skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kickstarter Crowd-funding Hits $1M A Week
How bicycle makers got together and decided to fly...
I'm working through Atlas Shrugged at the moment)

What do you think so far? How far into it are you?

Not sure what inspiration you can draw out of that, but I'm sure this will put Google one step closer to tying all my online identities together.

Heh, I've given up hope on that front. I suppose you could say "officially" now, since I mentioned earlier the one thing that's an absolute, sure-fire dead giveaway to my real-life identity. <shrug /> Oh well, if somebody can connect the dots of all my various online accounts, more power to 'em.
Stand Alone Complex ..
Ask HN: framework for webapps in Scala
So I now know Scala and want to make webapps.

Which framework do I go for and why?
Well, the advanced languages often compile through low level languages like C anyhow, to get the performance they have. In terms of productivity, I remember running into this comparison including Haskell and C++ from '94.

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/haugwarb/Programming/Haskell/has...

I'm also curious as to why functional programming hasn't been more successful. I think that, whilst such languages are especially elegant for some forms of control flow, they require more mental contortions than mixed-paradigm languages. Since this makes them less comfortable, they're less popular still.
Clickable: http://www.texaslovestickets.com
I'd love to have that as an API to integrate into a webpplication. Much like Crocodoc, only support for far more file formats.
LPTHW is a good goal for beginners but what about the intermediate ones? I know how to code but when I see mongrel2 or any other opensource code I have no clue how to start integrating them. There may be others like me so when are you planning to write a not-so-advanced-book/tutorial for the intermediate coder who can recognize a pointer from his function.
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We switched from a merchant account to PayPal because of fraud and a dramatic increase in fees during the time we used the account. By the time we moved we were paying over 4%, plus flat fees! We were also dealing with several fraudulent orders a week, and the process for dealing with them required faxing documents back and forth, which is just idiotic.

The fraud protection stuff at PayPal is better, though not great (too many false positives to call it great), and our rates are much lower.

I do have a fear that someday they'll just decide to screw us and close our account, since it has happened to so many people. That'd be a bad day, for sure. But, in the meantime, I'm spending less money and have a dramatically better UI for managing things like chargebacks and refunds.
people prefer larger volumes because it gives them the warm fuzzy feeling (tm) that they're going to find whatever they need inside

That's how I felt when I was a novice. It didn't take to long to realize that most large books are padded with filler though. Not only did I find much of the content useless, I found the lack of concision made them harder to learn from.

do people really prefer smaller books

Absolutely. If I see a large book at the bookstore I don't even bother taking it off the shelf. Reference books are the exception, but I mostly use the web for reference.
It is to me.

But then again, I buy a MacBook Pro instead of a junky plastic laptop. I'll pay a premium for quality, so will another chunk of the market and everyone else can fight over the Wal-Mart segment.
thanks for the link. Ill go ahead and put it on the list of Todos.
The trouble is that it feels like the shallow parts are growing much, much faster than the deep ends. There's pockets of good stuff, but you have to look harder for it. If you like the shallow sections too, then it's a great pool to play in. But if you came for the deep ends, it's kind of a pain to swim with all kids in the shallow end splashing everywhere.

Maybe I'm just bitter.
Does the autoCAD open up into google sketch up? B/c that would be cool.
I think that's one of the greatest things. There is something for everyone, from almost everywhere. The bigger stuff gets noisy and you see forks into smaller things where people create a different atmosphere, often about similar topics/niched more.

Sometimes I just want to go /r/aww other times, I'd like to checkout info about /r/<country> or /r/<city>. Not to mention sports like /r/hockey that has a subreddit for every team plus the overall. So I can talk about the stuff only caps fans care about and go to the main one to talk about hockey in general.
The Illustrator and Photoshop formats are what caught my eye.

What happens if you try to view an Illustrator file in Google Docs Viewer?

Does it render the file just as Illustrator would?

