skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats on launching! But please consider either a. a better microphone or b. a professional speaker service. It's not that your voice is bad or so, it just sounds more professional when representing your company.
I would expect that it will not be pleasant and the chain reaction will make the news. It should be noted that this did happen in the not too distant past with the rail system in the US. I know of at least one car filled with soybeans that sat on some side track in the middle of nowhere for multiple (6+) months.

Story: At one point, I worked at a company that did clinical trials. They had this great computer controlled track with multiple cars that delivered all the samples to each lab (1 self powered car per sample). It could go straight up / flip over and the sample never tipped.

One day, a sample didn't arrive at one of the labs. It was frozen and we needed to get to it before it thawed as it, shall we say, wasn't a liquid. We traced the track an finally found it Alien's style when I turned a slow 180 with the flashlight as I was about half in the ceiling standing on a ladder. It had stopped because a rather large rat had not avoided getting hit by the car. I did not, at any point, think this was a logical consequence of my choice of professions.
Ask HN: Who Has Solved the Third Party Payment Aggregator (TPPA) Problem?
Ladies and Gents,

I've been beating my head against the wall on this one for some time. I've talked with Braintree (Payment gateway which many people say great things about) and a host of payment processors to no avail, yet.

We've raised a seed round (Low six figs), are in a business incubator funded by the Federal Government of Canada, and have established a board of advisors to help us through problems like these and mitigate much of the risk associated with a startup.

Recently both Yardsellr and AirBnB have been approved for the exact payment flow we're looking to provide (Albeit in a very different market). Does the HN community have any insight on who I should be talking to, to solve this problem?

A little info on us can be found here, if you're interested:

www.twenty12.ca
www.styckyd.com

Any info or leads would be greatly appreciated, I've been working at this problem for about six months and feel I'm missing something key here.

*EDIT: To clarify the above issue, we're having trouble finding an Acquiring Bank that will approve a TPPA model. There are other startups who have found some and we're wondering who those banks are as we have come up empty handed so far.
>"is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?"

The media is doing what it usually does. It is reporting on the easiest things. Wikileaks is a bonanza because it contains thousands of documents which can be summarized with trivial analysis and hyperbolic rhetoric. All packaged in conformance with the no-gel foot orthotics fear mongering journalistic favored by the US main stream media.

I.e. Wikileaks can be used to signify pre-existing narratives.
Original Source:
http://www.contactme.com/blog/trends/the-homepreneurs-growin...

Edit to put source at top. Also, looks like they fixed the site. They are apparently running Drupal, which was throwing an error earlier.
Angels in desperate need of "Angel Academies" -
You can direct sell your ads and get much better rates, but it is a hassle to manage. Lots of sites have a page that says "advertise here" usually with an email address to contact them. There are ad networks like buysellads that will take care of it for you too. For affiliate networks, look at commission junction, linkshare and google affiliate network.
This Kinect for Xbox 360 Hack Makes You Invisible 
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect hacks have been plentiful, but here is a very original one that is almost guaranteed to impress. A Japanese coder by the name of Takayuki Fukatsu posted a video showing Kinect’s "optical camouflage" effect that he created with openFrameworks.
Just wanted to mention that Articles/comments posted on Hacker News tend to end up on popular search engines fairly quickly. The ramifications in this isntance is that you may find this public document being exposed to a much wider audience than just HN.

Good luck and all the best!
As for what it does, it allows you to store an interval in Lucene, so you could store 1792 - 1796 or you could store 140000 - 125235466734. It uses a similar algorithm as the one used to store numbers so that it doesn't have to store millions of terms in the second example.

(we're pretty surprised by the response too!)
I remember talking to one of the devs some months ago when first signing up. Fun guy, great product.

