skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Who needs a dongle for mobile payments?

Anyone who actually wants to _do_ mobile payments. The author reveals zero understanding of human behavior, payment processing or how to get business/service traction.

There's a good reason PayPal and Square are now in the best position to actually deliver some meaningful advances in payment processing: they both originally took advantage of human behavior and existing rails.
New Bi-Plane Design Promises All of the Sonic, None of the Boom
That doesn't follow at all. Programming language research and crypto research are different fields. There are likely lots of mathematicians who could provide opinions on bitcoin that have never heard of BitC.
I don't know if it's a general EU directive, but this is becoming a legal requirement in some European countries (identifiable sender name, must be possible to reply to email).
No, I'm not sure. I'm using Sudo version 1.7.4p5. sudo su <user> does not prompt for a password. sudo -su <user> and sudo -s -u <user> do prompt for a password.
Not much. Yes, that _could_ replace the dongle (see Jumio, Card.io) but the experience is pretty miserable compared to the swipe.
WoW/Starcraft theme park in China
Should We Use Progressive JPEGs for Retina Displays?
And what kind of middle school manages to get Noam Chomsky invited for a talk? Is that something he does normally?
I'm not convinced that just because you'll soon be able to fit the world's entire electronic cultural output into your pocket the media companies will necessarily be out of business. They're pushing for controls on the way the rest of us consume content, and they may well be successful in the end. They don't have to be 100% successful, just successful enough to make money.
The NYTimes article says that the initial offering of BATS "would have been the first company to be listed as well as traded on the exchange", and the post mortem currently at the top of http://www.batstrading.com/alerts/ (no direct link that I can see) says that the A-BFZZZ shard "encountered a software bug related to IPO auctions".

I read that to mean that this is the first time they've ever used their IPO-related code in production and it failed badly. So it sounds like it was the normal sort of bug, in their own code, and their own IPO directly triggered the bug.
I hate to sound McCarthyan, but if a teacher recommends her students to fail tests while also name-dropping Chomsky and referring to him as "the great man" in the same text, her ulterior goal can be hardly anything other than subversion of capitalistic system. Sometimes things are more black-and-white than we are willing to believe.
I'm in the minority, but the language that annoys me most is Python. Not because it's a really bad language--not at all! Rather, it is a mediocre language with weird semantics, warts and no redeeming features. That by itself is fine--there are many mediocre languages on this poll, some of which are worse than Python.

The real issue is how over-hyped Python is--everybody wants me to use it. I can avoid other unfortunate languages like PHP or even Java fairly easily, but everywhere I turn Python is basically shoved in my face.

It's also constantly heralded as a well designed language when most of it is anything but. I don't even think it's the best dynamically typed language--out of the ones I've any experience with, Scheme, Lua and even JavaScript (aside from the DOM and browser stuff) are nicer and more elegant. Python is bigger, more complicated and yet less expressive than any of these languages (especially Scheme).

It seems to share a philosophy with Java (we can't let programmers have anything they might possibly shoot themselves in the foot with!), which does not make for a language I would like to use.

As I've said, its faults are not unique. It's a sub-par language in a sub-par world. But for some reason it's elevated as the paragon of language design and used widely.

Of course, there are plenty of communities that do not like Python--it's only overrated in the HN sort of sphere. Low-level programmers like C and C++; enterprisey types like Java and C# and neither like Python. I am not interested in either community myself, however.

The one community that I am interested in, and that doesn't like Python either, is the programming language group. Comments on Lambda the Ultimate are much more critical of Python than comments on HN.

So yeah, I like Python less than even Intercal, simply because I've been forced to use the former and will never have to use the latter.
Children get upset when someone copies from them. Adults realise that there's no such thing as an original idea, but there is such a thing as validated product-market fit.

The 99c vampire romance novels on the Kindle Store don't undermine Stephanie Meyer, they reinforce her status as a thought leader. The waves of Apple-derived industrial design (here's looking at you, HP Envy!) entrench the status of Jony Ive as the only designer that matters. Counterfeit designer clothes and accessories are the reason that luxury department stores in London are now employing Mandarin-speaking staff.

If you're not delighted that people are ripping off your ideas, you've badly misunderstood the modern market. On the internet, the worst thing you can be is ignored. Imitation means that not only is your idea good enough to notice, but that it's good enough to slavishly copy. The clones might get a few hits or a few bucks, but the social capital is all yours.
Join the Mixpanel engineering team
Keep in mind: the demo matters less than the way you present yourself (confidence + intelligence).
If you just want to get a feel for Catholicism without getting too serious, you should leaf through 'In the Beginning'

http://books.google.com/books?id=a47neDIBaSkC&printsec=f...

