skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the standard when I've stayed at hotels that do accept cash (AKA Debit) they wan't $100 or more as collateral, I assume to avoid the whole problem you just described.

However, what I didn't know, which I soon realised was that the hotels pre-authorization hits like $500 on a room I pay $50 for a night. I found this out when I'd just moved country, had zero-credit, had a single $1000 visa card and was planning on putting a weekend away with my wife on credit so I'd have two pay checks in before I had to fork out the cash.

The worst was when we booked a campsite out of season. It cost us $14 a night and they required booking by credit card. They had $500 pre-authorized for over two weeks until we'd stayed, and I paid them cash. It's absolutely absurd.

Thankfully since the hotel incident we've always kept a burner credit card for things like this. I don't get the logic behind extending someone credit and then allowing it to be held-up in pre-authorization that will never get processed for the full amount when the credit could be spent at a restaurant or something.
SpaceX is a lot more than CG animation. They have done some pretty amazing things in just a few years, and successfully privatized space exploration.

Their first ISS mission is a month from now, and their past and future manifest is impressive
http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

No disrespect to anything Virgin Galactic is doing (I hope to buy a ticket one day!, and am also a big fan of Rutan's work), but SpaceX is doing a lot more impressive things than suborbital passenger flight.
Chrome supports SSO with NTLM/Negotiate.
On Windows it will even automatically turn on SSO for sites in your Local Intranet security zone, which is much smoother than the Firefox about:config, network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris method.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/http-aut...
But isn't it neat how shit still works?

Never fails to amaze me what users will do with a software tool.

I've seen experienced devs and support staff run a C program written to parse some weird data against another data set in the vain hope that it would parse the new data set into something usable.

I've seen MBAs who could barely tell you what a variable is write visual basic macros in Excel to do hardcore data management.

Game devs who almost seemed to frickin' think in OpenGL.

It is a big ball of mud (turtles all the way down, eh?), but on a good day, I listen to a hacker talk about finally getting that little piece of code beat into submission and it's very satisfying just to see that gleam in their eye.
The real problem is that tools and libraries are incredibly unforgiving. Not only do you have to understand 10-15 different technologies to make your project work, but you need to understand them all extremely well which is a huge barrier to entry.

I don't know a whole lot about rails, so this is conjecture, but I imagine this is why ruby on rails is so popular: you don't need to know very much to get it going.
I would have to agree; a plethora of headaches are to be expected when dealing with merchant accounts. Monthly fees coupled with compliance issues and constant intervention make for extra work. Relying on merchants is like relying on your local broker. Nonetheless, certain merchant accounts will allow you to escape with fees almost a full point less than Stripe. Not to mention, the 7-day rolling period can seriously impact operations pending your specific business structure. I for one am curious to learn more about how Stripe can customize payment flows...
> Can you please explain your theory...

I wish I could but I can't, not in context of a HN thread comment. I'd be happy to recommend some books if you are interested.
I definitely was not recommending constant practice--I agree that doing so will hurt you more than it helps you! I was recommending consistently regular practice.
This article can only be beaten in its ridiculousness by the corporate ritual called casual Fridays.

I thank the lord I am no longer employed in a place that feels it's doing its employees a favor by instituting such policy.
If you're transferring the money into Paypal anyway (and exposing yourself to "the paypal risk"), why not just use Paypal Website Payments Pro?
I've had accounts at Bank of America for the better part of a decade, due to my employer they have been completely free. Just recently BofA sent me a letter detailing all the new monthly charges for my accounts, to the tune of an effective annual fee of $372. The irony is that I never use those accounts anymore, having switched to a vastly superior local credit union about a year and a half ago. Despite having pumped six figures in deposits through them more than once over the course of having them as a bank BofA never treated me any better than if I were some junkie or drug dealer, it was a breath of fresh air to move to a bank that didn't treat me as if I were nothing more than a cow to be milked for fees.
Grouper Founders exposted as Huckers
What's with unethical startup founders these days?
Vim Macros - 5 Minute Screencast
That's right, because rocket fuel just comes out of a vending machine.

There are a lot of jobs behind the extraction and refinement of rocket fuel.
Hi all, I made this! Neat to have my dream of being on the front page of HN come to fruition.

To use HN parlance, one might say that I have launched! (Any VCs out there want to discuss other ideas I'm working on?)

This kit look me about 6 months to put together, from prototyping the PCB to iterating over an enclosure design. Waiting for components to arrive in the mail (PCBs, laser-cut designs, resistors) was what took the most amount of time.

When I started, I was fully convinced that I would have a working product within just one or two iterations. Putting together a polished hardware kit (and I'd say that this has some degree of "polish" to it, though far from perfect) is much more difficult and time-consuming than I would have ever imagined. Quite different from the agile! lean! iterate! that we talk about in software-land.

