that they typically remove semantics from the layout.
I have seen several. There is little to no change reported in most as a direct result of age. Most of the changes reported are the result of families and jobs.
Or people will just stop using planes. I started driving when I need to go anywhere now. I really enjoy it. I can make it from my place in Florida to my fathers home in Montreal Canada in less than 2 days. That's no worse than spending an entire day in the airport. At least in the car I get a comfortable seat, radio, and a nice scenery.
You find that funny?
This already exists. For sending money to a friends account you just log in to the bank website, type their bank account number and the amount and voila.

For sending money to companies there is something called iDEAL. On the company's website you click checkout and you get sent to your bank's website where you get a page with the amount and a button to confirm. Unfortunately this iDEAL system is currently only available in the Netherlands.
While web services don't have similar monetization options (quite few services survive having a paywall, leaving advertisement as the only common monetization model), the clear advantage is the cross-platform aspect. We had some discussion about this regarding Linux desktops recently:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/the_web_and_the_free_desktop/
No, please no. Then it registers as an attachment and then I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment at a quick glance. Keep it short, sweet, and in 4 lines please.
Digital photos can reveal your location, raise privacy fears
Am I the only one having difficulty loading these pages? Each article (.pdf) seems to be about 1.5 - 2.5 MB. But it's taking 3-5 minutes for anything to appear.

The lists appear immediately.
This has been a hot topic recently here in Japan. Very happy to see more attention being paid to the entrepreneurial environment in Japan.

However, it's important to point out that the web/high-tech entrepreneurial industry is still fairly young and seems to be in its infancy compared to areas referenced in another comment regarding government subsidies and whatnot.

For the past four years, I worked as a head-hunter recruiting Japanese talent for companies in the web space. I've met and spoken with over 3,000 industry professionals ranging from company owners, entrepreneurs, engineers and designers. Here's what I've learned:

1. Those most considered risk-takers, confident and willing to forgo the security and stability for more entrepreneur-driven opportunities are normally educated outside of Japan, or have spent a significant amount of time outside of Japan.

2. Start-ups created in Japan, in the web space or high-tech space are considered too risky. Even foreign companies that have been successful in other markets have a stigma attached to them and are not considered as attractive options.

In my experience, most Japanese like to see either a track record of success in Japan as well as a partnership with or backing from a major Japanese company in order for the start-up stigma to be removed.

3. Tokyo is beginning to have a great start-up and entrepreneur community in the high-tech space however, there is a language barrier that, in my opinion contributes to the slow growth of the community. For example, there was recently a conference title New Context Conference 2010, in which several companies from a new YC Clone seed accelerator (Open NetworkLab) were able to demo their start-ups. A part of the program is that companies receive mentoring from international and Japanese investors, founders and the like to help improve their start-ups. Watching the presentations, it's clear that the Japanese start-up founders for the most part were struggling most with presentation skills.

My point is, when your language ability is limited and you can only access resources in Japanese, it's tough to really push and challenge yourself, especially when a lot of the most exciting things happening in this space are in English. It's unfortunate, but Japanese is not the language of business outside of Japan.

4. Have you tried starting a company here? With the long set-up time at least 1 month, expensive office space, taxes, banking fees, not to mention the difficulty in closing a company down-- they don't make it easy to take a risk.

5. If you're a former founder of a failed start-up here, unless you have a great network it's highly likely that the only companies that will find your failed start-up experience highly attractive are foreign owned. Most domestic companies would be too blinded by your failure and/or the fact the founder is used to being independent and most senior in their company, and may not be able to adjust to a team environment again.

I could go on, but overall there's a lot that contributes to the current state of Japan's lagging entrepreneur state.
You can get this in the United States, too. Get a checking account with ING Direct. I don't make a habit of overdrafting, but it has saved my bacon a few times when e.g. I forgot that a credit card payment and estimated tax payment both happened the day before my client's check cleared.
This post is from 2007?
Can anyone elaborate on some applications of fuzzy sets? I'm guessing something like strength of relationships in given social graphs as an example.
Read to the end before you downvote.

It really is a matter of your goals. If your goal is to use the airport for its intended use and you do not really care about your civil rights or you trust the government wholeheartedly then the above makes sense.

I think airport security exists more for the government to save face then anything else. It allows them to take an environment made unsafe in the perception of the public and make it 'safe'. Similar to stationing a squad of police officers at a shady part of town and having them harass everybody. In the short term everybody get harassed, but they have to admit in the long run the police officers 'fixed' the problem. This is also a medium of communicating this type of message that the government has practice and established methods of doing.

