skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People get paid for solving problems, not writing software. Solve a problem with your software, then it's not terribly difficult to make money.

The reason that people push back on the idea that you should get money because your git origin is a public GitHub repo is that that in itself does not solve any problems.
I wrote chronicle which handles this via a CGI. Comments are dumped into text-files and they are included in the rebuild.

That means there is a lag and a rebuild needed to publish them, but it works for me & my blog:

http://blog.steve.org.uk/
3DSecure for MasterCard or Verified by VISA. These solutions are very American and not at all what European customers expect to see.

I can't speak for Europe, but basically every site here in Sweden where I buy something with a card uses 3DSecure and VbV. The pick up over the past couple of years has been massive.
how did they get arnold for the commentary?
A stand-alone blog and publication tool for Org-mode
Nobody. Think about it: the honor's system is predominantly what keeps most software companies afloat, even though many choose not to trust their users and (pointlessly) administer DRM.

Thankfully, most people who need software both a) are comfortably employed and b) aren't perfect models of economic self-interest.
I am also wary of people suggesting that software whose users are "required" to pay a per-user fee could be open source. Open source software could not come with a universally enforceable requirement of this kind. "The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software..."

But the prospect of open source developers being paid other than per-copy, per-user is plausible. Alex Tabarrok demonstrated in 1996 that it should be possible to do it even without altruism given enforcement of contracts and someone with sufficient information about demand. (I don't know if that kind of information is often achieved in practice.)

Karl Fogel just ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund creation of the second edition of Producing Open Source Software, which will be distributed on terms closely parallel to open source software (all recipients of the book can redistribute and modify it, and nobody is required to pay a per-copy license fee). The payment to Karl happened up front and ahead of time. The same structure might have worked if Karl were to apply this funding to software development instead of to writing about software development -- and indeed Joey Hess did that a while ago with his git-annex-assistant Kickstarter, which as far as I know has worked out quite well.

In the Kickstarter case there is a significant potential free-rider problem; for example, I didn't personally fund Joey's project but I might still benefit from his work on git-annex. Kickstarter seems to use various aspects of social norms and psychology to address free riding, often with good results.

I think we need more work on this even as we continue to insist on not diluting the meaning of open source.
Neat. Bug report: score is not preserved among reconnections. Example: I close my browser by mistake when we're 4 - 2, when I load the URL again scores are back at 0 - 0 (but the other player that not disconnected still has 4 - 2).
Bloomberg West is surprisingly good for a financial news program; the contrast with CNBC is striking. (although CNBC Asia was pretty good, as I recall, at least a few years ago)
Somehow posts like this make me think this SF web media bubble will soon explode. I just do not quite understand how...
Those Rumored Google Stores Are Starting To Make A Lot Of Sense
If you haven't read Neal Stephenson's Anathem, you should. (That idea is called Saunt Lora's Proposition -- all possible ideas have already been found -- in the book. Good stuff.)
In my state you have to file to have what is the equivalent of a 'finders license' to charge a fee, as well you're required to have a private investigators license. EVERY state is different.
"How dare you digitize books from the library of Alexandria. That's theft!"

No idea what I'm trying to say here, by the way.
This is like SF startup bingo. And I think I just won.
Those three books talk about the 1500-1700 Nayaka rule, languages in 1700-1800 and the third book's summary says it talks about the 12th-14th centuries. That doesn't qualify as evidence of anything. Here is what I'd pay to learn about -

1) Origins, dating and translations of the literature - the sangam lit, the andal songs, etc.

2) Exactly what the fuck was happening in south india from 500 BC to 500 AD? There are Roman coins found in south india and south indian coins found in Rome. One of the Ptolemies refer to a pandian king. Pliny the younger complains about the amount of money spent on indian goods by the roman people. Apparently the romans also had a huge space reserved for indian peppers. One of the chinese explorers have some descriptions of a port in tamil nadu. All this more or less sums up what we know about this period. I know I have to cite sources but it will take a lot of time to hunt them down and I'll do it over the next few days. What else was happening? How did the people dress? Did they know about the greek and the roman ideals?

3) The pallava kingdom - Why were they so into sculptures? Why did they practice so much religious tolerance unlike the later cholas, for example? How did they come to power?

4) The chola kingdom - are the names of the kings really all that we have about the early cholas who ruled around jesus's time? How come they went out of power and then came back into power after five centuries? What were the pandavas doing when the cholas were in power? Were they hunted? Why were aditya karikala's murderers pardoned by raja raja chola? Is it truly about their caste? We have a shitload of kalvettus from this time - can we translate them all and upload them online, please?

5) Do we have anything at all to go by in terms of the food they ate at any period in history? How did the language change over the two millennia?

