skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, VAT, how I hate you so! You'd think if the tax authorities were going to saddle us all with worrying about other countries' VAT rules, they could at least provide a list of the ISO country codes and applicable tax rates we need to charge in a format that could easily be imported into a database. Some sort of simple automatic notification system for when the rules change would be useful too. At least that way, every small business in the known universe wouldn't have to write the same bunch of SQL after looking up the same details when they eventually found the same web pages, and then worry forever afterwards that something had changed and they didn't know and would wind up inadvertently committing tax fraud or something.
There's plenty of comments that are enlightening... Is it possible that some of your own comments were a little too blunt or were taken the wrong way because of how they were phrased?

I'm disappointed though, I found myself disagreeing with you more than I agree, but you do have an interesting perspective on things. I'd just ignore those who are trolling you.
The best discussions and comments on HN are the ones based off technical and constructive submissions. The discussions and comments based off any submission that is someones opinion or is politically/culturally charged will be far less insightful and more about 'winning'.

As can be seen, most of the comments on this submission are now about discussing the age of the poster and how 17 is or is not a kid. Real enlightening stuff.
Man. I found an XSS bug in the University of Washington's web portal several years ago. It would allow a hacker to impersonate any user if they clicked on a crafted hyperlink.

After testing this on my own account, I reported it right away to the university. They thanked me and fixed the problem within days.

But after reading these horror stories, I feel extremely lucky that they didn't do something much stupider. My entire academic career could have been destroyed, as well as my professional one if they'd decided to press frivolous charges.
I've been getting "soons" since November.

I asked only a few days ago how soon is soon, to which no-one will actually answer. But the Stripe guy did say that he agreed that we shouldn't wait... go implement something else, and then they will help people move to them post-launch.

So don't not launch something in the UK because you're waiting for Stripe. Launch with GoCardless, launch with PayMill, hell... launch with PayPal if you have to.

Getting money through the door should be the only focus, not waiting for other people.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the correction :)
I've used the IcoMoon app at http://icomoon.io/ a few times to good effect.

It lets you pick exactly which icons you want, from a variety of sources, and combine them into a single font.
I appreciate the honesty and lack of 'spin'.

I was considering GoCardless but a survey of my customers stopped me.
From the article:

In Antarctica, too, there was a spike in levels of a form of beryllium - beryllium-10 - in the ice.

These isotopes are created when intense radiation hits the atoms in the upper atmosphere, suggesting that a blast of energy had once hit our planet from space.

Using tree rings and ice-core data, researchers were able to pinpoint that this would have occurred between the years AD 774 and AD 775, but the cause of the event was a puzzle.
I have to agree. Flag the article, but don't moan if it gets on the font page. It'll go soon enough.
Gawker’s Realtime Dashboard
I highly recommend (http://learnyouahaskell.com/)
Giving a Presentation From an Apple ][
AirBnB TechTalks
This is cool. However, in the spirit of contributing, comparing one byte at a time is not optimally efficient. It's possible to write clever optimizations by hand, but I'd be surprised if just using https://github.com/rbdixon/glibc/blob/master/string/memchr.c doesn't cause a meaningful speedup.
Why is Google Code still exposing people's email addresses publically?
They took away my Flag option when Steve Jobs died, after I flagged all but one Jobs-related posts on the front page.

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.
we're using them as well after having tried many of the other options. they are quite far ahead from other european cc payment providers like f.e. saferpay. and from experience, their support is way better when it comes to technical/api questions.
The problem is that the VAT you need to charge does not only depend on where you're located and where your business partner is located, but also on the goods/services provided and on wether the partner is a business or a person and maybe even the moon phase and the current water level of the north sea. You can't just create a lookup table, you have to implement the actual rules.
That's a good idea, but it's going to require a bit of thought to implement. It might make sense to have an "advanced examples" external page for every section in the tutorial, which would sort of transform the current tutorial into an annotated table of contents. Which could be really neat! But perhaps it should wait until Rust has some analogue to play.golang.org available.
This is a huge, folks. Please, sign.
> One option would be non-alias usernames. Youtube seems to think this is the answer to poor-quality comments there

YouTube also provides an excellent example of the total failure of the "real names improve comments".

I strongly agree with the rest of your comment. Some people are jerks. One technique that it useful to ignore jerks is to take just a few moments to help control the thoughts caused.

You sit with the unpleasant thoughts for a few moments. You work out what the "hot thought" is; you work out what the emotion is. You then work out what the evidence is for those, and how strongly you feel it. Then you think about the person making the comment, about why they might have made those comments (are they attacking you for a realistic reason, or are they just attacking a block of text on a screen, etc), you think about the good comments, and then you assess how strongly you still feel your hot thought and emotion. This process should be enough to interrupt the negative thoughts, which can sometimes churn and stay with people.
I think they still take a larger percentage though, so probably only worth accepting for higher-value transactions.
That's definitely true. Also, preventing diseases is much harder to monetize than treating them.

