skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use to do freelance inhouse work at design agencies, heaps of laudy mamas there.
Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but it seems odd to attack something designed to make statistics analysis easy for statisticians, because it doesn't meet the needs of mid-level managers.

Managers and other folks who need to make pivot tables, graphs and related things without programming have a great tool to do that: Excel. For these people, Excel is Dropbox.
Inilah Raja Seks yang Terobsesi Dengan Paris Hilton
Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn’t worried about climate change
Inception Movie explained using the C language
Actually, my solution was to fire the whole division AND get out of the market.

And this isn't a technical problem; it's a process and culture problem. MS almost certainly has the technical and financial resources to have prevented this. The fact that they didn't points to an utterly dysfunctional company. Getting out of a market that they're rather obviously too hidebound or screwed up to compete in, is definitely a solution.
Michael Arrington’s Dreams of a Blog for True Startups
Ask HN: Advice on strictness of credit card validation
Our business is such that we authorize credit cards ahead of time, and then do a bulk capture (actually submitting to "charge" the accounts) at the end of the day. We also allow the user to "store" there credit card on a third-party, PCI compliant provider.

Until this point, we have not been very strict on the way we verify/validate credit cards. So today I was implementing additional levels of verification and felt like things were getting a little complicated/strict.

Here are the various levels I am working with:

* Typical checks for presences and lengths of fields as well as algorithmic credit card check

* Address Verification Service (AVS) which matches first 5 contiguous street digits along with 5 digit zip code

* Require CVV code (3 or 4 digit code present only on the card itself)

* Attempt $0.01 or $0.00 authorization (and then immediate voiding of transactions)

Note: when a transaction fails to match with AVS, there is an option to "accept and hold for review". However, this seems somewhat meaningless as I would not know whether an address was "valid" or not unless it was clearly fraudulent (i.e. "123 main street" type of stuff)

Main question: When the user initially enters their payment information, should we be performing $0.01 authorizations every time? Also, for stored credit cards, should we ask again for the user to provide the CVV (since it is never part of the stored payment information)?

Just want to make sure that this level of strictness is really necessary. It doesn't feel like most sites that store my payment information require me to constantly reenter my CVV.

Any advice or "here is what we do" type of responses are appreciated.
> I hope it didn't look like I was bashing anyone.

No, not you. It's why you got a reply from me that at least tried to sound intelligent. =)

But it does get tiring hearing the same useless tripe repeated, especially here on HN. PHP's worst quality is whenever it's mentioned, a bunch of know-nothing's start making what amounts to the technical equivalent of dick and fart jokes. I'll just stop there though. =)
Would be fantastic if they open sourced the code powering it
I'm not a dolt, why is the workspace window calling me a dolt? :)
This is what's selling me on OS-vendor-provided App Stores. Of course there are many reasons a self-respecting hacker would turn up their nose at such a thing. But product activation and billing really should not be novel experiences in 2011.
Agreed completely.
There's a long running joke response to 'solutions to spam' that's been running on slashdot since they were giving out 5-digit uids. cf. http://www.ninjavspenguin.com/blog/2007/10/01/slashdot-spam-...

Although totally flippant, and never addressing the specific issues in a post directly, I've yet to see a thread on /. in over 10 years in which this was not an appropriate response.

Mail is big-H Hard. Yesterday there was a discussion on the demise of the self-hosted mailserver, and there's a real reason why MailChimp etc have become a no-brainer for small-medium enterprise. Trying to run your own mailserver is increasingly becoming a fools errand.

If you want to hit Yahoo and Gmail, you get a solid reverse DNS, implement SPF and DKIM and hope that the spec doesn't change under you. Even then you need to maintain relations with their team if you're sending more than a couple of hundred emails a day to their platform.

