skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Viridian might be large for a credit union, but with only $1.4 billion in assets (according to wiki) it's really not very big compared to many of the banks and companies that use ACH. In 2011 alone, $33.1 trillion was processed by ACH in 20.2 billion transactions (https://www.nacha.org/node/1130).

To my mind, as someone who works in the financial sector, Dwolla claiming they're going to take on ACH is a huge flashing red light saying that they're either dangerously naive or they really don't understand why banking works as it does - or a combination of the both. Either way, there's no way I'd let my money go near them.
Show HN: Started a blog with Jekyll (minimalistic design). What do you think?
It sounds like you turned down Amazon, which was likely an excellent decision. (Full disclosure: I work at an Amazon competitor and I routinely hire Amazon refugees.) Amazon is (from my perspective) an environment that does not value the individual: their engineers are not permitted to blog or otherwise describe their work -- and participating in an open source project is so outside their culture that no one dare even ask the question. The good news: Amazon is the exception, not the rule. Other environments (large and small) empower the individual -- and I think that that is the essence of what you're looking for. So the questions to ask: will I be allowed to reasonably discuss my work at conferences, in blogs, etc.? Will I get the opportunity to work on open source projects? Will I get the opportunity to open source original work I develop here? If the answer to those is a verifiable "yes", you are likely headed to a generally supportive environment (be it established company or startup); in software engineering (as in government) sunlight tends to disinfect...
So where is the line (for you) between not following a pet programming philosophy and incompetence?

If they don't use a bug tracker?
If they don't use version control?
If they edit the code on the live servers to make changes/add features?

(I've seen all these things)

I agree it depends a little on the specific project but a lot of these kinds of best practice stuff are more than just pet programming philosophies. If you are used to or function best in a place with a certain level of professionalism than working somewhere with some cowboys who just wing it or somewhere were the every piece of work is in a feature branch with a corresponding user story, conforms to a style guide and has proper tests is probably not a good fit.

Where a team falls on this spectrum is part of the company culture.
Sure. But you don't write a system only in assembly. The point, now buried in this silly thread, was alexchamberlain's nit that it wasn't "literally" true that all systems are built on top of C kernels (whether it be an OS kernel, firmware, whatever).
RIAA Tries To Downplay Its Role In The Feds' Censorship Of Dajaz1
The implementation is a nice example of clojure protocols kicking ass - the core vector and map implementations needn't know anything about implementing coll-fold as the protocol definitions can be added within the reducers library.
This is the standard way of operation in Germany, too. Like many other things in the U.S., we're about 30 years behind Europe. (That would explain why I'm wearing leg warmers today, too. ;)
Geeks & Depression meetup
This is probably the most important comment on HN this month. Seriously. Steal that line. Even if you /dev/null'ed the answer (which you shouldn't) the fact that you asked the question has significant value for you in terms of positioning.
Since the original posting, Mr. Burt has cleared his debt and I have no further qualms over our business together in the past
At work I set up one of our project's automated build to fail if the cyclomatic complexity of a method exceeds 20. It's a C#/.NET project so we use NCover as part of the automated build. NCover has a reporting tool that you can set to return a non-zero return value (which will fail most build systems) if it's metrics exceed some value -- in this case class-level cyclomatic complexity exceeding 20.

I've thought about ratcheting it down to 15 based on stuff I've read, but unfortunately that particular failure metric can only be set as low as the class-level in the latest version. The next version (4.0) will have the ability to set the threshold at the method level.

