skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a field (meta) on the Debit resource that allows a marketplace to pass fraud signals like IP address and shipping address. Gittip is facing this issue much earlier than another marketplace in comparison to their volume. Otherwise, we don't ask a marketplaces to pass in more information until they've grown more. The problem in being restrictive too early is that you can hinder a marketplace from growing by having false positives.

In the end, I think we (Balanced) should have done a better job here, and we'll work hard to do so in the future.
Fleeing the US to Europe to escape restrictions on civil liberties... Head = asplode.
It is extremely true that mathematics curricula for schoolchildren in general require reform, and most mathematicians will agree on this point. The problem with previous attempts is that they have been designed by people who do not fully understand mathematics and executed by the same. The by now infamous example of the "New Math" was satirized by popular culture because everyone seemed to miss the point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

While pieces like the well-circulated "A Mathematician's Lament" (PDF: http://www.maa.org/devlin/lockhartslament.pdf) by Paul Lockhart argue that the mathematics taught to schoolchildren ought to resemble "real math", the sort of math that mathematicians think of as math (with theorems and proofs and much less of an emphasis on computation), they neglect the unfortunate reality that compulsory childhood education still exists largely towards a pragmatic end. Children must be able to compare prices at the grocery store and be able to reason about quantities.

Hung-Hsi Wu has done a great deal of work into how to fix the mathematics curricula of today. This is in contrast to the revolutionary approach that we have tried and failed at. His work focuses largely on fixing specific weaknesses in the core standards and fixing the way mathematics is taught, rather than what is actually being taught, in many cases. http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

In addition, Pólya's How To Solve It is the sort of text that teachers should read and become familiar with, in order to better understand how to teach problem solving, which is much of what mathematics at the grade school level is - instruction in problem solving. In fact, I would recommend it to every HN member - it's a wonderful little book about the art of solving problems, mathematical or otherwise. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/669.html
Automated JS memory leak discovery tool from Googlers
Well the number of abortions is far lower than the number of people on the internet or even the people using file sharing. I think that OP was just saying that the impact of SOPA effects a larger number of people, not that the impact was more acute.

Everyone has to make judgement calls with their votes, that is how democracy works. There are some people who have little interest in the internet, there are some that don't have an opinion on a woman's right to choose. This doesn't make them bad people, it just means that the issues that drive their votes are different than the ones that drive your own.

If these issues had a broad consensus they wouldn't be such big election topics. Believe it or not, there are some people voting for candidates because they are pro-life, if there weren't then candidates would not publicize their stance on the topic.
Yes because only in magic software wonderland can you have millions of users before you have any money.

Once you exit the software bubble, almost everything, especially new technology, becomes a lot "harder" and takes a lot longer.
Sure, what's your Gittip? :^P
Check Yo Self: 5 Things You Should Know About Data Science
> If it's the former, until you make a transaction there's no way to verify in advance whether or not a card has a still valid account attached to the backside of it.

It's possible, with most credit card processors, to perform a $0 authorization to confirm that a credit card number is linked to an active account. It doesn't guarantee that any charges against the card will go through -- the card may be at its limit, for instance -- but it will correctly reject numbers that are structurally valid (e.g, pass Luhn) but which don't correspond to any account.
Not using any special library for ffmpeg, but I'm executing command line ffmpeg using Fabric library.
For the record, I've been waiting and watching for this to happen. It did happen sooner than I expected, however. Not sure if that means Gittip has grown faster than I expected, or our Jokers are earlier to adopt than I expected. ;^)
Are there designers who prefer to work alone as well? I would love to see a hackathon-y mechanism for putting introvert/solo coders together with introvert/solo designers, like a development-oriented Chatroulette.
I would like to ask - in all seriousness - how do you fill your pipeline - cold calling, agency work, regular clients ?
It's been 10 years since the PATRIOT Act was passed, and nothing has really changed here. The consequences of the legislation were vastly overblown.

