skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is of course very difficult to forecast into the future and that is the problem with intervention into free market matters.

I do think it is interesting to note the German approach in terms of protecting publishers, and how there appear to be many more book stores in Germany catering for niche areas of publishing owing to the fixed pricing arrangement for the sale of books.

http://www.thenation.com/article/168124/how-germany-keeps-am...

For me, it suggests that price is not the only factor to consider in terms of satisfying consumers.
I agree, to a point. I primarily work on mobile html5 apps. You actually can make an experience that compares to native in some cases. For example, I created the App.net client http://shrtmsg.com which I believe is on par with the native apps. If you target "latest and greatest" browsers, the subtle browser differences thing isn't that big of a deal.

What I don't get is how people direct their disappointment with the state of html5 towards "html5" as though the idea was to blame, or the idea has failed.

If you want to know why html5 is slow to roll out on mobile it should be blatantly obvious: there is almost no competition. Whereas on desktop competition is fierce. On iOS competition is outright disallowed. On Android it is allowed, but it is harder to get people to switch than on desktop. So this is why we see the "once a year" browser updates on the 2 major platforms.
I agree with you, until their clients start to break.
WebFire has to be my favorite answer :)
It's a bummer since sliders are such a fundamental control.

When people must create their own:

* Implementations are more often than not sub-par.

* Implementations are inconsistent (will clicking off the thumb snap to the mouse or act as an increment?).

* There is no platform-native look & feel control (which should matter for any FF phone device, as they should want all apps to use a single slider implementation).
Web worker pre-warming
Take a picture of your homework and get help from volunteer tutors
When Google Checkout launched it was in a right mess. I remember trying to use it and it silently crashed without an error. It was bizarre, all over the forums, no Google response.

It also had an even worse payment flow than paypal. Which is saying something.

You can't ignore early adopters like that so no-one switched.

Also seem to remember it didn't take payments from a lot of countries. Could be wrong.
Amazon payments would be a great alternative, main problem is that it's only available in the US (this is why Kickstarter is still limited to US projects btw). I'm not familiar with the details on Google wallet, but my hunch it's the same reason
I can understand that Wayland does not want to pay for the complexity of network transparency, but I'd be sorry to see it go entirely. I'm one of the few people who do make use if X11's network transparency on a regular basis. Being able to open a web browser on a machine that is several ssh hops away is awfully convenient. I hope that Wayland has some provisions for reproducing or emulating X11 even if it isn't built into the core.
Then you 'd have to make the same demands from the whole advertising industry (so Ghandi never used Macs? who knew!)
Doc 1 & 2 are not changed but chained together to create doc.all
They seem to really hate any and all pre-sales, plus they have a list of "risk items" - if you're lucky not to fall into one of those categories, it's a happy life with Paypal for you :-).

Then there's their automated fraud prevention system that is just too trigger happy. As an example: I bought an item on eBay the other week and they refused to process the payment. A couple of days later I decided to try again before buying from another seller and it went through without issues.
7 Shitty Things I Will Think Today
You are correct on both counts regarding the vim and grep example - I guess I just assumed I would have to have all the files on a single line before handing them off to vim.

Thanks for the suggestion about -exec +; I will have to remember it in the future.
Even when it becomes available to merchants in other countries, it still won't let you accept payments from the dozens of countries where people use PayPal but don't have major brand credit cards. There's really no equivalent service.
WhatsApp in fact is using NSClassFromString to get access to the private class UITextEffectsWindow ;P. However, I don't think it doing anything to get access to CoreTelephony and pull the IMEI.

Another piece of evidence for this is an article published on a website I found while searching for the API endpoints that WhatsApp is connecting to; this person pulled apart the Android client.

http://www.mathyvanhoef.com/2012/05/whatsapp-considered-inse...

In this article there are a few API calls that are discussed, including v1/exist.php and v1/code.php: the former takes an argument sim=MSISDN and the latter takes both sim=MSISDN and imsi=IMSI.

However, on my device (iOS), all of the other fields are being sent (including the MCC and MNC, which you can apparently get using the public CTCallCenter API) except those sim and imsi fields.

(Note: the actual service seems to run over XMPP, and I did not bother figuring out how I'd man-in-the-middle that to figure out my password, so maybe they do something really sneaky at a later step.)
They'll just rule that political speech is always free speech and can never infringe on copyright.
To be fair, who holds all four keys at once?
Yes. It's just that people who are preachy naturally invite a careful critic of their practice.
Multiplo: Create Your Own Robot
Error Handling Mechanism in Windows Phone 7 Applications
For those interested, this is an actual screenshot of my cdbaby dashboard for my bands album (seriously check us out, links in my profile)

http://449123359ecac587d434-9396469e34eeeef2caa4cdabedda4716...

