skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One issue that a service like this is going to run into relates to security. The fact that this application needs to be secure from local tampering and unauthorized betting is obvious -- what may not be as obvious to some readers is the location-based access control that needs to be built into legal gambling applications.

Several casinos in the United States (Nevada, from what I've seen) have already built and released apps to allow, for example, poker or sports betting from within the associated casino. Some of these also allow betting from wireless connections within the state of Nevada.

This is where the idea starts to get really sticky.

If you're allowed to gamble from certain geographic locations, but not entire regions, how do you enforce access control? GeoIP is somewhat reliable, but border towns can fall on either side of the coin.

Wireless networking is generally not super long-range, but the DEFCON wireless shootout proved that it's possible to sustain a wireless signal from hundreds of miles away, given the correct (in this case, desert) conditions.

And that's not even mentioning transport layer issues. Could I set up a VPN in England to use this Big Fish app and gamble pseudo-legally from my phone in the States? If I do so, who's liable? What about simple SOCKS proxies? Dedicated/colocated boxes in the "allowed" region?

I think that this is really cool technology, and I'm excited to see it succeed. That said, as a security guy, I can't help but wonder who would be liable in these edge cases.

And, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I'd love to know exactly what security precautions are in place to prevent unauthorized bets and tampering. For example, let's say you're using this phone in a Starbucks. Will an SSL error (I can only hope they're using SSL) prevent the connection occurring at all? Will it give the user a chance to accept the change? Can I just submit a spoofed request to transfer me money, or is there some sort of "two factor" key on the phone itself?

It's an interesting problem, and I'm sure Big Fish has come up with interesting solutions.
This is a better explanation and seems to be a better solution to the problem described in this article regarding installing git on CentOS using yum.

http://mattiasgeniar.be/2012/06/20/dependency-errors-for-git...
This is some seriously impressive work.

Here's the project page: all the work is open sourced :-D
http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/
My question is a bit rhetorical, and ridiculous, but I'll ask it anyway - is there any corresponding law in Australia that prohibits one from driving disguised or dressed in such a way that it is impossible to determine who is actually driving?
What I love about Venmo is that they took payment processing and aggressively went after a niche - 'spotting' or paying back a friend for cash - tailoring the app to that unique experience. Good job Venmo!
wow, pretty cool. I wonder though is there much use for it outside of aggregate sites like digg? Even for a site like reddit, all the content is already split up into categories by users. While this is really cool, I'm not really seeing much use for it. What are some problems that this will solve?
From 18 U.S.C. 794:

Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by inprisonment [...]

Clearly he is guilty of that.
One thing I think that is missing here is that there is a category of app developers which are implementing NEW technologies (Machine vision, AR etc...) which need tons of funding but doesn't necessarily lead to further projects in the way that a true small business does. If people took the poster's approach, then those will never get funded and that technology will either languish or come from bloatware companies. It is hard to get those up and running because it is so leading edge and is not repackaging a social/mobile/local/aggregation etc... service.

The whole VC world is looking for the billion dollar exit, which is entirely unsustainable and given it's history doesn't produce the requisite amount of major tech breakthroughs.
I don't know much about it, but refusing the ships in the harbor could be due to crazy laws/restrictions the US has about them. For example, watercraft are not allowed within a certain radius of aircraft carriers, and if they get too close they can be shot without penalty. I don't remember the measurement, but it was large. Could really mess up the flow of a working harbor.
Seriously though, the printout I have from March 29, 2006 of their Mixed Grill offer says "One-time payment of $499" and "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."

That constitutes a contract which they are clearly trying very hard to ignore. It seems so petty given their success, available resources, and the very manageable limited bandwidth and quota'd storage space us lifetime customers are allocated.
Yeah, this needs to be made entirely clear. App.net is a change in degree, trying to make another twitter, but better. Diaspora and identi.ca are changes in kind, trying to make something different to replace fb/twitter.
This part was really surprising to me - definitely one of those things you don't learn until you try it yourself:

>I soon learned that lots of investors liked to reschedule meetings at the last minute to meet with other seemingly “hotter” entrepreneurs. Having a full pipeline gave me leverage to say, “Well, we can move our meeting, but my schedule is so booked — I don’t know if our round will still be open by the rescheduled date.” This ultimately caused some investors to un-cancel our meetings.
The Swedish justice system might have been a better way, if they had not in the past demonstrated they are prepared to hand even asylum seekers over to the CIA to be shipped off to be tortured and if it wasn't for all the irregularities with this case so far.

