skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way to fix this is to do all your "backing" (which is actually pre-ordering, no matter what clever wordplay KS tries to apply) on an Amex, where chargebacks are decided by default in your favor and they go after the merchant on your behalf.

I backed a failed project, where the creator indicated they'd spent the money on something else (!), and that they weren't going to issue refunds. A 5-minute call to American Express later and I had my money back.
Open Source Beer, Serve Cold w/ a Licensing Controversy
Now boarding with Apple’s Passbook: two more major airlines
How is it misleading? It's called a pledge, not a purchase.

From the page: How do I pledge? (It doesn't say: How do I buy?)

You pledge because you'd like to see the project exist, not because you need a watch. It just so happens that if you pledged enough, they would also send you a watch. I personally never look at the deadlines for Kickstarter projects - they are at best estimates. I don't know when my Pebble will arrive, but I know that it will eventually.

All of this hype is way overblown. We're not talking Duke Nukem Forever here.
AFAIK they maintain that by buying a lot of commercial place data.
Finally an IPO for a startup that has real money making potential. Trulia is a great app. If any of you guys here are are Tulia employees, congrats on building a great product.
The fraud/abuse we're talking about in this case is perpetrated by the merchants themselves.

But the merchant account issuer doesn't distinguish fraudulent merchants from losses due to stolen cards, fraudulent customer chargebacks, etc. So currently in the US, essentially all fraud costs tend to be passed on to the merchant (and for small entrepreneurs, their kids' college savings).

It's called Paypal.

Note that most of the criticisms people level against Paypal aren't against their policies and mechanisms that are a rational defense against risk. It's things like the destroyed antique violin, banning merchant accounts for "editorial" reasons, outright hostile customer relations, and (last but not least) a penchant for holding on to other people's money for as long as possible for completely unjustified reasons.

Hopefully we can agree that the root cause here is the prevalence of fraud itself. A more secure transaction system could make things nicer for everyone. The problem is that the payment networks are the only ones who can institute meaningful change and the current system (that enables them to pass the costs on to merchants) suits them just fine.
The Devil is in the ‘Flight’ Details
Isotope seperator - plague kit

I assume this is downloading nuclear bombs or viruses?
And that means that we need AI to monitor us constantly in case some idiot kills everyone?
I wasn't aware that the intersection of truncheons and skulls was a "conversation".
Our group's review of a book on Ensemble Methods: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2011/07/book-review-ensemble-...
Yeah, it's pretty perverse. I sometimes wonder how many AirBnb's and Squares we could've gotten for the price of Twitter.
Kickstarter backers should fund a project with the understanding they are trying to encourage people to do cool things, and that their is better than even chance nothing whatsoever will come of the project. Then, the rare time that something gets delivered - it is a pleasant surprise.

Maybe that's how people should approach Kickstarted, but that's certainly not how the majority of Kickstarters projects are presented to their backers.

Almost every funding level I've seen for any project on Kickstarter says, "If you give $X and we reach the funding goal, you get Y. If you give $X and we don't reach the funding goal, you get $X back." None of them say, "If you give $X and we reach the funding goal, you might get Y if it turns out we can come up with a business plan that fits the amount of money raised."

I agree that Kickstarter isn't Amazon, but they (and the project creators) do a generally piss poor job of making sure the customers (backers) understand that going into the project.
Academia & startups
Is Hong Kong a "Libertarian Utopia"? In some ways, yes, but it probably isn't what people think of when they see that phrase. But that's the idea here-- to import the models that work elsewhere into a new location and let it grow.

I hope they are successful. If their offering ends up being competitive with the alternatives, we'll locate our startup there (I already have talked it over with my cofounders.)

We're currently engaging in jurisdictional arbitrage to find the best home for us, as we can do what we do from anywhere that has the internet. So, we're choosing from a list of countries based on what kind of environment they will provide us.

The problem so far hasn't been finding a country that is more hospitable than the USA, but in selecting from the dozen or so who are more hospitable, and trying to figure out which one is the most hospitable.

Imagine that-- we're struggling with too many choices for good places to locate our business, all of whom offer at least one key benefit over the USA, and most of whom offer many such.

Many people think the USA is hospitable to business, and assume that there's something shady about what we're doing that we don't just go to the bay area and be done with it. Well, here's our "Crime" in the eyes of the USA: one of our founders is from Britain while the others are from the USA. This means, while we can spend up to 6 months in Britain, and 3 months in the USA, neither country will let all three of us live there to do our startup without a great deal of hassle.

Contrast that with Chile which gave us a year of residency without any more hassle than showing up at a consulate with an application, some passport photos and a fee. We can renew that for another year, and after that first renewal, we could renew it for a final time-- and have permanent residency in Chile!