There's some more recent ones but they're identical to what you see.

iTunes match has paid out several different amounts:
http://449123359ecac587d434-9396469e34eeeef2caa4cdabedda4716...

For those that may not know, cdbaby taks a 9% cut of what services pay out, but there's no yearly feel like with tunecore.
Just to note, the's author's not in the US, he's in the UK and Paypal's a regulated bank over here.

I always have mixed feeling on these stories.

On the one hand, if you operate almost entirely online, you're in amidst a mass of scammers and conmen, it's a much higher risk, hence everything being more draconian. So there's always problems. Brick and mortar businesses are much less as there's a real presence, etc.

On the other hand, this is a long established business. Are they really that high-risk any more? Why are they treated like someone who's just started? Why can't Paypal treat them more respectfully as there's plenty of trading history. Why are there no mechanisms for establishing real identities that are much stronger than what they seem to be doing?
Sorry but what about this is "Show HN"? You're not showing anything!

This seems to be a fairly common thing on HN - have half an idea, do a bit of webdesign and create a email-submission form.
HTML5 audio can on iOS. Not sure about Android.
Jsbin is down
It depends on your definition of ‘edge of solar sytem’, as there are many definitions around. What amazes me the most is that we built something 35 years ago, shot it into space and it’s still going strong, sending radio signals from a place so far away that it takes 16 hours to get here. They supplied it with an 8-track disc that contains information about earth and humanity.

To me, this speaks volumes about the brilliant naivety of that era, and I mean naivety in the most positive way possible: an uncurbed enthousiasm where you don’t see all the implications and problems on your path, but just execute. Did they think about the fact that 8-track records would be outdated by the time the Voyager would reach a destination where alien life would be possible? It seems not. But they built the thing, and it’s still doing what is’s supposed to do. This mindset has been missing for a long time, although the new Mars Rover project has got my hopes up again.
I got into a 20 minutes argument with a coworker once about why it isn't a good idea to put spaces in filenames (my argument being that it can sometimes break handcoded argument parsing in homegrown unix scripts when the escaping of the spaces aren't passed down properly).
Either of those would work, or just pay a homeless guy $10 to drop it in the mailbox for you.
In case the HN submission of the following doesn't float to the front page,
it seems Nokia has apologized for the fake advertisement:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19499879

EDIT: The HN submission

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483817
Lessons learnt: Building business critical applications on the cloud.
To me, the chart-as-written says that the average time per level for people who reached only level 7 was ~18h, and for people who reached level 8 was ~36h? That would mean level 8 took on average 8x36 - 7x18 = 162 hours to complete...

Does it mean average total time, separated out by the max level reached (so, level 8 took at least 36-18=18 hours on average, but probably more)? Or is the level on the x axis mean "max level reached" for the number of people (dotted line), but "level" for the average time, so that it's just directly 36h average?

It's further complicated because the clock kept ticking even when people took breaks to sleep and go to work, so I don't even know what to expect. To be fair, it has been ~360h since the competition began.

Someone help me...
We're showing a product we're about to launch in a couple of weeks and are looking for feedback and to hear what the HN crowd thinks about this kind of service.
What is 'interesting' about it? Having 5 kids fits perfectly with his stated philosophy of improving our odds overall.
Please avoid sensationalist headlines. I don't know why this is being described as a "feature" here, but not on GitHub, nor why it causes "unreadable" logs, nor why it's only in production. Context?
In case anyone decides that they want to register for Bugzilla and comment on the bug itself about how they feel about priorities, please heed bz's comment and take the discussion to a more appropriate (and probably more responsive) area, like dev-planning[1] or dev-platform[2].

Bugs like this are meant to be mostly for technical discussion and aren't the most effective way of getting attention around this kind've issue.

[1] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning

[2] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Why can't I turn off the Garbage Collection in Java?
I have one, too. Yesterday I tried Ubuntu with LXDE, it's a little bit slower then expected and video decoding is not fast enough. I guess I'll use android and maybe try CM10. I use a powered USB hub to plug external drives (the power may not be enough for some USB drives)
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/578446_101510870...

A friend of mine shot this in Helsinki. Low lighting conditions, Nokia style.
For me, code listings are too small on the small Kindles, even when the books are bought from Amazon. Also it's a bit distracting to me to turn the page as often as is required on the small Kindles, which fit much less words per page than a paperback.
To the extent this perception represents actual reality:

You know how every time a new payment provider comes up and people kvelch that it isn't available in their country and how no provider is? This is because every payment provider which attempts to hit as many countries as Paypal does dies. They're killed by fraud. (Fraud kills domestic ones, too, all the time, but it's marginally less frequent.)

