skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be sure to evaluate FastSpring.com as well.

Before you go with PayPal, you may want to read up on some of the issues people have been having with PayPal:
http://www.fastspring.com/blog/2008/...nt-processing/

Also, this post explains the difference in a full service e-commerce solution and a basic payment service like PayPal and the others:
http://www.fastspring.com/blog/2009/...ng-e-commerce/

Keep in mind that one of the ways customers can pay when using a full service solution is via PayPal, but customers have numerous alternative payment methods available as well. Some vendors won't need the features of a full service solution, while for others it makes a huge difference in their bottom line.

- Dan
Anyone who'd choose prison over giving up Facebook doesn't need to be in prison, they need to in a mental ward; they have serious issues.
what more can you ask for? regardless of whether you know how the system works, the nature of an API will impose certain things that you have to design with or around.
Off-topic maybe, but: "How to Write Code Fast", now can someone point me to literature for that? Highly appreciated!
Was on the road today and just noticed the stats for several of our sites were really low today. This explains the problem. Does anyone know how long it was down for? I know David is a member here so any details from him would be greatly appreciated.
Actually, I was a smoker. On the addiction scale, I'd say very high which was part of the reason. I quit for health reasons mostly. It was also becoming more of an inconvenience.

Honestly, I liked smoking a lot (still do really). I disliked the addiction.
Instinct, Intelligence and Intuition: Aides in Forex
Some of what Einstein said goes completely against what Newton said. They were both geniuses.
Heh, both good points. Maybe you'd be able to pass off that you're hard at work composing an email on your iPhone?
Oops, just noticed the answer to my question on their website. Looks like it was only down an hour. Guess it was a slow day for our sites. Oh well. Still support EveryDNS 100% though!
I think the obvious reason is that understanding why the API works as it does allows you to understand more about what your program is doing, and thus lets you write better software. For example, you can just think of malloc() as a magical "give me a block of memory!" API, which is perfectly sufficient for a novice who wants to write working programs. Alternatively, you can understand some (not all!) of the details behind virtual memory and how a typical heap allocator works. In the long run, that helps you write better software (e.g. by gaining an intuition for the relative costs of manual memory management, or debugging heap corruption).

So I think it's part of the difference between being a journeyman and an expert. That said, not all APIs are worth understanding, and you don't need to go into exhaustive detail with everything; it's a question of deciding what's worth learning in the long-run.
So, it sounds like a better description would be very helpful. We are adding some in-game instructions, but would it also be helpful to have some basic instructions in the description?
Bootstrapped revenue models are good for first time entrepreneurs
I don't think Hayek's prize was due to his work on the Business Cycle. It was primarily for demonstrating how market pricing serves as a communication mechanism allowing an emergent system, a distributed "cloud" (in today's terminology), to efficiently allocate goods. (of course these concepts are interrelated)
But doesn't this introduce this risk of a nerdy teenager being stung by one of these irradiated bees and manifesting all the traits of a bee, except magnified to human scale?
Points well taken. We need to make it clear what the objective of the game is. In this case, the point is to gain as much credibility and cash as you can in the amount of time you have to play. So, you buy products at low prices (say $1-$5 for reusable shopping bags) and then sell at higher prices ($10-$15 for the same bags). The simplicity of the game actually offers a fair amount of strategy (e.g. when to take out a loan, when to sell at a loss to take advantage of better prices, etc.)
Those are helpful suggestions, I'll add some better descriptions as well as captions for the screenshots tonight.
Digg & Reddit missed out on Twitter. Here's why
I'll say. I haven't been keeping up with the development, but the improvements to the model layer alone are worth the price of admission.

The conditional view processing is another gem, though I'm not sure it'll supplant a real caching engine -- it should at least get wins for those who either opt out of something like memcache, or perhaps haven't gotten around to it yet. Of course, adding it as a supported backend, I can't imagine that happening very often.
Luckily our dreams have already come true. We were able to build the game, get it accepted, and we've had a couple thousand downloads in the three days since it's been up. But, we are hopeful that we can continue to improve what we've built.
One of the most successful smoking cessation methods uses this very tactic to help people quit. Smokers already know that smoking is unhealthy, stinky, expensive and inconvenient. This doesn't help them quit. Convincing smokers that they are drug addicts seems to help more. It's easy to rationalize smelling bad, but very hard to rationalize a drug addiction.