It starts assuming virtually no background in the faith and it really gets you into the nuts and bolts quickly.
pheelicks' app is a good idea, but it really does need Contacts integration. There's no way I'm going to type in a bunch of addresses I already have on iCloud (that got there through manual entry).
Impressive - so smooth on iOS!
Teachers still have a ton of accountability. They aren't necessarily accountable to be good teachers, but there's a lot of stuff they are accountable to do. There's usually a lot of paperwork and all kinds of requirements.
Agreed. I was looking for that, too.
I think you need to look up the regulatory bodies for lotteries. They care a lot about this type of stuff, and making sure there is not statistically predictable pattern (essentially the sample size required to find the pattern would be larger then the number of tickets printed). If you do find a pattern, a lot of people will get into trouble because it was their job to make sure that was not one.
3 Things for Efficient Coding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card#Financial...
Sure, and I certainly agree with that choice. In my (limited) experience, a Perl->PHP rewrite either indicates a desire for more developers or a seriously weird or outdated Perl architecture. The latter was quite common in the early days of the web, where basically everyone's first web page was a mess of Perl CGI (or mod_perl a bit later), but as YP isn't that old and performed well enough before, I wouldn't have thought that this was the case here. Thanks for confirming my suspicion, wasn't intended as criticism.
I'm all for free software making inroads in government and elsewhere. I just wonder if it'd be better off recommending someone a little more, let's say... pragmatic, than Stallman as an advisor.
Funny. When I was running my music startup with couple mil users, it was originally coded in perl by my perl-genius cofounder. When my cofounder dropped, it was next to impossible to find solid perl developers(there are many who tinker with it). I remember recoding it in php and life getting so much easier.
The kickstarter model and 'ransoming' has been offered as an alternative in a world where the MPAA is dead.

That's one short hop from kickstarter vs netflix - are the movie studios that literally are the MPAA supposed to still be making most of the movies that most people want to see after we/they/technology killed the MPAA, aka their collaborative effort to protect themselves?
I think there's a larger picture here. It's time to declare war on middlemen, period.

There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the 21st century.

Here's a startup formula for you all:

1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an industry.

2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much lower margin.

3) Profit.
great idea. And it should use how often you are late to improve that notification.
>AFAIK there is no defined standard or agreed-upon XMPP extension for the latter.

The standard is here: http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/Protocol-v2-3.1.0.html It doesn't need an XMPP extension because it's defined in terms messages, so it works with any IM protocol.
It's interesting, because there are sources on the internet that catalogue a taxonomy for all manner of fallacious arguments (Wikipedia is one obvious example), but there doesn't seem to be a name for claiming that internet posts written by the people in set A are hypocritical because they presumably-contradict either 1) posts by people in set B happened to appear on the same website, or 2) some hand-waving characterization of the zeitgeist of the site's denizens.

This is clearly fallacious, I don't know why people keep using this technique, and we really should give it a name so that it can be referred to by shorthand. (Any suggestions?)

If you happen to find a person in the set A intersect B, then you've got a case against that individual. But nobody seems to go to that much effort.
It's not clear that improved usability will make any difference while fundamental problems (like unwieldy currency exchange) remain unsolved (possibly unsolvable). Likewise, if mobile apps allow Bitcoin to go from 10,000 users to 20,000 that's still virtually nobody.
Why are they paying if they can get illegal copies ? and why watch broadcast tv when they can get on-demand content ?
Interesting point. Thanks.
Firstly make sure that some concept of respect, or politeness, is built in and applies to every person making comments.

Encourage use of cites; some way of rewarding useful citations might be interesting. (EG, this post is lousy and only gets two upvotes, but the citation is great and gets ten.)

Ban out-right some topics; or have very narrow constraints around how they are discussed. Some topics will instantly explode into heated bitter flamewars with no possibility of sharing useful information and no chance of changing people's opinions. They're toxic. Which is a shame, because they are usually the things where people actually need more and better information, and where a carefully arranged discussion could shed some light. Obvious examples of these topics are Palestine/Israel[1], Abortion, Circumcision, etc. (Yes, I know you posted two examples. I guess you have great users, long may that continue.)

Your idea about collectively owning a site is perhaps useful, but you'll be in for a rough ride if you need to make changes that your users don't like. Because you've made them co-owners now, and they have a say, and they are entitled, and etc.

You do need to find a way to split deterrents for posts that "do not belong here" and posts that "I disagree with". There's some suggestion that, on HN, acceptable posts are being downvoted because they're unpopular.