Edit:
There simply aren't that many books published about south indian history. There isn't all that much digging up either. There is one Nilakanta Sastry who is cited by everyone who talks of Cholas, but his books have been out of publication for decades. In comparison, we have hundreds and hundreds of books published on every conceivable aspect of a number of other civilizations - about the changes in english, greek and latin over the years, the mayans, the rise and fall of rome, histories of the various european monarchies, the aztecs, etc. [all of which interest me hugely].
I appreciate the effort. I think there have been many attempts to do this (wordpress, wetpaint, wikia, etc). I have yet to see one that really impressed me.

I think it's hard to balance the ability to create what you want, with the ability to have enough structure so the site isn't just a random collection of stuff. It's also hard to build a gui that allows non-coders to have fine grained control over the display.

Right now, I feel like this leans too far to the unstructured side, where it's hard to figure out what to use it for. I also find the controls to be kind of cryptic and difficult to use.
> Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

I think OSS contributors are driven by a fairly wide variety of motivations. Linus, for instance, has spoken out on this issue :

I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's
all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world
a better place". No, open source only really works if
everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons.

Now, those selfish reasons by no means need to be about
"financial reward", though.[1]

I made sure to include the last part, because it's both relevant to this discussion and it "completes" the statement. OSS contribution isn't necessarily about monetary reward, nor did the article claim it was.

However, money does happen to be necessary to devote time to a given endeavor. Without it, the best a project can hope for is a collection of part-timers, which is ultimately limiting.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231
If I understand MMU correctly, it is merely an address translator and physical memory data fetcher. It cannot process page faults, and when it encounters one, it will have to signal the CPU, because the CPU and the OS on top of it knows how to handle faults. Even if faults are generated repeatedly, doesn't the CPU still have to execute the instructions to push the stack which is how this "instruction-less" machine works? Unless there are certain PFs where the MMU will not signal the CPU and tries to handle the fault by itself.
I love it. So simple. So creative!
Not sure the state of OCR in other languages, especially obscure Indian ones. Might be cheaper to just have someone straight transcribe/translate these.
I completely agree with you here. fullscreen web doesn't really work in 16:10, even in portrait. It's among the reasons why I preferred my iPad to my Xoom for web browsing a couple years ago.

Now I wish you could switch to portrait on this one and still keep the keyboard.
I could see this also work for feature requests. Just let people fund bounties for particular features, therefore attracting more developers to more urgent problems.
What a bitter man you are. So my grudge and distress you're on the lookout for karma justice. Still got no balls to say you're sorry and move on. Truly, one of the biggest egos I have met.
I think this whole system of differentiated / > 150% profit margin billing - when people are at their weakest, a.k.a. exploitation-based healthcare - is utterly unethical.

I honestly don't see how anyone, and American public opinion in particular, can accept that such things are happening in their country.

In any other setting such billing practices would clearly be considered criminal / outrageous. Say if a surf-instructor at the end of the day charged you $80 for his sun lotion, or if lawyers you had not signed up with started offering you advice, and charged for it at a rate only known to you after the fact. And they would be swindling you when you would not be in dire need...

How can parents still be proud when their children become medical professionals in the US? Why do people still donate money to 'non-profit' hospitals?

Healthcare, the market, and decency don't mix. At least I'm happy to live in the UK where healthcare works (a lot better). The market is great, but one has to pick the right tool for each job, and the market not always is.
1. Buy some Bitcoins.

2. Wait till Bitcoins are in demand, continue till demand reaches epic levels. Since supply is short, more people are read to pay big dollars to buy same number of bit coins. Continuing this cycle.

3. You own Manhattan.

But the article says some between 2 and 3 say ....

2a. Drug dealers, mafia, war lords, terrorists and such a likes will flock this market.

2b. Since its decentralized they will reap the benefits of anonymity.

2c. Government gets pissed due to the fact anonymity gives the criminals all the immunity they need. There fore they can't be sanctioned/tracked etc.

2d. Government moves to shut down all Bitcoin exchanges.

We never go to 3. And therefore we never get to own Manhattan.
Thorough analysis of The Avengers screenplay
> Actually, the quintessential open source project is a developer scratching his own back. That's not particularly altruistic.

He wrote the software to scratch his own back, and now he needs a reason to release it as open source for others to use. My point was that altruism would be just a good (if not better) a reason to release it as any of the other reasons listed by btilly.
Interesting to read such polar views about Meteor.

At Wigwamm, we wanted to build a user experience that was simple. A real-time auction and an auction catalogue full of full screen photographs.

We discussed at length whether Meteor would allow us to do everything we needed. The conclusion was interesting: if it's not simple, if doing through Meteor is too hard, we probably don't want/need to do it.

