skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need more socialites with tech skills
Just a quick note based on my current insanity. I think chatty social people who can also program are becoming just as valuable as the hard-core competent hackers who write magnificent software.

In the unix hacker tradition we called those who spent all their time reading papers, writing USENET articles and participating in listserves "lusers" or Read-only users. The socialites couldn't RTFM and do everything themselves; they can write the occasional C code or Perl script but their specialty is more towards Pine, MUD games and chat.

All that has changed with social networks. Your project, however important, needs people like those to get the word out and keep in touch with the pulse of your industry. I have been trying to do both things for my project myself, and I can see the effect it has on my productivity.

When in hack mode, I can spend long stretches of time focused in Emacs churning out a great module. However, in the days and weeks I spend TABing between my editor, several PDF windows full of math, and a browser window open to library documentation and specs, I can feel myself withdrawn from the industry. Hack-mode has this weird effect on me where I no longer care about project, performance or any business goal; all that matters is code. I get flash backs of the years where I spent buried in mathematics texts oblivious to what was happening in the world. I had a different time than all of humanity; In more than on occassion I woke some afternoon to go out for coffee, just to see the streets empty and wondered where all the people went (hint: it was Christmas)

The same thing happens to me now when I take a few days to implement a module in my project. However, the other days when I'm scavenging the internet for information. When I'm doing subconscious analysis, catching up with the industry, taking a second look at my potential market, reaching out to peers, being active in blogs and the "scene". In those days, I feel my hacking mind completely removed and the only way I can communicate with it is to jot notes down as detailed as possible so my analytic self can tackle it when it returns.

I'm only suffering through this because of my chosen niche. A combination of industry and cultural specialization that makes finding competent hackers who speak that "foreign" language (in my case Arabic) a little hard. Plus it's quite lucrative, so I'm still too clingy and holding my cards close to my chest.

If your niche allows you to find knowledgeable peers who you can chat with about your domain of specialization, please do yourself a favor and find one partner who can do one either hacking or social networking and market research, and by all means focus on ONE. Your productivity will thank you and you might just have some fun.

I thank you for existing fellow HNers, let's keep the spirit of this place alive. Go and kickass!
No contract at all is needed to distribute Android apps.
The Pirate Bay's IPREDator service is accepting beta signups.
Ternary is advanced and confusing? It's neither of those things.
Um... Yes you can. Here is your above example:

>>> def cons(a, b):
... def lm(f):
... return f(a, b)
... return lm
...
>>> def car(cns):
... return cns(lambda a, b: a)
...
>>> def cdr(cns):
... return cns(lambda a, b: b)
...
>>> x = cons(1, 2)
>>> car(x)
1
>>> cdr(x)
2

Most scheme code translates relatively cleanly into python code. The biggest problem in translation comes when code wants to modify variables in a closure. Since SICP is primarily concerned with functional programming, this is a non-issue. Furthermore, Python 3.0 includes the nonlocal statement which fixes this problem (details here: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3104/). Python is not lisp but its pretty darn close and unlike lisp (or scheme in this case), it has a well designed, well tested standard library -- something extremely important in programming languages today. In light of this information, MIT's decision to move to Python is justified.
The claim was that Citi can't distinguish good from bad. If that's true, they can't have preferentially sold either group.

Note that we now have two stories on what they sold. One story is that they "unethically" sold the bad. Now we're told that they sold the good.
Oops, I think I gave the multi year price and the GP quoted the single year price. The prices are actually identical at $499 for 1 year. Sorry.

Of course, if you can pay, I would recommend buying as long as you can anyway. Refreshing SSL certs every year gets real old, real quick.
As I commented below I accidentally gave the multi year price. Probably didn't save anything. Sorry!
I don't really understand this article. He was living in his Jeep? Didn't he bother making friends? I thought the whole point of college was to engage in Lord-of-the-Flies-style social hacking? That "one red paperclip" guy needs to teach this kid a thing or two...
I don't know why they're singling out Stanford.

Probably just because it's the SF Gate (same reason the only comparison made was to Berkeley).
Don't forget to keep an eye on browser cookies when you surf travel sites. Delete them often, or use a browser that lets you surf in secure "zones".

For me it's Attitude Travel and Asia Room for hotels. Shoe string baby.
Very neat. I've just started reading that book.
If anything, I've seen the opposite problem. Programming is fun- reading manuals is boring. People tend to want to dive right into the programming, without first doing research that would greatly improve the speed and stability of the project.
"Treated like a monopoly" doesn't mean that you can't dominate a market or get huge.

FWIW, none of the large financial institutions had >20% of "the market".

