skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love Square, and they are a classic disruptor. They started slow, at the low end, and created their own blue ocean before starting to chew at the heels of the entrenched incumbents in the payment ecosystem.

That being said, the payment ecosystem is a pretty messed up place, even though the ugliness is all pretty much abstracted from the customer. The interchange fees charged to the merchants at times rival their margins on the items they sell. And it got ugly because it was essentially a duopoly and the stakeholders including Acquirers (MC, Visa etc) and the Issuers (Credit Card Issuers) and the POS vendors all had a pretty good reason to keep things the same.

When things are messed up because we do not have enough choice, do you think it would be preferable to hand over the keys to this to a single player - in this case Square? If Square controlled both ends, owned the customer as well as the merchant POS, and cut off everyone else in the process (by going directly to your bank account), then how long before Square starts bumping up the fees it charges each merchant? Couple that with the fact that Square will own the customer, and is in control of delivery of targeted merchant offers, and you get a sense of the size of the pie they would like to own. Anyone agree if that is a good thing? I certainly dont.

The reality is, the ecosystem will be a lot more fragmented this time around than it currently is. The various mobile wallet initiatives (and there are over 70) will eventually coalesce around a few major players, but we will be using NFC driven mobile wallets (GWallet) and Cloud based mobile wallets (Paypal/Square) and the traditional plastic form factor for a long time to come.

Square is a disruptor. And they have created a beautiful customer experience and has spurred the reinvention of the check out process. They inspired several, including me, to see how the status quo was so messed up.
Just yesterday I had a chat with a guy who's an entrepreneur in tech sector, and kept asking me: "What's wrong with IE? I'm using it for years and never had a problem? I don't want to install Chrome unless you can tell me what is the benefit of it." (and then he dismissed all the arguments I had for better browsers).

I kinda gave up on such people. Life is too short to convince someone who doesn't want to, and better spent with making awesome stuff. :)
Bill Gates: The Power To Save Lives
I don't understand how people can raise Steve Jobs on a pedestal when one of his few peers, Bill Gates, is doing such amazing philanthropic work.
I hadn't considered that - but Twitter shows ads in Twitter, and since this is a web view - maybe?
I like the design, colors and the general vibe. Registration was easy.

Once I logged in though, I didn't know what to do. There are three menus (top, left, right) and I didn't know where to start. I didn't know what watchlist is watching. In short, a nice welcome message with a quick tour of the features would have been very helpful. Maybe on first login I should be taken to "Add Property"? It's your call, but an empty watchlist was a let down.
While our social welfare system isn't set up for it, it seems to me that if you make it 65 and feel not merely okay, but 20 years younger, there's no reason not to keep working (and thus paying for your care).
Thinning Hair In Women
The problem is that they're targeting non-users so heavily that they're alienating the users they already have. If they never take user input to heart, they're going to wind up with no users.
As a long-time Linux desktop user (but Ubuntu outsider) I have been watching this unfold for quite a while. I think that Mark Suttleworth is smitten by Apple and desperately wants to create a mostly free-software OSX-ish Linux distro.

He copied the anchored menu bar, moved the window controls to the left, copied exposé, copied some elements of the OSX panel, tried to improve typography, etc. Some of these were actually good developments (the Ubuntu branded font set is nice) but most of the time it just feels like a cobbled together interface.

It also seems he is trying to copy some other elements of Apple. He is eschewing customization (ostensibly) for uniformity and simplicity. And he has made Canonical's designers the top decision makers. Programmers implement. Community gets what they're fed. Usability is their ultimate trump card (as we see in this case).

This doesn't appear to be working well, though. Apple hired world class designers and payed them tons and gave them a massive amount of power. And they had Steve Jobs who would say "this sucks" when no one else would. Canonical (probably?) has pretty good designers given near-absolute power. I'm thinking there's quite a difference between "world-class" and "pretty good". Not to mention that Shuttleworth, an amazing man in his own right, is no Steve Jobs. He probably doesn't say "this sucks" enough and maybe even doesn't know what actually does suck when it comes to design and usability.

Anyways... I wish Shuttleworth well but I'm not very optimistic about Canonical's future. And I think they'd do better if he brought his own personality, creativity, and intensity to the project instead of chasing Jobs' shadow. Or maybe he should find a new leader to take his place.
Not really.

Most NAND flash use floating gate-mosfets (a type of transistor), which work by storing a very small amount of electricity within a high resistance material to prevent dissipation when in the "on-state". But this charge is extremely negligible in terms of mass, and energy. And depending on the particular memory used, the "off-state" could carry a charge as well.

Interesting to think about though.