Since Google Docs offers the ability to export to PDF, it would be impressive if you could open an Illustrator file in Google Docs and export it to PDF format without the need to own a copy of Illustrator.
I'm pretty sure that, if UberTwitter is a violation, so is UberTwiter. The standard isn't "is spelled the same"; it's "is likely to confuse the customer".
The real problem is a lack of moronic costumed super-villains with ridiculously complex plans that require a huge amount of money to set up and have almost no chance of making a profit.
Why are they limiting it to only a 1000 people?
"Won"? Ho ho ho, wonder what Vladimir Putin would say about that? That's who it's calculated to impress, not you.
Lift is probably the most mature as well as the most documented Web Framework there is for Scala.
> why the brain would need so much complexity

Be more successful in avoiding predators, acquiring food, mating.

Mother Nature will get every little advantage she could scrounge up.
Vulcan Ship made of LEGO
wheres pg ?
Transcript of Obama's tech meeting in Silicon Valley
I can't imagine anything more spectacular than running native code inside the browser securely and across multiple OS.

Google is handling this just as they should and I can't see how else would you introduce such a major piece of browser infrastructure.

This doesn't even compare to Google Wave.
If you're running a multi-user server, with possibly malicious users, that's not a good idea. Ports <1024 can only be bound to by root; so if a valid user of the server can figure out how to crash sshd, he can run his own version on the same port >1024, and then all your users' password are belong to him.
On ARM support, from their website:

> Native Client runs on 32- and 64-bit x86 systems that use Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Some ARM support is implemented in the source base, and we hope to make it available for application developers next year.
You likely ran afoul of "voter ring detection": http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/22551773068

I think it works something like this. Say you and I are buddies and only upvote each other's articles. The voting ring algorithm thus flags us both as being part of a voting ring. Votes on our articles are then penalized by some amount to reverse this gaming. Detecting voter rings is important as failing to do so has really hurt communities like Digg.

On a related note, if most of the votes on your articles comes from readers on your site that only upvote your articles, those users will probably all be flagged as part of a voting ring.
"If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he talked about running 4 years straight with zero chargebacks using a policy like that."

This is a fairy story.

We have a no questions asked 60 day full refund policy. We have at least one chargeback a week due to stolen credit cards. We, of course, don't have any reason to fight them over it, so we just accept the chargeback when that happens. But, we definitely get chargebacks.

I do occasionally get phone calls from people who don't know who we are. I answer their questions, and if the description doesn't ring a bell (sometimes they'll say, "Oh, I need to ask our system administrator if he bought that." and I never hear from them again), I process a refund immediately.

But, software companies definitely get chargebacks. There's no way to completely avoid fraud without refusing lots of legitimate customers (AVS, for instance, doesn't work for most non-US card holders, and we do half of our business outside the US, so we can't reject orders with an AVS mismatch).
I uploaded an SVG and it converted it into a read only image. I tried inserting an SVG into a drawing and it failed.
I can't see why people not liking the defaults (which are great for beginners) can't change their settings.
Skipping Rote Memorization in Indian Schools
The problem with fail2ban is that it's vulnerable to denial of service attacks when the attacker spoofs the source IP address of the failed login attempts.
It seems reasonable to me that we should deal with inconvenience here.

Dude, seriously, The Queen of England doesn't cause as much disruption to London as Obama causes wherever he goes, and she actually is royalty.
This Google search: http://www.google.co.uk/#q=do+you+understand+flowcharts

Top result: http://xkcd.com/518/

Hard to believe it's not original from XKCD.
Book: Intro to Applied Bayesian Statistics & Estimation for Social Scientists
There are a couple of companies you could be talking about. If you mean Apple and their development of the KHTML engine into something that has been embedded in lots of other software with hugely beneficial effects for the web, then yes, good precedent. If you mean Microsoft and the distribution of Silverlight, the connection is somewhat more tenuous because Silverlight is a solution in search of a problem.

Note the distinctions: open source, platform agnostic, solves a real problem.
The Technology behind LinkedIn Polls
I was working on a blog addon service that required adding a small javascript snippet to the page to add a button on the side (like GetSatisfaction or UserVoice) and found that this was possible on almost any service except WordPress.com.

I'm well aware that letting users add js to their sites is a major security issue, but it seems like something that would also have a lot of upsides.
I think the point is that if the President needs a 5 mile wide security bubble, he should avoid stepping outside for a hot dog, teleconference a bit more, and relocate the senate office to the suburbs.

I.e., be a little bit polite with that 5 mile wide security bubble.