Given that, I see no reason at all to trust that he would get a fair trial, if he'd get one at all.
I got mine from RS, preordered the week it went on sale. My cousin ordered his a month later and got it last month. 12 week shipping to the midwest. Crazy.
you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare)

Why? Why should an able-bodied person get free food, housing, and healthcare as a basic right?

Shouldn't an able-bodied person at least be required to have a job to obtain any of those things?

What possible societal benefit could such a policy have?
Is registration tag theft a problem where you live? That seems totally incredulous to me.
I'm intrigued by the FBI presence off US soil. I thought they were a domestic-only agency.
Square is really opening the door for credit processing in a lot of places that it wasn't practical before. I just went to a "Food Truck Friday" event at a local park and every single food truck was accepting credit cards via Square.
You are changed | Morning Bash
Clojure and Google App Engine
Do you have sources for this collusion by the Swedish police? I'm surprised I haven't heard about this by now.
Have you seen that guy competing with prosthetic legs? He completely blows your argument. He is at the bottom of the scale on "phisically disadvantaged".

Olympic athletes are not super heros. There are the exceptions, but 95% of them are "normal" people who just work really hard. Maybe you can't be the greatest sprinter ever (who knows?) but you could make it to the olympics. The brazilian judo gold winner was just a very poor girl with a wish 4 years ago.
There are plenty of costs though, operating global real time processing networks is not free.
this is going to cost small - mid cap merchants more money!
Does this include checksums of server-side code, or random interval testing?

I am not sure how deeply you can go into your vetting process publicly, but I'd love to know how you can prevent a shadier company from pulling a bait-and-switch to change the odds of their games after you've approved them as a trusted vendor.
Grrrr. Articles like this really irritate me. While he's sort of right, I think the whole article is somewhat misleading. In my experience, if you're the best at something, you'll probably be able to make a decent living doing it, unless it's underwater basket weaving levels of useless.

What people don't seem to understand is that passion and discipline are interlinked. Like any long-term relationship, your passions are going to have ups and downs, times where you don't want to push forward. Discipline and willpower are the only ways anyone can convert passion into marketable skill.

So yeah, you can do anything you want. You just have to be willing to be disciplined on top of being passionate.
Cool. Thanks for the info. I'm in the middle of developing a distributed scraping (HTML to JSON API conversion) for internal use at a company I'm working for and we plan on open-sourcing it eventually. However, before we do, we need to map out all the possible pathologies of such a system, which the two most concerning ones are greedy nodes and preventing usage of the system for the execution DDoS attacks. I'm going to look into "greedy routing".
This is already pretty common in the AppStore. I remember AstroApe talking about it at a meetup over a year ago. Since you can't push a new version without a review process, they often have server side settings for any new feature or game setting. So, for example, if they push a game release and see it is too hard for players, they can dial down the difficulty without having to wait a week for the review process.
Mobile Payments Startup Venmo Acquired By Braintree
The actual Broadcom port of 4.0? I haven't seen anywhere that it's actually available to acquire (which is too bad, because it would be quite useful for the project I'm working on).
Maybe because they care about Django, not Pyramid?
because when you go up and up the ladder, eventually you end up with 5-6 huge companies that control everything...not too surprising when the companies end up with similar pricing.

I mean take credit cards for example. You have Visa and Mastercard with the majority of the market. Then you have American Express and Discover that have a tiny portion.

That's it. And that's more or less worldwide.

You'd think since the coming of the internet, we'd have at least some competition in this space. Just imagine how much money there is, in join Mastercard/Visa as a top 3 credit card.

Square is a little lower down the chain, so the main thing they are giving here is passing through their huge savings down the pipeline. But even then it's not 100%.

Their basic pricing is 2.75%. So essentially you need to sell $10,000 worth of stuff before you start profiting off the $275/mo...and you only have until $20,000 before you go up to the regular 2.75% pricing.

And 2.75% is pretty high...for credit card processing.
No, we are not an Orwellian dystopia. But we have still helped CIA to deport and torture by proxy totally innocent innocent asylum seekers. If I were Assange I would not wish to gamble on that not happening again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
It's an interesting question. If I make a promise I know I can't fulfill, and you know I can't fulfill, is it still a promise? Is there a breach of trust when I end up not being able to fulfill it?