Oh. So I have 4 or 5 PCBs from the first few iterations. If you end up ordering one (and I encourage you to do so!) then send me an email and I can throw one in the box. You know, as a collector's item.

If you have any questions or anything, do let me know. Be on the lookout for a post describing some numbers behind this traffic spike.
Obama class warfare? No sign of it. I think Obama's a great human being, but he's a essentially a conservative by any sane standard. With the economic stance he holds now, he'd have been a Republican in 1970 (a time in which Republicans were not all horrible).
A thousand times no. It's what we do when the problem set changes that causes trouble. We only ever respond one way: by agglutinating more code with the old. Compound this a few times and you have irreversible complexity. It's what would happen in a neighborhood if you called garbage "construction material" and only ever piled it up all around you.

The solution is to delete nearly as much code as we write. Put differently, the solution is small programs, ruthlessly pursued. The reason we don't do this is that it's totally absent from (nearly all) software culture -- absent as in blank stares and why-you-talk-crazy-talk if you bring it up -- and by far the number one determinant of what people do is what other people do.

There are a few points of light. Chuck Moore and Arthur Whitney come to mind. From everything I've heard, their programs are small enough not to have these problems. And in case anyone is wondering "If this is so much better how come we don't all work that way?" - the answer to that conundrum hit me the other day: sample size. Statistically speaking, it's never been tried.
I think it's possible to flip by shifting the center of mass, which can be done by moving some mass (for example, fuel) inside.
You honestly think we'll be able to find other people qualified to run the new banks? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd imagine that whoever's running the show right now will easily be able to stay in the picture. It's like being a CEO. Once a CEO of a big corp, always a CEO of a big corp, no matter how poor your track record. Maybe I'm just being cynical here.
We should write a filter for HN that makes it impossible to submit articles from the Leaders section!
> Right now you're just making up numbers so I can't really debate your point.

No, I'm not, and it's a bit disrespectful of you to say so. You could have verified what I was saying with a mere sixty seconds of fact-checking on your own.

I was talking about receipts, just like earlier in the paragraph. What tax it comes from really does not matter for the purposes of this discussion. Receipts would have had to increase somewhere on the order of 10-20% during the Bush years for that period to have a balanced budget. That's according to this chart (http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/growth-federal-spend...). Now, this is from a conservative think-tank, so take that with whatever grains of salt you will, but this is consistent with spending charts I have seen on non-partisan sites.
That's a great reply. Thank you. Maybe you could save comments like these and put them on taxgeek.com :-).

I'm not trying to evade taxes. I'm European, and I pay taxes here. Still, even in Europe getting a Merchant Account is difficult. I'm simply looking at this because the cost (money/time) of starting and maintaining a Delaware Company might be less than the cost of setting up a Merchant Account over here.

Without US company:

1. Europe company sells subscription for 20/month

2a. Taxable income in Europe

2b. No taxable income in the US

With US company:

1. Sell subscription through a US company for $20/month

2. US company receives $18 (Merchant Account keeps 2)

3. US Company buys subscription at Europe company for $18

4a. Taxable income in Europe

4b. No taxable income in the US

Am I really "draining taxable income" if in the other scenario there wouldn't be any US taxable income either??

Is this what you recommend:

1. Sell subscription through a US company for $20/month

2. US company receives $18 (Merchant Account keeps 2)

3. US Company buys subscription at Europe company for $17

4. Profit of $1 per subscription per month

5. Business expenses (including accounting & tax return)

6a. (eg) 5% of total revenues is now taxable income in US

6b. (eg) 95% of total revenues is taxable income in Europe

Of course I would need a good accountant, but things still look pretty simple to me... The only thing I need to calculate business income / expenses is how many subscriptions were active during a month. Please do understand the cost (time/money) of getting a Merchant Account over here. I like to keep things simple too, and it might just be the US route is simpler.
Delicious.com - Discover Yourself
This reads too much like a rant for my liking.

I get why complexity is disliked(/feared?) by some people, but unless you've got a better workable solution that you're ready for me to try out, your rant is just noise to me.

I've often found myself begrudged by the complexity of a piece of software, but that doesn't make me think we should throw the entire program out. How about we make it easier to use instead?
Congrats! How is it working for Steinway? Not a company one typically associates with having a software division. :-)
Looks like the site is down??
Hey if you are looking for updates on Stylate.com, we just put up a twitter account--->

@stylater
When you simplify it like that it makes the US look exceptionally petty.

... Does anyone want to tell the American public that the Chinese are going to beat them to Mars?
I'm not saying you're wrong because I don't know but you are over simplifying

First you're forgetting those countries don't have state taxes. For example, the top tax rate in California is close to 40% when you combine both State and Federal. Plus you have some cities that have income tax.

