skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it were that easy to abuse a credit card number on its own, then credit card fraud would be much, much higher than it is.

That's because the format of the credit card number is well known[1] and conforms to an ISO standard[2]. Numbers generated using publicly known issuer identifiers can then (usually) be checked for potential validity by running it through a standard checksum called the Luhn algorithm.[3] The Wikipedia article for the algorithm even helpfully provides a working Python script to do the work for you.

This is all well known stuff, and I seem to recall there being a joke file of "hacked" credit card numbers in the late 90s which I believe was just a list of numbers generated this way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_card_number

[2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
Not sure about that. The regex for variable identifiers shows that Ruby is alone on the island of languages that force a lowercase first character.
Sure, it wasn't meant to be snarky. I think a lot of folks simply have vastly different measurements for success. Some think it is binary meaning either total success or total failure. Others define multiple levels of success. Tie money and success together and the resulting discussions can be quite inflammatory.

I've seen a few folks chime in here already that one of the reasons they work for themselves is that for them freedom is greater than money. Not everyone agrees with that but wouldn't some personal and business interactions benefit from a bit more transparency of goals or stated missions? If you want to shoot for the stars, financially speaking or regarding market coverage, then tell me. That's great and I applaud your enthusiasm. If you are happy just providing reasonable service and expect to make a reasonable return then tell me too. At least that will allow me to make a somewhat informed decision about possibly interacting with you. Don't make us guess as most people are terrible gamblers.
Pooh-poohing is showing scorn or disdain.

Poo-pooing is what babies do in their diapers.

On second thought, maybe you did have it right ;)
It's Ballmer. I have been downvoted for the comment, but no one ever has given a strong reason as to why Ballmer is a bad CEO. He is not a very good one, that I agree, but he doesn't deserve hatred, does he?
Only if DreamWorks intends to start making cubist movies, I think.
Perhaps "complete" is not the right adjective -- something along the lines of "appropriate" might be more fitting. I was driving at "complete" with respect to the purpose of a given assignment.

I think that the article makes a strong case, which meshes with my personal experience as both student and teacher, that word count ranges aren't always a good way to convey the expected scope. If you're a regular contributor to a magazine, with a well-defined and professional style, then a target length can be a reasonable metric. For students in their formative years, such a metric can lead them astray.
Either that, or Google will loose money on this transaction.

Im suggesting, that Google has the intent to maximize profits.

So, if turns out bad for us, as consumers, it turns out bad for Google.
Got to admit: this quote seemed like a parody to me at first.
No. The Casimir force is a consequence of the fact that the lowest energy state of a field is not zero. However, because it is the lowest energy state, by definition you cannot extract any energy from it.
They can and do but that's what Sparrow were already doing successfully.

That said, everyone (including me) who is speculating a better revenue stream would have prevented them selling out in the first place is merely guessing ;-)
> The fact that the embassy, police and consulate seem to have ignored him is a very interesting bit of data. I don't know what it means.

Well for the embassy and the consulate it just means they were doing their jobs despite someone trying to waste their time. They have nothing to do with situations like this. He might as well have called his senator, NASA, the TSA or his personal hairstylist or whatever.

That he "did not have much luck" with the police is very telling, however. Because, if we are to believe the story in the article, the whole scene started when this guy assaulted him out of the blue trying to rip the glasses from his face. A lot of things happen afterwards (tearing up documents, another attempt at removing his glasses, and being pushed out of the door), but if that first thing is strictly true, there's no way he would have had "no luck" at the police.

That either means Paris police are actually not doing their job and ignored him as he tried to file a report for physical assault. OR much more likely: We're only hearing half the story, many other things took place before and after the first guy suddenly jumped him, the whole scene did not, in fact take place in complete silence, words were exchanged, maybe they asked some pointed questions and mr Mann lost his temper ... I don't know it's all speculation.

And even then, that's no reason for the police to ignore a report of physical assault. "An employee of the McDonalds on Champs-Élysées assaulted me and damaged my expensive glasses" is something that no police would ignore, regardless of which side "started it".

Really, the only explanation for that is that he didn't really try and that "without much luck" refers to the fact that the Paris police does not speak English over the phone.
Yep. If I offered Marco $500MM with the sole condition that I could take the Instapaper source code and live stream my burning it with a blowtorch, I think we can safely say he'd take the money.
Discuss HN: Crowdsourcing Open Car Maintience Startup Idea?
Ok, I'll spill one of my ideas here and see if it goes anywhere here. I wished I had the resources to build this but, meh. Hopefully someone interesting happens here. So here I go....

Have you ever been to a mechanic for routine maintenance? You'll notice they will say you'll need to do this or that or this for your car. Then you'll go to another mechanic and they'll say something completely different. So you then go to your car manufacturer website for the final authority. I mean, they did build it, right? Until you hit a wall.

