skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From reading the sign-up page, it sounds like each month you are billed you receive a 'credit' that can be used to purchase an item from the site.

To me, the responsible thing to do would send an email to customers that have been billed for the month but have no yet redeemed their credit near the end of the month. Let them know they have a credit and suggest some items that they could purchase with the credit.

At least that would give information to the customer so they are more aware of what's going on sooner rather than later and people may feel less that they are being 'scammed' because the site was actually trying to help them get what they are paying for.

However, I agree that the signup page should make it more clear that it's a recurring charge. In fact, I would support a rule/regulation that required a user check a box that specifically states, "I understand that I am agreeing to a recurring monthly charge of $xx.xx".

I know that I'd be pretty pissed if I saw a recurring charge show up that I wasn't expecting.
It's not nearly enough. Some major conglomerates (If I recall correctly then GE, GM, Samsung and others) do stuff like that in-house by creating bank-subsidiaries in their largest markets, but I'd guess that it would be reasonable at 78 billion revenue, not 78 million.
Web is going to save TV. If we still can call it TV.
> Instead of 1-3 years, replacement timescales became 3-5 years, and at this point it's probably 5-7 years.

I don't think that's true. Laptops are still being replaced every ~3 years, from what I've seen. The difference is that a lot of those frequent upgraders are Mac users, and all the new Mac laptops use SSDs.
pg should just webcast a sample of ycombinator presentations.

The "search for the next Steve Jobs" is a pretty active market. I predict competition for this show.
The conspiracy-minded might suspect that the real reason for this might have been to keep web view based apps inconvenient to develop, and poorly performing, to nudge developers towards native ObjC-based apps. Which are coincidentally harder to port to other platforms.
"See technologies overview for explanations on the methodologies used in the surveys."
All day on a treadmill is going to be bad on your knees, hips and heels. If you running/jogging make sure you really pay attention to your form if you are going for that long (which is going to conflict with your concentration). If you are walking, you have to be even more cognizant of your form because walking typically involves constant heel-striking.

Elliptical might be a bit better, but now you are sitting in an uncomfortable seat and the repetitive motion will get you sore quickly.
Say what you will about the Singularity Institute and its ilk, but at the very least they're geared towards optimistic futurism.

In fact, compared to space colonies, the notion of downloading someone's brain into a computer is far more sci-fi-ish. Space colonies would be a colossal engineering effort, but don't require any fundamentally new science.
Where's my $4/month rails hosting?
And it had an editor too! Turbo Pascal was what I cut my teeth on and to this day I have fond memories of how productive I was in it.
Jobs had to rectify damage to a core aspect of Apple's branding, high prices justified by a perceived value proposition which the massive price drop upended because it made Apple enthusiasts feel that their brand loyalty had been abused. Jobs formalism was a function of his having to go entirely off message.

Cook's tone is entirely consistent with the narrative the press has built around Maps - it sucks but Apple is sincerely trying to improve it. What goes without mention in the press is that Apple knew it sucked and used its sucking to generate press coverage for its launch. It's no accident that the letter was released Friday so as to dominate the weekend news cycle. It is also no accident that Apple isn't offering to make customers whole. Apple has been out in front of this story since before the launch. That's why all the press since the initial story lost its edge has been positive.
Is this better? http://i.imgur.com/qiZgj.png

Direct comparison of some of the more egregious examples in Firefox (Top) vs Chrome (bottom). Look at the tab title, the text in the dark grey nav bar, the aliasing on the back button, the aliasing on the text, the aliasing on the edge of the "O" in the Google logo, and the aliasing of the text under the buttons.
I don't have the science but I have been standing at my desk for over a year now.

My advice is: keep it loose, keep moving around, take lots of breaks. If you were standing, sit for a bit. If you were sitting, walk for a bit. Don't stay in one position (even if it's a good position) for any long time. Keep your arms and head at proper and comfortable heights. Keep good posture.
As great as this kind of thing is - and it's a great step forward for new types of online media - I find it incredibly frustrating that this is where so much developer time is being spent while basic box models are still broken in CSS.

