skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The kinder, gentler PayPal can't ignore the law, the tax code, or serious risks of criminal activity on its platform. They made a commitment to cut the red tape in the situations where it didn't make sense, not to throw out the rulebook and the rule of law. None of what happened here is inconsistent with their promise.

This situation isn't some innocent trinket seller whose account was frozen without reason and without recourse. It's a foreign national funneling six figures across borders through multiple anonymous PayPal accounts even after being advised, by PayPal directly, to stop doing so. Above and beyond the breach of contract and ignoring PayPal's guidance to stop using a US account when he's not a US citizen or even in the US, the activity looks pretty much exactly like money laundering. On top of that, PayPal has its own legal obligations to the United States, which it can't fulfill since he's not providing a tax ID while he's passed the IRS reporting threshold by a factor of 10.

They closed his US account, which they gave him warning he wasn't supposed to be using. He hasn't claimed they are keeping any of his money, and they didn't stonewall him about why it's being closed. Should they have allowed him to continue operating illegally forever?

My opinion of many people has dimmed as a result of the comments here. They say you can judge a person's character by how well they treat their waiter at a restaurant. In the startup world, how fast someone is to trot out a "PayPal is evil" comment whenever the company is mentioned, no matter the circumstances, might be a decent analogy.
Why do you value the freedom of profit-driven megacorporations to profit off of their exclusive control of intellectual private property over the freedom to share information with one's friends and neighbours?
ooo, I can play this game. I dare you to create a single US dollar. ha! proof that the US dollar isn't fiat.
Best of luck with this, Max, Dan, Sam, & co! The state of US immigration laws is disastrous, and getting the govmt to do anything is like steering a cruise ship. Will parking one 12mi offshore be a wake up call?
Is anyone else amazed this guy made 200k with an open source js library like this?

What am I doing with my life?
I don't see the irony. I don't agree with the whole premise that people reacted negatively in public because of the monkey dancing thing.

Another explanation, IMO much more likely, is that people who disagreed with his claims simply chose not engage him in private due to the tone of the rant. Maybe his coworkers and collaborators find it very well to be told to "rot in your computational shit heap", but for most outsiders this sort of thing doesn't signal a willingness to have a polite conversation.

Besides, the top 3 comments on the reddit thread, while "negative" and not thoroughly polite, also addressed some of OP's points and provided information for people interested in the field.
You should read this article from 1996 - where Bill Gates is talking about his relationship with Warren Buffet. The quote below is pretty clear in that charity had always been his ultimate goal.

"Warren and I share certain values. We both feel lucky that we were born into an era in which our skills have turned out to be so remunerative. Had we been born at a different time, our skills might not have had much value. Since we don't plan on spending much of what we have accumulated, we can make sure our wealth benefits society. In a sense, we're both working for charity. In any case, our heirs will get only a small portion of what we accumulate, because we both believe that passing on huge wealth to children isn't in their or society's interest. Warren likes to say that he wants to give his children enough money for them to do anything but not enough for them to do nothing. I thought about this before I met Warren, and hearing him articulate it crystallized my feelings."

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/...
How does that work? Back at the big bang, there were 0 dollars, euros, rupees, etc. Now there are many.
I feel like I've read the comment I'm about to make somewhere else about something, so this isn't necessarily my original idea: the buzz is from social media currently, yes? And it works as a great indicator after the movie comes out, as people are tweeting/facebooking/etc. about it. But what happens in a little while when the "buzz" dies down? Or is the idea to just give you a quick glimpse of currently releasing movies, and not to be a ranking database of all movies ever made.
How the Startup Community Helped Me Go to Startup Weekend HQ
Text copied from ICSF:
"On 5 February 2013, International Crimes Tribunal-2 delivered judgment against Kader Molla, who was accused of rape of minor and at least 350 murders. Tried for his crimes against humanity, his crimes were proven beyond reasonable doubt, according to the judgment. However, the Tribunal comprising of Mr Shahinur Islam, Obaidul Hasan Shahin and Mojibur Rahman awarded Kader Molla life sentence, instead of death penalty which the accused deserved. People, rejecting this lenient sentence, has risen, in Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh."
Very nice..!! Although to be fair the concept of deal sites has always partially included yield mgmt (running deals in winter, or restricting use to weekdays, etc).. Not to mention in the industries wherein reservation platforms are prevalent (open table, styleseat), deals tend not to be at all. Will be interesting to see how they solve the optics issue inherent in deals and how that usually conflicts with the aspirational leanings of most reservation platforms (and more importantly those of their users).
> And thus, piracy is equivalent to stealing.

