skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where companies like Sift interest me is moving from a place where a system determines whether or not it believes a charge is fraudulent to a place where you evaluate the likelihood that an individual transaction is fraudulent. And they're absolutely right that individual components are going to lead to tons of false positives and then eventual end-gaming of their countermeasures.

As an example, in the implosion following the dot-com boom, it was almost impossible for denizens of many Eastern European and African countries to buy things online because the incidence of fraud attributed to their country was high enough that the fraud officers at many online retailers wouldn't chance it. I have a friend who lived in Romania who had a credit card that used my address in the US and frequently required me to ship stuff for him because no companies would ship directly to him. He loves the modern era of fraud evaluation, because while his country is weighted negatively, his use of a respected international bank, an IP address in the same area as his billing address and purchase history with many online companies has greatly reduced his level of hassle due to false positives alleging that he's a fraudster.
I think the answer is rather straightforward and is hinted in other encounters - eagles are getting involved as a last resort, to maintain the balance of good and evil. They are seen as the open messengers of the divine power, and aren't getting involved when the balance can be maintained by other means. So since there was a way to bring the ring to Mordor (even though an extremely hard one), eagles didn't interfere.

I.e. it can be seen as a way to preserve the potential for choice between good and evil. Open and obvious involvement of the divine diminishes such potential, so it happens only when really necessary.
Yes but (ugh, sorry for the cliche) you're missing the forest for the trees.

The issue is not that Tolkien didn't know of airplanes or of aerial warfare. But his most indelible memories of World War I was that of ground campaigns, and even though planes were used in WWI and reputations made (such as that of the Red Baron), they were by and large a fringe part of what comes to mind, at least compared to the introduction of mustard gas and machine guns.

The gap between knowing of something and experiencing something can be quite large. If you hired me to write a novel about conquering adversity through sport, I'd probably write something about basketball, a sport I don't really play but watch and keep tabs on on a regular basis. I would never to think to use soccer as a plot point, even though it's apparently the most popular sport in the world and it's not too hard for me to look up stories/information about soccer today. Sometimes you just go with what you know.

And keep in mind there's a decent lag between introduction of technology and the mainstreaming of technology. Before flight became an integral component of war, Tolkien and everyone else had seen and studied war exclusively through the mindset of land and naval warfare.
I just think the basic idea is to keep things as separate as possible, to keep complexity down. Just encapsulate things OOP-like, hide the guts, and provide a clean access API to them. That makes it manageable.
I loathe 'Verified by Visa'. I changed credit cards so that I can avoid it.

It's thoroughly stupid and broken.
You're right that it's not proper A/B test, so it may be a case that correlation doesn't imply causation. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of research published with rigorous A/B testing for this kind of thing. If any of you out there would like to run an A/B test (and have us help detect fraud if you're worried about increases there), I'd love to help!
Did Shutting Down Megaupload Impact Digital Movie Sales?
You miss the point. His point is that if his grandfather died at 80yrs old. He has a good chance of living up to 80 too.
News for hackers.
I'm not sure. I haven't closely studied the difference between each algorithm. My guess would be that sort -u would perform better as the data set gets larger with a good block size setting because it does do an external sort. Cardinality would also affect the performance. If the unique set handily fits in memory, an external sort on a large data set wouldn't be very efficient.
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Which games? Please be specific.
You are just changing the metric of measurement to come to your conclusion. The OP said "throughput is closer to disk that memory" which your own numbers, 20 GB/s vs 500 MB/s vs 160MB/s line up very well with, a ratio of 400:1 vs 3:1. You counter with "characteristic size is closer to memory than disk".

You mention that characteristic size is the crucial parameter, but isn't that only the case when you are only considering a single storage medium? Since you always have memory, wouldn't a caching strategy between memory and SSD provide superior performance compared to only worrying about how the data is formatted while on the SSD?

