skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point credit cards will be treated somewhat like public utilities, because they're effectively becoming money or access to it. You can make a case for the right to do business with whom you please. I doubt if you can make a case for restricting anyone's access to their own and other people's money, and as the relevance of cash falls, credit cards look more like money itself and less like a business that you choose to do business with or not.
Ruby 2.0: What We Want to Accomplish in the Near Future
Wow, I thought the creator had given up on the project. Whilst I loved the promise Espresso 1 showed, I found it had too many issues to make me switch from Coda. I'm curious though, besides a rewrite of the program and integration of CSSEdit, what's actually new?
Even on OS X it doesn't look great, but I'm guessing you're using Windows? Windows is notoriously bad at rendering custom fonts on Web pages for some reason. Enough so that some people stop custom fonts rendering on it using a JavaScript check.
The point is that any business can pivot at any time, for their own reasons or because they were acquired/merged. Myspace is firing a good portion of their employees; maybe all that data won't be used for Myspace-like purposes, but instead sold to advertisers. Not what any Myspace user expected when they signed up.

Shit changes.
Ask HN: Enough of the reviews - WHY is Google launching +1?
What do you think?
Thanks, I guess I should have clarified -- I think PayPal will work fine to actually handle the transaction. I guess the thing I'm wondering about is how to handle the tax / reporting side of things.
Define "free speech organization".
The author, Ben Laurie, argues that the way checkpoints are arbitrarily applied to the Bitcoin block chain relies on trust (of the developers), and therefore make Bitcoin centralized. He then argues that an efficient currency could be designed based on this trust.

Firstly, only 7 blocks are checkpointed out of the 134000 in existence (as of July 2, 2011):

if ((nHeight == 11111 && hash != uint256("0x0000000069e244f73d78e8fd29ba2fd2ed618bd6fa2ee92559f542fdb26e7c1d")) ||
(nHeight == 33333 && hash != uint256("0x000000002dd5588a74784eaa7ab0507a18ad16a236e7b1ce69f00d7ddfb5d0a6")) ||
(nHeight == 68555 && hash != uint256("0x00000000001e1b4903550a0b96e9a9405c8a95f387162e4944e8d9fbe501cd6a")) ||
(nHeight == 70567 && hash != uint256("0x00000000006a49b14bcf27462068f1264c961f11fa2e0eddd2be0791e1d4124a")) ||
(nHeight == 74000 && hash != uint256("0x0000000000573993a3c9e41ce34471c079dcf5f52a0e824a81e7f953b8661a20")) ||
(nHeight == 105000 && hash != uint256("0x00000000000291ce28027faea320c8d2b054b2e0fe44a773f3eefb151d6bdc97")) ||
(nHeight == 118000 && hash != uint256("0x000000000000774a7f8a7a12dc906ddb9e17e75d684f15e00f8767f9e8f36553")))
return error("AcceptBlock() : rejected by checkpoint lockin at %d", nHeight);

The mechanism by which these checkpoints are added is very slow: every few months developers add them, and it takes months for most of the users to deploy these new versions of the software (notwithstanding the fact that many users never upgrade). Obviously a delay of multiple months to validate transactions and issue coins is not acceptable. I cannot imagine how an efficient currency could be built on top of this "more efficient" mechanism as described by Laurie, who avoids this problem by stating "the exact mechanism by which these snapshots are established is not important".

Secondly, he argues they make Bitcoin dependent on the trust of the developers. This is not the case. The developers simply record some proof-of-works recognized by the global Bitcoin network as of thousands of blocks ago. Trust in these checkpoints is 100% based on trust of the proof-of-work mechanism. The purpose of these checkpoints is to help prevent attacks where Bitcoin nodes are isolated from the global peer-to-peer network via active man-in-the-middle attacks, and are distributed an illegitimate block chain. This only solves part of the problem (only the blocks up to 118000 are checkpointed) but it is better than nothing.
So what you're saying is there's absolutely no way these organizations are motivated to block the money going to the organization which threatens to publish their own secrets because of any threat to themselves?
Spain scintillating - the many charms of Life Spanish
The "always just out of reach" metaphor is tired.

It's a somewhat outdated view of the community, which is now quite large, with many members gainfully employed building systems in Haskell commercially, and in non-trivial applications.
I would never join a country club that would have me as a member
is google's strategy of limiting entry to google+ kinda brilliant in that way?
I'm always going to remember the name now that I read an article using it as an example of a bad name. It doesn't stand out to me as a terrible name, not worse than many others that bear no relation to their functions.