Throttling is arbitrarily switched. 50/second, 10/second, 1000/second. Unpublished guidelines which change and you need to comply or your server gets a mysterious 5xx error response which you have to debug. Other error messages related to mailboxen, existence of accounts etc. all have to be handled and appropriately applied to addresses in your list. Send too many post-bounce messages and again the banhammer will be wielded.

If you want to get into AOL Goodmail was one option. For Hotmail you have 'Sender Score' certification which costs an arm and a leg and is completely useless for small-volume senders.

At any point in these, if some jackass passes anything that hits their heuristics you have to do a personal contact contact back and forth with the ISP, and god forbid you encounter human-modified SURBLs. These are terribly subjective, frequently on vacation, but relied on as gospel by many mid-level admins in institutions such as universities and mid-level enterprise.

Email is broken. It was fundamentally based on trust in the early days, and seeing as PGP never (understandably) took off, the whole system is IMO beyond redemption. What we see now is a growth in systems designed to replace email as a functional method of trusted communication. Opt-in services like Twitter, Facebook for interpersonal contact and groupwise style systems intraoffice.

While Gmail has performed admirably to save email's utility for the basic user, that their systems will never be taken up by certain industries and orgs (central control issues, incompetence, revenue streams[SenderScore]) means I think it's well into the long decline we saw with Usenet.

What will emerge, who knows, but I see little hope for the technological replacement or fix to email which wouldn't in using essentially give up all central control to once agency, be it Google, Facebook or whoever.
or at least not used your real name...
Hosted in Canada (netelligent.ca) might buy them some time...
then you run into the Duck Hunt problem.
With all the treats they surely have enough money to sponsor a lawyer for it. The problem could be the time, as H1-B's often take several months to get through (mine took about 3 and required lots of documentation).

The post looks like they are looking for someone _now_.
In theory, centrally planned things make a lot of sense.

In practice, democracy usually comes to a better solution, even if it is not perfect.

HN is driven by votes, the community is getting what the majority wants right now. The only way to really improve HN is to change or limit the community. You can tweak the rules only to limit certain actions to high-kharma users, but if there is pent up demand for some kind of story it will make its way to the front page.
As far as I can see, the script will print out a contact in both of these cases:

1) Contact goes from Online to Invisible

2) Contact goes from Online to Offline by signing off

This effectively means that the script gives you no more information than what you get from the contact list. You can't know if someone went offline or went invisible.
Apple hasn't shipped on announcement day for a long time now (at least not for anything other than incremental updates, like spec bumps for laptops).
Wow, 98 is a great score (higher than Google!)

You're right, there's a lot of noise in the results. If the size reduction is small, like a few bytes, there's no need to show that.
> True Grit while good was such a pale movie compared to the original John Wayne version.

And in the reviews I read, it was better than the John Wayne movie, because it was more of an adult film.
8-bit game "January" a mix of art and nostalgia
Heh. Noob! Slashdot was cool in 96!

Just joking! I totally agree with you. Both in regards to /. but also with websites in general. In fact, the Internet in general. It started out (for me) idealistic and cool and slowly has got dumber and more mass market as normal people started using it. Ah well. We lost something, we gained something. The cool is gone, but there's a lot more of the typical stuff and the Internet is making some of the real world changes I hoped it would only because it is now so ubiquitous (like the change in the Middle East)

I think all discussion sites struggle to identify quality discussion. The whole Karma idea that /. created was very very cool and has worked reasonably well over the years. Certainly, their discourse is wildly better than digg's, for example, and I would submit that Karma is a large part of that. But the problem with Karma is that it promotes group-think and that's where /. is today. Alhough: you could say just the same about HN. Anyone who doesn't love LISP, Python & PG is automatically on the outer. Hating Java is cool, too.

Perhaps group-think is an inevitable requirement for communities to form? Perhaps without some level of shared unquestioned axioms, groups will not form in the first place - just in the way a Christian and an Atheist can struggle to have a conversation about right and wrong because their starting assumptions are just so far apart? I don't know - I'm not sure if there is an answer to this kind of thing, I think that maybe it is just human nature at work.
Geeks: require 'life/love'
> For example, the naming conventions for methods are camel-case instead of of the python standard “lowercase with underscores.”

