skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe he sold the cards as being unlimited money for 30 minutes. It's probably not even difficult to refresh the cards. He was already in their system, he had the account numbers, it could have been scripted. This was a one-shot deal -- the accounts and his hole into WorldPay were probably cut-off the next day. There's little reason for him not hype these cards, sell them for a good price and keep them working.

The benefit to him is his increased reputation. You can't survive in these circles unless people vouch for you. That's why, when you read articles about darkmarket, they talk about reviewers who inspect products from vendors. This guy just sold products that netted $9,000,000. Everyone is going to want to buy from him now.

Don't think that there's nothing in it for the vendor. ATM skimmers sell for $7,000. If he pulls this off again, people may just buy the cards from him for $10,000 each for a 700% return. That's not too shabby for sitting on your ass and not taking the risk of being on the streets.

I just don't believe that this was structured like a traditional gang. This level of organization in online fraud is completely unprecedented. There were more than 6 cities hit in numerous countries, I don't see them recruiting that many random people to participate and having profit sharing since gangs are tight-knit.
You're partly right: I think it's because all the vehicles in its class have roughly the same capability, but the steps can differentiate the F150 from the competition. Around here any truck sold from dealer inventory automatically comes with a tow package and will at least occasionally be used to tow something. Even my Xterra is sometimes used to tow a trailer.

People are still buying big trucks: I just bought my wife a used F250 with 7.3L diesel and it's her daily ride!
Kolmogorov complexity has the exact same problem (if it is a problem) as length-after-LZ-compression: what maximizes the complexity for a given length of string is random junk, which seems a long way from what people normally mean when they talk about "information".

What creationists are trying to get at when they make claims like "mutations never add information" would, I think, be better expressed by globally replacing "information" with something like "usefulness". Of course their claims are still wrong when you make that change (mutations usually don't add usefulness, but occasionally they do, and natural selection filters that to produce a steady increase in usefulness), and often the use of pseudo-information-theoretical arguments is just flimflam, but the Instant Refutation of saying "mutations almost always add information" or "duplications almost always add information" or whatever doesn't really engage with what the more honest ones are trying to say.
It really helps that git has all the history locally stored, too - doing an intensive bisect search with something like perforce would take quite a bit longer.
Disclaimer: I work 7 feet away from agotterer.

I convinced him to try VIM a few months ago. He tried it for a week but didn't find it productive so switched back to zend. I blame myself for not fully explaining the productivity benefits of a properly configured VIM environment, so I'll try again:

Learning VIM requires a huge time commitment (weeks, even months before it is truly second nature). However, after 'getting it', there is less of a barrier between your brain and you code. I have code completion, good syntax highlighting, syntax verification, and keyboard shortcuts to do anything and everything to my text. My IDE is pre-installed on every sever I've ever seen.

I am highly recommending using VIM as an all purpose text editor, and specifically as a PHP IDE. Knowing it is a skill that be used whether you are an author, developer, sysadmin, or any occupation that requires typing.
I have tried them all since I am back in PHP now because of our CMS. The new Zend Studio on Eclipse is just an embaresment, I almost bought it based on my experience years ago but it has really gone downhill. The best options in my opinion are (and you should try them all yourself):

* Eclipse with PDT, and the other plugins you need. Build your own better Zend studio (use Spket (www.spket.com) for JS and CSS support)

* Netbeans. A lot better than Zend Studio, more features and much more stable - a great IDE (www.netbeans.org)

* PHP for Visual Studio (http://www.jcxsoftware.com/) or an open source version which isn't as good but showing promise: http://www.codeplex.com/php4vs

Btw, if you are a PHP dev and you aren't using a decent IDE (with code completion and debugging, at the very least) you are missing out on a lot. For some reason a lot of php developers tend to be notepad + var_dump hackers
This is why I don't believe in writing libraries in the abstracted language they're intended for. I'd rather see them coded in C, or better, optimized C, or better, pure asm written by someone who knows what they're doing.

You don't need python to be good at searching, you need to use it to leverage fast libraries.

This is notably a critical failing of other abstracted programming languages. (I won't name names, I don't want to be piked here Vlad Tepes style.)
vim-latexsuite does something similar for creating environments. The default is Ctrl-J for jumping to the next section that needs to be filled in. The procedure takes some getting used to; I didn't like it at first.
I am pretty sure the Azure services platform will eventually have full RDBMS
I don't want to be a dick and argue with Cory Doctorow, who is bright and famous, but every time I read this article I feel frustrated. I tolerate computer screens, yes. I can read off one for eight hours a day. It is not a good screen for reading a book off of. It's bright and very slightly stresses my eye and most importantly, it's not invisible. I don't sink into the content. E-ink vanishes as I read it. I curl up into it mentally the way I'll physically curl up with a good book. I gladly put down money for the Kindle. It was utterly worth my money.