Look at this for example: http://www.honda.com/ or http://www.bmw.com

Tell me, you need information on maintaining the $30,000 car you just bought. Where do you get it? Apparently you don't. Even Dell has a better site than this.

It's not unless you use your master search engine expertise to end up well, here http://techinfo.honda.com/Rjanisis/logon.asp?Region=US or here http://www.bmwtechinfo.com/.

So the car manufacturers are keeping their mouths shut. Where do you go next? I'm guessing Google and forums, right? Congratulations, by doing so, you entered Anecdotal Evidence Hell which ends up being just as bad as where you first started.

What I propose next is this. The creation of a car website with the equal authority of Wikipedia except for car ownership. It is a website where if a mechanic is saying you need a $600 car repair, you can quickly look it up on your smartphone and see if they are bluffing or might be on to something. For the fun of it, it will also allow you to compare costs of different car maintenance in your area as well as link to some DIY wiki page should you try to do it yourself. It will be the ultimate second opinion for your car.

So what do you guys think?
Haha, thanks. I'm going to keep it as-is merely for the entertainment value now.
> Or if you must, all of the digits in text form (328.06 Megabytes):
http://prime.isthe.com/no.index/chongo/merdigit/long-m431126...
Everybody considers their version of reality reality.
I would love to see this software on Github and to watch the organism "evolve" in different forks into different virtual organisms. A very meta-biological-software thing.
Eleven ways to comment to the end of the line; five of them used only by one language each.
Kata Mutiara Ramadhan
Google provides services in exchange for personal information. I see this as a fair trade considering the great quality of their services and the value of my input to their systems.

I would struggle to replace their services with products from other vendors.
Those comment sections are something else.
I completely agree, the notion of people using any software I write far exceeds the idea of getting paid for it.
It would start to get interesting if the simulation could predict results outside the scope of the input data. E.g. no-one tried putting the cell into environment X and using stimuli Y, see how well the simulation can predict the results.

This is the main point of interest for me personally.
Good call...and for those not necessarily using something underscore.js-like (thought almost always nice-to-have):

var report = ['name', 'dob'];
var person = { name: 'Andrew', dob: '1980/03/23' };

report.forEach(function(prop){
console.log(person[prop]);
});
Timesheet manager for freelancers
I agree that some kind of support should continue.

But in the case of an email app, focused on simplicity and ui design; not feature sets for power users, i dont think this expectation can reasonably consist of new features.

On the other hand: the value was in the ui design, not some dificult technological challenge. If there is actually a viable market here, chances are more than one player will follow in their footsteps. UI designs are easy to copy.

And until then, the kind of support one can reasonable expect, will continue: bug fixes.
Well, the actual quote is "the love of money is the root of all evil."

And there are two ways to get money. One is to create value. The other is to make other people's money yours.

The latter is very popular among people who love money. (Hello, Wall Street!) Which is part of how it's the root of evil.
I buy Claritin over the counter at a price of about $40 for 200 pills. It used to cost $80 for 30 pills, and was only available by prescription.

I don't think you understand economics. If Company A could sell this test for less than the tests available by Companies B and C, Company A will get more sales. If the product is much cheaper to manufacture, then they get better margins too.

Any company in the world would jump at a chance for higher volumes at higher margins.
Erm, no.

Talent acquisitions happens when you have big potential to compete and are willing to cash out early instead.

Otherwise it's just giving up and getting a job.
The imap engine is open source : http://www.etpan.org/
> Money doesn't make me happy, freedom does.

Guess what money buys?

The only problem (in this context) is that it has to be a fairly large amount of money, and all in one chunk. Seriously, if Facebook offered you $10MM for instadesk, under the condition that you'd have to work for them for one year, you'd turn that down? No way. You'd be silly not to take it, because you could put in your one year and then be free for (basically) ever.
He hardly came up with the content of this post--just copied it from a deleted SO question.
Building a Better Hackathon: Four Core Principles from LiveOps Hack Day
We recently held our eleventh LiveOps Hack Day event, and it was something special; a number of really interesting ideas came to life in a mere 24 hours thanks to the efforts of some very passionate and dedicated teams and individuals.
The Steam Summer Sale trap
I'm confused. In what way is Python not there? If one specifies, e.g. Python 2.7, what do you consider to be the short-comings?

I'd also like to know how you think numpy/scipy are short compared to Matlab. I've not run into their limitations yet.
Keep yourself in the press so they cant tag&bag you.
He sure knows how to do it.
Even if someone were impressively thoughtful about that, they'd still cough up arbitrary code execution on the web tier for most Rails / Django applications, by writing an appropriately serialized external command into the queuing system. That external command would be loading metasploit into /tmp and then gaining root with a local privilege escalation.