In other words, while those rules are simple, they don't seem to address any problems that we're having.
In regards to GoDaddy, I've been using retailmenot to get 10-20% discounts on the wildcard certificates I've bought recently.
There are several companies that create DDoS mitigation hardware/software. I have good knowledge that Amazon (et al) use several of these companies for solutions.
Thanks. A great read.
I find it most valuable as a glimpse into the mind and approach of a 10x (or more) developer.
I'm a happy Spreedly customer (I use them at www.neobudget.com). I'm a one-man shop. I developed my software in my free time and wanted to provide it to others at a small subscription fee. I know this sounds like a commercial, but I can't say enough good things about Spreedly. They made what I do possible. Otherwise, I would have to spend half my time worrying about payment processing. But now, I just integrated their API (in one evening after work), and I was good to go.

In my situation, it was well worth the cost to be relieved the burden of developing my own payment processing. Also, the cost is so low, I had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. If it didn't work, I was only out $19.
Is Spreedly PCI-DSS compliant or have plans to become compliant if it isn't?
Maybe he doesn't want to live in Saskatchewan.

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

I thought the whole point of college was to engage in Lord-of-the-Flies-style social hacking?

Please tell me more about this thought. I tend to think that the reason the low-income student should go to Stanford if admitted is precisely in order to meet a lot of students who are much better off. But I didn't try it myself (I attended a state university where I could afford to work my way through my degree program, knowing I wouldn't have any help from other family members), so I'd learn something from your experiences if you kindly shared them.
I use cdgcommerce.com. I've tried a few different providers and they have been very helpful in answering my questions and you have the option of using their gateway or authorize.net
These innovations are what's going to drive artificial intelligence into the mainstream.

There is a lot happening in the background that we don't see (risk analysis, expert systems). But once this is in front of us and improving our lives, there will probably be a rapid increase in innovation as more people see the possibilities and a much higher economic incentive to do this type of thing.
Is OpenID the future?
The man is amazingly unbothered by things, and he writes really interesting notes, too.

I started to get a sinking feeling. I searched around in the level for a view that would confirm my suspicion, and when I found a clear enough view of some angled geometry I saw the tell-tale mid-polygon affine swim in the texture as I rotated. They were using the software rasterizer on the iPhone. [..] The developers came back and said it [rewriting it for OpenGL] would take two months and exceed their budget.

[..] I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. [..] my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four

:D
I don't know why people even bother with XML when it is so much easier to write S-Expression generators and parsers.
hm. you are in for an uphill battle. it's hard to identify good people with skillset X unless you also have skillset X. That's the challenge if you have money. the problem is that you don't have money. You have to convince a hacker that your skills are worth something (and often hackers have the same problem picking business guys as business guys have picking hackers.) Think of it as your first sale, perhaps?

I might be interested in a trade. lsc@prgmr.com. My experience is in SysAdmin/Networking, but if you do want a youtube-alike, you are going to need a lot of bandwidth, and I have that.

You say you have an 'image' do you mean a .jpg? or do you mean html/css?
To clarify

There's three 'it's in the story. The first is that Apple will start offering 90 day refunds, the second is that devs will have to sign a new contract by the end of the week and the third is that devs will have to pay back Apple 100% of the purchase price of any apps returned (meaning that for every refund the dev makes a 30% loss)

My take - for what it's worth

1. The 90 day refund story is rubbish and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the AppStore and what it is. There's very few apps here intended to last more than 90 days. They're disposable, especially the games. You pay $1 and get half an hour's entertainment.

2. There is a new contract, but it states nothing of this 90 day return policy

3. As quoted by gcheong below, it seems there is provision for Apple to claim money back from a dev in the case where they offer a refund, however (as also noted by icey) I think this is more of a CYA clause.

In short, the article is nothing more than flamebait, which it seems I've fallen for :P
Check out the page source for more fun. :)
Creating an evocative user experience
Yeah, that's why I called it "what they used to call functional programming". Functions are first-class values and closures are easy to get at. (Some people quibble with the exact implementation, but they are definitely there. Such people will be happier with Python 3.0, but still not entirely satisfied.) This is what "functional programming" used to mean.

Now it means having immutable values, tail recursion, easy lambdas, powerful type systems, and so on. There's a clear historical progression from past to present, but there's still been changes in what the term means over time which means that different people mean different things by "functional programming" if they don't clarify.
No contract is needed for most platforms. However, most sales come from distributors that run on-device or online stores, and they all require a contract.