I'd say that yes, it's still a promise and a breach of trust even if everybody knows I don't really mean it. But I don't think there's a single obvious answer.
Through the use of elementary arithmetic, Square is charging every company the average expected transaction fees for the month, regardless of whether the actual transaction fees would be higher or lower than this. So half the companies save money while the other half lose money.

This is being spun as an innovation when, in reality, it's likely to net Square more revenue as there are probably more merchants between $0 - $10K than there are $10K - $21K.
Ask HN: Why am I willing to waste free money?
I'd like to get HN community thoughts / rationalization for the following behavior which I think is a cognitive bias.

1- I've found a unique way to get 'free' money - (I'll explain below, but it's really for tiny sums/not scalable)

2- With the money that I think I could get, I am completely willing to waste it - ie spend it in extravagant things, that I wouldn't otherwise do

Now I am sure this is a complete cognitive bias. The fact that I've 'earned' that money has nothing to do with how I decide to spend money in general.

For example, I am sure that if I got an increase in my traditional (ie not 'free') income in the same amount, I WOULDNT plan on spend it on the extravagant things.

It's almost like giving myself permission to do stupid things with that money because it is 'extra' or 'it doesn't count'

Any thoughts on how to rationalize this behavior? Any psychological theories?

PS: The 'free' money trick has to do with a trick to buy dollars in Argentina with Pesos using the 'official' exchange rate (which is highly controlled right now).
I'm not saying for a minute that my (the UK) government should. It would be a dreadful precedent and a misuse of the law and I'm glad to see them backing away from it this evening

But asylum was never meant for this either and while they shouldn't go in and get him I see no reason why they should grant him safe passage either.

I suspect that the next step may well be a legal challenge to the grant of immunity.
It's not free, it's just effectively free as long as you don't run up against Google Map's daily usage thresholds [1].

[1] http://www.techradar.com/us/news/applications/software/after...
The author fails to escape a nihilistic world view, but doesn't notice it. He is mistaking the action for the value of the action.

He speaks of these things too early in his life and I cringe at noticing this fact, being 24 myself.

"You can be anything you want to be" is simply true, because notice how it says "can" and not "will".

"You can be anything you want to be" is an invitation to self-creation and to not shutting the door on any dreams.

When you peel away one layer of life's veils, the next awaits you. Blog authors in general have a hard time adapting their stance and tone to this truth.
Love this product, but please, please, please get me a web version so I can build decks from a non-Apple device. I'm just not in deck-building mode on my phone or a little tablet.
The normal projected benefit for this kind of social model is that people don't have to work for sustenance. Instead, the whole range of human motivation can become a driving force.

It is assumed that you get more focused, happier and more committed working people, because they can choose their work based on whatever motivation drives them. That could be money, curiosity, laziness, skill, chance etc. It is also assumed that people would be willing to take greater risks, since they can be sure they a) won't become homeless and b) won't starve.

If society provides a safety net for everyone, you don't have to build your own while trying to do all of the above work on top of creating a baseline of security.
But it didn't actually have to take over, right? It just had to build up a decent user base. Then it could be linked with identi.ca, and they would be linked to whatever came along next . . .
The general arguments are that it's worth sacrificing some of the top end to reduce the severity of the bottom end, partly for ethical and partly for economic reasons. The hypothesis is that in successful Western societies, at least, the majority of value is not created by people who are working solely to avoid dying. And therefore there is no great loss if we remove fear of dying from the list of motivators to work.

The hope is that it can be administered in a way such that it will not greatly harm incentives to be successful either, merely dampen the curve by some percentage: so there are still rich and poor people, but the rich people maybe will only be 20x as rich as the poor instead of 200x. It's still much better to be successful than to be on welfare, both in terms of prestige and social standing, and material comfort (you can think of it as an order-preserving nonlinear mapping). And there are some arguments that it may help economically in some cases: by raising the floor of what bad outcomes look like, it becomes more plausible for individuals who don't have a family safety net to take risks.

As for what possible societal benefit, the Scandinavian societies are fairly nice places to live, partly as a result, though making like-for-like comparisons in economics is notoriously difficult. They certainly have lower levels of severe poverty, crime, homelessness, etc. But there are many books arguing for and against these views, so I'm not sure I can convince you in a comment.
> Sure, but so are the Ecuadors - Diplomatic Immunity wasn't set up to allow embassies to offer temporary asylum for non-national fugitives :-)

It might not have been, but there's plenty of precedent:

Jozsef Mindszenty stayed at the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zsef_Mindszenty#Confinem...
Don't worry, I'm going to make it my mission to come this year, going to be submitting a poster too, hopefully our team can get a chance to present at the poster session.
I suppose I can understand the argument. I know if/when we find life on another planet or moon (Europa, Titan, etc) that no living matter from Earth should touch that world, for fear of mutating / polluting it. But when it comes to others we either know have no life (Mercury, Jupiter, etc) or most likely don't (Venus, Mars, etc), what is the harm in human exploration or even terraforming attempts?

