skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jumio Turns Webcams Into Credit Card Readers
If it were up to Jumio, we’re all going to be ‘netswiping’ to purchase books, clothes, travel, FarmVille crops and whatnot online in a couple of years. The startup has been extensively testing its digital payments service in private beta mode since last year, when Jajah founder Daniel Mattes started teasing whatever they were building.
I think that, despite making some mistakes of its own, the content of the article is still valid and raises some important points. I did find it irritating that they used small, light coloured text on a dark background in places, as I find this very difficult to read (and am hardly alone in that).

However, I think there are bigger fish to fry than quibbles like that. On any given day, there's at least one article on the HN front page that I actually cannot easily read, and frequently it's black text on a white background, plenty of contrast, just far far too thin on my display. I suspect the significant difference between font weights in browsers between OS X and everything else may be to blame.
He endorsed google using Sun Java, not googles implementation of "Java".

This whole line of argument is FUD From pro-google people who are trying to pretend like its hypocritical to want to defend Java.

Android was using Sun Java before the licensing dispute caused them to go their own way.
Money talks in NYC. It's hard to hire because well capitalized startups pay as well as finance.
"I wish Boxee didn't crash so much."

Sadly true. And Plex, the main alternative, crashes as much, but in different ways. No more Front Row in Lion. I think Apple want us to buy Apple Tv...
Pardon a bit of advertising rhetoric. Let me make a couple of more precise statements:

1. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, dislikes its syntax (he was famously told to "make it look like Java" even though its semantics are derived from Smalltalk and Lisp) and has become a fan of CoffeeScript. He blurbed the book and, as CTO of the Mozilla corporation, has been pushing to develop tools for debugging languages that compile to JavaScript within Firefox.

2. CoffeeScript doesn't fix all of JavaScript's quirks. Roughly half of what you'll find at wtfjs.com is applicable to CoffeeScript. (Most of the other half involves `==`.) As JS gets faster, it'll become more practical to use JS as a VM to run languages that offer niceties like every number being a BigDecimal. But for now, CoffeeScript is an excellent compromise: Fewer quirks and much less boilerplate than JS, with little to no loss in efficiency when used properly.
APIs and support
"I wish Chrome was a better browser,"

that's easy, just use Firefox

whistles
I tend to read the new page more frequently than the default landing page.
>designers need to think of elderly users with bad vision

There are plenty of us young folks with terrible low-contrast vision, too :) I've personally got HN turned up to 175% zoom, and even that's a bit on the low side if I want to read the text of self-posts.

IMO, this is an important distinction -- I once heard a friend indicate that, because their app was targeted at people aged ~20-30, accessibility wasn't an important focus. I thought that was a very short sighted decision.
Fasten your TDD red-green-refactor cycles
Have you tried using tree tabs in Chrome? It isn't quite as slick as the Firefox tree tabs, but still nicer than the little nubs that are the default. That's interesting though, I always do dev stuff in Firefox because of how anemic firebug is in Chrome, and casual surfing in Chrome because it feels faster.
What's wrong with using Firefox if it works better for you exactly?
> if everything was high contrast, everything would be SCREAMING AT YOU FOR ATTENTION

Simply not true. There's many more factors besides contrast that determine attention focus.

See this excellent series on gestalt principles of design:
http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure-grou...
(it's five parts you need to click to get to the other 4)

Also see http://24ways.org/2007/typesetting-tables which shows a very nice way of adding structure to a table using contrast, instead of making everything scream for attention equally. (Additionally, the site used a different layout when this article was written in 2007, and currently it seems 24ways is a good example of low-contrast crappy readability :) )
I believe your starting point is largely irrelevant, but first...

A good justification for (b) can be found by determining the genetic diversity of indigenous populations from thousands of years ago and comparing to the present day. As an example the UK has had many 'immigrants' in just the past two thousand years alone, with the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans being notable topics on a good school's History lessons.

Nevertheless, I believe your arguments aren't particularly relevant to the issues held by these extremists, who fear Islamic culture more than they fear Muslims themselves. They view 'multiculturalism' as the replacement of indigenous culture. If you want to go anywhere with this, you have to debate this more nuanced (and less scientific) viewpoint.
A split keyboard is coming in iOS5 IIRC.
I strongly suspect you'll get your book sooner than that. I've asked my editors at PragProg repeatedly why the Amazon release date is so far in the future; it seems to be some sort of glitch. People who ordered their print copies directly from PragProg have already started receiving them.
I guess theres a post explaining whats going on:

http://sprouter.com/blog/sprouter-is-shutting-down/
I have an n9(50) myself. It's the best mobile device I've ever had... I think they are beeing foolish because Microsoft forced this move.
Woops, didnt see this when I posted. I should probably read before I post :)
> I wish there were some way to disguise the iPhone as a PC, so that no website automatically redirects me to any mobile version ever.