"Quit Smoking the Easy Way" by Alan Carr
DollarDNS is another free DNS service worth mentioning. I use it in conjunction with EveryDNS in case one of them goes down.

http://www.dollardns.net/
I've played a couple of those. I think one thing we'd like to incorporate at some point is the ability to apply some of the items for a particular purpose. If you can do that, then we could also introduce an option to trade with other users, because there would be a changing, real-life demand for in-game products.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate your insight on this. I've found a copy of "The Underachiever Method" online and plan on checking it out.

Thanks!
Twitter Starts Serving Ads For Third Party Apps
Interesting. I wonder if rentals as a whole are down. If so, then this would suggest that the MPAA claims that piracy is killing the industry are wrong. This would be especially true because cheap rentals are the obvious substitute for expensive theaters in a tight economy.

On the other hand, the recent crop of crap movies can only account for so much in the video rental business. I mean, it's possible to rent older movies as well as new crap, so if people just want to watch a movie, and the new ones are lousy, wouldn't they just watch a good old one?
This is how I feel about Firefox now, but Firefox 3.5 (previous Firefox 3.1 IIRC) is looking pretty impressive. Many features you'd find in Chrome, plus an improved Javascript engine.

I'm a Firefox loyalist at the moment, and will stick with it until 3.5. At that point, if it fails to impress I may have to fall back on something else but as a Linux user, my options for Firefox rivals are limited.
What we need is lower home prices across the board, along with smaller homes instead of 4000 sqf for a family of 3. See the Rocio Romoro homes.
Could you theoretically take AppScale and Eucalyptus and create your own cloud startup?
A New Memory Tool for the Web
The Ecodrain: How a simple, non-moving part can reduce hot water consumption by 40%
But then you lose alphabetical order.
This reminds me of a passage from "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" that I love to quote:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Just make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
China urges new global reserve currency
No offense, but I really don't think hackers are going to grok the medical records interface problems of doctors and nurses until they start writing the code from the wards of the hospital, show up at 5 am, and have to solve several life-or-death problems before lunch amid screams and body fluids.

If anyone is really interested in solving that problem, let me know. I'm convinced it's a small team problem. Not a 10 person or 50 person problem. 2, 3, 4 people. The big guys will never catch up. They can't. They're too invested (billions and billions invested).

Interested parties would need to commit to several months in Portsmouth, VA (the most active Navy hospital, and the one where I'll be, and where one guy is already working on this problem). Would need to be willing to get up to date on immunizations. Would also need to be prepared to get up and 4:30 am daily, stay late most nights, stay overnight in the hospital several times a month, travel to different hospitals, with absolutely no promise of a contract at the end.
Owning a home is lovely. But being overexposed to real estate, like any other asset class, is imprudent.
Hackers meetup: StartupDrinks in Montréal this wednesday
BTW, for the uninitiated, AMC is streaming all 17 episodes of The Prisoner at http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video
I disagree with that article...home ownership is something everyone should strive for. The home equity line is a huge security blanket for living in today's economy. Thats an additional $100-200K line of credit that you'll always have access to.
Homeownership by itself is not useful, but it does promote saving. For the average family, a home is the most expensive thing they will ever save for. After 10 years in that mortgage, they'll have significant equity that they probably wouldn't have otherwise had.

Is it a risk and possibly a poor choice to own a house? Versus other investments, possibly. Versus consumption and other disposable income spending, absolutely not. There a lot of people that could do better if there were more knowledgeable about ways to save capital, but it the absence of the knowledge, owning a home is not a bad default.
we've all seen it coming a while ago
There's the story of the early xerography (xerox) process being sold to IBM - but they carefully assessed the need for it and declined:

Similar story, different area - Pixar was nearly sold to Microsoft even after Steve Jobs had signed the deal with Disney to produce Toy Story in 1991, as Jobs was worried about the companies finances.

Worked out well for him in the end.
There are some worthwhile ideas in this article, but I have a slightly different take on them.

The sentence near the end, "Trust is the new competitive advantage." is the main point. And he says small companies tend to have the advantage as far as trust goes. But, while that is generally true, it might be looked at as a challenge for large companies.

As I see it, large companies have two advantages: (1) they can take advantage of economies of scale, and (2) when they figure out how to do something right, they can apply their knowledge very widely.

For an example of #2, consider Joel Spolsky's statement about Big Macs: "The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way." If someone is in an unfamiliar area, other restaurants may offer the possibility of better food, but McDonald's has them beat on trust: when you go to McDonald's, you know exactly what you are going to get.

So, rather than say that trust being an advantage, means that small companies are going to win, we might say that, in order to be competitive in this economy, large companies need to figure out trust.

And, for better or worse, the ones that do figure it out, might very well beat the small companies hands down.
FTC To Require Advertisers Using Testimonials To Show Typical Results
Madrid, Spain.
I've always rented.