In any case, I'd rather have a handful of places in the code where someone has to do something goofy to work around that metric rather than accidentally allow the whole project's complexity to creep up as time goes on.
They're putting out annual reports: http://vpri.org/html/writings.php

Recent HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878661
I guessing the robots will behave a great deal more deterministically than the humans. Its the old style human driven cars that will need the warning lights.
Edmonton Escorts
We build it truly easy to find a sexy companion near you to fulfill your wishes. We offer Edmonton Escorts of the highest superiority. Ladies listed on our site are beautiful, educated, and well-spoken.
From the site — "same price as an ACH transaction" — so a few to tens of cents per transaction.
So in the US we have about 8 fatalities per 1B kilometers driven. Yes that's 8 too many, but that is a damn lot of km driven without incident. So yeah we do okay. Machines will do better, but we do okay.
That's not aesthetics.
"I am sorry, but I am not at liberty to share internal details of my previous workplace.". If they look upset, follow it up with "NDA, you understand...".

If they still look upset, might as well leave right now. They have no sense of ethics, and they sure won't keep promises they made you.
Who’s liable in the share economy?
Pricing is already out: $0.02 per cloudlet hour.
Cloudlet = 128MB RAM and 200MHz CPU.

When you first start out, you get a trial period; but within the dashboard, you have a pricing calculator as well.

http://www.servint.net/jelastic.php
Myspace settles with FTC over sharing user data with advertisers
Android Fragmentation: Finger Pointing Begins For ICS
The Entrepreneur ‘Ah Hah’ Moment And How To Get It
Has the airport experience become horrible?
I did that the first two times Google contacted me. The third time, I took the plunge - and I must say, they were great at finding a fit for both my skills and my interests. YMMV, but I don't feel like I've been shuffled of to an undesirable project. I get to work on some pretty cool stuff.
IPod Out of Power on the Beach? Plug it into a Solar-Powered iKini
Github flow in WordPress projects using GitHub and DeployHQ
http://zippykid.com/2012/05/06/how-to-update-your-wordpress-site-automatically-using-github-and-deployhq/

I'm curious what other methods people are using for projects that depend on CMS like WordPress/Joomla/Drupal.
This is pretty comparable to being asked to be critical of yourself (e.g. "What's your biggest weakness"). Generally speaking this is a bit of a trap and your main goal should be to not take the bait and move on to another topic ASAP. If they really press the issue focus on issues where there's nobody to blame and there's not that much that's going to be held against anybody (e.g. Old Co become very big which was fun but now I'm looking to be part of a smaller team). The key thing is to keep things positive and move on to why you want to work for them instead of why you don't want to work for your old employer.
Review of MasterCard’s mind boggling PayPass Online
Plaxo shuts back door spammers used to access Google accounts
Ask HN: What is the best online resource for learning advanced VBA for Excel?
Ask HN: What is the best online resource for learning advanced VBA for Excel?

I would like to get to advance my knowlegde in VBA for Excel and wondered what the best place to look for help on that would be?
They're not the same. Unions are equivalent to crony capitalism (ie. regulations put in place to prevent competition), but most of what companies do is just free markets at work (which helps the consumer).
THAT is awesome.
Of course, at no point in history has someone been prosecuted by a government on trumped up charges.
The original article states that the author was physically presented this rejected patent application at the Lincoln museum.
> However, as TIOBE indicated, Android remains Java’s ace in the hole.

I'm assuming that if Oracle wins the lawsuit against Google that they've accounted for the drastic but unlikely step of Google moving from Java to another language and VM.

I always assumed that Java was popular in enterprises and scientific research. I wonder how C is making inroads? I thought that the speed of Java is ever-increasing.
I think this note from June, 2010 about same-day ACH payments is relevant (note: this project has been stalled as far as I can tell):

http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/175_123/same-day-ach-10...
I'm the CTO at a startup (which happens to be hiring frontend, mobile, and backend people I might add!) and we don't look for "rockstars" or "ninjas".

We look for competent engineers who are naturally curious people that will fit in with the team. Fitting in with the team isn't important because we want you to spend all your free time with your coworkers (god no, go get some fresh air!), but because we want people to naturally want to help and teach each other.

My point is that decent people are out there. Not just in startups, but in a variety of environments. Just make your next company one you pick because of the cool people you met in the interviewing process, not because they offered $5k more than the other guy. Your sanity isn't worth losing over that.

