skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the account number has not changed, the card will continue to work after the expiration date. All that most payment gateways and credit card companies require is that when you attempt to charge it, you give an expiration date that is in the future. I've seen some recommend that if the card on file is expired, just add 3 years to the expiration date and try it.

Also, VISA and MC both provide an updater service, that some payment gateways make available to some merchants. The updater service allows a merchant to ask for an update on the status of a credit card. Possible responses are: no update available; account is closed; here is the new expiration date for the card; card was replaced and here is the new number and expiration date. The service is pretty cheap. One of the card companies charges something like $150 to sign up, the other charges nothing. Queries are free if there is no updated information available, and something like $0.10 if updated information is returned. They do require that you query for all your stored cards at least once a year.

This doesn't work for all cards. Although the service is provided by VISA and MC, it is up to the individual bank or other organization that actually issued the card to decide if they will support it. When we started using it, it boosted revenue on subscription billing by maybe 2-3%.

I don't think the updater service is available to everyone. I believe they do some looking over your history to try to ensure that you aren't the kind of business that would be misusing the service. I'm sure Amazon would qualify.
Looks like this panel is already over (as of March 13th). Is there a video of it somewhere?
Is it really true that many real-world programming tasks require this level of thought and dedication?

Honest question, I'm a student and none of my school/pet projects have been difficult enough that stepping away from the computer was beneficial. Only puzzles have been hard enough.
Not the first "you've been pwned" message on the Internet and won't be the last.

It just happens to be the first I've seen use Google Analytics to track the lulz with CSS and @font-face. With that layout I was expecting to see a customer rant, not a "pwned" message.

On a more serious note are they going to be able to afford to have a separate EC2 instance per customer to avoid having to write a proper sandbox?
Hey there -- the domain wasn't as much as you might imagine.
Mainly spreading the word on facebook and via highly targeted facebook ads.
Cool, thanks for the feedback!
LinkedIn is fantastic. It tells me which people already know each other. This is more useful than I would have imagined.
They could try downclocking for temp fix.
Some useful math cheat sheets
Ask HN: Facebook should buy Instagram
I know a lot of you are not going to agree with this one, but as I'm increasingly becoming an Instagram addict, it's annoying that it's not more integrated into Facebook.
Space Taxi anyone?
This was on reddit a week ago:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/g4e1d/sony_offers_a_...

starting to get sick of all the content farm tech 'blogs'

if the site isn't writing original content, and simply doing a wrapper around a story, especially an old story, plz don't submit it - we shouldn't be supporting these sites
If you're good at selling it doesn't matter if you're introvert or extrovert.
They're STILL replacing the old Macbook Pros with the dodgy Nvidia graphics cards from years ago, for free.

I wouldn't be too worried about this.
If I have something I'm passionate about, I have no problem working VERY hard. When my friends and I started a new business, I loved it. I had no problem working 16-18 hours a day because there was no place I'd rather be. On the other side of that, my first job was in manufacturing. I started work when they asked me to and I clocked out when they asked me to but I never put any more effort in than was absolutely necessary. I have a good feeling that you simply haven't found that dream project yet. Once you have something that you think about even while you're at home, something that you can't wait to start doing every monday, you'll be surprised how easy the "hard work" becomes.
Yes, Groupon, along with some other startups, has a problem because the business they are in is a geographically local natural monopoly: In one city everyone uses the coupon service that is most popular in that city because that service has the most coupons from merchants in that city because that service has the most users in that city. So, whatever Groupon does around the world, they can be beaten in one city at a time. That is, a shopper and a merchant in Peoria don't much care that Groupon is also in San Francisco, Australia, and Brazil.

Similarly for romantic matchmaking, restaurant recommendations, headhunting, real estate listing, plumber recommendations, etc.
As someone that has been involved it in hacking apple products and making some pocket change from it in a past life, I hardly think apple has a reputation for disliking these people.
If anything, apple looks at what people come up with 'off the ranch' and pulls it into their own stuff if they like it. Apple may have this 'reputation,' but it's purely because the press wants to have it painted this way. I'm no fanboy or anything, I've had a business crushed at their hands; as an engineer and a business guy, I find their decisions to be relatively rational and I was well aware of what was coming well before it was delivered.

People like to point to the guy on top as big and evil. Rightnow it's Apple, 12-15 years ago it was Microsoft. Tomorrow it could be Google.
What the FUCK is YC?
OK, I guess I just don't understand you. Let's take a simple example - programming a toaster.