The problem with Doctorow is that he's a geek more than he is a writer. Yeah, he got himself published thanks to BoingBoing, but he's not from the breed of writer that lives and breathes for language. I'm not the best spokesperson here because I'm lodged in between the two types, but I'm close enough to the one side, and I'm friends with enough people over the brink, to be able to definitely say that the people who are obsessed with language will never tolerate something like a light-based screen. Some people I know are in fact physically sensitive: they won't watch TV because they don't like how jumpy and powerful the screen is. Those same people are fine with e-ink, because it's so neutral.

Maybe most people here either don't get that or don't care. I've been in arguments with people here who think that literature is overrated and overblown by English majors: it's a typical elitist hacker response. Doctorow absolutely has that opinion. But as somebody whose startup is focused entirely on the English language, and on emphasizing beautiful language, I rather disagree, and I'd say that the people who are really pushing literature forward today are still the ones who read ink and write ink, and a lot of those people won't put up with screens as a primary reading type. I'm sure that many non-writers are the same way.
Please explain how you think it is like the french expression you are referring to.
Why do you say something, and the quote what you just said, Raganwald? There are other methods of emphasis that involve less deja vu...
+1 for vim, which I didn't mention.

I don't run X on *nix so when I am doing dev there I use vim, and have done so for a long long time
> Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.

Open source is no different. Click the "fork" button on Github, and the project is now yours.

> Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in.

> The larger the project, the less likely it will.

This is not really true. Send a patch to any open source project, and it will probably get in if it needs to be in. (Sure patches get rejected -- not everything needs to be "core", the code might not work, it might not be useful, etc., etc. But if you send a useful patch, it will get in regardless of how big or how small the project is.)

Anyway, Wikipedia really has the same model, it just looks different. You can edit anything, and the edit sticks immediately. But eventually an arbiter will review your edit, and if it's bad, it will be reverted. (There are "WikiProjects" dedicated to making sure every edit in their project gets looked at.)

Bad edits rarely slip by completely undetected, and if they do, that's life. Bad patches are committed to open source projects. Paper books have errata.

I am not sure why Wikipedia needs to be held to some higher standard than any other form of media ever.
Blip.fm is in trouble
If mixx is the new pownce, then like pownce, who cares?
David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think
Really? It seems this guy's principle argument is summed up as, "Remember where we're at here: the end of the longest week in financial-market history, when no one -- traders, reporters, Congressmen, you name it -- was getting much if any sleep. Simple errors can easily be made, numbers can get fuzzy, everything was moving very fast and confusingly."

I'm not saying it did or did not happen, but I am convinced that after reading that entry I'm not any more convinced of what really happened.
My keyboard has an ECHO.
This also highlights the key difference between journalists and the vast majority of bloggers.

Of course, if you read the article, you might notice the following about the source of the story:

Would you believe: the Sunday New York Post, which on September 21 published a story headlined "Almost Armageddon" featuring this paragraph:

According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening [on Thursday]. The total money-market capitalization was roughly $4 trillion that morning.
No, it's the same domain, so unless your victims are your co-workers, it won't work.
Coder's Half-Million-Dollar Baby Proves iPhone Gold Rush Is Still On
Hong Kong has a far longer history of prominence then Dubai. It grew slower & it has lost its position slower. The underlying reasons for HK's importance have been dissolving. There is no reason to use HK as an intermediary for dealings with China. There is no reason not to establish an office in the mainland.

But being in slow relative decline meant has meant that they fared alright. (a) Decline Relative to China can still be reasonable growth. IE they can have a smaller share of a bigger pie. (b) The secondary industries: Tourism, financial services, consultancies etc. have had a chance to have a go on their own.
I measure my productivity in a way akin to the ratio of time spent adding features added + fixing other people's bugs over the time fixing bugs I create and rewriting my own code.

Granted I am an "engineer" in a small company, not just a programmer, which I guess means I do things like write requirements, evaluate new platforms etc. IE lots of things not directly tied to implementing new features or improving existing ones. Not sure how that factors in.
The Story of My Startup. 
After an incredible amount of complications and pushing the launch date back over a year, we've finally just made the site live.

This is blog post documenting the entire story. I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community.
Github stands as one of the more inspirational companies. Their model - business/customer services/innovation - can be applied to a few other markets as well.

I definitely wish them luck, as an avid user (though only at the $7/month level).
Are you referring to drinking, gambling & prostitution?
Drug Intervention
Drug Intervention
Billu barber:movie review
Why is Great UI so hard to achieve?
Welcome to The Lonsdaleite Age?
Writing plug-ins in Python
Actually, he cited several data sources that agree that it didn't happen.
My personal measure is that I'm most productive when I'm least aware of time passing. The longer the day felt, the less productive I was. This doesn't give me any insight into the relative productivity of the guy sitting next to me, but if we treat this as a personal quest for productivity rather than an institutional one, it suffices.

