skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few months ago Finland's banks switched to SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) and IBAN bank numbers permanently. This meant that old bank account numbers would no longer work. This is obviously a change that has been in the works for years and it's something that every company should have been prepared for.

Well, apparently Google failed to realize this and update their systems. October's payout failed and I received a generic automated e-mail message about it. I realized what the problem was instantly and tried to figure out how to contact Google about it.

Google Checkout doesn't have a direct contact form nor a phone number: instead, their "contacting support" page [1] presents a list of options about "the topic of your question". Only after I chose something vaguely related, filled out a contact form that didn't have a freeform text field and received an automated form reply I could tell them my real issue by replying.

After they fixed it and re-entering my bank account details, I had to wait until December (the next payout date) to receive the failed payout.

(I've received this month's payout successfully without any issue.)

[1] http://support.google.com/checkout/sell/bin/request.py
We're up in Milwaukee if you ever make it that far north. As for recommendations, I'd check out the Frontera Grill. Its the restaurant for Rick Bayless, the PBS cooking show dude and the food is great. The sit down area is expensive but the carryout place has cheaper street food type offerings and it is AMAZING.
http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/xoco.html
Great stuff on commandlinefu. Thanks for the really helpful tool to find the info where you want to use it.
The FDA is not an ethics organization that evaluates drugs based on the total effect of public health. That simply isn't contained in the bevy of Bills that together form the Code that FDA mandate is derived from. I understand how frustrating watching these public health issues is, but the FDA isn't tasked with that, and only Congress can change that.

The FDA does something else: Drug company says they have a drug that does X. Does the drug do X?

That's it (okay, the FDA regulates a lot, but in the context of pharmaceuticals, this is their mandate -- "efficacy"). They require inordinate amounts of proof of efficacy.

Not the morality or ethics behind the application of the drug, but rather: does this molecule, in this concentration, in this delivery route, in this population, have the exact pharmacological effect that they claim it does.

From there, it is up to each person and their doctor to decide what treatments are needed!

Blame the doctors, then, or blame Congress, but the FDA follows it's mandate quite wonderfully.
The start screen seems to work.
Just like a real computer: Android gets Android IDE
Take a closer look at the post, and you'll see that what JunkDNA just said is that is going to happen, and hard. Right now they run about a 17% profit margin [1]. If they lose their cash cows en masse, that's going to go negative, fast. That's not that great a profit margin from that point of view.

What are they going to do then? The only thing they really can, slash costs. It seems unlikely the all the slashing is going to come out of everything except R&D.

We're ultimately going to have to deal with the fact that as a society we've chosen to make it extremely expensive to bring new drugs to market. Basically, our extremely high standards are/were sustainable only because we also gave them patent protection. It is going to be economically infeasible to have both extremely high standards for new drugs, then refuse to protect them for long enough to recoup their costs. There is no law of economics that says a thing must be produced; raise the cost above what can be recovered and what happens is that it won't be produced.

[1]: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html
Rumah obat herbal
Android App Puts Ads on Free Webcomics
Another Fatal Conceit
Ah, I didn't know if apps could be restricted (as I mentioned). Maybe there should be a flag in the market that tells the developer "it looks like your app might not run without a 1Ghz processor". I would imagine smaller devs wouldn't have a wide range of test devices.

There has to be a better way.
Laser lightning rod: Guiding bursts of electricity with a flash of light
I disagree with the patent situation as much as anyone, but that was massively melodramatic (and almost completely lacking any substance).
Well you can't create PNG images with free form outline I'm afraid (if I'm understanding you correctly, you're talking about ignoring the transparant parts of a png right?) so that won't be possible, the drop shadow would just wrap around the actual outlines. Although it is possible to apply a border radius to your png and add a drop shadow to those, so rounded corners or circle pictures should work.

But yes, if you have actual free form outlines you would want to shade you'll have to resort to adding them to the PNG, but for most elements we can use CSS.
> I am just applying the same principles to Python what
> used to be applied to Perl.

No, there are some significant differences between the two which your commentary misses, like the fact that python3 ecosystem and the path for migration to it is far more mature than perl6's is (or likely ever will be, the way things are going.)
Outside of the Android market, Google Checkout generally seems dead. I created an account months ago to integrate with E-Junkie. Despite numerous requests for support the account has never been blessed with an "integration" tab, as indicated in their documentation, so the relevant information cannot be passed into E-J.

I'm guessing they're letting it die and are working on something else.
The start screen is for starting tasks. I agree that it works as well as any other (it has search, that's all you really need). I'm talking about switching between running tasks though. What is the Windows 8 method that is superior to a taskbar?