(Besides, I think his personal chef can handle making him a hot dog - as I recall, she and Bobby Flay beat Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse on Iron Chef.)
Hi,

The killer app would be to do the "usual" web stuff comfortably from PHP, while having a (possibly distributed) Erlang core deal with "persistent" stuff like an in-memory session database, and also to handle the comet functions (keeping track of even thousands of dormant connections that wait for an event to happen). Erlang is good in that stuff.

Best,

Kristof
BackType is hiring hackers!
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Your view of how to solve problems seems very programmer-oriented and not business-oriented.

Stuff like how to process a REST request is simply details. I don't understand why you are focusing so much on this aspect, but I have seen this anti-pattern so often that it repulses me; most examples of RESTful APIs are bullshit, written by people who did not take the time to actually understand REST principles. A good example I documented on my blog is how awful and stupid the ThreeSharp Amazon S3 library is for C#. And writing it in the same style in F# would be just as ugly and stupid! I also discuss why it is a joke that S3 itself is called a REST API, and point out how the language examples in Amazon's documentation is COMPLETELY inconsistent from language to language -- there is no correctness-preservation across language implementations!!!

Incidentally, when people say "web development", they can mean many things, with True REST being just one of them. Most people are actually referring to corporate intranet applications, such as data entry forms and stock analysis tools that chart trends, provide real-time data feeds, etc.
Try the Play Framework

www.playframework.org
http://twitter.com/#!/BigThingist/status/14290670671896576
I find parasites offensive as well. Many definitions of parasite specifically cite people as the object being described.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parasite

a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.

(in ancient Greece) a person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.

Perhaps you are right as the definition of parasite in regards to people generally indicates living off others by their consent. Rather than living off others by threat or use of force.
Thanks for your thoughts. I do prefer smaller books myself, but I keep seeing people buying large reference books which end up being wasted money in a time of Google search.
While I sympathize with the author, I don't think we can generalize from his experience all that much. For a balancing anecdote, here's my life progression to date:

Bachelors: 22
Start PhD: 24
Meet girl: 25
Get engaged: 27
Submit thesis: 27
s/girlfriend/wife/: 28
Get 6 figure salary working for Mozilla: 28
Am now: 29

Yes, everything turned out better than expected (though I omitted the bit where I started and folded a company in there), and it could have gone horribly wrong. But you just can't generalize about doing a PhD, or anything really, from his anecdote, or from mine.
I think you're cleanly sidestepping the point I'm trying to make, which is that consumer's definitions of quality is quite arbitrary. Given two vehicles of equal finishing, engine power, engineering, consumers will pick the one with a stronger brand, the one that has more sex appeal. That is a quality.
The one big reason why iPad rivals can't compete on price
> In Silicon Valley you decide to start a company then look for ideas.

It was true for HP, the original Silicon Valley startup, but not for all of them (e.g. Apple, Adobe).

Interesting, fits with a focus on the company, not the tech. I personally prefer the tech-based approach.
Web Apps 3.0, no web site, login or storage
HTML5 Boilerplate for Wordpress
Yes, it's 'spectacular' to you and I. I meant in the broader sense of spectacle, the sense in which people on the street want to try it out because it's like nothing they've ever seen before. And that is possible with NaCl if expectations are properly managed.
Douglas Crockford might be opinionated - and Anton Kovalyov and Paul Irish are fantastic fellows - but a fork of JSLint reminds me of the South Park premise: if you allow one episode to be censored then you in the end everything will have grounds for censorship... the fork looks all dandy now - as long as "the community" doesn't end up having too much say in the matter. It's a pretty dang big community we've got now ;)
great way of finding out whether you have the xfactor :)
I'm only 150 or so pages into it - Dagny is reminiscing about her teenage years with that prince she used to date (don't remember his name right now). I still have a ways to go, and the family makes it hard to make big chunks of progress into the book. I carve out 15-20 pages here and there, but I always feel a little sad when I have to put the book down and deal with something else.

As for how I like it, thus far I am a little concerned about one point. The characters that I think I'm supposed to like (Dagny and the prince boyfriend) all seem to have gotten where they are by being born into awesome situations. Don't get me wrong - Dagny is a hell of a lot more sympathetic than her brother, for example - but it's hard to look at her as a "self-made woman" when the railroad has been a family business for like 5 generations. I'm hoping Hank Rearden shows up more, because he seems more in line with someone I'd sympathize with.

