skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not. I spent a week setting up and learning to checkout, update, add files, and commit. The only workflow change is an occasional trip to the shell to commit, but this is usually at the very tail of a session where it doesn't break flow anyway.

Then (if you put in on a public server, of course) your work is accessible from anywhere. Run into a friend at Starbucks and want to show him the module you wrote today? Just get into the shell and checkout your repository.

Not only that, it's a perfect record of your project. Occasionally I need to assess the status of the project vis-a-vis some point in the past (for myself when strategizing, for my boss when he needs a report, etc). Being able to look at the commit logs saves time and produces better reports (commit logs don't forget).

So even if you use only the most basic features, you still get an immense benefit from using a VCS. And the hours it's saved me in trivial tasks made it well worth the week it took to hammer down.
He should use an iPhone to record a video of that... oh wait...
It is kinda funny
In poor countries people use bikes as they can't afford cars.
Poor countries become countries in development, and cars start becoming prevalent
As more people can get cars, it becomes very expensive to keep them (parking, clogged streets, etc).
And people in developed countries switch back to bicycles...

full circle.

Addition: I have seen it in my own country. Having a car when a lot people didn't, was awesome. I could go everywhere faster, easy to park, girls take more notice of you... etc.

10 years down the road, now that everybody has cars, it is hard to park, traffic everywhere, not a status symbol anymore.. .etc.

Simply, wealth is a very relative thing.
Shrug. He sweet-talked some guy on the internet into stupidly parting with ten bucks. Big fricking woop. Used car salesmen perform far more impressive (and lucrative) tricks of manipulation every day. I'm not sure why he's still straining his arm to pat himself on the back over it, especially as he eventually started losing and then gave up.

Sorry Eliezer, but the self-congratulatory tone of these posts is pretty grating. You've never done anything impossible, and if winning at a "let's pretend I'm an AI" role-playing game is the most impossible thing you've ever done then you've never done anything hard either.
What has Monsterpin taught me? Another failure story
I was checking one of my favorite websites when I was in college and found out it's dead. Here's their story.
"I learned that the best way to learn a lesson that life wants to teach you, is to write it down. Monsterpin taught me some very important lessons, so here is to learning from them."
We can simply look at the last downturn, which took place only seven years ago or so. Having worked for an open source company back then, it was most definitely not a time of opportunity. The company managed to survive, but salaries were cut for everyone, very few people were hired and investments were nearly impossible to get.

Maybe it was even worse for people working in Java or .Net, maybe not (many of them do government work etc which is less affected by the market) but it was certainly not a boom time for anyone.
iPhone 1999
My quality of living is substantially higher due to the fact that I commute by bicycle instead of by car. I save hundreds of dollars a month, get at least 40 minutes of exercise every day, and have an interesting sport/hobby to engage in when I have a few hours free on the weekend.

As a programmer, the exercise and outdoor activity components are particularly critical. I do some of my best "mental coding" while riding to and from work, and while I may have put on a few pounds in the last couple of years, it's not the unhealthy, inactivity-driven sort of weight gain that would make me worry about heart problems or diabetes.
Well, as always, it depends on the audience...
It would be interesting to see car vs. motorbike production/sales also.
Well, I guess this website can answer to your question: www.highscalability.com

Hope this helps.
AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?
I've got to agree 110% with the notion that Facebook should probably work on it's output more than it's input. It's too easy to say they're kind of moving away from users, but that's just how it feels.

More and more features are being added that few people actively use other than developers and advertisers. Who was it, ReadWriteWeb that discovered there were very few applications built around actually networking versus games, and widgets that really do nothing but parse data (though some great applications have come out of that realm of development; Last.FM, Pandora, Delicious to name a few).

But at the same time, it really is kind of hard to see where Facebook is going, or trying to go. Ostensibly an Internet within the Internet is the only thing one can say because that's just how it seems, though I've got to go back to my original argument that echoes what's being said here: Facebook needs to focus on output more. The internet is open, and fwiw, Beacon, Live Search, things like this really relies little on user-to-user interaction.

We'll see I suppose.
Amidst the cacophony of music start-ups, ReverbNation echoes
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information
We run a hosted e-commerce app, and currently store credit card numbers, expirations and cvv2s as plaintext in the DB.

Questions for the community:
1. Is this a crime or criminal negligence? It should be ...
2. What are the best practices for storing credit card data in a secure, PII safe fashion? One way hashes? Last four only? Use some kind of vault service?

Please advise as I am ready to make this change yesterday. We do need to store the numbers somewhere for repeat customers ...
Just a couple things I'd note.