(and to clarify, this energy is coming from the device's battery, not the RF energy or something else OTA)
Applists: Playlists for Your Apps
What happens when your chilling in a coffee shop and your arch nemesis orders a latte with your name?
Can you protect from other folks pulling it? Sometimes people just don't want to reveal their code while is ugly...
How To Become a Portrait Photographer?
Portrait photographers have billions of different people that they can photograph throughout their lifetime.The advantage of being a portrait photographer is that you have choice of millions of faces to shoot.Unlike other photography that often focuses on locations and backdrops as opposed to the subject within the photograph, portrait photographers excel in capturing even the slightest nuance in a person’s face to accentuate the beauty of life .
Where is the import from Linkedin option?
Totally wrong assumptions - iOS was not a platform when the iPhone was released. It became a platform much later.

Second, the email/connectivity issue is incorrectly reported. Email would have been through the web. I use an ipad2 and use the web version of gmail. Most apps have the ability to send email with content, and I am sure the same would have been the case with the Courier.
Do people really dream of such a thing? Some at PayPal thought bill-splitting would amount to something which was of course foolish.

The difficulty and hence lucrativeness of financial transactions depends on size, distance and familiarity. A large transaction across the world between two strangers is the riskiest/hardest/most expensive. A small transaction face-to-face amongst friends is the opposite.
Wondering about using the pg_trgm option for this sort of search. Might not be perfect but it might help a lot and as a side effect might suggest where words are misspelled too.
This is the problem I think. Their web app (both for Gmail and G+) are very good, so people expect that an iOS app for the same product will also be very good.

Then they went and released the iOS app for G+ and it was woeful (and continues to be woeful after a couple of updates). I didn't get the new gmail app before they pulled it so I can only speculate (and considering they pulled it rather than left it to iterate, I'll assume the bugginess was pretty bad).

Why is it they can get a mobile web version of an app so right and get the same native app so wrong?
Definitely. Occasionally I'll run across some code in an old program (eg: Emacs), and be utterly unable to read it, because it's an older dialect of C (that I'm surprised most compilers still accept). I'll have to dig out a copy of K&R first edition just to read the code.
There's a lot of money in micropayments and there are loads of problems with existing solutions from the perspective of virtually everyone involved. The compromise solution tends to be purchasing service-restricted credits in larger increments.

It's a great problem to solve, but people have been trying to make incremental improvements here for ages. What makes you different than all of them?
And "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings".
If you're looking to better understand and treat depression, this is a good resource: http://www.clinical-depression.co.uk/dlp/understanding-depre...
<token dude posting about privacy issues>

This is amazing in terms of ease-of-use. However, the privacy implications are a bit worrying...

I don't really want to rubbish this, I hate the naysayers when something disruptive comes around (note that Japan rolled out pay-by-cellphone on their subway systems something like 10 years ago) but...

"She saw my name and photo on her iPad, tapped it, and I was done. A receipt was sent to my phone."

So all employees at stores using Card Case can see the name, identity and photo of every single person using card case within a 100 foot radius of the store. Completely regardless of whether they want to buy something or enter the store. What if you don't want random stores to know when you walk past? What if your abusive ex-husband is working at a store and sees your name come up on the list.. etc.

Additionally, if you use the app, Square knows exactly where you are at all times. I'm not at all comfortable with that. Apple had a massive scandal when it was revealed that it's technically possible to retrieve location history from iOS. This is legit human tracking - police and three letter agencies everywhere are probably throwing parties right now.

HN was up in arms when retail giant Westfield was tracking number plates entering their car park. Just number plates.

</token dude posting about privacy issues>
I would do this, except for most of the day hook up the iPad to a 24" monitor with the HDMI cable. The only roadblock I see is not having chrome inspector.
The university site I manage still has IE in the lead. Luckily the majority are running IE8 with IE9 close behind.
A charged battery is merely an imbalance of electrons. It's like a stored water power system. You put water in a reservoir on the top of the hill and open the tap and let it run into the reservoir at the bottom. When the upper reservoir is empty, your system still has as much water as it did before it just has no potential to generate power until you pump it back up the hill.

What they're saying is that the electrons captured to change the state in a solid-state drive holds physical mass. If this mass change is extrapolated to the data storage of the entire internet, then it physically ways as much as a strawberry.

This likely means that all recorded data in human history would weigh less than your standard package of printer paper from Staples.
I spend much of my time in the database, legacy and greenfield, and I would love a better DSL than SQL, something that ran directly in the database itself and targeted the planner/optimizer rather than just emitting more SQL. I would like to be able to pass a WHERE clause to a function, or a SELECT statement to a procedure, not just simple ints, or strings to be exec'd.
Buried in their About page are the founders:

http://re.vu/stephen
http://re.vu/bart
http://re.vu/mikeharding
I think it was developed by SCP for 86-DOS.
Callbox: Opening Comunication Lines
It's not reasonable to expect a design team to be able to function under the condition that whenever a user disagrees with the placement of a UI widget, they must either publicly justify their decision as being objectively correct or make the widget's position a user-configurable option.

