skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I usually suggest python to people who do not have a primary role as a programmer. Most recently it's been some GIS folks who just need some basic programming now and then.

That being said, I'll probably get my kids going on Python or JavaScript first, even though I started with Basic, Pascal, Fortran and C (can't really remember which came first, probably basic).
Once you've launched with another service, you've already done the integration work, and Stripe's main value proposition seems to be its simple sign-up and integration process.

Once you've launched with another service, you may well be tied to them anyway, if they lock in your subscribers' card data. At best, you're running multiple services in parallel until all your early subscribers quit, or you're asking everyone to resubscribe and surely losing a significant number of people during that process.

And once you've launched with another service, you've permanently accepted their legal terms, which may or may not be a smart thing to do with some of the things these guys hide away in their contracts.

I certainly wouldn't wait for a company that says "soon" forever, but it's also not as simple as just signing up for any alternative you can find and hoping you'll move later. Of course you want to start bringing the money in, but as the saying goes, if you get into bed with the wrong partner for a night, the consequences can still last a lifetime.
Some Eyeballs Are More Equal Than Others
Vinetrade has the kind of business model that scares banks and card payment providers. We trade high value goods (prices in the region of £1.5-20k) that are rarely delivered to the buyer (they're stored in remote warehouses).

I love virtually all startups and wish for their success. That said: I'm thinking that when every bank in Creation was saying "We won't take CC payments for that. No, no, you simply can't convince us that is a good idea." they were actually being appropriately conservative about legitimate operation risks uniquely incurred by this business model.

If you don't have a Fraud Guy, I respectfully suggest either hiring or training a Fraud Guy very, very soon, preferably before enabling any form of credit card payment. Your Fraud Guy is going to have some recommendations, including recommendations which meaningfully interfere with the product team's ability to meet user demands. If you do not listen to your Fraud Guy's recommendations (or, regrettably, even if you do), you may eventually get an expensive lesson in why both BigCo and startups in related fields eventually have to hire a/several/an entire department of Fraud Guys.

One of your Fraud Guy's first questions is going to be "Is there any pathway by which I can take a credit card and turn it into cash using this service? If so, what is the timeline on that?" I am not a Fraud Guy, but I count two ways to cash out credit cards, just reading the website FAQs. If you are discovered by the adversaries to be the weakest link in the UK financial system with regards to cash outs, you can expect heavy, dedicated adversarial interest.
As far as I understand it, you can check and are expected to observe and note anything odd about transactions with supplied VAT numbers but AFAIK - and I'm not a lawyer! - there's no law that you must check every one. (Note: This may be a UK specific interpretation.)

However, if they turn out to be false and the tax man comes back to you, you could be liable for the VAT. Depending on your sales profile, you might consider this an acceptable risk - I certainly do (I get perhaps 10 transactions like that each year).
This is what I'm currently planning on doing for handling monthly (possibly annual) subscriptions.

Do you handle subscriptions and if so do you have any plans for handling moving the subscriptions from PayPal to Stripe?

If I were just to be handling one-off payments I'd not particularly care who I chose to go with (within reason). With subscriptions this gets, I believe, a bit trickier.
Also, surgeons need to be able to cut people open without freaking out, possibly even enjoying it.
Scala LiftWeb: Upload File using AJAX
I tried using Google Checkout early in my business and it had a fatal flaw of not letting me sell things in US dollars and British pounds but only British pounds. Since 90% of my business is in the US, it was a non-starter. I have to wonder if they've improved it since, though.
If you don't want to play the "I'm only 17 years old" card, how come your main blog landing page says so very clearly =), just kidding, I oddly agree with your point. You can get some good feedback by posting on HN, but there will be the occasional troll that might ruin your day. Give it some time and you'll build up a thicker skin and learn to let them go.
I've found some pretty amazing templates/themes while doing iOS development. Between that and emulating apps I like, I do OK.
Although it'd be hard to ever answer this definitively, I've personally had this happen due to overly aggressive fraud detection systems.