Tiled windows managers are not new by the way. But Microsoft has made one that's not very intuitive or full featured for a mouse/keyboard.
Your entire post reads as a cheap appeal to emotion, rather than a balanced view of app purchase methods on mobile devices.

Let's turn this around for a second. Why are parents letting children use their very expensive and unlimited purchasing power mobile devices without supervision? If the kids have their own phones, why are they linked to their parent's account for purchases, instead of using the (very cool) allowance feature that is built into the store?

There are a number of solutions to this problem, but arbitrarily deciding how many clicks away a purchase has to be or somesuch is near the bottom of the list.
Good Relationships: The Spring Data Neo4j Guidebook
Funny thing about meth is that it's not that dangerous -- it's almost identical to adderral. The methyl group (meth-amphetamine vs amphetamine) really only improves the ability of the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier. It's basically a form of adderal with a slightly stronger bioavailability curve.

The reason why meth is a public health issue while addy arguably is not is mainly because requiring a Doctor rx, using an exact dosage with no refills, combined with the purity and safety of GMP-produced drugs, eliminates most of the issues behind meth.

I was shocked when I found how just how similar meth and adderall truly are.
Google Checkout is indeed dead, they want you to use Google Wallet now.
That's pretty neat upvotes for you.
yes I am new. Today I learnt that HN society hates patents and everything related to it (which kind of make sense). Lost 10% of my karma in couple minutes over 3 posts I wrote.
Oh for the love of all that is good and holy, can we put this marketing-is-brainwashing thing to rest? People don't go to McDonald's because they saw a clown singing a jingle on a television. They go because they like the food at that price. They may be more aware of that option than other options due to marketing, but people aren't automatons that just do like television tells them to.

That being said, I challenge your assertion. I can buy a double cheeseburger (call it 1/4lb of meat) from McDonald's for $1. This takes me about 5 minutes. Buying organic beef, cheese, and rolls, and then prepping, seasoning, and grilling that burger will take you, give or take, 20 minutes and probably cost you on the order of $2-5 per burger (depending where you live), minus the time needed to get those ingredients. You value time, effort, and knowledge at zero, which is below their actual value.

My point is that your argument is fallacious. Learn from what McDonald's puts out and understand why, despite plenty of marketing, Burger King has fallen off a cliff and Wendy's has come charging ahead. McDonald's has a lot of value in terms of a case study, but you dismiss it with that old-programmer-standby, "It's just marketing." I'm sick of seeing that attitude--it quickly dismisses good and interesting business strategies that we can learn from.
The Tim Ferris Experiment: Demystified
we don't do that at USV and never have. i agree that the VC industry is guilty of that practice, but we are not.
Transmitting the power around the planet isn't a given. You'd need super conductors to limit power loss.
Its OK to downvote -- just reply to the question, please.
Why Twitter (badly) needs channels
Vodio: An app for video lovers
Likewise, it was so simple and elegant. I'm really happy for their employees, but I wish the app would stick around. I'm thinking of migrating to tumblr, and I'm doubly hoping they release a migration tool since tumblr doesn't support imports and copy paste is a bitch.
Part of why I love the law is that every legal discussion is also a philosophical discussion. Should killing someone be legal sometimes? Should pornography be illegal sometimes? Where does my right to privacy win out over society's right to protect itself from crime? When is it OK to back out of a contract? Should my quality of life suffer after the divorce, if you were making the money while I took care of the kids? Is there a right for a child-rape defendant to sit across from the child while she testifies and stare her in the face? Can we outlaw gay marriage just because some people don't like the idea, or do those people have to prove some kind of actual harm?

In all kinds of stupid little cases, every day, lawyers hammer out what kind of people we want to be -- how our society wants to instantiate our morality. It's glorious.

Anyway, the copyright question is partly the legal question of what people should be allowed to do, and partly the moral question of what laws it's OK to break when there's no real prospect of enforcement. But it's all about laws.
Is paying fines corrupt? I would say that dodging fines would be considerably more corrupt.
In 1978, he co-wrote "The C Programming Language." 34 years later, he's published "D Is For Digital." At this rate, he'll be done with the whole alphabet by the year 2760.
To be fair, one could equally frame what they're doing as removing the subsidy to people who put photovoltaic systems on their roof. Arguably that same money would have been better invested in research of improved solar technology such as this.
Can you elaborate more on the untestable code point, for those of us who've been spending more time on ruby lately? I find play very interesting, but it's great to hear about its warts as well.
Help, Linux ate my RAM
In the wake of the ignorance highlighted by SOPA et al this book seems prescient. It sounds like a useful tome to pass on to older, yet intelligent, relatives so they can better understand how and what information they enter or leave on the Internet is collected.
The Best Browser is the One You Have with You
The reduction of the solar subsidy is right. It is not killing the solar market at all, but your new solar-panels on the roof of your house won't give returns as nice as 10% anymore. Also those returns are paid by every electricity consumer in the country which at the current rate isn't fair at all.

