skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The net-net is _never_ give your credit card to anyone who suggests they will charge you, unless you have full control over that relationship.

huh. most people don't feel this way. I have setup my company to require action from the customer if they want to pay me; all the feedback I've gotten from this has been negative. People care more about the convenience of recurring payments than they care about security.

I use paypal, which doesn't really support pull billing; I send the customer a bill, and they pay it or they don't. Upon request, I setup paypal recurring payments, which seems to be fairly popular.

I do this in part 'cause I feel that pull billing (e.g. "charge 'em and hope they forgot to cancel") is a little scummy, but mostly because my billing system is a mess, and this way, the worst thing that could happen is that I end up asking people for more money than I should; no money is automatically moved, protecting me from that particular embarrassment.
That's why I use a one time use credit card number with these things. If I want to stop the charges I just click "close number" and they are blocked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Payment_Number
It's quite simple. If you sue your competition to win - you will lose because the reason for your success is not protecting your IP rights (which can and will be abused as soon as you succeed - relentlessly) - but by making new IP.

Disney rocks not because of Mickey Mouse - it rocks because of Pixar.

Google rocks not because of PageRank - but because of pushing the edge of search and AI.

Tesla rocks not because of the Roadster - but because of the cars yet to come.

What you've done in the past means nothing in intellectual pursuits - it's what you are going to do that matters.

The only places Apple can enter now are to continue trying to grow PC market share and Virtual Reality. Google does both better.
After reading this, I'm reminded of a famous Ben Franklin quote, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

DRM and walled gardens are often said to reduce malware and provide safer computing, but at what cost? As technologists, we can change this and have a say. I'm concerned though that it may already be too late.
True, but at the very least, this shows that at the time the iPhone was released (or just before), many of the concepts were "obvious".
This is very convenient, Google Accounts, Amazon AWS[1], SSH[2], and Dropbox, all from one simple app.

If Google Authenticator allowed to change the order of accounts without removing and readding them, I would have absolutely nothing to complain about.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/mfa/faqs/

[2] http://askubuntu.com/questions/159727/how-can-i-use-a-passco...
I'm sure the gym is trying to screw him. They make money when you don't show up, not when you do. That's why you read the contract before signing it, and negotiate it to something less shady. Or take your business elsewhere.

Like I said in another reply, you mail the Attorney General's office so that if there's a pattern of screwing customers, the state can take appropriate action.
Getting your suits tailored is essential, but please never do it with jeans. The key to jeans it to get them a bit smaller than is comfortable as they will loosen over time. As GQ (or esquire?) said about John Kerry's style choices during the 2004 presidential election season: never trust a man with tailored jeans.
Why your smart device can’t get WiFi in the home team’s stadium
It's available to all users. But since it's experimental, you have to go here to enable it:

http://www.dropbox.com/try_twofactor

Then it will appear under Security.
I'm not sure what the point is?

whitehouse.gov is also a GOVERNMENT website that looks good.
This is neat but only requires a phone, there's no second factor.
If you are an Arrested Fan (although not highly rated on Netflix for some reason) the first season of "Children's Hospital" is hilarious.
Paypal recurring payments are much easier to cancel than credit card recurring payments.
How entering 6 digits hard for users?
Hm, I wouldn't be so sure... most "normal" people out there who don't read HN every day can't really tell the difference between an ipad and a galaxy tablet. My mom, for example, refers to both tablets as an ipad. She uses an ipad to read her news sites but when she tried to use my galaxy tab, she was confused there was no browser on there. I've experienced a similar thing on the train as well, people would point at my 10.1 tab and ask if that's the new ipad... tech people can sniff out brands from a mile away. You may laugh, but it's a different world out there. Back when I owned a motorola razr, I had people ask me if my phone was a new nokia model... nokia didn't even make anything remotely similar to the razr. These people have no concept of product names, they refer to tablets as ipads and phones as nokia.
I'm willing to be that somewhere in your cardholder agreement you give the bank the right to pay recurring charges on your behalf--as if you gave them the ability to act as your agent. An ability that apparently according to recent legislation you can't rescind merely by cancelling your card.
FTA - "I've learned that the adage about innovation is true — that at first, people say your idea is absurd, then they say it was obvious all along, and then they say it was their idea to begin with."
Right now the second factor can be the PIN code that you set up for your phone. Soon we'll add an optional intelligent PIN option for the app itself.
Doesnt quite work in Safari 6 Mountain Lion.

Oh, yes it does, it just needs about a minute to load using my 50mb connection. It is probably the parallax script.

