skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with most of these alternatives is that they are not ready for prime time.

Google Checkout has limited availability internationally. Furthermore, it has abysmal, nearly non-existent customer support. That's fine for a hobby site, but not for something a business relies on for its income.

Most of the other sites charge exchange fees for US transactions. That's fine if you don't have customers in the US, but not so good if you do.

Digital River is great (and Microsoft uses them to run its online store)...but not so great for small businesses. It's designed for and sold to large corporations. It can handle small businesses, but it's like using a sledgehammer when you need a hammer.

Amazon is really the only alternative for most situations, but it's also part of the Wikileaks mess...
"We do hear that both Zynga and Twitter may be recruiting him aggressively"

Why? Perhaps I'm missing something, but hasn't facebook pretty much sucked in terms of monetization?
He talks a lot about Austin and creating a company culture there. There's been a lot of talk about NYC vs. Silicon Valley, but great companies can happen in more than two cities (Living Social in D.C., Gowalla in Austin, Mahalo in L.A., etc.). Seems like many people are talking about the perks of starting outside of the Valley more and more as it becomes a little easier to do so over time.
Moneybookers already blocked Wikileaks. Sorry :(

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/14/wikileaks-says-f...
From the terms:

IF YOU CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE GIFT EXCHANGE AND YOU DO NOT SEND A GIFT, YOUR TWITTER.COM USERNAME WILL BE POSTED PUBLICLY.

I didn't go any further, but didn't see this anywhere else but in the terms page. Are you going to run a list of users who do not follow through?
Pakistani judge upholds wikileaks' right to publish
That's a good thing to point out... first guest we've had from Austin and he make a ton of great points on why it's a great place to put your company.
I suppose one way to help is by sending them leaks. I hear they're looking for corporate leaks now, so they could certainly be helped by people who have evidence of corporate wrongdoing.
Hard to believe most of the entries would be any better about bowing to US pressure. Several of them already don't accept US accounts (anymore) because of their ties to online gambling.
For those who want to watch live, the show is taped on Tuesday and Friday at 1PM pacific time.the show can be seen live:http://www.thisweekin.com/livehttp://www.ustream.tv/thisweek...
Amazon, Paypal, EveryDNS, and now Wells Fargo. Tried to make a credit card donation this morning after hearing about the mafia-style business tactics and Wells put a block on my card! I called and had the block lifted, then asked to file a complaint, but the manager said I could not follow-up nor would they issue a complaint number! You might not be surprised by something like this in Russia, but I live in the US!
Only nine of the top twenty-five football programs matched or beat NCAA's average graduation rate. Commitment to championship football doesn't necessarily imply commitment to graduating football players.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2010-10-27-ncaa-gradu...
Machine Vision Used To Make a Curtain That Follows Passersby
I think braintree is a big one:
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/
Fun for hacking: a chumby-powered device for $49
Yes, I run one at imeveryone.com. Click on the 'Live' section.
Whilst I agree with the point they are trying to make, they article is argued in a fallacious way that made me feel uncomfortable - they start off by acknowledging that there is no way to know whether Amazon really caved because of the call from Lieberman:

'While it's impossible to know whether or not Amazon's decision was directly caused by the call from the senator's office, we do know that Lieberman has proposed "anti-WikiLeaks legislation" and that he has a history of pushing for online censorship in the name of "security."'

But then for the rest of the piece they make strong statements assuming that it is true:

"That makes it all the more unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer's right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs."

I wish they'd found a more honest way to make their point than innuendo. They could have at least kept it as a question for the reader to answer in their own mind.
There has also been a miraculous decline in deaths from scurvy.
Wait, how is Amazon involved?
Vassal - Open Source Boardgame Engine
Isn't it slightly contradictory to not have a 'buzz this' button at the end of your essay?
Chiming in one more voice from someone who has worked for Jason: Yes, it's a grind, but he is completely up front about what you're getting yourself into (and if its not something you're interested in, I'd suggest avoiding it). However, if it is something you vibe on, it's overall an amazing experience that gives you many X the experience as you would in most other jobs. There was some hard stuff to deal with, but don't regret my decision to go work for him at all and would absolutely do it again given the chance.
In my opinion, the wisest words ever uttered by any tech entrepreneur are these:

"Make a good product and sell it for money." - DHH

It amazes me that we reached the point where those words were practically heretical. I think that the entire concept of "monetization" is a relic of the dot-com bubble and deserves to die in the same fire that consumed "burn rate". I am strongly of the opinion that if you don't know how you're going to make money, it's not a business - it's a hobby. We've been blinded to the most basic principles of business by a handful of companies that made billions by accident. You might get lucky, but luck is no way to run a business.
Google vs. Yahoo: Who’s Greener?
Why what? Don't leave with that cliffhanger!?
Probably far too strong choice of language. It's not something I plan on doing and I'm going to edit the terms to reflect.

