skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If any Etsy employees are reading, I am curious about why it took nearly 7 years to add direct checkout to the site -- Paypal is not known for being particularly kind to either buyers OR sellers, though perhaps there were all sorts of scaling/technical issues that took priority over something like this? It just seems like, with the amount of volume that Etsy does, Paypal's rates would be on the very high side.

Congrats - looking forward to trying it out!
There's a bios setting for switching between the two
I haven't researched this much, but my gut tells me Cassandra and/or Postgres.

One of the main reasons why we escaped MySQL was that we were stuck with out schema. Adding an index or a column basically copies the table to a temporary table, apply the change and copies is back in place. That's my understanding, which might be a little bit wrong. All I know is that making one very simple change took hours and hours because our tables were so big. It was quite ridiculous. We couldn't afford the downtime, so we were stuck with what we had, which was no longer sufficient for our needs.

I understand that Postgres doesn't have that limitation, but since our schema used to change so much and we has so many joined tables, the MongoDB data structure seemed like a great fit. Mongo was also amazingly fast in our tests, but those tests didn't properly take into consideration the global write lock.

The global write lock problem is a very well known issue now but we started using MongoDB before 1.0; way back when nobody really knew anything about it. At least people are now more informed, although it doesn't seem to prevent many from making the bad decision of using it.
Missing Online Stanford classes.
I was checking http://www.pgm-class.org/ and noticed extra space at the bottom then crossed checked with class-central and see that the tech entrepreneurship classes are gone. :(
Hey Amy - I just read your travel post. How do you guys handle support while you're both on the road? Do you just make it clear to customers that there's a multi-day response time, or do you hire temporary support staff?
Or, if it's GPL, you won't take it, and you will write your own in-house version which you'll never release. That is the more likely scenario.

You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes. They're going to spend more money on an in-house solution because they have complete control over it and know it won't bite them in the ass in the future.
The one vote of the US doesn't matter. Historically, the US has been the biggest funder of the UN, and traditionally the organisation is dependent on the dues of the US being paid. The US tends to use this as a bargaining chip, which is an awful lot more powerful than just one vote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_United_Na...

Bear in mind that we're not even talking about US diplomatic efforts here, which typically sway many nations in exchange for other favours.
That point has been corrected.
"Programming ability" absolutely does not fall onto a linear scale, it's an n-dimensional vector.
Since Domino/Notes was one of the first enterprise apps supporting strong encryption --except for pre-2000 export restrictions, I wonder what internal email systems are the most frequently compromised when we see these leaks.
Could a flow chart me made, from payment request / initialisation through receipt of funds? The verbal part creates a lot of question marks.
> I mean either scenario is possible...

We're not talking about a movie with an open ending, we're talking about something that has been happening for the past 11 months right in front of our eyes (maybe not literally, but there is at least a couple million YouTube videos about it).

When you're talking about current events, don't assume. Do some research and then post a comment. He has killed 6000 Syrian to date, it's not like they were in a school fight and we can l forget about it in a week or two.
We can also demand vendor free CSS from our contractors and developers. I've had to ask several contractors, usually younger developers, to please not use prefixes. They comply, but clearly think I'm too old school because CSS 3 is what all the cool kids are doing.
Dwolla Raises $5M Series B Lead by Union Square Ventures
I couldn't be more excited to see a start up like Dwolla thriving in my home town. Congrats Dwolla!
I couldn't be more excited to see a start up like Dwolla thriving in my home town. Congrats Dwolla!
This is software that is designed to find viruses and malware. The authors of viruses and malware would be interested in seeing the source code and seeing how to get around it.
Bit trickier to send or receive that through channels like Liberty Reserve.
Consider also the possibility that Apple sponsored Clang/LLVM because was written in a way that made it nearly impossible to analyze code exactly as the compiler would. The separation of LLVM and Clang means that Static analyzer in clang is doing the same thing as when you compile.
I think that all of your font sizes are too similar. Think about what is the most important to least important on the page and use the font size that is appropriate.
> but code written in CoffeeScript is easier to read than code written in JavaScript.

To be fair, that's a personal preference as well. For e.g. some people prefer reading code with symbols (&&, ||) than English keywords (and, or). Also, I have seen people from a C/C++ or Java background find JS easier to read than CS.
We have arrived at a point where innovation in education is just beginning. Khan Academy doesn't have all of the answers, but they have made a significant contribution to the marketplace of ideas and tools, which will continue to evolve and grow.

That type of innovation is the key to significant progress. And this sort of discussion will drive it forward.

So many people seem eager to pick the winners and losers in this space right now. It is a bit early for that.
I wrote an article on use the NLTK library for gender prediction http://stephenholiday.com/articles/2011/gender-prediction-wi...