It's a shame that I never got an invite, can't wait to get my hands on this :)
Oh yeah, I talked to you right afterwards in the lobby for awhile. Really enjoyed your talk btw.
Motorcycle owner / Startup founder here. Love riding and love my work. Having jumped out of planes, skied the Swiss alps and rocked out at Burning Man, there is still nothing quite like gunning my Ninja on the i5 at night with all 5 lanes to myself. Similarly, nothing compares to the rush and energy you get from running your own startup.
Yes, you are correct. They have rebranded as the American Association for Justice.

http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/xchg/justice/hs.xsl/default.h...
As others have said if your idea is straightforward to implement and easy to grok then likely it would be independently "discovered" and implemented regardless of whether you told anyone else. Nobody had to tell the world to make mp3 players or automobiles, they were obvious ideas that many people had and implemented at about the same time.

If you have a truly novel idea then you'll often have trouble getting people to accept it, and even if they do if they were to implement it they would get the details so wrong that they wouldn't steal your thunder.

Imagine one of the google founders telling everyone else how google was going to work. Even if other sites had simplified their search landing and results pages, even if they had used page rank, etc. they still wouldn't have reproduced google search. It required the coordination of several disparate disciplines from computer science (map reduce / parallel computing / pagerank) to system administration (sharding / commodity hardware / unique data center operations) to user interface design (response time / uncluttered interface) to business sense (contextual, unobtrusive advertising) to get that right, and it's the careful balance and details of every single element that led to the success of google search.

Or you can look at mp3 players again. An obvious idea that everybody had. By the time apple entered the market it was saturated, but they executed better than everyone else and dominated the market.
This is not really very accurate.

At their core, each of these systems use ACID databases (or very nearly if you nitpick about isolation levels in Oracle). Between databases and between companies, they've developed "eventually correct" schemes to synchronize information. The lease patterns that many of these systems rely on require atomic operations at their core and offer stronger guarantees than the basic eventually consistent systems popularized by models like Amazon's Dynamo.

It's not just that the account values have to agree between systems at the end of the day; they have to actually be correct at the end of the day.

I know that consistency models vary between NoSQL systems (and even within a single NoSQL system). There's some great technology out there and plenty of problems to solve. There's are certainly plenty of use cases for NoSQL systems within banks and stock exchanges.

But the "banks are eventually consistent" line of reasoning needs to die.
While I can't comment specifically on the accuracy of this valuation as I don't really know shit about that world (although, based on the numbers they present, it looks pretty accurate...I guess?), I can say that commonly people see Facebook's valuations and say "That's absurd!" I disagree with that -- I think it's pretty much in line. Facebook is fast approaching -- or might already be -- a huge player in the software world, as huge as Google or Microsoft; as in, they are slowly building a platform that you soon won't be able to live without.

Right now they're just a social networking site...but their poised to take their business to a new level and become your actual online identity.
Avast sees single software license used illegally 774,651 times
even behind your pesky office firewall

Curious - can you sync between two such locations (nat/default deny/no udp)? i.e. will you bounce connections through your host or does one side have to open an inbound port?
7 out of 10 home businesses succeed? I thought that 98% of small businesses fail? How can that be of 53% of small businesses are home businesses?

{edit} Well I guess the saying is that 'most' small businesses fail...
Very good point. Doing that now. Thanks again everyone for the suggestions!
I think you're missing the point. The UI isn't autogenerated -- it's the only bit that isn't. (Aside from DirectToWeb, which is a whole different thing). What WO allows you to do is save on all the backend work and focus entirely on the details of the UI. Which as you say, are the bits that matter.

