skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Banks already do ask for financials and corporate track record. You're required to stake your own credit when your financials are inadequate.

As far as I can see, those providers who require personal guarantees usually do so as a standard condition for almost any new business. Effectively, they consider everyone's financials to be inadequate.

You want that to be illegal? It's better than those companies not be able to obtain merchant accounts?

Someone would still offer the merchant account services to businesses who could demonstrate a reasonable business plan, because on balance they would make money from doing so. Most new businesses are not, in fact, going to experience a 30% chargeback rate four months after the original sale.

The banks obviously know that, they just want (as usual) to privatise the profits but externalise the risks/losses. I have no problem with prohibiting that kind of predatory behaviour. It's a potentially significant barrier to starting a new business, and with the global economy in its current state, allowing absurdly risk-averse banks to inhibit new businesses is exactly what we shouldn't be doing.

If the banking industry had a track record of assessing its clients responsibly and lending (or not lending) based on the results of those assessments and reasonable assumptions, I would be happy to cut them some slack. But we all know damn well that they aren't doing that. And if governments are going to pressure them just to lend to small businesses, they should certainly pressure them to provide basic services to businesses that are viable without relying on loans as well.
Content Marketing Ninjas – Why 4chan Secretly Rules The World
Migrating from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6
It'd be unethical if you knew $500 was undervalued and you thought Ferrari didn't, i.e. if they were inexperienced and possibly accidentally undervaluing their own car. Then you would be taking advantage of them.
Apple to create a Pandora rival, sources say
Which MTAs do you suspect wouldn't deliver it? I've used internal zones of that form extensively without issue on all the common OSS MTAs (postfix, sendmail, exim).

I'm unaware of any common MTA software which wouldn't handle it.
Those are huge accomplishments - congrats.

My point is that its important to factor motivation into product conception and design. Sure, we could all read wikipedia and articles all day (i mean, we do) - but having measurable "buckets" for our choices make them easier to explain. Hence the entertainment or resume-builder formulas I laid out, which appear to fit your motivational measurements.
http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html #16

It's not on this topic but it definitely hits on it
Every new Kindle Fire model is ad-subsidized with lock screen 'Special Offers'
Personally I'm looking forward to a Randy Rhinoceros in six months.
I think the screenshot would help more than the link, much like a product shot on the home page without doing the "Feature Tour". It makes sense that it's probably minor, though I'd imagine newsletters are hard to come by for conversions anyway. Thanks for the heads up on your test!
You mean Go, right?
This is actually one of the more interesting things about how data is being collected these days... because we (or rather, our machines) now have the capacity to scavenge and parse so much more data than we could've dreamed of before, people, corporations, governments, etc. have already caught on to the idea that you don't actually need to know your angle before you execute. Gathering tons and tons of data may seem completely worthless or missing the point, but the reality is that "the point" no longer exists. It's all just floating data that, when the time comes, either passes through the filter or throws a flag.

Basically, the government may not care who you're messaging on facebook now, but if someone discovers a correlation to some other problem in the future they'll be damn pleased that they have that data.
Student ‘Interns’ Forced to Build Apple iPhone 5
You are describing fraud. Money laundering is the redirection of the proceeds of illegal business to make it look like legitimate income.
Frankly, your lack of belief is likely due to a lack of experience with user submitted forms with email addresses. It's VERY common for users to simply type the wrong data into a particular textarea. If you do no validation you will get things like the person's name, street address, or other confused mixups.

Anyone who deals with forms of this nature will have seen this firsthand, and with enough frequency to cause trouble with mail relay as the person above has described. It's a real problem.
^ This. VPN is not a magic bullet. It stops your ISP from snooping and adds another hoop to jump through when tracing you. If the sites you visit (nodes you hit) are monitored you are still at risk.

[Edit] not protected/still at risk.
Back when I did some small scale sysadmin work, I found that our CD/DVD burners were a lot more reliable as CD burners than as DVD burners. This seemed to be true both of the older Dell ones we had and the newer generic-brand ones. I had much better luck using CDs for basic installs and then fetching additional stuff from the net than trying to use DVDs.
If you have a working solution to that problem, stop working on contests and proceed directly to IPO.
I don't have one of these compuetrs so I don't know how it works but by reading the article it seems to me like you need to supply a password to the software which is then stored in almost plain text. The assumption the article is making is that people will enter their Windows account password?

Correct me if I'm wrong.
I was actually wondering about this, maybe you can enlighten us.
Could they not have used external ligthing for the Nokia shot, and none for the competitor shot? How do we know they used the same lighting conditions?

