skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marc deals with the processors on a slightly different level and has been hitting the same wall we have.

Our model is designed to cover a lot of that risk. We can determine when the package arrives as we've built in the shipping system to our model. The model would be:

- We receive payment
- The seller prints out the shipping label
- Carrier picks up the package
- Package is delivered
- When the buyer approves or 48 hours after delivery has passed we then release payment to the seller

If there's a problem with the shipment we can then enter a claims process to solve the issue. This is designed to mitigate as much risk as possible.

I suppose to clarify it is the merchant bank that is the problem, we're unable to find one that will take on the business. It would have been easier had I stated that in my original post, I'll edit it.

Braintree is trying to help, but we're unable to get underwritten by their Acquiring Bank. That particular bank wants to see $50MM in net worth, which we cannot claim at the moment.
DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings
i assume this is your web site? http://new.surveyshare.com

who do you consider your main competitors? survey monkey?

anyway, you might want to think about running an adwords campaign and using the names of your competitors as the keywords and target them directly... like we under cut their prices... or something of that nature.
Writing and processing a ton of analytics data - all the raw logs sent into Flurry are stored in HDFS and then processed with map-reduce jobs.
Ask HN: Which advert is the best for next's months Hacker Monthly?
Hi,

I am purchasing a full spread advert in Hacker Monthly next month and since I am a shoe string budget I have decided to do the advert myself. However this is the first advert I have ever created and was really looking for some advice I have two potential adverts created ...

http://www.venturesocially.com/advert_1.pdf
http://www.venturesocially.com/advert_2.pdf

If you could review these and tell me which one you like I would be very grateful. Also if you could tell me if either advert actual would draw you attention!

I have submitted items to hacker news before, but they rarely go anywhere. Please make this one popular
The whale could be just out of the water and still have some momentum.
> "The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does."

>-Warren E. Buffett

He sure got that right :) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17buffett.html?_r=...
Note the colour of the whale and the dejected expression on Ahab's shoulders.

"Not another fricking black whale", he's saying. "Whale fail!"
In this particular case, you are right. And I fixed it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Irony run wild - Air Force Can't Afford Bombers, Schools Can't Hold Bake Sales
Umm before someone tells you off for it, you need a link to greplin.com on the sidebar of individual blog posts. Or best to have it in the header.
Math Professor Figures Formula For Beatles Success
I resold Avast through my small consultancy for a few years, and I don't think they're the type of company that would actually litigate against their users. Their free product is very good. The compelling reasons to go pro matter most to businesses, who are usually happy to pay for a license/support anyway.

I am somewhat disappointed that they withheld the single most interesting statistic to come out of the whole experiment. The debate over what percentage of pirates would actually buy the software they pirate is a long standing open argument in the industry. This would have been a rare datapoint. Something tells me that "the industry" doesn't want those stats out in the open.
Public Radio Exchange: Apple, Allow Public Radio to ask for Donations
MongoHQ have a pretty awesome product. The only concern I have with them is I noticed they recently capped databases to 20 gig but that's 3x more than my leaderboards come to at the moment so that's future-me's problem.

The custom data on the leaderboards and levels is just ridiculously easy, it's basically just copying object properties/values on the user end straight in to document properties/values in MongoDB.
The whale isn't failing, Ahab is failing at whaling.
Another biker here.

It's true that as a motorcycle rider you're completely invisible: not just that you should imagine yourself invisible -- you really are. Nobody in a car has the faintest clue that there can be non-car vehicles on the road, probably next to them when they change lanes, etc. If you think they can see you, you're dead.

BUT I like it that way: it's cool to be invisible, and it's also safer. Car drivers don't understand bikes: when they see you they have all sort of weird reactions -- like kindly going to the side to give you more room, forgetting that there might be another bike on the other side that they are cutting off!

My favorite car drivers are the ones that don't care about me, stay in the middle of their lane at constant speed -- in general, those who are predictable.

And that's probably where the analogy with the startup world breaks: a startup really needs to be noticed to move forward -- although maybe not by everyone; it's better if competitors don't notice you before it's too late.

So cars are competitors; but who are the customers?
Their starting point obviously isn't above their ending point, though.

mansr is right, I've been looking at this all wrong because I assumed the weight of the strings was small compared to the weight of the whale. But if the strings are dense they will curve under their own weight. So we're not looking at a super-light whale, we're looking a regular whale supported by super-heavy strings.

(Where do you get strings so dense that the mass of a short stretch is comparable to the mass of a whale? Why, the same place you get those goddamn birds, of course.)
One thing I don't commonly see mentioned in these types of articles/posts/etc is something I've been doing for quite some time as an avid reader.

