skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite the other comments, I completely agree with you.

It's just foolish to give up control of one of the most important communication resources your business has to a company with a notoriously poor customer service record.

http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-perio...
Ask HN: How do you handle chargebacks?
I am launching a startup soon. The most pressing problem is how to collect money. The fine print at Google Checkout, PayPal, and WePay indicates chargeback fees of $10, $20, and $35, as well as language to the effect that even a single chargeback could result in my account being frozen or closed. I don't mind the occasional chargeback, if a person genuinely could not get satisfaction from me, but I wonder if this could be a way for a competitor to attempt to shut down my business. I'm not saying that this is likely to happen, but it has occurred to me that a competitor could simply purchase a number of prepaid credit cards, and use each, from its own email address and IP address, to make purchases from my website, and then, for each purchase, complain to my credit card processor that I've done a lousy job in servicing their order. I'm not trying to be paranoid here. I honestly don't know how to make it easy to accept credit cards while avoiding the potential for such a situation. Thanks, in advance, for any useful suggestions.
Item number 2 on the site's featured list: The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Changing Academic Practice.
I believe he was referring to an unlimited sync-to-mobile, since he references unlimited storage in that sentence, as well. He's probably referring to a model like Rdio's.
[Hurry Up] Hacker Halted 2011 Special Offer For The Hacker News Readers
Changed to "artifacts of the FPGA" (as in "the FPGA platform", which includes the crystal oscillator, DRAM, and everything else that might be responsible).
Does anyone understand what that javascript code is doing?
> its still by far the single most installed desktop runtime.

Flash is likely the single most installed software in the world. Consider how many Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops and Android devices have Flash.
Iodine could be taken in supplements or added to other common foods.

There are plenty of people on low-salt diets in the US under the supervision of doctors and participating in clinical studies. If it were to become a problem here, it's not one that's likely to go unnoticed.
I got a question. Does Facebook connect give Spotify access to my email address that is linked to my Facebook account? Does it give them access to my first and last name as well? If so, I could understand their stance... it will give their service a higher viral coefficient.. at the expense of a few users..
Great tips for mobile devs: How to get potential clients to click the 'Buy Now'
Let's see if I have this right. I could be wrong about the details here:

Before it was called "Scheme," Sussman was writing papers about a lisp subset that could be optimized. Some folks tried to write an optimizing compiler, known as "T."

http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/

Common Lisp was a superset of a bunch of vendor Lisp systems, even more monstrously complex than any individual vendor Lisp.

So if I follow the author: If a CL implementation was indeed faster and better-optimized than the simpler Scheme dialect, then what was the purpose of Scheme?
Inesbit34
The observations are worth looking at. I could pull down a part of an article about CERN's 'faster than light' claim. Here it is;
"An American experiment involving Fermilab and a Minnesota mine showed the same thing back in 2007, but the results were within a margin of error that kept anyone from jumping up and down about it. (The CERN results are within a margin of statistical certainty that, were this not such an unexpected result, it would be considered a new discovery.) Now the team plans to update that experiment with about 10 times more data".
We can't rule out the possibility of an entirely new perspective on quantum physics. The tests are on and we can here a follow up story soon.
Show HN: HackerThings - My 48-hour weekend binge project
I stayed up most of the weekend working on this. This is basically a ThisIsWhyImBroke but for the programmer/hacker/hardware hacker scene. I tried to keep the products as tech as possible without sinking into the "for geeks" area (e.g., little to no video game stuff or gadgets for the sake of gadgets).

There are no affiliate links.

Please let me know what you think! Especially of interest to me is what products I should be including on this page that I am not, and what products I should remove from the page because it's not 'hacker' enough. :)
The Air Force's secure Linux distribution
Minus 3 for telling the truth? Shows why Google is in such pathetic shape, Google employees spend all day doing nothing.
Ask HN: Review my startup - Boorgle
Hi Everyone,
For the past few months I've been working on my spare time on this little service, and although there are really lots of things I would like to do better, change, and polish, I feel that this MVP is ready for some feedback and see if there's any interest in such a service.

http://www.boorgle.com is a service which will push your friends contact details to your phone (currently via GMail) so you can always stay updated. The video on the homepage is probably the best way to understand it.

Few points that I would appreciate feedback:

* I realized that the marketing message of this service is not clear to people, however I seem to have failed to get it right. The only way I can get people to react to this service is by showing the video of a phone actually being updated in realtime.

