skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Terry Childs gets jail and a 1.5M bill for overzealous security
That's a big when. But in the end, NFC is a hardware issue. Square is adding the most value on the software and financial side of the equation. If anything, Square strikes me as the best positioned party, other than Apple, to capitalize on NFC once it sees some broad adoption.

If Apple makes the NFC APIs private, though, that could put the hurt on Square given their heavy iOS investment.
You're confusing a collision (find any x, y such that f(x) = f(y)) and a second preimage attack (find any x such that f(x) = y for some particular y). The latter is much more difficult, but the former can still be used - see "rogue CA".
Gamifying Github
I'm assuming that the initial contact (from up to 2 blocks away) just tells the restaurant that you're coming and primes their register with your info.

At the restaurant, you order and eat as usual. When it's time to pay (before or after, as per normal at the restuarant) you just give your name instead of cash or credit card, and it's put on your tab. (Which you have to pay later, of course.)

Again, those are assumptions based on what little I've read... Which is probably the same or less than you've read.
AFAIK sabbatical are quasi exclusive to US and Canada. I never knew anyone in Europe going for a sabbatical.
Depends if, as a dev, you want to keep waiting for them to become implemented. If I were dreaming of AR, for example, I'd still be waiting.
That really makes me think though: If they chucked redundancy out the window, that makes you the only person who can do a business critical task. Shouldn't that give you enormous leverage to negotiate with your employer? It often takes a lot of time and effort to get someone new up to your level. If they can't afford another couple weeks of vacation for you (in exchange for you staying on board instead of having to bring in someone completely new), then they must be doing it wrong.

What does everyone think?
Don't conflate pretty with usable. Useit.com is one of the best sites there is about usability, and it is backed up with real data. While it may not be pretty, it is eminently usable.

Edit: fix typo
Hi Dave. They do now, but didn't when I posted my original comment.
Queen's Brian May Rocks Out To Physics, Photography (Terry Gross Interview)
Why is the magnetic stripe reader necessary? Why not just use the camera to OCR the card itself?
I live in the more protestant part of Germany, Hamburg. People here get the same vacation (the company I work for has 28 days paid vacation for its employees). The only difference is that we have a few days less public holidays than in the catholic regions.
I'm not sure how common this is but "vacation" for the few Japanese and Chinese tourists I've met is usually done as a work retreat. For example, your division has met or exceeded its objectives for the year? Congratulations! you're all going to Hawaii for a week. I assume this is how compensation is done there.

While vacationing in Hawaii I read an article about the massive logistics it took to host about 10 million Amway sales reps from China. The visa and hotel backlog was insane so it took about 2 years from when they were promised to when they were actually delivered that company paid vacation.
Where are you located? In the SF Bay area?
If anyone is interested, FaceCash Register works with cash, credit cards, and FaceCash payments too.

https://www.facecash.com/register.html

It's JavaScript-based so it works on just about every platform, not just iPad.
Yes and no. Adopting Square is much easier for both consumers and retailers than merchants adopting a POS NFC device in store. While I think both have difficult challenges in getting to scale (majority market penetration), I assume Square's route seems easier to adopt than the NFC route. Not to mention Square provides a slew of information/analytics that may be missing with early NFC adoption.

That said, there isn't any reason why Square wouldn't just transition their App to adopt both their physical Square device as well as the built-in NFC chips to have both working with their App (assuming NFC API are available). There's too much speculation and guessing to determine how things will turn out. But Square does have a lot going on for them at the moment between their partnership with VISA and their devices being sold in Apple stores. Hard to believe that they won't be able to innovate and pivot to continue growth even with NFC coming out eventually.

It's also worth noting that Square also works for non-merchants including random street vendors, hot dog stands, and the like to be able to accept credit card payments. NFC would not work for this crowd and that's another disruption Square is going to have in their favor.
Judge: don't bring me any more anonymous file-sharing suits
Indeed, I see my Twitter example is a bit off...
You guys are doing it again -- idealizing the other side of the fence as if everything was all rainbows and unicorns in Europe.

In Germany and many European countries, you pay for healthcare and it costs a lot -- you simply don't have the option of not having healthcare and the cost is proportional to your income rather than your health condition. Also note that the employee caries the full cost of health insurance as opposed to the employer usually covering it in skilled professions in the US.

The social security model is also somewhat similar: you pay (high) social security taxes and get money back based your contributions.

Unemployment, also like in the US, is pretty sane if you're a full-time employee and are fired. You don't get it for several months if you quit on your own and if you haven't payed unemployment taxes, you get put on unemployment that's just at the edge of livable (housing costs + about $500/month).

And note, those taxes come after the lower salary. A pretty common take-home salary for a European software developer would be $3000-4000/month.

And really, how many 20-somethings that complain about the cost of living are doing it because they're stashing away too much in their retirement fund?