An unhealthy diet plays a large role in obesity and diabetes (the other one being a sedentary lifestyle). Research has unsurprisingly shown that if people know how to create food from scratch and care about a healthy diet, their risk to become obese reduces significantly.

My startup appetico tries to create cooking apps that are as engaging as Instagram, Pinterest, Angry Birds etc. because otherwise kids most likely won't start cooking for themselves.

That is a really tough story to sell to investors in itself. People won't go back 20, 30 years later and pay us because they realize that they are not obese because we got them into healthy cooking. It's easier (but still hard...) to sell that cookbook publishing is a $1bn industry that is still growing despite falling sales for books overall.

Shameless plug: We're looking for seed investors and basically everyone else who would like to tackle this problem with us. Shoot me a mail at whateverhuis at gmail dot com!
The "community" at HN is made up of those create thing, those who read articles and those who write comments. In fact it's a mix of the three.

Clearly he knows about HN. Possibly he was lurking. Maybe he's not sure or is not confident enough to comment often. What he has done is created an app and a few interesting blog posts. As far as I'm concerned, that is what HN is all about!
Where to Find High Quality Mobile Devices Wallpapers?
I used to work at Skytech. We already had a case of a student discovering a flaw in our code while I was there and things went very smoothly. We contacted the student, he told us what the flaw was, we corrected it. Edouard made him sign a non-disclosure agreement and made him delete all the data he had gotten from our servers and that was the end of it. This student was a brilliant student with excellent grades just like Hamed.

Now why is this story different this time? I'm not too sure since I've left a couple years ago, but my guess would be that the college administrators have taken this decision. Knowing Edouard Taza, I doubt he would have pushed for this student to be expelled, since he clearly has a great future in software and could be one day employed at Skytech to fix even more security holes.

Edit : hadn't finished reading the article, it seems the professors decided to kick the student out : "Following this meeting, the fifteen professors in the computer science department were asked to vote on whether to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz, and fourteen voted in favour." To me what this says is their computer science department is full of idiots. Any good CS professor would have understood that Hamed didn't have any malicious intent.
Ask HN: Moving to a city in Europe. Where should I go?
I am a MSc. CS and have lived in Madrid for one year. Now I am looking for a new opportunity within Europe and have looked at a few cities that are good startup-wise. You read a lot in the media and it's hard to get some unbiased feedback... so here goes.

I would like to move to either Berlin, Barcelona or London, but I have a few questions and I was wondering if there are some people on HN that have lived or currently live in one of these cities (or even better, have lived in two or more). I am currently freelancing/consulting in Ruby on Rails and might continue to do so. Another option is to get a startup job that allows me to learn more about scalability with a company that is seeing heavy growth. Any (general) advice is welcome.

1. How does Berlin, London and Barcelona compare ecosystem-wise? We're hearing a lot about Berlin and London lately, but not too much about Barcelona. Is it any good? I know Telefonica has an incubator (Wayra) in BCN, but is there a lot of other activity?

2. How much Spanish is required to do well in BCN? I have lived in Madrid for a year, so I can speak some Spanish, but prefer to communicate in English, at least professionally. If I go to meetups in BCN to network (for RoR gigs), will I have to speak Spanish or English? Same question for Berlin and German.

3. Rent is probably cheap(er) in Berlin/BCN. I heard it's pretty high in London. What can I expect in London? I would wanna share a flat with flatmates. How does London compare to Birmingham?

4. Should I look for a job, I know London and Berlin have a lot of startups and big co's. What about Barcelona? Could I apply for a startup that is seeing heavy growth and allows me to learn to build products on a decent scale?

5. Any other suggestions? :)

I hope some of you can help me make a decision. Thanks!
This explains /everrrything/ about hardware engineers :-)
I strongly prefer Amex because the consumer bonus is better for me at least and even more importantly it doesn't take me through the Verified by VISA liability shift/security nightmare.*

* Verified by VISA with my VISA card redirects to a third party domain (not the retailer or my bank) which then asks for DOB and very basic details to set a password (and little more is needed to reset the password). Even if fundamentally secure the user education message of this process is awful. I believe that some card providers make better use and of Verified by VISA mechanisms but not all.
This sucks, the GFW sucks, the government sucks!!
There is truth in this. Certainly shipping more is good. But the situation is somewhat analogous to the perennial debate about commenting code, with "talk" playing the comment role and "ship[ped code]" playing the code role, so that your "talk less ship more" position becomes analogous to the perennial "code should be self-documenting" position. There is truth in that: to an important extent, well-designed code can be "self documenting" and thus speak for itself. Analogously, to an important extent, shipping code can work so well that its demonstrated excellence tells you something about the techniques that it uses, and thus it speaks for itself. However, it's hard to use that kind of speaking-for-itself effect to communicate some abstract issues , such as the issue of why something was done that way. Text explaining "here's why such-and-such [inheritance/functional/macro/declarative/whatever] techniques are important here" can be hard to replace with "look at the code". This problem can be quite severe for languages with extremely unusual paradigms, like the Haskell or Prolog examples that people have mentioned.