* Design/UI/Focus - It seems to me that this product has few user-stories/scenarios (e.g: discovering new people to communicate in real-life), however until now the only positive feedback I was able to get from my friends and family was the syncing of the contact details. Should I drop/hide the groups + messaging part of this service? (I also realize that the groups + message purpose and behavior is not clear to the most user, but am still trying to find out what design/flow could make it more clear)

* Technically: the service is running on Django-nonrel + AppEgnine, however recently I've had a feeling that it would be easier and maybe cheaper to use EC2+Mongo backend instead. Anybody had experience migrating Django-nonrel appengine app into mongo backend?
* Monetization - I feel that getting companies to pay for their presence in their clients phonebook could work, but am not sure that this is the best path for monetization.

* I realize that there are other companies doing similar things, however I feel that the way it's currently designed is different. Also this service is very easy to replicate, and still again I feel I have a clear way of how I would like to make progress and differentiate from other products. Any suggestions on the matter?

Thanks,
Alon Burg
You're over thinking the problem.

The merchant processor does not want chargebacks either, so when a chargeback is initiated you get a document describing the chargeback reason, and they generally ask the card holder to have some proof that they attempted to contact you to rectify the issue but did not get satisfaction.

So, run your business. Do a good job, concentrate on your company. Chargebacks won't be an issue unless you re doing something horribly wrong.
Would love to go, but i have tickets to the Teatro Colón at that time (being wanting to go for years and there is a Wagner's opera this weekend), so it's going to be the next time for me.
Track the twitter reply-spam you submit:
IMO your summaries are too concise to be useful - they barely tell me anything more than the articles' titles, which I can see easily by just scanning the HN front page.

I would be more interested if there was a 1 or 2 paragraph summary of the article that went in a little more detail than what you have right now.
I wish MacVim with the drawer worked, but -- for me, at least -- it leaks memory like a sieve...

Using an editor that sucks 2Gb of RAM opening a simple C file is just... weird.
>latencies of the order of 10-100 ns unexpectedly added or subtracted to a baseline

Perhaps my stats is a bit rusty, but if its the discrepancy is +60ns (only plus) & <20ns uncertainty, doesn't that rule out a -+100ns source (plus minus) as the cause of the (possible) error? i.e. We should be looking for an issue that shifts the results, not something that is adding noise.
In the businesses that I've worked for we always took rational decisions based on the numbers, feedback from customers, our capacities, deals, etc. If you know those things, the vast majority of business decisions that companies take are really quite understandable.

There are several reasons they might have taken this decision, one might be that it was part of a deal they made with Facebook. Spotify is probably aware that like most websites, they are a fad, and they need a way to survive. They've chosen to become a cleaner fish for a much larger animal that will provide them with food and protection, in return for a valuable service. It's neither a good, nor a bad business decision. It's a rational one.
Pinky Twirl, cross application keyboard shortcuts
All the best ! Leave your dream :)
cool. how about getting those angry birds on this.. :P
MOG has a solid free option, mog.com/m
Hope his product is actually worth so much pathos
VMware Fusion 4 hands-on: Lion, Windows 7, Windows 8, and more
"Controller" says to me that it's the where all the events are dealt with, so I can have one single place where events are handled.

As for "ConstraintVerificationUtil", I personally feel that things that end in -Util are definitely worse than things that end in -er. Maybe that is just personal preference.
This project was built during Defcon Israel's recent 24 hour hackathon. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Seems like Facebook might've asked for this as part of the integration deal. Otherwise I see no obvious reason for Spotify to limit their customer base. Unless the economics of delivering music to a non-facebook user is much less attractive and have much lower conversion to paying user? I find music discovery on Spotify to be poor compared to Pandora, and without my FB connections sharing playlists, I have no incentive to pay for Spotify.
Who Needs SEO When You Can Just Piss People Off?
A lot of responses are claiming that patents aren't property, or there isn't public use.

35 U.S.C. § 261 claims that "patents shall have the attributes of personal property."

Kelo established the broad reading of 'public use.' Just about any economic intervention could fall under public use, it isn't limited to the government taking permanent ownership.

These are muddy questions debated in legal journals, but if the government is depriving that many people of significant value, then everyone who owns any patents will pitch in to the legal fund. The case is going to be made in its strongest possible terms, and it's something that government would have to seriously worry about.
Hacking the Food System: The Story of the Ultimate Cookie
Never mind its IPO, Groupon itself may be doomed
Prestamos rapidos sin verificacion de credito
i know you're trolling, but, i do speculate that java makes it difficult to write tight code.

[1] http://www.dustingetz.com/java-sucks-because-it-makes-functi...
[2] http://www.dustingetz.com/java-sucks-2-the-java-api-is-state...
You should check out HARO (help a reporter out). That's a 3ish times a day newsletter that goes out. Reporters who need quotes, information, contacts, etc list the stories they're working on and what they need, and then it goes out to x00,000 people.

