skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never heard of this service before but it looks quite interesting. I wonder though, how feasible is something like this for paying membership dues in a small club, for example? Is there some other service does this a lot better?
Why You Must Buy A Noise-Cancelling Headset
PHP the language does suck. PHP's library sucks. PHP's overall environment though rocks and no one has even tried to ship a similar environment using a better designed language and library.

With PHP, one server can serve hundreds of websites only requiring a one time setup by an ISP. Those websites don't need to be aware of each other, don't need to worry about stepping on each other's toes. They run without extra tools or dev environments. No compilers, etc..

Compare to say python. For a python based server you need one server per website (virtual or otherwise). Even if you managed to use virtual servers you'd overload the physical server much earlier than with PHP. Same with node.js. node for 1 site beats PHP. Node for N sites on the same server loses to PHP. You can use CGI and use perl, ruby or python but then you'll kill your server as it has to spawn a process to run a page.

I've longed for a PHP like environment but with a better language and library. One that cheap ISPs can install and forget like they do with LAMP. AFAIK it doesn't exist.
While they likely have ulterior motives, the actual choice doesn't seem out of keeping with standard practice in these kinds of suits, which is to pick some charity that advocates against the alleged harms being sued over. For example, if the alleged wrong involves drunk-driving, then a donation to MADD might be part of the settlement; or if it involves environmental damages, a donation to some environmentalist organization.

Since the alleged wrong being settled here involves privacy violations, isn't the EFF one of the more obvious choices? They, the ACLU, and EPIC seem to be the main organizations advocating on these kinds of privacy issues.
Here's Why People Are Backing App.net
I worked on something with credit card processing a few years ago. As I remember, it doesn't really matter if the details hit your server, but the point is you absolutely can not save them.

No putting them in a DB, no putting the in a log file (not even the last four or something like that), nothing. So if your form takes the numbers in, you make an API call, and then you blank them in memory you were OK.

If you put them in the user's session, you were in trouble.

It's all insanely complicated, and the only good solution is "don't do it." There's a good reason people use things like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net's CIM (where they store it and certify that they are PCI compliant).
Ask HN: What Happened to LikeALittle (lal.com)?
Publicly known: The founders created LikeALittle, completed YC, and then a little while later launched another product, Circle. At some point they seem to have launched one or more new products at hawthornelabs.com.

Though lal.com has dropped in traffic recently, one would expect this as normal behavior during summer months.

LaL was abruptly shut down about 3 weeks ago.

Personally I was very enamored with LaL, and would dream of coming up with something that was that popular. I'm curious to hear more about how they decided to pivot away from a successful, funded project to focus on one (or more) other ideas.
Supporting piracy is supporting an alternative. Piracy along with donating directly to the artist seems to be a great solution for many consumers that I know personally.

> Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Theft is the removal of ownership. It's not stealing, it's copying.
It does, but since browsers have no defined API for this Modernizr deals with quite a few false positives. Putting the onus on browsers to accurately describe what features are present is good.

Plus it's always a good thing to kill off javascript libraries; we don't want to always keep sending JS down the wire when the platform should have this stuff by default.
They are (potentially) losing revenue.
Farther, Faster: The bleeding-edge tech used by Olympic athletes
Tribler was one of the services I had in mind, though I couldn't remember its name and I have limited access to search for such things where I work.

But, yes, thanks for the share and the response.

I also remember reading about something called CryptoSphere on HN a week back. While it's also still in development and not currently useable, my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established (e.g. FreeNet, TOR, etc). Now it's a matter of finding creative ways to use these technologies to serve P2P's purposes.

It's not that far off, and with takedowns like these becoming more common I think it will only serve to catalyze next-gen development. Five years is an eternity in technology. The iPhone just turned 5, for instance. I can barely remember how I lived before I had a smart phone.
I wish Clojure could make itself more accessible to new programmers. For example, installing Leiningen:

1. Download the lein script
2. Place it on your $PATH (eg. ~/bin)
3. Set it to be executable. (chmod a+x ~/bin/lein)

Step number one takes you text you need to copy and paste into a text editor, but what do you save the file as? A new programmer doesn't know what his/her $PATH is, and you can't simply cd ~/bin. And for the last step, you need to save the file as lein, which you might not have done.
I want to contrast this with my experience learning guitar (classical guitar).

I started as an adult student, ~25, struggling to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I mean... really struggling. I didn't have any musical education prior to deciding to learn. Playing "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder in 4th grade was the extent of my experience.

And I went to my first recital, surrounded by midget 12 year olds who had been playing for 5 years, and me sounding terrible.

And then I understood.

The race is with yourself, not with others. I'm as good as I am due to the work I've put in, but not yet as good as I can be. And this applies equally on all my endeavors (as well as it applies to those 12 year olds), it was just most apparent when I first started studying music.

