skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I'm being too permissive, but that screen doesn't look fishy at all. I went through the purchasing/sign-up process, and it goes like this:

1. create a profile (answer questions on style)
2. fill in details, click a *JOIN NOW* button
3. get a "*first month* for 50% off" offer
4. get to this payment screen

At no point it implies you are buying a single product, there are no "buy now" buttons or calls to action.

To me it's pretty clear that it's a recurring service, like many others that exist for chocolate, wine, beer, socks, razors, etc. The right hand side on the checkout is clear enough, and the skip the month part is there highlighted, not in small letters.

EDIT: apparently this is just the flow after choosing something on the home page. If you choose one of the "special" products or go to the Featured section, it does go through a standard add to cart + checkout flow (http://minus.com/lA7snPkHUHOZR). That is actually terribly misleading.
I now enjoy it, but from my understanding, it depends on the attitude the team and management has towards it. Maintenance during the earlier phases of a product is also very different from doing it in the very late phases, when you know all your efforts are going to just delaying its inevitable death.
Mozilla Style Guide
Rainbows End (Vinge) has a very interesting and not exactly dystopic vision.
Hold Your Nose and Vote
Its a scummy thing to do regardless of how it affects the boss. Its how it affects the fire-ee that makes it scummy.
Camera prints Text, contextual description of what was in the shot
Awesome stuff - I write for Wired.com and would love to do a post on this - I sent you an email, let me know if you're interested.
Disable Text Highlighting With CSS
Thanks, my first thought was they were from 'Rendezvous with Rama' by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Perfect Bacon Cooking Method
>I think the point is that vetting is a ongoing process and the asbestos example is one were something has been approved for use over a period and then later in its life-cycle found to have enough negatives to make it not be use.

And again, there's just no comparison between the state of science today and the state of science a century ago. For a point of reference, the idea of blinded and randomized trials was a new concept when asbestos first came under suspicion.

The implication that the efficacy of science will improve in the next 100 years comparably to how it did in the last 100 years is spurious. Scientific understanding is being continually refined, but it is not a linear progression. Take the difference between our understanding of the shape of the earth in 800BC vs. 600BC; the model went from a flat earth to a spherical earth. That's a giant leap in 200 years. Then in the next 350 years they nailed down the size of the earth to within about 20% of the true value. An impressive advance, but surely a lesser one. Then, over the next 2250 years, we've gotten a more accurate measurement of the size of the planet, and noticed that it's a bit oblate rather than a perfect sphere. As science advances, the rate of progress slows; that's just how it works.
It seems that the author developed the underlying kinematics needed to implement an inertial measurement unit (src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit ), though with his introduction of GPS, he could probably convert it to an inertial navigation system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system). I wonder if the author is aware of the Extended Kalman Filter (src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Kalman_filter ) -- he could fuse the noisy sensor data with the aircraft's kinematic model to cancel out some of the error he was mentioning getting. The best resource I've found online about how to use Kalman filters and EKFs is course notes from a simultaneous localization and mapping workshop taught at Drexel University in 2006 (src: http://prism2.mem.drexel.edu/~billgreen/slam/slam.html ).
Just needs a bigger ego. Whenevery I get laid off (actually just the once) I assume they are fools to do it, they must have no idea how great I am, I'm going to a better place.

True or false, its the right attitude to take with you. The alternatives - like a year of depression - are awful, and self-inflicted.
It's a fascinating issue, and one that I think will come to dominate political discourse in the next 10-20 years.

NIMBYism has a lot to do with this, but the whole system is rigged against the young. We have a generation of teenagers, many of whom have a more mature understanding of issues such as student loans than older generations, but are not allowed to have a say.

BRB: Setting up a political party to represent Generation Y. Abolish the minimum voting age, massive housing expansion, force older generations to retrospectively pay tuition fees, reform drug policy, abolish copyright protection, appoint Cheryl Cole as the Queen, etc.
Which States have the Highest Risk of an E-Voting Meltdown?
Stick with Java, more job security, bigger support base, better tooling and Java is likely to go obsolete as I predict Xtend will very soon and Scala will soon after when people realize how much of a minefield that language is (I think they keep all those 'special' cases there to see if you were paying attention in class, no idea).