Site looks good, but works poorly. Not well designed
This is also the case in the UK. Property price here is a trivial expression of the supply/demand function. Yet no one from any of the political parties will suggest the obvious: build. Those with £1MM+ houses (which includes all our politicians) seem to be against this (for some reason).
You have to log in with your username and password first and then you have to enter another password (those digits that you're talking about). With Rublon you just scan a Rublon Code and that's it.
> I'm surprised by the number of comments like this.

The sentiment is borne out by the facts when you dig a little deeper. Just calling document.getElementById without using the return value does not actually dig into the DOM and find the element according to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436438
Have you tried it without Javascript?
Wow - I disagree that this is well designed. It also looks half finished (lot of links are dead, many others are unclickable when they should be) - I'm guessing this is a work in progress from an agency?
Unless they're using the card online, when they only need my address (which isn't the hardest information to uncover).
Oh wow. This is amazing news. When we got Netflix in the uk we randomly put on Arrested Development without knowing what it was. We watched it back to back and were a little depressed to get to the end of it.

I'm so happy to hear that Netflix are bringing it back. It ushers in an interesting new era in tv.
there are a few pieces of unclaimed (or disputed) land left: the largest patch by far is: Marie Byrd Land ( a part of west Antarctica). because of the hostile conditions there you might be better off with with "seastanding".
Even if it is multiuser, they're not installed with any special privileges. You can install java in your home directory.

I can't wait for the day when people get their wish, and 50% of the installed browser base will run random python scripts off the web.
Oddly enough, the high-graphic Apple-like website gives it a `less serious` feel. Apple-like websites primarily try to sell something, whereas a government website's more or less sole purpose is to present information.

An example of website that presents information well is Wikipedia (but it could do better.) Essentially, the driving factors in a website like this should be: 1) Is the information well-organized? 2) Is it easy to find? 3) Is it well presented?

However this website seems to put an undue emphasis on presentation and graphics (with the large background picture of the police men and two vehicles taking up much of the page.) Compare this with Wikipedia, where snippets of information, news highlights and other interesting tidbits of information from their vast encyclopedia populate the front page. Milwaukee police does do that in their second page, but too much of the index page contains fancy ad-like imagery. To me, it looks like they're trying to raise the public opinion of the department.
Sed&awk&grep&vim. shirt
Design might look a bit familiar. If the shirt reaches its goal, all profit goes to charity. (Taking suggestions. Is there a charity that teaches underprivileged kids web programming?)
Interestingly the one time I had a chargeback dispute with an Amex customer--even though I won the dispute (I had clear evidence--video, signatures etc...)--Amex still credited both my account and the customer's for the full amount.
You should set the node property instead (e.g. standard textContent or innerText). It will work everywhere.
Is this really a gov site? Looks like a local police blogger. The about page doesn't load for me so I can't be sure.
That is why companies are allowed to appeal the veredict (and presumably will do so), but the whole "jury trials are unfair" thing is not new and definitely affects all kind of cases, not just technology companies, and I don't think we will get a insightful answer on this subject on this forums (experts in law have been debating this issue for years).

As of now, this is the veredict, but its not game over for Samsung. If they think they have a case and they've been wronged, they should appeal and use this quotes as proof of wrongdoing by the jury. Let the judges decide on it, that's what they are for.
Design might look a bit familiar. If the shirt reaches its goal, all profit goes to charity. (Taking suggestions. Is there a charity that teaches underprivileged kids web programming?)
Put a truecrypt volume in your DropBox. Why rely on someone else to do the encryption?
The Sidekiq Experiment, Part I
Ask HN: What are your side projects?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

In a world where I'd already watched Game of Thrones season 2 via torrent I'd still have consumed some of the other entertainments that I actually did, but less of them.
tl;dr

Once Apple loses and Android (or "open platforms", whatever that means) win the general purpose computing war, and every technology illiterate device owner is telling their phone, computer, tablet boot loaders what software sources they trust (Ubuntu, ACLU, EFF, and Wikileaks, natch), we still have a problem.

Computers are everywhere, from vending machines to subway turnstiles, to pacemakers, and that users are going to be easily oppressed by owners' restrictions. Thus we need user-overrides to be able to overcome this oppression. This is all about the effectiveness of decentralized decision making and thus was supported by both Hayek and Marx for opposite reasons. Thus libertarians shouldn't whine about property rights violations. In fact they should support it, because it's just a natural extension of why the "general purpose computing war" was won in favour of openness, it was all about regulation (by Apple, or the Government) vs. owner's property rights to run what they want on their computers. And property rights will win (we presume).

(Insert lots of debatable philosophical asides, historical allegories, and modern anecdotes to justify this thesis.)

In summary, defeating the forces of regulation (:hint: Apple :hint:) is what I call the "war" on general purpose computers, and this war is all about defending owner's rights to run what they want on their computers. And though I don't explicitly say it will be won by the forces of openness, it's completely obvious that the world will determine that regulating computers is the wrong way to solve problems and we'll all be happily using trusted bootloaders that only run owners' approved code (not what Apple, or the government, wants us to run).