Not trying to feed the anti-Nokia, I've always been curious of these types of things.
Great news! However, it would be even better if everything were made in the UK. Would be nice if the US could follow suit. Unfortunately it usually isn't good for business. But I don't believe that the government should interfere with free trade to promote such things.
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Best way to do this is a separate virtual machine.
So, if you are doing synchronous multi-master you will also need to do explicit failover (in this case, not from server A to server B, but from server A/B to only server B): otherwise, a partition between the servers would be catastrophic to your data integrity (as there would be no way for the servers to know whether they should start accepting data that might be different from its buddy, as both think the other is offline).

Once you start thinking in terms of multiple servers (whether it be based on replication or partitioning) you have to start thinking about these kinds of complex corner case issues, as you have moved from working with "a server" to "a distributed system", with all of the associated theoretical limits (such as CAP).
Yeah, but this 'pedigree' being thrown around in these comments is starting to look more and more like blatant discrimination, which was something the recruiters hide pretty well.
Simple, pay with a prepaid credit card, purchased in cash at a Walgreens or something.
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Fraud IS illegal business.
Purchasing goods using stolen credit cards is part of a process of making it look like legitimate income.
Google Maps for your code
I'm in Waterloo, Ontario. :)
Thought this was amusing:

From the article: Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris blasted back, telling BI that Graham's accusations were "patently absurd."

First example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-denial_denial#Types: Characterizing a statement as "ridiculous" or "absurd" without saying specifically that it is not true
Even if they did keep logs, there's only 2 external IPs.
How about this instead?:
http://www.zazzle.com/government_did_not_build_my_business_t...
From business perspective right and nothing new: printer manufacturers, video game system manufacturers, telcos and many more do this for years—building a base where they earn money when people using their stuff rather than buying the initial setup.

From user's and ecosystem perspective it's wrong and leads to bad user experience: proprietary and closed systems, gatekeeper controlling the 'market', limited to no competition within the proprietary ecosystems.

I don't want this and look back at that days where businesses made money from selling systems following or creating open industry standards.
Heh. I did, actually. :) That's why I added the "irrational audiences" bit; an academic environment does train you to argue and debate effectively, but with other academically-minded, vaguely rational people. Playing politics with a broader audience requires two related skills that communicating in an academic require doesn't require as often or as strongly: communicating with people who have a much larger inferential distance from you (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance), and dealing with people who don't subscribe to logic at all.
Absolutely anecdotal, but on the second point I found the US easier to deal with than Canada. Not because of the government, but because no Canadian companies (and definitely startups) were prepared to sponsor me.

Largely it was because they'd never done it before- US companies are very familiar with it. So, I left Canada and now live in the US.
I've recently joined a Canadian startup, and I'm less cynical than I was at one point—and I'm an emigré from the U.S. in any case (who has gotten invitations to interview with several big-name U.S. organizations).

1. Yes, a lot of folks who can't see past the dollars leave. I've done the math and for me to work in the Valley, I would need to make almost three times what I make, because I'd also be losing my wife's teacher salary as income (which is about 80% of my current salary). She also doesn't want to live in the U.S.—we happen to like our health care and the relative calm of Canada.

2. There are several startups in the space where I work (we are all at least partially funded by the same fund) and they're all pretty interesting.

3. Sadly, you're right about the Harper government's unfriendliness toward immigration. At some point, they will be turfed and saner immigration policies will be reinstated. Hopefully, someone will also have the political will to fix our shameful treatment of certain skilled immigrants as well (doctors should not be invited to Canada on the basis of their skills and then denied certification because the provinces have jurisdiction over said certification).

4. If you're in the right spots in Toronto, it's fairly easy to find startups. If you're not, it's harder. I suspect it's a bit like New York, where there's a lot of financial software development because Toronto, like New York, is the financial centre of its country.

5. I'm not sure what the government influence through things like SR&ED is…every company I've worked for that used SR&ED basically came up with submittable work based on what we did as part of our regular roadmap.

I'm quite happy to stay here and work for startups here.
If someone could make money by offering merchant services to businesses with no credit history, they'd already be doing it. No law requires banks to require personal credit checks for merchant accounts.
The article suggests that Google is offering half of what the entrepreneurs have already been offered. So the hypothetical Ferrari guy is choosing to sell to me for $500 over another offer for $1,000, even if the true value is $50,000.
It's okay, because someone else is building the production artifacts and they're using a different tool.

</sarcasm>

I have a Jenkins install on a "found" server (belonged to a project that no longer exists, never gave the server back to infra) so I know my tests pass and my Ant scripts produce good artifacts. Still, it would be nice to step away from Ant and use something requiring less effort (and, could automatically resolve my dependencies, which by the way are a whole other battle).
I love this concept, kind of got hung up at this point:

"72 MHz 32-bit ARM CPU with 32KB of flash ROM and 8KB of RAM"

The reason is that I've been playing with an ST Micro STM32F4 which an ARM Cortex-M4 chip [1] which on the $15 demo board has both an on-board debugging system 192K of RAM and 1MB of Flash. Granted that is a $12 chip but still.