In general, moderation is often awful. You need someone to kill the spam but after that lots of stuff becomes subjective and thus open to arguments.
By the way, service doesn't look like it is still alive. Is it?
I don't really see the point. Getting from my favourite places to my favourite places I usually don't need a map.
Students pitching startups for 48 hour hackathon
Ask HN: Javascript Key Mapping Plugin
Hey Guys

There was a plugin (jQuery) released on HN a couple of days which made it extremely easy to map keyboard characters to functions etc. Unfortunately I can't seem to find the plugin. I'll be really grateful if someone can point me if he/she has the link to the plugin I'm referring to.

Thanks a lot!
Bash — language where even spaces are dangerous.

It's frustrating that in shell scripting gap between "looks correct" and "is correct" is enormous.

Whitespace, leading hyphens, paths, globs, shopts, masks, signals, race conditions and POSIX compat problems and quirks — there's always some edge case.

Even `echo` can't output arbitrary values in a portable fashion (sometimes accepts `-n`, but doesn't accept `--`).
How Pinterest changed everything (or at least our user homepage)
Replica Island - One Month On
What to do when your free app doesn't take off
For while you're waiting: http://mashable.com/2012/03/23/instagram-alternatives/
This doesn't bother me. Or, I should say, I'm not inherently opposed to it.

Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.

As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.

So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.
Go might have had less marketing than Java, but it still had a decent amount of support. There were several high quality promotional videos when it was first released. The web page is really full-featured; it has a ton of documentation, including translations for several languages. And all those appearances at tech conferences take time & money (and I'm sure that Google sponsorship helped to secure some of them).

All that stuff adds up in terms of manpower and budget, and it's out of reach of what a small independent team can do. It's not all about technical merit.
Donate your Car for Kids
This is a great post, redmine ticket has been submitted, its something we're guilty of. I completely agree that a name is important, and to reiterate what others are saying here I also agree that email addresses you cant reply to are useless.

Thanks for sharing, the internet is a better place for it :P
Never used it but from what I read about it, seems to be a great way to locate similar like minded people in your area.
Guilty as charged. I do want a functional language like Scala, because I believe that school represents a better design. That school of language design saves me the headache of null pointers; it helps me write unit tests with QuickCheck; it allows me to define custom generic collections; it places emphasis on having a fast GC; it features monadic style to help with error handling.
Very, Very clever. Definitely going to give this a try.
Garbage collection and modern virtual memory systems
Iranian Oil Import: What US Sanction on India Could Mean for US
P2P is here to stay. RIAA and MPAA aren't.

It's not a destruction of property rights. It's the beginning of something new for people that make a living creating things people like to hear and watch.

Speaking as a musician who has had dealings with the RIAA, I won't miss them even one little bit.
I think we already have this so called new model. I buy movies I like from Amazon. Movie studios look at their sales numbers and make more movies like the ones I want to see more of. Then people complain the studios only produce more of the same.
So how does it generate profits?
Interesting about ownership affecting how users perceive changes to the site itself. You're 100% right on that, hadn't thought about it.
Thanks, I hadn't seen this site before and it looks interesting.
Since Railscasts.com is now making money through subscriptions, I'm surprised nobody's made a Djangocasts.com. Back when I was only flirting with web frameworks, Railscasts' bite-sized videos were the easiest way to get a taste of Rails.
Reddit bot that tracks the removal of political links
One small CSS Tip
BitC is often referenced from object-capability literature, which is one way of decomposing problems to mutually-trustable solutions. It's certainly possible to understand adversarial system design without having come across the ocap model, which is why I said 'most likely'.

Question: What is the fundamental problem that bitcoin solved in a novel way? If your answer is something from cryptography, you don't know its context.
Dual Decomposition or back to divide and conquer...
MacOS KenDensed: iPads Gone Wild
I remember that the maker of Instagram was offering 50% of Android sales to anyone willing to do the work of porting Instagram to Android and providing the support. Is this what finally happened?
My first thought was that I don't think I've ever needed directions to or from a location more than once or twice, once it's familiar I know where it is.

But then I realized I do need transit times between familiar locations every time I use mass transit.

So then I went to buy it, and it's free -- is there a way I can give you money?
32 Is The New 16
Congress and engineering
Nice article! I think 'creepy' could be an understatement =0p...
LabView is quite horrible. Their graphical approach in particular.
More details on the encryption element: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/229630898/protect-your-c...
Why do people keep saying that? As far as I know no respected company is doing that.
I truly believe in taking the core concept of an idea and making it better -- if companies and start ups lag behind and leave room for innovation, why not capitalize on it?

