skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN opinion: Square is a platform.
HNers:

I think that Square is an exceptional business enabled by a novel piece of hardware, their headphone jack card reader.

It would seem - then, that the card reader and payment service could actually be seen as a platform play.

Platforms are technologies that are useful themselves - but enable far reaching, broader use cases in ways, that at times, can be unforeseen.

Square could enable a range of cottage industries by providing other applications built on their solution.

We have the ability for mobile payments, as it were, and thus we should see a need for dead-simple mobile business management apps; inventory, supply chain, vendor management, invoicing, product lists etc.

This leads me to believe that Square is a platform that through its deployment applications can be built upon it that will change the way commerce can happen on the individual level.

Further - it would seem that there is also a great opportunity for sales distribution here as well. A product distributor could reach out to and enable a mobile sales force providing all these applications to their sales force in the field on a single device - as the merchants sell product, it can be tracked in real time and supplies replenished.

This could work very well in connected, yet less-developed countries such as rural Philippines, China and other parts of Asia.

Couple this with prepaid charge cards -- and the ability to LOAD cards in the longer term, and there are some significant opportunities that can be built using square alone.
Single chip optical spectrometer
The Technology Behind Making Mobile Payments a Reality
If anyone from wufoo's around:
Beautiful work guys! One tiny typo:

The <input type=tel> link on the index page is incorrectly going to:
http://wufoo.com/html5/types/1-tel.html
When it should be going to:
http://wufoo.com/html5/types/2-tel.html
Fully agree with you, this whole NSA wiretap business isn't some low level tech grunt and a low level bureaucrat. If someone at the FCC/FTC gets a call from whoever authorized wiretapping the nation they'll listen. And if they start screwing around with the merger they'll get a call from exactly that person.

If Eisenhower was scared of this cabal the FCC/FTC will fold like a house of cards.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Baby boomers actually have little to do with Neocon ideology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism#History_and_ori...
I would get cracking on web development if I were you. You can definitely do it alone for a while. That way you're not at the mercy of a programmer and you will have learned a useful skill in the likely event your idea doesn't make it.
This is an interesting technology if it pans out, basically a way to do analysis quickly and cheaply for identifying unknown substances. Its also another example of how MEMs and quantum dots are combining to make tools that used to be impossible, possible (another article linked here talked about quantum dots application in wide spectrum solar cells)
> The man in this article has already castrated himself for his wife... What's next? Recommending cuckoldry as a solution to satisfying his wife's sexual needs?

Wow.

Um.

Daaaaamn.

Unresolved issues much?

Without knowing the couple in question, I could see any number of potential explanations that indicate a co-equal relationship. Let's enumerate some:

- Trying to cut back on expenses and reduce debt, need to watch out for each other's impulsive spending

- Saving for big vacation, remember?

- Return it you oaf! (Your birthday is in a month and I already ordered you the best one)

- Hey, uh, just lost my job. Sure we want to keep it? That $600 is a lot of bills

When you're sharing your life with someone else, finance is a team sport.
Or maybe just try disallowing patents altogether for a couple of decades to see how that works out?
I'm aware of that, which is why I'm asking why it would be a duopoly. at&t will have a monopoly on GSM celluar service, and I'm left without options.

They're saying that all T-Mobile 3G devices would need to be replaced as well ( http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9M3LNPO0 ) which means that my Nexus One is a $550 paperweight, since it won't be useful on any US carrier. I won't even be able to resell it to recoup some of the cost.
Don't fall for it. Expect a new kitchen, a new bathroom, new wardrobe and/or appliances in the near future.
Supposing that it is true, Apple has paid a very small amount of money and received a (comparatively) very large amount of advertising. Why, they've been well placed on HN for quite a while now, for one thing.
They forgot about the biggest losers: every wireless subscriber in the US.
Japan's quake and nuclear emergency coverage
Amazon shuts down Lendle
The Customers Have Spoken: We Want To Export Our Mockups to HTML/CSS
Appreciate the advice, but I primarily wanted to know how much importance to give to the "time factor" - you know, I could spend 6 months developing skills for something I wanted to do only to realise that someone's get their foot into the hole I had my eyes on?
I'm sorry if this sounds puerile or naive, but it's just the first time I've had an exciting idea for a startup so I really want to see this come to fruition soon!
We decided to go for YC first and if they don't take us we will apply at other incubators.
It probably sounds worse than it is. It's not like we're stubbornly keeping to our own opinions whether the code should belong to company or not. We're all inexperienced in this area and intuitively I feel like the code should belong to the company and the other programmer feels like we should not restrict ourselves. We just want to do this right.

