skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Alternatives to 3rd Party Processing?
My startup is kind of stalled at the moment, while I try and work out a solution to the 3rd party payments problem.

My business provides (or will provide) a payment solution in a niche market, mostly the domestic service industry, cutting costs for the vendor and providing better service and more convenience for the customer, whereas Paypal lets their users request payment against an email address, I let my users raise the invoice against a street address.

However banks see this kind of thing as "3rd party payments", taking money to give to someone else, and won't touch it with a barge pole. Paypal have a similar sucking air through the teeth reaction, they're all scared of fraud.

I'm looking for solutions, and I have two in mind at the moment, one would work, but might negate the need for the business in the not too long term, the other might not even work in getting the banks to grant me a merchant account.

So, the first option is to use Paypal, and require the vendor to have a Paypal account, and have the customer make payments direct to the vendor, I know there are several billing applications around that let people raise invoices, but they require the vendor to have their own method of collecting payments, whereas I want to provide that for my customers as well.

The problem, as the various bank reps have explained to me, is that the people making payments are not buying anything from me, and that raises issues with fraud. So I was wondering if having the customers purchase "tokens" from me, and spending them on the services from various vendors. I'm not sure if this will be enough for the banks though.

Are there any other alternatives to being a 3rd party processing application? Any that I've missed?
Is Your Cloud Opaque or Transparent?
Not focusing on a single product. We moved into a related sphere because our technology applied, but doing it part-time we ended up shortchanging both.
From what you are saying you'd think the iphone is the first phone OS capable of running third party apps ever. Other phone OS's have been able to do this for 5 years and many of them haven't needed to restrict users so badly including Windows Mobile, Palm OS and in some cases Symbian.
Plenty of commercial software has poor usability. In general, it's hard to find people who can condense behavior into an intuitive workflow.
Sounds like a stripped-down version of http://www.ideosphere.com/

I get that you were going for fun over market, though.
Quite lengthy, but even as a non-Lisper I can see the sense in it. Most of those suggestions apply equally well to other languages.

I code in Ruby these days, and elegant, beautiful code is part and parcel. I can totally identify with:

"Pick out any three lines in my program, and I can tell you where they're from and what they do" David McDonald

(quote from the article)
Ask Hackers: What business Google App Engine fits?
I think it's suitable for Dating site where are huge data lasting for very long period and isn't suitable for Auction web where is only relatively small amount of data and people still refreshing it :) What is you opinion guys?
Watch Dexter Episodes Free
Dexter TV show is a dramedy which moves around Dexter Morgan who is a likable, self-effacing jovial employee in the Miami Metropolitan Police Department’s crime lab. Dexter is a forensic blood spatter expert.
But the beauty of Ruby on Rails is abstraction. <list of features>

Every language has this stuff. Nobody writes CGI.pm-style web apps anymore; that died in the early 2000s.

You should give it another shot, if you're a web developer, it'll make your life a million times easier.

This is incorrect. Ruby has a major problem right now; module authors have no respect for each other... they will happily modify core functions (and other classes) when you load them. This is not fun to debug. Ruby is still very new, and it's still getting over the mistakes all languages go through. Back in the day, people did this with Perl, but eventually the community learned that monkey patching (etc.) was unacceptable, and most modules don't do it anymore. Eventually Ruby will be as mature as Perl... but why wait... Ruby and Perl have an interchangeable featureset.
Sometimes we need years of studies to (re)discover what our elders knew long ago. That's probably from where comes the proverb : Night is the mother of counsel.
These are indeed bad, and nobody uses these features anymore. (They are important to have around for library authors, but you will probably never need them in "user code".)

Sometimes it's acceptable to use them in a very small scope:

my $entire_file = do { local $/; <$filehandle> };

This is much easier to read than something like:

my $entire_file = readline $filehandle, -line_separator => '';
I spent a year after college goofing off, and not in the good way either. When I finally woke up (literally, pretty much) and realized a whole year had passed by I had lost a lot of momentum. Otherwise I would definitely have completed my master's (or at least worked on something useful). I blame social security.

But at least I came through - I had friends that time who are dead now (one overdosed on heroin, one crashed a stolen car while a fugitive from prison).
Smalltalk also has different precedence rules. Assignment is highest, followed by unary ops, binary ops, then keyword messages. In some cases, this results in expressions evaluating left to right.

This is often the biggest complaint from outsiders. But it's easily solved by including parenthesis now and then. In 10 years of doing Smalltalk, I've never encountered a situation where this is ever an issue. I've never encountered a but caused by math expression precedence. Newb Smalltalkers might make the mistake, but they generally correct it in the next second. So much for the first impression of programmers who are unfamiliar with the language.