It's quite a versatile library.
I agree it is not as natural as on paper it's only unnatural because you did not spend 12+ years doing it that way. I spent enough time with my old ti86 that it became vary natural to express math on it despite the poor interface.

I have no problem using this machine to say:
abs(4/3 - 1) = abs(3/3 + 1/3 - 1) = abs(1/3)
abs(3/4 - 1) = abs(4/4 - 1/4 - 1) = abs(-1/4)
abs(1/3) > abs (-1/4), so 3/4 is closer to 1 than 4/3.
There's no current way to switch painlessly, but there is something that makes it slightly nicer than having to restart all of your programs. Check out Bumblebee [1]. It does it by running two X servers, one for the lower power system and another for the NVIDIA binary blob and plays with environment variables to get things working. Then it takes the NVIDIA server and copies the images over to the slower card. In a round about way it's what windows systems do for it, but not quite as sane and not quite as performant. There's been some work to create the sharing needed so that drivers can share the buffers directly and eventually there won't need to be the second X server. However this also depends on if that work either gets its license changed or NVIDIA GPLs the kernel bits to their driver.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee
My to-do list isn't so detailed (but it is LONG), though my appointment planning is. I use Calcurse so I can manage both in the same terminal.
http://www.calcurse.org may be worth a look if you have to manage appointments along with your to-do list.
He is writing about math education. The characters (3/4)^(1/2) make sense to all of us who have already learned math and know some programming languages, but that syntax is pretty confusing to students who are just developing a real understanding of exponents.

There is plenty of room for automation in math education. But in a really good math education, the automated tools need to be balanced with more socially-oriented approaches to education. Students need to talk to each other and to good teachers about their work. Students need to see each other's approaches and hear each other's ideas, and have face-to-face conversations about math.
That's why he qualified it with "I think". Facebook was built with PHP. You get the point.
Cached pages:

Intro:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DiP8w8Z...

Roughly what it looks like:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sCkxm9F...
Another tiny detail from Switzerland
Censoring the Internet should be demonized and ridiculed as people using botnets to ddos sites. Its the same thing really, getting a bunch of people together and deciding something should be unavailable to everyone without including the justice system.

I hope one day to see some politician convicted of conspiracy to destroy a national asset in exchange for bribes as a convicted botnet user who used it to ddos sites.
Providing that kind of assurance of integrity is precisely what DNSSEC is designed to do. With the signatures and "chain of trust" a DNSSEC-validating DNS resolver could determine whether the DNS info has been tampered with and provide that feedback back to an application. Now, how the application might choose to present that info is a different question... and could, in fact, offer creative error messages like the one you wrote.
Game Development in the 21st Century: Meet my A.I. Team
augmented reality is around the corner. see Ilmari Heikkinen work at https://github.com/kig/JSARToolKit
Still, the code is worthless for anyone if your product is secure. And I would imagine that product by security company would be secure.

Antivirus software might be something different as you might learn how to trick it. But "remote desktop"? It doesn't require any "security by obscurity".
(Bandwidth prices not withstanding.)

10,000,000,000 GET requests on Amazon = $1,000.00 (0.01/10000 reqs)
10,000,000,000 GET requests on Rackspace = $0.00 (FREE)

1,000 GB on Amazon = $125.00 (0.125/gb)
1,000 GB on Rackspace = $150.00 (0.15/gb)

Total Amazon: $1,250.00
Total Rackspace: $150.00

That's what he's getting at.
Any chance of a command-line session transcript instead?

I suspect there may be some interesting content here, but this is the kind of thing where I just hate screencasts. I can't skim it to see if these are things I already know or care to know, and even if they are it'll take me half an hour to get through, when I could probably read through the command-line session in 5 minutes.
I obviously didn't post to get the upvotes and was sort of expecting an unpopular interpretation of events to get some down-votes. But I wasn't expecting anyone to create a new account just so they could tell me I live under a rock and call me a "sock puppet?" (huh?)

I do watch the news on a regular basis have a general understanding of the narrative in Syria. I realize the nature of the regime and I never suggested that Assad was elected - but merely that political elections did take place in Syria. I was merely offering a possible viewpoint but thank you for coming out and contributing to the discussion.
Giving in to not quite what they're being asked to do and trying to buy time does smell like 5-0. If I were them I'd release it at the first signs of stalling and then move on to blackmailing the next company, who will know better than to contact police and just pay the 50K.
"Why Cognitive Enhancement Is in Your Future (and Your Past)"
Airbrake acquired by Exceptional
I'm not sure Canonical supports XFCE in any way, and now they also no longer support KDE (financially, that is). There were hiring one guy to work on Kubuntu, that's not much if you ask me. So we're down to two (Gnome-shell and Unity), and the support of gnome-shell is almost mandatory. Unity itself is based on gnome3, so they need to help maintain and improve it.