There is an enormous class of design problems that have several appealing solutions, one of which is better than the others, but not so much better that it's worth the time to find it. "Where should the launcher be?" is very likely a member of this class: There probably actually is a best place for the launcher to be, but it's better to just have it in the wrong place than to have to argue about it on a bug tracker, and certainly better than having to make a configuration drop-down for it.

The entire reason you have a design team is because design-by-complaint reliably produces shitty software. Unity exists because every other Linux GUI has fallen victim to this process. Will it succeed in not being shitty? I have no idea. Ubuntu will sink or swim on the merits of its leadership. But the only way to avoid this one major failure mode is for Shuttleworth to ignore, as politely as possible, the complaints of his users.
EDLIN was the only text editor for all MS-DOS/PC-DOS versions prior to 5.0, when they were able to piggyback off QBASIC to create EDIT.
I'm curious why any volunteers still contribute their time to Ubuntu instead of contributing to more open and meritocratic distributions.
Nice article, but it kinda butt against chrome, which I like to upgrade every single time it come out. (Actually, it get upgraded automatically when I tell archlinux to update against itself.)
> Paying for stuff with your phone sounds awesome until you stop to think about it.

Uh, it doesn't sound awesome to me at all. It sounds annoying and frustrating. Swiping a credit card is already pretty simple.

> then tell the cashier your name

Yeah, because that works great. My name is fairly common, and cashiers still manage to get it wrong, especially if it's noisy. Also, what happens when three "John Smiths" walk in?

EDIT: They do address the multiple "John Smiths", missed that in the article.

> For instance, because Card Case can notify a coffee shop when you walk in the door -- and because the cashier can see your profile, and can see that you usually get a medium mocha and a croissant -- the barista can get your drink started for you while you’re standing in line.

If a restaurant's going to go to all the trouble to install a system like this and set it up so that my phone can pay them, why couldn't I just order on the phone? Then I wouldn't have to stand in line at all, and they won't have wasted their time if it turns out that I want something else instead of what I usually get.
Olympus DS-5000 – Digital voice recorder – DSSPro
The video itself actually says the weight of the electrons used to serve the Internet is about 50 grams. The actual weight of the information stored on the Internet is way less, closer to the size of a grain of sand.
> More recently I’ve been scanning mails over IMAP with a python script instead.

Natch.
Microsoft Contributes to Samba
Gitolite[1] will let you mark branches as private on the remote either by specific branch name or a regex (ex: any branch that starts with "swah-" is private to you) if you want privacy before revealing your code.

[1] http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/
Trello.com has become the new cool product in the (crowded) project management space in less than a month from its release.

It is definitely a success in terms of awareness in our community.
Blogger Dynamic Views, seven new ways to share your blog
the color scheme is awesome too
Unfortunately pg can't make it. :(
Open and Freemium API Access and Rate Limits
the privacy issues are negated by it being totally opt in. the other examples in your post are silent, unauthorized tracking. obviously there are privacy concerns with a system like this, but if that is something that worries you, you can control it.
The Top Reasons to Start a Home Based Travel Business
Sounds like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mt/beautiful_probability/
Apparently, I am not authorized to view any information on sandboxing besides "[a]s of March 1, 2012 all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing" and that it "is a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users' systems."

Apple's developer relations with anyone who doesn't want to fork over $100 just to read the docs are really poor.
the article specifically mentions this problem. you should try reading it.
I wish I could find better documentation for this. I'm curious how their sandboxing implementation will work.

I guess my "membership level" can't see the tech docs.
It's not about golfers per se, but it never was about the energy savings. At least, that's not why people want it. It's purely cultural.

Why do I say that it's cultural? It should be obvious. It starts in mid-March and ends in November. This doesn't make sense in the context of day length (February has more daylight than November). The standard time period (which is less than half the year) corresponds with the coldest months.

DST could be year round, but in the winter, it's more of a downer to have darkness at 8 am than at 5 pm, and outdoor activities tend to be limited to 3-4 contiguous hours because of the cold, so short afternoons aren't an issue. But in the October-November leaf season, people still want light at 6:00 in the afternoon, which they wouldn't get without DST. That makes a lot of sense in the context of, e.g., fall hiking trips.

DST isn't a bad thing. It's bizarre, but most people hate the idea of getting up an hour earlier. DST tricks everyone into doing this at the same time: to get up at 6 and just call it 7. It's brilliant how well it works.

For the record, before DST, businesses had summer and winter hours because it just didn't make sense to expect people to conform to the same clock-time schedule year-round. DST just regularizes that process.
Great design. Love the smooth radar animation.