Even if humans "infected" the whole solar system, how can we spread from there? The Centauri system is the next closest star system [1], most likely without planets there, and is over 4ly away. That's roughly 25 trillion miles away. If we could travel at the same speed as New Horizons (36,373mph) [2], it would still take 77.5 thousand YEARS to get there. [3]

We are not gonna pollute the universe and its a silly to think ourselves capable of such a feat.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Near-star...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+travel+24.7+tri...
When milliseconds are not enough: performance.now()
Seconded. I've been using blue host for years with no troubles. Only downside is they keep lowering their rates, so I've got to call them every year or so to switch to the cheaper plan.
Cool! I'm doing a similar port of todo.sh [1] Except when I started I didn't know about Dojo...

So my next task is to refactor my todo.html into a framework based on Dojo Boilerplate [2]

I suggest starting with a bare Dojo Boilerplate that builds nicely, then adding your ikog code to the boilerplate project.

It's more difficult to build later, although you can go a long way with the online Dojo Web Builder [3]

[1] https://github.com/Leftium/todo.html

[2] https://github.com/Leftium/dojo-boilerplate

[3] http://dojotoolkit.org/blog/introducing-the-new-dojo-web-bui...
With REI, I think you need to re-buy the lifetime membership if you do not purchase anything at an REI store for an extended period of time (IIRC, it was a year)
In case anyone from square is reading this - you're page loads absolutely 0 content with JS disabled. Just some feedback, take it or leave it.
> "Want" is not picking a warm-fuzzy-inducing phrase off a list because you feel compelled to make a choice. "Want" is "get the he11 out of my way" compulsive drive which permeates your being.

To many faced with "you can be whatever you want" don't want to do anything; all they "want" is satisfaction of basic urges and amusements.

I think you're articulating perfectly the "delusions" that those in the "me" generation have.

There's a big difference between "wanting" to be, say, a famous singer because you want adoring fans, and "wanting" to be a famous singer because you truly love music to your very core, will sacrifice anything short of your own life to do it, and because you really have a unique point of view to share.

But, even for those in the latter camp, they have to have at least some sensitivity to their audience, and the market forces that enable them to pursue their passion as a livelihood.
Their behavior here is embarrassing and labels them as not trustworthy in the future. Pacta sunt servanda. The other side ending up potentially getting the better end of the deal, a nowhere near certain thing here from a 2004-6 perspective where their customers took significant risk taking the deal, is not an equitable reason to terminate the services.
This was an idea I was toying with for a while, and even started working on as a side project, so while I'm kind of bummed these guys have beaten me to the punch (and it looks like they did a nice job doing it), in a way it's sort of nice to see that other teams out there concur with my assessment that the current state of performance reviews is nothing short of awful.

I think the real question for something like this is: Can you convince management that its a big enough problem?

Ask any rank and file employee at a mid size company and they will tell you that evaluations are miserable, and borderline useless. When I mentioned some ideas for improving evaluations to my manager at my current job, the feedback I got was basically that the current system "wasn't great", (and basically everyone agreed), but it wasn't bad enough to justify the pain of switching to something else.

Convince the decision makers that bad evaluations are enough of a problem to justify switching, and then make it easy to do so, and reviews could actually (gasp!) become useful again.
there are actually a ton of costs for them.

They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI
Zenound Music Service - Need beta testers
Just released my new music service. If anyone would like to help test it please do so and give me some feed back =)
I'd think loads of $400 transactions from the same card to the same merchant would get both Square and your CC issuer's attention rather quickly.
Ahh upon further investigation I discovered that the catch is that businesses wishing to do over $21K in sales per month are ineligible.

So the product is only for businesses who meet all three of the following criteria:

1) small enough to not need over $21K per month of credit card charges

2) low enough chargeback risk that Square accepts/keeps them as a client

3) are currently paying more than $275 in fees per month with their current provider.

So bottom line this is a great marketing pitch but not really useful to the vast majority of companies in the real world. The odds of #2 and #3 both being true are basically nil for businesses small enough to meet #1.