Public transit is a valid one, but then, the two highest paid areas for software developers in the US, New York and San Francisco, also have quite good public transit. (Not to mention that a one-month pass costs $100-200/month depending on the area.)

The truth is that I've heard people say that while they eat out every day, have a new car every couple years, live in swanky places and spend money on a constant stream of new gadgets. Americans also have a weird fetish that you don't find other places about buying homes in their 20s. While there are some valid reasons that make the total cost of living in Europe comparatively lower, I'm really not convinced that's the core of the difference. It's just that people quickly grow into their incomes and start seeing things as essential that aren't.
Notice how politicians, regardless of political party, are liars?
In the US advertised salaries don't include personal income tax (local and federal), insurance, social security, medicare, 401k, and any other fees you might incur.

At the top of your paycheck you would see your 'advertised' earnings for that period and then at the bottom you have your take home net pay. Depending on your location, you loose around 20% of your 'advertised' pay to taxes and other mandatory things. If you contribute to a 401K you loose even more.
The web is full of great, crisp user interfaces, and no one questions that. It's just that they don't run (as well) on mobile devices. That's a function of the devices and their software; not the technologies of the web. Projecting that to continue indefinitely seems short-sighted.
Thanks to all for your responses!
Re: #2 - so you'll be trying to get sued and win, then? The first part doesn't seem so hard; let me know how the second half goes.

Seriously, it's far too easy to say that someone else should do the right thing.
As long as people can't game HN points, I don't think there's a problem with people trying to get their ads on front page - Only if enough people thought the content was worth looking at the ads it gets upvoted, so the quality stays good.
(As an aside: I don't know much about this, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to create a couple of dozen hn accounts, set up a script and upvote any post you like.. Indeed, with the amount of geeks visiting the site, I'd be surprised if it hadn't already been done. Anyone care to explain?)
Google Chrome Courgette differential compression algorithm
Courgette uses a primitive object disassembler adjuster to compute "assembly language" differences that are about 10% size of bsdiff.
For what it's worth, I'm pushing 40 and have a house and kid, and I wrote the comment you're replying to.

I don't consider losing my job to be traumatic in any way. It's nearly impossible to find good developers, so if you have a bit of skill you don't ever need to worry about the consequences of being unemployed.
Well, they did upgrade Youngsville, NC to wideband DOCSIS 3.0. I'm not terribly happy about supporting a monopoly, but I do have 30/5 service now.
Thoughts on Square card case
Because the magnetic stripe contains a security code that's not otherwise represented on the card. Including that code in the transaction gets you a better rate, since the physical presence of a card may signal a lower risk of fraud. (2.75% flat for a swipe versus 3.5% and 15¢ for keying in the number, according to Square's site)
So if he worked there for 10 years he would have gotten 10 x 3 = 30 weeks holiday, however had he not negotiated he would have gotten 5 x 2 + 5 x 3 = 25 weeks.

I cannot see how you consider that he got a bad deal.
Google doesn't seem to be interested in addressing the limitations of WebP, like the 16383-pixel limit or only supporting 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.

I think the use-case is: run all your images through the converter, and if they're not bigger and don't look like crap, then you might as well use it. Not exactly compelling...

On the other hand, the algorithms have a lot of room for improvement, so it might make sense to focus on those for a while and worry about less-common cases (like huge images) later.
Making Migrations Faster and Safer
This is the story of a developer who happend to sell RVs for a few months and what he learned. Some interesting points:

1) One of the three options they showed customers was always a bad fit. They showed it to make the option they really wanted the customer buy look esp good because of the contrast.

2) They sold by painting a picture in the customer's mind. They'd tell the customer a story about how she'd drive the RV for a getaway, and help the customer imagine how her life would be different.

3) When they negotiated, they found that it was most effective to go "ask the manager" 3 times with 3 different offers before he'd accept the deal, because, if the manager accepted on the first try, the customer felt like it was too easy and that he didn't bargain enough.

I wonder how these (and the rest of the ideas in the interview) can be used online.
Replacement cost is often quite high for any employee, even someone working a basic job, as training is expensive.

Thus why many employers don't do training other than the bare minimum - why train someone who might use the training to go elsewhere. This is the "keep them dumb and stupid" approach to employee retention.
That's a great improvement over a generic binary diff. I remember Symantec was doing something similar for their AV definitions updates. In fact they got some patents: http://www.symantec.com/press/2001/n010207b.html
Beware misleading about the mobile gamer
Have to agree on the horrible link-bait title. The article itself talks about another person's rebuttal on Marco's earlier post.