Their newsletter is free, but at the top is a sponsored paragraph/text blurb about a product/services/etc. I think that is a much better monetization strategy than getting people to pay $15/m.
I just realized after posting that SEO is probably the same as pissing people off. My bad.
Modern Tiny Ajax Comments System
I get your point, but I'm still uncertain about whether to feel happy or disappointed at the fact that everything goes in circles.

We (the internets :D) spend all this time getting out of the AOL walled garden, only to go back to the Facebook walled garden. Seems like an utter waste of effort.

But maybe the glass is half full, and we will be out of here soon.
It's hard to underestimate the impact that working in a secretive industry has on your career and tools you can build on (points 4 and 8). Trading technology is driven by a really fantastic set of challenges. There are only a few other problem domains where you are forced to react semi-intelligently to millions of messages each second with microsecond latency. So there's some real innovation going on. But what Jason says about the closed culture is spot on.

Information only flows from one firm to another through hires. There is little open dialog between developers at different firms. For most of the last decade that I've been in the industry, the sheer scale of the technical challenges we were facing kept most of us innovating ahead of the consumer web (in terms of infrastructure tech -- don't ask us about UI). But now that the consumer web is going real-time, I expect that edge to evaporate quickly. Unless you want to play the high frequency game (and have access to the requisite large amount of capital), I would recommend a web start-up over a trading firm. Your salary will likely be lower, but you'll be happier, and may even have more upside.

- Ben

Disclaimer: I haven't fully made the leap myself yet. But I'm doing my best to spin out a real-time web start-up from our trading firm.
I guess I fail to understand the thought that brought this question up in the first place. So tell me: Why shouldn't they?
This is another area of the disclosure debate that will never get solved.

The only new thing here is the staggered updates. This article takes the stance that this is a bad practice, and operates off of the assumption that malicious users will use the patch to create an exploit. The flip side is, of course, that there already is an exploit in the wild and now chrome users are safe.

The reality of the situation is that both are true. Someone malicious already has the 0day and someone is going to reverse engineer the patch. You'll never know which is the better option short of scanning every single.swf, trafficked over every protocol on the internet to do a statistical analysis of the incidence rate prior to releasing the patch as well as attempting to predict how many new malicious swfs will pop up after the patch before adobe releases. Oh and predict the patch application rate, as well as the probability of exploited users along the long tail.

Oh, and thats only if your definition of "best" is least users compromised.

What about the relative value of targets as a factor in determining which patch release strategy is the better option. The RSA attack used a flash exploit embedded in an xls. Is 500 patched boxes at a hypothetical-RSA averting an attack worth 500,000 grandmas slow on the upgrade train compromised?

Welcome to the world of responsible disclosure. Its easy to understand how to maximize damage, minimizing it damn tricky.
Google Announces Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Project
A lot of us partake in the coffee and/or diet soda while programming. This jacks with our BP and invariably the subject of sodium comes up.
It's true that FB hasn't found a way to convert the time spent on it to revenue the way google has, but facebook will still make a lot of money selling targeted display ads in the short term. They'll do this while stealing market share from content companies like Yahoo, AOL, etc.

The money from display ads will give facebook a lot of money and time to come up with a better way to market using the social data they have.
Image Scraping Example Using the Ruby Mechanize Library
Affiliate Marketing Programs Website Marketing Service Tools Internet Marketing
One of the worrld's best Internet Marketing Companies...anywhere!!
I’m idly imagining a massive Google HoneyFarm with browsers that examine payloads from known “harmful sites” and spam or phishing emails.

The moment one of the vulnerabilities is found “in the wild," the patch is automatically pushed into the wild, Adobe be damned.
I needed to access the mysql forums today and Google kept blocking me, claiming malware. I had almost overrode it thinking that google must be wrong and am glad I didn't.

Looks like they are still infected --- anyone know of a way to tell if a site is infected (kind of like a "is it down or just me" ) outside of Google search?
It kinda bothers me that the first thing people tend to do with these datasets is find the average. You could at least look for clusters, like crunchy ones and soft ones. Average is boring!
I didn't mean it as an "end goal", just as languages which promote different paradigms versus Ruby (actors, functional programming, lisp-ness, etc). They also have different performance characteristics, if you need that sort of thing.
GTK itself will probably never do that, because it doesn't include any sort of language-processing code (as I understand it). Adding code to GTK that could translate programs between languages would be a huge increase in complexity and scope.

However, a project like GCC could certainly do that. If someone really wanted that to happen, they could add a Javascript code generator to GCC and pair that with GTK's HTML5 backend to produce something like what you want.
I find the last bit the most poignant observation there. "Monkeys pounding on the keyboard" has been taken to mean an unintelligent being diligently typing at random. That experiment showed that one monkey probably leaned on the "s" key for a bit and that's it. If we literally meant (generations of) monkeys with indestructible keyboards, it seems more likely that they would evolve intelligence far sooner than they would bang out complete sentences on accident.
How to keep your car clean and shine like a pearl
The implications of this are incredible with tablet computers becoming more and more popular. QT is approaching this as well with their Lighthouse project but I think it is still a little ways off.

