skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a question about Helium. The premise is that for 2% any site could be made an eCommerce store, making total transaction fees around 5% for a dead-simple solution. This is great for anyone without the technical knowledge or desire to code their own solution in. What happens when the site gets successful? At what point is it worth it for the site owner to pay someone to build a more cost-effective solution? 2% for $1,000/month is only $20, but if the site gets much larger, you lose a customer.

I guess the strange fact is that the more successful your clients are, the more likely they are to leave. How will Helium deal with this?
A solution is to try to find ways to change the game.

An independent-reasoning educated populace is one way to fortify against manipulation.

Reply written in the NYC Public Library reading room. This inscription is out front:

"The City of New York has erected this building to be maintained forever as a free library for the use of the people. On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27954/27954-h/27954-h.htm
This announcement doesn't speak to the 100 people that ordered the 'Unassembled Prototype'. I'm in this group and wondering when I will be getting my prototype to play with.
> UserContentSpamChecker.new(content).spam?

Noooooooooo !

Sorry. There is no purpose for these layers of indirections since you're never passing the instance around to share state. If UserContentSpamChecker where a value object you could have argued that you're doing a form of casting but it's not. Best is to stay with a simple function:

module UserContent
extend self

TRIGGER_KEYWORDS = %w(viagra acne adult loans xrated).to_set

def is_spam?(content)
flagged_words(content).present?
end

protected

def flagged_words(content)
TRIGGER_KEYWORDS & content.split
end
end

Now you can just call the function directly:

> UserContent.is_spam?(content)
Can I ask what you guys are using for the mouse-based signature feature? Is it something off the shelf or did you guys write it yourself?

FWIW, I think it is potentially a very viable product if you can find and effectively market to the proper niche (which obviously is not the HN crowd). Good luck!
IT Certifications, People Still Believe in Them? (2006)
So is your target customer is very small transaction web sellers? Because 4.9% + 30c per transaction is extremely high. That's 2.9% + 30c from stripe and 2% from you.

https://stripe.com/us/help/pricing

If you're selling in any kind of volume, something like shopify would be a no brainer over this.
Fun fact: there are tons of cell lines that are "immortalized", usually using various oncogenes. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

HeLa cells are certainly the most famous. It should be noted that the HeLa stocks used in most labs now are radically different from original HeLa stocks.

Even in routine experiments, you have to keep a bunch of cells frozen in liquid nitrogen to replenish your "working stock" of cells. After around 30-40 passages (e.g. generations of cells), most immortalized cell lines start to get funky with mutations and exhibit different behaviors. You kill them off and go back to your frozen stocks to get back to the "original" genetics.
Who do you have to know to go from CSU Fullerton to a job like that? Wow.
I found the post worthwhile and I do not doubt its veracity whatsoever. I think you attack the author unfairly.

I clicked to read because I followed a similar path to the author, except I never attended any kind of bootcamps. I started writing my first django app and one month later I had my first coding job.

It was difficult at first, I was often baffled by the intentions of the codes author who I took over for, but I made the product work and it changed my life forever. I just started coding professionally January 15th of this year and already I've fixed and enhanced two large complicated projects and built two of my own.

So anyone saying this isn't possible is absolutely wrong.

I recommend watching Google's Python Class [1] for anyone getting started with Python that has a familiarity with basic programming concepts.

[1] : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKTZoB2Vjuk
Want a Flying Drone? These Students 3D-Printed Their Own
People who have no kids and are sterilized permanently.
The elite - most intelligent, most beautiful, most valued members of a ruling political party. It would be a 1970s dystopian sci fi movie come to life.
Thanks, I didn't see that bit.

> There's a limit to what kind of checks you can feasibly do.

Actually, this one would've been easy to catch - we know which states have which zip codes. The company I work for checks this in web forms, but I don't find that such validation is common.

> By the sounds of it, requiring a billing address in the United States seems reasonable.