Often I will run across a phrase, or a sentence or sometimes a paragraph, that just feels awkward to me. I can't help but read it two or three times trying to find the not-awkward way of 'hearing' it.

When I encounter these I tend to type out the text that doesn't jive with me and then rewrite it twice:

1.) in a way that comfortably flows with the context I found it in (I call this exploring another writers voice.)

2.) and re-interpreting it in my own 'style.'

Never do I publish the results of this exercise. Aside from the obvious benefits of the two points above, doing this just helps me get the damned chunk of prose out of my head so I can move on with my life.

Does anyone else have any quick and dirty, improving your writing in the wild techniques?
Probably something like http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9070

iPhone 4 added one too: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Yeah, I came here to say exactly what you did, thanks. I remember an article like this every 2-3 years popping up. Oh yeah, and of course the HN hive mind voted you down.
The only times I've had problems with the touch screen on my N1, it turned out to be because one of my other fingers or the edge of my hand was overlapping one of the other edges of the screen. :-) For quite a while though I did think that my touchscreen would just stop working.

BTW.. you mentioned problems while charging. Do you keep the phone in the little neoprene pouch while charging? My N1 generates quite a bit of heat when charging with the supplied AC adapter. Doesn't seem to be a problem when the phone is just lying on my desk or my nightstand plugged in, but initially I used to leave it in the pouch at night while charging and it would get alarmingly hot in the pouch. Just an FYI.
Google’s Stock Worth $680 on Mobile Search Growth -- Trefis
links

http://www.venturesocially.com/advert_1.pdf

http://www.venturesocially.com/advert_2.pdf
I'm pleasantly surprised people aren't having a privacy freak-out over NFC yet. My concern is more practical: too many eggs in one basket. I feel like if NFC were to really live up to its hype I would need to keep a secondary device with me at all times as a backup in the same way I carry multiple credit cards and have a spare set of keys for my car. I suppose when it becomes a more mature technology that would be an ideal use for an older generation phone with NFC.
Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net
1. This use of fail is becoming a fairly standard colloquialism. I don't think it's too hard for the average person to conclude Moby Dick from context, since they've probably heard someone under the age of 25 use fail in a similar manner.

2. Google is renowned and even loved for their "unprofessional" home page logos. This is no different, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of whimsy.

3. As is all art.
Indeed, disaster is coming. The problem is, the champions of this law don't understand technically intertwined user tracking is with providing basic functionality on websites.

Users will be forced to encounter cases where a website says, "we need you to opt-in to be tracked so that we can provide this convenient feature that you like to use." Then, the users won't understand why they have to do this either, and they'll get angry at the site.
Yes! In fact, the usual way to define bottom in a programming language with a fixpoint operator is 'fix id'.

It's not appropriate to call NIL/NULL bottom, because it is a real value and we can always do computation on it (if var == NIL). Because always detecting bottom is equivalent to the halting problem, we lose. Of course, GHC will sometimes raise a NonTermination exception ;-)
In that case it's pretty disingenuous of you to claim that "In my experience, this does not work," seeing as you did not, in fact, experience this.
and I wrote up what I'd found in a document for friends and family

This is a great summary. The only thing that I do not quite agree with is that all carbs are described as equally harmful and causing fat gains.

There are actually hunter-gatherer cultures that appear to enjoy great health on a high carbohydrate diet (i.e. Kitavians). The source of carbs appears to be important.
I wish PG would write more about painting and hacking and education and lisp and history and psychology and philosophy and literature and politics and a bit less about investments. Seriously, quite a dry topic..
Yep, it's actually very interesting. In fact, it's possibly a great marketing technique, if a polite offer to upgrade to the paid version converts at all.
Any details on WebM support? I see it listed as a feature, but no specific API for it. I have an app where it would be very useful to turn a bunch of images into a video file, but I haven't found a reasonable way to do that and was hoping WebM would help.
This is a very interesting perspective. Initally I felt the title was slightly degrading. After reading the article however I feel the title is fitting and less degrading. I like the idea of cultivating your own personal image as a way to increase your demand. I for one have a bad tendency to put off releasing code or writing about what I am working on. I've been meaning to change this. I plan on using this article as a kick to start working on this type or "personal branding". I created a HN account and posted this comment to jump start this inititive. Thanks.
Can you hack non-VM phones to use this plan?
It would seem perhaps that our impressions of "pesky office firewalls" are a bit different :(

http://www.aerofs.com:8080/signup

Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to www.aerofs.com:8080
try it with some sort of dynamic data, one you never http-request it before (talking about the page-embedded scenario). i can't get it to work, even in different environments/networks. it always works when the chart is requested directly :(
Regarding item #2:

The home page doodles are interesting and unconventional, but not unprofessional.