Sort of a line to encourage social responsibility :)
Alex, Man do I wish I could have kept you for three years!!! You're a true Jedi and I can't wait until you start your own company... please make sure you save some room for me as an angel investor!!! :-)
Very much so. I just added it, thanks. As I said, I really just switched.
etsy.com has a cool widget for this. It reads the keywords of the account's info page (interests etc) and matches with tags of etsy products.
Spam disguised as a blog post.
This reminds me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
Ask HN: Is there an EC2 Spot Instance shortage?
I'm new to dealing with spot instances, so maybe i'm just missing something, but why am I unable to get a single c1.xlarge spot instance in us-east-1b activated? I put in an absurdly high max price or $10/hr yesterday for 1 instance and it has still not been started.

How can the going rate be $0.23/hr and my $10 bid not get honored? Isn't the idea that if there's an extra capacity of X machines, it goes to the X highest bids? Shouldn't the rate be much higher than $0.23/hr if there are very few spot instances available?
This all looks excellent. I'm not sure about the debt management part though.

First of all, something about your math just isn't right:

"All employees who want to sign up to the programwill have a percentage of their debt paid off each fortnight. So instead of getting$70,000/year they might get $23,000/ year and be debt-free in the next 4 years."

Why would I spend a total of $188k to pay off an average of $24k in student loans in 4 years? I mean, I know that interest rates are a bitch and all, but that's a bit much. Plus, I don't know where you guys are located, but $23k/year in San Francisco isn't a whole lot. I understand that these are probably all hypothetical numbers, but you might want to choose numbers that are a little bit less scary.

Another thing:

"If groups of employees live, work and party together our hope is that they will love their entirelifestyle, not just their work."

...I don't think it's necessary to be that intimate with my coworkers. In fact, it could arguably be bad to encourage people to be that close. A workplace needs some level of conflict to discourage groupthink, and it's much easier to disagree with someone you're paid to do a job with than someone who's your best friend and roommate.
Ron Paul: ‘What we need is more WikiLeaks’
I love that photo.
Working now ...
Totally agree with znt after starting a co without learning to code (now working on Zed Shaw's Python guide, which is awesome).

Learn to code. IF you don't, and even if you successfully find a tech cofounder/lead engineer, you'll know so little about dev that you'll be wasting everyone's time during project management meetings and/or have no idea what's going on at your startup.

I looked for a tech cofounder for 9 mos. I could have/should have been learning to code at that time. It establishes basic cred you'll need.

And if you're not willing to learn to do that, ask yourself if you're really ready to do a startup, where you'll have to learn painful new skills on a near-daily basis.
I view it as a compliment to Jobs as a visionary.

From a business perspective, the desktop industry was still to peak and then shifted to a luggable version of the same ecosystem with laptops.
Social Media Software
Unilyzer Social Media Software provides a social media performance management platform. Managers need insight, guidance, and progress reporting in order to keep.
3d printed insect wings
Ask HN - what is the best method to learn how to code?
I'm a business guy but I want to learn how to code as a frontend developer.

Which method is more effective?

1. Should I learn by doing? I have a website and want to improve it. Will I be able to teach myself by trying to fix features?

or

2. I pick up books and start from scratch? And only then, after reading the material I will be ready to make something happen?

Please advise. Thanks!
The project is very young. Open Transactions was posted to Cryptome (http://cryptome.org/0002/open-transactions.htm) on the 4th September, which is when I first heard of it, and I've only been working on the client for approx. two weeks during the time when I am not in class.

However, the hope is that once there are some working clients it should be trivial to issue assets and to run a transaction server, so anyone can create and start issuing currency backed with whatever they want. Hopefully some pre-existing currency providers will run servers and issue certificates, but I also hope that with the availability of easy to use clients and simple to deploy servers that the private currency ecosystem will really start to flourish.

N.B., this has not received any real peer review yet, but is based on OpenPGP, OpenSSL and uses Lucre for blind signatures.
The conversation moves too fast for the points (karma) to matter. I can't see how this would work.

Comments drop off as the conversation continues, removing any relevancy to the points. You can't "hold" highly-rated comments because they'll end up out of context.
Not really sure what to make of this. It's a bad implementation[0] of a chatroom with up and down votes on each message. I don't like the idea of real time karma. There is enough discussion about why something is up voted or down voted when you are constrained by the slowness of a forum system.