And chile is a perfectly fine place to run a business. It is a first world country, with a much more pro-business government than the USA. We'd be comfortable staying here and running our business for the next several decades.

So, I hope that Patri and the competitors to his company are all very successful -- lets make honduras one of the competitors. Already we've seen Panama grow dramatically as the best and the brightest fled Venezuela after Chavez took over.... there's still huge opportunity for jurisdictions that offer good terms.

Mobility is only going up over time!
My solution to having to choose what to wear was very simple. When I got a little extra cash I reinvented my wardrobe using slacks and shirts (3 suits also, but that's for special occasions that require them). The trick was to get clothes that mainly can be worn interchangeably. Now I just grab a pair of slacks, a random shirt and I'm sure it'll look good because I spent the time to actually analyze my wardrobe woes when buying all the clothes.

On the weekends I just grab a tshirt and a pair of jeans at random, just like teenagers that are uninterested in making fashion statements. Just like the college student with 4 tshirts and 1 jeans that doesn't care about what he's wearing. Just like I do on the weekdays with my more "serious" clothes.

ALSO, people you can't mock the turtleneck thing. Even the top secret spys do it. Tactical turtlenecks anyone?
Paul, re: your comment "all other things being equal" -- wouldn't you agree that some investors are not at all equal to others? (YC itself included)

seems that GV resources are worth something more than other investors checks by themselves. while i agree there are many investors who are "just a check", there are at least some who bring a lot more to the table than just capital.

anyway, i understand the timing issue of subsequent / lower cap deals, but i wonder if this isn't just a result of a sequencing problem for diff "hi-res" financing negotiations within a period of 30-90 days around the same raise.
There are other words you can use. You can grant people a nonexclusive license to redistribute unmodified copies of the work without cost.
name brand recognition brings a truckload of value.....lol sounds like sour grapes.
Wow what a shitty article. This whole thing is killing pg's first comment in the thread yesterday

Just so everyone understands, I was not saying that Google Ventures is a bad investor and should be avoided. If we thought that, the email would have been a lot shorter. I was just talking about a structural problem that happens when you've already raised some money on a convertible note with a valuation cap, and an investor offers to invest at a lower cap

From an author who obviously read that thread she's completely ignoring what he said with crappy statements like this:

Considering this comes from a man who just asked his portfolio to blacklist an entire venture firm, this might read as a rather contradictory statement.
You know who does the same thing everyday, in the same manner, using the same moves? I have a strong feeling it is called 'robot'.

We are humans, we should be diverse, we should seek diversity, it is what makes us alive. Not routine, not being robots that work work work. Work should and has to be fun. And diverse.
One of the terms of this agreement is that any Honduran citizen has right of residency in any of these cities (provided they agree to the cities rules, of course.)

So, I don't think there will be jealousy that aliens are getting a better deal.

Also, if the cities are successful this will increase business opportunities for Honduran businesses.
It shouldn't be any different than the existing functionality. stripe.js is solely responsible for turning credit card information into one-use tokens, so that CC information never hits your servers. That token is then used to communicate with Stripe using a private shared key (kept serverside, never exposed on the client) to create a Customer record, which is then used to conduct the actual money parts of the transaction.

So, a malicious party could create tokens with CC information, but without the private key they'd have no way to use them.
That really sucks :( RIP man.
Some people do take the piss a little with their coding task requests, but an hour isn't too bad. I do appreciate when someone is willing to look at code I've written beforehand, though - at the end of the day, even if you're being quite focused with your job hunt, if every application took an hour it'd really limit how many you could do.
What's up with Fast Company using HP's advertising font?

http://brandopia.files.wordpress.com/2006/08/hp.JPG
http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/19987.jpg
You might want to read up on how Stripe works before commenting.
>> "Kickstarter does not make it clear that the users are "backing" and that it's not guaranteed they will deliver."

In this modern world of litigation, they have to say it.

But come on, do they really have to say it??

A single ounce of common sense would tell you that this is inherently a risky proposition. I really can't sympathize with backers who did not prepare themselves for the possibility that not all business ventures are successful and deliver on time, regardless of their prior experience.
Best of the Best from YC Demo Day
Great work! I'm inspired.
The title is misleading.

Suggests that there's going to be no Pebbles, while in reality the watches are seriously delayed.

Cheap link bait.
I don't know how long Kickstarter's "hands off" approach will work, even though I understand why they don't want to get involved.

But if backers start feeling like KS is a place to take money and never deliver while KS itself turns a blind eye, they'll just slowly bleed credibility.

But what do I know. People still buy laptops on eBay, they still get scammed, eBay still refuses to do much about it. eBay still exists.
If I were in charge of Kickstarter, I'd have an Czar Of Managed Expectations hired specifically to work with high profile projects.