It sounds like a great product. I've wondered a solution for the lack of a package repository for common Windows programs.
it belongs in meta rather than as its own tag
Using Linux and Chromium here, no problem with the font.
Your accountant should tell you this.
do it here: http://longbets.org/
At least you wrote the program to generate it rather than typing all that by hand. I think you got the gist of the idea. In any case, would all those branches be faster than the comparatively expensive floating-point arithmetic?
That's a very generous upgrade policy. It's nice to see developers look out for their existing customers.
Quoting from article:

What scientists don't know yet is how 46 chromosomes came to win out over 48.

There is almost certainly no advantage in how the DNA is packaged. If anything, having a different number of chromosomes hurts someone in terms of having the most babies possible.

It might be that where the two chromosomes fused together, some new helpful gene was created. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this.

An alternative is that dumb luck allowed the 46 chromosome humans to win.
What makes OMeta special?
We tried this pretty early on. I feel like it is bastardisation of the meta tag to add information that is needed by the system to register an intent, we can't add new attributes just for intents. Then if you have to have it span across multiple tags it is a nightmare to manage for developers. If you don't span across multiple tags you have to have a special encoding inside the meta tag to describe the intent, which again is massively frustrating for developers.

How would you specify an intent through the meta tag?
+1 is just the latest iteration of Google's social networking attempts, so in a way they've always been working on it. As for why, well, Google is in the business of organizing data and having detail data about its users' social life is a goldmine. Although I'm not sure that it will improve the quality of their search engine, as many people have stated, it will most definitely tie users even more to Google and that's always a goal in itself.
There’s a pretty good summary on one of the developer’s blog: http://beckism.com/2011/06/espresso-2-pre-release/
Hi, I'm a Hg dev. I'll talk to the people doing the website see what they think about that.
Adding to the thread, anyone that needs to deal with Windows XP or Windows Vista installs, nLite[1] and vLite[2] are in this same vein, but help you build custom installs. (Also forgotten this one about once a year).

[1] http://www.nliteos.com/
[2] http://www.vlite.net/
Location-based Instant fuzzy search
Live demo of location-based instant fuzzy search developed by bimaple.com, a startup from UC Irvine.
It's built on a dataset of 17 million geospatial objects from factual.com.
Perhaps petowners can use this site when animals are lost?

I would explore that angle.
Very interesting. I'll be curious to see how Ruby comes to be used in the near future and how it develops as a language.
I'd have to say that his arguments are interesting, but they only work well with carefully chosen examples.

In particular, the question of efficiency in the context of lazy evaluation appears to be very tricky, and thus far it has been only little explored. For example, the first way to do large-scale I/O in Haskell that doesn't eat up resources (namedly, "iteratees") is maybe 3 years old, and I don't think an awfully lot of people really grasp it. No, it seems to me that we're just beginning to figure this stuff out.

Earlier comment:

Talk about just out-of-reach, how about the words on the page? Viewing this under FF3.6 on Snow Leopard, and the words go just off the right-hand side of the window, no matter what size I make it.

EDIT: Tried Safari. It's a fixed-width column there. And Readable works fine under FF.
Patience and Finance
Yeah. 11 counts of electro shock therapy? Are you freaking kidding me? Reading that part and coming back to these comments makes me feel a little insane..
I would argue that there's a subtle difference between being ambiguous and being vague. Being vague implies that the intended meaning cannot be discerned, while being ambiguous implies that the law can be interpreted and applied to multiple scenarios, even those that did not exist at the time of its writing.

IANAL nor have I read the ECPA itself, but from my understanding of the case, the judge fully understood the intention of the law and applied it appropriately to this case. Had the law been less ambiguous and more specifically defined "radio technologies," then we may have ended up with a situation where wiretapping encrypted wifi might actually be considered legal. See mattmanser's explanation above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2721831)

Of course, there is a fine line between being too vague and being too specific.
I think the opposite has generally been true for Google's more social products. Google Buzz went down in flames fairly quickly. Knol was widely perceived to be a failure. Orkut did not receive a positive reception in the US.

The generally accepted version of Google's history with social products is summed up well in this recent AdWeek article:

Has Google Learned From Social Failure? Why Google+ might succeed where Buzz failed
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/has-google-learned-soc...
It can. However, this is a very uncommon pattern, so it's not worth trying very hard to detect. On top of that, I'd expect the compiler to bail after the pattern gets to a certain size.
Wonderful story. Thanks!
Exactamundo!
He made a video blog of his house arrest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCNzU3u7G3o
WiFi 'napping' doubles phone battery life
Until I read the post about how the name was selected from a list of computer-generated options, I (and apparently a few others here) thought it was a play off of, "ni' night." This made sense to me: you start Ninite to do unattended installs and then head off to bed.

Regardless, I think the name is actually pretty good. The issue for me is that the site has so little branding and personality to it that nothing reinforces the name. It's great that it gets you to the functionality right away, but I think you can preserve that quality and add some branding elements that reinforce the name.