What I would love to hear is some experience or consequences that could result from assigning code to the company and also from not doing it. I'm sure both ways have their minuses.
Keeping your mind busy in the background is the easiest way to fall asleep, otherwise it obstructs itself.
Personally, I just either, listen to a podcast or start thinking of big landscapes and as my mind constructs trees and objects it gets busy and let's my subconscious do the work.
That most probably means one of two things:

1. Google hasn't got any relevant patents (unlikely)

2. Google has a number of defensive patents in other things, and have threatened to countersue anyone who comes after them (like Sun before Oracle), which explains the cowards going after the smaller manufacturers instead.
Apple Released Mac OS X 10.6.7,With MacBook Pro Issues Fixed and more [Update]
This is older, but the visual is impressive:
http://www.technewsdaily.com/smartphone-companies-in-a-vicio...
Not that this will prevent baseless, ad-hominem, assumptive comments from being posted and voted up on this site, but...

I've been with a lovely woman, who enjoys being treated like a human being instead of a deity, for over four years.
I would argue that art now constitutes the majority of even big budget titles.

Big budget titles seem to spend the majority of their budget on marketing and promotion. I was astonished by ~40-50mm (development) vs ~200mm (marketing) figures for Modern Warfare 2 (http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2009/11/19/modern-warfare-2...). Even if other titles' budgets aren't that skewed, it's still a huge ratio.
Embarcadero AppWave Store: The World’s First True App Store for PCs
There were known NVidia graphics hardware defect issues with MBPs of roughly that vintage, so if that was the problem, you should have received similar service even if you were not covered by the AppleCare extended warranty.
People x Process -  How Facebook Became the Hottest Company on the Planet
Interesting. I didn't even question this part :). 80% of people here make money off of software. If I was being funded by an iPad app it definitely would be that important.
I almost certainly know less about corporate taxes than you do.

But how do you explain the gap between stated and effective tax rate? Maybe I'm oversimplifying by blaming the Cayman Islands but obviously big corporations are doing something to pay significantly lower taxes than the advertised rate.
Become an Objectivist in Ten Easy Steps
Got one. Needs a new G string. Broke it while tuning it. Hence step 2, learning to play. =)
That's the only way someone will install this thing, after all... No other site will do that.
Linux kernel development process
Wow, the way you're doing it seems really convoluted. I wonder if using an NPAPI plugin would be easier? I know this would be tons easier as a Firefox extension.
but you could move to south san francisco, and have an easy bart commute and the company wouldn't have to pay any payroll tax.
It seems like most of these services are mostly boutique clothes with higher price points. Is this due them just going after more affluent customers, or is it difficult to get wholesale prices from lower cost vendors?

Seems like others might be drawn to this if they didn't have to shell out $200 for a pair of jeans each time. I definitely get the desire for premiere clothing/shopping just wondering if it can scale down the price line and still work.
Sure, but in that situation, as you say

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351451

you wouldn't give a giftcard either. Giftrocket is only meant as a replacement for giftcards, not as a replacement for cash.
well, if we were getting real services from it I wouldn't be as bothered by it.
According to the chart, IE9 supports just one feature: the output tag. "The <output> element is the semantically correct element for displaying the results of a calculation from form elements."

My questions is... why did they decide to implement that one, out of the whole bunch?!
I think it depends how much money you have to spend. If you have money then see about finding a developer. If you don't have money and you don't expect investment then I would say take your time. 6 months is not that long. Unless you're idea is fully developed it will probably take that long to figure out what it is you're really going to end up building based on feedback.
no, it's not on the overage. It's on the total amount.
>every teacher we replace saves $50-150k/year directly and removes a massive unfunded liability (their pension/future health care costs) from the government balance sheet

Who looks after the children?

If parents are working then, even if children are learning through a computerised system, children still need to be cared for.

Are you going to do away with teaching staff altogether? So no one to monitor and encourage the students, to watch that they're not going lord-of-the-flies and building a bonfire out of the learning terminals or are you going to mandate that parents look after their kids and take responsibility for what is currently [often] school based learning.

Don't get me wrong, teachers are not solely childcare professionals. But, children still need care without teachers.

Presumably non-teaching child care staff in a school like environment still need to be paid wages and pensions and have their health costs paid - did you account for that in your savings?

Are you planning on Khan Academy sorting out emotional education, social education, etc. too?
I'll hazard a possibly bad answer.

MVC is not inherently OO - it's more about sending messages which, although a feature of modern OO (Alan Kay even said that he should have called OO Message-Oriented programming), is not its defining feature (as we see it used today).

