skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
correct url: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/theo_jansen_creates_new_c...
PayPal with Web Site Payments Pro can be completely behind the scenes. You create a recurring payments profile, that has a profile id, you use that to reference it in the future (to cancel it for example).

PayPal also does not require that you setup a merchant account. All you need is a bank account. It's $30/mo for Web Site Payments Pro. If you provide them with a URL that shows what you're selling that's all they need. Otherwise you have to fax them a brochure or similar, to show that you're doing something legitimate.
Trafficconverter.net going down
100 Million? Really? Got a source for that? If it was something more like 10 Million, I would find it much more believable.
Lame. I agree. By "verbose" I imagine the author means statically typed. What's so "wrong" about using a static language to do web development?
Have you ever seen WebKit's Web Inspector? Its very comparable to Firebug. Check it out in Safari 4 on Mac/Windows (Enable Develop menu in the preferences) or Chrome on Windows.
freebase.com also extracts WP and can now return its results as rdf too.

dbpedia's RDF is somewhat easier to work with, but freebase results contain more sources than just WP, you can edit the data with a nice gui on freebase.com, and freebase spends a lot of effort tracking topics between updates. With dbpedia, I think you just get a snapshot of WP, even if that means your URIs from last week are dead.

dbpedia is open source, the freebase extractor is not.

The #2 use case example from dbpedia (use it to put WP data on your pages) is a big focus of freebase.com, and they have a bunch of tools to make that easy.
Authorize.net is great for customer service, I've never once needed to talk to them and had to wait more than 5 minutes (granted, on-site text support, but it's useful and they're efficient).

We used paypal's payflow pro on our latest project. PayPal is TERRIBLE for development. For auth.net, you just put the account in test mode, send it some transactions, and get the appropriate responses. For PayPal, you have to have a sandbox account, and users in the sandbox, and this and that and blah. What it ends up meaning is that it's HARD TO SHOW YOUR CUSTOMER THAT PAYMENT IS WORKING. They have to have a sandbox account, and manage all of that stuff. Or you just conference call and screenshare, right?

Now, it turns out PayPal's not TERRIBLE, but I'll never use it again. WAY more hassle on that project than any of my others (I do ~10 ecom-enabled apps in a given year).
Ask HN: Do you teach the old generation to use internet?
If you do, then how? What do you think they don't get and why? What do you think you're teaching not good enough? What are the crucial things every user should know, but most don't?
The ability to form two words containing Z/Q rather than one in a single play is a fairly big deal.
Does Amazon payments allows 3rd party developers to hook into the P2P-style payments?

Their web site is a bit confusing.. as a consumer, it seems that they offer me P2P micropayment services. As a developer, it seems like they just offer me the ability to bill people.

What if I want to write an application that wraps around their P2P services? (Like an "Email Money" application)?
/warning: rant ahead. I'm at work on a Saturday.

I really sympathize with the OP, because I inherited a web based enterprise system that was built using as many open source packages as possible. It appears to be something north of two dozen; some of which I have never heard of. Have you ever tried googling for "barbeque software"? (I found it, barcode scanner.)

I am a big believer in getting your core compancies down cold. I'm in the Java world, so that's a given. If you are serious into business, you must have a good understanding of SQL. I am now going through hell because the previous developer wrote his object hierarchy in java and XML and let Hibernate put his database together. Now I have serious performance problems, along with mysterious bugs.

I see too much of the attitude of adding layers of adding layers of abstraction to allow them to to use the Java mindset. God sakes, people. SQL is way more powerful than Java. Use it. The same thing with JavaScript libraries. Don't pull in a 100K library to get a couple of useful functions. Write them yourselves. Avoid getting caught in a maintenance trap.
Thanks for all the advice guys. I'm not from California or even the US, so I wasn't sure about my legal options here. But I've done a little reading and the advice here has helped a lot. It's amazing how solitary you can feel doing this sort of thing! Thanks to all.
If the population would remain the same, then all the effort will have to go into feeding it. And most likely will fail.