Two ideas jump immediately to mind. The first is to play off, "ni' night," and use a darkened children's room, the night sky, or a children's bedtime book theme. You could add a dark background with a memorable graphical element such as a poster bed or the moon. The second is to conceive of "Ninite" as some sort of cool new chemical element -- a laboratory, the periodic table, or chemical structure diagrams could serve as themes.

Regardless, I'd move "Featured In" to be a horizontal set of badges below the screenshot and place a large logotype to the left of the screenshot with the tagline, "The Easiest, Fastest Way to Update and Install Software."
More, disturbing facts re the Fukushima disaster come to light.
I think that there's something more going on than a simple naming issue over here.

As a product you're exactly in the right place to be. You see, your product isn't something "cool" that people should use. It's now a fact of life. It's an extension of your users environment. This means that they take it for granted, because they just can't imagine life without it.

That's an amazing position to be in for a product. Think about it. When was the last time you thought, "hey I'm going to send you a messing using an electronic messaging system that allows me to send files and store things on a server!" You just say, "I'll drop you a line". You don't even need to talk about the technology over here! Email has become just another fact of life.

Some technologies become so ingrained into your life, that they are the technological equivalent of drinking water. It's something completely natural that you will never think twice about.

This means if you play your cards well, you're here to stay...
1. Don't go on your own
2. make sure you can go back to your current job if things don't work out
that stupid lace had it coming.
Ask HN: How to accept payments?
I want to start doing some freelance work on the side. What are the some of the ways to accept online payments from clients?

I currently have a google checkout account, would this work well or is their something that is a lot better?
Reversed dating
Gotta love the Digg and Delicious icons in the footer.
If you're in the US, you can use Square: http://squareup.com/

For online payments, Google Checkout should work fine unless you have any particular gripes with it.
At first, I agree. But then I look at my running programs: emacs, Steam, Safari, Python, Clojure, along with the more descriptive Finder, iChat, iTerm2, Mail. Somehow, I think the problem has more to do with how obtrusive or how much interaction you have with a program rather than the name.

What would you call Ninite?
Hmm.. Maybe if you had worked for them, they would have succeeded!
+1 for LucidChart (http://www.lucidchart.com). I'm a big fan of the collaboration with clients.
Maybe it could replace Tumblr for you, but my impression of them is that they're building a platform for "creative" people... I don't think Google will touch that anytime soon.
> What would you call Ninite?

install-in-one
Sprockets, as it exists, can't do module loading: it's a Javascript concatenator. All it does it copy the contents of <filename.js> in place of //= require 'filename.js'.

Gotta, say, I just spent a chunk of time converting a project from one to the other (actually RequireJS), and I really think it was the right move.
maybe Samsung can't afford to lose Apple as a customer, given the $7.8 billion in sales it provided last year?
True Blood Season 4 Episode 2 
True Blood Season 4 Episode 2 just for you
I leapt to the right conclusion without reading the article. I'm a lazy genius! reading through the article I realize they came to the same conclusion I did.
Color me skeptical. Progress on this app has been embarrassing. If you want to keep up with Textmate (which seems all but dead), you have to do a little bit better than this.
Also it depends on where you live and other things like that. "Median annual wages of wage and salary computer systems analysts were $75,500 in May 2008." (http://bls.gov/oco/ocos287.htm) "In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer applications software engineers were $85,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $67,790 and $104,870. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $53,720, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $128,870." (http://bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm)

According to https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm, $73,045 is the typical starting salary for a Berkeley EECS major, although several people I know have gotten offers 10-20k higher.
If only it were true. I started in on Sprockets to get my feet wet for Rails 3.1, and have to say I was disappointed. Sprockets is a textual concatenator, which makes it appropriate when you're writing short snippets throughout a project. By contrast, CommonJS (and requireJS and a slew of other implementations of asynchronous modules) implements well scoped modules, which have all kinds of boons.
No error checking around mallocs?
Aren't APIs kinda sorta built for this?
Oops, I didn't mean to come off as saying that the author's problem isn't real. I understand where he's coming from and we hear similar things from a lot of users.

But, there's not a good solution available so I don't really worry about it day to day.

We're not going to change the name at this point, and I think people have started to see us enough that its becoming less and less of a problem.

Actually, lots of people do remember the name. Our top 26 searches to find the site are variations or misspellings on the name. 27 is "install multiple programs" and then we're back to the name until "multi installer" at 40. We got a quarter million visits last month from people typing ninite or ninite.com into google.

I also don't think founders of new startups should fret too much over naming. Just make something great, release it, and improve it. The catchiest name in the world won't save a bad product. Product is the high bit here, naming is lower than you'd think.
+1 to postfix.