We now have three flexbox specifications, none of which are supported well enough to use, anywhere. Forgive me if I am not excited about 3d effects when we can't even reliably tell a DIV to expand to available width or height. Most layouts I do these days have to rely on awful hacks like "padding-bottom: 2000px;margin-bottom:-2000px".
Because self-defense of active threats is not the only purpose of the military. The military does not need to involved in combat to be part of an active geopolitical strategy. It's mere existence and size are themselves an extremely effective tool for peaceful foreign policy.
That reminds me of certain ads I sometimes see on the french TV for ringtones or silly phone games: if you read the small print you realize they actually offer a membership, not a product, and you actually pay something like 3 euros a week instead of a one-time fee. They call that "clubs" or something.

Those ads usually seem to target teenagers (they're mostly on music channels or channels aimed at kids) who probably aren't in charge of the bill and if they're not careful they might end up with a bad surprise. This is beyond shoddy.
http://www.orionsarm.com/ world building project.
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" features technology that I would personally like to achieve some time in my life time.
I'm seeing a lot of slashdot.org posts today that are just small snippets of the original article that add little or nothing...
Don't forget that doing a chargeback doesn't absolve you from having to pay for services you've legitimately signed up for, it just denies the parties the convenience of settling through the credit card companies.

They can take you to court for breach of contract, and if (IANAL) the subscription contract is found to be legit, you have to pay + fees.
To me the Jobs letter reads like one from a leader: strong, confident, and yes egotistical. "I know I'm right, this will all work out to your benefit, you made the right decision, but all things considered it seems right to throw you a bone."

The Cook letter reads like one from a battered spouse. "I'm sorry, please don't leave me, meanwhile have some other women if that makes you happy."
I don't think that's true. They have come down but not to the absurdly cheap level they were before the flood.

As an anecdote, I purchased a 2 TB hard drive just a few months before the flood for $60 from Newegg. Now, the cheapest 2 TB drive on Newegg is $100.

So, they have come down but still haven't recovered. This is why I haven't been able to bring myself to buy another 2 TB drive because I know I'd be paying a 50% premium over what I paid last time.
Frank & oak has a similar confusing model on their hunt club
So I had some pretty angry thoughts after hearing this. I mean this is seriously unethical and immoral and I'll be extremely surprised if this approach stays after what seems to be an increasing amount of public pressure.

The fact some well known VC's pile a ton of money into this does not surprise me one bit. The company is making money and to be fair they do explain it pretty clearly IF YOU GO LOOKING. What they're doing isn't illegal. However, more should and could be done online to protect people from bad practices such as these.

CC companies do offer a form of protection through chargebacks, and over here in the UK whenever I have needed to dispute a transaction the mere mention of 'chargeback' usually kicks the retailer into shape.

One company I have HUGE respect for is TeamTreehouse, I mean look how they manage a subscription service[1]. Best practice indeed.

[1] http://cl.ly/image/0u0B1t313e3P
I wonder if he scans for any credit card data with an RFID reader.
Obama blocks Chinese wind farms in Oregon over national security
I definitely second this. I used to work a children's website, where kids would often take their parents' credit card and make purchases, and we'd inevitably end up with many chargebacks (even though we offered refunds, many people went straight for the chargeback option instead of contacting us). The chargebacks not only cost the company extra - even if the company wins the dispute - and if chargebacks happen too frequently, banks may shut down the account.

I have also won 3 chargebacks against companies who never delivered their product or used deceptive practices. The process was not too difficult, and I believe the CC companies tend to side with the consumer. Verdicts on the disputes can take several months to process though.
4T is a pretty large amount of data though.

I think what will happen is that more and more funds will move to SSD research and improvements, pretty much the same way it happened around the time that the GMR was discovered and first marketed.