Also the adaption of solar panels on homes went far faster, then most people expected. The grids in single-family home neighborhoods simply are not designed to handle much power being fed into the system at this point. The problem is that at daytime, when the sun shines there is not much power needed in residential neighborhoods, since everyone is at work. This is why self-consumption is the desired use-case for solar-energy on family homes. That's why I think there is a market for home-control right there. -> "Start washing machine WHEN solar energy > X"
Why the down votes? Diminishing returns is a real issue and randomly testing chemicals until one happens to work for something is hardly the most effective approach possible.
Manipulate Machines, Not People
Also, see CityEngine:

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/research.html

Generating whole cities procedurally using certain themes(for example, ancient Pompei - http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/images/frontispiece_p...):
Comodo Internet Security 5.10.228257 on Downloads App
4 points - good stuff
It used to be the other way around, say, circa 1997.
>Hey! What's with all the down-voting in this thread? I understood HN was a place where down-voting was reserved for trolls, not disagreement ... and "good" down voters explain reasons not immediately obvious.

It's also reserved for stupid, uneducated opinions. Saying that "no, they shouldn't freeze accounts, no matter what, full stop, regardless of how good their CS is" not only adds nothing to the discussion, it's completely silly and flies in the face of the very logical and sensical reasons why accounts are blocked.

I'll say it again here: The problem isn't the automated blocking (which all payment processors do), it's the lack of an appeals process.
Switch razors to Occam's Razor: all other things being equal, the idea that makes the fewest assumptions is better.

Either the government is engaging in a disinformation campaign that is so broad and so pervasive that even the blogs at the TSA are involved...

Or it's some idiot at an ineffective government organization who screwed up.
numpy/scipy/matplotlib have been there for about a year, according to http://pythonsprints.com/2011/04/8/matplotlib-python-3-thank...

(I am dragging my feet on this, too.)
You have to remember how many failures it takes to have a big success. For every Intel there's a wasteland of shoulda-been companies that are dead and forgotten, with billions invested having gone up in smoke.

Of course, when it's private venture capital that's behind this, people don't seem to complain as much.
In practice much of those go away with -- we need to support ie7 (or even ie8).

Sadly.
These are not sold as physical chips, but as logic macros, where someone implementing a soc pastes this on with all the other stuff he wants. The total chip size will of course be bigger so that it can have pins.
Indeed he does. Everything down to the BIOS is FOSS. Apparently worrying about hardware inbuilt backdoors is a level of paranoia too high even for Stallman.
Sony's initial plan was rice cookers.
Unfortunately most of us aren't able to buy the million devices out there to test with. More annoyingly we usually only find out about a device not working when someone writes a 1 star review such as "dont work HTC <xyz> cm7".

I've had people email me and get nasty because my app didn't work on their Touchpad with ICS. Or even better when people write low reviews from Tegra 2 devices such as "Textures missing" but they are using a kernel which reduces allocated video RAM from 128mb to 64mb.

I love Android from a user point of view but I hate it as a developer.
Fred Being Fred aside...

Yahoo! could be aiming to be acquired by Facebook or Google.

Assuming the patents involved are tenable, this looks rather like a viable reverse-acquisition strategy.
Roximity: Location-Based Deals for Drivers
Unfortunately the error traces seem to be empty for the current errors. I'm quite interested in how they present these traces across networked nodes.
"They do but the larger governments tend to do worse."

Larger compared to what? I think places with the smallest most ineffectual governments are all hell holes. Every decent society has a large central government. The "economic freedom index" is a bit of a misnomer. They define freedom as a government large enough to protect rights. So right out the gate freedom is redefined as a large government that uses force to impose civil society.

Let me pick one example. Your freedom index lists Switzerland as "Free". Switzerland has government imposed universal healthcare. That sounds like a lot of government to me, how about you!

One last thing, none of the countries listed as "FREE" are anything close to a libertarian society based on the NAP.
The post are not easy to read. It would be better if they are highlighted
I thought it was because Wikileaks were going to be slow with getting the info up. Although they may have hesitated because the HBGary emails may not have met a 'public interest' requirement (see the Pentagon Papers case)
Thanks, good question! This should make it a little more clear:

The biggest thing I'm looking for is I don't want to 'lose' my comments; it's just that I don't want them in the final file; and I'm looking for an easier method than keeping two different files (one with and one w/o comments).
You can resume a running app from the start screen.
it was a rant. you are right.
Brett Serjeantson, CEO of MediaMiser, on PR disruption in the mobile era
It's an aside, but I no longer do business with anyone that doesn't offer appropriate contact methods for the products/services they provide. It's now the second thing I check after price and the primary reason I refuse to use Google products but "go large" on Amazon products.

