skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So this is quite complex....

You need:

1. Merchant Account
2. Payment service provider
3. Billing software (your own or someone else)

Like you, we are UK based business, who wants to charge in dollars. Wanting the flexibility of having our own merchant account, the better rates that should give, and the portability of your customers (and their card details) I first of all spoke to the banks. But some won't deal with startups without 2 years trading history (HSBC and LTSB for example). Some don't charge in anything other than GBP yet (Clydesdale). And some, such as Barclays, although they will charge in both USD and GBP want to charge exorbitant rates for USD transactions. (2 or 3 times typical GBP rates).

You also need to make sure your merchant bank support recurring transactions; not all do!

Setting up a merchant account can take weeks and a lot of paperwork and hassle. In the end, for competitive multi currency rates and simplicity we opened an account with PayPal Website Payments Pro. This took around 48 hours!

It also killed the requirement for a payment gateway, which reduces the cost and complexity again. The downside with PayPal is, I believe, that if we wanted to move in the future, our customers would have to re-key their payment details with our new provider.

Regardless of whether you are with PayPal, or a bank+PSP the next step is the recurring billing.

Putting together these three separate providers together can be a bit of a nightmare. Although most banks support most payment gateways, most recurring billing providers only support a minimal number of gateways.

If you are in the UK and want to use Chargify you have no choice but to use DPS Payment Express (an Australian company) and they in turn only work with HSBC or Barclays.

Recurly support (for the UK) Cybersource, SagePay and PayPal Website Payments Pro.

Spreedly supports more, but for some reason that I now can't remember I counted them out.

The thing about billing is that it quickly becomes pretty complex and the smaller providers have all got limitations which could, depending on your business model, cause problems. You can imagine that with however many customers they all have, there will be a lot of requests to them along the lines of "can you just add this... that would be great". It must be hard for these guys to keep up with such requests.

When you look at the recurring billing providers you may also need to look at whether they support multi currencies, and VAT.

That's all I can think of for now. Good luck!
Must be Aaron Sorkin's compelling writing that influenced the decision.
Is Apple’s Data Center Using a ‘Unique’ Design?
If the reddit team had had (errr... how's my use of English past tense?) the $150K deal, they might have lasted this long on just that. They probably would not have sold to Conde Nast when they did.
I'd be willing to bet Lieberman has barely used the internet. Ever.

I mean, my Nana won't touch it, and she's about 10x as progressive as him, so...
I don't know. I don't think Angry Birds is an interesting game, but it's obviously blowing up like mad, so I don't pretend that any rational dictum will predict that it dies down.

You don't see plushies and fan art for the other games - and you shouldn't ignore all the ways the creators profit from the franchise. They also make a bunch of themed releases like Halloween. They may also have hit a tweenage demographic susceptible to crap like Silly Bandz, Bratz, and other inane ztuff.

They even have an ad ready for Superbowl(!).
For most of my college career I was set on continuing it further into a MS in CS. I'm approximately a year away from my BS, and there is no way that I'd deviate from this current explosion of awesome present in today's job market. I see a lot more enthusiasm for creativity and output, something that lacks from a few of the traditional college systems. Then again, I once heard "college is there to test you, not teach you."
I'm sorry, but that's probably the least enjoyable experience that I've had on a website in recent times. It uses tons of fonts, few of which are actually readable. It doesn't degrade gracefully when JavaScript is disabled. It doesn't perform so great under Firefox 3.6. Overall, it's just unintuitive and confusing. It's an interesting concept but I'm not so sure the end justifies the means.
Pricing for Kalimba Pro is at: https://pro.embed.ly/pricing - there is no Free plan.

Kalimba is just the name of hn.embed.ly. I think you mean pricing for _Embedly Pro_.
We have not just Facebook movie data but obviously books, music and lots of other good stuff. Lots of relationships to explore between "likes" and personality, values, morals, which we plan to do on our blog, in the style of OkCupid. If anyone is interested in doing analysis with us, shoot me a note at tim [at] mytype.com. Would be cool to find someone else to write posts with.
One day we will see the (higher) education bubble burst. It's overdue already in my opinion.

I watched the bubble swell in the late 90's--and it has become insanely bigger and bigger in the last decade--as higher ed really turned into a business first and an education institution second.
Bing and Google are always trying to outdo each other - lucky us
Well it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the FCC will be the cure for the Comcast problems.
"We already know the US government isn't allowed to do this kind of thing."

You sure about that? I'm pretty sure the President already has far the ability to do far more drastic things than this bill authorizes. See for example: http://gcn.com/articles/2010/06/28/no--kill-switch-in-lieber...
Ask HN: Is it time to close my first startup?
Looking for a little life advice.