How do you tie that back into a database?
They haven't always been in a crisis mode. They've never linked to primary sources. Even if you take the print edition of a newspaper before the Internet, you'll never see instructions at the end of an story on how to obtain the full writeup of the data by the investigating scientist.
Gravetye Manor Hotel West Sussex in England wallpapers and photos
I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.
Woo, wyBuild! :)
التعديلات الدستورية
Hot and Sexy Shakira Kiss Photos Gallery Wallpapers 2011 | Best Wallpapers
Even at 16, you should be mature enough to know that this is classless. I hope for their sake they never start their own business and never fuck up, because that'd be awfully sad if the next kids to come along decided to show them the same courtesy they've shown here.
Is this just the new MBPs (the ones with Thunderbolt) or does it also apply to the batches of the previous model that shipped in early 2011?
The Design Cocktail 5
The Design Cocktail is a bundle created by Designious for the creative professionals, including lots of quality products at a very affordable price. The Designious team has been supporting the design industry trough royalty free designs, web templates, and design tutorials.
> Assholes come in many flavors

Two figures of speech that compose to form something hilarious and unexpected.
How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO
I guess that this doesn't occur on the 13" models then?
What particular model of MacBook Pro are you referring to? Those with Nvidia GeForce 9400M ?
How do you interface with a barcode scanner or credit card terminal?
I graduated from university a year and a half ago and started my own web business. The company now makes enough money to support myself entirely.

The business was borne out of desperation. I needed to make money quickly so I spent a weekend thinking about:
1) What other people were doing online that made money;
2) Where my unique set of skills and experiences would give me a competitive advantage;
3) Whether I could build the business and start making sales without the need for cash upfront (I had none);

I settled on selling law revision notes to those studying UK law (www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk). Having studied UK law I could easily spot high quality revision notes. I knew my market. I knew what law students wanted and what their concerns were. I knew exactly what terms they type in Google when faced with a difficult essay. These were my competitive advantages.

The "make money" aspect is very important. Too many startups I see around me (I'm in Ireland) come up with a "great idea" which ultimately never makes a penny. Don't be one of those people. Ask yourself "what can I do that could __make__ __money__ within two months" and you will be off to a good start.

You said you've started a few good projects. I suggest that once you find a project that makes money (assuming you haven't already) you should drop the other projects and focus all your energies. You can always return to the other projects once you're rich.

-- Jack Kinsella
Open-Source Bach; Copyright-Free Goldbergs
The early-2008 models, with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377
This is just precious:

@ElliotSpeck:
> ...I'm available for consulting if you ever want to hire a security manager for @phpfog. :)

As someone who takes security seriously, and manages shared hosting security for a living, I can't imagine what the PHPFog people are going through right now. Finding security holes in commercial systems and discreetly notifying the owners of the problem is one thing; broadcasting knowledge of the holes to the world without a reasonable wait is akin to criminal. I don't care if they actually exploited it, they just threw wide the door without a second thought.
After serious reputation damage… will they still have customers?
After reading about how it took 6 tries for iamwil to get into YC, it makes you realize how awesome of an achievement it is to be really living the dream:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2345664

Nice job guys!
Ask HN: Any service similar to Heroku for php besides PhpFog?
Are their any services that provide freemium models like Heroku for php based products besides PhpFog?
There is a correlation (most good CS researchers publish in journals), but it is not as strong as in physics. Also, the lead times are much longer. In CS conferences typically play the role that journals play in most other fields.

The fact that CS mostly uses refereed conferences as the publishing medium is an ongoing issue when comparing with other fields. One favorite anecdote I heard was the CS guy who was told off at a faculty review by a physicist for getting a "Best paper" award at a conference, he shouldn't spend so much time on frivolous presentations :)

Unpublished claims of superconductivity and cold-fusion should be regarded as suspiciously as unpublished claims of proving P!=NP.
Jeuxvideo24
jeuxvideo24 J'ai fait le tour hier des articles sur des sites français du jeu français. Leur "notes" et "tester" les jeux sont souvent cités comme références dans les articles sur les jeux vidéo
...but you saved a lot by ordering it on amazon: 45 (manning)-26(amazon)=$19 savings. Is the pdf worth $19?
Whats hitting earth?
The Amazon link is an affiliate link, all others are clean. Bit.ly provides a simple service to shorten links, and some additional features like click counting.
Strunk & White is frequently wrong and doesn't even follow it's own rules. For example, what you quoted is obviously wrong - "better than me" is correct here and is what anyone who isn't completely pretentious would write.
It rather doesn't matter. The X11 that Apple ships is effectively http://xquartz.macosforge.org/, so if they drop it (which I doubt), it's one short download away.
GetPantheon is actually funded by the guys from Heroku and focusses on high performance Drupal (not strictly pure php)

Also you could have a look at happycoghosting.com Once again not exactly the same but in the same vein
Ask HN: Ruby or Python or Java: which should a non-tech person start first?
Hi everyone,

I decided to start learning how to code as I have a strong interest in starting a web-based startup.