Also, the ractchet does not only work in one direction. We've had peaks of restrictions on civil liberties far worse than what we have now. E.g. alien and sedition acts, reconstruction, japanese internment, mccarthyism.

You seem to have worked yourself into a froth over nothing.
I tried to figure it out from MSDN and couldn't, so maybe someone here knows something I don't:

Is there any functional difference between LocalSettings and LocalStorage in terms of capabilities? I see the use case for file storage, of course, for special purposes; I see the use case for IndexedDB, for more powerful object storage; I see the use case for RoamingSettings, which syncs between Windows 8 devices; but I don't see the use case for LocalSettings when LocalStorage already exists (or vice versa).

It seems to me that the only reason that they're both usable in WinJS apps is because one comes from the .NET APIs and one comes, of course, from the HTML5 APIs, and no one ever stopped to think they might be redundant.

Of course, I could be totally wrong. MSDN isn't exactly illuminating on this matter, nor on, well, anything related to WinJS.

Oh, and an aside - if anyone's looking for a nice wrapper for IndexedDB that plays nice with WinJS, give db.js (http://aaronpowell.github.com/db.js/) a shot.
Ah, I see Vietnam is still at it. Persistent buggers.
My company (Sift Science) helps sites fight credit card fraud. We work with a few large ($100m+ revenue) marketplaces, and here are some things I've learned.

First off, strictly speaking, this is most likely to be a stolen credit card (i.e., fraud) rather than money laundering. You do NOT benefit from fraud, because when the cardholder notices the charges, they'll call up their bank and issue a chargeback. The $488.15 in your account will actually be removed and given back to the original cardholders. In addition, each fraudulent charge carries a $15-$25 fee, which you're liable for.
https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/testing#chargebacks---...

What's worse, chargebacks can take 60-120 days to reach you, since there's delay at every step: the customer's bank, the credit card networks, your payment gateway, and the acquiring bank (your bank). Unfortunately, that means you won't know how much fraud you have today until February (!). It's a broken system, but that's how all the major card networks work, so it's something that everybody who sells online has to deal with.

If your fraud rate is higher than about 2% for two months in a six month period, Visa and Mastercard reserve the right to block payments entirely to your (or Balanced's) account unless you prove you can get the chargeback rate down. This is called an "excessive chargeback program."

In terms of heuristics, fraudsters adapt rapidly to whatever counter-measures you use. The half-life of a good heuristic is maybe a couple of months. The best approach is to evaluate hundreds of different signals, using a machine learning algorithm to constantly adapt to changing fraud patterns. My company is running a private beta of exactly this technology and we're happy to help: http://siftscience.com. Even if you don't use us, I can recommend other services or give you general pointers.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions: brandon@siftscience.com.
I'm dying to know more about the brilliant non-human people you know =-)
November 5th is Clang-Day for FreeBSD
> didn't count on using quantum computing instead of adding more cores.

And you probably still shouldn't. Quantum computing only provides a speedup for a very specific set of problems. For the vast majority of everyday computing tasks, quantum computing offers no practical advantage over classical computing.
I do this but with git gui, it's much easier this way: http://i.imgur.com/3Mrwr.png
I’m Not Here To Make Friendster
Why You Shouldn’t Raise a Friends and Family Round
Amazon Prime is awesome
@mittermayr I responded to your comment too :) There isn't much you can do about the latency at their end except try and get the most out of your API quota by making sure you don't issue a call when you know you will time out (discussed in the reply).

I would be interested in knowing other solutions that work for you.
Kevin Systrom: 800,000 #Sandy Instagram Photos Bring Data Into Focus
Exploration Of Single-Page Websites
I think the "meta-context" must be taken into account: it's a driving license test, if I got it correctly. The examiner wants to make sure you'll be a careful driver. From this perspective, the mysterious D answer totally makes sense and is obviously what they expect.
A dozen versions, sold by dozens of manufacturers. Android is so fragmented it's hard to actually consider it a single thing. It's like saying "4.5 million computers are sold every 3 days".