It's very humbling to be schooled by a 12 year old. It takes a lot of restraint to take that extra step and be able to learn from them. Just last week I had a guitar lesson from a 16 year old. Half my age, but with twice my experience playing guitar. And I set aside my ego and I learned what I could, and I've set aside my XBox and am putting in the time to practice what he's suggesting for me to learn.

If you haven't tried learning an instrument it's a rewarding challenge and there's a lot you can learn that you can apply to other areas of your life.
Infringement is not theft. Even narrowly legally, and certainly not morally or ethically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_%28198...

However, strict ideas of "Intellectual Property" can constitute suppression of freedom of speech. That's a principle we can all get behind. "Intellectual Property" is at least moderately un-American.
Lots of businesses rely on their email newsletters: Groupon / Living Social, Daily Worth, Tasting Table, etc.
I believe you can go the Android SDK route on *nix
Show HN:  dailykata
X11? Do I need that for my Mac to get on Facebook?
Speaker list for DataGotham conference
I actually dislike GPL as well. There's a reason why BSD-style licenses have done more for open source in the last decade than GPL. What gives you the impression GPL is well-liked by pirates?
X11 used to be included on install disks (possibly as an "extra") but it wasn't installed by default, IIRC.
Except that XQuartz in the past installed itself to various system paths on Mac OS X. When you "upgrade" the OS the installer moves everything installed out of the way and basically does a clean install of the OS. At the end it copies over everything in paths that it doesn't control (mainly /Users, /usr/local, (/usr/<everything else> gets wiped), /Applications, /opt and others). Anything that is core to the OS will basically be in a clean install state.

For example, I've written some custom device drives for OS X that were installed in the system path (being kexts and all), those were removed. They weren't specifically compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, so it makes sense.
1. As mentioned by other commenters, radiation hardening takes several years.

2. The government procurement bureaucracy takes some time.

3. Obviously the rover has to be designed, built, and extensively tested on the ground. Possibly through several iterations depending on the results of the tests. I'm guessing since the rover has to be mostly software-driven due to lightspeed delay, software is a dependency of basically everything the rover does, and since the computing hardware is obviously a dependency of software, it'd almost have to selected very early in the mission development.

4. Getting stuff to Mars is really expensive. I imagine that most of the expenses are R&D for radiation hardening and fitting within the overall volume/weight/power budget. So the amount of memory for example is probably just what's needed to get the job done.

5. To me, 256 MB seems like an enormous amount of memory for an embedded system. Most of the memory usage of everyday computers is due to all the graphics and multitasking. (Think about the sheer number of scripts and images in a typical webpage, times the number of tabs you need to open to consume all your memory.) All of NASA's fancy GUI's like the simulation they showed during landing are on ground computers, not on the rover.

All in all, I thought the computer was enormously powerful compared to previous space missions.
No shit you want to pay 1/5th of the current cost. Everyone wants to pay 1/5th the current cost of everything, all the time. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Things like music are not priced according to how much it costs to deliver to you.
Because good editors and typesetters cost money, just like good programmers and designers.

The marginal cost of printing a book is in the pennies because the cost is spread out over millions of books (across multiple titles). Materials only add a dollar or two more in costs. The majority of the cost of a book is in fixed costs prior to printing, i.e., proofreading.

Moreover, distribution costs real money (unless you also own the pipes).
Dang, sinister plan revealed: I am in fact a sleeper agent sent back from 2016 to 2006 with the instructions to build the most unlikely business possible, gather 75k karma, and then pave the way for my shadowy masters to get on HN.

Seriously: they're on my blog because of the reasons in the post. My blog's on HN because, well, that's a complicated topic but suffice it to say that it happens with a fair degree of regularity.
For what it's worth, we don't have a PR company or marketing department currently =).

We try not to post on HN unless we actually think people on HN will like the content (and we've argued internally before and decided not to post stuff to HN because it didn't seem useful enough).
>For example, if you're in the CLR or the JVM already, there's a lot of reason not to move.

Yes, it seems economic. After investing time in the larger and more enterprise-focused ecosystems, you'll probably have less incentives to try or move to something else.

That's not implying, that Python and Ruby don't have great ecosystems themselves.
I think he means it resembles iPad's keyboard to the unexperienced eyes[1]: light keys on a gray background, "blue" glow on shift key, essentially the same (though much uglier) graphic for 'delete' key and placing '!' on top of ',' just like iPad's (they have a number row at top; why didn't they add it to '1' key like all other keyboards on the planet have done for the past 4 decades? and they have lots of keys on that gigantic keyboard, why didn't they add the much-used quotation marks and went with just adding '?' and '!'?).

