skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your solution here is obvious. Several times per week it seems there's a thread here lamenting paypals policy's. My advice to you would be to start a competitor to paypal. (yes they're owned by eBay, but remember that there's potential antitrust issues if they harass you too much or refuse to allow you to integrate your payments widget into the listings.) You certainly aren't alone in your struggle, and were I in your position, that's what I'd do. Just my $0.02.
HTML5 Audio. See a definitive rundown why Firefox 4 is the best answer by a wide margin: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audi...
In a traditional class room its not possible to collect that data in a practical sense. Teachers are already over worked and technology is in short supply. Which is why tools like these are not available, its only possible here because all students are interacting with the khanacademy.org system.
Thanks! You will definitely hear music you know, though. I think you'll be surprised who is trusting us to deliver them value.
The Wage Struggles of Men
Sorry, but i'm not sure i find your "readable" hacker news more readable than the default layout. Might be because I don't mind reading small text, and can't bear scrolling. Also find the font and color choices iffy.

That being said, I think it has some of potential. Maybe do a little user testing and get a little more feedback and iterate on the design?
Here is a link because ted.com is just as awesome as youtube.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...

Also is the youtube video a strange colour red for anyone else?
I agree it's important to practise a bit of both for personal development. But why would you continually fight against the grain if you could be playing to your natural strengths and delivering more value?
The other laptops have been decent too. The Chrome netbook would be a novelty to show people and Alienware/Sony VAIO machines are not bad at all.
> I can see how you associate it being the least secure with it being the most awesome

In fact he associated the fact of being the most awesome and generating the most media coverage with the fact it would be the first to fall, regardless of how secure or not the computer is.
As an old guitar player I really have a gut aversion to this whole idea.

I find trying to wring cash out of, what are likely, struggling indie artists sucks.

As a consumer I do not want crappy music by the bands that paid the most in my stream.
Sure, here are the gems.

nested_set,
devise,
jquery-rails,
dynamic_form,
chronic,
chronic_duration,
easy_dates,
lazy_high_charts,
recaptcha,
rspreedly,
redcloth,
delayed_job,
workless
Representative Democracy doesn't Scale
> The way FF adds subtle indicators when the content on a pinned page updates is especially nice.

I'm on Chrome 10.0.648.127 and it does a periodic glow when pinned content has been updated. It's a little too subtle for my tastes, really.
Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued
I think China's attitude has changed, so they are letting reports come out through the border.

Or the article could be right - the flood of second-hand electronics has changed some North Korean citizens' attitudes.
US accounting rules sometimes require companies to charge for updates if they provide a significant feature left out of original products. An alternative solution can be to restate past earnings, something Apple would likely prefer to avoid.

Apple has sometimes been infamous for charging for updates typically expected for free. The most frequent example has been major iPod touch firmware upgrades, which cost a small fee up until iOS 4. In 2007, the company went so far as charging $2 to enable 802.11n Wi-Fi on some Macs.

Read more: http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/02/24/may.be.trying.to.avoi...
> tens of millions of dollars of revenue we project

Paypal's revenues are well over $3 billion/year and growing. They are also known around these parts as a fraud detection company with a payment processing component. Respectfully, I would first suggest you be happy that those millions are still just projected and not sitting in limbo in a frozen PayPal account.

Next, check out some other payment processing options. Here is a great place to start: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Ironically one of the few services I happily pay for is Pandora in order to listen ad free. I don't really find the earbits model any better.
No, the reason that people are pissed is because they want to be pissed.

There's no real reason to rage about this, other than a self-created illusion that the only thing stopping some hypothetical FOSS developer somewhere in Romania from creating the next Apache is the inability to pay Apple 5 dollars.
how else he would attract investors for next rounds and then sell his startups to big companies? ^_^
Facebook writing privacy policy in plain(er) English
Can't edit the link, here's the primary source (facebooks data policy page): http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy
It's definitely an on-going thing. Over the past week I've gotten feedback and kept working on it, changing things here and there. I finally decided that it's at a good enough spot to post on Hacker News and get even more feedback.

It's been a 50/50 hit on whether or not to use a sans-serif or serif typeface. At least that's the biggest type of feedback I've gotten thus far.

But yes, I'd love feedback on this.
> Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. We are not machines.

Here's a thought experiment for you, then: imagine that someone builds a product called TheBestSearchForYou, where you step into an advanced MRI machine and think your query. Then:

1. Your brain is copied into a billion virtual emulations, each of which then sees a single page from the TBSFY's index.

2. TBSFY then measures (through whatever destructive, invasive process is necessary) which em had the most positive response according to their own utility functions (which are all the same as yours, mind.)

