skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1 for Authorize.net. Paypal's Website Payments Pro is good too.

Consider the trade offs between better user experience if the payment process is on your site vs. not having to deal with PCI compliance with a hosted solution.
Walk away. There is no point in having the relationship when trust can never be there.
Look at Freenet.
Would you agree that most 20 year old hackers are NOT funded?

Why do you think you were funded? What made you different from those who didn't get funded from those companies? Was it your demo? Was it a patent? Just an idea that was so brilliant, no demo, patent, or experience was needed?

I'm very interested in any introspection you might share, as to why you got funded when others did not.
The press in the UK have concluded it was a considered insult to Brown.
Doubly agreed. I particularly like how one of the articles refered to in the title of this thread basically said 'I surveyed my options and counted out all of these others because I don't have any experience with them.' Yeah, nice scientific decision-making there. I want back the five minutes of my life I took to read it.
Great powerpoint. Fun theme, interesting and relevant.
Check out their DevPay service. It's intended use is reselling Amazon Web Services with a markup, but you can also use it to do a simple recurring monthly fee. It's dead simple to set up compared to every other ecommerce system I've looked at, including Amazon SimplePay.

It's almost like a loophole, finding something so dead simple that doesn't require you to run SSL at your end. If only they could roll that interface out to their other payment products.
sbaqai, you are absolutely correct. 3D printing gets a lot of glory, but it is just one of the amazing technologies changing manufacturing. Laser cutters are another great example, but so are the home use plotters like the CriCut that put mass customization in the hands of anyone with $300.
Security Issue (Availability)

Disable the use of "pre" tags or enforce maximum line lengths for "pre" sections on comment threads. Long "pre" lines widen the entire page width so you have to keep scrolling right and left to read. In addition to accidental problems, you might also run into problems with trolls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam#Page_widening
We use Payflow Pro Recurring Billing (PayPal).

If you don't need access to the funds for a few days I would recommend using Braintree for recurring billing. But if you want the funds in your Paypal account immediately Paypal's Payflow Pro is a decent option.
I mostly agree but:

> The average library is, by definition, average

It's not that simple. The average programmer who releases a library is better than the average programmer.
I mentioned that in the first paragraph, but then later went on to hyperbolize in the quote you pulled out. "Most 10x coders deal with it by not using 3rd party libraries, except for ones that are very highly regarded and trusted."

I do use 3rd-party libraries. I'm a big fan of JQuery, for example - I can't use it in my day job because we literally count bytes when serving JavaScript, but I use it all the time for prototypes and personal projects. But I know that Resig is a top-notch coder, and more importantly, JQuery has had thousands of projects beat on it for a couple of years. If there're corner cases, they've been explored and uncovered, bug reports have been filed, and patches have been made.

Similarly, I use Apache/Lighttpd and MySQL and Django and PIL and BeautifulSoup (though I had some installation issues with PIL, so maybe that's not a great example of a well-tested, well-documented library). But these are pretty well-exercised projects with large userbases: other people have already done the dirty work of discovering all the bugs.

Makes me wonder why anyone would ever use new open source projects, which is essential to getting to the well-tested, well-exercised stage. I think it comes down to need: they'll reach for an imperfect library if the problem is so scary that they don't even want to approach it. So go work on hard problems, and you'll be popular. ;-)
"Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was.."

Opposing factor to speed up these sorts of setbacks is that much of the experimentation/testing would already be done. We'd know the fuel efficiency of coal for example. We'd know not to bother with methods that have failed.

I'm more curious what technologies we'd realize never needed to exist. Would electric cars be the route we choose? Would open source operating systems be 100% adopted...etc
Minerals are definitely the hardest part.

You wouldn't need coal. If you can make a fire, charcoal is easily produced from wood.

Making forges and blast furnaces isn't too difficult. To build one, pile up dirt or clay walls to form a bathtub like structure. Make sure you have holes at the base so air from your bellows can make it though. Construct a fire in the tub and pile on alternating layers of charcoal and iron ore. Keep pumping on the bellows for the next few days until the the charcoal burns up. Your iron ore should now have turned into pieces of high carbon steel, perfect for making any tool from ploughs to blades.

You might be able to find iron ore as dark colored sand in stream beds. I don't know where you would find copper or zinc.

Once you have steel, everything follows. If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things.

If you are interested in learning how to make machine tools from very simple materials, look up the Gingery series on making a complete metalshop from scrap:

http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html
HA! I love this thought. I hope we can assume that knowledge is infinitely accessible. If not, it may turn out more like "idiocracy" in that initially we build things that suck.
Paypal is good and pretty feature rich, but it's not the most straightforward thing to work with. It's not really that the API is under-documented, more that it can involve lots of back and forth and your code needs to deal with lots of cases. The advantage is ease of use. In terms of time to implement and wide spread user awareness it's a good starting point to get the money coming in - with more options provided as time permits.
http://www.zuora.com/

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

previous HN thread
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284
I have not seen that episode. Thank you very much for telling me how it ends. I guess that will teach me the dangers of not seeing everything the second it airs. A couple of comments like that, and I can throw away my PVR completely, and save a lot of money.