This has to be a joke right? Style preferences gone wild!
You're 50/50 there. My Apple mouse and trackpad both support secondary click, and the app store can be easily put directly into the trash.
Wow, if TechCrunch was just about startups (Everyone of them), I might actually come back to as part as my daily reading. Until they clean up their articles and focus on what matters then it is hard to justify spending time on their site.
Seriously? This is a major company with some very big problems regarding how they handle (or outsource) legitimate digital purchases.

It's this kind of crap that drives people to piracy (with justification).
Take things into your own hands and get a sex change. Problem solved.
Your next camera will be 3D... or maybe the next one
Something tells me that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about.

> And because every phone is running the same software, well, it should all just work, shouldn't it?

As we all know, an operating system is simply software. It doesn't interact with hardware and, if it did, the hardware is all completely identical, right? There's absolutely no difference between any of the WP7 phones on the market.

> The company was non-specific about the purpose of the update; it's not the copy-and-paste update that will be shipped next month, but rather an update to somehow improve the update process.

It's a test update, one whose sole purpose is to help Microsoft work with the carriers to figure out how to roll out updates. It's not like remotely updating hardware is a trivial problem. It's better to have a test update fail than a functional update fail.
What I responded with to a guy asking what sets it apart from iCal, something like this will go on the front page after launch:

What Makes Romulist More Than Just Another Calendar App?

* Variable reminder windows
Outlook and iCal can tell you rent's due on the 1st, but they can't remind you about it 5 days in advance (or a week, or two weeks, etc).
* Perseverance (aka, pestering)
Once Google Calendar tells you about an event, it's up to you to do it and cross it off your mental checklist. Romulist will tell you about the event and then keep telling you until you tell it to stop. Subtle, no; effective, yes.
* No need to log in
Once you've got your events set up and email reminders turned on, you won't have to log in every day to make sure you're on top of things. You'll get an email from Romulist on days when there's something you need to worry about. On days that you don't, you're all clear.
* No software to download
It's all on the web. If you've got a device with an internet connection and a browser, you're solid.
* SMS / TXT support (future feature...)
Not by a computer every day? No worries. In the next version of Romulist, you'll be able to get and interact with reminders by TXT message on your phone. Receive "Car payment due in 5 days. -Romulist", respond with "done", and you're all set until the next time it's due. No internet connection required.
"This is the only truly effective way of obtaining targeted advertising on a search engine," 1plusV said in a statement.

That really seems silly, the competing search engine complaining that the only way they can make money is by using another search engine's monetization technology?
I'm sorry but you're full of shit. "Most of the developers are bad" is a faith-based unquantifiable statement. In all the project work I've done (open source and proprietary) over the last four years I've encountered two (2) truly miserable PHP developers. One works for a newspaper company (I guess they couldn't afford talent), the other is so new he's still learning the implications of for() vs while() and since the guy's actually really smart just a smidge of mentoring and some experience and he'll train up nicely.

"languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn a new programming language" I think you're confusing PHP and Visual Basic/.NET here. Based on hit counts of job posts there are way more job opportunities for MS developers than PHP developers and based on median salary data coding .NET is worth about 20k a year more, so if they're rational actors the "just in it for a paycheck" crowd should be migrating to Windows development.

Your language salad comparisons are likewise faith-based. How about we trade anecdotes instead? I've met a total of six Ruby developers during my professional career. To a man they were immature, arrogant and totally in love with the hype surrounding their language of choice. Four of the six could be fingered for running multi-million dollar projects into the ground courtesy of a year and a half long series of hipster love-in's masquerading as a SCRUM meetings. Meanwhile during the same time period myself and one other developer launched 65 sites on four platforms with a combined total of around 1 million in annual ad revenue generated for the company. You just keep singing your song, man. I'll keep shipping shit.