Look at Handango's terms to see how bad it can get.
Treasury to Seek Power to Seize Non Banks (Trojan Horse Alert)
I agree this article was a little weird. But it can be hard to make friends across economic disparities. You can't join them for lunch out, or a weekend ski trip, or chip in towards the keg. The one red paper clip guy worked because it was a novelty. The rich kids at Stanford would eventually get tired of buying this guy lunch in exchange for paper clips or whatever, and he'd get tired of asking.
If they have already attempted to extort $$. You should keep the mitigation device in place. There are a few devices that do packet inspection and can handle multi gigabyte size attacks.But like many have mentioned contact the upstream provider
Is this at all related to the Polywell fusion generator? I see no mention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
I'd go a bit further and say that even over 100Mbps you're not going to get much protection over an OpenBSD box or a Sun system running a decent Firewall.

The key thing is to try to block it upstream. Your firewall (and indeed anyone's firewall) is only really designed to restrict IP-layer access to specific source and destination hosts, ports and datagram types. Unless it was built by Cisco, in which case it was probably designed to do a whole load of other stuff, none of which will help you right now.

There are limited things you can do to the IP stacks of most OSes these days that can help discard unsolicited packets, and reduce resource consumption on the local boxes (if that's high) but an upstream solution is likely to be more optimal in most cases.
Glad you fixed it so fast and sorry about being an asshole earlier. It's a bit of social engineering : it gets things going - if you hate me and/or the disclosure you are more likely to fix the hole. Stupid, I know, but it works.

I confirm that in my initial post, I wrongly assumed the demo page was down. Downforeverythingorjustme.com confirmed afterwards that my IP was blocked - luccastera moved incredibly fast! And right now, the canned messages seem to be whitelisted, which fixed the problem for good.
It really is a license to print money. That's not an attack though, most SaaS businesses are. What's unique about being a SSL issuer is the relatively low levels of innovation involved. There is little technical innovation, and no time spent thinking about how to design a product that people want. Putting all the pieces together and striking the right deals certainly requires a bit of business savvy, especially to have done it in 1997, but otherwise the business is rather straight-forward.

I think part of the hostility towards SSL issuers comes from the seemingly monopolistic pricing structure. As you note, validation is the largest expense. Largely, that only needs to be done once though, so why doesn't the cost drop dramatically in the second year? And it seems clear to most people that the cost of servicing a domain and its subdomains should not be an order of magnitude higher.

If a SSL issuer charged me an upfront service fee representing the cost of validation, then low yearly maintenance fees, and didn't gouge me for subdomains or multiple domains with clearly the same ownership (.com .net), they would have my business forever and my gratitude.
Trustico wants $149.00 for a 1-year True BusinessID cert. Servertastic is only asking $114.00. So, you still saved me at least $35.
Steve Blank is awesome... I highly recommend that book.
Related discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529694
"Next fall, he plans to pursue sociology and will enter the Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana"

Well, that will certainly not help his socioeconomic status.

During my undergraduate career, we had a speaker come in who was the subject of a recent novel. Growing up, he was a bright kid who lived in a miserable ghetto with violent, useless schools. He managed, somehow, to catch the attention of a local journalist who helped him get into college, where he excelled.

What did he choose to do with his college education? Did he choose to become an engineer, or a businessman?

No. He decided to get a PHD in Sociology and become a social worker.

I am mystified by the exceptional poor students that follow this path. Maybe they pursue subjects like sociology because it tells them that the reason they grew up poor is that society has wronged them. However, it is certainly an ineffective way to increase the prospects of themselves and their families.
Funny, Zuora quoted us 2% with a $1,000/month minimum fee. Not realistic for a startup until you're already pretty well established IMO...
I think that, if we're talking about the level of traffic that I think we're talking about here, it would almost HAVE to be a botnet.

either that, or somebody at one of the bandwidth providers got really <i>really</i> pissed off at you...if the later is the case the guy (or girl...they can be vindictive as hell) has probably already been fired since, you know, they sortof monitor these sorts of things.
Software Craftsmen and Agilists
"We are microfinancing platform, like Kiva.org."

Complete the sentence. "We are an X platform like Y, but with/without ..". If you can't differentiate your service from a competitor yourself how do you expect others to? Also, name dropping your competition without naming your business is not a good idea.

Regarding your query, you're already in the right place. If you want to hire developers try Craigslist. For contractors try Odesk. Usually for me it's just a matter of reaching to people I already know.
Some people spent their high school years learning programming languages and reading books written by dead guys.

To these people, living in your jeep is a LOT less scary that asking one of your classmates if you can sleep on her couch.
Is Noah Stokes a known name?
Why is Apple dealing with developers with customer service, they should deal with their developers like you would any business partner.

