skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why the startup world needs a "Vendor API"
You see a lot of startups today, most in the tech space or 'business to consumer' markets. Many are creating a new service to disrupt something that is simply disorganized or out of reach to a certain market, like über, or BlackJets. The power of these businesses is that they handle transactions directly through the consumer on the credit card. Generally, they charge and track just 1 or 2 values, that is, "what the end user paid", and "what they owe the cab driver", pilot, pedicab driver, or other vendor.

For those of you in B2B startups, you may already know this, but for those still in B2C, I'll fill you in:

Handling vendor invoices can be a real pain, especially if you are trying to disrupt a truly rusting industry. My vendors still send paper invoices via mail, or, at best, PDF invoices via email.

However, vendor pricing data must be accurate in my systems, and the existing services are not perfect for a startup's needs. ACH can be a big risk to your cash flow, and credit cards, as Square is showing, have their inherent drawbacks. Also, OCR just isn't there yet, unless you have a form-style piece of paper, like a personal check.

So where does that leave startups like us, who are tracking more than just the 'Total Amount Paid' field, who want to digitize -everything- in their vendor payments for analysis?

My company is an information service for company's and their dumpsters. The product/pricing book for dumpsters is anything but simple. Every location has a different sized can, with various fuel surcharges, environmental fees, local government taxes, frequency of pickups, and so on. I want to track all of this, and so far, I've had to employ interns to do the data entry for us. And worst of all? There are millions of permutations of waste invoices. If I went with OCR, I'd really just be trading man-hours entering data for man-hours managing invoice templates.

ACH, as I said earlier, is a big risk because its -instant- ... Why do you think credit cards are so much more popular than debit cards? And even if I did ACH, I paid full price, before the full net-pay duration, and still lost out on the data.

'What about ERP Systems?!' - well thats an option, but they are massively 'clunky', and barely automate anything anyway - I'd still have to get a direct tap into my vendor's databases/ERP systems... Sounds like $ millions $ to me.

So I'm left with this question:

Why isn't there a universal API, or something similar, that companies like my own can tap into, and automagically track dozens of fields per invoice record? Get every vendor-type company to push data into the system, and BOOM - we've got an exchange.

If anyone wants to create that, you have my seed backing. Alternatively, if my Google skills just aren't as good as someone else's, and there is a better system than exists from what I mentioned above, please, please fill me in. Hoarding knowledge isn't cool, didn't philosophy teach you?!
This should rather be titled "How to make an application running in a vm look native on Ubuntu". The "seamless mode" was meant for just that.
did you ever use maemo? nokia may have mishandled it into an early death, but from a developer perspective that thing was gorgeous. i was very excited about it for a while (and correspondingly disappointed later, of course, but what can you do).
Where you can find work in 2013
Surely you can put a maximum on whatever you might be accidentally transmitting. Those GPIO pins are 3V, and you are not going to get many amps through that board.

How many "couple of watts" are we talking about? I don't see this being capable of more than single digits.
Yes and yes, but it depends on your web server.

For example, while this API allows you to implement the WebSocket protocol, Nginx's input buffering will interfere with it.
I just believe any given individual is less likely to be right that the market, as an emanation of the will of many many people (at least on a statistical basis)

Markets only know what everyone knows. They are vulnerable to imperfect information, yes, and also mass delusions and hysterias of every sort.
At first, I didn't deal with it very well because I didn't realize what was happening. I thought I had gone crazy, or was in the process of going crazy. Back then, the Internet wasn't as helpful as it is today (or harmful, depending upon how you want to look at it), or I would have Googled it; but I had heard about panic attacks through film and TV (The Sopranos, for example) and I eventually dragged myself into a bookstore to browse the self-help section (something the "before" me never would have done), and there I stumbled across books about anxiety disorders. After a few months of suffering, this was enough to motivate me to see a doctor. Of course, the doctor was familiar with anxiety, and suggested that I see a psychiatrist. This totally blew my mind. A psychiatrist? I was "normal" just a few months before. I had never even considered seeing a psychiatrist for any reason, so I brushed it off, thinking that I just needed to get it under control by myself.

So I spent the next year reading about anxiety, going through workbooks, taking supplements (another thing I had never done before), and trying to "gain control." Turns out, trying to wrest control is a bad way to approach anxiety; it imposes impossible expectations upon yourself--"If only I were smarter and stronger I wouldn't have these panic attacks. I just need to get it together." This kind of thinking makes anxiety worse. And it got worse.