3. TBSFY returns to you the page that gave "you" the strongest positive response.

4. Then the ems are stopped and deleted, because—since you're going to be a slightly different you the next time you make a query—it's useless to keep them around ;)

I would say TBSFY adheres to the definition of an "optimal" search engine, however infeasable. The actual question it raises, though, is how closely TBSFY's results can be approximated by a company that knows increasing amounts of personal information about you.
switch to using keydown (that's how real instruments work) and add a metronome, and this might be usable!
What do you think of the new fab.com viral invite tools?
This comes up every single time Apple charges for something small, but it's most likely due to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
Can I coin the term 'brogrammers' for this sort of code-soulmate, whole-far-greater-than-sum-of-parts partnership?
It's not about the karma, it's about people attempting to silence those who simply speak the truth. HN fades one's comments more for each step below 0. I'm not sure how it works, but I assume eventually your posts fade into the background color.
I have not seen launchrock. That's a pretty cool site. One thing I was thinking about was doing a survey to see if people were interested in renting out their parking spot, using SpotHero to purchase parking or both.

I'm glad you like the business concept. The way the current system is being set up, is that you can list your parking spot from anywhere. We are focusing all our marketing efforts/energy/time in Chicago to start, but it can scale and be used anywhere there's an open parking spot.

If having the "Chicago" there puts people off from other areas, I think you're right about removing it.
And Emacs has viper :)
This incessant competition for grades between children, deliberately inculcated by adults, is tragic. Done in the name of education, it has nothing to do with a love of knowledge. It is part of the schooling tradition: a set of memes surviving purely for its own sake, with a huge amount of suffering and worry generated as byproducts.

In a life worth living, success doesn't comes from doing the same old thing a shade more quickly than the next guy. It comes from cooperation and from building a niche in which one can thrive.
Facebook's data policy page:

http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy
Very true. The blog has definitely been instrumental in driving traffic to our website.
Great question; obviously we've thought a lot about it:

1) First, it shows you videos of your friends. When we looked at how we used videos we realized we didn't go to Youtube to find videos our real life friends had taken.

2) Second, we let you easily post video to Facebook or Twitter. You can do this from your Youtube client on the phone (if you have Android) but it is hardly a streamlined process.

3) We optimize the process of getting video off your phone. Youtube is a fairly terrible experience in my opinion.
I actually use hnsort.com for a related reason. Do you think you'll be adding any sorting options? Maybe even a feature like reddit to hide posts?

Thanks!
No one really knows if there's a bubble before it bursts

This is commonly quoted but not true. Everyone who had any clue saw the housing bubble collapse coming a mile away. I was warning friends buying houses in 2006 that they were buying at the peak of a bubble. And everyone on Wall St knew exactly what was coming down the pipe.
I'm curious how higher gas prices are really going to drive alternative fuels. If gas prices go so high that alternative forms of transportation are needed, that will also constitute a massive switch in infrastructure. With gas prices being so high, every facet of the industry will be facing higher costs from transportation.

People will start feeling the pinch from their own transportation along with food and other items as the industries shift the costs to the consumer. In every corner of the market, high gas prices will have an effect, so how is that the market will become ripe for electric cars if for starters, the cars are still expensive (most people needing loans ), and prices for everything are going up?

The idea that there is some golden era when gas hits 5-6$ a gallon and electric gets a large chunk of the market just seems absurd.
Hey Mike, I hear you...my partner and I spent thousands of dollars trying "traditional" music marketing tactics - fliers, ads in the LA Weekly, and all of the normal social media that bands use now. What I am sure you know is that nothing sells an artist more than hearing their music and deciding for yourself if you like it. If a good artists gets into rotation enough on radio, they will build a fan base. We can play a band to a targeted user for $0.01 and that's plenty for what we need to operate. That's 1/15th the cost of a flier. We're so committed to treating artists right that, if that user skips you in the first 30 seconds, you're not charged.

And in terms of the quality, we also don't sell pipe dreams to bands who will not benefit. We focus just as much on listeners as bands. Fire up a channel. You may not like everything you hear, but there is no "crappy music" on Earbits.
Wait...are you under the impression that the hacks are developed on the spot when the challenger steps up to the computer?

In fact, they are developed far in advance. The order the browsers fall is determined by the order the challengers get to demonstrate their hacks.
The forbidden railway: to North Korea via Russia
Donated. I once had to put an early (Win 3 I think) version onto the Net. It was the first time I connected anything to the Net and opened up a whole new world to me. For that I am very grateful. I would be extremely interested to see the total that peter actually receives. So if someone can ask Peter if he could set up some sort of online running total thing I think it would be a nice thing to watch as I have always believed that Geeks/Nerds/PeepsLikeMe have a financial conscience and I would like to see that shown in black and white. Please.
Should "everywhere" be "anywhere"?