[1]: experienced eyes will spot readily that it's much uglier, and waaay less polished.
Everything Will Be Connected, Everything Will Be Hacked
> That's the problem. You're stuck thinking that a download == a lost sale

No, no I'm not. Nobody believes a download is a lost sale, it's certain that there is crossover between people that would buy if they couldn't pirate but there is no way that every illegal download is a lost sale.

My point is that if you (a label, a musician) expect 100,000 people to listen to a song then you should be able to expect that 100,000 people will acquire that listen through means that you support? Either a download or a stream or any other "legitimate" method. If a label or artist only cared about securing the maximum number of listens then they would make the song free, but (most) choose not to, which would indicate they want every listen to be a paid listen (or through an official streaming system), correct?

> A huge percentage of pirates not only had no intention on purchasing, but no money to purchase with. Not that they're necessarily entitled to the music, but the money you want to pretend is being lost just doesn't exist. What use is telling these people not to be so "selfish"? How is that a solution?

I'm not pretending money is disappearing and then 100,000 illegal downloads = $100,000 in lost revenue. I'm stating that if an artist or label publishes a song online and they decide it will cost $1 to download then they should be able to expect 100,000 downloads to net them $100,000 in revenue. If 100,000 downloads means only net $5000 in revenue (95,000 illegal downloads, 5000 legitimate) then that is unreasonable and they should be able to consider that "bad", and make efforts to stop that (through shutting down of illegal download services).

> Piracy is a systemic problem due to copyright's flaws, not the other way around. You didn't provide a useful solution for any of this.

I don't have any solutions, but that doesn't justify piracy and make it acceptable, or something that should be allowed. Piracy should be illegal.
I thought he was going to say, "sell your house, now!"
The ethernet port has been removed ...

Edit: Oh ... got it now. Shit that was a woosh
While that seems unlikely , there is definitely a strong constituent of people who would applaud it as a "bold and forward thinking move", "lol, who uses email anymore?"
You want Apple to drop vi from Mac? Pathetic
It seems to me that Clojure exists on the idealogical extreme opposite of Haskell (standing next to it's little buddy Scala).

How did you go from one extreme to the other and pick it as your 'primary' language.

Isn't it like saying "I really like President Obama, but my favorite politician is Rick Santorum".
Hype-kill: Graphene is awesome, but a very long way from replacing silicon
My hope is that we can do some really good things to help two of the biggest complaints here: Tooling and Documentation.

On the tooling side, the next version of the Light Table Playground will be even more friendly than the previous one and seeks to make it a one click experience to go from nothing to a complete Clojure env. It's also getting tutorial content and a few other things that should make it far easier for people just starting out.

In terms of the documentation and discovery problem, I think we just need to push documentation into the community's culture and I imagine the best way to do that would be to make tools that make beautiful documentation easy. We have codox for the generation of API docs, but nothing for longer form documentation and I haven't seen an environment that really embraces both the consumption and creation of docs - this is a problem I really want to see tackled in Light Table and I think there are some very cool potential solutions.
https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-decentralized-and-uncenso...
To make sure there isn't confusion here, having card details go through your server, even if you aren't saving them, still can lead to certain PCI compliance burdens (e.g. you may need to get an audit from a PCI auditor verifying this).

Having the card never go to your server is the best way to make sure you are PCI compliant, as you mention.
> One thing I've been seeing recently is that some implementations using Stripe DO have the CC details hitting their server. The most common case being when Javascript is disabled the form posts to the website because the developer didn't design with graceful degradation, a dangerous mistake when mixed with credit card numbers.

Only if you do it wrong. From the Stripe docs: "The only thing to note is how input fields representing sensitive card data (number, CVC, expiration month and year) do not have a 'name' attribute. This prevents them from hitting your server when the form is submitted."

> It doesn't appear to be a problem for you (your payment page for CC info doesn't gracefully degrade with JS disabled and is impassible - you might want to fix that!) but I've seen it on other sites, and it's especially a problem when other sites don't use SSL as a fail safe for this sort of case which I have also seen.

Again, SSL is covered by the docs. Stripe says you need it. Not that you should consider it, or that it's a bonus, but that you need it. https://stripe.com/help/ssl
Larger photo from NASA here, http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/673727main_PIA15980-full_...
Check out RailsApps - https://github.com/RailsApps and http://railsapps.github.com/. It's a bunch of open source Rails 3.2 example apps and tutorials. I found it extremely useful when building my first applications.
This is wrong. You still need to be PCI compliant even if you don't persist the CC data. There are a few bullet points you don't need to worry about in that case, but the vast majority still apply if the system has anything to do with credit cards (such as the details hitting your server).
How to 'level up' in Ruby on Rails app development?
inspired by Uncle Bob's "The Clean Coder" book where he says he do warmup katas, i've done this site. Every day dailykata.net will challenge you with a different exercise and programming language.
That's what a company I worked with did, and I thought it was a bad decision.