To keep on topic, I think that many would die due to lack of food and medical technology, but it wouldn't take long to reach the technology level of 1900. The difference between then and now, is that we know it is possible. How much time was wasted because people didn't think something was possible?
I do. That was a requisite to know how things are lost in the noise. Go to /newest and you'll often see almost the whole page with submissions in 1 or 2 and without comments.
Google Checkout has no customer service, not for merchants at least. No phone number, no email address, just a knowledge base and a forum where GC merchants vent their frustration by making threats and typing in all caps:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants/lab...

In addition to the rate hike which now puts them in the same fee range as Paypal, Google Checkout is missing basic functionality.

True story: you can't download your complete transaction history. You can download one day of transactions at a time, but if you want something to give to your accountant at the end of the year, you've got to download 365 .csv files and combine them yourself.
Blog post aggregator of Hacker News users
What ASP.NET MVC Can Learn From Ruby on Rails
If we woke up and all the technology was gone, would we want to get back to where we are now...a second time around would be a good chance to fix/improve stuff.
Ask HN: If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2
in a follow up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526458

If all of the sudden all technology was gone (assuming we had knowledge of that technology)...
What technologies would entirely be skipped in the rebuild?

Dumb examples: there would be no period of time we would think the world was flat. There would be a very short period of time without movable print...
I've been using Chrome as my primary browser for about .5 years now. Apart from a few crashes, it has been the best browser I've ever used. I don't see any ads after I click my Readability bookmarklet either. When I shut down my computer a few nights ago, I had 92 Chrome windows open, each with 6-12 tabs. Firefox probably would have died had I tried this. Two things annoyed me about Firefox. When it crashed, all open windows were shut down. Since Chrome spawns separate processes for each window, it doesn't have this problem. Secondly, Firefox took 5-10 seconds to open, and frequently lagged. Chrome opens instantly and has no performance problems on my machine.

Also, could we please stop killing every somewhat-questionable link? The HN conversation surrounding them is typically very interesting. (Until people start complaining about the quality of the articles, that is.)
Ideas wanted on how to find a qualified co-founder?
I am an east coast entreprenuer who has recently shut down a non-tech company I founded and plan to move to silicon valley to start my next company, this time in the internet space.

I am moving to the valley with considerable savings to found a start-up. I have a great idea, bootstrapping success and operational experience BUT....no hacking experience.

With no tech sphere of influence I'm looking for proven ideas to meet brilliant technologist co-founder(s).

Any thoughts?
What you say is interesting, but it would also be interesting if you'd actually answer the question, i.e., give a guess in years.
so its like a friendfood room [aggregating x, y & z feeds]?
Holy crap, that's handy! Thanks so much!

Out of curiosity (and in hopes of eliciting a reply to see if it shows up in my new Hacker News Responses feed!) would this also be easy to do with Yahoo!Pipes?
I feel like I'm reading comments from a (smarter) alternate universe version of myself. I run a small real estate company in Atlanta and bilbo0s is nailing the CRA on the head.

Minorities could not walk into a bank and get a mortgage because they were a minority. That is patently false. However, in my neck of the woods, Atlanta, GA (in Fulton County one of the 35 worst), money was made by developers who "invested" in low income areas.

Areas like the West End and Lakewood saw tons of development during the real estate boom, and then developers disappeared, after they removed the equity from these homes. There are now streets in these neighborhoods where the average price of a home sold is under $35,000, but the foreclosed properties are listed at more than $300K.

@bilbo0s, I would LOVE to talk to you. I'm doing a foreclosure bus tour in a month, and I would love to be able to explain the CRA situation as eloquently as you did on this forum. You can email me at broderick at sktrealty dot com.
Administration Seeks Increase in Oversight of Executive Pay
Your idea is devilishly cool! I am not qualified to assess whether / how it could be implemented, but I wonder if it would be cost-efficient. Smartphones are not that cheap. A criminal organization would need some serious financial incentives to deploy such a network. In any case, it sounds really neat: an entirely distributed and decentralized. Such a system can't be brought down with a warrant. It can't be beheaded.
risk card values go up pretty linearly.
Microsoft :P no, I jest.

Conventional knowledge would still exist for the most part (assuming an approx 10 year time frame), so we probably wouldnt have geocentric delusions or anything like that.