Second you're forgetting loop holes. Again the point I made above is U.S. citizens paid less in taxes when the U.S. tax rates were higher.

So again I can't say you're absolutely wrong. But you did over simplify (and you also ignored the point made in the very post you were supposedly replying to)
Contrariwise, I'm actually in favor of CEO severance packages. A CEO can do enormous damage to a company and if the board thinks that they're doing something wrong it's very difficult to oust them on any kind of reasonable time period. Getting failures out now can easily be worth tens or even hundreds of millions to a company, so handing Mr. Apotheker a few million bucks to go away is probably well worth it.

Of course, CEO's shouldn't be paid that much in the first place (I do tend to think in almost all cases that the bad a poor CEO can do outweighs by several times the good a good CEO can), which would tend to lessen the value of severance packages overall. But if any Fortune 500 CEO deserves anything close to their current compensation package, spending only $10mm to fire one sooner rather than later is an excellent deal.
I love this quote
"Now we need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't reality wins."
Rhino is really slow when compared to V8, like Ruby slow.
Some of the domains have sold out so we had blank categories. We will be releasing a new bunch in the next 24 hours.
True it would certainly cut down significantly on people registering domain names on speculation.

But it would also prevent many people from getting their own site because of the cost. I don't think you would have many people taking as many chances as has happened with the current pricing.

Lowering costs has helped the net even though there are undesirable consequences as with anything.
Coming soon (like in the next 24 hours)
> You honestly think we'll be able to find other people qualified to run the new banks?

Clearly the ones currently running the bank are unqualified, which is why it is insolvent. Leaving them in place and expecting a different outcome is not sensible.

But directly to the point you ask: Yes, I believe there are many candidates who will perform better and for less money. (In the words of Charles de Gaulle: The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.) Probably a fair fraction are inside the organization already, but if I were the regulator in charge, I would cross fertilize and take folks from outside the organization because internal allegiances are probably in the way of a thorough reorg.
Things Ryan Dahl hates:

dbus

/usr/lib

Boost

ioctls

SMF

signals

volatile variables

prototypal inheritance

C99

dpkg

autoconf

LD_LIBRARY_PATH

/usr

zombie processes

bash tab completion

dynamic linking

static linking

glib

the details of programming languages

formatting source code

configuring window managers

configuring editors

unicode

directory hierarchies
Frankly, that's amazing. I hope you took/get to take something that's not too far off that mark.
I'll bite.

VG is putting tourists into sub-LEO. SpaceX is building rockets that can reach any orbit, carry many tons of payload and even send manned missions to the Moon or Mars.

When Musk started SpaceX he decided to use tried and true designs and instead focus on refining those designs for performance, safety and cost. He did so by moving the entire manufacturing chain in-house. Many would argue that he has achieved his goal.

Rockets (which usually have to be multi-stage) are more cost effective and more capable than the Shuttles. The Shuttles are too fuel hungry and too inflexible (in the configuration they settled on) to fly to the Moon or Mars (or even move beyond LEO). They are not "space planes", capable of zooming around space at will, they are Earth gliders with rockets attached.

I haven't read his rationale for the self-landing rocket stages, but I would guess it's about recovery costs. It's not cheap to track down and fish rockets stages out of the ocean. They also have to be completely rebuilt after their plunge into salt water. Heat damage is likely an issue as well. If keeping that amount of reserve fuel would not limit the rocket's main mission, it would undoubtedly save a lot of money in recovery and restoration costs.

It's progress because the Shuttle missions were a step in the wrong direction if the ultimate goal is to make space accessible. Well designed rockets can be more capable, just as safe (if not more so) and can operate at a fraction of the Shuttle program's cost.
Jasmine.js FTW.
Of course, if you look at the other side of the story, Oracle is said to be tossing lots of BS here.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/29/autonomy-orac...

Slides prepared by Qatalyst in January, meeting between Autonomy and Hurd as an introduction, not a sales pitch.
Banking has now officially become synonymous with desperation and lack of creativity. What was once saved for accountants in the backroom has splurged into the face of consumers. Once the "idea well" of ingenious ways to earn an extra-buck or two dries out big banks look to corporate tax-breaks. But what happens when supplementary hidden fees and costs just don't cut it? Apparently, this. Interestingly enough, BOA announced these plans with the concurrent release of "_% cash back on all debit card purchases"...coincidence?
This is just raw pessimism, you could rant like this about anything.

I hate all cars, especially my own. I hate that heavy, dangerous, gas-guzzling honda civic with an over-sensitive brake pedal and enormous, completely pointless blind spots over both shoulders. I hate filling it up with gas, which is expensive, smelly, and bad for the environment. I hate the dishes that I have to wash every day after I use them. I hate my Aeron chair that I sit in all day long. I hate peeling grapefruit. I hate the sound of my central air conditioning fan powering up. I hate how I'm either sore from working out or depressed from not working out.