Since the Model, the View and the Controller are just continually processing and sending messages, you could easily implement them as processes (say as in Erlang). A processes's state is then retained in immutable structures passed to recursive invocations of its main message loop (sorry if this sounds opaque - I'd recommend seeing how it's done in Erlang).

Another GUI approach to FP that is being researched is functional reactive programming. There is a neat Javascript implementation called FlapJax. You could probably argue that FRP is a generalization of MVC (though I'll hedge my statement since I'm not 100% sure of this).
They do have a reputation for taking good care of their customers. I believe that qualifies as "any" reason. Secondly, considering their margins, it's probably the best bang for the buck with their advertising dollars. Tens of thousands of impressions for $226 (or whatever it costs them to make the dang thing).
We compiled a list of 25 post-mortems which may be useful:
http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/

We also analyzed all the post-mortems to identify the top reasons for failure. That is here:

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-an...

Hope that is helpful. Best of luck.
It’s not free that’s the problem, dickbar haters
I wouldn't spend it or invest or anything. Leave in the bank or a CD and just feel secure enough to leave your job if you start hating it. The economy is bad.
The OS does not matter, because almost everything is running in my browser.
"Before I commit to this term sheet, I'd like to call in a buddy who's an expert in term sheets."
Right; except its cheaper; its faster; I spend my time on non-superficial things. I don't go shopping for hours for non-matching outfits. The Real Zen of Nerd is, when a matching outfit comes up, to wear it anyway.

And when I spend my free time on supporting a youth group, that's actually as shallow as spending it shopping for a cool outfit? Really?
It might have made a bit of sense at that level when the TLD was created in 2001, but the wide availability of excellent web directories and search engines has long since made that a moot point.
It wasn't a gift card in my examples.

That's what makes it invalid as an example.
What she really means - "I am free to junk my stuff as well to replace with new one". This is now her 00$ - license to shop till you drop.
I think I'm going to patent the wheel and then randomly sue Mattel because of Hot Wheels.
I'll have you know that Windows is every bit as easy to experiment and learn on. Microsoft go out of their way to make developer and sysadmin's jobs as easy as possible. New versions of the .net framework can be installed without restarting any services, all previous versions will keep running in parallel, etc. etc. Don't dis it till you've tried it.
Wait till you're already going to be without it for a brief period and send it out expedited then. Although be careful if you don't have a good mail carrier.

I had a package containing a replacement Kindle left in my apartment hallway by a moronic FedEx employee, who I'm only guessing forged the 'signature required' box so he didn't have to drop it off at the post office.

Although Amazon was great with the replacement, it took 2 minutes to get the guy to send out a replacement for a battery defect at 2:30am. Having dealt with them before back in the UK my wife simply didn't believe it that they actually had competent people working past 6pm let alone midnight (customer service here in Canada is on par to what black men got at KKK rallys).
It really doesn't matter. If you want to sell products into the US or the industrialized world in general, you are put at risk by the patent system.
The All-In-One Entirely-Not-Alphabetical No-Bullshit Guide to HTML5 Fallbacks
Warning: if this article already made you angry, reading the actual patents will turn your rage up to 11.

These are some of the most general and obvious patents I've seen used in a lawsuit like this in a while.
That's what I miss about Dell. I bought a 800 UKP laptop with 3year onsite warranty. After 6months the touchpad went wrong.

They sent out 12 on site repair visits replacing the touchpad (including 2 trips with the wrong part and 2 to replace bits of the case the previous guy broke) before deciding it was the motherboard that was faulty.

The onsite repair is done by a 3rd party who bill Dell 250 UKP for each visit. They spent almost 4x the cost of the machine repairing it - but Dell company policy is not to replace machines more than 30days old.

Funnily enough that was the last Dell laptop I bought and last place I ordered Dell servers for.
Mine was a ATI chip unfortunately. The problems were all in the end related to a broken latch - broken latch interfered with sleep mode, which meant that occasionally the laptop would spend a few hours in a laptop sleeve, fans going full blast, failing to go to sleep. I'm pretty that cooked the VRAM and DVD drive.

The non-unibody MBPs had a lot of functionality tied to the ridiculously complex lid latch. If the latch broke the laptop was SOL.
Ah, I wasn't clear, apologies. I meant hire someone to code as in hire them to be an actual part of the company, not just a temp hire.

This is my situation at the moment actually. I've got the majority wireframed but will need it coded by a skilled person (I'd just butcher it). In my case I know there will be a lot of customizing and optimizing later as the first iteration is just to get it up & running, so it will be imperative to bring someone on board who will be part of the team, not just a hired gun for a few months.
Because I'm developing apps for iOS and Uncle Steve requires developers to use a Mac that supports Snow Leopard.
You got it wrong; I don't spend time on it, so there's no utility calculation at all. Its a null set. Pride is also free.