I'm currently debating shutting down my first bootstrapped startup (AdsReloaded.com). It's in the vein of tapzilla, appredeem, and apperang. I "launched" last June and have had about 700 in revenue since then.

The bottom line is that I think it has a lot of potential and it's in a big space but I'm out of money and simply don't have time to put effort into it while going to Stanford. I formed an LLC a little early and the upcoming 4/15 $800 tax is something I can't afford. In addition the competitors in the space all have funding and are able to work full-time on their companies.

Here are what I see as my options:

1) Find angel funding. I want to take about 7 months off (spring plus summer) to give the startup everything I have. So far I haven't had too much luck, mainly due to time constraints. I've had a few informal meetings with angels, although no investments yet.

2) Close the company. Move on, build something else sometime in the future, and concentrate more on school.

3) Find some consulting work. If I am able to find some part-time consulting work I might be able to float the company through the 800 dollar tax. I can do iPhone dev, although would love to do some A/B testing consulting.

4) I'm adding in this 4th option due to the comment below about flippa. Alternatively I could sell it to someone with some spare cash that wanted a pet project; however, I'm really unsure how much the company would go for, if anything.

What would you guys do in my situation?
Popular is not JUST by number of downloads, or else it'd be a self-perpetuating problem. Age, number of downloads, number of ratings, actual rating, and I'm pretty sure the delta of all of these play a part (as in how rapidly it's growing).

[edit]Not to say I don't agree with you. There should be some sampling of new applications there too.
I tell you what, despite the lack of any actionable information whatsoever, Rich Dad, Poor Dad was what inspired me to go into business for myself.

Four Hour Work Week (despite not having THAT much actionable information for me) was the book that inspired me to stay in business for myself when times got tough.

Maybe Four Hour Body will be the book that inspires me to not be fat, who knows.
This is awesome. When I was in college (1986-1990) internships were a pretty new concept. Then when in MBA (1997-1998) it obviously became a bigger deal. But now, the practice is very much becoming the norm. But, the tools for students and companies to find one another are still archaic (school recruiting systems... and afterthoughts on Monster, etc).

Plus, it's just as important for companies to provide killer internships (to get the best students, year after year) as it is for students to perform.

It's an ideal way to recruit, and find great companies, and a space ripe for innovation and investment.

Very excited to see what the team comes up with (and yes, I'm a fan and advisor -- my enthusiasm runs deep, and is very genuine)
I have a much lower opinion of the Bing team after reading this non-denial denial. It's disingenuous to act surprised that using clickstream data from your main competitor might be called copying.
Doh, you are correct.
I do this. I don't have as many labels as you. i do have a follow up label. I think I'm an inbox hero!
According to the Quora below they're running on 112 Amazon EC2 instances.

http://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-does-Reddit-have
I'd give a strong recommendation to stick with it - at first all of the strange invented terms are a bit jarring but after a while they become natural and you get to enjoy what I would regard as one of the finest work of fiction of recent years.
Because those don't involve money, I would call them "promises" or even "contracts" rather than "payments."

But that was interesting. Thank you for the information.
There's a Kepler Mission Ops Controller answering questions on reddit right now:

http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/fe0ps/ive_done_this_b...
Of all the possible threats to a free Internet, the idea of a rogue US President shutting it off seems pretty far down the list. This is not something worth worrying about.
There was a similar site in the UK relatively recently, advertised quite heavily on TV I recall. It was named something like My Single Friend. I no longer have a TV so I don't know if they're still advertising.

As hackers we're always coming up with new ideas for dating sites like these. They frequently fail though, mostly due to the inability to pull in a large enough number of users. I've been hired to work on dating sites before, they've all failed due to lack of users. I'm now quite wary of working with anybody who has an idea for the next big dating site. I have ideas of my own, but not confident ones I'd actually risk spending time/money on.
One difference between Google's vs MS's approach. While Google's first post was much more rational (with proofs) and convincing to tech minds, this post seems more a politician's attack on Google with vague and scary sounding words like "click fraud". Only if some evidence for the above "click fraud" were supplied!!
Grammatically it's just fine, although I might have used "had received" or something instead to make quick reading a little easier.
Ask HN: Gadget and Windows software companies in Singapore
I'm looking gadget, consumer electronics and Windows software companies in Singapore, the likes of iTwin, Muvee and Razer. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance, Joel
YouTube & Flickr Offer On-the-Ground Look at Protests in Egypt
But isn't this problematic, since they would have to raise more money later on, considering that they'll be diluting their shares a lot.

Doing a $5M seed round at a $25M valuation after Google's offer is, what, a dilution of 20% total shares?