If you are worried about DNS resolving failures, you can run bind as a local resolver and only have it listen on 127.0.0.1 or only allow certain hosts to query it, including the local machine it runs on.
Very, very cool. I want to use this with my own app!
There's been massive advancements and updates since this was written in 2005 so don't expect this to be gospel.
Concatenating all the separate audio effects into one long stream and seeking in that stream to play individual sounds is a pretty clever hack.
I think it will help with some of the spam since users will generally not +1 a spam site. It will also add an extra attribute (social) to the search algorithm.
I also find the font rather bad. It's very "skinny" and "tall".
What MySpace's Tom Anderson Thinks of Google+
Thanks, this is a really great compliment.

One of my favorite things about Ninite is that we get thank you letters from grandmothers who hear about us on the local news and orders from Fortune 500 companies for the same basic product.
OMeta: an Object-Oriented Language for Pattern Matching
Would you happen to know how they chose? I am just curious.
There seems to be some confusion here.

Iteratees weren't introduced to solve the problem of "eating up resources" per se. They're a new abstraction for doing high performance IO -- in any language. You've always had several choices for IO in Haskell: lazy IO (like pipes in shell programming), or strict IO (like say, Python or C IO).

Iteratees blend these somewhat, giving a third way.

So you could say that IO isn't well explained by computer science yet -- as new approaches are still being discovered. That doesn't really say anything about Haskell, other than it was the first developer community to really take iteratee-style IO seriously.
Instapaper text:
http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fstatus.net%2F2...
Well, perhaps I am one of the many who don't really grasp iteratees.

In any case, my point about efficiency in the context of lazy evaluation not being well understood, still stands.
FPGA based Forth development environment
My vote goes for Sinatra as well.
Well, they could be two of the most epic studies in self-loathing.

Hemingway (along with his "literary style of wearing false hair on the chest") damaged himself in his maniacal rush to prove himself the pinnacle of manliness. And Hoover, who was probably queer, commenced an unsurpassed reign of sexual blackmail of everyone including the wives of presidents.

Though I shouldn't speak such ill of the dead, I suppose.
I have been working on something like this but a bit different for a while; you can see an example at http://cloudactions.herokuapp.com/paint/ or http://xdpaint.herokuapp.com - I'd be curious what you think. (If you choose the Flickr open option or Imgur save option you don't need to log in with anything)

You can turn the iframes into popup windows if you eval 'cloud.noIframes=true' from a javascript prompt or enter 'javascript:cloud.noIframes=true' in the URL bar.

EDIT: There's also an older iteration of this idea at http://xdproject.org/filterizer/
Compendium of Unix Tutorials
John Carmack's America
Be more specific. The Intents are a kind of API.

If you mean REST APIs, one advantage that comes to mind is that Intents should require less integration on the server. Just write a callback that handles the expected data, and don't worry about integrating plugins.
Ask HN: What's your Google+ Account
Of course theres some very interesting people on HN who might have Google+ accounts, I'd be interested in following some fellow hackers and I'd think others would be too. To that end, post your account!

Self: https://plus.google.com/105503159085383028265/posts
While academically interesting, I'll wager a guess that QEMU wins in every performance comparison, right? While writing a TCG-style thunking generator is not "simple", it is extremely fast.

I'm also not really sure what instruction set you're targeting here. This is a very small subset of IA-32(e) if I'm not mistaken.
I bet we'd be exactly as successful with a better name. Are there examples of products where an awesome name made them into successes? Or even had a significant impact?

I'm sure you could tank a product with an offensive name or something that required weird unicode characters. But I think it's only worth getting a passing grade on the name and then going for an A+ on the product.

I guess the argument is that if you're right on the margin a better name could tip you into winning. But I'd already consider a product a failure if it only gets to that middle ground on its own. If the name makes a difference I'd say you're not working on the right sort of problem.
There's a lot of similarity between their ~censorship of Wikileaks and the censorship performed by ISPs and search engines like Baidu, in China.

Certain members of the government simply make unofficial suggestions, and the private companies _voluntarily_ block things.
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Yes, the space semantics of lazy evaluation is difficult to learn, particularly when coming from fully-strict languages, or languages with little support for lazy programming.

Many other programming techniques face similar barriers: e.g. memoization, concurrency or logic programming result in similar brain twisting -- yet can be suprisingly useful.

So I argue that programmers shouldn't be scared of technology -- embracing and learning new techniques can only improve your practice.
jrockway's comment should really be addressed -- this can cause some really nasty crashes.
Google Notebook (google.com/notebook) is still available, they just stopped working on it. I wouldn't consider it an act of "force" to stop developing a product. And regardless, they're not obligated to even continue offering it.

Regarding search previews, I can agree that the option to turn them off would be appreciated. However, I think it's still a stretch to say that you're "forced" to view them; hovering alone does not trigger them, only clicking within search results.

Personally, I had hardly noticed that search previews were still enabled, though I've never had a use for them. They do seem more useful on reappraisal than I had originally remembered, however.