The trouble starts once we get the idea that our personal quirks are somehow universal.
Ask HN: Please provide feedback on Sponty | be hangoutable.
Sponty facilitates casual social gatherings among friends.

We have been in closed beta since last fall. We were at the MIT TechFair on 2/2/2009. Here are some of the pitches we used at the table:

"Hi, we're Sponty and we want you to be hangoutable. You should see your friends more".

"Unlike other social networks that want you to sit in front of the computer to look at photos and comment on rants, we're trying to use the internets to get you off the internets so that you'd see your friends more. You know, the old fashioned way where you sit with them and gossip over dinner. That way you'll actually be in their photos."

"We're different. Social networks want you to sit in front of the computer all day. We think that's wrong. You should be spending face time with friends."

"We sure are all busy. But we all have to eat at some point. It is more fun to eat dinner with friends".

We're still in closed beta, so here is an invitation link:
http://www.thesponty.com/hn

Please let us know your thoughts!
Mozilla Bespin: An extensible editor written in HTML Canvas
Quarkbase : Website info aggregator
Yes, and I've seen some of ATMs in Waikiki dispense $50 bills.
Reverse Cell Phone Directory
Google didn't compete with Microsoft. They took advantage of a shift in the environment that made Microsoft irrelevant.

Microsoft is still as dominant in the desktop app world as they ever were. It's just that nobody cares about desktop apps.

(And eventually, the same thing will happen to Google and nobody will care about webapps, but not yet...)
Infinite SMS ends the text messaging rip-off. Sort of
Survivor Bias: Log Cabins, Classical Music, Etc.
Open source is different because forking a project doesn't fork the users of the original. There's a central repository for Wikipedia.

The model is fundamentally different. It's the ecosystem around that model that makes it work.
Sometimes I think that success is all about luck, and so the most productive team is the one that manages to expose themselves to as much luck as possible. Perhaps that takes the form of number of crazy ideas thrown out per unit time.

Then again, other times I think that success is all about luck, and so the most productive team is the one that manages to avoid blowing it when they do happen to get lucky. Think of Digital Research, Yahoo, or Netscape. Maybe productivity here is measured in disasters avoided.

I know for sure that productivity isn't something as mundane as effort expended or lines of code written. Because really, the vast majority of features you implement won't matter to anyone.
Sponty has been in closed beta since the fall. We were at the MIT TechFair last week. Here are some of the pitches we used at the Sponty table (we also had chocolates!):

"Hi, we're Sponty and we want you to be hangoutable. You should see your friends more".

"Unlike other social networks that want you to sit in front of the computer to look at photos and comment on rants, we're trying to use the internets to get you off the internets so that you can see your friends more. You know, the old fashioned way where you sit with them and gossip over dinner. That way you'll actually be in those photos"

"We're different. Social networks want you to sit in front of the computer all day. We think that's wrong. You should be spending face time with friends."

"We sure are all busy. But we all have to eat at some point. It is more fun to eat dinner with friends".

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Large Banks on the Edge of Insolvency
Jokey comments that are easy to read and digest and are mildly amusing and wind up at the top of the comment sections just like [PIC] submissions on lesser websites...where have I seen those before...?
I always used [:], although now I think I'll switch to copy.copy or list() after reading this thread. (Actually, now that I work for BigCo, I'll have to check what their coding standards say about this.)
jackowayed, joshuarr-- thanks for the question.

what i mean by "investment theory" is that there are specific requirements angels/VCs have when evaluating startups for fundability, that are indicators of the entrepreneur's ability to execute a high-growth concept.

we are extracting those characteristics/indicators and building that into the learning model for Portland Ten-- so that the entrepreneurs who work with us understand those concepts & are trained to think on that level, in regards to identifying and exploiting a scalable market opportunity.

essentially, rather than using the skills/information i've learned as related to high tech funding to work on the investment side of the table by taking a job as an analyst or working with a fund, i'd rather work with startups who are too premature to get attention from investors, or who may ultimately not be interested in taking funding, to pre-engineer the way they think about running a company so that it operates on a high-growth level, but doesn't require fitting into the venture capital model.

hope that helps. feel free to ask more questions or ping me directly via www.pdxten.com.

-carolynn
It's harder to sell real product to real customers now, as real customers don't have as much money to buy things with as they did a few months ago.

It's certainly possible, but recessions are all about averages, and it's a lot tougher for the average business right now.
Unfortunately, looks like my comment lost the first half somehow... anywhere, here's what I meant to put first...