[0] Bad because of the way the text wraps if the lines you submit are too long and it requires the use of http. There is only one room, etc.
Boycott PayPal for Dumping Wikileaks
There's a guy making a real-time fantasy football forum called SleeperBot: http://www.sleeperbot.com/. It's pretty cool. The success of one would probably depend on what it's being used for. The SleeperBot forums are great when football games are running. You would probably need some sort of reason to have a 'live' forum instead of a standard one.
I prefer this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-War-John-American-Security/dp/158...

Less hagiography (still more than I would care for, but not as much as the other book) and is focused more on explaining Boyd's ideas, less on telling his story (still a biography, but the difference in emphasis is notable).

If you're interested in reading the original briefings by Boyd, you can find them at the links below. Of course, reading his slides isn't the same as actually sitting through his briefing, but the latter option is unfortunately no longer available:

http://dnipogo.org/strategy-and-force-employment/boyd-and-mi...

http://www.danford.net/boyd/
Think about this... Jason needs visibility. People who spend so much energy hating him, provide him the visibility he needs. Some people will hate him just like some people hate Steve Jobs. Now when an Apple fanboy fights a naysayer, Apple benefits even if both sides are equally adamant. If a Jason hater argues with Jason's padawans ;-) with equal enthusiasm, probably Jason gains. Anyway jason's gains are non measurable but somehow it looks like a gain to my possibly naive eyes.

But all this has a good side for the entrepreneur... If Arrington and Jason keep fighting each other the entrepreneur benefits coz no single superpower rules tech media. They will both need to treat the entrepreneur with more respect than if they could "collude with each other" ;-).

Jason is notorious enough in the HN circles that if you choose to work for him after hearing all you have heard, you are either an idiot or a genius. Do the math of creating ur startup v/s joining him as an employee and if the math doesn't work out, don't bother to apply :-).

I remember reading a pg essay that each successive employee brings in less and less value... something like 1:1/4:1/9:...1/n^2

that is not hours of work but value. As the nth employee if you do not get what u deserve, for creating 1/n^2 of the value, just move on, else stay back.

I hope someone creates a startup that computes a desirability of working with various startups, angel investors and the like. Something like seatgeek with parameters like how handsomely the employees are rewarded, how tolerable the workplace is and so on. I guess there is a smooth curve from being the first employee to being the millionth. Each person can choose his own sweet spot.
Yeah, as an employee at Mahalo, I can confirm that no one is being forced to work here.
"Google asserts copyright, even on work I do in my own time." (Snap framework)
We are not discussing the difference between Python and Lisp (that is merely a short detour into something I know little about).

The argument is whether we can compile Python with gcc. We cannot, because of eval(). Can Lisp compile eval()? Yes, for a different value of 'compile' and a different value of 'eval'. You argue that the values of 'eval' are the same in Lisp and Python - I honestly don't have enough knowledge to evaluate that. All I know is that if they are, then Lisp compilers are not static compilers, in which case the argument has no bearing on the discussion about python and gcc.

You have implied that you can statically compile python eval()-statements, but you have not backed that up.
Mass Mirror Wikileaks
A/B Test Your Ruby Camping Web App Using ABingo
I agree that Coram's book had a taste of hagiography to it. I still found that the underling military theories made a lot more sense to me when revealed in the context of Boyd's upbringing and his own gradual development of the theories. I should definitely read Hammond next, thanks.

I've made it about 2/3 of the way through Boyd's slides and they're very distractingly dense. I'm sure they worked better with a live session.
Branding to Founders: What Law Firms Got Right and Others Haven't
I think it misses the main point as well. Large hosting companies are getting more wary of hosting controversial content of any kind. I don't think Rackspace killed the Quran-burning site because of government pressure, for example; and that situation seems fairly similar to this one. It might be that in this case the reason it was "controversial content" was pressure from the government, but it's not clear to me that Amazon wouldn't have done the same thing for different kinds of controversial content where the pressure came from, say, Oprah, rather than the government.

What if anything to do about that situation is trickier, which I guess is one reason for the EFF to frame it the other way. If indeed it was explicitly government pressure behind the scenes that caused Amazon's decision, then the analysis isn't nearly as tricky, because it's just government censorship, so what the EFF should do about it is obvious (oppose censorship, like they always do).
Facebook spam!
Got it now, thank you!
Well, Arrington has his own problems, and I wouldn't take that as an example of Jason's dickdom.
the rest of us are scrambling up the slope to get to $5m, then we can relax. Founders who reach that goal and still command the helm and less inclined, nowadays more than ever, to jump ship and sit at a cafe with their laptop, trying to look busy and tweeting about their comeback. Its cold outside baby!
> You don't need an interpreter anywhere, just a compiler.