The iPad is one thing, made by one company, that comes in two sizes.
Absolutely absurd.

What the FBI did with Martin Luther King came to light years later. Meanwhile, we're seeing their moves with regards to organizations like WikiLeaks in real time. There is far more sunlight today than there was.

National Security Letters are also wildly overblown. They are a formalization of things the FBI was already doing. With that formalization has come increased judicial oversight: the PATRIOT Act Reauthorization in 2006 gave recipients subject to the gag order recourse in court.

You think if the FBI circa 1950 wanted information from you, you'd be able to go complain to a federal court?

Absolutely absurd.
What do you really need? I still meet people all the time who adore their netbooks (though many did also ditch them as soon as they actually had to use them – I’m seeing that with some tablets, not so often with iPads).

Besides, why do you assume that those people are buying their second iPad? Maybe they are buying an iPad for their kids? Maybe those who didn’t want to get one because of price are now buying one?

I really don’t get that tablets are supposedly not useful. I love my tablet. I use it all the time to read, surf, browse and write e-mails. It does nearly all the things I used to love doing on my PC so much better. It’s just all-around awesome in every respect, worth every single cent. Simply perfect. There has been no other computer I ever owned I liked as much as my tablet. I would not be surprised if quite a few other people also feel that way, maybe to a lesser degree.
I created a custom blog platform from scratch, a real one ;-) I was thinking about releasing it but got busy with other projects. You can see a sample post here:

http://tomakefast.com/google-not-paying-publishers-for-rich-...

For comments, IntenseDebate. The backend is just four tables: options, posts, categories & feeds. (Yes, it aggregates feeds too.) Index.php does all the front-end work, another php file for the AJAX server, 4 more php files for the backend pages. Basically, interact with the database using AJAX datagrids. I can edit the blog without clicking Publish ;-)
The Masters is cited with a dead link. The title of the citation also has "honorary" in the title...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain#cite_note-purdue-8
Onity exposing sensitive security information
If people forget to test their commits, they're going to forget them without using git add -p too.
> by a competitor who can't implement personalised search

I believe the main idea behind using DDG is that it does not personalise, collect data, etc. It's a feature rather than a bug. Your attack on DDG seems to ignore some facts...

(see https://duckduckgo.com/about.html)
Intel's 3rd Generation SSD Controller Analyzed
None of this implies committing untested code. The index is not a commit; it is a pre-commit staging area. When you use 'git add -p', you are adding hunks to the staging area, not committing them.

What's the difference? When you're done staging your patch, you can then check out the staging area and run unit tests on it prior to promoting it to a commit. Doesn't compile? Tests fail? Restage as necessary.
I usually do something like:

git add -p
git commit
git stash
<run tests>

If it fails then I can stash pop and commit -p --amend and try again.
Every time I mention this on HN, at least 15 people upvote it - which means they didn't know about it. So I feel obliged to repeat it again and again (as I usually use this method a few times a week and it's tremendously useful for me):

If you want to get Google's cached version of a webpage, just type

cache:[url]
e.g.: cache:http://johnkary.net/git-add-p-the-most-powerful-git-feature-youre-not-using-yet/

in the search bar and press return.

EDIT: 14 already, after an hour!
Coke Gets Hacked And Doesn’t Tell Anyone
A third of women in the US end up having an abortion at some point in their lives. That's a pretty blunt edge.
Thanks for your answer. I'm not offended, I'm just getting some kind of fatigue reading your anti-google posts. I think insinuating Google care more about Obama than Romney is bordering on FUD, like all of your anti "bubble" articles are always bordering on FUD or at least intend to scare people a bit. You can't deny you're kind of aware of that, aren't you?

It's been more than a year now since you're writing anti-google and anti-personalized results articles. It's getting old and people love personalized results. I don't think it should be made opt-in as I think Google (and any product) should make the best option opted-in by default, and personalized results is the best option as it offers the best experience for regular users. Why would they offer a worst experience by default? It doesn't make sense. Also, most people don't know or care enough about changing options so they'd just keep the worst experience by default.