Edited to add: just keep on downvoting, truth hurts.
There is always a fair amount of noise which I just tend to ignore. YSlow always penalises me for not using a CDN for example.

Something useful to add would be links for the compressed images you use to work out how compressing the images could save space. A side by side comparison would be pretty useful so I could see how the compressing changes the look of the page.

Just for fun I ran it over http://duckduckgo.com which comes back with 100. Google comes back with 98. Interesting.
"Engineers brought the world closer together...a few people are tarnishing it"
Poll: Has Hacker News jumped the shark?
In response to the scathing post and subsequent comments (found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2252152), and as a relative newb to the site, I'm curious if you think Hacker News has moved beyond its prime.
Yes, but HN can be fixed (comment as to how)
Yes, but HN is no where close to ______.com
No, it's fresher than it ever was
I'm too new to know.
This is an inaccurate comparison to VMWare Fusion. There are many features, e.g. Bootcamp partition virtualization, that virtualbox either forgot to mention or purposely excluded.
How ironic that the /. link you posted is blocked by my corporate sonicwall...
Looks like a really cool framework; the demos are pretty spiffy, too, particularly the realtime video frame analysis of the Shreck trailer.
I got my VMWare Fusion key in the email. Two seconds, confirmed. I guess YMMV. I've been a closed beta tester for VMWare Fusion for ~2 years as well.
Tool looks really nice. I expect you'll be adding resources to the Academy and then linking to them from the results page? Losslessly compress my images? Recommend some tools. etc.
Just tried this, tweeted about it, and the interface crashed...

looks really awesome. keep going.
Why is it not misogyny? Would you drop the phrase "Sorry, niggers." so casually into conversation? Probably not (after all, it's racist), but it still uses a segment of society in derogatory fashion.
To be excruciatingly explicit: That code is 51 years old. Nobody writing Lisp now writes code that looks like that. Lisp environments are no longer based around punch cards and computers the size of a row of filing cabinets with the computational power of a fifteen-year-old cell phone.

Trying to judge what Lisp is from that code is akin to trying to judge what airplanes are from something the Wright brothers built in their bicycle shop.
I don't want to be a negative nancy, but every idea I can think of along those lines with an obvious profit angle actually has been built by 10 people first. For example, babysitters — there are tons of sites in that space. Just Google "find a babysitter" and you'll get a full page of sites dedicated to just that.
> It's a test update, one whose sole purpose is to help Microsoft work with the carriers to figure out how to roll out updates.

If it's a test update, why is anyone who doesn't work for a carrier and/or Microsoft aware of the problem? If real live customers are having issues, that's not testing, that's screwed up deployment. It doesn't matter how minor the update is.
You should allow URLs to be converted to links, and eventually similarly with images and videos. This could be really, really sweet.
Funny you should mention this...The Startup Foundry is doing exactly that. A blog focused only on startups. Check it out, we have gained a lot of traction and have a relatively large following for being so new (about two weeks). http://thestartupfoundry.com
This whole entire business is in dire need of a major disruption - it's ridiculous and takes an Einstein to even figure out the charges. That said...

1. I read a thread on here a while back (<3months) talking about address verification and why NOT to do it. You'll have to do your own search - but I'm reasonably confident that it was related to 37signals in some way.

2. CVV verification reduces your fraud levels and it is a MUST have for web transactions, IMO, but you'll need to check with your merchant account to see if it also reduces your charges per transaction. I'm thinking that the CVV verification does reduce it. Why wouldn't you need this on a recurring transaction? Presumably, the recurring transaction already has done the verification??? The way it's processed isn't really a new transaction, but a recurring. If you do a new purchase, even with same company, I think you'll be asked for CVV again. I honestly don't know, but I bet it has something to do with this. Never have done recurring transactions before, but someone here will be able to answer.