Overall I would agree that SSD's have similar seek performance to RAM, where you can live with fragmentation, but I think the OP's point that there throughput is barely better than a disk is still valid.
Thanks. Which usb graphic card do you use and are you happy with it?
cd `find -name foo`
One way or another, that's true of any terminal. The shell sees characters, not keystrokes.
Big Data is in the driver’s seat at Hertz
Maybe they had a budget set for servers then now that that budget wasn't enough they are running through the hoops to get that budget increased and trying to work with what they have in the mean time.

That or they don't have an easy way to add more hardware to the mix and they weren't set to scale like you said.
I think you're confusing centralization of project control with centralization of domain names.
I just tested out the iPhone key/secret using the script here [1] and it worked perfectly. It'll probably bump my actual iPhone client off though I'm assuming.

[1] https://gist.github.com/tcr/5108489/download#
other free drafts/full open content books

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/273ASpring10/IntroM...

http://alex.smola.org/drafts/thebook.pdf

http://www.p-value.info/2012/11/free-datascience-books.html

http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/textbook/090113.pdf
(webserver's on verge of falling over, maybe we can stagger requests)

and i think some others are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672930
Feels very outdated.

1. Use zsh, not bash. AUTO_PUSHD, CORRECT_ALL and tons of other options make some tricks redundant. Also, the zle M-n and M-p are more useful than C-r imo.

2. Use tmux, not screen.

3. Use z (https://github.com/rupa/z), not j.py.

4. Use cron, not at. Or even systemd timer units, if you're so inclined.

5. Use public-key authentication and keychain, not password-based SSH.

6. Don't send emails from command-line naively; you have no control over the headers. Use git-send-email or similar.

7. Consider using something slightly more sophisticated than Python's SimpleHTTPServer to share files/ folders. One example: woof (http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/woof.html)
This is a perfect example of Google's absolute failure at marketing docs/apps.

If this had been rolled out as a feature in Apple Pages, we'd have seen it demonstrated on stage, even if only for a moment, and given an easy to remember name (Pages with "Cloud Complete", Pages with "Net Functions", etc.). There would have been deserved oohs and ahhs. It would have been widely reported on and helped ship units.

Google buries the lede and thus misses another great opportunity to show off a really neat feature.
The Good, Racist People
Clearly the answer is #11, and there are two ways to see this. First (and most evocatively, I think) is the drug metaphor: the effects of the Ring are cumulative, and they also grow stronger in proximity to Orodruin. We can model the Ring as an involuntary opioid dispenser that is certainly harming Frodo's body cumutively. But, even more sinisterly, it's dosage is increasing in proximity to Mt. Doom. Clearly, if Frodo approaches Orodruin with high velocity, his "dose" of the Ring's power will become very, very high, and he will OD.

The second way to see this is a physics metaphor. In this case we model the Ring's action as a spring pushing away from Orodruin. Frodo uses his will to compress the spring. Each step he takes requires work. Frodo can only expend energy at a more-or-less fixed rate[1] (which is nicely called will power, and captures the same notion of work-over-time), so, as expected, his progress toward Mt. Doom slows considerably as the opposing force increases. (I would add that consuming nothing but lembas made the final leg of the trip even possible).

So, an eagle ride would have either a) resulted in Frodo overdose, or b) forced Frodo's mind to exceed it's capacity for work, snapping it and either killing him or letting the Ring take over.

[1] http://psyserv06.psy.sbg.ac.at:5916/fetch/PDF/10978569.pdf
Wait. There are people who don't bill for meetings?

I understand not charging for the initial meeting where we figure out if we're going to be able to work together, but after that if I'm in a meeting with the customer then it's billable.

That's part of the reason for charging by the hour. An hour of my time is worth X dollars, if the customer wants to pay that so that I can listen to he and his business partner argue about spending money to get more whiteboards in the meeting room (true story) then that's their choice.
Show HN: A better way to monitor web apps
Hey guys,

We're excited to reach Beta milestone with our web app monitoring service. By posting here, we're seeking to get some feedback from you.