In 10 years of Smalltalk, I've also never encountered a situation where Smalltalk execution was slow -- it was always poorly designed (low-latency favoring in a high-latency environment) database IO. If anything, I've always been impressed with how fast the commercial VMs are.

My point: the "popular notions" about programming languages are often as misleading as urban legends.
"Fast hacks, fast, quickly." From my perspective and style of working, I would call this a temptation, not an advantage. ;-)
Regular expressions are expensive. I find a lot - actuially, most - of the things I'd do with RegExs in Perl can be replaced with string methods in Python.

They are not that expensive. In perl, you pay for executing opcodes. If you can do with one regex what would require 10 "fast" string manipulations, then the regex will nearly always be faster.

I imagine Python is similar; there is bookkeeping to be done every time you call a core string function. If you can condense the operation into one call into the core, then you save yourself the bookkeeping overhead.

Additionally, it's also common for Perl users to use RegExs to do things like modify markup languages, which is extremely fragile - use a tree data structure and paths. Python has even has element trees built it in recent versions.

This has nothing to do with Perl. You can write bad code and use bad techniques in any language. I'll bet a Google Code Search will reveal tons of hand-built parsers written in Python. Most people don't know there is a better way to solve a problem, so they use whatever they think of first.

Code should be written for the people who have to maintain it.

When you write code, expect that you will be the primary maintainer forever. You will spend more time reading your own code than anyone else will, so optimize it for yourself.

Your beholders value simple code rather you selfishly saving a few keystrokes.

If you can't read Perl, perhaps it's because you don't know Perl. I can't read Python. Why? Because I never bothered to learn it. Does that make it intrinsically "unreadable" or "unmaintainable"? No; it just means I am dumb. Don't blame the language for your own ignorance.
DSL customers fleeing to cable broadband
As soon as you have a secret police, the second amendment (if not the entire constitution) will have been abolished. So how does the second amendment help against secret police?
I don't know about the oil industry per se, but guys who write software for trading energy futures make loads of money.
I've done a lot of research/consulting in prediction markets. I'm not totally surprised that in theory bluffing is possible. I've seen cases of market manipulation in my research.

But I think everyone should look at the results in a different light: Are they correct??

If the results (either probabilistic results or index results) are accurate, then if there are minor cases of manipulation who cares? I don't believe that prediction markets are that different than any other marketplace with minor concerns of manipulation.

As for accuracy, I've written about that here:

http://blog.mercury-rac.com/2008/01/25/how-to-interpret-pred...

(most people, and virtually all journalists, just don't get the math when it comes to probabilities.)
I love Perl, but its essential problem at this point is that it's lost momentum. After over 7 years of waiting for Perl 6, a huge gulf has developed between the people who can influence language development and new users. In this time, other language communities have taken great steps to attract new users, and in many cases they've been pulling in more former Perl hackers than converted Java/C++/etc folks. In web apps, Rails and Django are king for a reason; they're excellent libraries that are well-documented and easy to choose because of broad support in the language's community. Perl's Catalyst is workable (I've used it) but is tricky to install and configure, has inferior docs, and a thinner set of libraries. And it isn't what all your friends are doing.

It might be narrowminded to blame Perl 6's schedule slippage (and the general shakeup in Perl leadership and Larry Wall's struggle with cancer) for the broader community decline. But there was a time when, say in web apps, Perl was the default choice. That default started to change when some smart hackers wrote some terrific libraries in Ruby and Python, and broad segments of the hacker world started to agree on roughly what features they expected in a web framework. I'm not sure why those hackers didn't choose Perl, but if I had to pick exactly one thing, it would be Perl's awkward handling of references, a skill that might have been easily picked up by C hackers but seems exceedingly arcane to those reared on Java.
Meet the Rich
Any given language is under appreciated by that subset of programmers that mistakes their own ignorance for the language's shortcomings.
New technique to compress light could open doors for optical communications
How to back up your web server (not just your database)
Is it "K" or "Q" language?
Typically you just need some sort of version control and to routinely backup your database. But for those of us who like to be extra cautious, this is a good way to automate the process of backing up and archiving the entire thing.
Intel’s Line of Graphics Chips Could Have Broader Uses
I agree that this approach is deranged. It all stems from the decision to distinguish between values and references. That decision comes from the available hardware and typical programming background at the time of Perl 5's development (early 90s). At that time computers weren't abundantly fast for most programming goals, and storing all variables as references (or objects) was a pretty serious "extreme OO" position. Plus, anyone who called himself a hacker would have to be competent with pointers in C, and Perl references were substantially easier than that. So Perl layered on ways to reference and dereference values, and @{$array->[1]{"foo"}} was born.
Serial Port Splitter 3.8.2
We use BlinkSale (http://www.blinksale.com) for invoicing and like it very much. They have a nice interface for creating templates and recurring invoices as well. Though, as I began digging deeper into this area, I've begun to think that there are a lot of sites that do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. Go with one that's free to begin with, and pay if you like it I suppose.
That would be a nice improvement for Hacker News.