Java for the few oddities is quite a solid language and one that will make you marketable in the industry for many years. For personal projects... pick one that has the most verbose structure because 6 months from now you won't remember why you did something and having to figure out the language and logic is a bit annoying.
Unless you want to seriously screw up the user experience: don't.
Merge For iOS Combines All Messages In A Single Thread On A Per Contact Basis
Every now and then, a jailbreak package comes along that seems like it should have been a part of Apple’s own implementation of iOS.
I am a polyglot programmer even though I try to concentrate on languages that I need to get stuff done. I am really enjoying Martin's Scala class https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun, I use Clojure a lot on customer and my own projects, and (J)Ruby is so often my go-to language. And, I use Java a lot, but less than these other JVM languages.

That said, I was having a quiet think while walking in the wilderness recently (I live in the mountains) and I asked myself the tough question: would I have accomplished more in my professional life in the last ten years if I simply always used Java? I honestly don't know the answer but I suspect that the answer is that in some absolute metric of both money earned and productive work for society, just sticking with Java would have been the better call. In the past I have had the same quiet think about just using (J)Ruby.

The big win of being a polyglot programmer is reshaping one's mind to think about problems in different ways, and I don't know if it is worth it.
Also, if 1-2% of your charges through a merchant result in a chargeback, the merchant will drop you completely. However, a good scam company will have a few merchants lined up just for this reason.
Great literature summary. The apocryphal story however - I call BS. Everybody can write a loop from 1 to 100.
I know that ad. I always angrily yell at the TV, "yes they're the same: equally bad!"
The Myth of Male Decline
I haven't specifically used an iDevice, but all the gyroscopes I'm familiar with provide the first derivative, not second.

I'm also curious why he doesn't mention any use of magnetometers, which can give absolute orientation (not just the derivatives). Are the changes in position/elevation too large for airplanes to rely upon the local magnetic field of the earth?
The page clearly says you'll be charged every month. It charges you and applies a credit, implying you can use the credit any time. It doesn't charge you and then not let you use the money.

Is it misleading? Yeah slightly, except it says exactly what will happen with a bright pink numbered list. Did they create the program hoping some people will forget about it? Yes definitely. But, this a common tactic employed by any company with a monthly subscription.

All this outrage is a little ridiculous.
Agreed any feed based system, even with filters adhears to one fixed albeit customised set of filters. When you can have a different filter set that takes into account what is important to you right there and now, which changes. Then it will be more managable, but that is still away of as predicting the weather 100% right all the time. Compters are good after all at learning from there mistakes once said mistakes have been highlighted to them, it is when they learn human mistakes which the human is unaware of that starts to become an area of conflict.

But if feed based products were the way to go then USENET would of been growing in popularity above and beyond the binary feeds.

We after all as humans are still pefecting ourselfs and with that we are shy of any software that dictates direction for us. For most a forum were the input feeds are moderated and sanatised by others prior to you getting it is the common form, be it via crowd sourced forums like this or teirs of managment filtering what is interesting. Though the ability to overide those filters is just as important than having them and any other way is dictating and controlling the information in a way that makes most uncomfortable in the expectation that they are missing something which to them is important. Just as if this forum had no search option and the ability to view only the deemed top news items, well you know how that would work out badly, even if most don't use search or the new options much.
the phenomenon you have experienced is known in the node community as #JIFASNIF
RIM isn't a US company.
UF Sparse Matrix Collection
From the FAQ:

"How do I make a link in a question?

You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)
"

Let's face it you posted the link in your question in order to promote your site. I think you are doing a fine job promoting it without asking for legitimate help from HN.
I tried this for booking my current business trip. I offered a $100 reward for a five city US excursion, originating in Japan, with the proviso "I use Delta. Make sure I get miles for this, either with them or an allied carrier."

The best offer I get that actually read that instruction knocked $3,000 off the $5,000 that Delta.com quoted me. I went with Delta. I have the utmost respect for the amount of searching which went into it, but the instructions I got back were 6 steps long, with each step sounding like "Book a one-way flight from X to Y using this web interface", and I was terrified of getting halfway through and then being stranded in Des Moines not able to book the rest of the flights at anything near the quote.

I'm so there if they can handle the bookings themselves, such that I'm not the one bearing the risk-of-failure-to-book.
New Content-Delivery Tech Should Be Presumed Illegal, Says Former Copyright Boss
Actually it's more of a scam than a business model, only made possible because of the BS bubble.

Lot's of people are gonna be seriously hit a la 1999 until this scheme fades out.
These companies exist even today. The have an army of affiliates promoting their offers on all ad networks out there. These companies are paying the affiliates $10-15 for each valid billing info.