So, why QABot? Why another monitoring service?
We believe in Continuous Regression Testing. We are sure that continuous app validation reduces downtime and helps avoid disasters. QABot uses real browser and gets the monitoring as close as possible to real usage. At it's core, QABot is based on Selenium, an open source web browser automation tool. When we say monitoring, we mean more than checking http statuses and response times, we mean Continuous Validation of web apps, of rules defined by you using Selenium IDE.

To get started you need an account and a valid Selenium IDE test case (*.html file). Once it's uploaded we'll run it for you and notify if anything goes wrong.

URL: http://qabot.net

Thank you.
You cannot write an article like this if you cannot first write an article on Python's warts

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202012909/http://www.amk.ca/...

http://www.rittau.org/python/warts

in fact I would love a warts wiki for frameworks, libraries and more. Python or not. Its important to have these debates out loud.
Here's a tip if you care at all for International payment:

DON'T RELY ON ZIP CODE ALONE

For one, you don't know the different formats of zip codes around the world

Second: not all countries have Zip Codes. Like Ireland, for example.

See here: http://www.google.ie/about/jobs/locations/dublin/
"Dublin 4" is the "Zip code"

About the issue of matching addresses, it seems that the payment processors can't do a fuzzy matching (not sure why), so if your address is "P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney" and you typed "42 P Sherman Wallaby Way Sydney" you're denied the transaction
Fixed. Sadly there are no C++ jobs yet :-(
> why not just append the security code

It may be an extra layer of protection related to getting the credit card number via seeing or taking a picture of the front of the card, having it on the back helps improve security from that aspect.
There's also an enhanced version of 'Verified by Visa' and 'SecurePay': at your bank you order OTP calculator/card reader and for every online purchase with your credit card, you are prompted for OTP passcode. This card reader costs about 30 euros. Mine looks like this: http://www.vasco.com/products/client_products/card_reader_di...
> so I’m not saying they can’t make great cofounders. What I am saying is that working at one of these companies doesn’t come close to qualifying someone to be a technical cofounder, and in some ways, it makes them worse

That's not what I get from the sensational title..
Linode Nextgen: The Network
Show HN: Pantastic.co - Do Something with those iPhone Panoramas
Even if you do need to collect some of that information (such as the address if you need to ship a product), several of those fields still remain redundant.

Notably, you should never ask for "credit card type"; the credit card number already tells you that. I like the forms that just ask for a credit card number and then show the computed card type's logo once you've filled it in.

You can also automatically compute the city and state from the zip code, but that requires you to ask for the zip code first, which does break user expectations somewhat.

And please, don't ask for "First Name" and "Last Name" unless you specifically need them separated for some reason; just ask for "Name".
Nice, I've been seeing those badges around
Does it ever get the types wrong? Just curious, I assume one wouldn't want to see the kind of code where VS gets the types wrong.
The device itself is pretty solid, and there are several other companies working on 3D motion detection (such as Intel[1], who has the lofty aim of replacing single webcams with dual webcams.) I think this definitely has a shot at augmenting computer interaction.

[1] http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/325946...
could they anesthetize the ringbearer, fly him over in one of those super secret nighthawk choppers, and give him the ol heave ho into the chasm?
IP based "fraud" detection is fucking annoying.

I live in the UK and want to have stuff shipped to family in the US. I've had vendors of all sizes turn away my business because either they didn't like my IP or wouldn't let international addresses order at all.

Amazon(.com) has literally earned themselves thousands in additional sales because they happily accepted my UK payment to a US address without fuss or hassle.

You might say this is a niche situation but money is money, and I've had lot's of small vendors lose out because they were "US only!"

I now also have a "flower guy" because they're the only one in the city who will do international flower orders...