1) I swear I clicked a couple times on less than $10, and was shown less than $25. Bug maybe?

2) If there are no items that match a filter, the filter shouldn't show up. If you have items in the $15-$50, and I click on Less than $10, I'm just going to be annoyed.

3) Unless I am missing something, there is no way to sort search results. I would potentially like to be able to sort based on release date (how much are new games?) and price (what's the coolest game I can afford?) and popularity (what's selling best right now, a great deal?)

4) Are you just adding the shipping cost into the seller's cost and then saying the shipping is free? The prices just seem a little weird. I guess seeing the total price is kind of cool.

5) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/buy/ - Your buttons aren't right, and you don't use your Standing Offer terminology.

6) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/
- I don't understand the refund policy. So someone is going to buy my game on the website via CC, and then if we work out an arrangement, I'm going to reimburse them via check off-site? I understand you are trying to limit refund charges, but this seems like one of the weakest portions of the selling process, imho.

7) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/
- I completely don't understand the answer to the question about the damaged item. Am I missing something?

All around, this is looking pretty nice. At first I was a bit skeptical, thinking that this doesn't offer much more than Amazon Marketplace and/or Ebay, with much smaller audiences. However reading the responses here shows that the lower fees and simplicity of the process is a win for the seller, if not necessarily the buyer. You should really stress these advantages to first time and/or potential sellers to get them interested.

Any chance you will let users offer compound Standing Offers? For instance, I'll buy 10 copies of this item at a certain condition for X. Or I'd pay $Y (total) for games a, b, and c.

Keep up the good work. Will bookmark you.
It's not tough to heap together a few complaints out of a day's worth of tweets.
The fact is that many GitHub users, myself included, noticed GitHub was down and went on our merry way coding and working and doing whatever.

This is a non-issue imo.
Also a vote for finding a slogan without the word moronically in it.
If they can offer a decent API to their analytics, I'll jump on board right away. It's so frustrating that Google does not provide anything other than a web interface and manually generated exports to interface with their data. And as far as I can decipher, making that data available to your site users is against the TOS anyway. Maybe Yahoo can do better.
Flash memory is high read speed and low write speed so writing from vista and reading to xp is not exactly a fair test.
8,000/day doesn't seem high but I bet they were very targeted and had a good conversion rate (especially that Bankaholic was on Google's top searches for certain terms).

Now, if they bring also more people to work at Bankaholic then the site could do even better.
Google's Super Satellite Captures First Image
I have this feeling too. However, I've just started using git, and one nice thing is the sense of closure when you "commit" something, it's a milestone, a bit like a release. It's also nice to have a log of changes, with a short comment about each one.

But I haven't had any actual advantage from it so far; and any nervousness about playing around with files has shifted across to nervousness about playing around with the repository (I had to delete it and start again a couple of times). Actually, I find doing anything to the repository (reverting, branching etc) terrifying, because I don't really understand what it's going to do, and I could lose everything. If only there was a way to back it all up first... ;-) I'd rather just get on with my actual tasks! Just my experience - so far.
11 Places to Get Started with iPhone App Development
Why would a 3rd party daemon be better than a built-in fulltext search engine?
Introducing Yahoo Web Analytics
Arrington, congratulations on upgrading Earthcomber from "Who?" to "Oh yeah, those guys that sued TechCrunch... What ever came of that?"

They may not get their money's worth from this publicity stunt but it by far wasn't the worst way to spend their cash -- more money has definitely been spent on less exposure in the past.
“Windows Strata” - name of the Microsoft cloud OS?
because the built-in one is terrible and has severe locking penalties due to requiring MyISAM?
Yahoo’s stock hits where it was in October…1998
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+r...

Looks like 66 of the 481 pages with the word RescueTime somewhere on them have my username somewhere on the page. I imagine many of those are assorted duplicate views of the same comment and many more are threads where one person mentioned RT and I responded.

Feel free to sort thru the times that I've mentioned RescueTime to see if I meet your obviously high standards for contributing to the community.

Being a troll and finishing with a ":)" doesn't really make it okay.

:)
Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble
http://github.com/blog/175-github-disaster-guide
Make your buttons clickable, not just the text. (e.g. http://pixtures.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/dawdle.png)
CS undergraduate enrollment is increasing
Even more importantly (the history is interesting but..) it's a word. Words have whatever meaning people give them.
I actually really like building client software. And web software. And services. And agents/bots. And scripting engines.