Problem is, it isn't. US citizens living abroad have every right to donate.
The Setup / Yihui Xie
This comes highly recommended.
I disagree. I once saw a talk by Bob Martin that did a great job of explaining good OO design principles by looking at examples from Unix.

It's true that Unix isn't object-oriented, but the principles that made it great are ones that object-oriented developers can benefit from studying. And given the long lifetime and wide use of the Unix model, it's a great object of study.
you don't use any accounting/bookkeeping software? freshbooks, xero, etc?
But you don't reduce the cost of going into orbit by 10%. Not even in the absurdly best case.

Let us take Elon at his word that increasing the size of the booster stage by 5-10% can replace these engines entirely, and assume that it actually is 10%. The booster stage is mostly fuel, which varies as volume, but the costs are all in the metal part, which scales as area. So this size increase costs you at most 6.6%. It actually costs less because the complicated rocket thrusters are left unchanged. So let's say 5%.

But we're not reducing the cost of the whole rocket by 5%, just the booster stage. If we assume that the booster stage is, say, 70% of the rocket we're only saving a maximum of 3.5% in reductions on the existing rocket components.

But we haven't yet factored in the cost of the new component. Which is, after all, very much like the existing engines except more complicated. In a Falcon 9 we have 9 rockets, so each one is about 11% of the cost of the total. If we strap on 3 of these new things, which are much like rockets except more complicated because of the whole hybrid thing, they each can cost a maximum of about 1.2% of the total cost to stay within our budget.

So unless these things, which are more complicated than rockets, cost you 1/10th as much, you don't get any cost saving at all. It is difficult to see how they can be this cheap.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Elon has plans to reduce the cost to orbit by another factor of 10 in a similar time frame to when these might actually become commercially available. (He's already reduced launch costs by a factor of 10.)

A large part of how he's managed to reduce costs so much is that he does this kind of common sense analysis in his sleep, and uses it to ignore everything he has to ignore, and zero in on what he needs to pay attention to. The numbers on this technology simply don't add up for space.

(But they don't have to. A practical technology to double the speed of jets by a factor of 2 will be extremely interesting to various militaries. Plus the potential savings for the existing airline industry - which is a much, much bigger market than space right now - means that they are going to have no shortage of potential customers. Elon is simply not one of them.)
Rogue DRM “Vandalizes” Video Game Creators’ Projects
splendid campaign. hope you'll succeed!
DataMaps - A JavaScript Library For Interactive Maps For Data Visualizations
We're developing a suite of "enterprise" e-commerce tools under the Freshplum brand, so presumably we'd up-sell the retailer to those.
Single element Geometric Shapes - more than 50 shapes using CSS
Don't try to gain karma. Your phrasing in this title is going to ill serve you.

Repost this as what you seem to have intended, asking how to engage with the community.

Now, for anyone who is here to learn how to game karma, I'd like to convey the following:

Karma is an abstract way to show quality, a way to organize discussion on HN to prioritize valuable information and people with insight. It is not an end to itself, except maybe as an ego boost. Oh, I guess at some point you can down vote posts, but seriously, karma is a tool intended to benefit the community, not a measure of your value as a person, or your skills as a developer or entrepreneur.

Try to add to the community; Add your insight and knowledge, up vote good quality comments and posts that are interesting, and trust the community. Attempting to game karma detracts value from the community. You are better than that. We are all better than that. And if you do that, the karma will come.
How does scrubby know the alpha value is real-valued (not integral)?
Algerian Hacker hijack Romanian Google and Yahoo Domain
> Why wasn't the CVV part of this page?

Checking CVV isn't required, but may result in a higher transaction fee for the merchant. The campaign likely made a choice of "fewer fields = better conversion".
Uhm, what did I miss, what is his rate now?
Gator.js - simple event delegation in ~800 bytes
Toyota Has Solved a Problem that Could See Magnesium-Ion Batteries
Via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/11/datamaps-javascript-li...