For us, it's nice to work with technology that genuinely pushes boundaries.

Little plug: we're London UK based, so if you're local, love building products that help people and want to build in pure JavaScript/Meteor, please get in touch (@WigwammHQ on twitter)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BER7a-JP3vs
This article seems like an excerpt/promo for the author's new book, which seems to be an interesting read,

http://www.amazon.com/Smuggler-Nation-Illicit-Trade-America/...

and has garnered a few favourable reviews so far.

P.S: Is there a way to provide inline URL linking in HN threads that I am not aware of?
Thanks for the reply Douglas, I'd dropped you a note via FB asking for advice on how to proceed.

It's a very frustrating position to be in. I can understand why you need to test, and the arguments in favour of preventing spam.

It does seem that when you play by (what you think are) the rules you can get screwed, as others take advantage of the system. It's been a very frustrating few days!
Bigger inconvenience in Firefox 19:

Script: http://gistflow.com/assets/application-ffa7d5c2098bdbb3028af...

Keeps prompting me about taking a long time or dying...
How Payment Gateways are Doing in the Arab World's Emerging Markets
I admit that using an APL keyboard makes you more geeky. :D

http://www.microapl.com/apl/introduction_chapter2.html
I released several "Type 0" free and open source software in the past. And making people pay for using them, would be the worst I could have done. The software I release as FOSS, is basically stuff I would have coded anyway. But by releasing it for free and as open source, i got following in return:

* Feedback with ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself, that helped me to improve my software.

* Free testers, that reported bugs, I wouldn't have found myself.

* Free contributors, that sent me patches for features and bug fixes I would had to spend my own time on otherwise.

* A nice portfolio, future employers can look at, making it more likely that they hire me.

However making people pay for using my software, will reduce the number of people using my software, and so the number of people who will give feedback, report bugs, and contribute patches. Also people paying for something are less likely to contribute. They are more likely to expect that it is my job to make sure that the software behaves like they expect, since they are paying me for it. But 10-15$ per user, is much less money as I would save by releasing it for free, increasing the number of users/testers and their motivation to contribute.
So happy to have insight like your GP comment, and have it being voted to the very top.
How to Transform and Duplicate Objects in Adobe Illustrator
Your knowledge of basic functions of transformation and duplication in Adobe Illustrator can save you a lot of time. You have no need for manual operation.
If you aren't nice to someone that isn't nice to you first, and they do the same, who would ever be nice to one another?
Thanks for the downvotes everyone.

For the record, when I wrote the above comment, the headline of this thread was "Zendesk was hacked, 3 customers affected". It has been changed since, without due notice of course. I wonder why...

Now, my comment looks like I'm a nutjob and have a personal gripe with Zendesk or something.

That the three customers were Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr didn't come out until later as well.

Carry on.
"Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Children's Subsequent Intrinsic Interest" (Green and Lepper, 1974) (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1128110?uid=3737536...) and some other papers which came after it showed that introducing extrinsic rewards to what was before a intrinsically motivated activity could actually hurt long-term motivation.

I wonder if the same would apply here, if this takes off.
I dislike this line of reasoning. It imposes a fairly unrealistic value system where none need exist. I quoted Linus elsewhere in this thread, but it's worth repeating at least once.

I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's
all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world
a better place". No, open source only really works if
everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons. [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231
I'd like to see someone tackle actual website building via a tool like this before tackling the collaborative portion. At the end of it though the money is in enabling internet marketers/salesmen to focus on their craft while eliminating technological hurdles.

“We actually believe we can play a part in payments down the line, by letting you build a page full of stuff that’s for sale and adding a payment widget,” said Plyush. “Right now it’s very basic, but more sophisticated interactions are on our timeline.”
15 Deals Worth 10000$ As a Startup Pack for Geeks Only
If tall thin windows are better, why not have a widescreen with two windows side by side?
Too big to fail is a real problem, but the assertion in the article is more than "a bit" disingenuous. It is _very_ disingenuous, because what they try to measure (money saved by the big banks with lower interest rates) isn't at all what the taxpayers pay - economy isn't a zero-sum game. There will certainly be a correlation in the long run, but that number they throw there has 0 credibility imho.
>>In the end, money isn't any good if you don't spend it

The money that you hoard, invest and which grows itself is the best kind of investment.

I know of a few people who saved through their life to buy real estate and rent it out. The next generations have practically slept through their lives without ever working and yet continued to live like millionaires.
And what's your actual point now, except trying to disagree?
In my book near-zero cost actions can't be meaningfully altruistic - in that case the term gets so watered down that it's essentially meaningless.
But there's a greater than 0% chance that zendesk had an API token for at least one of those services. That could easily allow a hacker to make authenticated requests to those services to gain user info. The fact that usernames and passwords weren't stored on zendesk doesn't mean much, if a hacker can gain full admin access to those other services through an admin token that might have been stored on zendesk.
GameSpy and Gamespot are the only gaming sites I knew. Where does one look for information on games now?