Thomas is right, though: if you lose the DB, you're forked.
More than that - apps like Sparrow move the goalposts actually. It was such a superior to experience to even the best native clients of the day that it widened the gap between web and native once again.
Those listening test results are impressive. I wonder how it performs at higher bitrates.
While reading this, the Matrix crossed my mind:

What if we're just living in a giant simulation? What level of computing power would it take to run the planet Earth?
It's really just a huge premium to get a team of people (this is important) who have built something similar to what you want to build (also important).

And you get the IP as well, which is nice. In some cases you're consolidating power and shutting down competitors. It makes a lot of sense in some situations.
You are not alone. http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html describes a way to write far more interesting essays.
Also relevant: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
Some parts are about language features, others are about implementations of algorithms in many languages.
A private company probably. If a public company were to do that, then I think the shareholders might not agree with your opinion.

But who knows, along comes Microsoft who can write off huge amounts like the $6.3 billion for aQuantive.
Great talk! The search for rewards (tribe, hunt, self) part goes by quickly, so I went looking for the slides:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/95259116/Behavior-Engineering-Inno...
My dad connects his Mac to the TV, but only uses it to watch pirated TV shows on YouTube...
Beyond merely the frequencies themselves, there's a ton of logistics involved in things like harmonic or other interference and propagation, all of this related to power. However, it is increasingly such that a lot of devices are software-based radios, so changes to a lot of existing technology could be just a firmware upgrade, if possible.
Indeed, I think that maybe companies this big have similar hiring strategies actually.
For a large-scale organism, how would you set the starting conditions? It seems unrealistic to not include some external influences from, e.g. air and diet. When you simulate a bigger organism, not only do you face a geometric increase in the number of cells but you also must account for externalities, I guess. I have no idea how you may do that on a mouse, let alone something as large as a human...
That's another type of talent acquisition, yes... There are many flavors.
I imagine this will alleviate some of the speed concerns: You can make most of your app native and the finnicky content parts PhoneGap.
Or more subtly cynical: it's a way to boost net wages without actually increasing salaries. This is a real problem in the PRC, where the enormous trade surplus has left an artificially depressed local currency. Workers are being paid much less than they should/would be in an unrestricted exchange environment. The whole point of the managed exchange rate is to keep salaries low of course (and thus preserve that trade surplus), so there's no doubt pressure on executives from boths sides: underpaid workers and government regulators trying to avoid a wage explosion.
> a welcome rest-bite

Was that supposed to be "respite"?
"Yoda Conditions" takes the cake. It's pretty interesting how a commutative operation such as `==` still has certain conventions. Then again, `==` isn't guaranteed to be commutative in Ruby, since it can be overridden (which I'm not a big fan of).
I am Batman, and so are you.
I don't know: from earlier researches, it seems Sparrow is based on LibEtPan which is open-source:

- http://www.etpan.org/libetpan/index.html
- https://twitter.com/sparrow/status/6396505883676672
Well, the comment above yours says that the whole thing is available: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272721 There's nothing to stop you from creating a Github project with all that information yourself.

In my experience, physics researchers are not familiar with GitHub or similar OSS hosting sites. The omission of a Github project is likely through ignorance or apathy, rather than disapproval. I'd be happy (delighted!) for you to take my own physics simulations and play with them, for example.
Kudos that they're the new team is getting user feedback. One thing that would be sad to loose is the API - it was one of the first back in 2007.
That's actually two ...and there's not much else.
I hate to say it, but if Sparrow had been picked up by Apple and the same thing had happened, I really don't think these posts would have been written (edit to be fair: though I'm certain a lot of people in the other camp would have complained about Apple shutting down a popular gmail client). This Google-is-the-enemy culture in the Mac world continues to amaze me.
Yes, I can't spell very well.
Batman Colorado Tribute Logo
Having worked with a few small businesses to setup their web presence, with and without a website, I think that they have a lot of good points.

Also, having a website and having good search ranking for a local business are not the same thing. With Google Places, Yelp, etc. you can maintain great listings with them without spending a single lev. ;-)

What is branding to a business that doesn't need a website? Iheir location is the brand, not a series of locations that need to be identified wherever you are.
It seems like a lot of people don't like this acquisition.

However, I think it will be much bigger outrage if they raised the price of their software or they started requiring some kind of subscription.
Yep. Otherwise it isn't free.

Burning money, by the way, doesn't actually destroy value. It just increases the value of all the other money in circulation. So in effect it's a gift to other money-holders.
TELL HN: How to get motivated college students to market for you
Well I already saved 5% then, which is a good start.
There are two parts. The meta part, which is "why is this deleted? should it have been deleted? can you reasonably expect anyone to learn from this question? what happens when a site is overrun with questions like this one?"