This bastardization of English is not interesting, only unconventional in educated company, and certainly unprofessional.
Well it is much nicer than the google default http://www.google.com/blalgalgal
EDIT: For full disclosure purposes, the parent post is from John Hugg, a software engineer at VoltDB, which is a high-scale data store that competes with many "NoSQL" databases. I am not claiming his point of view is invalid, just that it comes from a certain perspective, and should be viewed in this light.

Amazon's Dynamo itself is built on BerkeleyDB, which is ACID compliant. That doesn't mean Dynamo is an ACID system. You have to view the system as a whole, not just the component parts. The information systems I refer to in large banks, stock exchanges, and logistics are often composed of thousands of instances of ACID-compliant databases, but as a whole operate with eventual consistency guarantees. EC is kind of a misnomer for Dynamo anyways, because it's really TUNABLE consistency. Dynamo can operate in a fully consistent mode, but you're going to sacrifice availability. CAP theorem doesn't care if you're a bank or a stock exchange or you have a trillion dollars. It still applies.
Twitter / @Tumblr: The recovering database cluster is online...
It rhymes.
Cashed-up angels to rescue Aussie tech start-ups
Not true. It just has write-protection. It only looks like it's "restoring" because linux is caching FS writes, but never gets to flush them.

See here for details: http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=HTC_Vis...
Love the idea. Great job. :) This is how I'd summarized things (I didn't watch the video):

Appointmentreminder.org:

- Automatic appointment reminders for your clients (phone, text message, email).

- No more meetings where nobody shows up!

- Get notified automatically if someone is going to be late!

- Client needs to cancel or reschedule? We'll let you know!

- Record phone reminders yourself, or save time and have our professional voice actors do it for you!

- Always on the go? Use it on your laptop or iPad. (iPhone coming soon!)

Never show up to an empty meeting ever again. How much time and money are you going to save?

:insert pricing chart here:

Questions or comments? email@email.com 888-555-1234
That's literally the next sentence.

>You don’t need to spend any money to keep your machine protected, especially if you run Windows. Microsoft offers you a firewall as part of the Windows default install now, and Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software is free.
I guess that's a much better way to phrase my last paragraph
I wish they would announce this sort of things months ahead of time. It's so hard to plan around contract renewals. I just bought a G2, but would much rather have had this.
Tumblr DOWN For 23 Hours And Counting
Anyone know what really happened?

[ Not inserting obvious comment about lack of communication during outage... ]
The best movie speeches of all-time. (Quora)
> The HTC Vision (T-Mobile G2) has a complete copy of it's ROM on board to "restore" if you flash the phone.

Not true. The Vision was NAND locked like previous HTC phones. What was actually happening was that if you tried to write to internal storage, the Linux kernel would tell you it was making the changes, but never actually committed the writes to storage. That's why the changes 'disappeared' after a reboot.
Why do people still pay for SMS in the days of Google Voice and MMS?
Wikijerks
If you're accustomed to "right-clicking" to accomplish tasks, I'd imagine that much of Linux system administration is opaque to you. That, however, does not make it "better".

I don't mean that to sound snarky. I just think it's important to recognize that though the mouse may be one man's treasure, but it is another man's ball and chain.
when did skepticism become nonsense?
"Wantrepreneur" is justified by virtue of being a true witticism rather than a mechanical combination of a demographic + "preneur" — it's actually funny, or at least meant to be. "Kidpreneur" and "femtrepreneur" are in the same vein as "Bennifer" or "Brangelina."
Which (I'm very sad to see, but maybe it'll change in time) Google has adopted :\
That should be "When Windows was better than Linux". The author is saying that 3.5 years ago it was harder to set up RAID on Linux than on Windows. In a comment he clarifies that he is comparing 3.5 year old Linux to 3.5 year old Windows.

That makes it hard to see what the point of the post was. There would have been a point in such a post 3.5 years ago. Today, it seems to be a waste of time.
Most of the Samsung phones have ROMs on them now. The N1 was easy because the vendor overlay that Google provided, worked nearly perfectly out of the box for the N1... which is going to be the case for the Nexus S. Also, the open bootloader helps though I believe Samsung phones are "open" in the sense that ODIN/ODEN(?) can flash it easily without much difficulty.
Didn't see details in the article about how they are making their pitch, but including photos of the developers and explaining the work they've done to create the software would likely help them win some sales.
If a string is hung between two fixed points, then it will fall in the shape of a catenary (hyperbolic cosine):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary

Even when one of the ends is weighted down rather than fixed, I think it's still going to want to fall into a catenary curve, because that curve minimizes the potential energy of the string itself, and there is some equilibrium between the lower potential energy of the string and the higher potential energy of the object. How far the curvature departs from a straight line is probably a function of the ratio of mass between the lifted object and the string itself. With a whale and some yarn, it's going to asymptotically close to a straight line, but still slightly curved. However, fail whales are apparently light enough to be carried by a handful of birds, so the weight is probably comparable to the string itself.
The clickbank counter is fake
clickable: http://hwknd.com
Best guess is the standard first huge failure, push an update and break everything.
One other thing. This algorithm, unless I'm missing something, doesn't handle situations in which the available widths are different for different lines in the paragraph, and in particular in which they available width for a line depends on the precise break positions and vertical alignment results of all the earlier lines in the paragraph. Handling this is required to correctly handle CSS floats. Greedy line-breaking does this by the simple expedient of fully laying out all previous lines in the paragraph before considering the next line.
For those that don't recall, the NYT article was mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945112

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946085

I had a feeling it was going to come to this, and soon. He had the opposite strategy as Zappos and had the opposite "exit."
TeamCoco.com "Pale Whale" 404 Page
Doesn't Avast have a free version? (in fact I'm using it)

Why bother with Pro, seems unnecessary.

I guess the logic is those people wouldn't bother to pay anyway but I am surprised they would allow their IP to ping the server in the first place.
You do the best you can with the resources you have to promote your app, even if its free, since that cant hurt. Even with free apps you still need a good app and luck, its not that any free app will generate tons of ad revenue.
Please review my book: Running Lean (roughcut)
Running Lean = Customer Development + Lean Startups + Bootstrapping

Download link: http://www.runningleanhq.com/downloads/running_lean_rc.pdf
Is my startup about to fall apart? 
I'm involved in an online dating startup with one other cofounder and it has the interest of a prominent angel investor who is willing to pull the trigger with a full-time CTO on board (we are both mostly non-technical). 1.5 months in, and communication issues are beginning to surface (we didn't know each other that well before forming the company.) Although I know he is invested in the company/adds a lot of value, he maintains a consulting gig on the side to pay the bills, and he is very particular about how he divides his time between the two commitments. Whether it's for this or other reasons, he occasionally falls off the map (sometimes for days at a time) and doesn't pick up 99% of my calls first time around. Having said all this, he has been meeting his deliverables and progress on the company is being made.

At this point, I've sat him down twice to discuss the issue, but nothing has sunk in as there have been no improvements. My options are threefold:

a) Go solo with the project - risk him doing the same - and search for someone as a cofounder and/or CTO to build the product. I'm very into the concept but this will be a process as I'm a first-time entrepreneur, so I imagine attracting someone will be tough.

b) Give up on this project and commit full-time to another project I had been working prior to this opportunity. The other is more of a "dude business" (can easily outsource dev) which I am at least AS into as the former and I think I could learn a lot from. However, no interested investor and it's a monetized Q&A community, so probably won't have the same reach/credibility as an online dating site, assuming success in both cases.

c) Try to work out my differences with the cofounder (although it seems I already attempted this...) and try to forge a path forwards.

Any advice or feedback on this situation would be hugely appreciated.
Download link: http://www.runningleanhq.com/downloads/running_lean_rc.pdf
Dan Feyer, the Crossword Wizard Who Is Fastest of All
Nice work. I really enjoyed this presentation the other night.
Is The NFL Keeping Cable/Satellite Companies In The TV Business?
If you look at the link to the original post about doing it on Linux, you can see the steps that were necessary to go through. If the Linux method had been as simple, but required the command line, it wouldn't have been noteworthy...
No, the opposite; it's when you break a project into component parts, inflate the effort required for each part, and convince the client they need to buy all of them. "Rustproofing" is another term for it.
There's a problem with the math (from the graphic):

- Homepreneur based businesses have revenues of 427,000,000,000

- There are 18,300,000 home businesses of which 35% (6,405,000) make more than $125,000

But 6,405,000 * 125,000 = 800,625,000,000
You make some valid points, but I think Eco intends this as an amorphous investigation into how the Wikileaks events affect the prevailing Zeitgeist. His assertions aren't meant as hard truths, but as launching points for reflection and discussion.

Something like "The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper" is clearly not a factual statement and Eco certainly knows this. It's hyperbole designed to emphasize the changing relationship between the populace and the state.

After all, Eco is foremost a craftsman of fiction and fantasy. I don't think it's off base for him to inject a bit of literary whimsy if it adds insight or enlivens the dialogue.
Moral: Don't do illegal shit

Criminal's Moral: Don't give out interviews