skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run an ecommerce site and we sell about 50% in the US and 50% overseas and have a lot of fraud attempts pretty much daily (more outside of the US, but plenty in the US). A couple months ago I built some simple checks that dramatically reduced our handling time of fraud cases. The checks include:

1. Has the credit card been used by any other account holder?
2. Has the shipping address been used by any other account holder?
3. Has the phone number been used by any other account holder?
4. Has the billing address been used by any other account holder?

If any of those are true a warning or info notice is shown depending on the situation. For example, if the shipping address is used by multiple accounts an info notice is shown as there are plenty of times the same address would be used by multiple accounts (freight forwarder, sending parts to a repair shop, etc...). It reminds the order processor to check it out and verify the order is legit.

If the billing, credit card or phone number match it throws a warning as that is far less likely to happen legitimately - which is what you experienced. We don't automatically decline like Newegg did to you, but we do investigate the order thoroughly and if we aren't comfortable with it we will decline or require funds be sent via a verified papal account or wire transfer.

We use a lot of other methods for checking fraud; IP, AVS, etc... but these really simple checks have been really helpful because we get hit by the same people over and over again. They try the same card with multiple accounts or use the same shipping address on multiple accounts, etc...

If an order has been marked as fraud and any of those checks above hit then the new order is automatically marked as fraud too.
It says rejection of the AAH led to stigmatization; correct me if I'm wrong but that means it was not acceptance of the theory which has tarnished related areas; it was labeling it as "crazy" as you just did that caused damage.

You're right that I don't have a degree in the area, but I don't claim any merits to the thoery, to me it's just another conjecture (like what if life on earth came from a martian asteroid) - I don't really care if it's going to be proven or not and don't take it as a fact, it's just food for thought. Falsifying hypothesis is the basis of science after all! Quoting from the aquaticape.org debunking website:

false views, if supported by some evidence, do little
harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving
their falseness: and when this is done, one path toward
error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same
time opened
- Charles Darwin

It might sound crazy if you're immersed in the field, but it's not the kind of blatant pseudo-science we should be raging about.
I'm not as familiar with this problem as I'd like to be, so please take this with a grain of salt, but maybe you could invite female CS majors from nearby universities to come see your offices? Or better yet, to see what it's like to work with you for a day.

After all, one of the major issues seems to be that women don't see role models working in tech companies. If you have female students come and work with you, then they should be able to imagine themselves working at your company, or another small startup.
When female genital mutilation occurs, which is largely a problem in non-Western countries [or at least is perceived to be a non-Western problem, I'm not informed enough to say], white feminists historically attributed that to those people being 'uncivilized', which is obviously racist and white supremacist, rather than it being a result of those women experiencing a different manifestation of oppression in a male-dominated society.

So yeah, that's one way women can contribute to their own oppression. Obviously most forms of women's oppression are not the result of that woman "doing it to herself," but I can definitely see how that line of argumentation can be a slippery slope of victim-blaming.
This might help you: http://blog.nofate.me/?p=35

I've never tried it myself though because I don't own any games on Origin.
Personally I don't like ORMs because they're black boxes. When some complex model relationship results in crappy generated SQL (which I've experienced a number of times) I had to sit down and write SQL. The problem being that after a couple of years of ORMing my SQL skills had atrophied.

So now I've gone fully circle: from SQL to ORM and back to SQL.
The difference is that Google Plus looks absolutely terrible. I'm not kidding - load it up now - and look at the incredible amount of clutter around the content. The new Facebook News Feed is about highlighting content (and no doubt, ads), the G+ homepage is full of junk.

Don't get me wrong, I can see where there could be some inspiration taken, but the News Feed looks like G+ done right.

The G+ app, on the other hand, is great. No complaints there.
Great Kindle Single on breaking up the big banks: http://www.amazon.com/Megabanks-Mess-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/...
The contrived examples you've shown aren't examples of POSIX-incompatibility, or bugs in `find` at all. You've explicitly involved the shell. Of course trying to run every directory name as a shell command string is going to result in executed code!

Your original argument was that given:

find . -type d -exec chmod g+x {} ';'

It is possible to force code execution of arbitrary commands given a carefully crafted directory name. The key difference in this case is that the shell is not involved _at all_. I challenge you to find an implementation of `find` that is broken in this way.