Piracy isn't really stealing because it isn't changing owners from one person to another. Piracy is more like communism because it is an attack against the idea of private property itself.

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html
How many times have you won a hackathon? (As in top prize)
Hello,

'Bangladeshi' here. Thanks for putting your thoughts together, however I have some points to make.

It's true that this movement is not against the corrupted government. But to say that this is 'instigated by the government and indirectly controlled by them' is nowhere near the truth. This was started solely by the students, who has had enough of all the wrong things happening(including the corruption). Several, government officials were denied the chance to speak at the movement, when they tried to give this movement a political brand and use it to their advantage. The people were angry and the politicians took off after several minutes(I was there).

What started at Shabag, has now spread throughout the country. I just spoke to my dad, who live in a small town far away from the capital, says the movement has reached there too. Its all over the news.

The youth of Bangladesh are tired of all the lies and cheating they had and this time they are on the street. Frankly speaking, even I could never imagine that people would ever rise up and protest. This is how it begins and eventually this will lead to corruption and other things that are stopping BD to what it can be.
I was thinking an ore vein that was harder than the material around it, and said outer material had been weathered away faster to expose it.

Either that or a door handle! :P
Steve Jobs believed that Apple products were better for people than charitable giving like food, clothing, shelter, or medical care. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-10-11/news...

"Despite accumulating an estimated $8.3 billion fortune...there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity..."
"in 1997, when Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he closed the company’s philanthropic programs."
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-...

"And it wasn’t until after an unflattering media report about Jobs on the subject over the summer, that Apple in September initiated a “matching gifts” program, under which donations to philanthropies made by employees are matched by the company."
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-06/business/35277...

This was just the first 3 results of the google search. There are hundreds of more sources to choose from.
I'm really not sure why Linux driver-creator spend effort trying to access laptop-specific feature. Most of these are somewhere between worthless and annoying. I had compaq where Ubuntu support twenty unwanted hotkey features that kept me from using standard function keys and popped-up the calculator with one false twitch. Took a few days to remove.

Manufacturers should pay developers and support the features if they want them in Linux - especially since I Manufacturers actually benefit more than end-users. IE, it's useless except for the rare few who like the features and gain BRAND LOYALTY, the most valuable commodity of the modern era.
I love how those BJJ guys manage to work it into every conversation.
I don't want it to be alien technology if it isn't.
Its a UFO from Venus
Not just that, he also ordered his company to kill all contributions to charity as soon as he was in power.

This trend has now been reversed since his passing.
I could very well twist that and say: I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games, but I won't because the nature of the parties in question is really irrelevant to me.

I value the freedom of creators of original works. Without them, there would be nothing to share. I don't care of those creators are profit-driven mega-corporations or starving artists. I think in a digital, connected age, the moral right to one's intellectual creations becomes stronger, not weaker.[1] I'm perfectly supportive of people who chose to share their original work, but I respect that some people don't want to share, or control the terms of that sharing, and that is their prerogative.

[1] Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?
Are DMG passwords really going through 250,000 rounds of PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1?

I've been using the Python PBKDF2 module with fewer iterations as it takes over 18 seconds to hash a password with 250,000 iterations on my 2.7 GHz Core i5:

In [1]: import pbkdf2

In [2]: %time pbkdf2.PBKDF2('mypassword', open('/dev/urandom').read(16), 250000).read(32)
CPU times: user 18.36 s, sys: 0.07 s, total: 18.43 s
Wall time: 18.45 s
Out[2]: '<>\x17\x03q+\x1d\x1c+\x94^\xa2\xc9&\xa9\xa56\xc2\xfa\x97A\xd7\xfb\xc8\x93r\x9d\xa0\xd67|\x1e'

Also, everyone else seems to be using way fewer iterations, e.g. 5000 for LastPass (http://helpdesk.lastpass.com/security-options/password-itera...)

I wonder if the C implementation is much faster, or if Apple uses some special hardware acceleration (GPU or special CPU instructions), as I'd love to increase the number of iterations in my Python application.
Rates, particularly in epidemiology, are often rescaled as deaths per thousand or hundred thousand.
isn't it worrying that so much electricity has been used because of bitcoin

I don't like it either, but you can't control what people do with their resources.
Which do you find to be the stronger definition of property, something of value, or something that can change hands?
I've been thinking about this very problem---recovering a forgotten encryption password without trusting a third party. The state of the art seems to be

1. Print it out on paper and put it in a safe. This is somewhat annoying and inconvenient for the vast majority of users, and if you lose or don't have access to the paper, you're screwed.

2. Encrypt the password using answers to some security questions and store it with an online provider you marginally trust. This has the problem of reducing the security to the strength of your answers (which may be known to any number of people close to you), and people might even forget the spelling of their answers which puts them in the same pickle.