However, i discovered my interest in web startups a bit late. I am close to finishing my degree in Econs, but hope to pick up coding & web development skills. May I know which language I should start learning first? and why too..

thank you!
Thanks guys, guess i better get to work
I've seen Lenstra's talk about Escher's print gallery some years ago in Rome and then again after a few months in Pisa.

One of the most captivating talks I've ever seen. He's a great speaker. I wish I had him as a professor.

EDIT: forgot to add, in the Mathematica blog there is another explanation of the mathematics between the "Droste effect" and the code to obtain it: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/24/droste-effect-with-mathem...
AFAIK barcode scanners use the keyboard interface, meaning scanning a code just sends some keystrokes to the PC.
As long as there are enough C64 enthusiasts, there will always be someone who is going to port VICE (or some other C64 emulator) to a new platform, no matter what "Windowing System" that platform has got.
Officially? (Edit: Obviously they do now, just checked the Apple link) My Macbook Pro "died" just 1 month out of warranty and I was lucky that I'd purchased my mac from a reseller who replaced it in goodwill, others weren't so lucky. They didn't acknowledge it officially, although NVIDIA did. IIRC they replaced it with the same faulty board (august/september '08).
Nope. I'm broke. Thanks for the reminder.
I'm glad it uses info published by the person themselves and not from something like Rapleaf, which was the name I immediately thought of based on the headline.
Agreed. 5 days ago one of the hackers wrote on Twitter:

"Wow, heroku for PHP. I thought of this once, sadly I wouldn't be able to get 1.2 mil in funding :(".

Well, at least we didn't have to look too hard for a motive.
Ask HN: Where to host a business WordPress Blog?
I had my blog on PHPFog but now it seems it's not a good choice. Any other option besides a shared hosting and a VPS?
For larger companies doing a fair amount of hiring, it's quite useful for trying to figure out what they're up to. Browsing to a company's page shows you the latest hires.

I also use it as a research tool if there's someone in the hierarchy I want to get in front of. As a bonus they'll often maintain a public profile describing themselves, detailing their past experience and possibly linking to their Twitter account. Now you can guess a little about what this person is about and what's on their mind.
Are these guys trying to get arrested?
Another way to make unique ordered keys is to use a timestamp and append a random value, such as a random UUID.

key = timestamp + UUID4
Top- Rated Video - Merton playing piano on Chatroulette
Not yet launched: http://orchestra.io/
Free, simple and easy advertising
Yeah, but the problem is whose definition of furtherance we should use, certainly it could fit into almost any agenda depending on who you ask. I think it's highly probable that these founding fathers would actually stand up and defend a mans right to protect his property. But we will never know their thoughts on DRM, which is another reason the argument is more of an appeal to emotion than reason. To be fair though, you see this type of argument all the time, especially in politics and news reporting. But the argument is rhetorical, the conclusion does not follow by logic necessity from the premise. And the issue of being independent from England and be able to influence how to govern the state, is different from just opposing the means in which a private company decide to protect their investment in R&D and so on.
It is so petty

I hope they get it sorted
I think the ones shipped early this year are referred to as 2010 models.
I get connection reset when I try to comment on your blog.
Do you have a link for that tweet? Or a screen-capture?
You don't even need Cloudfront. You can now host static sites directly from S3. See http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-... and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5043616/amazon-s3-static-...
Facebook Acquires Snaptu (For An Estimated $60 – $70 Million)
Is this at all incriminating against php itself? Tumblr which is written in php had a security issue and now php fog. Is php hard to secure as opposed to other languages/platforms?
Ask YC Alumni: Are any of you available to read over our applications?
Would any YC Alumni be willing to read over mine and any other YC applicants applications?
If you have little to no coding experience, leave Java out of the mix for now. I "restarted" my programming skills about 6 years ago with Python and absolutely love it. (And have since added C, java, javascript and of course conversant in HTML, CSS, etc) I know nothing of Ruby other than it has a following as devoted as Python. Look at the wikipedia entries for each language and see what "feels" more comfortable to you. If you find python "feels" best, and you're relatively new to programming... take a look at "Python Programming" by John Zelle (at Amazon, check out the reviews).
Let me know if you know of this approach being used somewhere in production processing millions of web pages. I would be very interested to know how they overcome the difficulties!