The next hurdle is organizational. You have to get the engineers together and working.

Once you cleared both, I'd guess not so long. Furnaces aren't really high tech, if you don't go for volume. Simple machine tools could probably be made out of wood, with only the essential parts of metal and using alternative power (animal, water, wind...).

In the end it'd still be a matter of administration (market?). If you get a group of knowledgeable people do one thing only (a furnace, a machine shop, an assembly line) it wouldn't take more then 1-2 years per step and many can be done in parallel.
I wasn't trying to criticize, I was expanding upon. (/bloviating/babbling/etc.)
Except of course when you are a woman...
I'm a reverse engineer, but I usually work with C/C++ and .NET stuff (PE-COFF, ELF, and Mach-O). I've never done Java Swing.

I imagine it's plausible given how easy most .NET projects are to disassemble. If you contact me at my email address at (alnayyir #at# gmail dot com) I could discuss the matter further with you.
No, the answer is not both.

Google has organic results and ad results, they are clearly distinguished in the UI and are generated by two distinct systems.
>I am a 10x coder

Hubris makes me sad. :(

>we are faster

That's unnecessarily inclusive and doesn't convey anything of substance.

>If you refuse to acknowledge that your webapp needs an operating system, a webserver, a cache and a database to operate

>depriving yourself of acquiring the magic systems knowledge

I smell a proud C/C++ programmer.

waves ASM coder over here, we (??) asm coders can write parsing libraries that spank yours seven ways to Sunday.

Does it matter? No. That's not how you "get things done (TM)".
The Best Ways to Consolidate Debt
Worldpay.com

They are a pain to work with, they delay payments by a month, and they're expensive but they do multi-currency. This is important for me in Australia, because it means a customer in the US can buy in US dollars, and their credit card is billed in US dollars, with exactly that amount (no mysterious currency fluctuations). Same for Euros.

Their take is about 4.5% (better than PayPal etc when you take into account its hidden currency conversion spread).

Every so often I look around for an alternative for my situation ("there must be something better than this"), but so far they're the best in this.
Just to add some more tips... I wrote an article in December at SitePoint about tips for staying sane while working from home... there is likely a lot of overlap, as I know instituting a lot of the ideas presented in that article have also helped to keep me from burning out at whatever I happen to be working on.

The most relevant tips were:

-Clearly define your work space. Making sure your work and personal life stay separate and don't start to blur is a good way to avoid burn out. If your work life spills over into your non-work life too much you'll start to feel like you're at work 24/7 ... that's a one way ticket to burn out city.

-Have lunch with a friend / join a local user group. Or, in short: have a personal life. All work and no play, yadda yadda yadda. You need to make sure you aren't _just_ working.

-Take regular breaks / schedule time off. Again, take some time to actively NOT work and you'll be less likely to burn out on whatever work you're doing.

-Get a cat (or a dog). Seriously, my cat provides hours of entertainment and (surprisingly for a cat) plenty of affection. That's very helpful for keeping me sane and ultimately keeping me happy and focused on my work.

Full article for anyone interested is here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/19/12-ways-to-keep-sa...
FYI.. You can buy Goretex by the yard from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics (http://www.owfinc.com/), everything else you need can be purchased from other cottage industry suppliers.. you just have to know where to look.
>"The chemical/psychological distinction is hardly important."