I assume that it is possible to track my votes and compare them with other users. If I voted for an article, I should get a recommendation for another article that people with similar votes have found interesting.

This would also give an additional incentive to use the vote button, since it would improve my experience.
I agree. Similarly, if IMDb would have good recommendations, I'd cast far more votes just to get better recommendations.
Study: Media Industry should embrace illegal downloading
Do they really think the earth is flat?
Casual Collective: Lessons Learned
> This is an interesting quote. If you replace Marx and Engels with Mohammed, Communism with Islam, and Russian with say Iranian you end up with "something you can't say".

Which is again interesting, because it isn't true. You'll have to be pretty blinded not to see the main difference between Marxism and Islam - namely that the latter is a religion which can exists independently of a government, while Marxism in it's very core is a layout for a state.

It doesn't make sense to live as a practising Marxist in a capitalism society, but you can very well live as a practising Muslim in a Christian or secular society.

Way too many governments are using Islam to subdue their people in a totalitarian state, and they are helped by islamophobes in the west, who lend them legitimacy by claiming that it's just the way Islam is.
A games portal may not be a common startup, but I thought folks would enjoy all the stuff CC is doing with testing, usage data, being open, and subscription -> credits.
Motorola poaches Qualcomm COO to lead mobile device turnaround
searched for bill clinton, and most likely this is not the right one, but the offense is amazing (EATTING ALL OF THE HAMBURGERS) :
http://criminalsearches.com/details.aspx?id=53330029
Hmm I think what hes trying to say is this:

I blog, I use twitter. I update twitter through my blog, the twitter plug in for wordpress. Before I had it, I only updated twitter...once a month.

If twitter connects with other platforms, it will expand its influence widely. Thats all that the article says, as far as I understand. Blogging is one way of telling people what I do, but I connect it with the twitter platform and that means more for twitter.
When Perl references start making as much sense as C pointers it will be a considerable improvement.
NoGray Visual Time Picker
I don't know Rails at all but I'll go out on a limb suggest Perl's Catalyst is probably just as good.
I have played hockey for many years and know quite a few people who have done the same. I can't think of anyone with a long term injury.

I suppose it is reflected in 'old timer beer leagues'. There are a few 50 year old guys on my team right now, and they can play fine they are just slower. Sames holds for baseball.

Even though football isn't that popular here - most of the guys I know that did play with hopes of making it big in the US college system ended up injured.
Most sites do recommendations as a big Venn diagram. If my_upvoted_items intersection your_upvoted_items > x then recommend me your_upvoted_items union my_upvoted_items(complement).

I don't think this is a great approach. If you and I have similar tastes, chances are that I have intentionally avoided the things that you like but that I have not voted on.

I'm working on a music recommendation site that, I hope, will avoid this problem.
I think your assertion of community decline is baseless. It probably hasn't grown as have others, but it's not in decline. It's also a fairly nice and quiet place to get things done without a riot of newbie noise.
Yeah they're currently brainwashing people to buy the iPhone which is sold out most of the time.
In actual fact no one wants to buy it, as the average joe on the street is incandescent with rage over their restrictive NDA for 3rd party developers.

It's really tiresome to hear people whine and moan on and on about apple, and to label anyone that disagrees a fanboy.

If you don't like the iPhone, simple - don't buy one.
Tell them to get the tattoos, and stay the heck away from social sites until they're 25.

(I say that only partially in jest)
FCC Votes 3-2 to Punish Comcast for Interfering with BitTorrent
As the article points out, this is exactly the same argument they made to justify the webapp-only restriction in the previous iteration. That particular restriction has now been lifted and the world has not ended... It makes you wonder why the restriction was there in the first place, and how important the current set of restrictions will turn out to be.
I hope he doesn't decide to go anywhere again as employee #6. I am not normally superstitious, but I would avoid that like the plague going forward.

'Oh you currently have 5 employees? That is too bad...' :)
Animated Strange Attractors
Most folks who say Perl is ugly are talking about one of two things (or both): Sigils or Regular Expressions.