I feel what would be ideal is some sort of a question/challenge that evokes a consistent, unique, high-entropy response from the user but the response is not based on a fact... sort of like a Rorschach test, perhaps, but one where each user would have a unique response. Is anyone aware of some system/research like this?
In terms of how big a chunk they take out of range, they're a disaster.
Lets not just beat up on ourselves for being so inferior to someone like him . Its a hard fact to swallow but some people are just way better than can be explained away by any simple reasoning . Lets be thankful that we can live along side them ,reap the fruits of their labor and awaken ourselves to the heights of human potential .
> "even if I agree with an author, I will occasionally post some criticism [etc]"

I would classify that as positive or neutral. It seems the original author would also classify "substantive criticism" (his words) or "constructive criticism" that way. But he notes that none of the criticism he received was of value, consisting mostly of insults and straw men, which are rightly classified as negative.

His tone may at least be partially to blame. But I've witnessed the larger pattern in plenty of circumstances where tone is not a problem -- it's easy to get insulting, empty criticism from strangers, but it's hard to find substantive criticism except in places that intentionally foster it.
I think public speaking skills are important for developers, not because they have to do public speaking, but because it trains them to distill their thoughts into simpler and finer points. In public speaking, you are trained to take the common denominator, which to some extent "dumbs down" the message, but makes it more comprehensible by anyone. Such a skill would be beneficial to a team, especially if you're trying to explain a bug to QA (who will never have to understand the underlying code), or propose a feature to a superior (will this earn us revenue?). So yeah I think public speaking skills for developers are essential, but not to do public speaking (presenting perhaps?)
Do I really want a PhD?
> (EDIT: Thermodynamically space-heaters are 100% efficient, since they always convert their source energy into heat. They are inefficient from a monetary point-of-view.)

They're a disaster from a range point of view.
Many features have no standard api, which includes screen brightness. My samsung laptop a keyboard backlight, which requires the samsung module to use. There are also various other options in the BIOS that can be accessed through this interface. Unfortunately they are required.
Shiny Groove: The Best New Grooveshark Player for Mac
any type of network reconstruction - gene - gene / protein - protein , gene - protein , interaction network are all very challenging and important computational problems in biology
There's also something elegant about the technology. If you compare the complexity and expense versus the energy density of a lithium-ion battery pack and a metal can, there's no comparison.

However, in an ideal world, I would think that carbon neutral hydrocarbons would become a niche fuel for things like long haul trucks and bulldozers. (And for auxiliary space heaters in people's electric cars.)
Heck yea brian! killing it
Using a real bank is hands down the best choice.
PayPal is not as crooked as people say they are. Just start a company with someone in he US. Payments go,to their company and they pay you. Assuming its a legit business "don't know how I made" 200k doesnt sound legit.
Well, at 5mm it's clearly an antenna in the 112GHz band, from which we can conclude that 1) there'll be other alien antennas in line-of-site of this one, and 2) Martians clearly run very high bandwidth wifi networks.
> I wonder if the C implementation is much faster

Very likely -- Run this on your machine and see if it improves things http://stackoverflow.com/a/9781943. I got about 18.6s for your python code while this one with a 16 byte salt and 250k iterations runs in 0.6s.

OWASP recommends over 100k iterations too:
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet...
> He wouldn't have tried running the vehicle to the edges of its optimal-condition performance in non-optimal conditions.

Yeah, either the author was kinda ignorant about how batteries react to weather, or he was trying to achieve a bit of sensationalism.
No, it's just the more reasonable. Most likely it's not any kind of artifact, but we have a lot more evidence for the existence of man-made spacecraft than we do for alien spacecraft, and Mars is a lot closer to Earth than it is to anywhere aliens might come from.
The difference is that INDENT and OUTDENT have to be defined by context-sensitive productions. Even if this occurs in what would otherwise be the "lexing" stage of the parser.
Creating wealth is not a zero-sum game. So your phrase: "I was always under the impression it basically just gets shifted around" is wrong.

Basic economics, man.

The extension of this is that if you've accumulated great wealth (through the market, rather than through dictatorship or government) then you have also generated great wealth for your business customers or clients. But that wealth will be more spread out.
I agree with you that if you want to prove the correctness of a new algorithm, you need to prove the correctness of that new algorithm. You're gonna want some proving skills there.

How often are programmers developing new algorithms? I guess it depends on where you draw the line for "algorithm", but let me propose two possible places for the line. On the one hand, you might use existing techniques in a new function. In this case, the proving technique you need is the theory of invariants and so on, as Dijkstra ranted about. You're not gonna need a lot of practice with higher-level math proofs for that. That's even assuming you care about "proving that it does what you say it does in all possible cases", which of course we all know is done by roughly 0% of programmers, especially with emphasis on the "in all possible".

