skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes and no. The bill speaks to a number of scummy things being done.

The first is negative option sales in which the customer pays a low or no up front price but then is billed a larger price after a certain amount of time passes if the customer fails to cancel the service. This is how all the acai berry and colon cleanse sites worked. The blow up between Zynga/Facebook/Offerpal and the press last year which resulted in the Offerpal CEO stepping down was in relation to this topic as there was a lot of deceptive advertising going on with the negative option marketers. There were also a lot of really scummy merchants double and triple billing customers. Facebook reacted immediately by preventing landing pages for these offers from hiding the terms on later pages and being very explicit. Zynga stopped allowing any offers like those to be run at all and if I recall correctly Offerpal and others like them were stuck as a significant percentage of their offers fell into that category.

The second thing they are talking about is the pop up offer, confirmation page offer or co-registraton/co-sale paths that these types of merchants were very fond of using. These worked by making additional offers available to consumers at the end of a transaction and presenting the additional items as being all from the same merchant. These sales would often be completed by doing nothing more than clicking a single link or forgetting to uncheck a checkbox. The original merchant would transfer all customer information including credit card details to the merchants of the third party offers that were accepted without ever notifying the consumer they were doing business with a third party. Another way this type of a sale would take place is via "order confirmation calls." upsell.com (no longer the same site as it's redirecting to a different domain now) ran a call center that would call up your consumers, confirm their orders and then try to sell a bunch of other stuff. If a consumer chose to purchase an additional item upsell.com would request the consumers credit card details behind the scenes so that the entire process looks like it was happening from one merchant until it hits the credit card statement. Besides potential PCI violations consumers were unknowingly putting their data at risk by having it shared without their explicit consent. This bill attempts to stop these practices.
You could add an "about us" page describing the point of this web app. What is the problem you're trying to solve? Or, is this a "just because" app you coded for fun?

Maybe change the copyright year to 2011. I'm pretty it's 2011 everywhere on the globe by now :-)
> I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way

I would. I didn't sign up. The concept looked interesting, but there was no real information on this side of the sign-up wall. For me, there really is a mental effort in establishing One More Relationship with One More Website.
The SEC is where they always are, fighting the last war. Investments create return because there is risk, not every investment is going to be a winner. When investing in startups with new business models there is a lot of risk and hence a lot of return. Hopefully the SEC stays out of it because the combination of the SEC, Federal Reserve and Federal Gov't create untold havok in the market. Even a GIC has risk because of the underlying fractional reserve system. The same thing that allows the economy to expand faster than the rate of gold mining also allows the leverage to unwind just as fast.

The Fed, SEC, and Federal Gov't collude to prevent the free market from working and bad ideas from failing. Look at a graph of global IPOs vs. IPOs on american exchanges since Sarbox was passed. You'll see how the overly onerous regulations prevent the market from functioning properly and create an environment of moral hazard where undue risks are taken, and investors who correct the market have their returns taken away from them. The investors who shorted AIG, Bear Stearns, GS, Citigroup, BOA, etc and recognized their impending fiscal collapse should be handsomely rewarded for their prescient view of the market. Having your company collapse is the right way to handle reckless investing.

Hopefully the SEC stays out of it, an ETF/Shell corp for Facebook shares is the ideal balance between public money and few onerous requirements. If an investor feels that the lack information available for Facebook prevents an informed decision from being made then perhaps they should not invest.

Yes, you may lose your shirt investing in Facebook, but you might also make a lot of money. I don't see a problem with either outcome.
Many existing Android tablets may not be upgradeable to Honeycomb
why is the trend currently to making everything so big? Im not Tufte fanboi but information content is a big part of design, and while i wish you the best of luck with your venture, I would love to see the design be less about big and more about density. (Chrome/9)
Offer HN: I'll redesign your website
Here's an example of a site I did for my buddy. http://www.citytheft.com

Post in the comments on yours and i'll do one like I did for his.
If he wrote it like:

Hey, I don't read your blog but here is my shiny new product...

Then it'd have reached spam folder already. It'd be interesting to compare what you two wrote in there.
I had a strange sense Déjà vu while reading this post. Regardless, "a robust set of widget creation tools" line was choice.
Curiously, the Xeon X7560 is also $3838; that must be some kind of magic number.
> I guess the hardest part is I want to be an expert right away.