There is, just don't use Mobile Safari. Atomic Web Browser supports user agent spoofing for example.
Does his political position really have any impact on his ability to redesign? How would knowing his political positions help you to come to a judgement on whether the redesign made a position difference or not?

However, knowing his political positions would immediately put you in either a positive or negative (depending on your position) frame of mind and would stop you from having a fair and balanced opinion.
I'm a current UCalgary student, myself.

As far as I am aware, the most major impact of this decision will be the abolition of the "nickel copiers", which allow for the copying of a certain percentage (10%, I think?) of any copyrighted work if you are a UCalgary student. I am uncertain of how the restrictions applied to professors & faculty.

I personally doubt that this will have much of an impact on my own career at University. I am not enrolled in a program that makes heavy use of such copyrighted materials, and thus far my use of said copyrighted material has been limited.

I think Access Copyright had it coming. For a very, very long time.
MacBook AIR by Intel?
I'd be very interested in knowing what the team did prior to launch in terms of marketing / viral / PR strategy to get these numbers. Impressive!
Indeed, the title did not deliver on its promise; all we learned was that it would have been straightforward to hack the election.

But in a better world, even that would be outrageous.
Navy’s Next Laser Mashes Up Machine Guns and Death Rays
Seriously try it out, it might require some time to get it setup in the way that you want, but combined with XBMC it is golden
I'm eager to check this out, but I cannot load it; it hangs on my iPhone 3GS and causes Safari to exit.
Too little, too late. It took them literally years to admit that they had a problem. I've long since migrated, and I know many other people that have as well.
Adventures in EFI booting
Well considering that Macs are still a small percentage of PCs and that Macs don't have scroll wheels I don't think most people will notice.
The article says that the system architecture existed for no other plausible purpose than altering the data, that exit polling supports that the data was altered, and that public employees were not allowed access to the data collection process.

Further, Connell died in a plain crash after the lead plaintiff's attorney reported death threats against him to the US AG.
Chrome does have a notification that a tab has updated, it's a gentle little pulsing light across the tab (granted, maybe there should be an option to make this a colored pulsing light or something)
Agreed. Also the less you're paid, and the less responsibility you have, the more you're scrutinized. Maybe because they can, maybe because at that level there are things you can physically steal, or break. Also maybe (please, I'm speculating) at that level there are likely to be more irresponsible people, and the time and expense of credit, drug and security checks becomes worthwhile.
Well now I'm curious. Just this weekend I had a great time texting myself with the official Python and Ruby libs from Twilio in only a few lines [1].

Sure there were rough edges like "which and how many phone numbers do I have access to" and "am I going to run out of credits and cost myself a jillion dollars accidentally" but on the whole it was a great starting experience.

Edit: I'm guessing you mean I need to build my own TwiML wrappers and scripts so that my customers can have a meaningful interaction with the computer rather than simply getting called by a useless one-line proof of concept that can't talk or listen to them?

[1] https://gist.github.com/1102938
>
While it's clear Symbian is going nowhere in the smartphone space (it could have a temporary future in the high-volume dumbphone segment as S40 gets pushed down by better hardware) and that MeeGo took ridiculously long to mature into a non-competitive-but-cute OS, the idea to bet Nokia's future on the unlikely success of Windows Phone 7 is one of the stupidest mistakes I ever saw.

Why was this stupid? The Android space is way too cluttered to really make an entrance. Nokia probably couldn't get much marketshare from Samsung or HTC in either the high-end or low-end Android markets at this point. They have years of experience in getting the software to work with their hardware, and are making great phones at this point. Nokia, as a newcomer, can't really compete with them.

Symbian is basically dead, so what would they put on their phones? Win 7 makes a lot of sense in that context, especially with the discounts that they're surely getting from MS. Google doesn't have much incentive to give anything to Nokia, considering the overall success of Android with everyone else.
No, I meant like web applications.
Exactly. Some used fonts are also very narrow and therefore hard to read.

But ofcourse they are called Contrast Rebellion. Not Readable Rebellion.
Unfortunately it's the new black to hit on Firefox/Mozilla.
I fear this leads to a Google-monopoly that would be bad for everyone.
It's somewhat complex, but in general most of the contentious US software patents wouldn't be valid in the EU, which is why Europe has only seen a handful of software patent cases over the last decade.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...
I really enjoyed the term "porous paywall". I guess that's what kids call it these days.
I agree completely. I'm not sure its best for everyone but that is also my preference too.