In my case, my cable modem was assigned an IP address from a "new" pool which had not been picked up by geolocation companies (MaxMind) and as such, my order was scored very high and automatically canceled.

Again, the only reason I have this knowledge was because someone working at United was friendly and upfront enough to let me know what the issues were, so in your case if you didn't get any information, it'd be hard to determine.
Build Entrepreneur Credentials Early and Wisely
Virtually every attempt at email address validation is overly strict, because the relevant RFC standards are vastly more liberal than people realise. Non-ascii characters above U+007F are valid since RFC 6530. An IP address in the domain part is valid. An @ in the name part is valid if it's escaped.

"異常.(),:;<>[]\".ຜິດປົກກະຕິ.\"அசாதரண@\\ \"অস্বাভাবিক\".არაჩ"@[IPv6:3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf] is a perfectly valid email address.
I still can't wrap my head around this. The CFO damn well understands finance. The COO understands operations. Why aren CIOs held to the same standard?
They were quite prominent in the Rails community early on (37signals use(d) them, as did several other well known Rails-based sites). They also used to reach out to Rails-based sites in particular but are now more general.
From the article at the bottom of the Wiki:

When the scientists checked the carbon-14 levels in the cedar tree rings, though, they noticed something strange: a spike in carbon-14 corresponding to the years 774 and 775 AD. It's normal for carbon-14 concentrations to vary a little bit from year to year, but the normal variation is just five-hundredths of a percent. During 774 and 775, the levels jumped by more than 1 percent -- a dramatic leap.

What kind of event would have showered Earth in the kind of radiation necessary to make so much carbon-14? Could a supernova do it? Supernovas do sizzle with gamma rays, which can produce carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Yet even the supernovas that happened in 1006 and 1054 AD -- which, unlike the 774 event, were dramatic enough to catch the eyes of ancient astronomers -- weren't big enough to leave a carbon-14 fingerprint in tree rings. If it was a supernova, it would have to be a strange one: the Invisible Man of supernovas, incredibly powerful yet unseen.

Indeed, astronomers can still see remnants of the 1006 and 1054 supernovas today. If a bright supernova occurred in 774, we should see a correspondingly glaring source of X-rays and radio waves somewhere nearby -- but we don't.

Could our own sun be the culprit? Solar flares douse the atmosphere in high-energy protons, which can also produce carbon-14. But a solar flare capable of making enough carbon-14 to explain the tree rings would be bigger than any solar flare ever recorded, say the scientists.

Though it is not beyond the imagination that our sun could have belched out such a "super flare," someone on Earth would surely have noticed and made a record of the resulting auroras, which would be unlike anything ever seen before. And if the auroras weren't worth writing home about, surely the mass extinction would be, as it's likely that the flare would destroy the Earth's protective ozone layer.

Not everyone is convinced that we should rule out the solar flare option, though. Maybe conditions were just right for a ho-hum flare to create a surge of extremely high energy protons. Or maybe, instead of just one flare, the sun let loose a series of smaller ones over a period of years.

Whatever happened, there are hints that it was a global phenomenon, not a local one. Carbon-14 levels in trees from North America and Europe were elevated around that time, too. All the way in Antarctica, layers of snow and ice were laced with traces of another isotope made by cosmic rays, beryllium-10. Though it's difficult to put a precise date on the sudden peak in beryllium-10, it seems to have occurred around the same time as the carbon-14 spike.
Did you also make "Save The Cubes"? I've been enjoying that since finding it in the "other apps by this developer" section. Really imaginative premise, like the style too.
"Social Science" at its best.
Too cold ?
Almost everywhere I go here in the UK accepts it (petrol station, supermarket, etc.) It tends to be small merchants who don't (local takeaways, particularly.)
I might be wrong, but I don't think that can work if you want to accept credit cards directly in order to keep customers on your site for the whole checkout process.