Eventually though, I was able to find a better approach that involved accepting anxiety as a part of my life. I was inspired by something I had read about Zen Buddhism, so I began trying to view my anxiety as an old friend, my old torturer, my own brand of human suffering. Believe it or not, this worked. I began to intentionally do things that made me anxious. Axiety is much less powerful once you acknowledge that its roots lie in the brain, in the evolutionary drive to protect oneself from danger, and you can't consciously control it. All you can do is acknowledge it and move on, or "Feel the fear and do it anyway." I forced myself to reengage in life. I never stayed home when feeling anxious (I found this was the worst possible thing I could do); I accepted invitations to parties, I traveled, I enrolled in college, I moved.

But I continued having recurring episodes of severe anxiety that would leave me crippled for weeks: I couldn't sleep, I could barely eat, I had difficulty doing simple things like grocery shopping. So, at the urging of my family, I saw a psychiatrist (who was not helpful at all, as all she wanted to do was find out whether someone had touched my peepee when I was a boy. Hint: no one had), a neurologist (who was very helpful and very knowledgeable about anxiety), and a new primary doctor. My doctors coordinated to find a suitable medication, an SSRI. With this, coupled with my learned coping skills, I eventually began to feel "normal" again. A few years later, after experiencing no severe anxiety, I dropped the medication and was able to move on with my life.
Care to do one for Arch Linux? I am currently learning Arch so I can make the switch and would really love it if you did an article on the subject. Thank you for your work by the way.
Thanks for the ebook, a little feedback in return:

After providing my email address for the ebook, I followed through and created a trial account for your site, and checked out the wireframing tool.

At first glance it looks nice, but I've been a happy subscriber to Balsamiq for over a year now and have no reason to leave at this point.

If there are any major advantages of UXPin over Balsamiq, it's not clear from a cursory look, which is all I have time for at the moment.

I'm also somewhat locked into Balsamiq, given that I have several ongoing projects there.

Hence, your 7-day trial probably won't be long enough to have any effect on people like me. Most likely I'll continue using Balsamiq for the foreseeable future, the trial will expire, and I'll forget about UXPin.

An alternative that might work better, would be to have a non-expiring free tier instead of the trial, with up to, say, 3 projects or something like that. Knowing that I can experiment with UXPin in my own time, when I'm ready (say the start of a new project which could be weeks or months away), and not lose my work, or not lose access to it in 7 days, would be more likely to tempt me to take the time to try it out, and ease into it if I find it better in ways worth making the transition for.

Hope that gives you a little insight into potential customers, good luck!
>Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query that exposes them in some way?

I doubt they'd have given a shit, let's be honest.
Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy
Every time? It's pretty clear people have their Facebook phasers set to annihilate, interpreting every action in the worst possible light. Every mistake Facebook makes is, when first reported, made to sound as terrible as possible.

To rephrase your question, how many times must a "not that bad" mistake be overhyped before people realize that reporters are trolling for hits?
FortyTwo is hiring Scala, Machine Learning and Backend Engineers
I'm not going to make that complaint, but as someone that has provided a lot of feedback and posted to the site on a daily basis for the past year and a half or so, the fact that they completely shut off access to our pages with only two other suggestions to bring our links over to (the third was Chrome's Bookmarks Bar) without any warning whatsoever really put me off.

Likewise, one of the services they suggested importing into was Kippt, but they had no idea Snip.it was going to be pushing their audience that way and have no way of importing their export files correctly (it imports as one big chunk of links instead of recalling my 10+ collections). Thankfully, I'm talking to one of the founders of Kippt right now to get it working right.

The other similar services listed on this page don't allow for importing, which -- as these services continue to come and go -- is the most important to me.
WP org bans Envato members from WordCamp gatherings
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072
I had the opposite feeling. Jobs was direct, concise and wrote in an unmistakable way. Colligan was writing "for the record" and used a lot of empty flowery language.
A lot of companies were in on this pact, and I think they should all be punished.

Steve was pretty consistent on this issue, he talked google and many other companies on this. This is what makes him "bad". He did it willfully and repeatedly.

I think what really irks me about the whole case is, that it's a free market for competition, but it's more free for corporations than employees.
False: http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png
Very similar conceptually to a tool (Attester) that our team has released a couple of months ago.
https://github.com/ariatemplates/attester/

We use it as a distributed way to perform tests in our main project (Aria Templates: https://github.com/ariatemplates/ariatemplates). The tool is able to use PhantomJS (configurable number of instances) and "normal" browsers which can connect in the same manner (by opening a URL). We use PhantomJS on Travis for continuous integration builds before merging pull requests, and real browsers before each release (every 3 weeks).