While I've "tossed my money down the drain", I've been able to live on the coast, in a mountain town (wanted to learn snowboarding) and in Amsterdam, to name 3 places.

Is having the unique experiences worth it? To me, they were.
I like the O'Reilly book, Learning the Bash Shell:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009656/

I keep it on hand as a reference for shell scripting, since it's both thorough and fairly portable.
'Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests': Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity
Ask HN: Why is there a 'Zoom' feature in Flash?
Right Click (in Windows) -> Zoom In, Zoom Out, etc.

Does anyone use it? Why is it there?
> You could create new planets, replicas of anything, etc.

On which of those planets is Jessica Alba going to get me a mojito?
Is The iPhone A Bigger Game Changer Than The Wii?
There are lots of conflicts over water, and sometimes violence. Mexico and the US fought over the Rio Grande for 70-odd years.

I think we don't fight full-scale wars because rivers are hundreds of miles long. You can't defend a river like you would an oil field. It forces people to get along.
I'd view the conditional view processing as complimentary to the cache engine; you can't have too many layers of caching really. Also, conditional view processing can save bandwidth since unmodified responses don't need a body. Bandwidth is a lot cheaper now than just a few years ago, but for some folks this is still a bug deal.

Also, one important "feature" you get for free when using conditional view rendering is that upstream caches -- Varnish, Squid, etc. -- will perform better as well.

So really this new feature is about improving how well Django speaks HTTP, not caching per-se.
Lets Go Deep - Meet The A List In The 2009 All American Home Run Derby
Wolfram Alpha: Next Web Search
> Thats an additional $100-200K line of credit that you'll always have access to.

Most people don't have $100k in equity these days.
We might, but it'd be short-lived. The gating factor to desalination is the cost of energy. Massive conflict or war by decently-wealthy actors will spur development of more efficient desalination techniques as the money invested and the money to be made from such an innovation would be insane. (Desalination plant or tens of thousands of troops? Easy call.)
how long has this thing been around?
http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

looks like you can search for faces and line art as well
What Perl version on what OS?
As "help wanted" ads go, that one is pretty good.
China's central bank calls for new reserve currency
Many years ago a friend of mine worked at Tandem. He said that hospitals bought Tandem machines for their financial systems, not their health care systems.
I couple hundred grand in insured CDs would be a much better security blanket.
http://images.google.com/images?imgcolor=red&hl=en&s...

A search for "White Shirt" with imgcolor=red

Fun results
I'm glad the article points out the cruel government incentive to buy rather than rent. It's one of the few regressive taxes (other than the lottery, some might say) that we have in the US.
How does this address the problems raised in the article?
"Others favor greater security for renters - such as laws making eviction more difficult"

This is nothing more than a government-mandated insurance policy. Landlords require higher margins due to the risk of freeloaders. Also, landlords may avoid renting to those most likely to be "helped" by such policies.

It is ironic that today's laws make home ownership a safer choice if one defaults on payments -- In most states, foreclosure takes much longer than eviction. So, given the choice between renting and taking on an interest-only, no money down home loan, the less risky choice for a family is ownership. Of course, those families couldn't get such a loan today.
Drugs are sooo marketed.

Celebrities use drugs. Drugs are used in "cool" movies. You are even informed of the euphoric feeling drugs give you in elementary school.

The fact that "cool" kids in high school end up experimenting with drugs first is a form of marketing (even if it is organic.)

I have three words for your stupid "bridge" argument:

BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge)
This is the first time I've ever heard a Chinese official this high up call for replacing the dollar. Can anyone else think of any other examples? If this is really a new development, then it's very significant news.
It seems like you are not arguing against circular navigation in general, but specifically the navigation on songza.

Your problem with the unpredictability of the menus in the songza-style navigation could very easily be fixed by simply adding an arrow to each item that contains a submenu, just like the typical context menu.

An arrow could be added on the tip of each leaf of the songza navigation circle that uses has a submenu. The arrow would visually indicate that a menu will pop out if the mouse hovers over leaves with these arrows. This would function exactly as the arrows on the typical context menu.
So now microsoft controls facebook, digg and twitter's ads?
Homeownership by itself is not useful, but it does promote saving. For the average family, a home is the most expensive thing they will ever save for. After 10 years in that mortgage, they'll have significant equity that they probably wouldn't have otherwise had

Does it? This presumes that for those entire 10 years, the family never refinanced the house, and never used that refinancing to pull equity out. I don't have any statistics in front of me, but given as big a market as there was for refinance deals, I imagine the number of homes being cash-out refinanced was nowhere near negligible. I can imagine the temptation was quite large for anyone not independently wealthy, but wanting to live the good life anyway.