Yes, those people exist, it's just not trendy to write lower-level OS-specific software these days. Maybe it never will be again.
A huge percentage of the work required to implement web apps is boring crap: browser testing, working around bugs for quirks in different browsers, look and feel review, screwing around with stuff in five different languages / formats just to do something trivial (i.e. Javascript, CSS, HTML, Python, SQL) ...

I really don't think there are many web developers that can pound out an interactive web GUI with the speed that I can bang out a cross-platform desktop app with a reasonable toolkit. There's a natural bias here towards web apps since this is a web-app community, but there are a lot of great developers out there that like working on desktop stuff.

@webwright -- feel free to contact me. I know a lot of people from the KDE world that do cross-platform apps; I could try to put you in touch with some people.
Either way they have to install something (either your app or the AIR runtime). At least installing the AIR runtime once, gives them access to other AIR applications as well.
I can totally believe that. That would be awesome.

How do we know Arrington didn't start Earthcomber to drum up attention for Loopt! :)
We're talking about a system where fighting a suit has a certain fixed cost, along with an added element of risk. (Risk because the system is broken enough now that the outcomes are often near random).

The "best" thing to do is settle for less than the fixed cost + your willingness to gamble. This creates a system of minor extortionists knowing that by simply filing suits and collecting settlements they can sap wealth from businesses that create it almost without effort.

Whats best for the one business (to settle) is not best for all businesses because it perpetuates the broken status quo.

What it takes to stop this cycle is for individuals to stand up and say "No. That's a step to far", even if it means loosing more than taking the "rational" option of settling.

To put it slightly more succinctly, to say as nations do "We will not negotiate with terrorists". There's a reason we take such a hard stance on that. Once you give in once, you'll be giving in forever. It takes courage. Even for a former lawyer.
Optimizing Your C/C++ Applications, Part 1
Looks cool. Google has been top notch for me for a few years now, but this looks even better!

Though, you can be sure Google will make it near real-time and have an API soon! If/When that happens, I may just return to Google. So try to impress me Yahoo! :)
My thoughts:

- First thing I noticed is when I clicked "View All" in FF3 in Windows, the menu was WAY over to the right (kinda broken).
- Also your URLs are really ugly. This:
https://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Video_Games=1/Systems=...
just looks awful. Pretty URLs are important.
- I'd guess you'll eventually run into legal issues with the "Buy It Now" links and using Nintendo's Seal of Quality as your "No Listing Fees!" image...
- Oh and the server died once when I was browsing :(
Penalty! Specious data! 1 point.

Flash memory is slower to write, but a quick survey of 2GB USB thumb drive benchmarks shows their write speed to be about 65% of their read speed, not 4% as reported in this user's results.

There is still more than one order of magnitude of performance missing.
1) i don't believe that the act of storing the information in plaintext is illegal, but it could contribute to negligence suits if you mess up.

2) 2- or 3-TDES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES) encryption; fully secure & restrict access to whatever database you use and whatever system holds the database; SSL connection (obviously).

having said all of that, is there a reason why you're not using something like paypal, amazon FPS or some other payment service? they kind of take the work out of this stuff by providing a secure way of accepting payments, including recurring stuff with stored CC#s.
The point of the post wasn't the AI box game. I agree that, at least to me, convincing someone to let you out of the box doesn't really sound impossible. In the post he says he chose it as the example of something "impossible" specifically because it's about the easiest thing he could think of to achieve and then discuss that to many people seems impossible. He's just aiming in the post to give people a real sense of what it means to try to solve an impossible problem, and try with the actual goal of succeeding.

I also think formulating a provably friendly AI probably actually is an extremely hard problem. I'm glad he's undertaking the challenge.
What do you do when it rains?
Hoover's 500,000,000 bailout
For as often as my co-founder and I check GA for our medium-traffic site, I'm a little concerned for our productivity if we can see analytics in real-time!
If you ever looked at the projections of the gini index you would already know that the middle class will soon be a thing of the past. That's an obsolete argument, my friend, and I would encourage you to not participate if you don't want to encourage a debate on the economics (considering this thread was voted up by the HN community and has to do with economics and not startups).

Thanks for playing though!
Mining landfill for gold
Wow, that's a lot of koolaid slinging.

People fight lawsuits all the time. People fight frivolous lawsuits most of all. The article makes it appear that the connection between Mike Arrington and the company is extremely tenuous. Great. Fighting that doesn't take courage, just business sense. There are far better profiles in courage, especially against better caliber patent trolls and slimy ambulance chasers.