Edit: There's people who've made millions through their Apps, and likely made Apple millions in the process too, so are these guys treated poorly too?

I always thought Apple had a good reputation for customer service, at least they always have been when I've had to contact them. But that could just be because, unlike most companies, I actually get to talk to someone in the same country as me.
def cons(a, b):
return lambda f: f(a, b)

def car(p):
return p(lambda a,b: a)

def cdr(p):
return p(lambda a,b: b)

As well as in theory you can do this in practice. It's about as elegant (hard for me to judge as I have a strong pro-lisp bias).

Aside from lack of tail safety and performance issues with writing scheme-ish code I don't see why you couldn't implement those things in Python. The main difference is that typically in a real world situation you wouldn't because there's a library or a language feature
"The claim was that Citi can't distinguish good from bad."

That's not the claim at all - it's that they had a sliding scale of how bad a loan they were willing to make because of incentive to have lax ethical standards, then they hid the "badness" of those loans by bundling them up with other financial vehicles that they resold to others.
If I am interested taking pre-orders on selling an item, but don't want to go through the hoops of a merchant account, what is the other options for accepting payment?
I use a very simple and exact O(N) algorithm to calculate mass properties of polyhedrons without computing convex hulls or anything:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/mirtich/massProps.html

Maybe 80 LOC. I'm not sure why anything more complex is needed.

PhysX does seem promising.
Installer.app lets you install any app onto an iPhone without jailbreaking
PhoneGap: Open Source Tool for Building 'Native' Mobile Apps (iPhone, Android) with Javascript
Some people measure their prospects in ways other than income.
Such as??? Can anyone point to a format I might want to use that has a Java library but no C++ or Python library?
No way. Really rich people LOVE hard-working poor people -- it plays into the whole theory that smart, hard-working Americans will always come out ahead. Also, really rich people often understand that they are simply not as focused or motivated as the hard-charging kids who NEED to make their own money. This is useful for future business ventures, or if the family company needs to hire some young smart people.

The kids in this article sound totally lame, and seem to use their lack of income as an excuse for hating their wealthier peers. Yeah, a lot of rich people are utterly hilariously out of touch with the world, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't want to be your friend and do things with you. If you feel there is some sort of major tension, it's got more to do with you and your insecurities than with your affluent peers. In fact, if some rich kid were to act like a total snob to you because of your lack of money, there is ALWAYS a MUCH richer kid who would love nothing more than to have an opportunity to say to the snob, "dude, shut up - my family can buy yours ten times over." (True story.)

This isn't some theory of mine, either -- I'm pretty much the poorest person in my neighborhood, which has taught me quite a lot...
Holy Cow, The White House Has a Digg Clone
Motel And Hotel Commercial Loans - Great Options
It's built with Google Moderator running on App Engine.
The attacker would simply move the syn-flood to where the candy is.
I'm wondering if pressure on MIT to develop demonstrable practical skills in underclassmen has increased since (classic) 6.001 was introduced. I mean, if you're smart enough to get into MIT in the first place and you learn Scheme as a sophomore and CLU as a junior, then by the time you graduate and look for a job, you should be able to get up to speed pretty quickly in Java or C++ or whatever the flavor of the month is. But if you're looking for work in the summer between your sophomore and junior year, the employers don't want you to spend two weeks out of a two-month internship learning the syntax of an industry-standard language.
This is a pretty sad exchange. Fog essentially says "I'd love to donate my code" and the glibc maintainers respond that they aren't that interested unless he can provide ready-to-apply patches. Then it comes up that the framework to do dynamic runtime checks doesn't really exist. Then there follows a terse exchange as to which mailing lists should or should not be used to discuss such matters.

It looks like the discussion ended at that point. For reference, the author (Agner Fog) is the maintainer of one of the best sites on the web for assembly optimization. This sounds like a great project for a student or young programmer who wants to bridge the gap between Fog's expertise and the FSF's beaurocracy. If you are excited by fast code, this would be a way to make a difference in a hurry.
The Official WhiteHouse.gov digg clone
Perhaps people who have managed to grow up without a lot of money better understand how to live a happy life with a job that doesn't pay $100k.

Let me quote a very famous person who grew up in poverty, Charles Dickens:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

One secret to being happy with a $30k or $40k salary is to maintain a healthy perspective on your social class: If you know that a lot of people struggle to live on $18k, your $30k salary will fell fantastically great. Whereas if everyone you meet has a $150k salary and a trust fund, you'd better have the same or you will feel poor. Happiness is relative. That's the entire point of this article.

It's not surprising to find that many of the happiest grad students are people for whom a grad student salary seems quite adequate, even generous.