These type of solution also rarely let you set up recurring payments.
Developer Education vs The Real World
UX Design Guidelines
It's blocked in my Beijing apartment.
Steve: do you still work for Bytemark?

If so, tell them to hurry up and let us sign up for bigv.io :-)
I'm having a hard time determining what's different in what you said from what the article said? Not trying to snark; I'm genuinely curious.

> The NES contains a Ricoh 2A03 CPU, virtually identical to the MOS 6502 CPU used in Commodore 64, but includes an on chip APU (Audio Processing Unit), while removing some CPU features such as Binary Coded Decimal arithmetic, supposedly to avoid paying patent royalties. Side by side to the CPU is a PPU (Picture Processing Unit), which is responsible for generating a 256x240 sized image.
The Mysterious Art Of Triangulation
Galleria JavaScript image gallery framework
The comments on HN are still better than most on Reddit.

Generally, but certain sub-Reddits have high quality discussions (/r/linguistics being one of my favorites).
From my experience, at least of the NHS, people in the job of caring for people don't care about people...
That is probably just their excuse. I think it's quite reasonable to check if someone fixes a security flaw that puts your own information to the risk. It's like trying to open (without the key) the safe at the bank that has your money in it.
If you're a web/mobile developer, why not just learn design principles and directly code?
Assuming consumers lead to your revenue, you should be serving them, not telling them they're not supported. But I realize that's an unpopular opinion here.

The whole "standards compliant" is now just something Web devs tell each other. Browser vendor prefix usage is at an all-time high. Devs are routinely targeting features added by browsers from draft specifications (because that never turns out to be bad). And "standards compliant" seems to always mean the latest standard, which naturally precludes any device that predates that portion of the standard. CSS 1, 2, and 2.1 are all standards too.

Oh, and my question about the consumer is given the choice between having no access at all or geolocation and drop shadows, I'm guessing almost all would rather just be able to access the site. I can't see much coming out of all this browser innovation that normal people care about or would ever ask for.
I'm thinking of using PayPal, but only for a one-off 1-year (or N-years) subscription payment, so there's no legacy to deal with once Stripe arrives, and a simpler integration. At the cost of losing some of those early subscribers later on.
Calling OpenSSL libcrypto functions from Go
Interesting to hear that Amazon Payments is available in the UK now, but they still seem to be physical products only, no digital downloads, services, etc. so that limits their usefulness.

FWIW, we looked into Google Checkout/Wallet but the unclear branding and some tight rules about how you had to present the option on your web site put us off before we got very far.
I hate desktop clutter. This article did not sway me.

I don't use icons on the desktop, ever. I do, however, save a lot of files there - inevitably a lot of stuff ends up there because of application defaults and/or my own laziness and lack of discipline. Sometimes I can't think of a better place to put something and the Desktop folder is so ubiquitous and convenient in file choosers and whatnot.

I've gone to the other extreme. On the Mac, you can completely disable desktop icons with this default:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

Now my Desktop is just the background for my windows and nothing more. On the rare occasions I do catch a glimpse of it, I can see my lovely unobstructed wallpaper instead of hundreds of unused icons.
That's not holier-than-thou at all.
Testing & Diagnosing a Text Classification Algorithm
You can find previous discussions about it here :
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053370
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5082923
Malicious definition: "motivated by wrongful, vicious, or mischievous purposes", so it doesn't look that what he did was malicious. Also, unlawful? please quote the Canadian law that he broke, even in the US IANAL but the law mentions a vague "unauthorized access", has anyone ever been charged or convicted for running a vulnerability scanner like Nessus?

Not that I disagree with you: always ask for permission in writing from an authorized person before performing any kind of scan or security testing.
Damn, you beat me to it. I think you did a better job explaining than I would have, too. An upvote for you, sir!