And then the content, which is a mirror of the deleted question.

Pick whichever part interests you.
I kind of like rest-bite. Phonetically similar, kind of means the same thing :)
The author's conclusion suggests that third party wallets are unnecessary because they purport to solve anonymization problems via this mixing protocol.

This statement is based on the assumption that third party wallets are only providing services related to these problems. This assumption is certifiably false.

To the average bitcoin user, the two most important functions provided by third party wallets today seem to be the capacity for exchange with conventional currencies, and the capacity for instantaneous settlement through hosted / pre-approved funds.

PS. Check out http://ifex-project.org/ for an attempt to abstract such services in to a free market describing their objective qualities (cost, timeliness, assets exchangeable, etc.) through protocol standardization.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
UserAgent sniffing and Graceful Degradation do not mesh.

This sniffing in particular will fail for Opera 6-8, therefore excluding perfectly capable browsers by a very shallow criterion.

The sniff serves no purpose, and is furthermore based upon a thoroughly disproved anti-pattern.
That story isn't remotely similar.

The woman did not in fact come out of nowhere. McDonald's wouldn't employ mentally ill people in one of the busiest and most famous streets of Paris. And your friend did in fact immediately call the Police and informed them about the assault situation--I'm not sure what Mr Mann did do, but "help me I just got assaulted" is in every "What & How in French" tourist language guide and no way that the police would ignore that. If I'm to take his story at face value he had "no luck contacting the police", which might as well mean the number was busy or something.
Yeah, sorry, probably a dumb comment. As somewhat of a sys admin newbie, it struck me as unfortunate that there wasn't something already available. I generally don't like installing things because I'm not sure what's being done and if I can easily and completely uninstall. But Brew is relatively safe?
Does anyone else think that taking photos with a tablet is a very clunky experience? I have absolutely no problem with my Nexus 7 having no rear facing camera as I doubt I'd ever use it.
Even games... the smart guys are building subscription models.

Right now mobile is going through the same discovery phase: a cool app comes out, sells a bunch... then what?
Sorry, it just seems your position assumes start-ups will fail and that's why they try to get acquired.

It's not hard to bootstrap. The hard part is coming to terms with what is actually sustainable. It takes a while to figure that out.
Sparrow being my favorite app... and Marco's post encouraged me to write a blog about the state of productivity apps in the App Store.

Excellent apps like Sparrow are damn expensive to write. If Apple cares about keeping companies like Sparrow alive (they should) they can do two things to help us.

1) Allow Apps to charge monthly/annual subscriptions.
2) Give ad/social marketing campaign data to devs so they know which of their efforts to attract users is working.

More details are on our blog post: http://blog.selligy.com/post/27652044305/apple-help-the-best...
Palo Alto Networks, Kayak do well after IPO
Worse than that, I can imagine a testing scenario where someone actually tries to authorize transactions against these numbers, expecting failure. If at some point a number succeeds, then you have just committed fraud.
That is what I thought also. That said, the GMail app on my Android phone is already fairly nice.
Contribution is a term that can be pinned down (I suggested using a sensitivity analysis above).

I don't see any particular justification for "What you need to look at is impact of decisions." Why is "impact of decisions" a more important criterion than "who does the work."
Who is arguing otherwise? We're not allowed to gripe without implying it was unfair?

I think it sucks, and as a user that bought the app strictly to support future progress I feel abandoned. I don't really give a shit if I have a "say" or not in their decisions. I don't like how it went down. Assuming they leave Google and launch another startup (which we all know they will) I certainly won't be supporting them in the future.

Just as I have no say in their progress, they have no say on how I choose to characterize their departure. I say, they took the money and ran. I prefer devs I can trust to stick around.
They can, and that was the prevailing business model for a long time in the industry.

The problem here is that it has little multiplicative power. Selling software is lucrative, but it will rarely make you Fuck-You-Money, and the tech industry nowadays is all about the Fuck-You-Money.

Recurring revenue model = incredible potential for revenue growth = justification for insane valuation = gigantic exit, which is what everyone is now looking for in the age of Facebook and Google.
I've seen Square used by vendors in NYC and DC, and my Miami friends use it to transfer money around.
Can't stand Yoda conditions, although I'm sure someone somewhere has an explanation why they're so good for me.
78 questions for founders
If you paid half that premium to the members of the team, you'd be much more likely to get them all to come over as a bloc than you are by purchasing the company. And you'd have the other half left over for hookers and blow.

Unless you value the goodwill or IP of the target company, it makes no sense to buy out the original investors of the target company.
Good idea but to differentiate yourself from becoming one of the all to familiar discussion forum would take some effort. Ofcourse, using facebook, twitter etc to crowdsource would help.
Nir, this was a great video. I took a lot of notes. Great stuff!