I'd ask that person to talk to the folks at the big projects on a very regular basis (at least weekly) and help them manage the expectations of the backers. I'd advise them on how to update and to keep the communication lines very very open. I'd use this to apply very light pressure to the projects to keep things moving and to tell the backers what's happening.

Heck, I'd try to help the big projects hook up with experienced mentors to help solve their problems.

I'd do this because the entire success of Kickstarter depends on it happening, and I would under no circumstances leave it to people who hit the KS lottery to figure it out on their own.
Very good observation, mixmax. I've considered that too. Is my threshold heightening or is this material universally not of high quality anymore? We know, for certain, this DOES hold true in other cases. Falling in love is one example. In grade school, falling in mad love was much easier than it is now. Our level of awareness is much greater, and we consider many more things about a person (breadth) and whether we can see ourselves with this person down the line(depth). All this analytical thinking sort of prevents us from feeling and falling.

Back to whether the articles and comments on HN, as of late, are elevated enough to trigger intellectual gratification... to believe that after 1883 days, you've changed because you've soaked up all you can and must move on, is a disservice to yourself and to HN. If not HERE, then WHERE? It is the responsibility of our seasoned users, particularly like you, to keep the morale and the quality of this site as high as possible. Plus, users like you are what make this site valuable. You (and users like you) are the adequate benchmark beside which we can measure the quality of the articles. Moreover, the world of knowledge is a vast and limitless ocean, much of which (I'm sure) still remains for you to be discovered. And the nature of this web site and what it is intended for still works. All that needs to be done is to match the growth of the audience by growing the material proportionately. This proposal to use karma as currency makes a lot of sense. Before, the karma was meaningless anyway. This structure puts the karma to good use and forces everyone to contribute mindfully. Cheers to the original poster. I hope it's implemented.
The policeman is likely to be saying something. And his focus is on the victim, and therefore unaware of the recording. So do we still think that should be illegal to record?
Canned Wells Fargo worker's story goes viral
Ubuntu 12.04's default media player still can't properly display song titles
37signals Invests in The Starter League
The name of the tool is "underscore" in case you don't feel like clicking the link.
Very clear points & a good read. Don't underestimate your competence, you pulled it off and it was so fun!
Surprisingly so! =]
Worse. They asked for money.

Let's face it. As an entrepreneur, you have limited resources. There're only so many dollars in the bank account. These dollars have to be stretched to cover everything from pay and benefits to basics like coffee and internet access. Few entrepreneurs have room in their budget for deadweight, and a designer who proposes things that can't be implemented is deadweight of the worst sort.
Elon Musk talks about the Hyperloop with Kevin Rose
But in talking with a slew of Y Combinator alumni from the past three years of YC batches, we found that Graham himself takes between 5 percent and 7 percent of companies for amounts ranging between $12,000 and $20,000. Those amounts aren’t any great secret; YC publishes approximations on its own site. But while the founders said YC insisted that these terms had nothing to do with their companies’ actual valuations, on paper, it made the startups worth between $228,000 and $287,000 on the high end.

This is based on the faulty assumption that $12-20k is all you get for getting into YC.
Yeah, that's right. It's also worth emphasizing that the Stripe API doesn't support sessions, and so isn't vulnerable to standard CSRF attacks.
This is one thing I don't get -- I don't know why people think they can escape the US government by going to the middle of the ocean, let alone Honduras.

You might be able to avoid taxation, if you renounce your US citizenship, or a handful of little laws like personal drug use if you hermit up, but I don't see what's stopping the US government from just doing whatever the hell they feel like if you piss them off by exporting things they don't want exported or even running a data haven.

Seal Team Six wasn't authorized by anyone but the US government, but that doesn't make Osama bin Laden any less dead.
This is a good analogy. But with 800m raised in 2011, arguably when they were close "escape velocity" already, its also a fair point to wonder if destiny could have been any different with less $$$ weighing them down.
Paul Romer, who also works in this "space", suggests that some first-world nation, such as Canada, act as a guarantor that the host nation (e.g., Honduras) not renege on the agreement.
You are confusing me with someone else. I wasn't the one who made the original claim.
Several active conferences. A thriving open source community. ASP classic is a dead product; All three CF engines released new versions in the last year, with support for REST, WebSockets, updated ORM support, etc. While you'll probably never see it used in YC because it's not "cool", there's tons of it in Fortune 500 and the private sector.
Daily Android tablet sales nearing 40% of iPad sales
This is a really well written paper. I especially like their review of Heisenberg's original uncertainty relation, which had already been shown to be incorrect in theory under certain conditions, and the modern uncertainty principle that still holds. (They then experimentally violate the former, not the latter.)