Let's take my brother's example again, if he searched for "ruby" and got results about rails and ruby.rb first before the gemstone because they are more popular than ruby the gemstone, my brother would just be confused and may even waste time clicking on the rails link first. So what should google do, propose a link that would say "opt-in to have search results that actually make sense to you". Do you see how absurd and bad UX that would be?

People who care about these kinds of things already opted-out, in fact, the most paranoid hackers I know don't even use DDG, they use Google+Thor and turn JS/cookies off. It's cool that DDG is adding more features but that's not anything I care enough to use or I could just write a quick google chrome script that'd do the same.
AFAIK, JQuery HTML constructors use document fragments behind the scenes. See http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2281-jQuery-Appends-Multiple-El... . No need for explicit document.createDocumentFragment
looks like Bitcoin could prevent this.
+ lives in a country that provides universal medical care
Maybe, but I think it can still be an issue, e.g. they release a new product now, and stock is constrained so they can't sell as much as they like. Now, this is the Christmas quarter, so many people will be buying something. If they can't buy an iPad mini now, and they buy a Nexus 7 instead, it doesn't matter that they could then buy it in January. That's still a lost sale to Apple.

Component shortages can manifest themselves in different ways too, e.g. why doesn't the iPad mini have a retina display? Is it because of display shortages, or processor shortages (non-retina means they don't need to put an A6/A6X in there)? It's arguably not because of profit margin: the Nexus 7 has an almost-retina display at a fraction of the retailing price.
Dolphins are among the freest creatures in the ocean, traveling vast distances in little time and pretty much independent. And I'm sure something drives them to be in that bay at that time; its just not a higher intelligence, by all the evidence. Thus the tendency to reinforce: dolphins are dumb animals.

So this argument isn't 'considering the issue at all'? Then what's it about? Some other issue? Would a personal attack have been more on-point? (sarcasm)
It doesn't have to run constantly, it will open everything queued on launch, so you could just open it periodically/once a day.

I specifically wanted to keep it browser non-specific, that's why there are no hooks like that in it.
Non-programmer wants to build functioning prototype
I want to learn one language that will enable me to patch together a functioning crowdsourced platform that works sort of like Airbnb. I know Dev Bootcamp focuses on Ruby, but can that do what I need or should I learn PHP, Python, or something else? Suggestions on best books/tutorials, etc. please. edw519 likes the Rhino book on Java Script by Flanagan. Thank you.
Let's just say that you lasted longer than I did ;)
The most unfortunate thing about this whole situation is that it was poor Chad himself who ended up discovering and shutting down the fraudsters. This should not have been the case, and I apologize on behalf of my former employer. I sincerely wish I would have been able to help catch this before it got out of hand. (Disclaimer: I am the former Operations / Support / Fraud Investigator for Balanced Payments).

As it turns out, the CEO of BalancedPayments is (there is just no nice way to put this) an unethical bag of scum. He recently went on some kind of insane power trip, completely disregarding the needs of his customers, putting me on unpaid leave for ... reporting an incident of fraud to a bank. I reported an incident exactly like the one Chad discusses here, but the dollar amount stolen was much higher, and the fraudster a repeat offender.

Anyway, after that last meeting where he was sneering and enjoying way too much the power trip of getting to "fire" somebody, I can confidently exhort that Balanced should not be trusted.

It's important that any company a marketplace entrusts its financial data with is an ethical one. So, yeah, looks like I'm on the job market; ping me : http://lnkd.in/NuBGDY
I don't fear personalized results, I just don't like them. I switched to DDG because google results have been getting progressively worse and worse for quite some time. Rather than jump through hoops to try to convince google to just search for what I asked instead of what it wants to infer I meant to ask, I just use a search engine that does what I ask it to.
You're overexaggerating the impacts of SOPA on the internet ("killing") and understating the kinds of restrictions people want to impose on abortion (it's more than 3 people--the Republican platform contained no exceptions for rape or incest).