I can imagine the cost/benefit of the approach is favorable for largest search engines like Google and Bing that are trying to squeeze last few percentage points of precision out of results.
For everybody else, the engineering and scaling difficulties are probably too big. I'd love to be proven wrong.
When I had to pick a language to learn I chose Ruby and after spending 3 years learning it I'd say thats the language you want to go with. Its a strong web language with a huge community around it. The language is in constant development along with the libraries and frameworks supporting it. Getting started is real easy with the framework sinatra. In the beginning I found rails was standing in the way of just purely learning ruby and its sort of "magic" made no sense to me. Sinatra is simple. You start with one file with your request methods that are blocks of code starting with get, post and delete. You can then build that out into an mvc style if you so please by seperating things out.

Ruby is the way forth

edit: Also, why's poignant guide to ruby will be the ideal way for you to learn ruby. http://www.scribd.com/doc/2236084/Whys-Poignant-Guide-to-Rub...
http://twitter.com/compwhizii/status/48172082667864065

(I had to create a different account because I have no_procrast activated on my main account. It'd be awesome if no_procrast would be automatically disabled during the weekend.)
it would seem so even looking at the linked thread, at least I did not notice anyone reporting isues with the 13" models
Did you RTFA? This had nothing to do with php.
PhpMyAdmin 3.3.10 is released
Brian Dunning wrote a critical article on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. It's at http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221

"The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, called MBTI for short, more properly owes the bulk of its credit to the great Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung. In 1921, Jung published his book Psychological Types, in which he laid out all the same concepts found in the MBTI [...]"

"An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it. She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who had a degree in political science. The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics. Together they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own. Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets. Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches. Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the sixteen possible ways for those switches to be set. Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number."
Im having the exact same problem though with a 2007 mbp though so it could be a software update that I installed
Please post this thread again in a few months. Fingers crossed!
How I Survived the Biggest Financial Crisis of my Life
If you're just going to host static files, just host them directly through Rack as described here:
http://mwhuss.com/2009/12/13/static-sites-on-heroku-in-two-l...

Also, make sure you are using http caching - that way Heroku will use Varnish to cache them.
I would say that learning Lisp is definitely worthwhile and will improve your Python coding; pg's essay argues for Lisp better than I could:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

You'll want to not just read a book, but also get hands on experience with the language. That's where I found Clojure a good choice for me since I could work on problems of interest to my work and reuse existing Java libraries.

Joy of Clojure also presents a persuasive argument in the opening chapter for Clojure, Lisp and functional programming. There is a pdf of that chapter available for free from the author's website:

http://joyofclojure.com/
http://ycombinator.com/

P.S.: What are you doing on HN, if you don't know this? :-)
Start-up Thoughts on Creating a Brand
Brand creation. Not specifically tech related, but still coming from a start-up.
> Finding security holes in commercial systems and discreetly notifying the owners of the problem is one thing

Last time this happened to me, I gave 6 months free on a dedicated server which was announced in an e-mail that went out to around a thousand users (the focus was explaining why feature x was disabled for the past few days).

It was brought up in discussion that it was probably too much, but the alternative to me was terrifying considering the amount of tickets opened because of the preventative measures.
Graphic design (no "s") isn't knowing a specific set of tools or techniques, but is a profession that really deals with solving the problem of how you communicate an idea in any visual medium.

The way you describe your skill set you aren't a graphic designer; instead you're a web production person or a front end developer. A designer knows subjects like art history, color theory, typography, etc.

Yes you can teach yourself these things, but that isn't a part time gig. Production on the other hand can be a part time gig — but you have to really understand that's more craftsmanship (and maybe some decoration) rather than high level creativity.

If you're serious about being a creative professional you should give up business school and go for a BFA or an MFA at a design school. Or if you really like the programming side if thing you might want to go in that direction. And of course there are other paths like becoming an Information Architect. Although all of those paths require going to school or really being ready to invest the time to teach yourself.

By he way it's important to note that there is nothing wrong with being a web production person or a front end developer. In fact if you can do that well you won't find yourself lacking for work (and both creatives and hardcore programmers will appreciate you through and through).
About the speed: how can these laptops be getting twice the speed, twice the graphics performance, etc ? Didn't the previous model already had the i5 and i7?
If they use reserved instances, it should be even less than that. They still need to control abuse in terms of bandwidth, etc. and that is the difficult part.
My hobby: Following up on entrepreneurs
You don't need special tooling for that, just a diesel car.

But you should be aware that biodiesel is a scam, since it takes more gasoline to create it than it saves your car.