Sad thing is, JustFAB seems to be just like these companies. Only it looks good and it is supposed to be a 'legitimate' business.
Shoedazzle pioneered this but had to get rid of the subscription and flip to a per-item charge because of scam complains.
In my experience Clojure is very callable from Java. For example, Lists and Maps can be passed as normal arguments to clojure functions without conversion step. This works because Clojure favors abstractions over concretions. For example, instead of a concrete cons cells datastructure, Clojure has the ISeq interface. As far as I can tell, calling clojure from Java introduces no overhead at all.

Datomic is a commercial database system developed in Clojure. The peer library is what you use in your client application to query the Datomic server. The peer library is written in Clojure. I expect that means calling Clojure from Java, and including the Clojure runtime jar in a client application, is safe/stable/supported enough to build a business on top of it.

I'm still learning though, so take what I said with a grain of salt.
i don't know if this list is real or not but that's remind me there is some total sick people in this world...
0.0001g 24/7 takes quite a bit of energy.

365 * 24 * 0.0001g = 0.876g for an hour = 70,000 mph worth of acceleration every year.
All coding efforts are just delaying the product's inevitable death. Software lifecycles are shorter and shorter. A style of shoes has more staying power than most software.
These $10 Robots Will Change Robotics Education
Acompanhar a migração das renas na Lapónia - Suécia
I believe by "personal remains personal", grandparent meant that the legal requirements for official email do not apply to an official's "personal" email - even when that personal email is used solely to circumvent the legal requirements.
Programming flying robots
How to clarify confusing behaviors in apps like Twitter and Instagram
Following the instructions to install via Homebrew, I got an error installing haskell-platform. Anyone have a solution?

https://gist.github.com/1a59577ead61a401f330
It's common for publishers to give authors an advance on sales of a book - effectively a loan, paid back via royalties. If Amazon gets deeper into traditional publishing it wouldn't be crazy for them to do some version of the same.
He has as many sources as the original article - experience.
I like the views, and I think the drawings understate them. You're on the inside of a curved surface: you can see hundreds of km in any direction, always from a high angle (no obstructions). And up to the full 4pi steradians of solid angle. Far more than a mountain view. Maybe more like an ISS view, but bigger still, and vastly sharper (with minimal assumptions about the atmosphere quality). The level of detail isn't really represented right.

It would be an interesting vacation concept, if only it were about 15 orders of magnitude cheaper.
It's the strangest thing. It's like having a blog and access to Hacker News makes self-proclaimed "seasoned" programers forget that they, too, probably had really crappy code when they started programming.

Instead of bashing green programmers who coincidentally became interested programming at the same time that Rails makes it so easy to start, why not offer them up a list of resources to make them better?

Humans are only born knowing how to cry and swallow. Nobody's born knowing how to program. Let's give Rails the props it deserves for lowering the barrier to entry for making web applications and look forward to the future where these new programmers are making things to make our lives easier.
The way the site is run really lets the contest down.
Someone should make a website or a subreddit with "Shit the Copyright People Say". I'm sure it will fill up quickly.
Rails has a steeper learning curve than PHP. And I can't see Rails (easily) being sloppily-disorganized like PHP can.

So I'm going to go with no.
Ask HN: Difficulties of a web app that sends out emails?
Hey all,

I'm looking at creating a web app similar to http://doodle.com/ that -

- Sends out an email to a customer
- Customer replies or clicks link and chooses date from a selection of potential dates
- Original sender sees the choosen date and it's added to the calendar

However, after doing a little investigation it seems like there could be massive issues with emails being caught by spam filters etc.

Has anyone worked on a startup or project that sends out lots of emails and is there anything you can do to get round this?

Thanks all.
So true. I started off writing really shitty Perl and PHP code. Some of my Java and ActionScript was also nothing to be proud off. Yet I think I write nice code today.

The key is not to be judgemental.

If you think there's a problem, don't point fingers. Go out there and help fix the problem. With compassion and understanding.
Why responsive design is worth it.
There's one case I recall that's close enough. A couple years ago there was a chiptune cover album of the Miles Davis classic Kind of Blue, complete with a pixel-art version of the cover. The photographer of the original cover art sued over the pixelized version. You can read the whole story here: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/
He's not bashing green programmers. He's bashing on programmers with years under their belt who never got any better, and don't participate in any community.
Is this showing that the PC death is overrated or that the HDD producer's monopoly works as planned?
Surely it will be one by four by nine foot pods.
As crazy as this is, this is an old technique from the adult video (Porn) industry. Recurring charges that also can't be disputed with either the company or the issuing credit card company.
Just integrated it on a personal Padrino project. Beautifully simple user and developer-side. Congratulations and thanks Mozilla!
um no?

PHP "has a relatively small community, with the majority of people working under the radar and on their own?" ?