I get that they can't do an evaluation that is higher than the next one, but they must really have recented taking the offer - perhaps for reasons of working at Google for four years for the $25M bonus.
The Second Amendment isn't really about self-defense:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
If you change the underlying physics, computational power can change quite a bit. The best-known example of this is that quantum computers are widely believed to be more powerful than classical computers. An even more striking example, though less well known, is that certain non-linear variants of quantum mechanics allow NP-complete problems to be solved in polynomial time. This result was written up here: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041

We could imagine, then, that what's going on is that the Universe really runs according to the laws of one of these non-linear variants of quantum mechanics, but the power-beyond-the-powers has arranged so that at the length scales that can be probed by the races in Vinge's story things look effectively like standard (linear) QM.

The thing that bothers me a bit about the Zones: how is it that humans think? We are, after all, just machines. So if AI can't be built, then how is human consciousness possible?

I'd be interested to know what (if any) response Vinge has to this. A possible-but-not-very-satisfactory response is that life on Earth is really an artifact from another Zone, and one that goes beyond ordinary Slow Zone capabilities. What prevents us from building AI is that we can't reproduce those capabilities. Seems a bit of a stretch.
In a sense, that's what an active blogger does before going blog-to-book. True, the author is the one putting the sentences together, but the market has a lot of say in the direction future articles go, and what of the blog content goes into the book version.
Thanks Scott this is really useful. I also didn't realise that Chargify didn't support UK Payments Pro.
I boggle that people think infinite scroll came from (X). People have been hacking infinite scroll onto pages that don't support it for years, frequently through Greasemonkey scripts and there are a few very powerful extensions for essentially every browser out there. If you want to claim Google copied it from Bing, Bing copied it from creative users. I highly doubt there has been any significant amount (if any at all) of UI/UX original-creativity on any large website before someone else made a quick demo on their personal site or hacked it on top of existing sites through browsing tools.
That's not terribly common in the US. It's possible to buy VISA or AMEX gift cards in some stores, but the markup tends to be significant (10%+).
What would be a suitable control variable? How would one know if Bing is using results from that website too or not?
In the 1980's, Apple's technology was pretty bad. It's arguable if Microsofts was much better, but they hardly created any shovelware. Note also, that Apple's 1980s strategy of locking down devices, software, and hardware was a leading cause of their failure, even aside from their poor operating system offering. They almost went out of business, until the return of Jobs and the Next assets.

The same strategy may fail them again. I certainly would never have even looked at a mac laptop if it were as locked down as iOS is. Although people often argue that mobile products are different, I disagree. They are simply small form factor computers and you need look no farther than Android to see that an operating system as flexible as a desktop OS works just fine in this area.
This is pretty vague. Can you point to specific instances where you have observed a problem?
That's not the statistic you are interested in though.
The question isn't - if you go to Harvard will you become head of facebook/apple. The question is if you go to Harvard will you do OK as a senior VP of a firm where the person hiring you went to Harvard.

MBA isn't for leaders - it's for followers, just very well paid followers.
I selected "any field" in both London and NYC and it had nothing for either. Not very useful without any listings.
That didn't take long. I'm actually NOT very much into self-help books. I can count on both hands the number I've read, and on one hand the number I've enjoyed. But I do think that there are a few that are valuable. And I'm quite skeptical that there's a mythical class of people out there who are either so brilliant or so far gone that useful information (whatever the source) can't help them.

Actually, I guess it depends what you mean by self-help: I enjoyed "Getting Things Done" and "Crush It!"...do those count?
http://theadmin.org/articles/2010/11/26/stepping-down-from-r...
I'd hate to thinking that our dialog has downgraded to memes and TV show references. Regardless of appropriateness, it doesn't add information or opinion, it's just noise.
I thought this gem was particularly hilarious: "Objectivity is subjective, and the laws of science are for victims."
I've enjoyed being on the cutting edge with high-end smartphones for a few years (I'm on an iPhone 4 right now), but I could see settling into one of these in the near future. Most of my phone usage is fairly simple and probably won't change - map searches, social networking, Rdio for music, web news reading. In short, I have little doubt that these phones would work for me and I'm an early adopter. With Google voice commands, even a resistive screen device might be surprisingly useful.
Better having to compete than being completely banned from the platform as would happen on iOS, I suppose.
Their assertion was not "bing is using clicks on google search and only google search." The assertion was just "bing is using clicks on google search." They've demonstrated that pretty conclusively.
Your "control variable" only matters if the hypothesis they are trying to prove is "Bing special-cases Google."

That is not the hypothesis. The hypothesis is "Bing has results in its index that it could not have gotten in any other way than from Google search results." Their experiment does indeed confirm that hypothesis.
Another key advantage is tax arbitrage. If you can make $800/day, that's because you have a certain skill set, you can't send a random college student in your place to collect your earnings for one month and pay almost no taxes. You have to pay your taxes on one $150k income.