Now if you'll excuse me I am writing a nutrition guide titled "Why You Shouldn't Invest in Higher Education".
Magstripe may be required for "card present" verification; there are different compliance rules for transactions involving just the information from the card (as when you punch the number in manually).
The rough <-> ruf example is a great one. One would have to argue that the "ough" spelling conveyed additional meaning in both written and spoken forms in order to support the hypothesis of the researchers, or else such examples are such a small subset of words studied that they are insignificant to the larger hypothesis.

I am somewhat aware of thinking about the etymology of word when using them. For example, whenever I use the word conspire I picture two people breathing together. Perhaps if I didn't picture this I'd just use the word "plot" instead in such cases.
Aren't you psychoanalyzing him yourself by somehow intuiting that he's putting "a lot of effort" into it? I don't really see that in the post itself.
Making the Best Use of your Energy Elves
What's stopping square from developing an NFC attachment? (Mind you, I don't follow NFC development too closely.)
I believe those types of comments are referring to Square drastically lowering the barrier of entry for accepting credit card payments.
I did note that in my original comment, but you need to note the following: if the software never needs to be restarted, you will find somebody who never restarts it. The result is that sections of the code base may get out of sync, resulting in nonsensical behavior. 6 months from now, somebody will push code which does not work anymore with right now's awesomebar (or whatever), and the results may be minor or may lead to significant loss of state and information.
Does it follow from this that manual carbon copy "imprint" machines are not eligible for card present rates?

This may sound dumb, but why not just put this additional security code in a bar code or QR code somewhere on the surface of the card to allow for the equivalent security using a camera to read the card?
The following link is a pretty thorough explanation. Much better than I could do in a few lines.

http://www.theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/
Tiny Host-Based IDS in Python for the Poor & Lazy
I'm not sure if many HN users are familiar with TabbedOut (there are quite a few venues in Austin that support it), but there is definitely some cross-over here with the Square Case. Specifically if this works in bars.

Essentially you can open and close a tab with a bar whenever you want. Forget to close your tab and realize you're a mile away from the bar? No problem, you can close it and add tip from anywhere. Forget your credit card often at bars? You don't give them a CC in the first place because it's stored in your TabbedOut account.

It also does nifty things like allow you to split checks via the app at restaurants, which is super useful.

One of TabbedOut's big accomplishments is they have invested quite a bit of time/money integrating with point of sale systems which is what allows them to have such a slick user experience. I'm curious if this is something Square has done as well.
The Java world is "standardized" (de facto, since it's not a "real" standards board, but still) by the Java Community Process. For .NET, you have ECMA-335 specifying the CLR and ECMA-334 specifying the C# language itself; standards by an internationally recognized body.

As for too heavy, I think that's a pretty silly argument, especially considering that Java runs on everything from phones (there's J2ME and Blackberry, plus Android's Dalvik is just an alternative way to look at Java -- register-based rather than stack-based, which speeds up interpretation considerably) to big iron, and .NET runs on everything from microcontrollers (I have a Netduino board sitting next to me) to the 360 to desktops to phones to servers. Heaviness comes from use cases, not intrinsic properties.
1. Zero-friction deployment. Everyone uses web browsers.

2. Reduced learning curve. Everyone is comfortable with web pages.

Compare to the VMs you mention. The JVM failed at #1 despite years' head start and doesn't even try to address #2. A better example is Flash, which threaded the deployment needle amazingly well but still ran aground on the remaining barriers.

Mobile is different, though.
How do manual carbon copy swipes figure into this?
So far, I've only had one experience with dropbox, and it was mediocre. Someone('s dad) was trying to share a ~1.5 gig file with up to 50ish people (mostly artists and musicians). The free account used up all its bandwidth and the person had to apologize to everyone and ask that they please wait while they figured out what to do (I assume they were using a free version and needed to upgrade, but that's just a guess. The Dropbox faq doesn't say anything about bandwidth).

So I uploaded it to amazon s3 and configured direct access to the bucket via the web (a very easy procedure though somewhat technical). It cost me less than $5 to get that file to the remaining people, with little worry about service interruption.
The numbers on cards become a lot harder to read after the coloring wears off of the numbers. Even as a human it can be hard to read them at times depending on the lighting.

Card layouts also vary a lot, even from the same issuers (for example: the Amex PASS).

Reading the mag stripe prevents fraud and therefore is subject to lower fees by CC companies.

Not to mention, having someone take a picture of my credit card would spook me out a little (yes, even if I'm familiar with the product).
Wondering: how can you be 'not even a little attached to it' yet 'REALLY LIKE' it- which one is it?
What do you mean by security consequences? As far as I can tell, the IETF draft specifies the whitelisted ciphers and key exchange algorithms for which False Start has no security consequences; as long as implementations use False Start only for those whitelisted algorithms, security isn't compromised. I suppose the only security consequence then is that bad implementations might choose non-recommended algorithms in their whitelists, either out of ignorance or because they are consciously compromising security for the sake of being able to use False Start more often.
american - working for a company i love, but i find it hard to even write long articles on HN because of the fear of "slacking"..i would love to elaborate more and explain why im slowing starting my own web design co for my traveling laptop days i so dream about....
To your last point, how is letting someone scan the magnetic stripe less spooky?