Beyond that, many important issues only become significant in sizable programs, to the extent that they are imperceptible in examples less than a few pages. (This is not only an issue for language features: books like _Refactoring_ and _Large-Scale C++ Software Design_ are devoted to issues that become important with scale, and would probably be very hard to appreciate for someone who's never constructed or maintained a piece of software that required more than 5 hours of programmer time.) So if you get your mind around an entire application domain and a software system for it which is a good fit to an exotic programming language --- as, e.g., the HOL Light machine-checkable proof assistant seems to be a good fit to OCaml --- then you will very likely learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of the language and its paradigm. But some fraction of people, even perhaps some fraction of HN readers, will treat a software system like HOL Light as "tl;dr", so a 5-minute or 30-minute pitch on how the language fits the problem may be more effective in practice.
They have! Although it's not "tiny".

http://vim-adventures.com/
I'm in MA, and what really drives me crazy is that local TV news sources have basically made it sound like she's going to still try running for MA Governor. Essentially, she's using her public statement to sugar coat and bury the story amongst folks that aren't familiar with Aaron.
They're absolute masters of market research, delivery and execution. They don't rip off sites (i.e downloading the HTML and changing the logo) or anything unethical like that, they create real competitive businesses from scratch extremely fast without compromising the quality.

Ideas aren't worth that much (the majority of their businesses are actually "old" ideas like ecommerce), execution and speed is what matters. They're brilliant at it and deserve a ton of respect for it.

http://posts.richoakley.com/post/rocket-internet-respect
Using a declarative DSL designed for validation rules should make it much simpler, it would minimize the amount of writing the boilerplate stuff that comes with a general purpose language and would focus solely on the actual validation rules.

It could be used in the same way as templating for javascript is used, a script element with a custom type or validation-src attribute in the form or something.
This sort of response is precisely what the OP was alluding to. Try and read his post with a degree of rationality and a modicum of humility and then respond. You'll be amazed at how much better you and your point comes across.
From the time I got Dropbox, I stopped saving anything I cared about on my desktop, My Documents/Documents (OSX), or any other random place on my computer. (It would be nice, however, if Dropbox added some secure folders with encryption/password. But that's a whole other discussion....).
I'm curious to know whether other people also abandoned local storage in favor of the "Dropbox model" I am using.
That's really fairly disruptive. Don't do that. I'm not really surprised they did this.
Scanning is the second phase of the standard hacker attack procedure.
Phases of hacking:

Phase 1—Reconnaissance
Phase 2—Scanning
Phase 3—Gaining Access
Phase 4—Maintaining Access
Phase 5—Covering Tracks

Regarding this guy's intention, you're probably right. The main reason why I'm commenting here is that guys with good intentions don't get themselves in the trouble for not knowing what they're doing.

Finding vulnerabilities in software on your machine and hacking other people's systems are entirely different things. By testing software you're not violating anything (except maybe EULA for some licences). By hacking other people's systems, you're committing a crime.

> What do you think would Google do, if this student used scanner(or something else) on gmail and found bug and then told Google about it?
At first, they would treat it like an attack. Like almost any other company would do. I have no idea what would happen later.
Vote any third party. No third party, including libertarian, can win in the current environment. But it's still worth it as a "none of the above" vote. None of the above is probably the most important messages we can send, even better than not voting.

Even if you don't like the 3rd party on offer, vote for it. It won't win, and you've still taken a vote from the demreps.
The Internet of Things: Hardware with a Side of Software
Grand juries are secret and so is the indictment. In fact, you won't even know about the indictment until you've been arrested. So unless someone isn't doing their job you shouldn't be aware of an indictment agains Assange.
> This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed.

Perhaps my reading comprehension of the original post is different from Jacques' (or I'm just wrong), but I don't think that the original article made such a claim. Here's the TL;DR of the original article:

> TL;DR: Conventional wisdom is wrong. Nothing can beat highly micro-optimised C, but real everyday C code is not like that, and is often several times slower than the micro-optimised version would be. Meanwhile the high level of Haskell means that the compiler has lots of scope for doing micro-optimisation of its own. As a result it is quite common for everyday Haskell code to run faster than everyday C. Not always, of course, but enough to make the speed difference moot unless you actually plan on doing lots of micro-optimisation.