Send a cake. I'm in Seattle now but you could send a cake to the designers on the 7th floor.

NYTimes.com Design Group
c/o Angela Rutherford
The New York Times
620 8th Ave (7th floor)
New York, NY 10018

Tell them to invite the Developers from the 8th floor too, and the Interactive News Group on the 2nd.

Add a brief note on any design/ux tweaks you'd like :)

Cake = (!Lie) ? Motivation : Lie
This is hilariously impractical. Who is going to service these things? When summer hits can you stand a huge hit in processing power when everyone turns their servers off?
Full text of the page in case it's down:

Just over a month ago we launched our new app Discovr Apps to help you find apps for your iPhone and iPad. Everything has gone really well and we’re very excited to announce some of our most recent stats:

* In the last 4 days alone, Discovr Apps has had more than a quarter of a million new downloads (256,719 downloads in 4 days).

* In the same 4 day period we’ve served more than 4.8 million requests in the app, averaging more than 1 million requests per day.

* On a single day in that period, our users spent the equivalent total time of 9 months and 1 day using the app.

* Discovr Apps also went straight to #1 app in 17 countries including the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Germany.

* We’ve released three updates in the 6 weeks since launch, and we’re very fortunate to have an average App Store rating of 4.5 stars.

* We’ve also seen an entirely new business model emerge in the last few weeks, with lots of developers wanting to advertise in the app.

All in all, we’re completely blown away by the response. We’re a small team based in Perth, Australia, and we just can’t believe it.

Thankyou so much to everyone who has had fun with the app. We’re just getting started. Get in touch to tell us what you want to see next!

The Filter Squad Team
Stu, Matt, Tamas, Ben, and Dave
Apple Mac Mini Thunderbolt Released Without DVD Support
Third Circuit Okays Collection of DNA from Criminal Suspects
I prefer them to scrolling when there are a lot of tabs open. Although Firefox's expose-style tab candy feature is nice enough that I don't get as many tabs stacking up as I might otherwise.
I Find it strange they're only talking about contrast and not line-height. That's the real dealbreaker for me. I am personally constantly changing line-height on other websites much more than type colour.
The downside is that the argument is not very effective.

Those designers believe that anti-aliased fonts look better and no tirade will convince them. It’s just ineffective to try and convince them that anti-aliased fonts should not be used. It’s the wrong argument.

Here is what the argument should be: Most users of the web (nearly everyone not using XP and everyone using Internet Explorer 7 and XP) have anti-aliasing turned on by default. There is no need to worry about them. Additionally, the property designers are using to turn anti-aliasing on doesn’t even work for many browsers. It’s mostly targeting users of Chrome or Safari and XP. That’s a really small subset of users and the benefit of enabling anti-aliasing for them is doubtful. Most other websites won’t be anti-aliased for them, the one that is will likely stick out and somehow look “wrong” to them – not because anti-aliasing is objectively worse but because they are just not used to it.

Who will be very angry is everyone who explicitly disabled anti-aliasing. That’s a small minority, for sure, but I don’t see how the benefits are worth that tradeoff in any way.
Keyword: Suspects... You know, the ones not convicted of anything.
Honestly yes. Google should not be writing an OS either.

But lets be fair here, Google has waaaay more resources than Mozilla (hell, most of Mozillas resources come from Google...), and a comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows that.
This paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/05315565939... seems to contradict that claim of a simple ratio between life variables.

Abstract:

A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals, as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate “adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous, in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight (over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and evolutionary insights.
Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity; regression analysis; mammals
Does he? To be fair, I would not have gathered that from his post. I think he kept that much separate.
Netflix integration with Facebook is a no-go in U.S.: Here's why
I've been thinking on this area and my conclusion is to do the simplest thing possible: just publish blog posts, github dumps, etc of your prior art...tag it as #prior-art and let twitter and google help you find stuff.
Wooah! Citation please??
There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem.

There's plenty of evidence that evolution is extremely inefficient. Due to its very nature it can't look forward, it can only hill-climb. Since evolution can't re-architect things, it gets stuck in local maxima all the time.

We can be reasonably sure of evolution's inefficiencies after looking at some some examples. Problems like the laryngeal nerve and backwards vertebrate retina are commonly brought up in these sorts of debates, but they forget that evolution doesn't even look at the vast majority of solution-space. It limits itself to squishy things in the discipline of biology. For example, neurons run at 10-200Hz and conduct signals at 0.000001c. Other substrates like silicon and diamond are much faster.