Not possible, it's like learning a musical instrument.

> When I start looking at building something, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

What are you trying to build?
Not a smooth experience for me at all. Tried multiple ways of scrolling.
I pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first.

It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.
Music of the Stock Market
Hey - you're right.

That's because I only just launched the new site and all the top lists from the past week are old lists created before images were possible!

I know the site isn't looking too consistent the moment but I'm really pleased with the way the new lists look - take a look at the latest lists and see how the new style looks.

I'm new at this coding malarkey and error handling and exception handling is still somewhere down on my todo list so not everything works perfectly... I'm working hard to fix everything tho!

Thanks

Tom
That's also something that's come up in the UK, too. Especially with teenagers. I assume that is because of television shows.
I'm curious why you think so (about the Z80, I mean). I seem to remember it being in very cheap computers as well (ZX Spectrum, doesn't get much cheaper than that) and was a great deal faster. I grew up with a 6502 and love it like a childhood pet but can't see how it 'ran rings' around the Z80.
> David Kelley, founder and CEO of the Atlas Society, set the scene for them: the context of the whole novel and the significance of what they were about to see–the portrayal of businessmen as heroes, MORAL heroes.

This is inaccurate. Atlas Shrugged portrays some businessmen as heros and others as leeches, thugs, incompetents, moochers, looters, parasites, etc... It glorifies a certain type of businessman, not all businessmen.
It's called Wikipedia, FYI.
I thought it was hilarious. Agree that the poster is an outlier.
I wonder if Microsoft is running that service for the same reason or simply because Google had a 411 a product Microsoft thought they needed one too.
But unless you do business in one of those countries you can pretty much ignore these laws.
Moore's Law of Internet Latency
Nike's hired guns for design are generally a bit ahead of the mainstream curve of any art direction. They've got a long history of legitimizing (rather, stealing) a particular style, postmodern editing in general, and Sagmeister and Victore's scratchiti style in particular.

So, yes. You'll start to see a lot of pop sites employ this technique. Still, there's likely to be a bit of a reprieve between this and when the really bad shops start using it. Say, eight months?
I don't think there's anything inherently spammy about ClickBank. It's a 3rd party payment processor with a built-in affiliate program for each merchant, pretty harmless stuff.
Is it worth cutting out sugar?
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

(Source: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html)
Plus, it was delightful to program.

Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program.

BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.
yeah besides the "and because we love you!," I liked the visual clarity of the second email.

Let's face it. We scan emails visually for clues as to what to read next. The step 1, etc. was much easier to comprehend, and the intro was two lines. That's what made the email great.
Show HN: Disguise webpage text to appear as though you are in Visual Studio
I could only get the presentation I think they were after by using their navigation buttons on the right side of the page. Using the scroll wheel or scroll bar manually gave a very poor experience.
Good point! I have just added a new section to the blog post which includes the browser compatibility points which have been made here.
BitTorrent Hits 100M Active Monthly Users, 400K Client Downloads Per Day
>I actually do have a page exactly like that

To me, that page is about installation. The screenshot where you apply the style is way down at the bottom. You need that to show up right on your home page, above the fold. You're wasting 2/3 of my window width on a gray gradient; dump that and use it to strut your stuff.

An idea to get attention: figure out the 100 or so top opinion makers for Photoshop users, and mail them postcards with before-and-after.
Nashville TN - No Remote

Big global company, smaller shop here in town. C/C++ software engineers.

Great place to work :)

Shoot me an email if intersted jantix5ATgmailDOTcom
Wired vs. New York Times on flash trading
I think this is the first well thought-out post I've seen on this subject in a while. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you for the information on the Android browsers. I have added your points to the post and linked back to your comment.
From the reading I've done lately, switchable graphics are just now coming into their own. Nvidia Optimus in notebooks (only) now apparently does very nice automatic seamless switching between CPU and dedicated GPU. There are some good articles out there benchmarking the much improved battery life. When the next round of SSD are released, one will be able to buy a pretty sweet laptop: powerful when you need it, but super efficient when you don't, and fast always.

I'm pretty certain I read (an article on anantech?) that graphics switching is explicitly not going to be supported on desktops until the next release of intel processors.

Here it is:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-i...