There's nothing wrong with a rant now and again but let's recognize it for what it is.

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
for an enterprise application, that seems just about right in line.
"Bold" action by the politicians and the central banks created much of the current mess.

The problem is a lack of boldness. Bold regulation on banks and insurance companies is necessary. If we're going to do bailouts, we had better make sure the same misbehaviors can't happen again.

In the U.S., we're fucking up my trying to fix failing institutions in-place. No management changes. No meaningful regulations. Often the laws are written by the industry they're intended to police (cf. health insurance). That's a horrible strategy. We need to become outright liberal again and double down on boldness, not play around with this compromising corporate-friendly chickenshit nonsense.

If we'd just cleared the pipes by letting the banks fail, recapitalizing new banks, and basically rebooting the financial system, we'd be much further along.

This sounds like a quote by Herbert Hoover. Contrary to history's view of him (which is intensely negative) he was a very intelligent and probably a good-hearted man. He, however, believed that there was absolutely nothing government could do to save the economy, and that letting the beginnings of the Great Depression go unchecked was the least evil action. He was wrong.

Instead, we got bailouts and crony capitalism and ad hoc intervention, and today the global system is in many ways in worse shape now than in 2008.

That is true. The bailouts were a necessary evil, but the way they were handled was ridiculous. Top management at the bailed-out banks should have been fired, and real regulation should have been put in place to prevent the behaviors that made the bailouts necessary.

What ultimately is destroying the U.S. is not the conduct around our banking system. That's bad, I'll give you that. It's the two astronomically expensive wars we are fighting that are unlikely to end any time soon.
I disagree. We have a similar event table in our product, and there was a huge pain in getting stats and reports for our clients and vendors.

I've created a similar application - one with integrated cohort analysis, a full working definition dictionary for all events, and a reporting dashboard that allows account managers access to data for their clients on a daily basis. The idea is that dev + product + account mgmnt work on the same platform.

I built it myself in my spare time over the course of about 4-5 weekends. When data is fully integrated and accessible it makes it worth the investment.
Exactly. It's not that politicians must "save" the economy now. We must save ourselves from the politicians who created this mess.
Stripe doesn't appear at all. You have full control over what appears on the statement.
I love magic!

Every level of abstraction above binary code, from assembly, to C, to Ruby, to Rails DSL's--each works by creating magic incantations that let you run larger functionality with a new shorter series of magic words.

Are you really against magic, or is it that you are against black magic (which I would classify as leaky abstractions)?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
True, obviously action was necessary, but it didn't have to be no-strings bailouts. At the very least, the bankers who ran their banks into [probable] insolvency should have been removed from control, and their shares and options rendered worthless.
I opted in a while before the move. I didn't do anything else.
Chrome now comes bundled with the Adobe Flash updater. This is probably a large contributor to Chrome's climbing popularity. Chrome is also bundled with Google's other applications and with Skype (but I'm sure Microsoft will end that).

http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...
Contrary to what some pundits would like you to believe, this is not new ground. A real estate bubble followed by a balance sheet recession has happened in at least 2 other places before: Sweden in 1992 and Japan in 1991. Different choices in these countries led to different outcomes.

In Sweden, the government demanded steep losses from equity holders before it took over a large part of the financial system (unlike US officials, the Swedish government officials were not afraid to use their superior bargaining position to get an excellent deal for the government). The upfront cost for recapitalization was 4% of GDP, the net cost in the end was less than 2% of GDP (based on different computation methods some even say 0%). Following asset sales in 1995, the Bank Support Authority went into a dormant role in 1996, 4 years after the crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23k...

Japan handled things differently and ended up with debt totaling 200% of GDP. See this excellent YouTube video from economist Richard Koo that explains the Japanese experience:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaNxAzLKegU
How to be a Stress Free Landlord
You assume that he likes what he created.

In this rant he didn't say Node.js was the solution, or better than any of these crappy abstractions.

Don't assume that. He might not say he doesn't like node.js, but it doesn't mean he is happy with it.
To some degree, I can agree with Ryan here that a lot of software these days is unnecessarily complex. However, I also think that his view is biased because he works on a project that is responsible for a great deal of abstraction.

The average Javascript developer using node.js DOES NOT have to "deal with DBus and /usr/lib and Boost and ioctls and SMF and signals and volatile variables and prototypal inheritance and _C99_FEATURES_ and dpkg and autoconf", because Ryan and other node.js devs already have thought about it for them, and introduced a helpful and practical layer of abstraction on top of all this complexity.

As a result of having to think about it all day, every day however, it's understandable that Ryan would despise this kind of stuff. On the other hand, as a web developer that uses the result of his hard work, I am not affected by it at all, so the complexity of my work is substantially reduced.