Does anyone have a source for numbers of homes refinanced out of all possible homes in the past 10 years? Even more interesting to me would be statistics on the amount that tended to be cashed out in said transactions.
persistence was definitely a problem that we have over come with some tricks.

I would definitely hold off for the next version until persistent storage is resolved.
In pursuit of my hobby of photographing abandoned buildings, I drive through the parts of Cleveland recognized Nationally as the "epicenter of the foreclosure crisis." On almost every block in the ghetto is a home with part of the roof covered by a blue plastic tarp. The owner doesn't have the money to repair the roof (or doesn't believe doing so to be a good investment?). There is much other evidence of short-term choice rather than long-term economically optimal decision-making when it comes to property upkeep. Perhaps, if these homes were owned by professional landlords, repairs would be made.
Tim Bray on the Future of the Web
"In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies."

Monetary policy is definitely not my forte, but why not use the Euro instead of the U.S. Dollar then? The Euro is not connected to any individual nation, after all. Creating a new currency takes such a long time that I wonder whether it would be practical.
Wow. As an iPhone developer I would like to say that this is huge and I am looking forward to integrating some of these classes into my projects.

Of particular note is TTPhotoViewController which emulates Apple's photo viewer, and which consequently is not available to developers via the SDK. This will save a lot of time.

I am not sure how useful the others are. For instance SDK 3.0 includes a new messaging UI similar to what TTMessageController is trying to achieve.

Also TTNavigationCenter seems a bit iffy. Using URLs to manage instances of UINavigationControllers. The iPhone is a different paradigm than the web so I'm not sure how effective mapping the web's main navigational structure to a less dynamic environment will fare.

Still, I am very excited about TTPhotoViewController. Thanks Joe!
That was a great quote. I guess no matter how much you know about the latest and greatest paradigms involved in the art of software. You can never truly become "perfect" if it does not become a part of yourself. And to extend that you can never truly become "perfect" if your description of software is not art, but work. When I think about it, it only shows how far I have to go to reach that kind of Zen like state.
Don't forget cigarette & alcohol taxes
I am a Montreal hacker/entrepreneur and I can honestly say that Montreal has an incredibly tight-knit startup community. I'm in the valley this week so won't be able to miss it, but come out if you are in the city.
I don't have experience in this, but there are some actual numbers in this article:

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comm...

Good Luck !
I was going to comment about how TTMessageController is different from Apple's, and then I remembered the NDA that prohibits me from making such a comparison. Let me just say that TTMessageController is completely generic and customizable and not tied to any particular messaging protocols.
Google deal machine adjusts to slow times
My guess is that it dates back to the Shockwave days when:
1) Flash was used solely for static & animated vector graphics, and
2) Browsers didn't have the zooming features they do now

We take Cmd+/Cmd- (and whatever the Windows bindings are) for granted nowadays. Browsers didn't always have the ability to scale things up and down for us, so it was a nice feature back then.
Coming from China, I think it is absolutely fair that they have to deal with the dollar as the reserve currency because we had to put up with the decade of bullshit from them pegging their yuan to the US dollar.

The major reason they're holding an excess of US assets is because they decided for 10+ years to ensure that it was artificially cheap for anyone in the US to import from China. We complained to hell about fair trade and threatened import taxes, but we let it slide mostly in the name of diplomacy and cheap consumption.

Well now China gets to reap the consequences of that decision and I have not a single ounce of remorse for them.

Great article from back in '03 when this was still an issue:
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js774.htm
Yes, and it allows fine grained control of the conditional view logic within the view as opposed to the generic and coarse default etags/if modified since handling.

Another instance of Django making the simple, simple and the difficult possible.
On my non-technical site, I got about 1 add in the last 100,000 page views. Its mostly a waste of screen space and user attention.

However, when I publish pillar reference content aimed at geeks, the simple Delicious button which shows number of people who already added it performs VERY well for me. (Incidentally: that social proof is totally missing with ShareThis/AddThis/etc. I wish they would incorporate it.)

Delicious also generates long term traffic, whereas most of the other social sites do not.
17" MacBook Pro = A Car in India
On a related note, has anyone found the different quality settings for a flash app to have any effect? I used to browse the web on an ancient G4 powerbook that would choke under most flash apps and movies, and lowering back the quality never had any impact for me.
Good point. When Cleveland levied a new sin tax to finance its stadium, the local labor unions opposed it citing the unfair burden such taxes place on their members!
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/26/opinion/edchellany.ph...