Other than that, though, I like it quite a bit. It's almost like my own thoughts are echoing back to me. I think it would be interesting to see what Rand would have done had she been alive now and whether the advent of the Internet, for example, would have changed some of the isolation she writes into her characters. Also, Dagny would have been able to track down that missing symphony she heard the train conductor whistling a lot easier.
I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has messed with this, or sees a ton of potential. My first take is "eww browser plugins v2.0" but I'm not certain that's an informed opinion.
Navigating the US National Broadband Map
I agree, but I'd remove "Obama" if I were you.

This is a problem between the office of president and the Secret Service. Obama is just the current occupant of that office.

And it's not even the president. DC has become an armed camp. Dick Cheney used to go into the White House early every morning between 5 and 6. How do I know that? Because of the screaming sirens and large motorcade it took just to get him across town. Five O'Clock in the morning, and they need sirens to clear the streets. Guys I knew who had military experience were getting carry licenses and working part-time as armed security for 2nd and 3rd tier government and foreign government officials. It wouldn't be unusual to have a dozen or more different police forces all operating over top of each other in any one spot -- and then you had all the private security guys on top of that.

It was crazy back in 05, and each year they just keep adding a little more. It's so bad that I think the best thing if they want to keep it up like this is to just get rid of all housing, ground transportation, and local government in DC entirely. Make it some kind of National Urban Park or something.
Looking for technical co-founder
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There are places I think the 30% is completely reasonable. As another comment here mentions, trying to do $1 transactions using Paypal or a merchant account would be insane. Taking a 30% cut on applications, where they are not just processing money, but also providing distribution and other infrastructure is fine.

My complaint is taking a flat 30% of all subscriptions and digital purchases where their only value-add is as a credit card processor. As I said originally, I think Google's 10% is also steep for this same feature, but, as others pointed out, you aren't required to use theirs, so if you find a better deal, good for you. Also, Google's 10% won't cause my iPhone subscriptions to go up by 10%, but Apple's 30% may cause my Android subscriptions to go up 30%.

This is still hypothetical, and it is a hard problem to solve. On the one hand, you have Netflix that has a huge infrastructure and large supplier costs who is already set up to do very well at $15/month. On the other hand, you have Po Dunk Developer who wants to add $0.99 subscriptions to his app. 30% on the former is too much; 30% on the latter is reasonable. How do you reconcile?

Most businesses would provide a way for Netflix to enter a formal agreement that pays some amount up front, then lowers the percentage. I have to wonder if Apple will go that path (or something similar) as well. I hope so.
RE: You don't have to lay out your GUI's with a markup language designed for typography - The modern VT100.

Are you referring to HTML and CSS?

RE: You don't have to keep state with a stateless protocol.

You are referring to HTTP.

RE: Now you get a nice (mostly) standardized interface and you get to build a lighting fast native GUI for your app.

What are you referring to?
This is one of my favorite features of Gmail, the easy opening of docs. Also very necessary on the cr-48.
Not necessarily true, if you set it to public, right?
also unsure exactly what it suggests but seems like yes, it's expired.

in any case, some relevance is that hbgary was actually in the middle of, or planning to create this software, while working with the fbi. wether or not it's related to this, there are clear implications of the government using this type of tactic as a tool.
SwellJoe - you were paying way too much for your merchant account...

Unfortunately, that's sort of standard practice for credit card processors, even ones that we've seen people recommend on HN. We've got it in our contracts with http://FeeFighters.com processors that they can NEVER raise pricing, don't have any hidden fees, and we have reviews on them so you can see how other people have liked them.

I don't know enough about fraud protection at PayPal, but we've heard a lot of horror stories when people come over to merchant accounts.
One could still become a Kick Ass though.
I always buy Amazon MP3s, personally. It works really well, and I know they don't seem to have a big skin in the DRM game for music, unlike Apple.

Personally, a Kindle is my next gadget to buy. I've been very happy with the Kindle apps on PC/Mac and I've liked the physical Kindle UI.

The iPad just doesn't do anything for me.
yay Patrick! looking forwarding to seeing you again.