On the other hand, you might make a bigger development, that requires more mathematical expertise. I suggest for your consideration that the correct description of a person doing this latter work is not "programmer", but "professor" (or grad student), and that this is relatively rare, and if this is what you meant all along, you've been using misleading language. I think you have it absolutely backwards when you say "this is an extremely rare case"; I think the case where you need real mathematical proof techniques is the extremely rare case, even in relatively math-heavy areas, e.g. numeric simulation. What you need, as I've said before, are techniques of calculation.

Also, my ML knowledge is weak, but from my modest knowledge, I don't think any of it works provably. It works probably. :) Seems a weird example to choose.

At this point, btw, I acknowledge that I'm thoroughly into "quibble" territory. =]
Ask HN: Please review my new App (Premium Themes)
We're not even talking about 6 characters - the article says they reduced the search space to 22472 combinations, which is barely 3 characters. Yes, 3 char passwords are easy to crack, what else is new?..
Gestures + Reveal.JS
You need to reduce the friction to join the service. Right now, you are like a door to door salesman who asks for the sale right from the get go. By breaking up the sales process you can argue away any objection the user may have to paying, and close more sales. I suggest offering a free trial with limited functionality. Have them use the service, and at the end of the trial close the sale. You should gain more sales due to allowing those who are interested to see how it works, and then converting into customers.
I've been looking at homes recently and it just depresses the hell out of me.

I'm not in my twenties anymore, don't work for the googles etc. although I have a relatively good tech job.

A semi decent house on the peninsula is coming in around 1 mil. And that's often for much less than 2000sq feet.

And this is for a house that has doubled in value since 1999. Afaik, salary increases are nowhere near that and certainly not mine.
satellite image via Bing: http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=19.113482~50.134083&...
Are you implying that a museum dedicated to Jimi and owning the majority of the Northwests' sports franchises doesn't directly benefit all of humanity? Because that sir is something we will simply have to disagree on.
I don't. If aliens exist and are able to travel to our vicinity, we're probably screwed as a species.
That's some pretty anecdotal evidence. Just as anecdotally, I have heard to the contrary.
True, looks like it's important to use a C module if available:

In [13]: from M2Crypto.EVP import pbkdf2

In [14]: %time pbkdf2('mypassword', open('/dev/urandom').read(16), 250000, 32)
CPU times: user 1.16 s, sys: 0.02 s, total: 1.18 s
Wall time: 1.18 s
> Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?

Not a very good analogy to demonstrate your point, as the scarcity of resources within the game is a central facet of the gameplay.

rayiner, I often see you as the lone man arguing on these things -- about information being free, journals being freely accessible, etc. You're unconvinced as of yet -- so I want to make the recommendation of two of Lawrence Lessig's books to you: Free culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)) and Remix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_(book)) -- both freely available for download on a CC license I should add. :)

You're a great writer and I wish more people engaged with you on the points you raise. If you go on to read the two books, I would be genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts.
Sorry to hear your situation.

For others: Assuming this problem is solved, in future, can an international student collect payments in his home currency? Will US govt allow full time students to do side businesses?
So he thinks that income inequality is bad, and his solution is fewer H1Bs which will cause greater income inequality...
Snapchat Raises $13.5M Series A
I agree entirely that they're almost certainly tangential. I generally agree with the line of your argument.

But you're being nasty about Paypal, and I very much doubt the implication. I'll bet you 10:1 that Paypal would rather give him his money. But they also want to be in compliance with the law. They also want to spend the least they can on policy-vio detection and fraud detection ("least they can" means "a hell of a lot", say my professional connections; they're serious about fraud), and the least they can on customer service, and have minimal PR consequences.

It's not like they get to keep the money if they decide it's not legal to move it; they have to give it back, or pass it on. They'd rather pass it on and have more future business, from which they can take their cut. But they won't flagrantly break the law to do it, and they can't spend infinite resources making sure the right thing happens in every single case.
I may not understand the whole context, but if you're using PBKDF2 for key derivation, you don't want to use something that works "fast". You want whatever algorithm/iteration combination that is as slow as possible [1], but not too slow that it annoys the user.

[1] on modern hardware, that is.
I would argue that he is an outlier.
Was curious what happened if you inhaled it. Nothing specific on their site, but it does say:

The coating has been found to be safe for use in nonfood contact areas
of food processing plants. The coating meets FDA and USDA regulations for those
types of applications.

Still curious.