Luckily, Paypal is an anti-fraud AI company which also happens to run credit cards sometimes. When in doubt, they will always come down on the conservative side. This is why they still exist. (Early in their corporate history they lost -- no kidding -- one hundred million dollars to fraud.)

This perception does not actually match reality, though: most people bitten by this are unaware that similar activity would get them shut down by the fraud department at e.g. a bank. See comments by dangrossman, etc.
The users get a smaller phone. They're not shrinking the dock connector for fun.
Faking images for a product rollout appears to be common mobile-electronics industry practice. Apple faked a video still from Star Trek and made a fake video of the New York Times for their iPad introduction.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-Exposed-As-Liars-in-Fak...

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/22/apples-ipad-nytimes-prom...

I wonder if Nokia cross-licensed Apple's patent.
You would also prevent many legitimate but controversial laws, and dramatically reduce the impact of electoral decisions -- what is the point of voting when you know that any representative will probably be unable to pass almost any law? At this point, i don't think more disenfranchisement is the way forward.
I have no insider knowledge, but here is the obvious answer: fraud is an existential threat to their business.

Paypal's profit margin is a small percentage of the value of a transaction. The potential losses due to fraud can go as high as 100% of the value of the transaction. I.e. their losses can be 50-100x as big as their gains.

Further, the selling point of Paypal is they let anyone who wants to set up shop and use Paypal for money transfers. The tradeoff you make by using Paypal is much lower setup costs (relative to a merchant account) for much higher risk.
My impression is that the barrier to entry of working with PayPal (in comparison to having a meeting with a bank and going through formal underwriting) is sufficiently low that people begin working with PayPal without knowing much about how financial systems work: they don't know how holds work, they don't understand how the credit system works, and in general they believe that the system should work identically to cash transactions (as in, the money is yours immediately when it hits your account).

The result is that the system is treating them identically to how a bank would treat a more organized company; however, with an accountant on hand and an understanding of the rules, the organized company is much less likely to make silly mistakes (such as selling people a product that is shipped more than 48 hours later, already in violation of VISA's rules, to a third-party's address and then claiming that it is a "donation" and not a "purchase" <- an example from earlier this year).

There are also simply more players, as we are now talking about a bunch of couple-person companies that are using PayPal to accept credit cards, and even individuals who may not be incorporated at all but are using it to launch and sell products on their websites. These kinds of people are also much more likely to decide to attempt "lynch-mob" as their primary means of recourse against a company doing something they disliked, so we are doubly more likely to hear about situations.

However, as a merchant who operates something that many people (incorrectly) call sketchy, and one who has spent much too long learning all of the relevant tax regulations, reading up on credit cards, talking to people with real merchant accounts, and having meetings with banks about possibly using their service instead, my opinion is: PayPal is not that difficult to talk to and they are not actually unreasonable; there are things they are incompetent at, but this isn't one of them.
Q: "What problems are being neglected?"

Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many problems in the world"

I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.
Rockwell is a noted self-publicist with a politician's reputation for truth and accuracy. Nikon can take their PR shots with whatever is best, should P&S publicity shots be taken with that P&S model? Of course not. If on the other they take photos with professional equipment and claim or imply that it was taken with a mobile phone then that is deceitful.
Hootsuite Buys Seesmic for the Users not the Tech
No, it's both the number of people that reached a level and the average time to complete a level...
I started using Skrill Moneybookers because it's used internationally. I can't use Amazon or Google Wallet because I'm in Canada and its taking them bloody well forever to get here.

Oh, and I just signed up for Zoompass.
Well there you go, case closed.
There are countless tales of eBay parties having their funds frozen. I've personally had around a dozen influxes of a couple hundred dollars at a time be frozen for 4-6 weeks before I had access to their full balances.

Additionally, many have issues with the fees. Going back to eBay, you get hit with fees for both services, and I think many just see it as being too much given other emerging comparable services.
Well, Google/Wikipedia is your friend in things like this
The fear is that posting a bug like this on a social network will result in a bunch of people commenting on the bug about how this needs to be our new #1 priority or how we're just too slow. While both are perfectly valid criticism, bugs just aren't the best place to bring that up.

I posted links to the mailing lists in my other comment; if you haven't already, posting a thread to them asking about the priority of the bug would be a good way of getting the attention of a bunch of devs and planning people at once.
I've given up on reading any technical books on any device. Even on an iPad it's a pain to try to read books that are formated with items that are not inline with the text.
So Amazon is being bad because they might seize the market and raise prices. But the publishers want to raise prices right now.

Got it.
The Lean Launchpad Online
I don't like this endless vertical list of application, even with the search feature. Also, the transitions feel slow with all these animations.
Yes, because the potential to break administrative scripts is a far more important consideration than the usability of a system for the average person.