If you're a frontend, iOS, or backend (Open to anybody willing to learn Python) engineer who wants to work with people who work sane hours and still get things done, contact me. :)
If your own site is down then your site search is down too, isn't it?
Title should be "Google gets license to not test drive...".
Profanity is intended to offend you. If you find it sexist and demeaning, it's actually doing the job it was intended for.

Below is a list of alternative curse words you can use instead of 'douchebag'. Please note that the great majority of them are sexist, racist, or religious blasphemes. If you have a list of non-offensive profanity we should use, please comment and i'll add them to the list with a special note.

http://pastebin.com/SKj9EiqP

Edit: pastebin'd for posterity
If this is real, which various other people have raised question to. Could it count as prior art in a reexamination [1] of some of the Yahoo patents that Yahoo is using to sue Facebook? [2] Specifically the "social network patent", which is apparently a patent for "World modeling using a relationship network with communication channels to entities"[3].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reexamination
2: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/yahoo-patent...
3: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
That isn't mentioned in the linked article at all - they just say "free".

However, if you go to the actual API site: https://fisync.dwolla.com it does say the same cost as an ACH transaction.
That's true. For example, this is basically just a rehash of that last blog post claiming that Franklin Delano Roosevelt invented Cracked.com.
As someone who works in the financial sector, can you explain the relationship between assets and transaction volume?
This is RubyMotion's biggest problem right now. All of the examples are nearly 1:1 of ObjC code, and they require you to already know the iOS SDK. For someone who already knows Ruby and iOS programming, it might save a few keystrokes here or there.

This specific example saves some code over building the app from scratch in straight ObjC. But, you could get the same savings with a regular ObjC library that does the same thing, too.
And for a given amount of time. (Which can be more valuable in dollar terms than the capital needed.)
Remember they didn't have raster images in 1845. That would have been a physical stamp of some kind that was inked and pressed along with the type (or maybe afterward, since this seems to be a one-off). The historian in the story claims Lincoln used this picture a lot, so it's likely that he commissioned a physical block made for this purpose, quite high-quality and reusable in multiple publications.
Permanent Residents (Green Card holders) also have to pay tax on their worldwide income, even if they do not reside in the US.
Unfortunately, it seems like those who aren't familiar or comfortable with iOS and Objective-C will still be completely lost with RubyMotion.
I like to think of the problem like this: Imagine building another interface to your app. Take a CLI as an example. Should the 'facebook update' feature be activated if you use your app through the CLI? If the answer is yes, it belongs to the model. If no, it does not.
What's the appropriate age to tell a young woman to grow a pair of balls?
Why the focus on Facebook? No one claims that Zuckerberg invented social networking sites.
Or anyone who used any of the myriad of social networks before facebook became dominante - Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, etc.
Beastie Boys Sued Over Infringing Audio Samples After Death of Member
Heaven forbid if you didn't mention that you "cringed" instead of speaking up.
Seriously, why do titles like this make it to the top of HN?

Yeah, Lincoln totally outpwned Zuck, because the idea of a place to give updates about your life is so mind-boggling, and that idea itself is why Zuck is rich.
There's the 'pmccabe' tool, which can check for # of lines of functions and their cyclomatic complexity.

Then,

pmccabe `find . -name '*.c'` | sort -nr | awk '($1 > 10)'

gives me all functions that have a cyclomatic complexity over 10; I often add it as a target in a Makefile, so I can easily check this. Similar, for functions of a certain length.
There's no motivation here to why I, as an iOS developer, would want to use this over UINavigationController. What makes it better? What problem does it solve? The one screenshot it has looks terrible.
Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, dead at 83
Very cool. I hope they start to explore the implications of indexing a trusted source at some point. Google ignores most metadata on your pages because for all it knows you're using that metadata to game the system. With site search that's not an issue, so the search engine could look for certain metadata on the pages it crawls, from author to importance/boost to activating keywords. The interface currently allows you to do some of this (e.g. reordering), but being able to guide the indexer from within your CMS would be even nicer.

