skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paypal, Google adwords, and many other services, do use statistical predictors to determine what is likely to be fraud. Many innocent people get flagged by them. This is a known and accepted risk of using such services.

The fact is, if Paypal were not permitted to statistically discriminate, they wouldn't exist. Is it really a moral travesty that they are using nation of origin as one of the predictors?
worthless interview - as you say no substance, 2 minutes and not one question really about the title
I wonder how many people who run WordPress think it's pretty simple to check for malicious Javascript or PHP code in a theme?
I'm currently in the same boat, working fulltime for a UK accelerator/incubator project, and then working on SlideReach (http://slidereach.com) in my evenings and weekends. The big challenge I'm facing is of choosing what to work on in my limited time, but thats where getting feedback early and often should help.
The impression that I got from watching that video was that they were trying to
1) flatter the average person by telling him/her that he/she is a very creative individual,
2) convince us that having a funny little device with 3 flexible screens is the pinnacle of creativity.

Incidentally, they didn't really show any really novel use for the device, except maybe the scene where they use the device to hold a flower temporarily (because you'll need to water the flower if you're planning on leaving it there).
It's all very well to understand something in the abstract, but frequently that doesn't easily translate to the specifics without a lot of running around mapping concepts. When your machine is abstract, or even better, a concrete implementation of something virtual, the kinds of manipulations you need for debugging are pretty trivial. But if that's all you know about debugging - only understanding it at that high a level - it will limit your practical usefulness actually getting work done in many scenarios.

Device drivers generally don't run on virtual machines; likewise most C programs, nor most VM implementations, nor most interop through foreign function interfaces in heterogeneous environments. Understanding how these things can be debugged on any particular architecture is applied knowledge, but it is knowledge nonetheless, and no less worthy of a blog post written for those who would learn more about the topic.

Considering a concrete case that people using Delphi for Windows take for granted: integer divide by zero diagnostics, communicated via exceptions on Win32. If your implementation is a virtual machine, creating a debugger to handle this kind of situation is ridiculously trivial; it's just a special case in however you implement divisions. On the x86, it's a little trickier; but Windows makes it easier for you. I don't remember all the details now (it actually may not even be for integer divide, but I think it is), Windows will handle the CPU interrupt, look at the faulting code, disassemble it, figure out what kind of problem it was, and then make sure to dispatch a structured exception corresponding to an integer divide by zero, rather than a more general arithmetic exception. It does this work for Win32, but not Win64, as I recall. Now, the mechanisms for how structured exceptions are dispatched is an article in itself, and very different for Win32 vs Win64; then there's the details of how debugger events are propagated to the debugger in Windows, etc. All this is part of "how debuggers work" in the concrete.

But if all you have is an abstract understanding of debuggers, it won't help you much when you're thrown into the deep pool of real-world writing of debuggers. The devil is in the details; and you get paid for dealing with that devil, not for floating around with the angels of "clarity of thought". The fact is, you won't get much done in the large without also having that clarity of thought at the higher level, and in particular, you won't innovate much.
Most big companies are incredibly inefficient bureaucracies. Contrary to popular belief, big companies aren't any better than government agencies from an efficiency point of view (probably worse, actually).
What sort of ambitious things?
Reflections on Graduate Education
You're right on these points. Mixi is basically the same from a functionality perspective, and what kind of activities they perform. However, there is a nuanced difference with the degree of sharing.

Also, Japanese who have been abroad defiantly do use it differently. One example is photos. I notice Japanese who have been abroad or have lots of foreign Facebook friends share far more photos than those who haven't.

Perhaps my article overplayed the professionalism of Japanese Facebook account. The accounts I've seen aren't on par with LinkedIn on their focus towards being professional. However, I get the feeling that Japanese Facebook users are much more conscious of what non-friends will think of their account than western users are.
Jupiter Applet
Not only Nigeria, may I point out that most countries of the world, besides the very few top ones (US, Canada, Japan, Australia and Eurozone countries) are in about the same position regarding e-commerce and web acceptance in general. You can't start a paypal account, you can't pay online with locally issued credit cards, and you generally are prejudiced as a criminal.

Which must be contributing to the online crime coming from this countries, since if you are already treated as a thief, why not just be one? :)
tl;dr --- the guy read:

* RailsTutorial: http://railstutorial.org/book/

* Getting Good with Git: http://rockablepress.com/books/getting-good-with-git/

* ProGit: http://progit.org/book

These are online ebooks, of which the first and third have free access to the HTML. ProGit seems most useful.

Aside from these pointers, the blog post itself has very little technical content.
Since your invoices are itemized and dated, and source control is itemized and dated, you're well within your rights to accurately roll back the deliverable to the state it was in after the last paid bill.