Yes, it is. In some cases, withdrawal can cause death.
A better example in Risk is Australia, which is key to every winning game...and sort-of does limit strategic possibilities.
Any mention of dragons brings fond memories the Pug, Macros, Thomas and Arutha.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, then I suggest you pick up a copy of Feist's "Magician."
Moving to Bay Area because I believe Paul Graham & Marc Andreesen are correct when they say that serious tech. players should locate to the tech capital. (see their posts on the subject so I don't have to re-type :)

Website idea leverages consumer buyers-impulse in way not done to date. Need hacker(s) that have technical ability to build top-notch retail site....I know this is vague, and non-inspirational, but I don't want to give away full concept for obvious reasons.
...or gay.
To add to this: I recently finished a small contract that I took on for the sake of family (don't do this, by the way). As a general rule I don't take contracts from people who don't know how to program, for the following reasons:

- They don't know how to write a specification. It's like asking a non-architect to draw you blueprints to a house. You end up with things like "there should be an arch here that's... um... about this tall".

- They don't actually know what they want 80% of the time. They will tell you (and you will document if you're smart) how they want it built, and when they see exactly that they will turn around and want it another way.

- They have absolutely no appreciation for how much work you're actually putting in. "But it's just a button on a page!". It's often insulting to work with people like this.

The spec for my contract changed constantly, and in the end took twice as long as I had anticipated.

And I still haven't gotten paid.
Spreedly looks like an interesting alternative for outsourcing the hassle of subscription payments: http://spreedly.com/

Not used them myself yet.
FYI-Co Founder does not need capital to invest....I have that covered. Stanford Grad. Students, where are you??
$20/hr is high? I'm sorry, but you're working for the wrong people. There will always be people who want you to make them a full-featured website with forums and interactive crap for $500. Ignore these people - ignore anyone who doesn't know how much your work is worth. Working with them is just asking for trouble.
.. that and NoScript.

There are plenty of FireFox plugins I use (primarily FireBug, but Chrome has good debugging tools and it's only a matter of time before someone builds an equivalent of FireBug for Chrome).

AdBlock Plus and NoScript give me not only less junk but block an awful lot of attack vectors. I feel kinda vulnerable without NoScript.

Oh, and a full linux-build, please. I've tested Chrome on Windows and am impressed, but as long as there's not linux build I can't use it. OSX people probably feel the same way.
You're in the small minority. Even amongst Firefox users last time I measured only 6% or so used ad block plus.
I'm actually writing some (custom internal) software for blind folk at the moment, as an extension of having worked with a small nonprofit for visually disabled people for general volunteer work (mostly admining the network and teaching). Through this I also found myself taking a look at the needs of blind users all over the place, and they do exist. I've had one dev tell me that it's stupid to prematurely work on accessibility, until it came up that most of my blind friends didn't end up using that software because it was inaccessible and that they probably would at least take a look at it if it were. Soooooo..

(edit: not to say that that detracts from the original article. i think all the points brought up are valid and very frustrating on all sides. yes, often times the changes that are "accessibility 'best' practices" are complete BS and some of the accessibility advocacy groups are annoying...I wish life were easier.)
Braintree does it. We're taking EUR and GBP in addition to USD. The API is also far far simpler than any of the SOAP crap the last generation of market leaders foisted upon us.
Ask HN: Good SDK for client-to-client game prototype in the browser?
I have an idea for an iPhone game that I'd like to prove out first without diving in to an Intel mac, iPhone and dev license. The concept should be demonstrable through the browser, but it's a kind of head-to-head game where some content comes to and from a content server, but the logic would all be between two players fighting each other on different machines. Graphics wouldn't be too fancy.

Can anyone recommend an SDK or set of technology to do this? Most of my experience is with web app development using Rails, Sinatra, Django, etc. I'm thinking that the client-side logic and graphics would be more suited to something like Flash or Silverlight or whether I could actually pull this off with a ton of javascript. But, I don't know about network communications between two instances. Any tips or leads?
Yes, firefox is a platform. The total value is higher than the thing itself, and that makes it hard to displace. Like DOS and Windows. Adblock is very popular, and although I use Greasemonkey (and scripts accumulated for that platform) and others, I doubt that many of the userbase do. And so for them, this isn't a factor.