It boils down to: They are doing their best. Yes, it is infringing on our rights. The only solution is a drastic change in the american people. All the fear and drama surrounding airports now, is the victory terrorists had in 9/11. It was their goals to make us afraid as a nation, and they succeeded.
As far as I can tell it was more than 2 weeks (or may still be a problem currently). I don't think freezing all of the money for an account because of some chargebacks and/or fraud should be what Paypal does. I understand if they need to freeze a certain amount - but make a phone call to the person when it concerns more than half a million dollars. Why collect phone information if they never use it to call in extreme cases?
There's also a good chapter on self-documenting data formats in Jon Bentley's _More Programming Pearls_, and don't forget http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PowerOfPlainText .
> Are you saying we should just let 9/11s happen, and then fix the holes?

Isn't that how TSA already operates? Someone sneaks a bomb into their shoe and TSA makes me take my flip-flops off through the metal detector. Someone tries to blow up a plane with "gels" and TSA bans sealed water bottles. Someone stitches a bomb in their underwear and TSA sets up virtual strip-searches.

Until TSA mandates that everyone be stripped naked, anesthetized, and sealed in blast-proof capsules for the length of the journey, there will always be a way to sneak something deadly onto a plane. As terrorists get more clever, TSA will continue to fix the holes the terrorists find with continually more invasive, illogical, and civil-liberty-stripping mandates in the name of safety.
I can choose whether I want automatic loans or failed transactions.
Then how does he get on the fligth deck?
If his ID isn't sufficient to avoid screening - but it is sufficient to allow him to sit in the front seats ?
Mobile password security: Introducing the "pass sentence"
Could you explain how you think adding a class violates the separation of content and presentation?

Unless you're building a completely unstyled site, you'll be adding classes and ids anyway, so what makes using predefined ones wrong?
To be fair, http://mrdoob.com has a lot of flash in the examples. You can learn http://processing.org/ and export to canvas if you want to do things like the stuff on that page.

On the other hand, js rocks...
We don't frown on cost-based pricing for web apps.

We frown on cost-based pricing for anything.

Pricing and cost are almost unrelated. Things are priced what they cost when they are plucked out of the ground, put on a truck, warehoused, and then delivered to the customer. Add any other step (say, "cooking") and cost no longer has anything to do with price.

This is not some web 2.0 thing. It's a fundamental principle of business.

Your question, as I read it, isn't crazy. It suggests, "if one way I can differentiate myself from my competitors is by being smarter and thriftier, shouldn't I be able to use that to differentiate my business through price?" The problem is that your cost should already be below the noise floor, and most nonzero prices incur the same hostility from customers --- so reducing your competitor's price point by 20% or even 50% might not help your business; it could even hurt.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can use one known framework(e.g. blueprint) than will be instantly recognized by other designers?
Ask HN: Secure Tunnels for anonymity. (recommendations?)
Pretty straight forward, I am looking for a tunneling service/account/pool of ips that I can use to keep my browsing anonymous.

There are lots of options, clearly. I am looking for recommendations on who HNers trust to not share information with 'authorities' or whomever comes looking; best price/quality ratio, etc.

As a side note, and maybe this should be their own thread, are there any 'pools' of tunnel accounts that are sort of cooperatively owned?

What I mean is that, lets say I have 6 100Mbit ips I use for tunneling; What I'd like to do is find 10 other people, throw them all into a pool, and have 60 nodes for all 10 of us to randomly jump around.

Looking to spend upto a ~250USD a year or so, although less is obviously better.
25-50%? I never saw that rate, and I've dealt with a LOT of processors. 5-10% is common. It's what the banks hold in case of chargebacks.
Thank you!

We've have thought about RSS feeds, but we pretty much run out of time with that :)

Little person silhouette is just a marker. We'll have person filters for projects at some point. Also if you see "-" next to the silhouette there are no people in the project (you can add them by opening the project and clicking "Edit").
How do we sell zip files to non-tech-savvy people?
We sell a lot of digital content daily in the form of zip files that contain MP3s and PDF worksheets. Our customers are primarily teacher with wildly varying comfort levels when it comes to computers.

The differences in OS, browser, and installed programs make it super-difficult to provide self-service FAQs that people actually use, and our small team is being crushed by daily emails and calls from "frantic" teachers.

How can we scale this better? What can we use instead of zip files?