Are you qualified to give legal advice? And if so, are you confident that this advice is appropriate for all jurisdictions where someone might be reading this comment?
I use TERM=xterm-256color
PayPal isn't in this business to do justice. Nigeria's market size to risk factor is extremely bad, and perception of it generally is not improving. There is no point for them to absorbing the risk.

Any given day I can dive into my spam folder and see at least a dozen of Nigerian scam offers, perhaps that explains the general perception. While on the dawn of the Web there was a number of places deemed to be sources of fraud (e.g. much of Eastern Europe), most of them got a grip on electronic crime, and their reputations improved. It's long overdue for Nigeria to get their act together.
Perhaps humans.txt would suggest which kinds of humans should and should not visit this site. Under-18s, for example.
Learn What Customer Focus Really Means in Sales
No, and no.

If you're in this situation, chance are it's because you're working without a clear written contract. The best you can do is work in good faith and hope that your client does the same.

In my opinion, delivering the portion of the product that has been paid for is acting in good faith. As is giving the option to proceed with the original agreed transaction, should the client desire to do so.
Yes, browsing via a proxy or VPN while not in the US is just common practice for plenty of folks. Apart from fraud flagging, the sites that geo-IP for language settings is very annoying. (Seriously, the IETF actually gets Accept-Language right, it's actually implemented, and then ignored?? Sigh.)

Google Chrome takes the cake here though. They use your IP to determine the install language. Even if you download the US binaries, they use your IP to determine your local search site and display non-English results.

The real kicker? Chrome then prompts "This page is in <Spanish>. Would you like to translate it?"
They are not doing a statistical determination. There is no algorithm behind it that indicates when a country is safe to do business with. They have just switched off Nigeria. There is no appeal. There is no review.
Why does he need to jump through hoops that others don't? Oh yes, because he is a 2nd-class netizen, the whole premise of his essay!
Better yet, tell them what you're working on, and get a signed statement that they're cool with it. Informal agreements may not survive a change in management.

(It may be less important to take care of these details in California, where, as I understand it, state law generally keeps employers from claiming rights to what their employees do on their own time, with their own equipment. But the devil's in the details, and it's probably best to talk to a lawyer about the limits of those provisions before taking anything for granted. And most other states are far less friendly to employees than California...)
Maybe this is not a very popular response, but am I alone in thinking that the collective responsibility for this rests, to some extent at least, indeed with all Nigerians?

In that as citizens they should support politicians that take 419/spam/fraud issues seriously?

Were there no collective responsibility, then all arguments of the kind that the West owes/owed something to Africa for its colonial misdeeds, would even be less valid (as hardly anyone involved with that is around any more...).

(and just to clarify, I do think the West owes something to Africa, but collective responsibility can't go one way only. Being responsible, and building a reputation for it, is as important for nations as it is for businesses, teams and individual employees)
Where do I send my bank account information?
it changed automatically
Personally speaking? Much like getting a surprise offer of marriage from a person on the street probably shouldn't change one's immediate plans, a surprise offer of investment probably shouldn't change one's immediate plans. Do you have a good handle on what changes in your life/business with $100k in your pocket? Is that a positive change? If you don't have good answers to both questions, table the offer for now.

You were going to execute on the startup. So, execute on the startup. Suppose you decide "Yeah, come to think of it, taking investment (and everything that goes with that) really makes sense for you, then you will probably find it still available in the future, from this guy or somebody else. It is unlikely you're going to get worse terms three months or six months from now, when you've added N more quanta of value.
But instead of saying that, he said "fuck you" which is more open to interpretation, I think.
Ask HN: Daily Recurring Checklist
Is there an app with a good workflow for a daily recurring checklist? I'm looking for a web app or something that I can use from anywhere which I can use to establish some habits. (Stuff like push-ups in the morning, make my bed, go sort my junk mail, etc...)
It works well for normal people. And these options can be configured from the "under the hood" preferences tab.
A VC: The Independent Web
There might be room for a new strictly programming related HN-style news/discussion site. HN has a lot of non-tech, and reddit/r/programming is very low-quality.
I wrote about this in Wired some time ago. Here's the link. It's also the subject of the last part--a sort of epilog--to my book Crypto.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html

I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.
I wish "Git" weren't synonymous with "DVCS". I don't know if these articles mean I should switch to Git from bzr or if they mean I should use a DVCS, which I do.

For this article, it's the latter.
- Never give up on your dreams. EVER!