There is no "abortion absolutism." Abortion rights have been scaled back dramatically since Roe. That's just plain fact, and it's dishonest to imply otherwise. The battleground is now over things like notice requirements and trans-vaginal ultra-sounds for abortions during any stage of pregnancy. And indeed, the battle ground is far closer now to "protecting any sort of abortion rights at all" than it is to "ubiqtuous, easy, and subsidized." What a totally dishonest characterization of the actual facts. The abortion rate fell 30% from 1990 to 2008, and has fallen in the past four years.
> Never use delete. Ever.

To "delete" is appropriate for hash-like structures, i.e., key-value maps. The runtime can't optimize these anyway; they will always be "generic slow objects". Plus, delete is the only way to remove the key, otherwise your hash will only grow in size, and you'd store a lot of "null" values for no reason that you'd have to explicitly filter.
The inference I get from your comment is that you feel I was arguing that people don't have a need for tablets. This isn't true, I specifically stated otherwise. What I was addressing is the notion that it's not possible for a large part of the market to do year-over-year (or 6 month) upgrades to the iPad they already own.
How is it different from http://prosperent.com?
What I get is a lot of survivor bias. "This is how to do it because this worked for me". What about all the people still in the middle of the pack in the gentlemen's race? Do none of them desire a top-ten finish?

I look at motivation as the hind-sight rationalization for how people got lucky. For all we know, 30 other people were trying what DHH was, but we never heard from them because they didn't get lucky.

I do think you can stack the cards in your favor (DHH is a really smart guy, that is certainly one planted card), but no amount of internal anything can guarantee success.

So I try to stack some cards: work regularly on my project, make a concerted effort to find value to add, interact with people in a positive way so I don't burn bridges, etc. Maybe it's not an "I can remake the world to be what I want" entrepreneurial attitude, but I think it is more realistic for a bootstrapped project.
I want to explore openness wrt fraud prevention, not out of a facile rejection of "security through obscurity," but as part of Gittip's identity as an open company. It's accepted doctrine that "information asymmetry is probably your only advantage." I'm asking: can we be open about fraud prevention and prevent fraud? If we can be, we should.

What are your thoughts on the value of the social graph in spotting suspicious accounts? It seems to me that we should be able to whitelist new accounts based on a review of GitHub or Twitter profiles, and perhaps for flagged accounts we "authorize without capturing," as dangrossman suggests above.
I took a tour of LightSail's operations when I was on a trip to the valley a couple months ago. They had just moved to a building that used to be a firehouse so it had beefed up power systems which they needed to test their products, a lot of neat equipment, and really nice people.

From my understanding, they are using compressed air to store the energy but are also using water to cool the system and reclaim the heat energy created during the process.
But what if they're excellent (in your opinion) in every other aspect? If you agree with them on 20 issues, and disagree on 2, it's better (and IMO, you're being much more responsible) to vote for a pro-SOPA than to vote for someone who's against SOPA but is a complete bozo.

I think you should not decide for/against someone just because you agree/disagree strongly with one of their ideas.

(Note: I'm not in the U.S. and like others disagree with SOPA)
Sorry everyone, thought we had Varnish setup. I'll do my best to get it back up. My screencasts above are what I'm mostly linking to.
MS is great. Desktop-parts annoy tablet-fans. Tablet-parts annoy desktop-fans. Everyone is happy in the same way!¹

¹ Happy level could have negative values, if measured in bits.
When you're at the bottom, even a gain of a millimeter seems to largely improve your standing because all of sudden you're 'better than the other guy.' From a big picture view, that millimeter doesn't matter so much.
It works for push-ups too. Instead of counting to 50, you count 1 through 10 and repeat. And if it gets really tough, just count to 5, and repeat. Even though you might be on 46th rep, but I found it easier to push myself harder if I'm counting 2,3,4,5 instead of 47,48,49,50. And if energy permits, I'll add another 5.