I would guess that as far as technologies went, the internet would be designed in a much more secure manner. Also, it probably would be designed as a scalable network instead of the scale-free network it currently is.
I'd go a step further and say the yuckyness is in some cases purely subjective. You probably know about the guy who got into hot water over his manga collection. This is a clear example of a culture clash. For an american, or european, everything involving drawings of children in sexual contexts is at least distasteful. Strange as it may seem, there are cultures where "sexy" is closer to cute then to porn.

It's probably one of those things which 60 years after will sound _really_ weird, like blacks had separated restrooms or homosexuals liked to rape little boys.
The b3 improvements are incremental, I doubt you'll see that big a difference in benchmarks.

There wasn't a whole lot of change from Firefox 1.5->2.0, Firefox 3.0 was the big refresh. I don't actually remember that much complaining about poor performance in Firefox 2.0 relative to 1.x.

What do you feel are missing features in Chrome that actually matter to people that you feel with materially impact performance significantly?
But what "additional evidence"? They enough evidence to link the ip address to a serious felony. If you lend someone your car, and they try to drive it across the border with 20kg of cocaine, expect them to come crashing through your door.
“You realize no one is ever actually going to do any of this, right?” There was an awkward silence as the people who had spent their lives in the trenches of access enablement contemplated the very real possibility that no one would ever benefit from their work." QUOTED

Haha, thats the problem with accessibility its hard to know when anyone is really going to use it with a screenreader, more then likely you are just wasting your time.
I think it's a very interesting question.

I would say three to five years. In my opinion, technological tools are overrated. Most things can be built by hand using common materials.

Actually, it would be a very cool project! Take a bunch of hackers. Set up an isolated camp for them in a remote area. There will be no technology there, but there will be plenty of edible plants, fresh water, and some medical supplies. The hackers will be supplied with a sample of every raw material that Earth has to offer. And when I say raw, I mean, for example, iron ore. Have video cameras all around the place to make sure they are not bringing technology from anywhere. Measure how long it takes them to build, say a computer. I think it will be less than a year. (The reason I answered 3-5 years to the main question is because in the situation you described most humans will be busy fighting each other, and hackers will have less time to devote to rebuilding technology.)
You missed me: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
I agree with this. I use third party libraries when its not inconvenient to do so. All the complexity and the kitchen sink that comes with a lot of stuff drives me crazy. For example, when I try to use any Java library from Apache I inevitably need to download three or four other libraries that depend on other libraries and so it goes.

Otherwise, I code in my own scripting language and I deploy to my own app server. I'm very productive this way and I'm able to leverage stuff that doesn't suck.
I'd say you're looking up the right avenue, but it may be hard for people on this forum to help you out if you do not have more details about what you're trying to do.

Why are you moving to the Bay Area?
What's the market segment?
What, technically, are you trying to do?
...
That's the funny thing. About what harm exactly are we talking about? If it's downloading "illegal material", then the harm was done a long time before. If it's producing, then evidence should be abundant, and the best strategy would be to gather more evidence before alarming him.

But you see, he wasn't even told the offense. And neither have we. That's the magic of child porn - you'll never see a journalist trying to dig deeper into such cases.
You must consider the opportunity cost as well - imagine yourself three months from now. You could be three months away from this mess, well towards making your $2000 back (or better), well into a new project or the same thing with a new developer and an improved contract.

Or, you could still be arguing with this guy over code you don't have, a product he hasn't finished, and a price that's still rising (it's not going to go down), and even at best you wont trust the program or have anyone to maintain it.
Right, but the 'scare' is an orthogonal issue to how law enforcement acted in this instance.I'd expect the same response whether it was human trafficking, stock fraud or racketeering.
My favorite part was (slightly paraphrased).

"All great companies get you laid, paid, or made"
It is always tough to find a co-founder. I am also looking for one, my expertise being in voice and natural language technology. I guess it has to do with establishing the trust and that is best done in physical proximity over a few meetings or like love, it can just happen. I am from India, but willing to partner with really motivated people in US. You can contact me on this id at aol.com
Apple - Downloads - Math & Science - SSPX
Its now almost april and hes almost finished.

Call me skeptical, but...

:)
Tips for Avoiding Entrepreneurial Burnout
I've built the gingery furnace, an poured aluminum twice. It's hot and scary. I've made arrowheads out of old glass bottles using a broken antler.

I think you're underestimating how spectacularly hard it is to make anything without tools. Go into the woods naked, and show me how to make a bellows.

I'm pretty sure i could do it, if i could keep my glasses, and my shoes and a knife and a bunch of food. I think i could run down a deer, if all the other people i'd be in competition with didn't kill me after i was 10 miles into the run.

I don't think steel matters very much. Sanitation, clean water, lots of food.