PS - Specific example, NewEgg, wanted to buy a several hundred dollar laptop - couldn't. Used Amazon instead.
Surface Support regarding Microsoft Surface escalation
What works for one company may not be acceptable or optimal to other companies. I think the biggest insight is that you should measure these things and see what approach earns you the most money, taking chargebacks into account.
Most of these forms are more complicated because of tax codes and such. If I don't know your name or your address, I can't adequately assess whether I should be collecting sales tax. Failing to collect and report sales tax can come with very hefty fines.

There's a whole bunch of other valid reasons too. If there's a problem, it's nice being able to actually contact your customer. Most businesses need to be able to produce receipts, with some data needed to even count as a receipt ("you were charged X on Y" via email -- which you may not have anyway -- usually doesn't cut it).

And I'd love to see the data on this, but if someone has gotten to the point where they've decided to purchase and are presented with fields that are pretty standard just about everywhere else, I suspect abandonment rate is rather low. The pros just seem to outweigh the cons on this minimalism debate.
By the way, cperciva's blog is also generated by a shell script called "blogsh." Pretty similar to OP's here, except the templating is external rather than built into the script.

I got a copy by request back in 2008 -- good stuff.

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2005-09-12-blogsh.html
Dave. My immediate family, wife, and grandma use path for basically our entire communications. We love it, brought us closer together.

One product note. I like path because it is only my immediate family, so the suggesting friends thing is a little annoying (because I think it will be less valuable to me of I add more people).
Nice articulation of what I was thinking but didn't get out.
Slackware-current is basically as stable as Fedora is at any given time so it's hard to really discourage its use.

Honestly, Slackware is almost a RHEL/Fedora type ecosystem when just taking about official packages. Slackware-current gets new stuff, Slackware releases only get bug fixes, and not too many of them at that.
I don't know Marijn's hourly rate, but perhaps one or two hours face-to-face on Skype?
Making an assumption that there will always be 'something else' that they can to to earn a living is just an assumption too. Attempting to find an optimal social solution before the unemployed riot and burn the factories is a good idea.
What makes the security code (CVV) different from just having more digits is that you (the site/merchant) not allowed to store it permanently in your database. You can keep it in-memory for up to 15 minutes while authorizing the transaction.

That means in theory, if the merchant's credit card database gets hacked, the fraudsters will get access to the credit card numbers but not the CVV.

In practice, the rules aren't obeyed as strictly as they might, so you can easily find credit cards with CVV on the black market.
Shocking (in Pictures) Why You're Fat
I'm also pushing out a rubymotion app in the next week. Its hard to estimate how much time it saved me but it definitely made building the app a much more enjoyable experience.
(author here) Yeah, there are a lot of such tools, and they can be invaluable. In my experience, though, if you're working with a large, complex system, including pieces like Ruby and OpenSSL which do some grody tricks internally, they'll flag lots of false positives and noise, and it takes a lot of work to get a development environment where they work well.

Also, we weren't yet sure whether this bug was reproducible in development/QA, or was only triggerable in production, so using techniques that worked directly on the running image was attractive.
Not to beat a dead horse, but this is what really concerns me about iOS. It isn't that these hooks are missing, it's that Apple has a vested interest in never providing them.

Google has a similar interest, but has provided them in Android anywyay. The lack of an Intents system in iOS is annoying, and I'm concerned we'll never see one added.
You sure you replied to the right comment? I was merely disagreeing with the assertion by btilly that airplanes were only used during the day in WW1. :-)
I've gone through this book. I found it useful for theory, but not useful for gaining an appreciation of how the models work in practice. Most practitioners will appreciate a more applied book than this one.
Facebook's New Feed
As soon as it started to have a few GB swapped performances started to be simply too poor to be acceptable.

Acceptable is a fuzzy standard. Different applications have different needs, and not all applications require thousands of transactions per second. I'd presume there is an I/O rate below which the performance remains stable. Do you know what this rate is, and how it compares to transfer speed or latency of the SSD?
I noticed that Qt programs were less likely to use sub-menus, probably for this reason.