The following war after THAT one is won, will be a "civil war" for users rights... and that I can't solve. "Agreeing to disagree on this one isn't good enough. We need to start thinking now about the principles we'll apply when the day comes. If we don't start now, it'll be too late."

[end synopsis]

I can't quite respond to this yet... words fail me.

edit: Rewording on tl;dr
The Apple Tax, Part II
They also took the multi-button mouse and made it (arguably) better.
Your point seem to imply that innovation was required, mine that it was trivial.
<3u2
yes. In fact, when they were first rolled out, it was difficult for me to cancel them for the customer. (this has been fixed; the recurring payments functionality is pretty good now. But it was crap when it came out.) but I have far more customers asking for some kind of recurring payments that /refuse/ the paypal recurring payments than customers that take the paypal recurring payments. Hell, I have more customers that have their bank send me a paper check every month than I have on paypal recurring payments.

The feedback I get is that if I offered recurring credit card payments, most of my customers would be using them; rather than the, say, one percent that uses paypal recurring payments and five percent that uses their bank to send me a check automatically.
I don't think you have any understanding on the meaning of patent infringement, or unethical behaviour because you're misunderstanding the former for the latter.

Resemblance is not illegal as long as it is not used to mislead someone into buying the product. No one is going to be misled into buying a Samsung instead of an iPhone, by the charger/headphones or even the phone itself. So resemblance is meaningless in this case.

The rounded corners complaint is so ludicrous it baffles cognitive function. Early blackberries and other full-keyboard phones resembled the same form factor as current smart phones including the iPhone. Notably rectangular with rounded edges.

The large screen with minimal buttons was so evident it was going to happen that it was in star trek decades before the normal person realized it would even be possible. Yet, I used an LCD graphics tablet as a touch screen tablet years before the iPhone or iPod touch were released. Funnily enough that graphic tab had a large screen and one button on the front.

Claim infringement and samsungs wrong doing all you want, but the precursors to the iPhone were laying around everywhere. Apple was just the first to put them together.

Apple has faired far better than most other technology companies introducing new devices by having a loyal user base of early adopters and advocates. I don't know a single apple fanboy who doesn't want to be first to get a brand new product, and want to talk my ear off about it.

Being biggest does not make you the first to design something, nor does it make you right.

I don't even know what my iPhone looks like because it's been in an otterbox since I got it due to my working outside. Given the iPhones ridiculous sales figures for cases and the purposeful design of the phones to support snap-on cases, the design is a completely moot point. Over half of people I see with an iPhone have a case on it, in fact probably more than half.
If they were so "obvious", why hadn't someone created something similar to iPhone's interface? I owned the Nokia 770 -- a great internet tablet for it's time. I even hack soldered a wifi extension dongle to it so I could get better signal, but the browser on that thing was just horrible.

What other obvious ideas are out there right now that some company will make billions off of? There's a few right under your nose that you'll probably say is "obvious" 10 years from now. I guess that's why they say hindsight is 20/20.
I truly doubt that the calculation is correct. Otoh, why not build a web site were you can save babies with a mouseclick. Just donate 1000$ and bing, you saved a baby?
The source code is available on Github: https://github.com/joaocolombo/textdown :D
Is it the JVM throwing incomprehensible stack traces?

Or is it the android SDK throwing slightly less but still uselss stack traces?

I often see the later, which is just poor error/exception handling by the developers. I very rarely (sometimes, but not enough to get annoyed) see the JVM printing out stack traces.
I don't follow your point. If I'm getting screwed shouldn't I be able to prevent them from automatically billing me (in addition to mailing my attorney general, which seems does not seem likely to resolve the situation in the short-term)? Why can't I cancel a recurring billing relationship just like I can cancel a check?
sure, but the benefits of using C# with MonoTouch over Objective-C is not because you don't have to learn Objective-C but that it can be a more productive environment to write the bulk of your code.
I just watched the whole thing. I liked how Cory Doctorow acknowledged that some of these problems he didn't know the answers to but he seemed satisfied just to get the conversation started.

Near the beginning he flashed a picture of an iPad as an example of a device that records everything you do and there is nothing you can do about it. I had never thought of that; instead I had viewed the iPad as a nice little device that probably would never be hacked, but in a sense it is already hacked as far as my privacy goes.

I happen to like Apple products, running OS X on my Air and just Linux (Ubuntu) on my MBP. From a freedom and privacy perspective I would really like to a bit more fully control my devices by running Linux but I find I can get some types of work done just a little faster using OS X rather than Linux. DRM is not a problem for me on Linux because my Samsung Galaxy S III can play Netflix as can the Nexus table.