There was an apparent slowdown in drive capacity increase and then, when the GMR based drives hit the market we were suddenly swimming in drives of 100's of megabytes.

That tech is getting older and the whole solid state movement seems to have the future. So this may be the last generation of storage media based on spinning magnetic platters. SSD still has a bit of catching up to do, but the writing is on the wall for hard drive makers.

Imagine to have to sign off on a mulit-year, multi-billion plan to create new factories that will have no application in a future iteration of the technology. That would be a very tough business decision. I'm happy they got as much production capacity online as they do.

On the plus side of all this: the last generation magnetic media, at 4T or even beyond will be sold at rockbottom prices to keep those factories alive as long as possible.
Columbia House was always upfront about the fact that your 8 CDs were merely the start of your membership, and they would send you a CD every month. If this site were at least sending you a pair of shoes you didn't want each month, you'd catch on a lot faster to the fact you're now part of a club.
Is there any way to get any existing data on the iphone into the app (preferably without too much pain)? I assume it's already logging my info: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
I have a book from 1979 or thereabouts with the ringworld illustration in it from this site. Does anyone know about that series of books, "world of tommorow" or something like that that talked about terraforming Mars, future transportation and health, etc? I really loved that series as a kid but can't remember the name.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629
The comparisons the article makes are not apples-to-apples. The authors start with a binary file, and compare it to uncompressed text files. For example, zlib.h on Mountain Lion is 80511 bytes, but only 22031 bytes when gzip compressed (around half the size of Turbo Pascal).

The article's tone implies that these were the 'good old days' when compilers were small and fast. However, priorities have rightly changed. We now have computers that can execute billions of operations per second without breaking a sweat, I/O devices which can perform tens of thousands of IOPS, and laptop GPUs that can push 3D content to a 5.1 million pixel display. It's likely that Turbo Pascal was highly optimized to deal with the constraint's of that day's computers. A lot of developer man hours were almost certainly allocated to shaving off extra bytes from the executable. It's usually not worth devoting such man hours to tiny performance improvements, considering the beefy hardware most people have.
Secure Share - Secure Social Networking
But you're not powerless. I (and I'm sure many others here) are purchasers of mobile servcies and are influential in recommend them to others.

I currently have T-Mobile in the US and haven't had the problem you describe, but based on your story I'll probably be a bit more willing to shop around next time I need to change my contract.
That is true in theory, but in practice, especially in situations like this that does not happen.

For that there would have to be a much more transparent sign up process and actual delivery. Non-performance is not a good basis to start a law suit, especially if you're on the non-performing side.
If this is such a large scale problem, how do they still have merchant accounts? I would expect they would be flooded with reversals from the CC companies and banks.
When books you didn't order start showing up in the mailbox, you pretty quickly catch on to what's happening. Charges that just show up on your credit card statement are a lot less obvious to most people.
That's pretty accurate. As far as the verdicts are concerned, yes, they can take a while to process but if a company gets a negative reputation the process tends to be expedited considerably.
If a classmate or a coworker checked me in FB or something of the sort (not possible really since I keep my online identities fairly secret) I would consider it being attentive and interested, not a stalker. Stalking is not a word to be throwing around willy-nilly.
Once again title reversion. Compare to the original:

Hard drive production 100% recovered, but prices to remain high until 2014

Which one is more informative at a glance?
Exit through the gift shop...
Good comment, although the Pajero is from Mitsubishi, not Nissan.
>"Really? So where were these "hundreds of trained economists" when the Great Recession came about? Out there, causing it."

Causing it? That's preposterous, being as how the borrowers (ie, Joe Public) are 50% to blame for over extending themselves. Again, tell me what tools the FRB has at its disposal that could have prevented the housing meltdown.

>"As for "being saved from becoming Great Depression II", well, let's wait and see."