Thinking is: "If I have a problem, can I get help?". If I can find a solution to that question in a few clicks, kaching, you get my CC details and we're good to go, else, x.

Customer service is not a cost center, if done well, it's the best marketing/PR channel you can get and it pays off massively in the longer term.
I'd love to hear Fred talk about how Twitter is preparing, because it's a good guess that they're next.

Probably the reason for this post in fact.
There's a huge difference between a programmer that uses Java and a Java programmer.

One is someone who uses tools to accomplish their goals, the other is someone defined by their tools.
This is utter genius. Thank you so much.

When I try the fu 1 command, I get an invalid index number error.
This is why I welcomed the backlash and even some of the sensationalism regarding the nuclear explosion in Japan. Even if I realize that nuclear energy could be safe and it's good to have an alternative that is cheap enough to compete with coal, I'd still wish we'd spend all those billions switching from nuclear and putting most of them into renewable energy technologies, which should be the future.

The arguments against solar were that the tech is "not there yet", so then it's better to just focus on nuclear. I disagree with that. I believe that if the energy industry changed focus to solar panels and other renewable energy technologies, we would get there a lot faster. We would have a lot more companies exploring different ideas that make them more efficient and cheaper.

Nuclear technology will probably never be gone, or at least not within the next century. But I just don't want it to be the holy grail of the energy industry and see the vast majority of investments go into that. I want renewable energy technologies to be that.
Very promising sad to have to leave indextank, but this looks like a good replacement.
i called Apple evil on stage at a conference a few years ago

http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/21/fred-wilson/
Misunderstanding the Future of Privacy
I wish I would have choose law instead of software.
Isolator V7 Released
I'd rather see see someone run an XMBC install on a Pi than a Roku box. One leaves a path forward for exploration, then other does not.
Hmmm, well for some things 64 hours isn't as bad as I first thought... This could be sped up and hopefully is highly paralyzable so with some more research you could have something while slower the resolution quality would be so much better is would be worth it for some situations. Imagine printing watch parts or pieces for musical instruments, etc.
Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.
i've been pretty loud and vocal on the anti-software patent thing for quite a while now
Turns out that he's not the digital messiah, he's a very naughty boy.
They pay fines for their corrupt behavior. You understood it wrong
The New iPad As The Next Gaming Console
I'm thinking there's a distinct lack of computer-knowledgeable people (coders, hackers, engineers) approving the patents at USPTO. So many of these patents are of the type where any two-bit code monkey would think of the exact same solution given the circumstances.

These patents just reek of an ignorant bureaucratic type rubber-stamping the patents without doing any research.
This is the first controller I opened from their samples[1] :

public class Forums extends Application {
public static void index() {
List forums = Forum.findAll();
long topicsCount = Topic.count();
long postsCount = Post.count();
render(forums, topicsCount, postsCount);
}
...
}

You can't mock out Forum, Topic or Post. You can't inject some type of "FormRepository" or whatever pattern you want to gain some type of control. In Ruby, or most dynamic languages, this wouldn't be a problem, since a class method can (and should) be mocked. Even if a static language allows for that sort of trickery (for example, there are a couple ways to test the above in C#), it's the wrong approach. Dependencies should be injected and thus controlled. I guess you could inject using static setters, but that's just a bad workaround to what, in my opinion, is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to write testable code.

[1] https://github.com/playframework/play/blob/master/samples-an...
Exactly what I'm getting at with using version control on the production file; we don't use a strict testing/production file-system (and I'm not high enough on the food chain to change that) instead someone may open the production file and make changes as they see fit. (not many someone's but still..)
Taking the Plunge (MIT engineer's advice on surviving elevator fall)
IMO, as long as the tax is inline with the actual external costs it of other forms of energy generation it's not a bad thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality) It's basically renaming a sin tax as a green subsidy but there is value in having that tax even if it's revenue is mostly wasted.
Many of the sessions that I attended last year at io were packed. Hopefully the additional day helps alleviate this.
> Copyright law is there because we want creative work to be possible to sell on the free market.

Er, what? Where do you get this claim from?
Mutually Assured Litigation.
Haters be downvotin' instead of answering my honest question.

So far I know of 0 cool uses for a Raspberry Pi. I don't have time to research every new HN trend in detail either. That's why I ask for a summary of what this thing can do for me.