There may be no silver bullets, but there is having a gun when everyone else is using three different types of hammer.
Even hyphenation like in Word would be an improvement over the status quo.
Thanks Shamiq. This is still a roughcut and I am anticipating additional refinement. At this point, quality feedback trumps tighter control.
le sans culotte - 'Allo 'Allo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fb5uxIWPfg
I thinks "NoSQL" a bad name too. With NoSQL you would expect the opposite of a db managed by SQL when in fact it's something completetly different.
DecorMyEyes Founder Arrested For Defrauding Customers
Links cannot be defamation because the content that is linked to can change at any time. Linking is more like referencing an author than referencing a book. A certain edition of a book will always say the same thing. The content on a blog or a Wikipedia article will not.
Works fine using a US VPN from Germany
Thanks, it's really cool, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something!
Need a UI/UX Designer
Hello, I'm looking to hire a UI/UX designer to work on an entire overhaul for our online billing website. Please post your resume. Thanks!
DecorMyEyes Founder Charged with Fraud, Threats
Looks great, but it would be nice if the hyphens were removed when copying text.
I keep wondering when some public spirited (and probably anonymous) hacker is going to come up with software to automate this whole process of cross-region purchasing of e-books, iTunes, etc.
So scope abuse is when you sell each component of a project separately and tell the client that they might not need some components even though every component is required for a complete project?

I can see why it's unethical to deceive the client about what components they will actually end up needing. I can see how you'd make money by luring clients in with cheap prices up-front then once they are locked-in charging more for the things they will inevitably need but didn't pay for already.

How does that relate to how you, as an ethical consultant, could raise your prices without raising your costs.

Are you saying that the only way you could raise your prices without raising your costs would be through scope abuse?
Verizon may pay to keep Sprint, T-Mobile away from iPhone
ePub is not the problem. It is the Adobe DRM that is comes baked into most ePub documents that are sold.
Jealous? Me? Nooooo. I promise. I'm not jealous.

Ok, yea, I'm 100% jealous.
> No need to think hard about it: Google simply doesn't give a shit.

This is a big call. There are many, many factors that prevent a global release of something like Books.
I signed up for your beta a year ago, I even chatted with you and begged you for one but I still haven't gotten my invite :(
Glad you liked it. :)
A list of probably obvious things to try:

HackerNews
Delicious Links
StumbleUpon
Niche blogs - There are people who don't get a lot of freebies who will actually do a full write-up in exchange for a free trial etc. Without knowing what your product is, it's hard to reccomend anything to specific in this category.
Twitter - Tweet about new features, promotions, related news at least once a day. This is also a nice informal way for your users to speak directly to you in a public forum.
Company blog - Get a Tumblr or something and have this feed to your tweets as well.
Facebook page

Out of curiosity, what's the audience?
am I the only want noticing the speech recognition feature "go to reddit" ?
You may very well be able to sell the company simply for the user base...
I would like to declare a moratorium on all new word coinages obtained by combining "entrepreneur" with something else.

That means you, femtrempreneur, homepreneur, kidpreneur, wantrepreneur (though I do like this one) and mompreneur.
Don't miss the original Fail Whale artist's page - http://www.yiyinglu.com/
Cyclone: A Type-Safe Dialect of C
So the "popular I love anal" was just an accidental discovery having no relation with the actual encryption method.
It works better, actually. The anchors are much larger, so there is less room for error (I have fat fingers!)
AFAIK Stylous.com uses vertexdb, a graph database.
here are some ideas you might could change to your site. http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html
You're not in the US, this is all you'll be able to see.

Try a US VPN :)
Both the ePub and PDF are DRM encumbered. I would not call those "standards".
When Windows was better than Linux
Motorola's Problems Can Be Summed Up in a Word: iPhone
nice one, I'll read this this week and get back to you.
Soho Haven Looking For NY Startup Hackers
Hey all,

We at Soho Haven (http://sohohaven.com/) are looking for a hacking team to fill the spot left by SeatGeek, a startup I think many of you are already familiar with. We are looking for a fun, scrappy startup who's working on some cool tech idea and wants to move in to our shared office space in soho and take part in our community.

If this describes you or someone you know in the area, please hit me up at nygren@atmalinks.com.

Best,

Erik
Borker Arrested: Alleged 'Bully' Online Retailer Arrested in New York
No. Honeycomb will likely be the first to use GPU UI rendering.