For any skeptics or laymen who might have been lost at 'electromagnetic wavefront', or who are wondering why electrons would seem to move so slowly when we think of electricity (and even free electrons) as moving so fast, the analogy of the broomstick really does not do it justice, since you can't see the broomstick oscillating very quickly as you might have guessed the electrons must really do to satisfy Heisenberg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_in_a_box

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=121456

The keyword is "electron drift velocity"

The important concept to understand is that information does not move trapped inside of individual electrons, and thus is not at all limited by electron drift velocity.
They were professionally embarrassed. Hence the agressive stance towards him.
Well good for you, im happy you could launch an app.

Is it a particularly hard thing to do? Is it news-worthy? I really don't think so.

Good luck with your future work.
This is pretty impressive. Do you mind posting a few links to learning resources as well?
Bullshit, if anything it should be the opposite, a surgeon that tends to get too emmotionally attached to their patients won't last long.
My rule of thumb, is not to bother contacting another .edu unless I know someone there. It isn't worth the pain and possible career problems.
Hi, nice job.

A few unsolicited code tips that seem to come up often if I may:

- `if <somestuff>: return True; else: return False` is always best spelled `return <somestuff>`

- You only need the global statement when you want to assign to a global, not access one

- `foo = d["bla"] if "bla" in d else None` is just `foo = d.get("bla")`

- You have mutable default args. They probably are not what you want. See http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/writing/gotchas/#muta... for e.g. for an explanation.

- Lots of your dicts with enumerates to set indices should just probably be lists

If I get a chance later I'll try to throw together a quick pull request, but otherwise, thanks for sharing.
Dotcom’s Mega: Anti-Piracy Group Moves To Cut Off Site’s Finances
Learning to program in 2013
> While his intentions were good, I think it was a bit
> naive of him to take upon himself the responsibility to
> make sure the flaws were fixed and conduct a test.

Given that his own personal information could have been exposed by this exploit, it's just as likely that he was acting out of self-preservation rather than merely due to feelings of personal responsibility. The only naive bit here is that he obliterated his plausible deniability via 1) not allowing more time between submitting the report and attempting the scan, and 2) not masking his IP behind seven proxies.
The title should be "EXE Icon Extraction with icotool and wrestool".
This is what I do now. I used to go the full Photoshop mockup route, but now I find it more efficient to just start coding.
the problem with some parts of the article is that in the hard high level contaminated parts we have small animal populations and in the exclusion zone parts not highly contaminated we increasing animal populations coming form other areas. Without some way methodology to weigh or readjust the numbers with new weights any study will generate error prone conclusions.

Not only that but when an animal has a shorter life-span due to radiation where do the effects show up? Its not showing in the population increase as the dying happens after the animal has given its maximum number of offspring as the study is studying long-term radiation effects from long-term radiation.
Plain english explanation of mark & sweep, ref counting, and GC algorithms
There are a couple of different ways to go that I considered:

Reinstate the use of memcached, at the object-level. Rather than storing things on the localhost each server would talk to the central memcache instance. That would avoid each of the webservers from having a local, and potentially stale, cache.

The other way to go would be more fine-grained caching with varnish. Right now we cache in-RAM as much as possible, and on any event which can change the state of the site (new comment posted, new article posted, etc) we throw away the _whole_ cache. That's quite a heavyweight solution, but it was fast to implement and is provable to never leave stale content around.

(I once setup a site for a friend where we did the same thing; the whole site was cached, and the cache was blown away every time a POST request came in. That worked perfectly, and inspired me.)

Using the varnish PURGE requests though we could uncache only the things that have changed. The reason why I didn't go down that road is because there are non-obvious dependencies. For example if there is a poll vote the front-page must be thrown away, because it has a running total of the votes applied. Keeping track of all the things that should be expired on a single event would be a headache.
How converting the project start-up into a product business
I would say that an even larger part of the HN community is lurkers. Those that read the articles, comments and upvote, but don't actively participate in discussions.