Edit: thanks for the suggestions so far! They all seem to be in blog style, with the typical horrible navigation (basically, you are limited to the most recent posts). I miss the huge repositories of game reviews from sites like GameSpy - being able to look up reviews of old games?
I spent some time at Reddit in years past, in fact I did two AMAs myself. I think I know the reason for the discrepancy between the votes and the comments.

One, people who post comments belong to a different demographic than those who simply vote -- the difference is in the level of effort, the level of aggressiveness and the willingness to get involved in a subsequent conversation. I think there's a gender difference (women are more likely to vote without commenting, men more likely to comment and not vote) -- bu I emphasize that, with regard to HN, this is a supposition with some observational evidence, but not a solid statistic.

Two, as to AMA threads themselves, when I was the subject of an AMA, the voting and commenting patterns were completely different than an ordinary conversation. After my second AMA with the same result, I finally figured it out -- many of those who posted questions and comments in AMA forums were women interested in meeting someone noteworthy, and who commented and voted in a way that set them apart from other kinds of forums. At Reddit there really is a large difference between the population of commenters at AMA events versus ordinary conversations, and the primary difference is gender.

For those who think this gender distinction is just my overactive imagination, read this AMA forum and judge for yourself:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q9qzn/iama_former_nasa...

What this would mean at HN is that an AMA would very likely be very different than one at Reddit, because there are fewer women who post here regularly compared to Reddit. That's too bad, but I am only reporting a fact.

I think if you compare silent votes versus comments anywhere, you will see a difference in views, not all of it is based on gender, but gender is a factor -- many women are more willing to cast a silent vote than post a comment and risk a hostile reply from someone accustomed to talking to men. Note that I didn't say "all women" and I don't know the reasons or how important the difference is, either quantitatively or qualitatively. But it is certainly real.
Microsoft lync & skype will be connected by june
Ask HN: Help a fellow hacker - drop out and get a job or get the CS degree?
Hi people at HN,

Here's my situation: I'm currently in college, studying CS. While I do like the subject, I find that my motivation is lacking for the following reasons:

1.) Getting grades. I get why they exist, of course, but it completely demotivates me to know that most of my efforts go into trying to get a passing grade by trying to show exactly what a specific teacher wants me to show, instead of trying to actually understand a thing.

2.) While I like most courses, I don't feel I'm actually learning anything practical I can use at a job later.

3.) I may or may not have bipolar disorder. The jury's still out on this one.

4.) I'm racking up debt because of my student loans.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. There are also some serious reasons why dropping out of college might not be such a good idea. To name the ones that've been bothering me the most:

1.) Obviously, I wouldn't have a degree, and while I've been programming since I was little, I'm not so certain about my career prospects. What would happen if I'm, say, 40, and lose my job: how would I find a new one? Would I even be able to find a job without a degree in the first place?

2.) I would prefer having my own house to living in a small apartment all my life, barely able to pay the rent. This is amplified by the fact that everyone in my family has a well-paying career. Also, getting an actual enjoyable career is probably easier with a degree in CS.

3.) Possible bipolar again. You can't drop out for a few weeks sometimes knowing that you'll make up for it before the final tests come around. Staying in college gives me a certain 'buffer' for when I feel blah.
Not to mention that working 40 hours/week is much more than I'm used to.

If anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated. :)

(I'm in the Netherlands, should people's advice apply to specific regions.)

tl;dr: I'm thinking of dropping out but am uncertain whether it's wise. Please help.
Just like a CPU, the design of the language was informed by the experience gained and the lessons learned when analysing/building its predecessors.

The analogy is perfectly fine imho.
mattsah, it is an opened issue https://github.com/gistflow/gistflow/issues/228 Will be fixed asap
Actually Intel chips are since long RISC based, with a CISC translation layer. The real difference is in the more advanced pipeline, prediction and cache and and of course the 32 vs 64 bit + other architectural features. Hence the intel chips use a lot more power than an ARM based processor.
This is a bit different - kickstarter style funding for existing open source projects. Developers remain 100% in control and put features up for funding.

https://www.catincan.com
> Java comes with cheap programmers, some of the best tools in the world, reliability, and speed.

You realize that none of your points are actually related to the language itself?

Yes, Scala's syntax is ugly, just look at this cryptic operator soup:
int[][]_00_[][]=null;
I use Kotaku and some french sites (nofrag.com & factornews.com)