"Quick Sync with a Discrete GPU There’s just one hangup to all of this Quick Sync greatness: it only works if the processor’s GPU is enabled. In other words, on a desktop with a single monitor connected to a discrete GPU, you can’t use Quick Sync.

This isn’t a problem for mobile since Sandy Bridge notebooks should support switchable graphics, meaning you can use Quick Sync without waking up the discrete GPU. However there’s no standardized switchable graphics for desktops yet. Intel indicated that we may see some switchable solutions in the coming months on the desktop, but until then you either have to use the integrated GPU alone or run a multimonitor setup with one monitor connected to Intel’s GPU in order to use Quick Sync."
Secret APIs
A company I once worked at, 800-Free-411 is still operational.

They're Ad-funded, so they should in theory be independent of a larger company's whim to shut down sluggish divisions.
that the pain of a public company is so onerous that having a bank involved is apparently seen as an advantage

Let's be specific about this "pain". What I recall from various articles, Facebook is very reticent to have it's actual revenue numbers floating around.

One might argue that there is too much regulation of public companies in general but the specific regulation that a public company has to engage in public disclosure seems sound to me. Facebook's skirting of this regulation seems questionable to say the least.
I didn't even notice those buttons until I came back here and read your comment. It is completely lost on me how this site is "awesome". "Unusable" sounds more like it.
Try the left and right arrows keys. It makes for easy navigation between 'slides'.
I guess this is another reason to be very careful of anything you say about anyone in an electronic medium!
The amount of oil resources is fixed upon a price point and technology level. At $1000 a barrel there is a lot more oil in the world than at $5. With improved recovery systems there is more oil in each well, etc. With 17KM drills there is still more oil. At $140 per barrel there is more oil in Alberta than in Saudi Arabia. Oil reserves are proved out at a given price point. Exxon will not look for oil that can be extracted at $250 per barrel because that price point is not on the near term horizon. I personally doubt we'll ever hit an inflation adjusted $250 per barrel because of the substitutes available at that price point.
My experience w/Yahoo! mail is surreal. It even marks my own mail as spam. And misses lots of real spam.

(i use gmail primarily, but have an old Yahoo! address for bacn)
The page scrolls up and down, left and right keys are very unintuitive in this case though it does provide the same experience as clicking on their navigation blobs on the right.
I don't know. For all that some people treat Ayn Rand's stuff as The End Of All Wisdom it can also do good - it shook me out of some bland and unconsidered pieties that Hollywood had instilled in me. I have a fair number of huge disagreements with Rand and don't really respect her much as a thinker - but I'm still glad I read the book when I did.
i second the first bit of feedback. the visualization of 'getting things done' is really important-it's a deal maker/breaker to me. and i don't want to sign up unless i know what it is. keep on keepin on!
I see it as Google's role to index all information, scan all the books and so on, to make sure that the AI will see that our histories are intertwined, that man and technology evolved together and it shouldn't eliminate us.
They're not a public company, or even effectively a public company, even with Goldman facilitating, if you still need to be a RegD accredited investor to buy a share.
Really cool idea, and great execution. I'm picky about signing up for little apps like this, but I like the idea alot.
I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing things about the city. I was glad I didn't have a car with me. The subway was excellent.
I have an email newsletter (http://dlewis.net/nik) and I don't think it's Mailchimp's (my ESP) fault that there's no audio/video support. (They allow for a pseudo-embed of YouTube videos.)

The fact is that most email clients wouldn't support it, and the user experience for the recipients would, therefore, suck.
I've been working on a board-game program lately and I've created a "referee" object that's responsible for enforcing rules, handling workflow, turn taking, etc. Works really well for me.
Manufacturers Turn to Smart TV After 3-D Disappoints
I was interested until I read this: "... the movie is in three parts, each separated by approximately a year ..."

Really? 3 parts? Sounds like they are really milking this for all it's worth (a-la Harry Potter 7). Is it in 3D too?

Personally, I would have liked to see a single, longer movie. I think you could distill the essence of the book into a movie 2-3 hours long.
The jumping right in is of the jump-right-in-by-typing-in-code variety. And that's the way to go.
Duck.com is owned by Google, not by DuckDuckGo
I suppose it would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to make the crack that the 2nd two hour installment will be John Galt's speech.
Reminds me of stallmans endless ranting about freedom and software.