As a side note, it is even possible to involve the shell in the picture in a safe way with `find`, without the use of `xargs` (and thus avoid the overhead of setting up a pipeline):

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'chmod g+x "$1"' _ {} ';'

(my contrived example is quite poor, though, since it does nothing but introduce unnecessary shell overhead)

Modern (POSIX > 2001?) `find`'s support `-exec {} +` which further reduces the number of reasons to invoke `xargs`:

find . -type d -exec sh -c '
for x; do
do_foo "$x"
do_bar "$x"
do_baz "$x"
done
' _ {} +

(example above shows how to make proper use of this feature with an explicit shell invocation)
This is the problem though. Their always on DRM doesn't work, they obviously didn't have enough servers to handle the load even though they would have had sales figures before the game launched. Maybe if they launched the game with enough infrastructure to cope, there would be no issue here. As pointed out somewhere else, Blizzard have done this with their last few games; Stacraft 2 (both) and Diablo 3 and people don't complain (even though at the start there were a few teething issues).

I understand the SaaS description, it's a very accurate one but the point is customers have paid for something that is essentially an overpriced server status and countdown application. This is not acceptable, it's not like the game was given away for free. People have paid for something they cannot use.

How would you feel if you just bought a new car, drove it out of the dealership and found-out it had some amazing new technological anti-theft GPS immobiliser in your car that always needed to be connected to the monitoring company network and it was preventing you from driving it out of the dealership? The dealership refuse to refund your money even though they knew the car had this issue, but they sold it anyway so you have to wait for a fix... EA sold us a lemon, I feel very ripped off.

Do EA even test their games any more or do they just develop them, throw some really buggy DRM implementation in and sell as many copies as possible? They're already one of the most hated companies in gaming, I guess they can't really lose out any more, they hit rock bottom a while ago. Much like the music industry, they'll eventually start losing copious amounts of cash and blame piracy instead of themselves. So tired of EA's crap.
I agree - at a very low 100MHz per player that's 25 players to a 2.5GHz Xeon core, 100 per CPU, 200 per server. Assume 100,000 players, that's 500 decently spec'd servers plus redundancy, bandwidth, storage, sysadmins, etc.
I think it's a fairly poignant example of what happens when SaaS fails, and what it means when you have a SaaS business offering.
No responsible webhost would just roll out a new major version of PHP without warning. Dreamhost have made their servers support it, which means that it is now an option that you can pick, along with PHP 5.2, and 5.3, in multiple modes (cgi, fastcgi, etc.).

But even so, if I build some PHP code that isn't future-proof for even the warranty period that I offer on any code, then I've got to fix it at my cost. If I build some code that, in 3 years time becomes incompatible with a new version of PHP, then it can be fixed then. I can't be expected to predict the future of PHP and build forever-proof code, though.
Oh man, I'm proud that these products are finally coming out. I was somewhat involved in the later parts of the standardization process, and this is actually the first time I've seen something I've worked on come to mass market. Looking forward to seeing devices with Ember chips come out.
MAC address shortcuts in your .bashrc for re-upping those “30 minutes free Wifi”
If they can't fix their own software to work without their own servers then they are lazy at best and incompetent at worst. There are no valid excuses in claiming a fix is too difficult when you're the one who designed the problem to begin with.
The best place to post is Linkedin and Craigslist.
I'm running a VPS with RAMnode and it's been nothing but roses.

Here's a benchmark on my VPS http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2012/11/20/UMLXH3qNTNOyfbGF

And here's a bunch of SSD VPS plans sorted by IOPS http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=IOPS+Seek+Benchmark&O...
Once I moved out of the Fremont DC, I was very happy with Linode.

But I have sites that choke on quite modest I/O. I waited for Linode to install SSDs, then waited, and waited more. Last week I gave up and moved to DigitalOcean.
"There is an IT talent shortage problem"

- management translator -

"The problem is we're paying IT people more than the minimum wage. Also the minimum wage is too high"
As suggestions to tape on your wall, these seem excellent, something to look at when you are stuck. As rules, maybe not.

"What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?"

Interesting notion, but then I think of War and Peace. Pierre Bezuhov is good at nothing much at all. He is challenged, and transformed. But what is the polar opposite of being a prisoner of the French in Moscow and during the retreat? Prince Andrei is good at a hell of a lot of things; what seems to transform him is being shot up to one degree or another...
hm. as a self-taught sysadmin, this hasn't been my experience.

I mean, a degree from Stanford is something that is worth a whole hell of a lot more than your average degree... so yeah, maybe someone from Stanford would have a significant advantage over someone self-taught... but someone from an average university? maybe some advantage, but yeah, I don't think it's as big of a deal as being a woman, or being foreign or what have you.

Of course, if you are self taught and have no experience? sure, you have it really rough. Much more so than a person who has a degree and no experience. You need the experience. but after ten years? (remember, you should have /at least/ 4 years more experience than the kid with the degree, if you are self-taught.) From what I've seen? I can be pretty competitive.

But women? Nobody has ever rejected /me/ from a job with:

"I'm sorry, but we don't have any diversity positions at this time."

The mind reels. I have had a job, before, when I was much younger, where I thought I was hired for altruistic reasons. It was soul-crushing. Imagine that rattling around the back of your head for the rest of your career.
It depends on what "breaking up the banks" means.