It's doing something; doing "nothing" is what Bootstrap does. But Qt 4 actually seems to go out of it's way to be unpredictable.

_____
|item1|_______
|item2|item2.1|
|item3|item2.2|
|item4|

If I drag my cursor from item2 to item2.2 through item3 qucikly, there's clearly a delay, as I see item2.2 get highlighted, but then the submenu disappears, and it selects item3. However, if I overshoot and drag the cursor out of the menu altogether, it leaves item2.2 selected.

But then I think it does something with the angle it is moving at to make that sometimes not work.

The behaviour is complex and unpredictable, which is different than nothing.
In theory, that is a shared cost amongst all their competitors.
Isn't the Third Age of Middle Earth the Age of Men? The Elves weren't intervening in a significant way, so why should the Eagles? I always figured that Gandalf chose this way (though he may not have allowed it to be viewed as him choosing it) because it really was the responsibility of Man (presumably Hobbits are thrown in with that lot) to resolve the issue.
Though that's not strictly a glob, but brace expansion (it will expand to all the numbers in that range regardless of whether or not files with those names exist). bash does have 'shopt -s extglob', which enables a number of useful globbing extensions, though I don't believe there are any numeric ones among them.
I have purchased stuff on sites that have greatly simplified their payment process to the point I did not need to type anything at all! I click "Checkout"; the site displays a QR code; I scan it with my smartphone, which decodes it and prompts "Send 0.123 BTC to xxx?"; and I click "OK". Done.

This is how the purchasing experience looks like with Bitcoin which, for merchants, solves the fraud problem. Hence buyers do not need to give any billing information.
Thanks for bringing the topic up, I always wondered why some sites ask me for only my ZIP next to the CC number, but never really got into finding out why.
sigh, and where are you going to send your invoices to? or is your plan to issue invoices for the costumers ip's. I am sure the tax authorities will love that.
I always used to use Python as a metric of the quality of a developer. PHP on the resume - Meh. Python on the resume - now there is someone who cares enough about unusual languages to try one out, likes it and follows through. A strong developer.

Of course thats a bit harder now, I would look for a functional language on there these days.
Restoration of rights after a felony conviction is completely dependent on the state where the conviction occurred. All states have a different process and some, like Florida, have intentionally been making it more difficult in recent years for felons to have their rights restored.

Further, there is no process for the restoration of your rights if convicted of a Federal felony outside of a Presidential pardon, which is what Aaron was facing.
I think you need elements of light interference and diffraction for something to be a hologram.

It's essentially a way to "record" light the same way you can record sound in grooves or magnetic tape.
I wonder how well the terms correlate with regards to search traffic. I often build up a list of search terms in the google adwords tool and see the traffic estimates for them and related keywords for evaluating niche markets.
As someone who has, at one time or another, failed at some or all of these points, I wish I'd seen this before I started out.

It's tempting to devalue yourself when you're new to freelancing or consulting in order to get business. But I'd take it all back and do it the right way after what I've seen.

The first time you make a serious mistake or don't get paid because you didn't ask for payment up front, you learn the hard way that business is, in fact, brutal and you don't get anywhere by being accommodating or nice; you can only go far by being professional and proactive.
Facebook's new feed: Less Clutter, More Stories
Go London User Group
Single-item submenus inevitably occur at some point if the submenu is filled out programatically (as smackfu pointed out). A list of recently open files is a good example. While it's possible to move the single item into the parent menu, that would make the menu confusingly inconsistent.
This is off topic but I absolutely love George Carlin. Very smart guy and well before his time. Just went back and listened to his seven words bit, still just as hilarious.
Titanium-built RideMatch App - Are we solving your Rideshare problems?
Jolicloud rebrands its unified cloud platform as Jolidrive