This is one of those claims that is technically true, but is misleading. Really, there isn't an interpreter/compiler dichotomy, they are just variations on a theme. Or, standard definitions of them are variations on a theme, but often the line between them is very blurred (especially when just-in-time compilers come into it).

People typically consider 'compiler' to mean 'static compiler'. It generates native code into an executable, and then the 'program' is the executable. Lisp compilers are clearly very different to this, but GCC falls clean into it.

So it's wrong of you to allege that "you don't need an interpreter". You need a run-time component. Sure, this can be a compiler, rather than an interpreter, but its wrong to imply that you can support eval() simply with a static compiler such as gcc.
They're offering your company money. Their stipulation: the money has to go to the company. The founder can't take it and buy a car (or a wedding). This seems reasonable. The founder is hungry. So are hundreds of thousands of homeless people.
Not a weird Google thing. Very typical IP contract term.
> Do I care about the well being of the guy who manages VFINX?

Well he is pretty replaceable...
Indeed, the "chemical imbalance" theory is only that (and doesn't actually explain much, anyway), really isn't directly supported by evidence and is more likely representative of our need for "explanations".

That said, we have empirically observed that if you poke the brain in a certain area with a stick, it will help the depression of many people. We're even on our 3rd generation of sticks (MAOI -> tricycilics -> SSRIs etc.)

From the viewpoint of someone needing relief or the doctor who's trying to help, when e.g. its been found that cognitive-behavior therapy isn't enough (that's something to always try) or something needs to be done before it can be tried, why they work hardly matters given that we have enough experience with the side effects to know they seem to be a good trade-off for the therapeutic effect.

How long was it before we understood how aspirin works?
WARNING: Trojan.JS.Redirector.cq caught by my software comming from this site.
Most Startups Don't value Clean Code
Some stubborn problems associated with the number 3/2
It is the perception of it being true that is truly damaging, regardless of the facts. As the article mentions at the end, it "Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon."

If Amazon had just kept the site up, OR if there was no call to their offices about it, and they removed WikiLeaks on their own, the perception would be different. A more independent Amazon and a world where US companies can make their own legal decisions about content without Gov't interference or coercion.

Now the perception is someone as big as Amazon can get scared by a phone call, and no place is safe to put a site that might tick off a gov't official, and they get ticked off at a LOT of stuff.
What about some proof or reasonable grounds?
TROJAN WARNING Do not click: Branding to Founders What Law Firms Got Right
The site has a trojan on it.
The US is by no means less communist than China in this matter. You can tell me that Mr. Lieberman asked everyone politely to stop helping Wikileaks. But hey, go see a movie about mafias and gangsters and you get pretty much the same.

The reality is that democracy is just a cover up, the government can always see your personal emails, but you can't see what the government does. Call this freedom. But without transparency there is no freedom.
Nochex(.com) is a good alternative that I have used many times - a good service for buyers, low fees for merchants
wepay should be on this list
I think that Kurzweil has already answered arguments such as this. My rendition of that argument would be that...

<argument> Scientists who study these things are absolutely correct in saying that we won't achieve quick progress with walls they can see and the tools that they have. Yes, the thing is that we won't see notable progress in the experimental biological realm but rather we will first see super-quick progress from something like a very crude, biologically inspired AI that indeed doesn't require us to understand the brain but works well-enough at the exe-scale. From that, we'll have far more powerful tools to actually start to understand the brain. </argument>

I'm not qualified to say whether Kurzweil's answer here is correct. However, I don't think anyone is going to be able to make final judgment until a "singularity" happens or until computing progress definitively hits a wall we can't go around.

The living-forever question, of course, is a whole, other discussion.

The world is changing very rapidly. Given this, any extrapolation thirty years into the future is fantasy. Things may be very much nicer, very much more unpleasant or in-between. My argument is for uncertainty, not certainty. The idea that things will remain about the same seems like at least as much of a "fantasy" as the idea that the singularity will come and solve all of our problems.
Android captures 50 percent of Chinese smartphone market in Q3
when a company is laying off good engineers while b!tching about no being able to fill the dev positions in another department (same technology, same domain) for which they are actively hiring - is the company experiencing a shortage or a glut? (disclaimer: i left on my own ;)
I have no doubt that political (and popular?) pressure played a role in Amazon's decision. From a business standpoint it seems like a solid decision. Hosting wikileaks gains little and could be quite costly in lawsuits, ddos, loss of political standing and bad press.

Regardless this is a clear message that if you are going to publish something controversial online, Amazon (and likely similar providers) are not the place to do it.

Unfortunately the scope of what is controversial is quickly expanding and already encompasses what some would consider speech vital to maintaining the rights and freedoms granted to citizens of the US.
And that's a business decision, not a moral one.
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