The development infrastructure of 'shields' is a pretty decent win, all three of the Arduino, the Netduino, the Beaglebone do this. I'm also a big fan of open expansion boards. The inkshield I got for the Arduino, way cool.

Something I miss though is an on-chip development environment. I know that sounds silly but I really think it would rock if you could just connect this to a serial port and start coding on it without the 'host' running the terminal software knowing anything.

[1] http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32...

[2] http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?x=0&y=0&lan...
“We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.”

Apple made money both ways, on device sale and much more so when they used the devices, and bought mp3s, and movies, and apps...
Help me understand. What you're suggesting is that, simply by having paid a couple hundred bucks to incorporate, regardless of my personal credit, I should be able to establish a merchant account?
Go Jimmy! Every site should do that anyway. The doors are closing, it's up to us the let them open.
When attempting to determine if someone is a culture fit, I am trying to determine if the candidates personality would mesh well with the personalities of the rest of the dev team (and the company overall). Not everyone is exactly the same, and not everyone is going to be a perfect match for what I personally am looking for, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are ruled out because of that either.

We just want to find someone we can work with on a day to day basis.
If your kindle is non-3G, the content that you email to your kindle address will show up when it's connected to wifi.
You could use the PGP endorsement model. Network effects should work out decently.
If high schoolers have access to scannable fake IDs, then I'm not sure a scanned pic of an ID is really suitably difficult to fake.

I agree that CC numbers is probably a good way forward as long as your users trust your site enough to provide that information.

Are CC numbers easier to "name check" than SSNs?
It is funny how much effort google is putting into their maps and yet their interface to the maps (maps.google.com) could still use basic improvements like how 99 out of 100 times I want directions it is to or from my house and yet I have to type in almost my entire address before it appears in the drop down. Considering I am logged into google, have confirmed my address and type in the same address over and over you would think their would be a Home button or at least have recent destinations appear in the drop down initially or whatnot.
One of the primary factors behind acqui-hires is a preset team.
The alternate image was useful for downloading now/installing the upgrade later. I guess the single image should be able to do that as well.
James Strachan set the Groovy project in motion in mid-2003, not 2004. He stopped posting to the mailing list in December 2005. James credits Bob McWhirter as being his co-creator.

Jochen Theodorou led the technical effort on Groovy since then. Other major committers over the last 5 years include Paul King, Alex Tkachman, Cedric Champeau, and Jeremy Rayner. I don't know for sure about before that. Guillaume Laforge's main technical effort was writing some utility functions very early on.

Although Guillaume has the title "Project Manager", he's really No.2 to the real management force behind Groovy, i.e. Graeme Rocher, who leads the Grails development. If Grails switched languages, Groovy would disappear almost overnight as it's not used much in anything else significant. OReilly's total worldwide book sales of Groovy (all titles) over 12 months is 1205 books (http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-p...).

> really brought the project from beta to 2.0 in the 7 years since

A few weeks before Groovy 2.0's "final release" in June this year, Grales 2.1, Griffon 1.0 and Gradle 1.0 were all released, bundling Groovy 1.8. Listen to what Groovy's users are doing, not what its fanboys are saying. Groovy 2.0 is nothing more than beta-quality software offered to production users so they'll "unit test" it in their workplaces. No-one should be using Groovy 2.x until Grails bundles it.
There's always:

#!/usr/bin/env python

too
not a python guy but heard this means python<3 scripts will break? no backwards compatibility with the new version?
Insightful - Motivation v/s Discipline. Motivation may be a start but discipline is what carries you through. One of those articles that makes me say "I never looked at it this way".
I think the "eight week" translates well if the average daily usage is half an hour?
This may be incorrect; I have only vague familiarity with the subject. I don't know if there are any non VNC-like solutions being worked on.

Wayland doesn't have network transparency as a first-class citizen, but it's easy to fit it into the mix. A bit of background:

In X11, the client sends the actual drawing commands (draw a line here, a smooth gradient here, a pixmap here, a curved line here, etc.) over a network pipe. The X server on the other end takes those commands and builds the resulting image.

In Wayland, your program just transfers (well, using shared memory) complete images of the entire window to the Wayland server.

The X11 solution is absolutely excellent and very efficient assuming your programs primarily use the X11 primitives. Most modern programs and toolkits do not use the drawing primitives; they just build the images they want and send a bunch of pixmaps to the X server. They do this primarily because X11 doesn't have a number of useful drawing primitives, like anti-aliased text. The result is that you're doing more or less what Wayland intends to do. (Though sending things like Xclock or Xeyes will be less efficient under Wayland, seeing as they use the X11 drawing primitives.)