It's worth remembering that Google doesn't care to win this war - they just want faster browsers to drive web and webapp usage.
Spelling correction as an iterative process that uses the collective knowledge of web users
I agree with your thoughts. It is sometimes difficult to digest not getting a fair opportunity, but after all, the world outside the school is not, well, the school. I also have EE background, with .95 PhD, and despite being ahead of the tech horizon, it's especially painful to be rubbished by some haphazard investors.

However, i am sure, if i put my full energy behind it, someday it will certainly fly with or w/o VCs on board. So, the real key is perseverance and commitments. And of course, finding like-minded or like-positioned people helps getting there.
You might be able to get a debt collection agency involved. I don't think debt collectors charge a lot in up front fees, and they probably work fast.

It sounds like you are really thinking about just forgetting about it. That might be a good idea, getting your app or money may not be worth the money.

But before you do, check to see if there are any fast and efficient things you can do to collect. Small claims court might work out. Would a lawyer be willing to take your case for a large percentage of the money, and no payment upfront? It might not work, but it will at least give you a chance to get your app without putting in a significant amount of time.

I found an ebook with tips for collecting business debts, so the ebook will probably have a lot of information you can use. http://www.viacorp.com/DebtBook.html

Edit: I just realized looking through the book that you can petition a court, this might include small claims court, to send the case to arbitration. Arbitration has a lot of downsides for the consumer. The results heavily favor the plaintiff, and the defendant usually pays the fees if found guilty. But all of that is good here.
All technology? I guess we're back at the bottom of the Civilization advances tree, eh? Do you want triremes, maths, militia or granaries?

England has ~65 millions of people. Take away all manmade technology (including buildings, tarmac, concrete) and any city would be many square miles of bare earth collapsing into holes where sewers and tunnels and underground trains once were.

Within a day or two it would be many square miles of human waste, corpses, mud if it rained, and people making their way to the nearest rivers.

Within a couple of weeks, significant fractions of people have starved or died of lack of medical treatment, fighting, illness from river water contaminated with sewage and corpses, etc.

OK, you can drink from the river you may not get ill for a while. What can you eat but other people? City areas -> wastelands.

Out in the country, farmers with easily harvested crops in season are the best off, until they get looted. With no food stores or shops, animals and current crops will be eaten quickly and that's pretty much that. Good luck surviving on hedgerow food and hunting with no experience and everyone else trying to as well.

Some strong willed resourceful people in remote niches will survive (nobody could travel to them very quickly). After a few years we'll see who. Small farms, maybe some farm animals, fast growing trees coming into usable sizes. Levers, (wooden) wheels, barrows, hammers hoes, heaters, cookers, flint/stone axes, they'll be around.

Maybe in short order some beach sand melting -> glass jars, glasses. The people who survive are the people who currently live with reduced technology and will be busy staying alive.

What then? I don't know. A few decades to a population big enough and connected enough for mass trade, I suppose. By then a similar sort of grind up through metalwork, blacksmithing, banking, debt, economic collapse...

What technology could we skip to that would hasten us through such developments? I say at least two hundred years.
I guess I meant that coming up with new ideas is hard. Invention is hard.

In the hypothetical case that everything is gone tomorrow, the ideas still exist. All we need to do is implement them.

I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.

Consider the further case that no one on earth knew that the quicksort algorithm even existed. How long would it take to be duplicated? Months? Years?

How did someone get the idea to smelt metal? It took thousands of years. Now that we know that smelting exists, all that is left is finding a way to do it. Many people in modern society will have the knowledge to rebuild technology. I would argue that expanding technology is much harder than rebuilding technology.

As to pouring molten metal, sure it is scary at first, just like driving a car. After much practice, like most things, it ceases being scary.
Not quite 100mil, but fairly close:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/10/the-future-i...
Then you think very wrong. It's trivial to find open WIFI all over China. Most restaurants and coffee shops have it.