I spend my time supporting a youth group; mentoring a high school game design club; gardening. What possible utility do you gain by ignoring these things?
Without knowing much about the mechanics of acquisitions of this magnitude, how plausible is it that AT&T made the offer simply to prevent Sprint from acquiring T-Mobile and creating another competitor? I mean, if they're pretty sure the FTC would block them anyway, if they set a high price, they've just made it harder for Sprint to attain their size.
I would advise you get started coding as soon as possible.
And there's two reasons I'm giving you this advice:

(1) no "learning experience" in the world compares to actually having to do something to your app's code -- I've been doing development for 10 years, and this is basically how I "learned" everything; by actually having to do it.

(2) your idea will probably change once you start working on it; they always do.

And don't worry: it's very unlikely that someone will just decide, out of the blue, to execute the exact same idea as you. And even if they do, the thing to remember is that it's the execution that matters, not the idea itself.
tl;dr:

1) partial pdf display to avoid image download
2) application task bar (+ hot key application switch)
3) "loading" gif
4) selecting text and resizing selection area
5) annotating pdfs by using a separate index file

Pretty basic stuff, and Apple uses all these techniques. I wonder if they are already tithing.
Right. Because every woman is a housewife just waiting for that chance to spend her husband's money on a rhinestone-studded refrigerator.
> It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

You may want to note that my comment had two clauses, and that this is handled in the second one.
Dtb
You can't it's already patented

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.stm
Well I'm convinced! No CEO would pretend to be bullish about a company they knew was in trouble.
A cartesian multiplication is not necessarily more readable, if it takes exponentially more code.

A bit more verbosity over [QKG]add?... could be nice. For example, Haskell's parsec looks like:

do
oneOf "QKG"
string "ad"
optional (char 'd')
..

This also has the nice benefit of generating nice errors when it fails ("Expected 'ad', found ...").
> They are all in the business to make money.

My problem here is that some make money building stuff people want. Others make money by extorting those who make stuff people want.
I had never thought about this, but that is one hell of a way to put your money where your mouth is.

Interesting ... very interesting.
At least you know you'll have 2 supported iOS major updates for each iOS device you buy (ie, I completely see iOS5 doing away with 3GS/iPod Touch '09 support) which install relatively seamlessly.
I've had good luck with online stores for custom shirts as long as I've had someone else assist with measurement and been careful to follow instructions. Generally it's best to stick with one of tailors who asks for a more detailed (but, not necessarily more complicated) set of measurements.

Also, try doing the first few shirts individually (typically there are discounts for buying 4-5 at a time). You may need to have 1-2 great-but-not-perfect shirts first. But once you nail the measurement, it's easy from there on out.
Microsoft on Android Patent Lawsuits: Licensing is the Solution
You're apparently unaware of the high dissatisfaction rate among businesses that could easily result in declining business interest in Groupon.
Or crash it so nobody rides it.
I think this is a problem more on the faculty side than the student side. Students have proven that they’re more than willing to adopt new services if it helps them become more efficient communicators. Facebook and Twitter are examples of that. Ultimately, it’s up to school staff to decide which platforms the institution as a whole should adopt. That’s where things can be lacking across all higher ed universities, not just HBCUs.

There are some HBCUs, like Hampton University, that recognize the potential of technology on a campus. My company, Localist.com, is working with Hampton to help engage their students more on campus by offering a social calendar system. It plugs into all the services students already use (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare), but provides the much-needed school context.

We’re going to be launching in the next couple weeks!

Anyway, like I said, I think the issue of students not engaging enough is a problem at the staff level. Students have already figured out how to solve the issue.
Amazon gave me great service when they had to do a warranty replacement for my Kindle. It took 2 minutes at 2:30am to convince the guy to send me the replacement. My wife being from Canada didn't believe such customer service even existed, but back in the UK I bought everything through Amazon and they were always great.

I did find out in the process that FedEx is as incompetent piece of shit as it was in the UK. The delivery guy left the package in the hallway to my apartment building and obviously forged the signature required as it was an international expedited and insured delivery.
Five Tips for Writing Good Bug Reports
Corporations run the government. Don't forget that.
They really had been failing in such a pathetic sort of way with most of their recent "innovations" that I, too, did feel a tiny bit sorry for them.

But not any more. Now that they have dared to attack real innovative companies that actually make and innovate stuff that people want to buy that faint spark of pity is gone.