I've been lurking on HN for 4+ years, and I rarely ever contributed comments, mostly just read articles and read the comments to see others opinions.

Don't think this is true? Take a look at how many comments are left on articles on the front page, then if you were lucky enough to reach the front page of HN, take a look at your analytics software. You'll see something like 20k visits in a short period of time, there's no where near that number of comments. Most people passively participate in this community.
Blur effect in iOS applications. How to & performance test.
OK, so you are talking about a different kind of debit card of which I have no knowledge. Romania was late in this world of online transactions and credit cards so we must have skipped this legacy somehow.

I also don't understand why VAT isn't the same everywhere in EU. So yeah, Europe is a mess.
There are some articles which you don't find interesting. One option is to flag those articles. You've lost your ability to flag.

Why do you think that commenting on these articles, especially with strongly negative content free sentences, is the right thing to do?

> I really don't like navel gazing posts. "How much traffic I got from HN", "What I learned from being on the front page", "How I was brewing my coffee when I hit the front page", etc. This is self-centric bullshit that may with some effort be turned into an interesting discussion, but it is not inherently interesting, leave alone being notable. It's neither N nor is it H.

The fact that those posts are so common, and voted up, seem to imply that for many people they are inherently interesting.

But let's assume that you're correct. Your options are to flag, to ignore, to add to the signal, or to add to the noise. You chose to add to the noise! That feels really sub-optimal to me.
Startup Assistwindow wants to be the Quora for Enterprises
Previous discussion with 174 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5084171
I am unable to understand your question, In the presentation I have just outlined how I learnt Photoshop to design elements in our mobile app.
CEGEP teachers don't do any research and aren't really considered academics. The hiring requirement for Dawson is a Master's in CS + 2 years experience, and that requirement can be waived down to a college diploma (DEC, that's less than a bachelor's) if one has enough industry experience to justify it.
Yes I do, and if you'd like to be invited please do drop a mail to the support address.
This is hacker news. His example is the embodiment of the hacker mentality - learn the skills necessary to overcome an obstacle with as little time and money spent as possible.

As someone who's a novice programmer, I'm impressed. I'd also like to learn the fundamentals of design.
> In any case, if the tax authorities who are experts on the rules can't find a way to codify and explain them to small businesses, surely it's self-evident that the rules are too complicated for non-expert small businesses to work with and should be replaced with something fit for purpose?

Full ack. Still, that's the current state. To make matters worse, those rules are subject to change and open to interpretation.

Example:

We just did an ElasticSearch training for a members of a german company that sits in Hamburg. However, the contract was via an austrian consulting company and we were just the subcontractors. Now, the question of wether we have to pay vat or not hinges around the question of that austrian company does have a german branch office or not. The first thing our tax accountant did was grab the folder with tax laws and read up on what could possibly declared as a "branch office". Is a permanent representative enough or not? Go, codify that.
For the tl;dr people:

On the nginx side, author discusses tweaking sysctl.conf, cutting down the number of sockets stuck in TIME_WAIT, some other tweaks for performance resulting in a 90% reduction in occupied sockets. On the node.js side, author uses the cluster module to fully utilize available CPU cores, arriving at N-1 for the magic number of node processes to spawn, where N is the # of CPU cores.

Definitely suggested reading for anyone running Nginx + Node.js
Not sure about the world, but the smartest people in Denmark are likely working within the Novo Nordisk domicile, trying to work on better ways to manage diabetes with second-by-second efficiency.

They don't post a lot here, because honestly, this site has few stories that matches their interests.

It is rather arrogant to believe that the greatest minds of our generation are to be found in our field, and not e.g. in biomedicine and other fields more relevant for diabetes treatment.
I know. That's why I asked for a link. Either this is news or it is unsubstantiated, it would be nice to know which.
One Question:
What robots.txt do you have to obey?
http://app.imdb.com/robots.txt
or
http://www.imdb.com/robots.txt?

The second one is rather restrictive (and the first one does not exist...)