First, thanks for addressing this in a reasoned way. The issue gets emotional sometimes.

That said, I disagree with your arguments.

A recent study of the H1B visa showed that the majority of these visas go to Indian outsourcing firms, not American companies looking for top talent. I have no doubt that many talented people come to the US on this visa, and that these people are well paid, but that appears to be less common. Most of the H1Bs are awared to rank and file workers, so I think much more displacement than innovation is going on here. I also think that we could easily create a visa (with full mobility rather than indentured servitude) that we could award in smaller numbers to higly talented foreign nationals.

I strongly object to your use of Sergey Brin as an example of why the H1B is important. Keep in mind that the writer of this article had no problem with engineers and scientists immigrating to America, he was just opposed to a specialized visa created specifically to increase the number of engineers. An engineer who immigrates independently of the visa program (as is the case with Sergey Brin, who grew up in the US and chose to study CS once he was here) would argue for the latter - that we don't need a specialized visa to get these kinds of people here!

(... then continue with the rest of the post, thanks)
I use both VIM and Eclipse PDT on a regular basis. Recently, while looking for a nice free Eclipse plugin that gives me vi key bindings (I haven't found one yet), I came across an interesting project: Eclim (http://eclim.sourceforge.net/)

While most Eclipse plugins bring vi functionality to Eclipse, Eclim goes the other way and brings Eclipse IDE functionality to VIM (using an Eclipse plugin that acts as a server-interface to a collection of VIM plugins). I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds interesting.

VIM is definitely top dog. I remember how excited I was when I learned how to use ":vsplit" and ":e ." -- I spent the next few years using it as my IDE. (Off topic, but equally as exciting was my recent discovery that the screen utility can do split-windows! Yes, I need to RTFM more often!)
I was coming to make nearly the exact comment. Working hard, being frugal, learning how your business works and how your customers think, and getting money to provide something to them - always a good thing. Create junk and flip it for big cash will always appeal to the human desire to get something for nothing. But create something meaningful and get something for giving the other person a lot more they paid - Damn, that's sexy. I love business.
No, you really can't say that for almost any field. Money management and poker tournaments are about all I can come up with. In any competitive field with a quantifiable scoreboard, you could take the data, extract from it means and standard deviations, and say with x% certainty that one player is better than another.

In money management, x is never very large. It's so small that you can't reliably say that anyone is better than anyone else, in fact the overall distribution of money managers isn't much different from what it would be if it were all chimpanzees selecting stocks with darts. In basketball or chess, x gets to pretty near 100.
In this case the dinosaurs are their own asteroid.
The Athens Affair: The most audacious cell-network break-in ever
Terrible title but a great question. The obvious metrics are lines of codes or tasks completed. At our startup we have a Trac setup and make lots of little tickets and check them off. Maybe 2 or 3 major tickets get completed per week per developer. More than that and you are making the tasks too granular and are wasting time doing admin overhead, less than that and they aren't specific enough a la GTD.
Toss a small (TM) on either Sponty, "be hangoutable", or both. TM means trademark - but anyone can use it whenever they're using new descriptive language that doesn't infringe on someone else's mark. You don't need to register anything - the (R) in a circle means Registered Trademark, and you need to register that.

Kellogg's has a registered trademark, they paid the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), and had a search done to make sure it didn't infringe on anyone. They have a very strong legal standing if anyone comes after them:

http://www2.kelloggs.com/

But look at Google - they just use (TM)!

https://mail.google.com

TM adds a bit of credibility. Split test it if you're not convinced, but it shouldn't hurt, and makes you feel like a real company. I'd definitely throw the TM onto "be hangoutable", because that's a cool phrase, and I'd want to own that after coining it.
Very similar to http://www.mixin.com/.
Thanks to whoever submitted this. It is an old post, but I just updated it this week with 230 new dataset links I collected in the last year. The page has about 400 datasets listed now. It also includes a tagged json version for groups like infochimps who are working to categorize open data or scrape it from the web.
Exactly. Don't turn off your bullshit detector because someone has a more "official" title.
what's to stop my mechanic using it?
Sure if I come in with a commodore/falcon then he'll be able to get parts easy - but come in with something exotic - and he might struggle / ring around heaps to find them.
Is it worth measuring the granular "how productive" or is it enough to measure the binary "productive or not"?

I'd argue that the biggest battle is preventing people from being unproductive. Measure how often people have a productive state of "true", but don't measure them against each other.
memcached + MySQL solution was invented by livejournal.com and is using by facebook.com. So-called in-memory databases also in the market.
And second important moment is the prices of RAM modules, SSDs and commodity hardware. In some cases it is better to create in-house solution that reflects your data structures and data flows.