In the end, Wayland will probably have something very much like per-window VNC. Your program will produce an image, some stub Wayland server will send that image over the network, and a Wayland compositor on the other end will receive it and display it.
Rich Hickey: extensible data notation
> Groovy does the same thing with less friction and switching overhead.

Are you the same M.Kimsal who sells subscriptions to "groovymag" ?
I'm well aware that InnoDB is MVCC-based. Unfortunately, its implementation of MVCC is hindered by the way the MySQL kernel handles locks, which are completely outside the domain of a storage engine.

Consider:

-- on MySQL, be sure to say "engine=innodb" before the semicolon...
CREATE TABLE locks_suck (id int primary key, val text);
-- or however you'd say "generate_series(start, end)" in MySQL...
INSERT INTO locks_suck (id) VALUES (generate_series(1, 10));

Now, say the following in one session:

BEGIN;
UPDATE locks_suck SET val = 'Transaction 1' WHERE id BETWEEN 1 AND 5;
-- Note that I haven't committed yet...

And then, in a second session:

BEGIN;
UPDATE locks_suck SET val = 'Transaction 2' WHERE id BETWEEN 6 AND 10;

In MySQL, you'll hang for a moment, and then see:

ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

In Postgres, you'll see:

UPDATE 5

That's the kind of concurrency MVCC can buy you. Readers can't block writers, writers can't block readers, and writers can only block other writers trying to write the same row.
I think the short answer to this question is "...almost anything, just do it significantly better than anyone has ever done it before."

the "almost anything" can be something no one has ever done before, or perhaps easier, something that is being done by others, but not well. "Significantly better" is where the magic comes.

N.B. starbucks has something called a "short" coffee which is not on the menu (smaller than a tall). I also thought a "half shot" cappuccino was not that uncommon.
SunVox, modular music app.
Datomic gets a REST API
>"DeveloperAuction says it is accepting applications from developers with “notable GitHub profiles,” CS degrees from Stanford or MIT or currently employed at Google, Zynga, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Yelp and Square"

>"We help developers get paid what they’re worth through a competitive process,"

Only if worth is exclusively dependent on Academic Pedigree. Or having worked at a large corporation that relies on a consumer product. Seems to me it's a pretty limited service.
How about an SMS verification code sent to the user's mobile phone?
Not entirely true. Really good engineers may not be good at getting what they are worth and be willing to see what they can get. Finding a job for a higher salary is a lot of work, finding the maximum salary (not that that should be your goal) is very difficult, negotiating is a huge challenge while auctions usually increase prices more easily.

Sure, an excellent engineer employed at $200K with a vast network is unlikely to send his resume to Craigslist ads, but they may use a simple way to find out whether they could get $300K and a $500K signing bonus.
"which was something the recruiters hide pretty well."

The recruiters actively sell the idea that pedigree matters.
I don't think he was claiming that $100k was a good or bad offer. He was doing napkin math. If the offers were within the ballpark of $100k (a nice round number), then there were about 300 offers. Which makes the given $30m number not useless at all.
You started me of on a trail that ended up here (so far):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/business/venture-capital-f...

Pretty interesting stuff, possibly even inspiring some ideas.
> ...is this supposed to be a point of some kind?

No, it's not. I'm just poking fun at the parent post, specifically the "practicing science does not make you science" line. It just sounded like some bizarre variation of "you are (or not) what you eat" to me.

> Why? People should be familiar with law for the same reason people should be familiar with science.

I agree with this. Unfortunately, all too often people making laws about science know nothing about it, and end up setting discovery back. Ideally there would be someone in government whose critical thinking could balance out all the rhetoric. I'm not saying all lawyers should be replaced with scientists.

> Do you actually know what Godwin's Law states?

I have not yet been banned from Wikipedia. Re-read the comment I am replying to. He is arguing against putting scientists in government because the Nazis had scientists. It was a good trolling attempt though - look at us two go on about it :)
Real-life Assassin’s Creed: Don’t try this at home (unless you’re this guy)
The complaints about R still seem counterintuitive to me. Python has the same data types listed above, and many more.

A list in R is a list in Python.
A data frame in R is a date frame in the pandas library.
A matrix in R is a matrix in numpy.
A vector in R is a 1-dimensional ndarray in numpy.

But Python adds dictionaries, tuples, iterators, sets, and a bunch of other data types that aren't used in R.

R's lists and vectors are relatively similar... but you could say the same thing about numpy's matrix and ndarray. You could probably say the same thing about python's sets, tuples and lists.

To be honest, I'd have said the strength of python is that it has many more data types than R... rather than fewer data types.