Also +1: more clarity on pricing, please.
Funny, I am female and it never crossed my mind that this was sexist and denigrating to women even though I view "bastard" as rooted in the denigration of women (edit: ironically, since it is almost always aimed at a man) because it suggests your mother did something wrong rather than that you did. I always think of "douchebag" as an ugly remark similar to "scum of the earth" -- in other words it calls up the idea for me that it is undesirable disgusting waste products, akin to saying something is "shitty", basically.

To each his own.
Difficulty can be a good indicator that you're at the edges of your current understanding.

The MIT electronics class often poses questions during the lectures or in the homework that are based on what you've already covered but involve concepts which are still upcoming.

This is difficult, but it's vastly superior as a learning technique as you have to work your way through it for yourself.
The Two Guys from Space Quest just started their Kickstarter
Yes, you'll be typing Nu code in a Nu interpreter.

Even though it's a Lisp dialect, Nu was designed from the beginning to be interoperable with Objective-C, so translating between them is easy. (Convert brackets to parentheses and you're 80% of the way there.)

As a contrived example, this:

if(![self.address startsWith:@"https://"])
self.address = [@"https://" stringByAppendingString:self.address]

Becomes this:

(if (not (@address startsWith:"https://"))
(set @address ("https://" stringByAppendingString:@address)))
Swiftype | Modern search for your website
I'll plead WTF on that.

I'm simply trying to tell the kids on here that SQL is great and ROR/LISP/NoSQL worship around these parts is misguided. No 'droppings' in that.

Yes, I write Lisp on my resume to make me look like a stronger candidate. I learnt it a few years ago for fun, that's all (I'm not a lisp flip-flopper). Just want to put the advice out there to be a relational weenie (instead of lisp weenie).
Urban Airship does do some sort of messaging thing. But, yea, agreed.
There's also https://github.com/pkluz/ZUUIRevealController
which implements iOS5 containment, and i think they ported it over to ios4
Funny that you mention Ninja Turtles as both boys watched the 90s live action version of TMNT and while there's a lot of ersatz kung fu neither of them thought of the bad guys as truly malevolent and weren't put off by the violence. I think it's the introduction of guns/blasters and swords that are demonstrated to do real damage where things get dodgey.
a million upvotes this class is killing me
Same problem here. Maybe the braces approach using {name} is an improvement upon %(name)s in that respect.
Green Eggs and Constraints
Ask HN: What are your favorite projects to follow on GitHub?
My guess is that automated vehicles will be both more predictable, and more dependable, at yielding.

When a pedestrian jaywalks in front of an oncoming vehicle, he's depending on the fact that the driver isn't distracted, and can pick him out of the visual clutter at the sides of the road. I'm a good driver, but I still find that it can be difficult to spot a pedestrian who is standing among parked cars at dusk, especially considering that my rear-view mirror obstructs some of my vision further up the road on the right side, as it does for a lot of drivers.

An automated car should always be paying attention (especially since it can pay attention to lots of things at once) and doesn't have to depend on human eyesight to detect potential collisions - it can utilize lasers, infrared and other sensors.
Then, as someone in the financial sector, you can explain "float" and how banks profit from locking up transfers for an extra day or two before the funds are accessible by the recipient.

If Dwolla wants to provide an alternative to big-bank ACH with smaller vigs for the holding banks, what's your beef?
To be clear, this is a discussion of "net neutrality" in that the author alleges that Comcast is prioritizing (and not charging for) traffic for its Xbox streaming media application, which works like a Video-on-Demand service. Comcast claims that this is similar to a standard Video-on-Demand service based in a cable box and can legally be prioritized because it is the functional equivalent of traditional VOD. Comcast doesn't see anything wrong with not charging for bandwidth used for set-top-box VOD, and analogizes that to Xbox VOD, even though the two may use different underlying technologies.