Indeed we shall. Care to put your money where your mouth is? I have, and continue to do so, participating in one of the biggest bull-market run-ups in history the past two years. Meanwhile, most people continue to spout doom and gloom. And I'm just some guy watching this happen from the sidelines, trying to piece it all together.
There are already enough people working on the flexbox specification. As a dev, I'm sure you know that adding more people to solve a problem doesn't help at all or as the saying goes: too many cooks spoil the broth. Knowing that, I'm glad to see that some people are working on other interesting areas such as CSS shaders as it wouldn't help putting a thousand devs to work on the flexbox spec anyway.
Telling people to leave finance
That's just to become an acquiring bank, to save on exchange fees.

Ultimately VISA determines who gets to participate in the VISA credit exchange network and will fine acquiring banks who participate in things like this. No one can force their way in and avoid responsibility -- period.
Exactly. And it's even more complicated: the author assumes that funding is distributed evenly over the year, when it's not. Very few deals close during the summer, and the period September-December is particularly active.

To the OP: you are jumping to conclusions too quickly without asking the right questions. You also seem too attached to your hypothesis. I recommend that you read Nate Silver's new book "The Signal and the Noise."
Volunteer Coders Team Up to Fix China’s Horrid Online Train Ticketing Site
And even then that's not the whole chain. After all, a GE capital card is backed by another card company:

http://www.gemoney.com.au/en/credit_cards/index.html

Piss off VISA/MC/JCB/AMEX and you're in trouble.
People are unlikely to just hand over their strategies, the good ones anyways. It creates competition. That's why most of the blog posts you see contain mostly generic information. It's pretty rare to see specific, repeatable steps.
0=
Oh, I dunno. American software hiring is blatantly broken. I've been there, I've seen it, submitting my resume half a dozen times to the same companies to finally get an interview and, yes, eventually, a job offer.

But the first five times being told that the company has no matches for me.

Meanwhile, the company complains it can't find engineers.
The pricing page utilizes some odd phrasing. Apparently the free plan does not include "privacy". Am I the only one who was thrown by that?
I'm comparing RoR to the act of running PHP scripts on Apache. Both are processes - this is also what the article addresses.
At least the bullet points on the right clearly describe how the site works. I'm not saying it's not misleading, but I think OP's complaint that customers have to “read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service” to see what the deal is, is basically wrong.

(Also you don't get “nothing” for $39.95; you get store credit. That sucks if you didn't want any, of course, but given the fact that people actively sign up to be able to purchase from that store, I can't imagine it's entirely worthless.)
It gives a good overview of the topics that made me want to learn more about them. I think some links to resources for further information after each section would be very useful for someone using this article as a starting point.
Worked for Zynga!
Not always. There are shows like Lost, Heroes or Dark Angel as well. But you're right that these are exceptions.
Well, there you go. Guess I'd assumed it was US-based since they'd had such a problem with patent trolls in the US.
Good point - I'll add some reference material.
> The article's tone implies that these were the 'good old days' when compilers were small and fast.

That's reading a lot into two short paragraphs. Tone doesn't come across well in text, and the shorter the text is, the harder it is to figure out tone.

I don't hear nostalgia for the 'good old days' in the article, what I hear is, "Wow! What a feat of engineering to fit an IDE and compiler into 40k!" We get the same kick out of watching demo competitions. Have you seen the "Elevated" demo? Including the music, sound effects, textures, everything, it's only 4k...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
I think the point is that the lowest priced laptop hard drives you can find on Newegg are about $50. However, you can get a 128GB SSD for $100. 128GB is easily enough for simple use, even with a smallish music and photos library.

The $50 tier of conventional hard drives does include 500GB models, but that only benefits a different type of customer.

Furthermore if a customer is trying to save $50, and has very light storage needs, there are 60GB SSDs that can be found for $50.
What happened to "ne bis in idem"?
I saw it, it's totally hand wavey.
Fun fact: The law firm Morrison Foerster often shortens its name to MoFo and is located at www.mofo.com.