A human visual cortex has billions of neurons doing complicated procedures (edge-detection, FFTs, motion-detection, etc). But only a tiny fraction of humans can multiply two 4-digit numbers without the aid of pen and paper. Had the human brain been designed by a human, every programmer in the world would scream, "Why didn't you give us an API you idiot?!"

Of course, we'd also complain about the brain's lack of 4G, since evolution never invented a radio.
Pretty sure he meant that the govt enables software patents.
My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"?

Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me.

Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.
I'd like to see a geographical and occupational breakdown, I'm sensing selection bias here.
麦考林购物网
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2804414
Data Warehousing 101
I prefer this approach, too. However I would still like to be able to use the scroll wheel to navigate pages when not on a mobile device. Scrolling up/down to move the pages left/right would be ridiculous, though. It would have to be set up to let pages flow up/down. Another problem on a desktop browser (and another reason to have pages flow up/down) is that the forward/back buttons don't behave as expected.

Bookmarking a page is also broken.
Rarely (only if there's nothing interesting on the main page)
The book on everything from useful to useless
FWIW, in gcc/g++ there are compiler intrinsics which (should) map to that instruction on CPUs where it's available: __builtin_popcnt, __builtin_popcountl and __builtin_popcountll for unsigned ints, unsigned longs and unsigned long longs respectively. Visual C++ provides equivalent functions for Windows (but I can't remember what they're called).

It does seem odd that the article misses this approach out.
That depends on the CPU used. Modern CPU have more arithmetic units than logical units and can perform more divisions than bit shifts. There was a good video presentation of that, but
I can't find the link now.

EDIT: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/19/a-story-... gives other reasons why multiplications can be faster than bit shifts.
Why don't they show some high contrast designs that aren't just black text on a white background?

Some of the low contrast examples they gave were low contrast to draw attention away from them, not just for aesthetics.

This guy is overreacting.
Nightline Time Tunnel: Silicon Valley Revolution [1997]
As Steve Blank says, "most products fail for lack of customers, not technology." Why would you spend time building a product--almost any product--unless you are absolutely sure there's a market for it? What makes your file sharing service different from the others? Where will its market share(and revenue) come from? Why will people choose your product instead of entrenched competition? And why would you spend weeks or months building something unless you're absolutely certain there's a market for it?
This is Why Your Newspaper is Dying
Announcing the Launch of Twilio Client
Objective-C Tuesdays: Dynamic arrays
I'm the author.

Writing about CoffeeScript has been a great experience. I'll continue to spread the word about the language with articles, conference talks, and perhaps screencasts—stay tuned.

It's worth mentioning that this is also the first book in print to offer substantial coverage of Node.js. I'm pretty happy about that. It's really, really cool to be able to write both the front and back ends of an app in the same language.
So after reading the article I didn't see as piracy creates purchases but more as, there are people who just can't get enough and they buy and copy to satisfy themselves. Similar to drug addicts and the RIAA is similarly trying to keep on selling their stuff like a pusher. Sometimes those people aren't loyal and will get it somewhere else but they come back.

Obviously there are other types of people. Most pirates I know or from similar threads on reddit and elsewhere that I saw who won't buy from iTunes or go to the movies would not even buy it even if they couldn't pirate the movie. They pirate stuff just for fun, they don't really care about the stuff enough to ever pay for it (or they can't pay for it and when they can maybe they will change their style.) Reformed pirates do exist.

You are always going to have dead weight like them and the RIAA is wasting it's time going after them because those aren't the ones usually getting caught (they use whatever newest way to get the stuff which the RIAA has a hard time of tracking). What they do by suing is get the people who do both aka your customers. The average person who will buy and copy once in a while off crapy p2p software that should be called spy tools for the RIAA. But with the ease of use of iTunes and other such service, it's becoming a larger waste of time to copy then to get them from legally licensed sites. Amazon MP3 is lightyears easier than bittorent and that has converted a lot of people to paying.

As for Movies, there currently isn't a good service out there (Netflix is ok but selection isn't that great) on par with the offerings for legal music sites.
Setting CSS3 Border-Radius with Slash Syntax
I find the developer tools in chrome actually better than firebug these days. Do you have any specific features that you miss with the current builds of both?
Video Background Loops
Wait for the whole story later, but in general: what happens in terms of user experience if you input a wrong number? What happens if you input someone else's number? What happens if 4chan discovers your site and uses it to input a particular someone else's number 8,000 times? etc, etc