From this, I understood that in a larger program, most programmers wouldn't be doing the kind of micro-optimizations that they do for the Benchmarks Game. I figure that most code would be written following this pattern:

* Write code to follow the spec (usually without thinking too much about performance)

* Run the code, and evaluate its performance

* If the performance is good enough, you're done

* If the performance needs to be better, run a profiler

* Find the biggest bottleneck and optimize it

* Re-run the code and re-evaluate its performance

The original article took a micro-benchmark (a mistake in my opinion, because it's easy to micro-optimize every single detail of that code) and showed that in the case of Haskell, the first version was too slow, but that with the help of a profiler, finding the cause was easy, and the fix was trivial, while in C the profiler didn't show any problem with the code of the user, so it must be a problem in the standard library's code, and to fix it required changing the design of the program and making it more different than the spec. And I felt this was the author's real point; that to get the maximum performance from a C program, you'll need to code it not like a human would imagine it, but like a computer would, and it makes the code harder to maintain later on.
A mastercard debit card works much like a credit card. In germany for example, your standard "debit card" is your banks card and in online transactions, you just enter bank account and the banks identifier. It's a legacy way of paying that dates back to the eurocheques. It's comparable to the Card Bleue in France which is a system that exists pretty much in France only. This fragments the market.
I wonder if 4 comments to Godwin is a new record for Hacker News.
How to create image-less cross-browser CSS3 buttons
Only if "because I do it" is their one and only argument for "always do X". Which it rarely, if ever, is.
pcwalton's point is that you must be explicit about initializing variables:

int foo = 1;
int bar;
System.out.println(foo + bar); // compile error: variable bar might not have been initialized
They just have too many enemies and too scared.I wish github can be recovered,otherwise I have to cross the wall.
That's a pretty good page there, I find the text engaging and interesting. I especially like the 'Cheap Bastard Plan' page.

It just shows that you don't necessarily need pretty graphics and one-liners.
But someone born in ancient Rome could say the same thing about an era with the highest population.

But we now know there's more to mankind than Rome.
Indeed, Mega gets beaten on the team aspect, but I would use it for the capacity it offers. It would really help to have 2Tb off my PC, into the cloud.
How I taught myself Design and shipped an app in 12 weeks
Eh, once in a while it's nice to see them raise their quality of reporting.
I get exactly this vibe from a certain other language, but never Haskell.
As far as I know, it's much more like a tabloid than satire (I'm not British though).
1. Buy cheap space
2. Sell cheap space for profit
3. Use profit to buy more cheap space
4. Sell more cheap space for more profit
5. Buy even more cheap space
6. Rebrand it as "[Generic Buzz Word] Space!"
7. Sell for even more profit
8. Repeat until sued or retired.
Some people burn on the outside just enough to keep those around them warm. Some burn deep on the inside to heat the boilers that turn the turbines in their minds that move the world.
That's exactly what I did, I launched in December with PayPal. Moving to Stripe as soon as they launch, although I am now tempted to keep PayPal as a payment option for people who feel more comfortable using it. I will be an interesting experiment to see if anyone would still use it.
Did you test any of this, or is that just your gut speaking?

Some people have funny ideas about how DD works, not realizing it's extremely consumer friendly and much smaller fees than credit cards.

I was thinking of offering both as my brief play with GoCardless was very easy to implement.
Indeed, she's doing it because it impresses her bosses and colleagues. Unfortunately it seems to impress voters too.
You can't really answer those questions for Wikileaks, so why even pretend you can.
> ADHD is kind of interesting because I think it's significantly under- and over-diagnosed.

I thought this was one of the better comments regarding the diagnosis of A.D.D.

Why? I was diagnosed late, so I was missed – and yet, I cannot ignore the obvious over-diagnosis of A.D.D. It seems if you're hyper, you have attention deficits. For me, I was never hyper so I completely missed the radar. That's also why I feel that there is an over-diagnosis – and why people feel that it isn't a legitimate diagnosis.

I was diagnosed with a less-noticed blend of A.D.D., more commonly known as ADHD-PI or "predominately inattentive". I actually could sit still, I didn't move around all the time. But the slight movement of a foot in a classroom would completely take me away from any focus. Most people can say that they have those experiences, but these people can also get into extreme focus later on for other things they actually love to do. That's the marker, for me, as a diagnosis.
The Happy Hacking Keyboard has a similar layout, with Esc in the upper-left where it belongs, Ctrl in the middle-left where it belongs, and tilde in top-right where it belongs. :)