They say it's good for business.

(For those who don't know, mofo is English shorthand for "motherfucker".)
I guess that also depends on how efficiently the GPU is used.
The weird/stalkery part of it is checking them out extensively on Facebook first instead of just talking to them.

If I was a girl in college and a classmate did that first I think I'd be a bit weirded out that he felt the need to try to come up with interests to talk about in advance instead of just starting up a conversation and finding out stuff about me.

But there's a lot of social conditioning in this—like, if I was a guy in college, and a girl did that to me, I'd be more understanding because girls in the US generally aren't encouraged to cold-approach guys in the first place, and so it would be cool for it to happen, period.

You can pretend to have shared interests at first regardless of how you find out about the other person's interests, so it's not restricted solely to that sort of creepiness, but it still feels like an awfully roundabout way of talking to someone you want to talk to compared to just talking to them.
I don't know how the US patent legislation is implemented but in many countries patents come with a compulsory license. That means that a patent holder cannot restrict others from using his invention. He only has the right to ask for the proper compensation. I think such a clause is imperative to truly have an effective means of promoting innovation.
That's only slightly more likely than mind reading.

Edit: D'oh! Changed "less" to "more"...
Does GPL 3 mean that I cannot use it for in my commercial projects?
And it was learnable. I mean, you could learn every detail of the language with a reasonable effort. Just read through the manuals, which are extremely well written. Not many modern languages you can say that about.
> So, this is ridiculous. The answer is no. Rails provides infinitely better tools in a better language than PHP.

You're making a highly subjective and unqualified comparison of a language to a framework, and (given past citations in similar discussions) probably using information to do so that's at least five years out of date. This after saying you're a python dev so presumably not especially well versed in either language/framework (do correct me if I'm wrong)

Like you say, there's a lot of bad code out there. PHP is notorious for it due to its shallow learning curve and widespread availability on cheap servers. The authors point is that the barrier to entry on ruby/rails appears to be quickly dropping and asks whether it will suffer the same fate.
I'm guessing he does it by being a bank himself (ad for a bank safety campaign).

The real bad guys have other methods, which you can google (try "online financial crime").
Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
You're right, of course. If the original 2009 spec had remained, or been better to begin with, we might have had decent adoption among non-IE and mobile browsers. Instead, we have a 2012 spec that was just put into a CR two weeks ago.

In any case, this is the slow march of progress, and it is good to see.
If you bought into Columbia House in the 90s, as I did, the math worked out to ~$10 average for each CD over a year (the 8-for-a-penny plus the full-price ones), back when they were $16 each at the local store.

The promotional offer was an attention-catcher, but you still saved $4-6 per CD.

Just because you feel like "there must be a trick" doesn't mean there is a trick.
I'm kind of sad to see this isn't a native app. Kinda happy as that was something I was cutting my iOS teeth on.
This is all well and good, but I worry about how incredibly complex the CSS spec is getting. I feel sorry for anyone who has to write a new rendering engine, having to be able to deal with 3D transformed filtered hardware-accelerated animated transitioned round-corner outlined bordered -webkit-canvas-backgrounded background-sized background-centred box-shadowed text-shadowed nested with ::before and ::after pseudo-elements text input boxes with custom vertex and fragment shaders, containing U͋͏n̛̘̪ͥ̽̿̈́ͩ̚i̝ç̲͔̩͚̩̭̫̿o̢̪̬̟̲̻̝ͧ̃̋͒̎̚d͔̩ͫ̎ͩ͆e̴͓̣̱͚ͫ̋̾̄̽ text with embedded right-to-left portions in a left-to-right document, all of which needs to respond to mouse and touch events.
C++'s complexity stems from the fact that it's one big leaky abstraction on top of C with a ton of warts, not because it derives from complex academic or conceptual depth.

I'm not saying Haskell is easy. I'm just saying they are categorically different kinds of complexity.