"If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things."

I disagree. Once upon a time, people drove cars on the moon. Should be a n easy thing to reproduce eh? heck, we've got 40 years of technology on them. The hardest part about progress is convincing other people to do what you want them to do.

The gingery books are FANTASTIC. i'd highly recommend them to ... everyone.
Human trafficking is real (I was actually offered to buy someone once), but in child abuse cases it's usually a parent or somebody close to the family.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would be easier to identify them if distributing child porn would not be illegal. I cannot imagine somebody starting to abuse their child in order to post a video. But I can easily imagine somebody who's already been abusing the child taping it.
I am confused. There is only one Z in the game, so the only way to get ZZZ would be to use both blanks, which would get you a lousy 10 base points. Given a blank should normally give you an out, you would be 100-150 points worse off if you played ZZZ instead of a word already in the dictionary.

So I hardly see what the issue is. Okay, so Q is a little bit easier to dump - but you could dump it pretty easily with qat anyway.
I would love to use Chrome as my primary browser, but until it supports an addon equivalent to and as feature-rich as Firebug, and is available for OSX, I don't have much choice but to stick with Firefox.
"Women make boys want to burn things".
Women are the source of all this, us, hanging around on hacker news; learning, digesting, trying, applying and executing. In the hope of getting successful at what we're actually trying to do, look good and buy ourselves, indirectly or some directly... women.
Either you have freedom of information, or you don't. All you're saying is that you want to write the rules yourself.

edit: What I mean, is it's a slippery slope. If you do the selection by yourself, you'll let out a lot of good stuff. If you trust somebody else to do the selection, that someone will be in time important enough to become either corrupt or a target, or both. Just imagine google excluding sites from its index on some subjective criteria.

You can't solve this kind of problem by limiting access to information. It's simply a bad strategy from the start, and like any design mistake it creates problems farther and farther away, when the issue is only one: a bunch of bits have been made illegal.
The BSG folks were dumb. Everything in nature is trying to kill you all the time. You can use a wrench to hit things long after there are no more nuts to be tightened. Apollo will run out of bullets and the natives will spear him, or the lions will eat him.
I don't know about those 5000 physicists against Einstein, but:

> Einstein was attacked by some with anti-Jewish leanings. When a pamphlet was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, Einstein retorted "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Einstein.html
Sorry, I honestly did not mean to ruin it for anyone. There's plenty in the episode worth watching that a few comments can't possibly tell.
Mozilla makes over $100,000,000 a year from affiliate Google searches.

What happens when Google doesn't need that?
No, not what I meant, on either the 'finding jobs' or that your EE is useless.
Your EE has tremendous value. HOWEVER, in addition to the value of creating, you have to create the environment where the product/idea is able to be sold.

I'm an anti-mac-boy (do we get a proper title? I hate being defined by something you're not), and getting quite a laugh about your remarks re: Jobs.

However, I think it is undeniable that Apple wouldn't be where it is today without him. From an engineering standpoint, sure Woz is a brilliant engineer, and made an amazing product, but it was leadership (management) that made apple into a great company (even if I don't like the way they do business or their products).

I wasn't aware you were referring to consumer electronics, but even so, take a look at how others have done it in the past.
I believe the story of Palm may be a good one (though I'm not sure what product you are really talking about).

Also consider the financial times that we're in. Using Palm as an example, they got funded early dot-com (I believe), so what worked for them might no work for you.
We are using Authorize.net's recurring billing service, and we are very happy with it. Mostly because we don't need to worry about the security issues you mentioned (encrypting, secondary processing server, etc...). Authorize.net stores the c/c info and takes care of it.

Paypal also does that, but we chose Authorize.net mainly because Paypal is not completely behind-the-scenes in the process (I don't remember exactly, but I think PayPal forces you to redirect the user to a PayPal page). Also, Authorize.net is cheaper in the long-run.

The downside of Authorize.net is the account set-up, which is a bit cumbersome. A provider will contact you and you need to describe them how you are going to use the account, etc... Also, I think you need to open a merchant account. It's not painful per se, but you should expect at least a week to get the whole thing up-and-running.

On the upside, Authorize.net gives you access to their test environment in the meantime, so you can do the integration while you wait for your account...
I've never had issues plugging in at JFK (or ROC - the two airports I fly between). A security guard has politely asked me to move before, but that usually happens when I start hogging the outlet for > an hour (layovers, wait before flight if its a long flight, etc). And I can understand wanting to keep the outlets free incase someone else needs to use it; usable outlets are sparsely spread out at airports.
How A R Rahman scored Slumdog Millionaire music with Logic Pro on Mac Pro ?
Do something (anything) that brings you in $400 a month with no extra work on your part. If you can pull that off, you are in the right mindset.