The per-transaction fees are lower, but there is a monthly (or yearly) cost. The API is big because it covers so many cases that you probably won't use.

Plus there are fees. Sure, they'll let you do e-checks (every customer wants those, right?), but that's a fee. Return? That's a fee. Chargeback? Fee. Process transactions in real-time instead of a batch at the end of the day? Fee. Log into the web interface? It's free, but it kinda slow and hard to use so you'll waste far more time that you would expect.

If you've got a business that does a lot of sales, or sales of very hight dollar items, that kind of thing can really add up. But if your sales are smaller or much more sporadic then the time investment and all the little fees may end up making Stripe cheaper. Sometime an extra 1% more than pays you back in lack of stress.

Also, for what it's worth, I remember PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon all being roughly the same as Stripe.
The goal is that with the next couple releases of the Light Table playground, you'll get the "I just double click this" kind of experience. You won't have to know what lein is, it'll be somewhat of an implementation detail.
Binary search eliminates branch misprediction
Can't they deny all requests from non HTTPS pages then?
I work in the same co-working facility as an education-based startup that switched from using PayPal(where user gets redirected to PayPal) to Stripe (completely branded checkout) and their conversion rates increased 40% overnight and have stayed at those levels. After digging into their API, we're actually building our new company, MoonClerk, on top of Stripe's API. We'll basically be an abstraction layer on top of Stripe so that non-developers can use it and implement it on their site, with a focus on recurring payments (even though we do one-time payments). We really want to allow non-developers the ability to use Stripe.
KDE ships version 4.8.5 of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
> Does there need to be? People are taking something for free, something someone is trying to sell and does not want to be taken for free. Surely that is enough for illegal sharing of music to be considered bad?

It doesn't seem like enough to me. Failing to conform to other people's personal preferences is not, in and of itself, bad. Some artists might prefer that their music only be played in appropriately serious and contemplative situations, but I wouldn't consider you a bad person for playing their stuff as background music while you clean — primarily because it doesn't hurt anyone.

The question of injury is very central to many people's ideas of morality. Other people's idiosyncrasies are less likely to weigh heavily in the estimation.
> "High-speed rail is going to break CA financially." When I hear this, I wonder what the west would be like if people had said the same of all the infrastructure we rely on in the west today.

There are several huge differences between then and now.

The big one is that that infrastructure exists. High speed rail can't make a 10x difference on any factor. That infrastructure did, usually on multiple factors.

Another is that that infrastructure was relatively cheap. We didn't "bet the economy" on it. CA's high-speed rail is betting CA's economy. (Govt then was roughly 3% of GDP. If it had failed, no big deal. That's not true now.)

A related factor is that we didn't have as much govt debt then as now.

> High speed rail may not be as critical as water, but it's ridiculous to think we can't build a modern railroad today.

High speed rail isn't at all critical in CA or across the US.

> If we can't build a modern railroad today then we're already broken.

HSR is technically possible, but that doesn't imply that it's a good idea.

> And if we're already broken, what do we have to lose?

That's insane.

I note that you didn't address freight....
Yeah you are right here that it is still possible for our users to mess things up. We do things to try to keep merchants from accidentally sending card numbers to their server (e.g. the default example form makes this hard to do, and most people simply copy and paste this form). It's an explicit decision we've made, though, to leave control in our users' hands as many people seem to like the flexibility to have their checkout experience stay on their site and be designed by them. But we think about where to draw the lines here a decent amount.
Ah, thanks. Like I said, I wasn't sure. We made sure we were PCI compliant, but I wasn't in charge of that by any means.
How to Re-enable Disabled Services and Windows Features After Virus Attacks
Well call it trustbusting if you want.
Choosing a single primary language does work because it's an informal web survey about a programming language. It's not a contract or a test of loyalty/zealotry. Your position here seems like getting upset when asked what your favorite sandwich is.
>"Let’s face it, the ritual of dressing in special attire, wearing colors signifying a tribal-like affiliation, and paying top dollar for the right to watch people we’ve never met play a game for our amusement, is quite frankly, weird."

People use special attire for all sorts of rituals, from church attendance to clubbing. Tribalism is normal...or rather one's tribalism appears normal while another person's may appear weird - trousers are not inherently superior to a kilt or loincloth, except that they won't get one fired from their job at the bank (and how weird is working in a bank in terms of human history?).
Can someone tell me where I could, as a hobbyist, participate in some hackathons?

I have tried searching and most events seem to be specifically for intra-company, or entrepreneurs vying for some piece of a pie.