We support only our own tests so far (eating the own food), but we may add support for other types as well.

Behind the scenes, the tool first gathers a set of classpaths of the tests to run (recursively); then it dispatches them to active browsers (e.g. when you have a couple of people connected via IE8, each of them will receive a subset of tests to run and effectively the test suite finishes earlier).

You can also run the test suite entirely in the command line (PhantomJS), and if you have multicore processor, you may increase the number of PhantomJS instances to parallelize the suite.

Looking forward for comments and forks!
The new reality of business intelligence and big data discovery
Ask HN: What PHP Framework should I use?
I'm building a healthcare tool -- about to land first client for a large amount of money. I wrote a bunch of code by hand in PHP with jQuery and Bootstrap. MySQL in the backend.

Most of the User Interface is scrolling through DataTables or looking at graphs (Google Charts API) based on the data.

I was looking at either CakePHP or CodeIgniter -- but I'm open to others.

What would HN recommend?

Thanks!
It is not an either/or choice. You can take one class a semester at night or on weekends if you do not want to go to school full time. At minimum, do a level 2 course on algorithms and data structures. CS is not like pre-med - what you learn you can apply immediately to a great extent. Go to a public college if cost is an issue. Your main problem is not what you don't know, it's what you don't even know that you don't know. If you do not do full time school, slog out one class a semester until you take a level 2 algorithm and data structure course. Some of the classes should be enjoyable, because if none are, you might be in the wrong career.
What a great philosophy! Are you hiring now??
The question completely confused me, probably because I've never seen it before and the triangle is apparently not printing correctly here.

I don't really care for interview questions that are unlikely to show up in the real world. This feels like sort of a "gotcha" question. Perhaps you will get the best of the best in your 10%. But I suspect you are missing a lot of candidates who are very good at real-world programming.
Libraries are also becoming places where the community can gather. In my hometown the reduction in actual book circulation has meant an increase in available, reservable communal spaces for local clubs, teams, and other organizations.

This is most certainly a Good Thing(tm), so long as the funding holds. Finding space for non-commercial, non-revenue activities is hard in many places.
Many people... on Hacker News or eHow?
In the UK more people take books out of the library than buy new books.

(http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/leading-artic...)

> While 200 million books are sold every year, more than 310 million are borrowed.
Right... The same could be said for this article too, but you missed the point.

I'd like to run Photoshop on my linux workstation but I don't have Windows.
Developing a responsive, Retina-friendly site (Part 1)
I've been saying for a while that I'm surprised no-one has written a BitCoin miner in JS and started pushing it out to connecting browsers. Given how much time a pop-under advert can sit no someone's machine before they notice it could be relatively lucrative. You'd not get a lot of processing per client per block of time even with the best current JS JIT compilers (especially as GPU mining is where it is at now), but if you have enough machines with your pop-under sat hiding from the user it might make enough to be worth the hassle of porting the code in the first place.
No, those have to comply with FCC regulations to ensure that the signal they are sending out isn't stomping over all the other bands.

This has no filtering at all.
Back when I was doing z80 programming on my TI-83+, I would sometimes us an AM radio as a very crude debugger. Programs stuck in busy loops would generally have a very distinct sound, and you were often over time able to learn what other parts of your program sounded like too.
I don't know... it seems like people are just curious about it, but it couldn't really be used properly (at least for me... I wasn't even able to download my files).

Let's give it a few days and then we will see.
That's not the takeaway I got. What I got is that the (communication endpoint,fundamental energy storage) technology has to change before there can be large improvements in (network speed, energy storage capacity).
The best way to control, share, and track the music you love.
sudo pacman -S virtualbox

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox
Also, I'm a self taught developer and will be learning MVC and other concepts as I go.. From an old thread I'm seeing some people recommend Laravel but I haven't read into it further.
> Insanity is a highly subjective notion ...

Quantatively perhaps, but qualitatively, insanity is not subjective. It's a miserable, miserable experience I would wish upon no one, and wish no one would experience. Weird is fine, funky beliefs are fine, insanity is a different quality altogether.
This sentement has come up semi-frequently in the past (almost) four years I've been a member of the site, and I lurked for months prior to creating an account. From my perspective, the site has trended towards mass appeal, but not at a very quick pace. The articles on the front page today aren't all that different from the ones I remember being on there four years ago. The level of discourse ebs and flows. Sometimes it's really good; other times it isn't.
Generate your own Passbook Pass for Apple iPhone
This is amazing! I wish I had my site up and running to take advantage of your amazing service! Although I don't live in SF, it is my goal to one day get there! Would it be alright for me to e-mail you, just introducing myself so that one day in the near future you can give me tips about SEO? I'm just a college student/aspiring entrepreneur studying Computer Science at the University of Arizona.
In the same way great writers need to be alcoholics?