The evidence is that the masses don't care. They just want stuff that works and solves problems for them. Is it open source? Why would anyone (apart from a geek) care?
I agree.. It seems every time I get a bigger monitor, websites progressively get larger to where they take up way too much real estate.
So long, broadband duopoly? Cable's high-speed triumph
Adam’s Life Hacks Part Two: The Paper Filing System
Saying something is wrong does not necessarily imply that there is a better solution currently out there.
FriendFeed had this over 2 years ago: http://friendfeed.com/steverubel/54df8bf5/short-urls-shared-...
It's funny how similar in implementation this could be to OhLife, and yet how different a feeling it has. It is really interesting to take the exact same technology, put a different story in front of it, and be amazed the entire new audience you have just discovered.
The title of this posting is so misleading that it can only be intentional. Please stop.

FTA: "Sarcasm aside, I greatly admire Google. My goal is not to be acquired, because I'm in this thing for the long haul -- but if I had to pick a company to be acquired by, it would probably be Google."
But there's always one nagging problem which it doesn't. In CS it is performance. In finance, maybe solvency?
> almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade

Unions will just go quietly into the night?
Justin.tv hiring summer software engineering interns [SF]
I'd love to get more insight into how Google fixes problems like this, like hopefully you don't just hard code a multiplier for stackoverflow.com or a negative one for the spam sites?
Etiquette of Screen-scraping Stack Overflow? - Meta Stack Overflow
You'll need `bundle update foo` if foo has a git source, e.g. `gem 'foo', :git => 'git://github.com/johndoe/foo.git'`, and new code committed that you want.

It's not as simple as saying never use it.
Ask HN: Help choosing startup name.
Any tips for choosing a good startup name?
Do you hate running out of toothpaste? (My startup pitch)
"In speaking with a few colleagues, it appears Twitter is using the 301 redirect on the short URL to provide the mouseover with the full URL."

Is this just a non-technical person attempting to inject a little detail into the article? My first thought was, "How would I do this in JS?" and it took me a second to decipher that sentence.
I've never used the Shapeways service, but I had some prototypes 3D printed before. It was a few years ago, and it was just some parts I used to make a mold for metal casting.

One of the most interesting things I've seen made by Shapeways has been the jewelry that some people have made. Examples like http://www.shapeways.com/model/107269/structural_skull_ring.... and http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=1664&#...
I've read several articles pointing out that traffic seems to be an emergent behavior, and can be predicted like the flow of a gas, regardless of the individuals involved.
Ask HN: What are the options for getting notifications?
I'm considering making HN my new crack addiction but this seems like such an obvious missing feature. I don't want to look on my iPhone for updates (from notifo) - any other options?
Really enjoyed the ideas of breaking instructions into steps and offering subtle separators to prevent users from being overwhelmed.

...and just like his email suggestions, Allan's email was succinct and helpful.
Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best.

>safety regulations could be greatly relaxed.

No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.

> children could own cars

But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.

> 3. The beverage industry will go.

False assumptions without supporting data, but I have no facts to counteract it.

>4. Speed limits will be unnecessary

Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.

> The map will shrink greatly.

No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.

> Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?

I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to. Urbanization has been the greatest driving factor of population trends in the last century. If anything, if what is proposed came to pass, you would see increased urbanization of small towns/suburbs.

>Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago?

No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?

>9. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a hell of a lot nicer.

I'm sorry, I don't live in fantasy land where fuel costs suddenly become irrelevant. Fuel costs make up at least 16% of the overall cost. And there will still be a premium because people will be willing to pay it.

Yes, a driver less car will make someone a lot of money. Does this equate to the above points? No, the author's hypothesis has no basis in reality and no facts to back it up.
I've been watching for them to drop into my price range for over a year now. Are they really worth the premium?
Social Coding How-to
Let 2011 Be Your Year for Financial Organization
Here's the only example I have:
http://www.google.com/search?q=facebox+value+text&hl=en

Based on my search history I've clicked efreedom links several times, but currently the stackoverflow link is the top one for those searches now. I would be surprised if I had clicked efreedom if stackoverflow was at top.
Add a webhook:

https://api.notifo.com/docs/webhooks

And you can redirect your notifo alerts to email/rss with a tiny bit of code.
I guess you need a publisher like engadget to get the bug noticed by Google! That bug has discussed on HN & Reddit multiple times this year but was never a priority for Google until now.
The Search for a Business Model