The N1 w/2.2 is extremely fluid, with minor stuttering that is attributable to garbage collection (the thing is endlessly pausing to do GC). 2.3 includes a highly optimized concurrent garbage collection so that should strongly improve.

However honestly I think it's one of those things that matters a lot if you're, to put it impolitely, dicking around, but becomes irrelevant when you're using it as a tool day to day. Similar to how everyone using a Kindle for the first time hits back and forward a bunch of times and complains about page flip times, whereas to actual readers it just doesn't matter.
What users in #vim (freenode) think about this plugin:

An slightly-maintained, buggy, over-complicated plugin intended to make
it easier to author (La)Tex files. Often, this is better served by using a
standalone snippets plugin (like snipMate) to define the snippets you
actually find useful as well as using the command ':compiler tex' to allow
using Vim's quickfix feature when compiling TeX to an output format.
Cool writeup :)

I would also add that you need to be intimately familiar with your bike (startup) if you're going to succeed.

Every bike you ride is different, the clutch, the steering, braking distance, all of that varies and knowing exactly how to operate it can mean life or death.

When I first started riding I ended up rear tire skidding through a few red lights because I didn't have much experience stopping my bike from high speed. It was absolutely terrifying ;)
But it would only apply when the web page author "opted in" with the appropriate CSS, no? Doesn't seem like it should affect performance on pages that don't use the feature.
The Crunchies 2010
dunno what travels is ( I guess "Travels in Hyperreality"), but if you hadn't read baudolino, you should :)
"Google eBooks can be downloaded onto all eReader devices that run Adobe Digital Editions"[0]

In other words: "Adobe DRM"

[0] http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=179863
It's fast. It feels great in the hand.
I read several Culture books in addition to the Algebraist and the Use of Weapons was the only one that I genuinely liked. I was constantly under an impression that I am reading a screenplay - good bones, but lacking the works and details that would actually turn reading into a wow experience... which is what I got from Commonwealth Saga. To each his own though of course :)
Microsoft's 'China problem' means IE6 lives on
I take your points. Here's the thing: if ACID is an aspect of developer tools and not a user experiences, and if ACID tools are the default, and if (as anyone who has held a checking account in the U.S. would surely agree) user-experience failures analogous to ACID violations occur regularly, isn't that evidence that we should continue to question what value we actually get from basing our systems on ACID/relational data stores?
Google Launches Largest Online Bookstore
What legislation is that?
And its cousin, the Heisenbug [1]

full-disclosure: I didn't read the linked article, but can only assume that it's in there.

1 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug#Heisenbug
One might call it "digital emotion."
I use Redis as a Cache and Queueing System at the same time.

Workers connect and get new jobs, they also write the results to redis. Everything touches redis and redis is just so damn fast that I don't have to care about scaling for a while :)
I find LaTeX-Suite bloated. Since I already use snipMate and SuperTab which provides minimal but useful TeX support, I only had to install TeX-PDF (with Rubber) to ease the latex/bibtex compile cycles.
From the New York Times article on this http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/world/07sites.html

But the list of “critical foreign dependencies,” compiled in 2008 from diplomatic missions at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, appears largely limited to sites that any would-be terrorist with Internet access and a bit of ingenuity might quickly have identified.

The list, drawn up in 2008 and subject to annual updating, mentions only the cities in which the various sites are located, not their specific addresses (though that information, too, would generally be available online).
Not sure exactly what you are asking here. Essentially companies like this collect payment from the "buyer", deposit payment in their bank, and then when it is time to pay the seller, they deduct the fees from the amount deposited and pay out to the seller using their account. I am not sure exactly how AirBnB does it, but I bet that it is pretty close to this process.
Watch out -- this was my thinking exactly when I went with an N900 on Tmobile. Unfortunately... didn't quite work out. The latency just kills calls unless I'm on Wifi. Pinging google.com, I get around 300-350ms latency on 3G and over a 1000ms latency on GPRS, which I have about half the time. In Boston, FWIW, not sure how it is elsewhere.