I think it is ugly because of its haphazard attitude to default behaviors. Sure the default is usually what you want, but if it isn't, there's no way to derive what you do want from principles, you just have to know it. The Perl documentation is littered with references to "magic" and so on. Whereas with (just for an example) Tcl, once you know the very basic principles, everything else can be determined logically from there.
Trusting the wrong people is painful - even when you have it in writing.
storing all variables as references (or objects) was a pretty serious "extreme OO" position

But LISP had been doing it that way for decades before Perl came along, and I'm sure it wasn't the only one.
URL Rewriting for Beginners
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Debuting September 22, 1999, NBC’s multi-award-winning The West Wing TV Show was America’s first truly successful political drama series. Producer Aaron Sorkin had allegedly created the property to make fuller use of the White House interior sets built for his 1999 theatrical film, The American President. Whatever the case, the weekly, hour-long series disproved the
I have to admit that there’s room for confusion here, though the sites ‘look’ alike the process to each vertical is different. We don’t mean to span HN, absolutely not. We are just hoping to get some constructive feedback on relevancy and performance. I personally apologize for any ‘spamed’ feeling we may have unintentionally created.
Startup uses video games to heal young people
Perl was never the "default choice" for web apps on its merit as a language tho'. At the time (I was there) on a typical large institutional or corporate Unix box you had C/C++/FORTRAN compilers for the engineers to use and Perl installed by the sysadmins for their own use, and that was pretty much it for languages. Getting a whole new language installed for a project that wasn't even "official" was a non-starter. The path of least resistance was to use Perl for CGIs. If Unix sysadmins had been into REXX instead, then that would have been the default choice. Now that most Unixes ship with several scripting languages installed already, people are free(r) to choose. Perl was simply in the right place at the right time.
Just a quick observation: Compare the comments on Hacker News to that on Reddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6uo66/my_experi...

You'd think everyone on Reddit created their own million dollar tech startup based on those comments.
10 calculations to know
The problem with organized religion of all kinds is that it tends to obsess over a concept of eternal and immutable truth, rather than accepting the possibility (and likelihood) of a multitude of paths to truth and liberation. This leads to a sort of legalism that detracts from the original purpose of the religion.

The original purpose of Shabbat in Judaism and Christianity is to devote one day out of seven to meditation and prayer, as well as to simulate the sinless state, in which there was no need for work, that existed before the Fall. There's nothing special about Saturday (or Sunday) as opposed to any other day, aside from the desire to have all observers recognize it on the same day. Before the modern era, the most common distraction from the meditative life was work, and hence the activities that are prohibited are those that were considered part of the "work" sphere in biblical times.

Organized religion tends to calcify, leading to strict rules that allow no exceptions. Hence, the question asked is not, "Will using electricity distract from the meditative purpose of Shabbat?" but "Does electricity 'count' as a fire?" Of course, one can't single out Judaism here, because significant components of all the major religions devolve into the same debates.
A New, Simple Way to Salt your Hashes
While it's true that people knew in both ancient times and in 1492 that the Earth was spherical, there were writers in the early Christian era who argued that it was flat.
Most people will happily accept any restriction that makes their phone less of a PITA than their computer. Has anyone looked at normal cell phones lately? They don't do much, they have a million hard-to-use menus, and they don't crash or reboot. The goal of the iPhone is to improve on #1 and #2 and hold religiously to #3. And they will make a lot of money for doing that.
Employment laws.
No one said it was in the students' best interest, just that the goal was to get more companies to stay in New Haven.
What did you get a PhD in?
Lol. I deliberately didn't. Thought about it ;) Didn't seem inkeeping with the spirit of hacker news though.
Why the world needs quantum mechanics
I'm part of the "I don't do this myself, but I manage people who do" crowd. It's always good to see these types of articles on here. They keep us from being totally ignorant about the mechanics of our own projects. Thanks!
The two best reasons to consider Prawn over PDF::Writer are
* Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM)
* Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file
This is a long excerpt from Surely You're Joking. Is this even legal?
How to capture your user value proposition
I could understand if your regret were not dating, but is your only regret a lack of sex? The "nice women" would be averse to marrying you if your number got too high. From the perspective of a marriage-worthy woman, it's fine to be a virgin till 23-25, and the ideal number for a 30-year-old male is probably 1-6.

How old are you? It seems that the odds get better for a guy until age 35. When you're 20, the age range of women you'll be able to date is very limited: approximately 18-21. When you're 35, it's 23-40. Gender ratios also improve (from a male perspective) dramatically as you age, with noticeable effects in dating. I'm 25 and loving it; I definitely don't miss being an acne-pwned, insecure 19-year-old.

Also, if you're looking for marriage-worthy women, have you considered moving abroad? The only reason I still live in the US is that New York is very, very international. I would not be able to stand it if the only women available for dating were white, suburban Americans.
Doing that with web.py is easy and fun, takes at most half an hour, worth playing with at least once.
Try using redundant brackets in Lisp.