- Do one thing a day.(Everyday)

- Happiness != Wealth. Love != Wealth. Love = Happiness.
Eric Schmidt was a great CEO, has led to success as a startup that Google is now the undisputed leader among search engines and offers a multitude of services (not counting those that are developing "Offer", the Social Network by Called Google "GoogleME, " and so on). In your opinion, when is the time where you have to CEO from outside the birth of the startup?
It's unjust, particularly because "being a Nigerian in Nigeria" is not a condition that most people in that condition can simply elect to remove themselves from. Consider the situation from a Rawlsian veil of ignorance perspective.
Sorry - I should have kept track of this discussion. For Startup Riot if you are presenting, the top Python based startups will be chosen based on audience voting. So if you have are presenting and want a slot, just keep doing what you were planning on doing and make a good show at the event. Winners will be announced at the end of the day.

Again, sorry for the slow reply.
While on holiday in Morocco one of my domains got very close to expiring, after trying for an hour or so to renew it I have a friend my details and they logged in and done it immediately. for some reason didnt think of using a proxy

I couldnt imagine how frustrating it would be for that to happen regularly
"Paypal won't let me register and account, so I'll start mass spamming scams online."

I'm not sure I follow.

Also, I'm Brazilian and Paypal accepted my locally issued credit card just fine.
The Internet is Running Out of Space...Kind of
What's "normal"?
Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator?
We know it has been done before, but we think we do it rather differently. Please tell us what you think. All ideas and criticisms are welcome.
This will all go away when Nigerians stop the fraud. It's really that simple (or that complex, depending on your point of view). Like many of Africa's problems, this one is systemic.
I run Terminator (http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/) in a Linux VM for the same reason. Such tremendous overkill. Now I'm tempted to dig out my Mac Mini...
I'll definitely agree about the photos -- Japanese people with foreign friends or who have been abroad are also much more aggressive with the photo tagging.

I wonder how much of that is just Facebook, though; when I started using Facebook heavily about a year ago after having an account since the beginning, I was completely lost about how to upload/tag/organize pictures. Facebook wasn't much help with its cluttered interface.

As far as self-consciousness, I don't think it's necessarily a Facebook thing... Mixi users are just as self-conscious and "groom" their profiles to be just-so -- the same for their profile pictures, which are their public face. I would argue that it's more a facet of Japanese society than of Facebook in particular.

I sort of think that the Japanese Facebook population of frequent users is still a bit too small to judge, too...

Edit: I meant to say this before, but mobage and gree are both much, much more popular with people under 18 than adults in my area. I wonder how much of that has to do with the commercials.

Edit 2: I just realized this, but I wonder how much of LinkedIn's lack of popularity has to do with the conservativeness of business culture in Japan in general. I mean, they have standardized forms for resumes and personal history here.
> "Paypal won't let me register and account, so I'll start mass spamming scams online."

Something like: a bunch of reasonably well educated people with internet access, unable to participate in legitimate web commerce, are more likely to pursue illegitimate ways to make money online. Sort of the same problem you had in the 1990s with a bunch of viruses and scams coming out of Eastern Europe.
Cool if true - the one thing you want to make sure of when using the IB interface is that you don't accidentally end up on margin - which is easy fairly easy to do by accident.

(It's not that they try to get you there - it's just a trading platform for pros. A friend once told me how part if portfolio was sold automatically because of an automatic margin call when he didn't even realize hew as on margin)
+10 Phillip K Dick points to you, sir
A talent acquisition means the company buys your company and then hires you -- all the shareholders make money, even those which the new company doesn't hire.

This is very different from dissolving your company and getting big sign on bonuses. If that is how you are being approached, your small shareholder is going to be mad.
How many percentage of internet users from Nigeria are scamming? It's a small minority, probably similar to the number of Americans sending spam emails. But Nigeria can be simply cancelled from the system, because it's a low income country. It's not a systemic problem, and it's not an 'Africa problem'. It's a choice by paypal.
> Which must be contributing to the online crime coming from this countries, since if you are already treated as a thief, why not just be one? :)

There is absolutely no logic to that statement.

Not being allowed to do business on a site because your country has a statistically high incidence of fraud is not the same as being treated as a thief.

Being treated as a thief would mean to be wrongfully prosecuted for a crime you did not commit, not being allowed to do business in the way that you prefer is not a punishment, it's an inconvenience, even if it is a substantial one.

'blame the merchant' seems to be the approach taken by most companies that are in the payment chain, our payment processor actually blocks a whole slew of countries and it might lose us the occasional sale but at least we get to stay in business.
Contact me privately and I will give you a VPN and unfettered access to the net, IF you promise me not to get yourself in trouble.