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resouces like jStat. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe:
http://functionn.blogspot.com
Yes, but just book a fully-flexible return, the refund it after you've entered the country. Quite a stupid rule given it can be so easily circumvented.
How about dividing the heat exchanger into two sections? One section cools the air while the other section defrosts, and then alternate.
You didn't miss anything. Some people just enjoy injecting their pet causes into threads kinda irrelevantly.
but if your target audience is the long-tail (especially folks without websites), odds are a good proportion of them won't even know what Stripe is..
I like it; it's a good framework for building web applications where you need to re-use widgets. Whereas YUI (which I'm forced to use at work), jQuery are handy for generating for single-page apps.
Starting small isn't necessarily bad. I can't blame Amazon for dipping a toe in the water and offering limited functionality to start after Apple's overreach. If Amazon invests in validated data sets and functionality, but keeps its AWS disposition of being the substrate, this all of a sudden becomes a very exciting new entrant into the maps wars.

It'll take strategy, time, and resources for Amazon to be able to offer the validated datasets and functionality that people expect. If they go about it the right way, I could easily see them becoming the lurker map that comes to dominate.
During the campaign some TV news person tweeted something like 'A billion dollars in contributions, but where does it all go?'.

I replied, 'To pay the salaries of you and your colleagues.'

It's the circle of life.
Willow Garage Speeding Up AI Development With Open-Sourcing
Now Available As A Gmail Add-On, PhilterIt Lets You Browse Your Inbox Visually
If you need size and not resolution, soon. If you are running multiple high resolution monitors, I think its going to be a while before small LCD panels will be able to fit the pixels of 3 2560x1440 panels.

Also take in to account you have weight on your head. In games, players often get a sort of tunnel vision and ignore whats going on around them, making it easy to ignore the lack of comfort.
Akamai GTM is the feature you are asking about.
Bungie's Destiny video game details leak online
The Great Filter is physics.

I heard recently that if the earth was 3 times larger, the most advanced chemical rocket would not have the energy density to leave the atmosphere.

Scientists now know that with out a Jupiter, the asteroid belt might not form in such a way to deliver 'water' and protect us from large comets roaming the galaxy.

Even now it may not be possible to leave our solar system without a significantly different understanding of physics. Voyager is just no leaving our solar system, and it will take decades for it to actually leave the effect of our sun. Today if we launched a craft it probably would get just about as far as Voyager in just about the same amount of time, but maybe our power source could power a more efficient version for a decade longer, getting us just a bit further than voyager will, but still no where near Alpha Centauri.

For us to explore the depths of space, it would need to be much easier and cheaper than it is today.

For it to even be plausible a DIY Scientist as you suggest would need to create energy density so powerful, it would be hard to imagine a world where that sort of thing is not regulated.

For us to study sub atomic physics, we have a structure that is 20 miles in length, this is not the research of... a DIY community.

Today we argue about Iran getting enriched plutonium for nuclear research, when some think they want to build a bomb and others think they want to build a power plant. I really can't imagine a neighbor of mine being able to ... take that step without raising some alarms.

Your mad scientist would have to be on a far off island/ comet/ moonbase with all of the resources and man power required without interference from others, but still have access to raw materials.

I am just not sure we will find other worlds in humanity's lifetime.

We may be able to colonize mars and a few other large bodies in our solar system, but leaving it is a different story.
I think this is very risky since stripe could easily put them out of business by providing the same thing and for no additional cost.
That's not true.

It will continue to halve, exactly one more time to 12.5, and then the next time after that, it will stop. Once the 12.5 reward is gone, the network will be supported entirely by transaction fees, and no new bitcoins will be created.