To me, "Click everywhere to go ahead" means that, in order to proceed, I must click everywhere.
Nothing. You should do it.
28. a very strong Steve; only linux
As a general guideline, I look into EC2 when:

1) My scale is significant enough to require at least 2 servers (unless one of them is RDS).

2) I have some background processing.

3) I can commit to reserving an instance for at least a year.

A small ec2 instance running 24x7 will cost me around $40 / month (+ bandwidth) if I reserve up at least a year's worth of usage. That's 1.7GB of RAM and 1 EC2 compute unit. For $163.43 you can get a pretty honking large instance (way cheaper than any competing VPS offering). Add in ELB and RDS and you've got a very scalable setup for very little coin.

I'm not sure how the Heroku dyno or worker performance measures up to EC2 Compute units though, but I'd love to hear from someone who does know.
Why is Singapore not yet a superstar in churning out startups?
I am perhaps a perfect example of why Singapore is not yet able to churn out many startups as other places such as Silicon Valley and Israel. No doubt these are the rare few superstar nations that are able to do so, but Singapore, with its small size, surely it's citizens are able to rely on each other and create jobs for themselves? Instead, much of our economy relies on foreign MNCs for our ricebowls.

As a budding entrepreneur, I then ask myself, why have I not yet started a business?

(1) Technology. It all goes back to our history during our founding years. Singapore, while known for its high-tech industries prevalant today, was not always of a high-tech nature. This is very unlike that of Israel, where children are being inculcated into the importance of education since a young age. I once knew of a entrepreneur who started learning coding at age 6. That would never happen in Singapore. It was in our history for kids to help their parents in F&B or trading businsses. Both of which did not require much technological know-how. Even at times of war, it was our government who went after the British to supply us with weapons. Singapore has also been far less experienced in warfare. Contrast this with Israel's need for their own innovation in warfare and aerospace.

(2) Marketplace. While we have just about 5 million citizens (talk about a small domestic country), we were fortunate to start off as a well-connected entrepot hub. There was almost little need to create our own technologies back in the 1960s. Trade was the door to all wealth. That explains why youths are drawn to enter the finance industry instead of engineering.

(3) Talent pool. Face it, even with the flood of early-stage funding given by the government, there is a lack of mentors who genuinely wish to grow startups. Singapore once had a close-knitted community spirit, similar to that of Israel's Kitbutz system. However, with the government's push for public housing, former village mates lost contact. This led to the downhill in our social fabric. Want help from a community? It is much harder to find like-minded youths with the entrepreneurial (coupled with engineering skills).

So..how are things in your city?
We're trying to build a way to help everyone do everything.

Also, we're hiring.
They also say "Netflix cannot be the first word in the application name. It can be used in the naming of an app as “x for Netflix” or “x with Netflix”, “x’s Netflix Manager”, etc."
http://developer.netflix.com/docs/Branding

In their approved App Gallery are apps with names like "My Netflix" and "Search for Netflix"
Maybe this represents some kind of breakthrough in mobile markets, but definitely not mobile money. It doesn't solve any problem related to mobile money at all based on the description.
A lot of Chrome's extensions don't integrate well with the browser itself. They feel a lot like bookmarklets rather than an actual extension of the browser (this is by design). Firefox extensions can be very well integrated. For example, NoScript on Firefox far exceeds the quality any of the alternatives on Chrome.

Simply put, Chrome extensions are HTML/CSS/JS, while Firefox extensions can actually manipulate the interface of the browser to a greater degree (making stuff like Vimperator possible when it wouldn't be possible on Chrome)
Chrome has taken the same approach Firefox did:

We can't prevent this from happening so we try to provide a good way for other software to do it, so they don't do it in terrible ways:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/external_extensions...
Moe has some good points about maintaining these instances, keeping things up-to-date, and launching more sophisticated infrastructure beyond your vanilla Rails/MySQL stack apps.

In my experience, Chef is really not that difficult to get setup, especially for the benefits it gives you: idempotent recipes with a great deal of control over the configuration, setup, and control of your infrastructure.

In the blog post, it mentions having to comment out migrations that will fail. That's bad: when bootstrapping machines, a db:schema:load is far more appropriate and less brittle.

Rubber seems like a half-solution for maintaining infrastructure. The blog post mentions that it was picked to prevent having to manually configure boxes, but it sounds like they chose a tool that only half solves their problem and then leaves them to do manual maintenance.

Now, with some experience, I can get a Rails machine booted and running an app in 20 minutes total with Chef. It's really pretty easy, and having tons of resources, lots of recipes, excellent support, and a sane system makes it super flexible.
Between requiring developers to pay to write apps (have to enter their personal or enterprise program) and now charging for the IDE, Apple is almost taking a hostile stance against developers, whereas Google is embracing them.