I can see several from my apartment.
Along with the one newspaper, I've got 2 business degrees where I got to hear about the manipulation from the other side. Then there's the digg experience, where Jay and Kevin could fabricate whatever the hell they wanted to, and it would be printed verbatim in many, many blogs, magazines, newspapers, whatever. I can give you many examples. Or you could actually search for articles - there's plenty out there - about how business magazines and business sections of newspapers out there that suppress info because it displeases advertisers.

That's not to say there isn't good biz journalism out there - just as a random example, for every 100 breathless, admiring article about Enron back in the day, there was one journalist who actually tracked down the truth.
The owner of the Tor exit node would still be in the logs, even if they only downloaded part of a file.
Seems like you should have stopped reading after the first sentence.
Yes. I taught my grandma how to use the Internet, E-mail, and Skype. She played Freecell often before, but nothing else on the computer. (She still says "So can I X-this out?" to close a window.)

I sat her down one afternoon and explained things very slowly, using metaphors such as the postman bringing mail to your house, and you putting mail in your mailbox when you want it to go out at some point.

For the internet, I used the metaphor that "your computer talks to other computers" and shows you pages that live on other computers. I had to explain about hyperlinks, ads, etc.

The key point to remember: They're not stupid; the internet is completely foreign to them. You have to explain things that we take for granted, such as hyperlinks, the windows taskbar, what a "window", "application", etc are.

Technical details: I put her in Chrome, and added a shortcut to her start menu for Gmail. She can feel safe because the home button always gets her out of wherever she wants to go.
The problem with paedophilia is that it is extremely difficult to enforce. It is not as if a 5 year old kid will walk up to a police station and file a complaint. The internet made it near impossible to enforce paedophilia laws.

If the cops have to cause a mild inconvenience to 50 people to successfully prosecute one bad guy - then so be it.
But...but...Platonic pursuit of knowledge and happiness?
How do you un-"svn update" after you don't like its auto-merge?

(Unless you never use svn update, you do branch and merge. You just don't have any control over how it works.)
Seems to me that there are two ways it could go, depending on how you take the question.

If when all the tech disappears the resources reappear, I'd say it doesn't take too long at all. Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, but nothing more than that. This is a sort of "If people with modern knowledge fall back in time" scenario.

On the other hand, if the resources aren't available, ie all the iron that's been mined over the last hundred years is simply gone then we'd be pretty boned, and would probably go extinct. This is more of a post-apocalyptic scenario, except you can't even mine the I-beams out of old skyscrapers, but all the cheaply accessible metal's been mined anyways so your civilization simply can't advance past the bronze age (or wherever you manage to scrape it up to). We'd be like the australian aborigines, who lived for (if wikipedia is to be believed) an astronomical 40000 years on the continent without developing anything more sophisticated than the boomerang.
Attacks against google, firefox, apple, and praise windows .net mvc, etc?

See a pattern here?
My approach to this is that my creativity and expertise lie in creating unique software. I am not out there to build a web server, so I look for the stuff that is commonly used, well documented, and has easily googlable problems. I try to learn them really well. I stick with the stuff that works. With small open source things, I have been known to pull in the code and get going with it myself...

Here are mistakes I see people make that I try to avoid:
1) Making decisions on technology before they have actually tried it.
2) Upgrading to the latest version of products too often. For every problem it fixes...
3) Fail to give developers system administrator access rights. Nothing worse than not being able to install stuff, but it happens all the time.
"We're eBay for takeout orders"

I hate that. It makes it sound like you're so unoriginal that you just picked a random market and a random existing huge successful product/company and put them together hoping the combination will work.
Are you sure when you say "Co Founder" you don't mean "employee"??? Maybe post to "jobs."
Though it does look slower than the standard qwerty keyboard with predictive text. I think it could speed up entering passwords or URLs. Actually anything needing precise input that does not easily benefit from contextual text prediction.
Yeah, I'll switch to Chrome when Chrome gets a VI mode.