Why void the authorization? Again, this stuff is all relatively cryptic to me, but I thought the purpose of the auth was to at some point actually charge? The gas station I use always charges .01 - I see it on my account before the actual charge goes through. I'm sure they are just verifying the CC info is accurate. I don't think they void it though. Anything wrong with authorizing the entire purchase amount you expect to charge, and then just process it at the appropriate time? For sure, the auth is good for more than the "one work day" you outlined above.

Myself, I've always wondered about the authorization transaction. I thought that I got charged some fee just for doing that, then another fee to run it. I'm probably wrong on that, but I was so confused by how I got charged and what percentages that I did the absolute minimum necessary. Customer has a rewards card? Great, we charge you extra for that! Amex is the worst with charge backs. Sorry...you've brought back some bad memories! :-)

EDIT: Here, I did the search I mentioned above. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953137
That's a lot more powerful than the 486DX 40Mhz with 4MB of RAM I used to play it on.
Hence my next point:

"As OPs go further from tech/startups..."

I'm definitely no funding savant, either!
Or create a strong enough legal precedence to help transform Canada into less of a piracy haven.
This is the best and most even-handed take I've seen yet on the new subscription policy.
The gentlemen market is also terribly, terribly underserved.
I've been at a few companies that required timesheets of software devs, and it was always weird/awkward at best. They never wanted just hours - they wanted to know what was done as well.

Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not, but the thing that bugged me was that it eventually was used against you.

Mgr: "Oh.. well.. I see here you've only put in 38 hours on core projects this last week... this doesn't look too good to others."

Me: "Well, I was actually here in the building for 46 hours, but 8 of those hours were doing some other stuff that there's no timesheet entries for."

Mgr: "Oh... like what?"

Me: "Like answering questions from people in the building that have questions about some of the projects I'm working on - status updates, etc. Apparently you and the other managers aren't updating anyone, and they ask me."

Mgr: "That's not your job."

Me: "So... I should silently ignore them, or give them a canned response to go ask their own dept manager?"

Mgr: "yes. But that didn't take 8 hours last week!"

Me: "I was also doing some research on a couple new debugging tools."

Mgr: "There's no need for that - the senior engineers are making their decision next week about what tool you'll use."

Me: "OK...."

Mgr: "I don't want to see you make a habit of 38 hours a week from now on."

Me: "Ummm... the last 3 months I've been putting in 45-50 hours non-stop, and have been in on some weekends to work with some other people to hit the deadlines."

Mgr: "Yeah, that's great, but 38 hours..."

This is a composite of discussions I've had and colleagues have had with various managers over the years whenever timesheets are involved. YMMV.
Looking Beyond Android Honeycomb
funny, Dropbox makes it happen w/ Python:

"Dropbox uses Python on the client-side and server side as well. This talk will give an overview of the first two years of Dropbox, the team formation, our early guiding principles and philosophies, what worked for us and what we learned while building the company and engineering infrastructure. It will also cover why Python was essential to the success of the project and the rough edges we had to overcome to make it our long term programming environment and runtime."

http://us.pycon.org/2011/blog/2011/02/07/pycon-2011-announci...
Sherlock Holmes 2 online megavideo
Sherlock Holmes 2 online megavideo
: Although no details of the above are available now, is the continuation of that part of Professor Moriarty as a movie villain (played by Jared Harris) and supports the role for you
Sherlock Holmes 2,online,megavideo
I know the first 6/last 4 rule, but Digital River requested the last five. I actually thought that was pretty explicitly in violation of PCI. Am I wrong, or maybe misunderstanding the rules?
Here at Atlassian, we have a refer-a-mate scheme. If you refer someone, you get a free flight to Sydney, Amsterdam or San Fransisco (or $2000):

http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/refer-a-mate.jsp

You can also refer someone for a graduate position for $750:

http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/refer-a-grad.jsp
I hear expertsexchange.com is the place to go.
You also got a shout-out in the article :)