I agree with the most of the points in the article, but the one regarding spaces is, IMHO, ridiculous.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't use (or care that much about) spaces in file names. I am talking about the vast majority of non-technical users.
Do you already know one of these languages? You know what they say about photography: the best camera is the one you have with you. The same goes for programming: if you already know how to build something in PHP, there's not much sense trying to make the project in Ruby.

If you know neither, try both of them for a short while and see which one you like better. It's really a 'what do you like better: apples or oranges' kind of question.
There is a recent keynote[1] by Christos H. Papadimitriou about Turing and Darwin, and Turing's paper that you mentioned. The talk also ends with a very emotional account of the speaker's connection with Turing.

[1]: http://videolectures.net/aaai2012_papadimitriou_computable_n...
I think the logic behind this response is valid, but in my experience with recruiters 9 / 10 of them would not go for this. (Would love to hear how it works for you!) Recruiters are not the same as dealing with a company directly, they are paid agents with certain rules of decorum.

The real point here is that companies that rely on recruiters generally have something broken about their culture. For a small firm, their management is probably not plugged into the industry, or they have become bureaucratic, lazy and/or process oriented (eg big firms) and probably not a great place to work. But you probably already know this, hence the letter.
Dawn Probe Leaves Vesta
I think Skrill Moneybookers http://www.moneybookers.com is as close as you'll get to PayPal. They accept pretty much all credit cards, banks etc.
>`Learned from 7 Years`

I'm sorry but if it took you 7 years to figure out things like caching your site, updating it to avoid exploits, having a good theme, backing-up your files, etc. then you are doing it wrong. These are all very basic principles that WordPress has recommended for as far back as I can remember. Especially backing up WordPress regularly.
How to hide e-mail, change language and insert most commented posts on Wordpress
This cracked me up. It might not be the real response from the recruiter, but it certainly may be what goes through their heads.
Does the oft-lionized "PayPal gang", famous for their successes in the tech community, bear any responsibility for the company's customer experience being sometimes so terrible?

Maybe this just happens to all payment companies at scale, but it seems like PayPal has a lot of stories from ordinary-sounding, reasonable-sounding people who were just trying to sell something and ended up losing all their money. Who's responsible for those service delivery failures?
Considering they have a quarter billion active users, a "horror story" once or twice a month is an amazingly, amazingly low dissatisfaction rate. I don't think PayPal is actually causing that many merchants much trouble. It just appears that way, because:

* At most merchant services providers, underwriting happens up front: you have to describe your business, what you're selling, expected volume, etc. on an application, and go back and forth with the bank, before you are allowed to accept credit cards. PayPal lets you start immediately, and only gets the information from you once you've started transacting some meaningful volume. So the risk problems are weeded out with other processors right at the start, where with PayPal it can come up suddenly.

* These people have never even thought about underwriting and risk assessment. They treat PayPal as if it's a consumer service, when PayPal has to treat it seriously -- they're essentially making a rolling loan in the amount of 6 months of your transaction volume -- because if you disappear, they're on the hook for the chargebacks for all your past payments. People do stuff no other processor would let them do -- like taking massive donations with no prior approval, selling pre-orders to software that hasn't been written yet -- and PayPal isn't OK with it either once they find out.

* PayPal merchants are disproportionately more often individuals than actual businesses compared to what other processors see... because it's so easy to open an account, and everyone that's used eBay already has one.

* Because the merchants are individuals, and have no experience with underwriting at other processors, and have previously used accounts suddenly limited or frozen, they're confused and surprised. Add to that customer service that won't really tell you much once an account's been closed, and you end up with a couple really angry people a month: cue blog post about how PayPal is evil and if only it were a bank, they couldn't do this.
Nothing to see here but I am curious to see what this team has come up with. As a UX Architect/Product Manager it's a tough game staying on top of client requests, clarifying them and then handing them off for development. I think the challenge is having something that meets the needs of everyone but is flexible enough to adjust for unforeseen work, new requirements and shifting priorities.
And apparently the heliopause is already overdue: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/missing-voyager-1-yet...
They explicitly state it? That's all the reassurance I need! Warez ahoy!
> What amazes me the most is that we built something 35 years ago, shot it into space and it’s still going strong, sending radio signals from a place so far away that it takes 16 hours to get here.

I completely agree. I remember reading about Voyager 1 and 2 back in 1989, when I was a just a child, and thinking how cool it was that humans could build something to send into space and it could last so long. 23 years later, it is even more impressive that it is still out there and kicking... and may last another 10 years :) It is very impressive, to say the least.
Experts Are Experts Because They Can Advise Not Because They Can Create