If we just mean to break them up into smaller banks, it is hard to say whether negating the benefits of scale will raise costs higher than the competitive pressure of no longer having dominant institutions effectively being able to set prices.

If we mean to break up securities trading and deposit-taking divisions into separate institutions (as Glass-Stegall was meant to enforce until repealed) then we may see a return to a more stable Wall Street, as the house would be forced to play it's own money instead of yours, and 'banking' will be pure and boring again.
There's only so much parallelism you can exploit, especially with network lags adding overhead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Will people please stop saying that in this context?

Merchant-side fraud prevention schemes are not security. They are heuristics for reducing the number of bad transactions that the vendor has to handle.

Algorithms should be air-tight. Yes, the best way to ensure that they are is to make them public. Heuristics by definition are not airtight. The best way to get utility from them is to keep their nature hidden from parties trying to abuse the system.
This is just speculation.

California has this:

> California’s Master Plan for higher education, adopted in
> 1960, guarantees a place in college for every state
> resident who can benefit. The historic blueprint produced
> systems and programs that have served as models for other
> states and for countries across the globe.

Stanford is a private university, and MIT isn't in California. The UCs sound like they're public universities. Perhaps the Asian students in California who are blocked out of other universities end up going to UCs instead.

This one might be incorrect, but California being on the west coast might mean that there are more Asians per person in California than in many other parts of the US, too.
A case for putting off documentation until the end
I found a bug in eventmachine during the time I spent writing em-zeromq, the eventmachine binding for zeromq. The important thing to understand here is that ZMQ is, in-essence, a userland socket. Normal sockets are efficiently monitored using the epoll system call (or one of its older variants, say select, or poll). However, as a user-land program

ZMQ 'sockets' aren't compatible with those calls, they use a userland equivalent of those kernel level edge triggered pollers. Integrating ZMQ with a traditional event library (like eventmachine) presents a problem at this point, as software like EM or Node typically require IO to be across real file descriptors from real sockets, something a userland library can't provide. The ZMQ devs however realized this was a hotly requested feature and so devised a way around this limitation.

The compatibility layer in ZMQ takes the form of performing some internal communication across traditional unix IPC, in the case using a pipe IIRC. In other words, for some of its internal messaging rather than simply use a function call, ZMQ will push data across a pipe. This pipe can then be exposed as a proxy for a ZMQ socket.

The downside of this strategy is that exposing FDs across software requires extreme care. Generally, it is assumed that one piece of software will have responsibility for an FD.

The actual issue in my case was that any ruby exception would cause the entire process to crash with an error about closing an already closed FD. What was happening was that given an exception both ZMQ and EM were trying to shut down all the FDs they knew about. Closing an FD that's already closed causes ZMQ to assert and crash instantly. It sounds simple once you're in the right frame of mind, but it took a good number of evenings to track down to that cause. It turned out the the EM option to not shut-down FDs was non-functional in the end. A one character patch provided the fix.
>How big is the subset of QR codes that are valid in more than one orientation?

Given the placement of the position and alignment markers in a valid QR code it looks like the only symmetry it can have is reflection (mirror-image) symmetry about its main diagonal (the line from the top-left to the bottom-right) [1]. If you take any given QR code and replace the part of it that is below the main diagonal with a mirror image of the part above it then in the worst case you will lose 50% of the information contained in the code (actually less since the pixels on the diagonal stay there no matter what). Now, the content of a QR code generated with the heaviest error correction settings can be recovered even if up 30% of its data is lost [2]. If you generate a QR code where the part above the main diagonal is similar enough to the one below it (meaning at least 50% - 30% = 20% of symmetrically located pixels are the same color) then such a QR code should survive being made fully symmetrical.

The above is a simplification, though, since, generally speaking, error correction in QR codes operates on blocks and not whole codes. In practice it also may or may not be possible to generate a sufficiently symmetrical code in the first place, let alone one with the specific content you want.

[1] See http://imgur.com/YMNIsgc. The red line show the diagonal, the green arrows point out pairs of symmetrical pixels.

[2] http://archive.is/20120915/http://www.tec-it.com/de/support/...
NFC Hardware Hackathon by Tagstand (YC S11)
AdBrite. As extensive and reliable.
Meh, people will complain, and then they will get over it, just like every other iteration of Facebook so far.

No one uses G+. I'm relatively technical, and have 40-odd friends there, and the last post was from December 2012 (and the one before that? July!).