Have you contributed to ACLU yet?
NICE! If only that would help our stock... :\
Things have changed a bit since 2005.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DJIVQIRIHs
Is Germany That Important to Facebook?
GitHub Disaster Guide
Doing, Thinking, and Machines.
Here is Turing initial claim: I PROPOSE to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine 'and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think 'are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?
btw, here is Turing's intial claim: I PROPOSE to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine 'and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think 'are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.
Why ? Because there are some good companies, in good businesses where I think the dividend is safe, and 6pct , plust hopefully future dividend increases is a good thing.

I hope he wasn't that drunk when he put his money down.
My advice: hire a sharp game programmer, specifically one who has worked on tools and has 1-5 years in the game industry. The pay is not that great for game programmers in that range of experience, so they can handle a startup salary. And they are typically enthusiastic and experienced in the right areas you want.

Many such programmers are burned out or just laid off, so they will consider working outside of games, but you have to bait them a little so they know you're not a corporate dullard. I would suggest a job listing with some game-programmer keywords or even sneaking onto CreativeHeads or Gamasutra.

I say this not in an exploitative mode, but because that was my profile when I jumped from games into a job as a 2000-era dot-com client software programmer. They specifically mentioned that they were looking for console programming experience because there were several former game programmers there who understood this dynamic. And I was quite happy with the time I spent there.
Any reason you don't use Mint (haveamint.com)?
I recently switched most of my stuff to git (granted I don't have that much source to throw around, so it was pretty easy) and absolutely love it.
uh.... what?
All the major card companies banded together and formed a standards group:

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...

Once you reach a certain volume of transactions you are required to comply. Doing so now is probably not feasible if you're small, but you can still take the spirit of the standard and do your best.
I don't speak for jbrun, but I wear a raincoat.

When it snows, I wear a coat, a hat, and gloves.
Selling points to convert me from SVN to Git:
* single directory
* ease of setting up a local repo
* per-line commits (interactive mode)
If you are processing credit card payments you are supposed to adhere to the PCI-DSS standards which do include encrypting Cardholder Data goto https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/

Get the self-assessment questionnaire and work through it.

Encrypting columns, rows or tables in your database is trivial, pgcrypto will do this for you if have postgres. Or you can hack something together w/ http://php.net/openssl pretty easily. Whatever you do, don't try to write your own encryption routines, people will laugh at you and Moldovan teenagers will buy BMWs with your customers money.

Set up views so that non-finance personnel see the last four digits only, and those with a need to know can see the full PAN and have their accesses logged to an audit table that cannot be altered without superuser privileges.

Right now you can slide by, but in a few years your payment gateways and merchant banks are going to be insisting that even small processors have outside audits.

And according to the standard you should never store the cvv2 code, you should request it each time.

HTH
Definitely. Going for a lunch sprint can help get the blood pumping again on slow days, too. :)
Really? As a web publisher adsense has easily been my most effective way of monetizing my smaller sites. Obviously the affiliate market is much more lucrative for TicketStumbler though.

Maybe everything is broken along with it? I don't really have the expertise to know.
Nah, it's probably just a good sign that some people don't really understand what makes git different from svn, they just keep hearing it's "the best", so they use it.
2 things. 1) many people who use GitHub do not understand distributed VC, and treat it as a central repo. GitHub is trying to do education here, and has published the disaster guide sant0sk linked to.

2) GitHub is more than just a git repo. It's a social network. People use it to find code, explore code, paste code snippets...so when GH is down, a lot of interaction can't take place.
Very hard, public transit or work from home. Light rain, jacket. I ain't made of sugar.
RCS - I'm coding solo and RCS has essentially zero setup.
Yeah I think the posts about Rails developers doing fine during the downturn applies to any of the fast growing scripting languages. Certainly Python, I am less sure about the current growth of PHP.

People are really working to find and hire Ruby/Rails devs in SF and Boulder
The green one is my folding bike: http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=ve/ee/xmuk.jpg...
Credit card storage is scary. I was working with a company that had 20k credit cards stolen. Visa never called, nobody was notified, nobody ever found out. Only a small handful of customers who had just placed orders even suspected who it was. We actually tried to notify the merchant and credit card companies and they were like "huh?"

They don't store credit cards anymore.
Not really. It's now closer to 60%. It's not off the charts, and is a lower percentage of the GDP than the next two largest economies (Japan and Germany, based on current CIA World Factbook numbers).
Angel Investor Ron Conway Adresses His Portfolio Companies Over Financial Meltdown
He recommends CDs but I've always wondered about bonds. Here are the questions I have:

Are there reasonably safe bonds that pay say 6-9%?

What's the probability of a grade B bond defaulting in a given year?

Where does one buy bonds, just through an Etrade account? What do you do if you don't get paid the interest?