Why should anyone care? Well, some security proofs for quantum cryptographical systems out there could conceivably assume the original relation holds, and would therefore require correction. Not to go into too much detail, this might have an impact on the bit-rate that some quantum crypto systems can securely run at.
The Free State Project never got the 20,000 signatories that the idea needed, and so it dissolved. Some people, not liking this failure, decided to move to NH anyway, and have perpetuated the "free state project" for the past decade by ignoring the fact that the math doesn't work. Plus the FSP wasn't viable from the beginning: even if they took over the state government, they couldn't overrule federal laws.

Minerva was more of an eccentric joke than anything serious. I mean what kind of libertarian is going to build an island and then let the Tongan "navy" take it over because he had no guns. IF you're building a country and you have no guns, you aren't really building a country. Hell, Sealand, has successfully put off a german invasion, and, having been recognized by the UK and still standing for decades now counts as a success.

Honduras is in the starting stages. But unlike the FSP they have the endorsement of the federal government. Sure it has its risk- no joke- but I'm glad to see they are trying.

I count Sealand as a win, disqualify minerva, and claim the free state project recognized it wasn't viable and didn't try.
In regards to the company complaining about pg's "valuation", if they felt they were far enough along to raise a priced round of funding, then why didn't they do that instead? Companies don't enter an incubator for the funding, so comparing that to true valuations is ridiculous. This is just a poor attempt at trolling YC and pg.
I work in Cupertino - let's grab lunch and chat about eReading. Email in profile
Grab Facebook Profile Pictures From an Email Address
This article written purely just to generate traffic. The author manufactured an 'investor battle' out of this? What?
This seems to have just gotten out of hand. How did this memo get "leaked" anyway? I don't think article is as negative as others are stating but it seems unnecessary.
Hopefully they add a "pay" Web Intent next.

(The Web Intent polyfill is implemented with the same postMessage hack they were originally using, so technically they could just use the web intent and nothing else. Though in practice, it probably doesn't handle cross-domain iFrame messaging for the old browsers that don't support postMessage.)
Show HN: Test feature ideas on your landing page
Show HN: HTML5 Tic Tac Toe game with local storage and canvas
Fair, but don't defend the propagation of things like that.
Would be interested in the name of that project, specific examples are much better than hypotheticals.
Doesn't a VistaPrint analog or Google Cloud Print offer something like this?
If picking out what to wear "takes time", guess what: you need to become better at making decisions.

Only a Jobs or Zuckerberg level of success gives you a pass to not vary your wardrobe.
It is legal, though I can only speak to US law. Its just that the police can take it as evidence, and that makes the task of making it 'disappear' pretty simple. Some jurisdictions also require the officer to be made aware of the recording as it goes on.
They are prohibited because every person who is serious about doing this knows that this would be a stupid idea.

Plus, there's no reason to create a charter city just to try and export drugs--- you have competition from people all over the world who are doing it without being a very public charter city, and you have no competitive advantage.

The competitive advantage of a charter city is only worthwhile to legitimate businesses.
No—there are cursive and block letters, but one is not the lower case version of the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet
yes, thank you very much for updating with the correct one
This article annoys me. Here seems to be the general structure:

* Generalize PG's statement until it is basically irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.

* Fill in a whole article speculating about the generalized interpretation of PG's comments.

* Say what PG actually meant in the end without showing any indication that the author actually understood what he was talking about.

* Paste a badly edited "primer" trying to explain the argument because the author obviously doesn't get it.
Nowhere does this say what the hosting environment is. The only clue is the "gem" command in the example on the GitHub page, which wasn't familiar to me so I looked it up. Apparently this thing is for Ruby.

Kind of a critical piece of info.
And now that it's in a secondary source (The New Yorker), someone will correct it.

EDIT: has corrected it.
This is absolutely ridiculous.

What, there's a "UX designer" AND a "visual designer?"

I do both. They're completely connected. How could you do "design" and not include the user experience?

Sounds like another one of those things where people "specialize" in certain areas but really don't have a clue what they're doing, and charge a hefty price tag for a whole lot of nothin'.

And it's worth nothing the design of that blog makes me sick to my stomach.
I'm guessing you've been to a lot of ::American:: plants - which have to deal with the salaries you speak of, but as OP pointed out - most of our consumer products (like an iPhone or a toaster) are largely made in China by lots of humans assembling by hand.

I was at Ford's Rouge River plant in Detroit and there were about 10 robots in the Assembly doing high-precision work (installing the windshield) - and a lot of ergonomics and fixturing for the overwhelming amount of humans that were screwing the F150's together by hand. I know this is partially the fault of unions - but still pretty crazy it's done like this.
Did the "Why I wear the same shirt every day" post really require a rebuttal? I think it was mundane/useless enough to warrant just letting it die.

I don't think anybody cares who wears what shirt which day. This is a tech site, not a fashion blog. Can we please just drop this?

Wear whatever the hell you want and quit telling people about it.
I backed Zioneyez for $150 on 6/6/11 ($343K Kickstarter) and still don't have them: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zione...