With progressive taxation, if you get 12 students to redeem 1/12th of your winnings (for say 5%), you're paying taxes at the lowest level (likely even 0%) rather than the 35+% you would be if you had to claim 150k on a single tax return.
Finally I have a justification for making an android application that will tell you where you are based upon photographing the stars.
I'm actually OK with the bill aside from this provision.

(Worth noting, though, that the bill hasn't been reintroduced yet so we can't actually see that language... and CNET's source for this removal of judicial review appears to be a single lobbyist for companies opposed to the bill.)
Sorry for the confusion. We currently only have listings active on the west coast in California, Oregon, and Washington. We should definitely make that more obvious, especially when someone searches outside of our current territory. I'll add that tonight.
Surc Turns Your iPhone Into The Ultimate Controller
I read this article because it was written by Nate Silver so I expected something substantial. There is not.

With much writing, he essentially says the following:

1. Microsoft's defense contains no information because they don't say how they weight the data learned from Google searches.

2. It's hard to say how Microsoft is actually using the data learned from Google searches.

For the crowd here this is essentially common-sense.

(edit: in point two I changed 'impossible' to 'hard')
I think it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, but to be fair, the proposal is not to grant the power to disable the Internet.

The proposal is to grant the power to partition the Internet. So, it would not be analogous to how Egypt disabled the Internet almost entirely within their borders. Depending on how you look at it, it's either a subtle distinction, or a huge difference. It still serves the exact same purpose (granting the power to shut down "troublesome" communication channels even if they are physically located outside the country). On the other hand, its activation would not in and of itself impact the vast majority of American citizens (because they only use U.S.-based sites).
the reason for this bill are a bit somewhat false..

Note, to date the number one entity skilled and reacting fast to cyber attacks on Net infrastructure has been commerce not government. In government has shown to be poor performer in this area.

It would not surprise me if this bill was being lobbied by MPAA/RIAA
>Additionally, if things were reversed and Google was posed these questions, I would imagine would be lacking just as many answers as what Bing is supplying.

That's like saying you'd be evasive like OJ Simpson if you murdered a few people and were on trial.

So if Google used Bing to rank searches it would also be under scrutiny? Since that's not the case we can all avoid the useless thought experiment can't we?
Do we have any information about whether Google uses clickstream data from users traveling between non-Google sites?

As I noted in a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166256), Googler Amit Singhal's wording was a bit vague about whether URL trail data from things like the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Ads, or other systems ever affects rankings. (His careful wording, "put any results on Google’s results page", could mean merely that URL trail data never adds results to the set of all possible results. It could still affect rankings of pages found through other crawling.)

The use of such data is clearly allowed by Google's very broad privacy policy. I would love a clear answer from Google on this. It should be easy to give.
"But Match.com didn't ask OKCupid to take down the post, CEO Sam Yagan told The Observer, it was just the "common sense thing to do.""

"Furthermore, the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com's public filings and press kit were not completely accurate, he said, which he realized once he saw the real data."

snip

"And even though the two sites are now playing for the same team, it'll be business as usual at OKCupid's Midtown office, he said. OKCupid will remain free and OKTrends will keep publishing the popular research it culls from its members. (Data from Match.com and its affiliated sites will not be included.)"

So, rather than putting up a correction to the previous blog post that due to fresh data showing something different; they decided to take it down. I suppose either because Match.com either refuses to release the data, the blog post is confirmed to be true or they wanted to appease the new owners.
A rather big problem in my browser: on any given page of apps, the entire bottom row shows only icons; the "buy" buttons are cut off no matter what font size or zoom I use.

So basically, they make 4 apps per page impossible to purchase due to shoddy web design.
My understanding is that running the experiment on some random other sites would work as well as long as Bing user's were actually clicking the honeypot links. This is probably the intended functionality of the click stream data. That doesn't change the fact that using this type of data from competitor search engines results in "stealing" (for lack of a better word) search results, particularly for rare terms such as "tarsorrhaphy".
I think there's a business opportunity here. I too have been looking for a recurring billing service for a SAAS application I'm working on. As a small, Australian-based operation boot-strapping though, I'm really looking for a one-stop shop - something that offers the convenience of setup and payment of PayPal (no merchant account needed, reasonable rates, etc.) with the ease of integration and flexibility of Spreedly or Recurly and the ability to keep the customer on my site at all times.

Anyone know of one?
Wow. And I thought groupon turning down 6bil was crazy ...

Back in the mid 80s companies would have killed for money like this!
Incorrect, once again to come to that conclusion you would need to test on a site that WASN'T Google as well.
Exactly. They never did any testing designed to specifically not have the result show in Bing.
Wrong link? I'm getting a Not Found.

http://mytype.com/blog/2011/02/233/ seems to work.
Can you say a little more about yourself? You can also email me directly at joseph at hellofax dot com.