If a company is always progressing and improving upon it's product or service, then this leaves less room for people to come in and steal their idea and "improve" upon it. Even if there are copycats that come into the market and try to improve upon the core concept, the fact that you're working to build upon your business inspires loyalty and reach among your base of users. I think it's these types of companies that are the hardest to compete with, making stealing their idea even tougher to execute.
Awesome video, thanks for sharing it!
I wonder if they considered HipHop instead of php-fpm.
Guide to using all speakers simultaneously on multiple connected Cinema Displays
The value of dcurtis's idea was exclusive content from a carefully selected bunch of people. The (IMO ugly) design of the blog or the idea of the ideas panel are not valuable.

If dcurtis had announced his blog platform; announced his blog network; and released the code I think he would have had a very different response. But his approached trashed the "brand" that he wanted to protect. Just read the comments in anythread mentioning the two products; words like "dick" occur many times.
Completely off topic, but the site you mention in the post (storitell.com) - its font rendering is horrible, it almost impossible to read anything. (Windows 7, Chrome)
Agreed. I scrolled past it and actually thought "oh, must not be indexed yet"
The important point this post makes is the issue of an ambiguous subject line. I had never thought of it before, but not putting a company name in the subject makes the email look much less credible and increases the chance of me flagging it as spam.

Thank you for this enlightening post.
I wouldn't think so.

I don't think there are very many people who would consider the internet to be something that would ever be in the same category of thing with nation states such that they could be related. 'The internet', even when used as a metaphor to refer to some collection of humans, is far less tangible and definite compared to a nation state.
I am really surprised to see the hate for Java. I admit I like using Ruby and Clojure more than Java, but, the Java infrastructure is awesome and the language is good.
I agree... the old interface was a menu. i didn't like it very much.
Ask HN: good alternative to Dell for good quality rack mounted servers?
It looks like media industry has to reborn and form a new way to do business and get their income.

On the other hand I like indie musicians more as they try to innovate or make music for people more than just get their money and aren't connected to labels.

An interesting group – Singleton is an example.
When all you have is a hammer, make your own tools?
> "if the From field only says "John" or "notification", I may open the email even if just for a second."

I'm completely opposite. If I don't recognize the name in the From field and the company name isn't in the subject line, it gets categorized as SPAM.
Yes, that could explain off some differences between python and C++ in these two polls, but right now, over 95% python voters favor it as opposed to about 50% for C++. I can hardly believe your argument alone can explain off this huge difference. Also, look at C and C#. A lot of programmers are forced to use them, too, but they seem to like them better than C++ at least in the HN community. On the other hand, I agree that Python may not be the best choice for a course on the compiler theory. I am sure more would hate python if they were asked to develop a linux kernel with python.
What is the difference between a 21" or 27" iPad, and a 21" or 27" TV that supports AirPlay from a regular iPad "with Netflix and HBO Go and iTunes Movies and TV shows".

OK, now make the "TV" a monitor, perhaps with an HDMI input for the cable box.
Copying is at least about 60% simplicity and convenience, and about 30% better quality and lack of commercial BS. Free is a nice bonus, but I have cheap tastes and more money than I need, so it's really not a driving force as long as the commercial stuff is reasonably priced. I really don't want to hunt through 4 websites/apps to find something. The fact that I know one will have something and no idea if one of the legal alternatives will is the crux of it - I don't have time for the results of their licensing games. It's the same reason I only shop Amazon with Prime.
But aren't there other aspects of same-origin policy that could bite you if you outsource static.example.com too?

E.g., it may not stop static.example.com from setting malicious cookies at the root.
It's not just about traffic, you know. Facebook is different then most sites, because it generates different content for almost every pageview. This means much less possibilities for caching. And Google, well...
Related: I don't understand why companies use a "noreply@..." email address. Why not make it easy for a customer to give you feedback?
Wasn't that Instapaper?
http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for-android
Ditto. My inbox is an email wasteland. I don't have any spare time to bother with emails that I don't recognize on the first pass.
Hmmm, interesting. Looks great on my Windows/Chrome setup. Mind emailing me a screenshot at esten.hurtle@gmail.com? Thanks so much!
Are you kidding?

I worked for gay porn company for a number of years and I've never had issues finding work outside of that industry. At least not for companies I'd be interested in working with in the first place.

If anything it helps considering there is a lot of big scaling issues that need to be solved when the viewer base gets big enough.
I'm glad he mentioned Kickstarter. I'm really excited about the potential there. I think Kickstarter (or something like it) will be at least as important as eBay or Craigslist.

I just wish we had it back when Firefly was dying.
If the business you want to be successful at is being a landlord then I think this is fine. Otherwise it's a time sink and not worth it.