The problem with Google and social networking is that social networks initially catch on by being 'cool'. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pintrest - they were all initially cool, and got that market right. G+ has never been cool (nor, in my opinion, is Path). If an app is used by a small group of people because it's cool, then it will grow. If it's used by a group of techies because it's better, it will grow until (at most), it covers the entire subset of techies. G+ isn't going anywhere, at least until there's a major rebrand.
I don't like discussing my salary history. When it comes up, I tell prospective employers 'don't be nosy.' If they can't evaluate your ability without knowing what you were paid elsewhere, then they don't know how to evaluate you and are just hiring based on confirmation bias. If they're insistent, grill them with questions about their company balance sheet.
I love how the pro-government mindset sees even casual jokes at the expense of governments as "blaming the government".
Which statements are you referring to?
Whether chronological makes sense is a product of the number of times you log in and the number of 'friends' you have (and the number of posts they make).

I have 140 friends. I log in a couple of times a day. I have filtered all their crap. I want chronological order.

If I had 1000 'friends' who posted all day, then I would want a way more filtered and special-sauced feed.
At first I agreed with you, but then I realized that I'd be stuck on a desert island AND I'd feel stupid.
Show HN: A JavaScript only waveform generator
Decide how much you will sacrifice. If you can get away with asking for 50, then seceding to 45, you will have done alright. I usually try to increase by 4-8k. Depending on responsibilities of course.
If they want 24hr contact than its an min 55k.
I am interested to know what makes you believe they move quickly. Do you follow an internal blog or know engineers? From the items the two other people posted it does seem that they post quite a bit but most of it seems to be about how facebook works internally or items their employees are doing for other people (AMAs).

I'm not sure I agree with your second statement in this context but I do agree with it generally in the sense that it is harmful. Obviously if one never releases a product but runs through the rolling internal releases of redoing items they've already done, then that can lead to an terrible negative-feedback loop. For a company that is well-established, however, I'm not sure the same rules apply. You don't maintain success by iterating on your existing product offering and instead need to rely on either simplifying, speeding up or offering new products/features to your clients.

One could argue that they are attempting to find alternative revenue source in these rewrites, which would be a valid argument and one I could understand, unfortunately I am not able to either confirm or quell that suggestion.
The Joy of Hyper-Rapid Development
And out of business ;-)
JAXB and java.util.Map
That would make sense but I wonder why. It is the minor updates that might be more interesting than "we've redone X".
I base my statement on what the NY Times publishes on its op ed pages, not on what it provides in its guidelines. I would certainly prefer that the pieces be better reported.
> Has anyone else experienced a similar situation? Am I in a no-win scenario? Can or should I stop the portions of the job that go above and beyond? How can I bring this to a peaceful resolution without delivering an ultimatum?

I saw family businesses of friends lose people who've worked with them for years without them telling them anything, maybe because those people experienced what you're experiencing. They would always tell me this bit: "we wish they approached us and talked, or at least some heads up that they got a new job".

You've hit a wall in your career, you're relying on spoken word from men instead of signed contracts - which is quite dangerous for your career path. Unless you're in it to actually develop and grow a long and deep relationship with the people, not the company, talk with them.

They've talked you into this position and you didn't sign anything, I think it's fitting to also talk to them as well, just tread tactfully. 10 years and that new "role" is enough to assume that they've come to embrace you as a key person in their father/son company and they would, hopefully, professionally hear you out.

You'll need to include them into your thought process. If you were to stop portions of the job on your own, they'll be quite surprised and it'll put you in really bad light. I mean, you've been working cleanly for 10 years and you suddenly changed after those months into the "new role", then they'll know something is amiss.

Also note that if you look for another job without telling them anything, it also puts you in a bad light. If they've slowly come to embrace you as family during those 10 years, they'll want to know why you're leaving.
Possibly useful: https://github.com/superjoe30/node-minecraft-protocol/

Or even https://github.com/superjoe30/mineflayer/
Because it is completely reasonable for providers to give you a locked phone for a price subsidized by a 2 or so year contract. Nothing stops you from buying an unsubsidized, unlocked phone.
Leap Motion and Double Fine team on Dropchord, give air guitar skills an outlet
Everything you said is completely sane. With that said :

EA's SimCity 5 (the newest release) stores towns and character profiles on a per server basis, meaning 'US West 1' and 'US West 2' are different. You must even re complete the forced tutorial if changing servers.

It's unclear what parts of are being offloaded to the servers. Possibly only the 'global economy' stuff, along with other 'social' features. A client can be disconnected for 20-30 minutes and maintain a stable game until the client forces the eventual disconnection "Because a connection to Origin cannot be maintained". Strange for the gameplay to not noticeably change when disconnected from the machines that are supposedly running simulation for you..
The web version did not work on Metro IE10 on a Surface Pro. It didn't recognize my touches.
Topix sees traffic growth due to political focus
Yes, but the find command will only affect directories (-type d).
The degree from Stanford and the job at Meebo were definitely what got the attention - not the skills listed.

Recruiters are heavily biased on what school you went to and which companies you have worked for.