There is no harm in letting community driven efforts take place. Having a variety of desktop environments available to pick from has its advantages. For example, Xubuntu is really useful for people who need to cut down memory/CPU requirements.
I think those two levels run in an infinite loop.
On that topic of the user experience, you might also be interested in the post I wrote about that question:

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/what-i...

which did get some discussion here on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435143
Pycoder's Weekly
yep... And it was I (with the help of NATO of course) who bombed Libyan cities. Poor Muammar, just like Caesar, he was surrounded by bad friends who killed him at the end... :(

Some one's sworn enemy reporting something about him does not make their point invalid; Just like Gizmodo reporting bad stuff about iPhone 4's antenna doesn't mean iPhone 4's antenna design is flawless.

By the way, it was the first time I've heard that Gaddafi was a sworn enemy of Arabs! Last time I heard, he was The King of Arabs. Maybe you meant Saudis, but even then you would've been wrong.
Website of petitioner who is against the social networking websites got hacked
I spoke only Afrikaans for the first 6 years of my life. The simplification still affects me when speaking English, mainly the examples mentioned in the article, especially with regards to tenses. I still sometimes make mistakes with 'do/does', 'was/were', etc.
Yelp for Business Services
How did the source code end up on servers not belonging to Symantec?
It is a literal statement and you are not reading it literally. OpenSuse is frequently but not regularly released. It also fills in gaps in KDE's offering with other software such as Yast and Firefox. Otherwise it is a good distro for KDE fans.
doing some initial calculation, it may be a ground for startup if you would be willing to pay $2.50/year for 100GB with first 10GB/year free download.
Top 3 Winter Roof Maintenance Tips for Homeowners | NJ Roofing Blog
> I don’t think CoffeeScript adds quite enough benefit to outweigh the costs

Those "costs" were the cost of learning, not development/efficiency costs.

If you are already comfortable with Javascript and know coffeescript beforehand, the cost is zero and the benefits far outweigh that.
I'm my username on gmail.com
Twitter adds SPDY support to Netty
To be fair, this is a guy who does hardened, embedded RTOSes. In the normal world implementation, of course crypto matters.

Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/
Google wants to do away with online certificate checks
Now that the code is available I wonder if the product will get better. Although I'd imagine any community that tries to form around it might get smacked down with a lawsuit. It'd be interesting to allow one to develop though.
They didn't lose anything, but they didn't gain anything either. If they had GPL'd their project, they would have gained improvements. So by choosing the BSD license they've lost potential gains. So it is seen by many as a loss.
Mandriva is less frequently released and like suse fills in gaps with their own technology such as system control centre. They have also been very bad at creating a community which leads to forks like PCLinuxOS and Mangia
I'm not saying that Matlab, Maple, and LaTeX have the whole "How do we represent numbers to computers well?" thing down, but we sort of do. A simple subset of LaTeX for use in classrooms could be useful (something like MathML or the like).

"Pseudocode would actually be the best way to transmit this image ."

I wholeheartedly agree. A graphics routine or a LOGO program would do a great job of describing that.

The author seems to have an irrational dislike of people trying to use computers in this fashion, which I find strange. I certainly agree that something like a geometric proof (in absence of a good modeling language) is difficult to automatically check, but at the same time I question whether or not the human element would be any more useful here. Math teachers, especially at lower levels, are not infallible.

I would almost venture that a better test, one that examines both critical thinking and ability to logic about a problem, would be a battery of small programming problems to solve some kind of geometric or graphical challenge. It's a bit all-or-nothing, but it would show that the student can both interpret a problem and also describe the steps to solving it.
Dwolla Raises $5 Million Series B From Union Square Ventures & Others
It's IE's situation in: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history all over again. I would not like that mess to repeat with CSS.
You have three menu bars near the top of the screen. On the left there's the social media stuff. On the right there's the [register | forgot password] stuff. In the middle there's the long menubar. These three are not neat and tidy.

In the logo there are button-like things that are not buttons, they're just part of the graphic.

In the middle of the top there's the phrases "Web Mobile Tablets Standalone Software" which again looks like a menubar, but isn't.

That top third of the screen could look a lot nicer and neater.
here's the pricing info: "Direct checkout will cost a 3% + $0.25 USD payment processing fee per sale."
>Having to manage the cron jobs running on each server is a pain

Agreed, that's why you would use a single, cheap Atom box sitting under your desk managing all of your cron jobs.

>spending an hour to save $20 isn't worth it

This isn't saving $20, it is saving $240 per year, so having your own hardware is break-even for year one. Year two is essentially free.

>it's the same reason I use Postmark [...] for my email

Email is an entirely different beast, dealing lots of config files, blacklists, and a kludge of MTAs/ MUAs. I completely understand outsourcing that piece of operations.