The author says that it shouldn't be treated like VOD because it is delivered over an IP network rather than old-school cable and Comcast has no right to prioritize video packets for its own IP video service over those for other IP video services (e.g., Netflix).

Which is more "neutral" is an interesting question: neutrality over the mechanism by which Comcast delivers its VOD service to cable subscribers, or neutrality between IP-based video streaming services?
Spot on. This is one of the real advantages to leverage in a site search system. We have only scratched the surface of what's possible, but there is a lot more to this coming soon.

Also, not sure if you caught this on the site yet, but we do have support for custom metadata: http://swiftype.com/documentation/meta_tags
Acquisition in Three, Two, One....
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 10 Notes Essay
More likely downvoted for making an unsubstantiated generalization - Google is a huge company with hundreds of products and projects, while many of them may connect to advertising / data mining, there are lots that don't.
It'll give them very accurate information on where people are travelling from and to - much as Google Maps directions/navigation does, but on a much more precise and reliable scale.

Bear in mind that there's a completely alternative model for car ownership; with fully automated vehicles, there's no absolute requirement for people to 'buy' a car - there could be shared metropolitan resources of cars, which would arrive and pick you up 'on demand' (much like a shared taxi service, subsided by subscription)

Also, given that Google would probably know the locations of all the cars at any point in time, they could also get very, very detailed traffic flow information. This they could use to further optimize traffic - i.e. load-balancing traffic through different routes - but also this could potentially be sold to other transit agencies, or even tied to demographic data to suggest where stores should open new premises.

Probably some more ideas/data sources and uses in here that I haven't considered too :)
....so you think we should stop using sexually-offensive language but reposting an entire block page worth of it is hunky dory?

Honestly I pastebin'd it because it took up an entire page of screen real estate which is really annoying for everyone else to have to scroll past just for me to make a point. I had the "backbone" to pastebin it, so I don't see how not pasting it in-line makes me less-backbone-y.
> Torrentfreak's articles seem to get better and better.

I disagree. They're intensely biased, they select only information that suits their agenda and they spin reports and statistics shamelessly.

That's not to say that they're entirely worthless as a news source but they do have to be treated as a mouthpiece.
Male here.

Most professionals will no longer bother to read an article with a headline that uses insulting, sexist words.

If you worked for me and wrote that title for an article about something we were working on, you wouldn't work for me any more. Period.

Tech culture is moving away from childishness, and there were a large number of other words you could have used in your title.

Go learn some.
AT&T, Google duke it out over who causes Android upgrade delays
I agree with this. No doubt there are crappy jobs and crappy bosses that can make a situation unpleasant. But in my 24 year career I've noticed that some people are perpetually discontent in their job and they feel like there is something more important out there.

People who are actually doing "important" or "exciting" work I don't think have this attitude - they consider whatever they're working on to be important and exciting. I've found this to be true from executive positions at corporations making a ton of money, all the way down to flipping burgers on a grill for minimum wage. It isn't specific to software development.

If I felt I was being mistreated or forced to work unreasonable hours, that would be different story. Aside from that I really do believe that a job is largely what you make of it.
"only count votes from accounts older than 1 year"

I think pg indulged us in this experiment. IIRC the front page was pretty much the same.
Jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch (RedsnOw)
Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE
Italian Gov't Gives Up Trying To Regulate Copyright Online
Totally reasonable. YC chooses companies based on a 1 page app and a 10 minute interview. Their hit rate (in terms of good companies and good human beings) is astonishingly good, but there are bound to be some misses.
720p or 480p would be more realistic; the bandwidth costs for serving 1080p would chew through that $5 pretty quickly. (Assuming reasonable video bitrates) Besides, a very large chunk of consumers own machines that cannot handle 1080p.

Before you scream bloody murder, remember DVDs are only 480p.