In all seriousness though: depression is quite different from feeling down or being sad, and one of the most frustrating things for people who have been depressed is that they can't really convey what it's like. I've been 'happy', in a way, that depression has been talked about more lately, because I feel that especially us geeks often have a hard time accepting something we cannot understand or figure out.

In some ways, you could compare depression to addictions. For people who have no addictions, and/or people who just do not have an addictive personality, it is really hard to understand. Even if they try to understand, it often feels like an addicted person is just not trying hard enough.

This is especially difficult with addictions that are similar to non-addictive behavior, like consumption of alcohol. Non-alcoholics just don't get it. I don't blame them for this, but it's frustrating.

Depression, in a way, is addiction to sadness.
The story behind my forth iPhone 5 and its Earpods
Ask HN: How do you achieve life balance?
[I posted this late yesterday but it didn't get any traction. I think it's an important topic, so I'll try one more time]

I don't see much on HN on what developers, entrepreneurs, designers, tech-folk might be doing outside of work. I think it's important to engage in other activities in order to reset your brain and even gain perspective.

I probably have too many hobbies. Some techie (RC drones/helicopters), others not so (woodworking). One activity I have enjoyed for nearly twenty years is Schutzhund Obedience training. I have now gone through this process four times (always German Shepherd Dogs). I find it incredibly rewarding and lots of fun. Nothing like spending a couple of hours at a park training your dog to completely unplug you from the keyboard.

It's even more fun when you get to teach your kids how to train the dogs. For kids this inspires confidence, inner-strength, self-reliance, compassion, understanding and a whole host of other good qualities that you just can't get out of playing video games all day. A dog is almost a perfect mirror of who you are. They reflect how you treat them and how you relate to them. If you are mean they'll be skittish and afraid. If you are firm but fair they'll be confident and willing to do anything you ask. If you are not disciplined and consistent they'll be confused and will not respect you. Too many lessons in just one activity to list here.

If you've never seen Schutzhund, here's a really neat video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTZmIFdgU2M

I am not affiliated with this dog or this kid at all. I just think this video is a beautiful example of the connection that can be created between a dog an its owner. Keep in mind that in this video she was seven years old. She has full control of a dog that probably weighs nearly twice as much as her and if far stronger.

How about you? What does your life look like outside of work?
I don't see this as replacing bash or zsh any time soon.

:)
If the issue with batteries for car sharing is that it takes too long to charge the batteries, why can't interchangeable batteries be used?
I don't use it a ton, but it has literally never crashed in ~2 years of use on Win7x64
Bloomberg Billionaires: Today’s ranking of the world’s richest people
Hmm, I'm trying to compare these to batteries. Does anyone know how to convert farads to watt hours?
This post is right on, but it's kind of telling that a post where the TL/DR is "Your business idea is not good unless it makes money" can make it this high on Hacker News.
Why do you suppose that there's a proper one? You clearly need to read more history.
how about symfony?

or why not do what many PHP devs have, and learn Ruby, then use something like Rails.
This taught me something as well, you could easily use this for other wine problem applications
Please provide a little story of the type of person who cannot quit facebook, and why he cannot quit facebook. Until you do, you're just making up boogie men.
Wow that's a hell of a tutorial, thanks for sharing :)
I don't think the attack as described would work in practice, because the modified javascript file would no longer be valid javascript and would just break the site.

I think you'd have to both create a file that passed the hash check and was valid javascript, which seems somewhat more difficult.
I liked Silex
Why aren't there more engineers in politics?
Sad thing in the town I live in, the downtown library has become a magnate for local homeless to bath and sleep during the day, making a number of families and other patrons uncomfortable. The downtown library gets the bulk of the funding at the expense of some of the outer branches.

I wonder how this whole thing is playing out across other parts of the US.
Google Transparency Report shows rise in data requests
Yeah. I'm much less angry about this than might be, mostly because of this same impression I get from him.

I find that 'geeks' have a tendency to really not handle issues well when they are difficult to understand. Suicide is like that. Most people hesitate to say anything about it, but 'geeks' can be lacking in that.

And honestly, I like that. He's saying what a lot of people are thinking, and it starts a good discussion.
It works on my iPad, so there must be.