>instead of buying hardware and colocating

There is no reason such operations need to be run from a datacenter/ colo. Any office/ business connection should be adequate to run cron jobs.
There is so much irony these days: the country that used to be the most active in fighting against communist dictators' censorship is now pushing new forms of censorship onto "free" eastern european peoples. No wonder they are fighting back.
What do	VC’s look for in a Potential Investment
The only thing I hate about these kings of notifications is that they pollute the names of my pinboard bookmarks if I don't manually edit them.
Show HN: CoffeeRoulette.net - my weekend project
One could make the argument that any mathematical syntax is equally confusing for the novice--so why not start them on something they'll be using later anyways?

I think we presume a great deal in suggesting that a simple flat array of characters and operators is somehow less understandable than a nicely typeset equation (especially when you've never written one before!).
Seems like it might be a pretty complicated thing to add... No other marketplaces that I know of have their own processing capabilities... Third party aggregation (taking payments on behalf of someone else) has many quite-complicated regulatory issues.
This same idea seems to crop up every month or so on HN, and it just seems like ego stoking. My friend is learning to program with a functional language. Does that automatically shoot him up to level 9?
Agreed. It's probably a slightly lower number now, but a few years ago 80% of all software written was custom in-house software where the choice of license is fairly moot since the GPL restrictions don't apply if you don't distribute your software.
There's also a story about the acquisition and history (and future) on their blog: http://blog.exceptional.io/news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake...
So you end up with a bunch of commits in a random order relating to different things.

Lets say person A and person B are working on two features both committing to master.

Person A commits some work to master and pushes to origin. Person B commits some work and pushes to origin. Repeat this a few times, now you want to scrap the feature person A is working on. How do you cleanly handle this?
Beanstalk Nonsense-Brute-force login protection
Beanstalk just send a newsletter to all it's user that they have a brand new Brute-force login protection → which blocks every account with to much failed login attempts.

Why don't they help user
- choose more secure passwords?
- block "IP" on to many failed login attempts?
- Show a Captcha (like Google) on too much failed attempts?
Not entirely true. Xcode does have a plugin model; just explore the Xcode developer install and you'll find it is entirely built up via plugins. Unfortunately, Apple have chosen not to document it or make it public.
Tried Unity and didn't like it so...

Running 11.10, replaced unity with xmonad on laptop. Running kubuntu (kde 4.8 ppa) or xfce on desktop computer depending on the mood.

I still think that KDE is the best (and improving) desktop environment for Linux but for older machines xubuntu/xfce is probably a good substitute.

The reason I use [xk]ubuntu is that I like the debian package system but with the somewhat more up to date packages.

I still run some gentoo machines, some for many years, but the pain of compiling stops to be funny after a while so I run it only on servers now.
That doesn't really happen, it's an extraordinary event that a raid controller dies. But can it happen? Sure, anything can happen...that's why we have an identical hot backup server only minutes behind on the database for just such an occasion.
Amazon streaming
Python + Django + Rpy + R = Web App (by Simon Knapp)
Can you give some more information about your project? Who are you guys? Why would I be interested in your opinion on what is good? What topics are covered? What is an example issue?

Right now, I only get the smugness:

"One e-mail each Friday(starting Feb. 17th), easy to unsubscribe, only god knows why you would want to do that."
Atlantic interview with Aneesh Chopra
Of course, while a weight surcharge may be a good idea in theory, it won't be easy to implement.

No, it won't be. Also, I'd guess that the weight of a passenger is small compared to the weight of plane required to add an extra seat to a plane.

All of which is to say I don't think this will start making sense until fuel prices go up by at least a factor of ten.
Yes. Also you need big sales volumes to justify the investment in time / money.
Google Search seems to keep things in its index conservatively, hoping that 404 and other errors are transient.

I'm guessing the Google+ profile didn't appear in "featured links" (don't know the proper name for the special links at the top) anymore, only in the organic search results.

plus.google.com is probably crawled just like the rest of the Web by Google Search (as it should be), and there is no special treatment for it, so having an outdated result in page 3 for a few weeks after the profile has been changed is likely standard behavior.

The post confirms this since the search result snippet image gives more info that was available when clicking through to the private profile.
When I do a video like this, usually someone does something like that within a few hours(!) but if not, I can do one. That said, it will all be on the Web eventually - the video was just to promote the effort (and put me on the line to finish it ;-))

As a list, though, it digs into: random numbers from a range, awesome_print, curious concatenation, fiddle, simple substring presence, spaces as string literal delimiters, multiple module inclusion, shorthand for ivar interpolation, ruby syntax checking, ruby syntax analysis with ripper, chained ifs, "next" as Proc's return, zipping arrays, exploding ranges into arrays, json output, __method__, multi line chaining, _ in irb, checking set bits, params defaulting to other params, Proc#source_location, prepending to a string in place, accessing the current source file as data, and some regex tricks.
Great point Alex - will look to add something like that next time we get a chance to update our splash pages!