So, yes, asymptote, but the rest of your comment seems misleading. It will halve once more, that's not exactly "continue to halve."
Announcing HashiCorp (a Company for Vagrant)
What about the rejected panels? Someone must be selling them. I picked up a few of those 27" korean IPS's that codinghorror blogged about a few months back. I paid around $300 with shipping, but the import form said $190.
It's 100% certain that it would be less conversion. It's also nearly certain that they were accepting illegal foreign donations. In this case, conversion probably shouldn't be the deciding factor... (Note I'm sure the OP had 0 say in this, just wondering if there is an explanation other than better conversions)

EDIT: To the downvotes, see my comment below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4843963

This isn't just about Obama, it's about all of the campaigns. Obama was just the most visible and highest raising, with a higher likelihood of attracting foreign money. It's also not just the CVV, but many many things that aren't being done (that aren't required yet but should be).
Considering his pet cause in this case is helping developers stop systemically undervaluing their work, I say that is something we need more of.
Tim Berners-Lee 1991-WorldWideWeb: Summary
Cab Drivers, Uber, and the Costs of Racism
Hmm, right. Dreams dashed, then. Thanks for the perspective!
As an Englishman, I parsed the title the same way as you did, though I did wonder if it meant BA.
Michigan Science Center about to Reopen
I would definitely consider capping the pricing structure. Something like 2% of the first $10k transasctions, and 0.5% thereafter. That or just have an introductory tier that's based on % of transactions, and higher level tiers that are monthly fees. The percentage fee is very attractive for small merchants who just want to try something out, but obviously loses its upside if your experiment works out.
Are there any known SD exploits? My intuition is that the format is dumb enough that there are not, but intuition makes for poor security.
I'm sure some of you chuckleheads are going to figure out how to use this to OC some poor unassuming Ivy Bridge CPU...
Maybe regulation should be only limited to internet infrastructure -limited to the piping infrastructure; without interference in what is flowing in it.
There was a time when electronic messages were far less central to everyday life, and it seemed vaguely reasonable. Nowadays? Precedent.
Me too. I'm guessing those plans were scrapped and we'll just get the first assembled dev kits, but an official announcement would be nice.
Blue State had multiple roles on the campaign, not just processing payments.

Many of us are joining startups, some are starting startups, and others are yet to decide.
Thats not what I'm saying.

If we are in the business of writing Rails apps and not innovative new IDE's we need to write code in a way that works with our existing tool belt.

If we start blindly following patterns without being pragmatic about our current tool belt we may very well see the ruby equivalent of EJB's.
> It's also nearly certain that they were accepting illegal foreign donations.

A CVV wouldn't make a difference for that, and given that US citizens live all over the world, there's realistically no way to prevent illegal foreign donations.

What would you use? Name? American have all sorts of names. Credit card billing address? Americans live abroad. IP? Americans live abroad. SSN? Fakeable (ask a restaurant dishwasher in NYC), and I dunno if you can ask for it.
Most open source projects would love to have $70K to spend on professional designers to rebuild their website. ;-)
How technology and misguided legal reasoning have made your life an open e-book
Love this! It's nice and simple.

It's also awesome that it's using on demand pricing. Sometimes I go a month or two without needing to send an invoice so it's great that I don't have to pay for months I don't use this.
Most transactions don't need a fee and even those that do will be relayed eventually even with no fee (currently).

See this Stack Exchange answer for some more details:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/4483/61
Nobody patented "a human cell". What can get patented is the method for creating this cell line. Here's the classic (and controversial, but for different reasons) patent related to the Mo cell line (T-lymphoblasts):

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4438032.html

These cell lines do not exist in nature and what is patented was the creation of a new immortalized cell line.
That was kind of condescending, wasn't it?
Actually, I think that zip code is valid :) according to a quick Google search at least.

But I admit I hadn't thought about citizens living abroad; that makes it more understandable there would be these issues. It's certainly a case of (perhaps) incompetence over malice anyway.

Edit: my mistake, I missed that he claimed the zip was in Arkansas.
I got tired of having to look this up and decided to write a Chrome plugin to load the cached version of pages. You can download the extension from here - http://blog.sdqali.in/downloads/GetCache.crx

You might find it useful.