Where is he getting these stats? relative to what? For instance

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Says PHP the language is more popular than Ruby the language (let alone the subset of Ruby programmers who use Rails). I don't get where that perceived smallness comes from. In all my experience and every way I've seen the PHP community is vastly larger than the Ruby community. Also comparing a language to a Framework seems... weird. It might make more sense to compare Rails to Drupal at least, which again, in the enterprise world, I have seen waaay more Drupal installs than Rails ones. There are a few high profile Rails sites but it quickly seems to drop off into hobby and startup. Meanwhile Drupal is just everywhere. It's surprising.

Also, accusing the PHP community of "writing below par software while charging their clients for it?" is hilarious coming from the Rails camp. Generally lowering the bar for entrance while making it easier for good devs to get good work done faster also allows more "bad" devs to enter as well. Anyone remember earlier this year that core Rails bug that allowed people to overwrite almost all data that most big Rails sites were affected by (including github)

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228

I cannot understand where this viewpoint is coming from, it seems hilarious (and at best, the criticisms seem like the pot calling the kettle black).
Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Hurray | Socyberty
This not in my backyard eliteism is a problematic mindset, especially geeks hating on geeks, who probably weren't that popular in school themselves.

Kind of ironic.

Tools are just tools. Most are capable and have good web frameworks.

Opinion and preference is largely what most posts like these are based on, while it's free to have your opinion and preference of what tools you use, judging others, and how and if they may learn is another thing.
Maybe. If Ruby / Ruby on Rails is a good language for web-development, easy for beginners to learn, the community is helpful, beginners feel welcome, and experienced developers invest in teaching; you'd expect to find a small army of 'just get it to work' developers knocking out small projects and charging too little.

I'm ok with that. Small projects get done. Not everyone needs a $125/hr consultant. Some of those projects will grow and need more experienced developers. All of those beginner developers will gain experience. Some of those beginner developers will continue to grow, learn testing, learn better software design principles and start contributing to the community.

If Ruby on Rails has, or were to have, a small army of beginner developers writing poor code on small projects and charging too little for it; I think it would be a healthy thing.

Disclosure: I got started as a Rails-first-language developer and have loved every second of it. And I try to get new people started with web-development using Rails and hope to see them get their first small projects that they can write bad code for and get paid anything for.
Document sheets in mobile operating systems
There's really only one paragraph here that remotely tries to explain the headline:

"The PHP where there are lots of people writing below par software while charging their clients for it? The PHP that has a ton of websites with crappy advice and crappy code to copy/paste? The PHP which has a relatively small community, with the majority of people working under the radar and on their own?"

I'm a Python developer. Do you have any idea how much crappy Python code and crappy advice is on the internet? Take a look at the StackOverflow homepage at any given moment. Every language has developers at every stage of the learning process. And every language has developers who have stunted in the learning process.

So, this is ridiculous. The answer is no. Rails provides infinitely better tools in a better language than PHP.
People have pursued such donation based models.

Nobody has succeeded in making substantial money on a per item basis. However NPR manages to do it on a brand-based basis, but their signup rates are something like under 1% of their dedicated listeners. It isn't easy.
In Unreal Tournament 2004, you can spectate a user's screen (be it a bot or a human). The bot's cursor follows rigid straight movements to hit the target, movements which would be impossible for a human to do (see: drawing a perfect circle on the first try).
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than (2011)
Can reducing the speed limit make for safer/faster travel during peak times
I suspect these Amazon loans are secured, with inventory as the collateral, which in plain English means that if the borrower defaults, the lender (Amazon) can take the inventory and sell it to payoff the outstanding balance of the loan.

If I'm right, given that Amazon manages fulfillment for many third-party sellers (meaning that their inventory is already stored in Amazon warehouses[1]), these new Amazon loans appear to be virtually no-risk.

Brilliant.

--

[1] http://www.amazonservices.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits...
No, make sharing stop double-counting for the 2%.
The level of elitism in the Ruby and by extension Rails communities never ceases to amaze me. Having attended several ruby and rails conferences over the last few years, the belief that Ruby is the language of "good programmers" is so prevalent as to be off putting.
UT2K4 was awesome! I don't enjoy any games after that!
My suggestion would be to use one of the many email APIs.

Sending email reliably is hard. Really hard.

One of the bigger problems will be your server(s) IP(s) ending up on blacklists. You'll need to constantly monitor them and either get yourself removed, or switch to a new IP.

Without the process of detecting you've been blacklisted, and switching to another IP being automated. Some of your emails will not get through - and your service will be viewed as unreliable.

Good luck!