I went so far as signing up as an Apple developer early this year to get an early version of Mountain Lion and bought an iPad, but listening to Doctorow and other people who think more deeply about personal rights and freedoms than I do, I am more often thinking of paying the small Linux productivity tax.

BTW, if Apple continues to rule digital markets, it would be ironic if Microsoft saw a business opportunity to make Windows devices respect personal freedoms.
NYC Dining: The Cost of a "B"
http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/AIDS-Ride-firm-closes-i...
hints a bit more controversy than apparent in the OP.
Groklaw has been a very reliable source for information, but to call them unbiased is naive. Groklaw has always taken an editorial viewpoint. SCO vs IBM? Oracle vs Google? Apple vs Samsung? They always have their favorites, so their analysis tends to skew that way. They don't try to hide it, and their reputation is top notch, but don't claim they aren't biased.

Normally, their viewpoint is right in line with most of the tech world. It just so happens that this time around, the tech camp is pretty well split on who the good guy was in this case.
Based on my admittedly limited sample size of 1, that never actually works.
PolitiFact on promises by House Republicans
The question isn't whether Apple was and is successful. The question is whether they deserve a ~two-decade monopoly on concepts that were incremental improvements on ideas developed by others. The parent comment in particular is meant to address a previous comment by nirvana that claimed "touch-oriented UI" was invented by Apple.
It may be worth it for specific use cases, just like there are certainly still specific use cases where assembly shines.

The point is we're well past the point where grasping for the asm-equivalent from the start should be the default unless you happen to specifically target one of those niches.
The cnet article was the original source for the Groklaw quote. The juror in the quote didn't mention anything about possibly going back to the issue. We don't know if cnet didn't run that part of the quote (why would they, they get more clicks with more controversy), or if the juror just didn't mention it. We do know that he isn't quoted as saying, "oh yeah, we never got back around to it".

And since they explicitly had to make the choice on the instructions (Y/N) on infringement, the safer assumption is that they did get back to it.
It is interesting that charges can be put through after a card is cancelled. I, for one, did not know that.

I've cancelled cards previously because merchants were unreasonable or unresponsive. Gyms are one of the worst for this. Cancelling a gym membership is an exercise in torture.

Anecdote: I was in an Equinox gym a couple of months ago, thinking about joining. I saw a "representative" who was happy to give a tour through the gym and explain the costs and benefits. For these sorts of things however I give a fake phone number because I loathe the follow-up calls from such places.

Anyway, at one point while standing around reception where there were 5 or so such representatives standing around the receptionist answered the phone. Someone was inquiring about closing their account. She said they had to speak to a specialist and none were available. What the...? No one else seemed to be with a customer. It just struck me as another tactic to make it more difficult to cancel.

Now for me this would be relatively easy. My company has a corporate membership so it can be deducted directly from payroll and when I say for it to stop, it stops. But honestly I can't condone these hard sell tactics by giving such companies my money.

Cancelling a gym membership should be as simple as a 2 minute phone call or (better yet) clicking a button on a Website (Equinox has a Website where you can reserve exercise bikes no less).

My only experience with dispute resolution was reasonably painful although not as bad as it could be. I ordered something online and the merchant called me to say that price was only when I bought it as part of a package. I said I didn't want it. He said fine. A week later it turned up anyway. I had the charge reversed. They applied it again. I had it reversed (again). I had to send the item back by registered post.

I think the lesson to take from gym memberships and similar fixed-fee for shared usage pricing models is that they create the wrong incentives. Gyms really want customers who pay every month but never come in so they can oversell their capacity. If gyms were pay-for-use you simply wouldn't have this problem. Likewise you could discount memberships for people who come in at non-peak times, etc.

Some point out the "you signed a contract" argument and agreed to those terms. To this I response: people have an innate sense of fairness. People will (rightly IMHO) reject unreasonable terms. If I don't pay my gym membership, I can no longer go to the gym. This isn't like failing to make a car payment.

Unfortunately consumers seem to like monthly fees so you kind of get what you ask for.
When I read articles like this my fears always move straight to a future where it has become harder to program for play.

I appreciate that this concern is somewhat superficial compared with some of the issues raised in this article, but I feel profoundly grateful to be able to tinker with computers in my spare time.

I feel this more deeply than the fear that my music collection might not survive a computer upgrade or that the government might be watching my internet habits.

I think that we, as programmers, enjoy a luxury that is almost unreproducible in any other field. My wife is a structural biologist, and as much as she loves what she does you can't crystallize proteins in our living room.

I truly hope that however this unfolds that my son will be able to hack on something, freely and happily (if he so desires) in the future.
Hey, be civil -- no name calling if you disagree.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A Father Of High-Speed Trading Discusses Its History