I really want to start playing with this, is there any reason why it wouldn't work with the python GTK bindings?
There is a site scanner here: http://sitecheck.sucuri.net (free)
Netflix Webkit-Based UI for TV Devices
The initial purpose of Scheme was to implement Hewitt's Actor model in Lisp. Steele and Sussman realized that "actors" were the same as lexical closures [1].

The Lambda Papers [2] describe the early implementation details of Scheme, and it was these papers that influenced the development of T [3].

[1] "The History of Scheme" http://labs.oracle.com/projects/plrg/JAOO-SchemeHistory-2006...
[2] "The Lambda Papers" http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html
[3] "History of T" http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html
I am as well, actually. Unless you are building tools for programmers or techies I think it's dangerous to assume the Early Adopters of your software are also programmers or techies.

They could be but it's far from default.
But SMTP is still a distributed protocol, you can switch providers in a blink and not lose anything other than a shiny interface.

I think you may underestimate the importance of the shiny interface. Regardless, the use of an outside provider is still a move toward centralization. Ten years ago, the small offices I did software work in all had local email servers. Today, running an email server well is a big job, and those offices all outsource their email service to much larger companies.

People ... demand the "follow individual" pattern (RSS) ... In the future some smart kid will come up with a "DNS for social relations"

It's interesting that you bring up RSS. I was thinking about that too. I think RSS is already very nearly a "DNS for social relations." But it's also failed to catch on outside the circle of techies, early adopters, and web-potatoes.

I'd say the failure of RSS to achieve mainstream popularity is an example of a decentralized system losing out to centralized alternatives. Like Facebook. Facebook is just plain simpler to get started with than a self-administered approach like RSS or a hypothetical next-generation DNSfSR would be. And Facebook and Twitter both killed off their RSS feeds once they'd felt they'd achieved a certain critical mass. They understand that RSS is an alternative for much of what they do.

I don't celebrate any of this. I use and like RSS. I wish I didn't feel the need for a Facebook account (but that's where my real-world friends are). But the pattern I see is that convenience beats out control every time. For complicated devices like computers and for complicated situations like the (real, human) social network, the inevitable complexity that comes along with local, personal control is often a problem, not a feature.

Under such circumstances, I don't see how Facebook (or its successor) will be overtaken by a distributed anything.
Even Cops Have a Social Media Strategy?
Meetup is great for growing the event. However, I would suggest getting a few core people together to it started. One way of doing it is to go around other events and invite interesting people in person.
Why would it mean that less people will sign up to Spotify? I'd think that being pushed in everyone's social feed and making a signup be one click away and no text fields to fill out, this will mean they'll gain a massive amount of new users.
It seems to hide an iframe call to http://falosfax.in/info/in.cgi?
Have you ever suffered a Google outage? I don't mean the kind of system-wide failure that gets all Googleplex hands on deck. I mean the kind of random, individual catastrophe that comes with a crash-course in just how astonishingly unreachable the Googleplex really is.
I have a question. Can you do this with Java/C#/Ruby/Javascript etc? What makes this so special?
The Magic of Bookshelves
Not if the rationale for hiring her as the CEO of HP was because she allegedly has "big-company technology experience"
I'm curious about what MIT Scheme's reader was doing wrong at the time, and whether or not it's been fixed. Does anyone know? Are most Scheme readers equally bad?
Hi, I'm a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and I'm very interested in talking to you about this. Can you email me?
Best,
Laura Meckler
laura.meckler@wsj.com
I took a look at your samples[1] and there are many people doing this for free[2] with more content. I'd recommend you start with a smaller amount of summaries, make it free at first, improve to the point you have a loyal following and then charge.

[1] http://hackingfresh.com/?page_id=19

[2] Shameless plug: I run http://skimthat.com A free site that fully summarizes tech news stories. You most likely won't even need to visit the source articles.
Why should kids be taught programming instead of reading, writing, language and maths?
If the curriculum was changed to include programming, it would almost certainly reduce the funding and time put into other, more important subjects.

This is a false dichotomy. In High School I took classes on Weightlifting (twice), Drama, Art, French 1, Spanish 1, and was a teacher's assistant twice (what a waste that was...). There were also classes available in tractor repair, farming, ROTC, track and field, etc. Our high school was able to fit more classes in than other schools because each year was split into fall and spring with 4 classes each half.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that there's room for more and for modification. Also how about tying math into programming? Or combining reading/writing/language in beneficial ways, etc.