Regards.
You're absolutely right. When I first looked at iTerm2 a few years ago, I could swear this wasn't supported to the extent it is today (horizontal and vertical splits). Apologies for the misleading comment.
You're incorrect on both accounts.

First, if my OS and browser preferences are stating English (or any language for that matter), why should the IP come into play? "Normal" people will already be using a localized OS and hence will send an Accept-Language with their preferred language (and perhaps country).

Second, while you can go try to navigate the "Under the Hood" section in another language to switch languages, the default Google search uses "{google:baseURL}", which gets hard coded to the localized version someone though you should be forced to use.

You actually have to delete the default search in the omnibar and create a new one, manually specifying the Google site you wish to use. There is no quick option to say "no, your silly auto-detection is broken, use the language I'm specifying for UI and search".
Depends what kind of options you are selling - but I'd actually say explicitly leave out writing calls from the plan - that's not somewhere you want to go given the unlimited risk you face.
It's fast, but a few things I have an issue with:

- only shows .com
- doesn't show splits or domain hacks (eg del.icio.us)
- not clear when I see only orange results if those are unavailable
The Limbo of Half Finished Projects
List of 10 Necessary Office Games
INAL. Of course, that acronym is always followed by bad legal advice. So for entertainment purposes only...

I suggest that taking something away from a client is more trouble than it's worth, even if they haven't paid for it. So to use your ideas with mine, don't formally deliver the completed work until you are paid.

A few suggestions:

1. Be very clear about the fact that the software is "in acceptance testing" state until formally signed off as complete and monies have been paid. It is not "In production." Agree in writing that when you are paid that you wipe any databases involved and start from scratch. This establishes quite clearly that the client is not expecting to run their business on software that is not in production yet, they are just testing it.

2. If this is hosted software, host development code yourself until you are paid, at which point you can deploy it to their system.

3. You're using source code control. Great! Establish a formal "production" branch separate from development. Bug fixes have to be performed in both branches. This is a good practice in any event, but when you're fighting with a difficult client later, they will often complain that the software doesn't work and you have to fix issues with software that is already in production before they will pay you for work you're doing on new features. Now you can fix issues on the production code while witholding new features until they pony up the lettuce.

JM2C. Did I mention that INAL?
I think the bigger issue is GDP and GDP per capita for both Nigeria and Africa as a whole:

Nigeria GDP (PPP): $170bil

Nigeria GDP per capita: $1754

I can understand why e-commerce companies might just choose to blacklist an entire country. There isn't much of a financial incentive to expend the resources for that small of a market.

I am not trying to comment on whether this is justifiable or not, but that is the reality of the situation.
When the title of the article is "How debuggers work", I thought it might be more profitable to actually fulfill that premise, and not get side-tracked by the quirks of ptrace. (For example, no one could implement a debugger for, say, python scripts just reading this article.)

A better title might have been "how to trace child processes under POSIX".

Solving the general case is not just an academic exercise, it's also a richly rewarding learning experience. When people learn to think abstractly, none of these implementation details really matter. You can always specialize and learn the details of an specific instance; it's best to get a good grasp of the big-picture.

[Edit: Instead of discussing "debuggers", in general, I hoped to narrow down and focus on just interruption mechanisms. Third-party execution tracing and stepping are usually outside language semantics, so there is some "art" to gaining control from an executing program. It would be nice to catalog the lore, and I hope others add to the three I have suggested above]
I'm having the exact same issue while traveling in Romania.

Romania is a part of the European Union as well. It's incredibly frustrating just to sit there and get "unable to process."

What a crappy error message too. How about "this is a suspicious transaction. Please call GoDaddy or join a LiveChat session to continue."

It really feels second class. Fuck indeed!
Not quite in order...

1. Splits & domain hacks. My partner in crime will be happy you said that - we will add. Prob at least a week though.

2. Orange - yes - means that they are unavailable. We can add a comment to make that more clear. If you click on an orange link, you get a 'more like this' effect where we search with the underlying phrase.

3. .com. Valid point - a bit like the domain hacks I didn't think people were that interested in odd domains so it wasn't rolled out at first. It will be added shortly.
Thank you :)
I think that 10x gain can be split into several multipliers like environment, tools and experience.

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf

There is already a disparity between tools (see link above, figures 15 and 16), about 3 times in programming speed. Multiply it by 2-2,5 times from environment and you already get disparity about 6-8 times. If you add experience or talent as a 1,5 multiplier, you will arrive to disparity of 9-12 times between best and average.
How many of those people are using the internet? How about for the rest of Africa? And how much ecommerce will they generate compared to other markets? That's the driving question when Paypal and other companies decide whether they want to take the risks inherently associated with operating in Nigeria and/or the rest of Africa.