I wonder what the reasoning behind this move is.
The same goes for any Acrobat plugin you may have, though I think Chrome's built-in PDF viewer supersedes Adobe's.
Hmm, good point. According to their documentation, "synced data is encrypted when it travels between your computer and Google’s servers" (this seems to refer to encryption in transit, i.e. SSL) and "As an added layer of protection, your saved passwords are encrypted on your computer and on Google’s servers using a cryptographic key."

http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

That does seem to imply that only passwords are encrypted while in storage. That's not surprising, since Chrome has a "master password" for password encryption, but unlike Firefox it does not require transferring an encryption key for your other sync data. (The client-side encryption key is the reason you need to "pair" your devices to set up Firefox Sync, instead of just entering a username and password.)
Oh my god, if you don't like the way rubber in implemented, either don't use it, or submit some patches to fix areas that you dislike, but give the guy a break.
Someday, the sun will set on SEO
Yeah. Turns out I live in the town he mentions -- on the street for one of the schools.

If I listened hard, I wonder if I could hear paradigms shifting.
Three suggestions:

1. There needs to be a way to get a reference to a room (so I can give it to friends) since I'm yet to find a room where anybody else plays anything.

2. Would be nice to have some way to choose or switch instruments

3. Needs more notes... you can probably fit 3 octaves in if you use the numeric and qwerty row for one register and the asdfg and zxcvb rows for another.
Sound like Google is making their challenge harder than everyone else. That just isn't fair.
The one thing that Xcode 3 does better for me: My main monitor is in portrait orientation. A UI based on a single window with vertical panes doesn't really jive with that.
I wonder how long before some bureaucrats try to regulate this market. The bets are on...
I think I'm fairly ambivalent about whether a sans-serif or a serif is used, but I do think the font should be smaller.

Also, a less contrasting color scheme than red-grey
It's interesting to see this line of questioning because the post to me was more about Rubber than about EC2 vs Heroku.

For me, Chef is a no brainer for bootstrapping and managing my instances.

Heroku is also a no brainer, but as rapind pointed, it's for simpler setups or for getting an app up quickly without a lot of ceremony.

We've deployed to Heroku and eventually moved to EC2, but have kept several apps on Heroku.
While I agree that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, I disagree with the spirit of the article. Yes, children should not be adults. But let's face it, America's percentage of overbooked, stressed, kids is nothing compared to the overwhelming masses which are under-challenged and not interested in school or learning. The U.S. is so far behind in education--having school years much shorter than the top countries like Finland and Japan--that overworking our kids should be the last thing we are worrying about.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a point about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation] Concerted Cultivation in his book Outliers that I think is very appropriate to the topic at hand.

One more thought: If a child from China read this article, he would probably laugh. I say, work our kids harder! Damn punks...
Grubster Aims To Be The “Pandora of Social Restaurant Recommendations”
As soon as hookers start using it.
I question the metric used in these contests. Reports always makes it sound like someone just walks up completely unprepared and hacks a machine.

”We had to do everything from scratch. We had to create a debugging tool, create the shellcode and create the ROP (return oriented programming) technique,”

Obviously there is a fair bit of preparation involved.
I gave up HN for lent starting... Now (you can too ;)
The iPad 2
Google drops reverse phone number lookup
Kind of odd, since the Safari vulnerability was in WebKit.
Less than a year on HN. So does that qualify for less brainy? Or you mean, I should have joined HN directly out of mother's womb?

Most realities are harsh to accept; but that doesn't change anything. Don't you see that some non-sense posts are making at the top here? And that is happening more too often?

I don't deny that today HN has the best of Internet and Techie crowd; but it is also a fact that there is also some junk. So let's accept it.

And yea guys, thanks for the down rating; much appreciated.
Collaborative? No one else seems to be in the rooms I get assigned to...
As Facebook Standardizes, It Kills FBML This Week
The thing that annoyed me about Chef was the need for a Chef server (or their Opscode service). Rubber may turn out to not be ideal so we'll see, but so far it seems to be pretty logical and not that difficult to maintain.

The part about commenting out a failing migration is a bug that shouldn't exist in that particular process, not relevant to Rubber.

I don't mean to sound like I'm vigorously defending Rubber because we just started playing with it but, so far, the criticism seems a little overblown.
I like these parts:

"There are no known technical barriers to the establishment of a manned installation on the moon."

"There is a requirement for a manned military outpost on the moon. The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential United States interests on the moon; to develop techniques in moon-based surveillance of the earth and space, in communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the moon; to serve as a base for exploration of the moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the moon if required"
Hackers Discover Google's Cloud-Based Music Service
They're all prepared in advance. I don't really understand what you mean about the reporting though, as you point out the discussion makes it clear none of this is off the cuff.