EDIT: Fixed minor typo.
Hi there. I'm Ben Mauer, a board member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (http://usworker.coop) as well as the Boston Area Worker Owned and Run Network.

I think that Lorem Ipsum, with a pivot in offerings (coffee, books, games), could be an extremely successful worker cooperative or multi-stakeholder cooperative (with worker-owners and consumer-owners). It has many elements that would make it successful, most notably its beloved status.

I'd be very happy to help you think through the possibilities of keeping Lorem Ipsum a truly community-oriented institution that is resilient and has a sustainable stream of capital from consumer-investors.

Feel free to get in touch with me via http://quilted.coop. I also have access to a lot of resources that could help in the transition, from funding to technical assistance. Get in touch!
That page is just beautiful. Well done.
If you hate trying to get press, read this
If you're looking for ways to make things sound condescending, you'll reliably find them. Even in comments that say "you're awesome, don't forget to raise your rates".
Yeah, that dude is amazing. :)
Come hang out with me Kyle. :)
The time between dinosaurs and talking monkeys is basically irrelevant. The important figure is the time between the formation of the sun and talking monkeys - 4.5 billion years. You're also making some assumptions about how easy it is to build a ship capable of crossing interstellar distances and also reproducing itself.

In fact, using current technology, we actually could build a "self-replicating probe" loaded with algae and other photosynthetic single-celled organisms. So we really can't rule out ourselves as the evidence we're looking for. We might even be evidence that such probes usually malfunction.
"Job Queue is Backend agnostic"

This may be slightly tangental and I really don't want to come across as a troll but 'agnostic' in its absolute loosest terms could be defined as 'unknowable' (although it specifically relates to whether the existence of a higher-being/god-figure is provable or not).

I don't know techies have latched on to this word when it's totally unrelated; words like 'independent' or 'neutral' already existed and do actually mean what the techies want it to mean!

I know language evolves - trust me, I'm a computational linguist who used to work for Longman Dictionaries - but if people started using 'mangler' as a synonym 'compiler' nerds would, quite rightly, wonder wtf is going on!

Other than that, keep up the good work :)
"Only old people use email" is an old Slashdot joke. I think it started with this 2004 story: http://slashdot.org/story/04/11/30/0034259/in-korea-email-is...
"Can all headlines that are questions be answered with no?"
Lies programmers tell themselves
Robots.txt doesn't have anything to do with this. Google adheres to robots.txt, but doesn't discriminate in the kind of content it indexes.

Search engines can certainly specialize, like in your (unnecessary) porn site example. But if they specialize in providing links to copyright-infringing material, make profit with advertisements, they can get in just as much trouble.

The OP made the comparison with search engines. How come they can have copyright-infringing links and not get into trouble? It is because they index all information available to them, without discrimination. And then they still have to respond to DMCA claims.

If a search engine specialized in engineering parts, it wouldn't need to host links to copyright-infringing material, so most specialized search engines are a non-issue.
Notable, then, is the fact that Apple felt the need to make their lens covers out of sapphire (Mohs hardness of 9). If they were using Gorilla glass on the back, and it has the hardness you claim, then surely that isn't necessary?
You’re Dividing the Chores Wrong
More and more apps built on Laravel 4 already, so good.
David Lee From SV Angel: “Foursquare Is One Of The Most Misunderstood Companies”
Delightful. I might have to use the share API then.
JITs (e.g. V8) aren't allowed on WP8 and iOS
That's a false dichotomy, though. There's no reason I can't have a minimal aesthetic about what I need to own while also getting some things that are "good enough" (maybe even "crappy"), and getting other things that may be considered the "best".

The parent seemed to be saying that this state (i.e., between the two extremes) was "not very satisfying", and that without strictly adhering to "The Best" philosophy you'd end up with all crap. That's primarily what I'm objecting to.
How to Hack Any Application and Set Yourself Apart From Other Candidates
Startup Chairman's Requirement Specification
Diets to Lose Weight
The Good Enough