Considering that augmented reality app that translates words on signs in real time, I suspect there is far less entropy in the raised numbers on a credit card... though you may be right that the variety of layouts would make it harder than it would at first seem.
"Thinking about how we are building stupid games for stupid people made me so uninterested in doing work."

This is not depression. This is reality.

Most people work at making things they don't care about, and serving people they don't care for.

And yet they're expected to put on a cheery face at work and at all the disgustingly fake work parties and cheerleading sessions, kiss up to the boss, and give a shit that their company is making x% more or less widgets this month.

I suppose it's good that he's found a way to put up with the cognitive dissonance a bit longer before he suffers a full-fledged nervous breakdown, but from another prespective it's pretty sad.

Ideally, of course, we should all find work that's fulfilling and meaningful for us. But that's easier said than done.
Twitter: Let the Information Wash Over You
I can't really support it, but it also just feels right that Apple would buy Square before they'd compete with them. So I'd wager on either Apple not going after POS or a targeted acquisition.
User data is stored on four different enterprise drives across two different physical servers. Nightly backups copies data over a dedicated 1Gbps link to a secondary data center.
This kinda scares me. Is this a real backup going to removable storage stored in a secure backup facility? If it's being synced via a dedicated line, why is it nightly instead of continuous? And if those four drives are the only source for production user data, isn't it likely a storm of writes could cause a severe bottleneck? (assuming SCSI drives, ~200 ops * 4 = 800 ops total, or with SSDs, 2400 ops... will they ever write more than 2400 times a second?)

Also, an extra layer (memcached) in front of mysql for caching requests could save them lots of nodes if reads are dragging down performance/requiring more nodes to spread read load.
I think it's for the same reason the just using the number increases the rate. It allows someone to snap a picture of your card without ever having to touch it. The magnetic strip adds a bit of complexity to getting the data off the card.
It's not the worst option at all, it's just the best of a bunch of bad ones. As a small software company CEO I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to maximize revenue, not to take stands against patent abuse. If my options were pay a small fee to someone who didn't deserve it, or go broke trying to fight it (no matter how right I am) I'm choosing the former.

It's unclear here what is right, even if you assume the patent is total bullshit. Is spending the money your investors gave you, and that your employees depend upon for their livelihoods, to fight a (probably) unjust patent claim right? It seems you're trying to make a right out of two wrongs there. It's certainly foolish from a profit-maximizing standpoint, and it's hard to imagine it's going to have any positive effect on the patent system even if you win.
Nothing, what i meant was "solved without any outside intervention or determined effort", just that. Poor english.
Ruraltopia: "Growth" v. "Prosperity"
I was very bummed that Sun forced me to take off the week of 4th of july for the same reason. I wanted to take a week in San Diego at the beach. That's crowded any time in the summer, but after labor day, when school resumes, the weather is actually nicer in early fall (they call it "june gloom" in san diego, coastal fog is still common in early-mid summer), rentals are way easier to get, and hotel prices drop dramatically. Instead, Sun was forcing me to take my beach week at the most expensive and slightly less desirable time of year. And when you only get two weeks at all, that's pretty crappy.
Square – Card Case
This is another brilliant call from Square.
NFC technology is not yet developed and many problems still exist for the implementation (the iPhone 5 might not have the appropriate chip for example), whereas square seems to make it easy for both customers and merchants. The only problem I see is that this square technology is suitable for the US market but I'm not so sure about Europe.
How to Get Started in the Consulting Business
Mixergy, of course, and I sometimes listen to TechZing as well.
I've managed to get the best of both worlds, working for a German company in America. 28 paid days off, plus 7 holidays.
I'd rather have a poor user experience than a zero user experience.
Left wing/right wing is a ridiculous argument. How much vacation do they get in North Korean factories?
Ask John Pettitt anything over at Reddit
>500,000 Square card readers shipped, 1 million Square transactions in May

So, half a million card readers have been shipped and they've each been used, on average, twice in this month? That seems really low to me. Do a lot of merchants get the reader and not use it at all?
You guys are doing it again -- idealizing the other side of the fence as if everything was all rainbows and unicorns in Europe.

I used to live in Britain. After having gone to doctor a few times there, I'd rather have the customer-pays model of America. I was just pointing-out that it's (obviously) expensive over here.
The original blog posting for the video:

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/01/10/dancing-monkey-gibbers-on-ab...
The Bureau Of Statistical Chicanery And Related Ballyhoo has reviewed your appeal and, based on the extenuating circumstances you described, has chosen not to revoke your blogging license...

... FOR NOW! (dramatic reverb)