The probability of precipitation (red bar beneath) seems lacking. I think just sticking with the green bar (amount of precipitation) and varying the opacity according to the probability of precipitation would be more intuitive.
I actually switched to Mint 11 after 11.04 and found it to be a really good alternative. Specifically because it didn't break everything and has access to all the Ubuntu repos and tools.

I switched back to Ubuntu for 11.10, hoping some of the things which pushed me to Mint in the first place had been fixed, but I am again bitterly disappointed. Unfortunately, I value having a pretty interface, I find xfce ugly, and simply installing gnome 2 in 11.10 doesn't "just work".

I also tried Arch, but I found I was spending too much time getting it to work how I wanted, and I eventually gave up on it for the same reason I stopped using Gentoo.

The one thing I never considered was switching to Debian - which might be the best idea yet!
Maybe because in addition to openness, meritocracy, democracy and equality they value other things, and they understand that insisting that all human relations be open, meritocratic, democratic or equal will hobble the pursuit of those other things.

Some participants in open-source software development underestimate the costs and the disadvantages of openness, democracy, etc. They seem convinced that if everyone would just uphold those values, everything will turn out well, and they seem impervious to evidence to the contrary.

It might be the case that if Canonical's designers and leaders get to boss the programmers around, then not enough programmers will continue to contribute to Ubuntu. But that is an empirical question that might turn on considerations other than openness and meritocracy. Maybe many programmers will continue to volunteer to help Ubuntu even if they understand that programmers and users do not have an equal voice in the direction of the project.
I'd guess our expectations exceeded reality.

Megan McArdle's take:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-rage...
I'm not a big fan of Unity, but I'm sympathetic to Shuttleworth in this matter.

After following open source projects for some years, it seems they're all eventually accused of some dark corruption - usually after making some UI change.

"You're betraying the ideals of the [project / community / founder]," the accusers say. "It used to be about giving users [freedom / choice / slightly less RAM usage]. Now it's just about [main leader of project / 'the developers' / the corporations]'s whims! Why not just give us [a setting / the old behavior / a large-scale feature]!"

Take a look at Firefox forums after every release, or Pidgin's bug tracker every time they tweak the GUI...

It reminds me of an older Less Wrong article - (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/).

Now, it could be that all projects are slowly decaying into [ego / corporate / dictatorial designer]-centric tarpits, but I kind of doubt it.
Vim has the kind of user lock-in mechanism that big corporations can only dream of: modal editing.

Once you get sold on modal text editing it becomes very difficult to accept or use any other editor that doesn't do it (which is pretty much every other text editor out there). Sublime, Textmate, e - all great editors. Don't feel like using any of them after 10 years of Vim.
This reminds me of "The Future of eBusiness" from 1999 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnwaFxFru5k Funny it took so long to get here, and that Square beat IBM to market :)
Carefully take out the blow dart gun...
Very cool.

This also brings with it a new source of analytics and marketing opportunities (for better or worse?).

A coffee shop cashier could be told (through product suggestions on the iPad they use) that you've missed your regular lunch up the street and to offer you something to eat.

Online ads could now be targeted towards you further, based off what you purchased in the real world (that coffee and muffin) because the purchase was matched to you, and your iOS Device ID.

A new round of marketing is possible by tying in real world/daily purchases and being able to push that information back to retailers (in the form of product recommendations or analytics for them), as well as advertisers.
It's ironic to see this article coming from Farhad Manjoo.

I wrote a response to his original piece a while ago:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=51

What Square has done with card case is pretty slick, but at present it doesn't scale. Paying with your name doesn't work at Wal-mart. And funding with your plastic credit or debit card doesn't work especially well for most coffee shops or other small businesses that want to save on interchange fees, not pay more of them.

I look forward to competing with Square again when I get my California license.
Whatsapp
Este un programa para moviles que permite chatear con otros moviles, solo debes inscribirte y podrás hablar con otros usuarios que tengan este programa
MVTools is a dedicated Avisynth plugin designed to detect real motion, which is probably more suitable. Encoders only minimize residual, not find real motion vectors.
Heart disease and Cancer are not a disease of the western world in that you can find plenty them thought the world. The reason we see more of them in the "western world" is because you are far more likely to see them as your age increases and the western world has a lot more 'old' people than anywhere else.

PS: By old I mean 40+. And yes Japan has 1/3 the heart disease deaths, but when compared to the 1/10th obesity rate and better healthcare system it's not all about fat.
It's not about being Apple, it's about solid execution. With consistently great execution, one develops faith that new products will hold up to the standards demonstrated in the past. When you release buggy, half-baked products people aren't going to get excited about what's coming out because they don't want to recommend a dud. They come to expect a low standard, rather than a consistently high standard.