Now, that could just be the N900, which I'm growing more and more irritated by, but I think in this case it's more reasonable to blame the network than the phone.
There are five thousand results on Google News for 2009 on [karzai corruption] alone. Come on. This isn't "abstract vs. concrete"; it's "information vs. narrative". Narrative is addictive. We lap it up. That's why the press runs it. That's the vulnerability WL takes advantage of (for better or worse).
Great point ... sounds like the main conclusion is that easy to replicate businesses would have already been developed. However I would also argue that there are plenty of instances where you think to yourself "Why didn't I think of that?" Then again, even in those instances execution is key.

So is there really ever an instance which justifies not sharing your idea?
Who Made Amazon The Judge Of What's Legal On The Web?
It is my total income. I need to pay taxes from it. But when I get full time job I need to pay similar taxes so it is still over 2x more that I would make on day job.
Oh my god. I have dreamed of, and half-implemented badly, exactly this. Not quite what I was thinking of, but still quite useful for that class of problem.

You should submit this as an HN post too. Thanks!
I agree with everything you say here. I only take issue with claims that Amazon was violating someone's right to free speech. I no more think people shouldn't boycott Amazon if their dislike of Amazon's decision makes them not want to use their service than I do that Amazon should provide hosting to someone if they don't regard it in their interest to do so.

Calling it a violation of free speech waters down the impact of the phrase as it covers real governments doing it with real violence. I went to college during during the height of the political correctness bubble and was exposed to nuts who called holding a door open for a woman "rape." I couldn't imagine any more crass or insensitive action with respect to real rape victims.
How to prevent choking under pressure, and how to force it in others
I can't see a problem description anywhere here ...
Just because you can identify a bubble doesn't mean you are any good at knowing when it will pop, in fact it's much easier to do the former than the latter. And obviously, just because it hasn't popped yet doesn't mean it's not a bubble.

I sold all my yhoo into a strong rally in 1999 because I thought it had an outlandish price. It went on to trade for more than double what I sold it for, but hasn't ever reached that level post crash. Good call or bad call? Hard to say really but it sure seemed dumb at the time even though I ended up being right.
One programmer's personal information manager: Spare Cortex
Rather than killing the license code, the team at Avast decided to watch what happened and how many users would break the law by using it.

Which law are the users breaking?
How infidelity has become accepted and even expected in Russia.
the text of the bill uses the word 'loudness'

... that's nice? Are you expecting people to call up their senators and explain the subtleties of audio perception and how the commercial that they just heard exploits the differences between perception and audio level to actually be louder than the primary content without reading any differently on a decibelmeter?

Here's my prediction: this bill will have absolutely no effect other than to make running a television station more expensive.

You can't solve this through legislation because you can't efficiently fine offenders. If you care about the loudness of commercials, stop watching television or start building a commercial solution.
Humorous, sure, but I wonder what percentage of Google Books users will get the reference. If I didn't know about Twitter's fail whale, "Whale Fail" might seem totally random.
Yes, there is precedent. I mentioned Frank Stronach in the comments, See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976711

I'm not sure if this is universal, but Stronach (a non-executive chairman of Magna Int.) had control over the board because of his Class B share structure. Every 1 of his B share converted to 100 Common Stock (and he had over 700 Class B shares, before he decided to give up control and convert)

That's quite remarkable, considering Magna is a publicly traded company.
It's a bit unfair if you take into account for how long the vim-latex suite is around. Back then in the old days, plugins had dull names, snippets were called templates, and the people on #vim probably just learned to spell their names.
I've always had the feeling that working 'literally' from home is a recipe for heavy procrastination. I think I'd rather spend a little bit of money and get some office space somewhere, so I can somehow force myself a routine, interact with other human beings and so on. But maybe this is just me.