skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sigh

PayPal is (still) not evil. It charges too much, and does some shitty things, like all companies.

It's ridiculous to jump to conclusions based off a blog post that doesn't even post a copy (redacted if necessary) of the allegedly offending communication.
>This is somewhat a flawed argument on Paypal's part. If a user chooses to obscure their connection via a VPN for security purposes but has supplied the appropriate identification needs to Paypal, what is the problem here?

Well, they don't want people to use VPNs/tunneling and such because they are being used time and again to mask the country of origin, IP etc. They can even block your account for logging in from another country that you're visiting (they've done that to me and ask for photo ids and such).

It's not about "security" or lack thereof, it's about stopping certain kinds of fraud and keeping certain tabs.

(Sure, a VPN may protect from other kinds of fraud, e.g MITM attacks and identity theft. But then again, most actual PayPal customers don't use VPNs, whereas lots of identity theft and fraud guys do).
Hire Recent Graduates, Or Their Parents?
I have a question for experts in Hoodie and/or other similar projects (like Meteor):

How are database connections managed? If every client (browser) basically talks nearly directly to the database, don't you end up with of thousands of database connections?

Large number of connections is not a problem by itself, and servers like nginx handle them well, but I am not aware of a database which will feel comfortable being exposed this way. MongoDB, for example, really starts struggling with 2K+ connections. PostgreSQL can barely handle a hundred.

Is this why CouchDB is used? Is connection pooling used on the server? Or maybe the connections are short-lived and never persistent? Basically, how does this work with large number (say, 10K) of concurrent visitors?

Thanks!
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad was written 50 years ago.
… and precisely how many users do you think know to do this? They might if it's happened before, been correctly diagnosed and explained before and it's obvious as soon as you open the file. It's more common, however, that the Excel bug only causes data loss or invalid results in a percentage of records and, when people notice it, it's corrected by hand.

If you need to do this a lot, generate xlsx - it's not that hard and there are decent libraries for most languages. Relying on users correctly setting column types every time is like making your daily commute depend on having airbags.
I changed jobs this way recently and it took ~6 months to receive a decision from USCIS.

Others have been done much quicker but I would be prepared to wait going this route, and also take USCIS's processing times with a grain of salt.

If the E-3 allowed for premium processing[1], portability[2] or the 240-day rule[3], I would try I-129 again otherwise I think I'll just apply for a new visa outside the US.

1: Pay an extra ~$1200 to hear back from USCIS in ~2 weeks.

2: Permission to start work for a new employer upon filing the I-129.

3: A 240 day grace period during which you may continue to work for your existing employer after your status expires.
Wow, thanks a lot for that, spot on!
s/Canada/Portland/

Our visa is easier to get. :) (if you're in the US)
You can add an apostrophe before the leading zeros, and the cell will keep the zeros and still be a number type.
Stiffer than Kevlar, thinner than paper Wonder material
Nope, it's still incredibly awful. Most of those thousands of lines aren't actually the grammer but the hand-written, full of exceptions, lexer. It has, if anything, gotten even worse thanks to allowing method selectors (the '.') to be placed on the next line, and the (key: value) syntax for hash args.

And all working active ports of Ruby use either the MRI lexer/parser verbatim or a mostly direct port of it. The JRuby port has the good graces to at least break the thousands of lines of lexing out into a few basic functions based on the first char of the token rather than leaving it in a giant switch statement, though.
>All in all, I'm not clear why we don't celebrate how empowering Excel can be to many business users

Sometimes we do.

Not all times.

This is one of those "not all times". In this instance we lament the misuse of Excel by business guys.
I started a white house petition to mandate federal agencies also provide plain-text data: http://wh.gov/MIXT
Thanks for responding - I've been wondering about this ever since I heard the story behind ZeroC. It adds a different sort of color to things, and shows that you were trying to help him reach his goal of doing a startup the whole time. Kudos.
Hmmm, might be very interesting for people running automated tests with browsers using ruby.
Because that's his handwriting. He is not a font.
Why not just use https:// ?

That way, if you load the file using file:// it will still work. Any downsides?
Even better, use `pdftotext` from the Xpdf package to turn it into text, so you skip the manual steps.

I do this will all my banking data - dump their PDF's in a folder, a script converts to CSV, then to ledger (cli accounting program) format.
As long as the underlying OS can provide file descriptors, CouchDB can handle the concurrent connections through the magic of Erlang, both persistent and shorter lived.

There are obvious limits to this, but the Hoodie architecture allows easy scale out (more DB servers and manual sharding, or a dynamo-like BigCouch, more workers etc.) that we’ll get to making use of once Hoodie apps become that big.
Who said anything about Democrats? It'd be nice if he simply didn't govern like a complete imbecile. He's raided the state's emergency funds and sold off state assets in order to prove that he can balance a budget, and has in effect put the state in a worse position than it was under the previous administration, and THAT'S saying something.
Ever shop at one? The layout was really bad. Then to top that off where you found signs proclaiming the low price and such you still had other signs indicating discounts!

Comparing them to Sears, Sears practically screams good deal. Its just up to you to figure out if its not. Plus Sears has Craftsman which sets it apart from other Mall retailers. Not sure what JC Penny has.

The only good job I will give them is, of the few sales people I met there they at least would help me. That stood out because in Macy's I was ignored even when I asked - apparently men are not allowed to shop at the mall or certain stores.
People are attracted to discounts because people love maximizing value. The standing-in-the-grocery-aisle, blink-of-an-eye assumption that people make is that the value of any item on sale for its original price is equal to the value of any other item on sale for its original price, meaning that items with the biggest discounts offer the best values.
Google Babel Screens... again.
Mobile compatibility can be extremely important depending on the type of restaurant and where it's located. On a website I did for a restaurant located in a tourist destination, mobile and tablet devices account for about 55% of all visits.
What did you expect? VPN is a favorite tool for all sorts of frauds.

If your true IP is obscured by a VPN this is just a red flag for PayPal or any other payment processor. Especially if you happen to share the same IP as someone committing actual fraud - which is very much likely if you are using public proxies. Very few legitimate customers pay over VPN.

Do not use VPNs if you do not want to be flagged or blocked.

EDIT1: In response the comments, no I am not sarcastic at all. The number of legitimate VPN users (among general Internet population, not HN) is miniscule and does not justify the financial risks involved. If you are using VPN you are seen as hiding something and flagging/blocking you from sensitive transactions is an obvious response.

EDIT2: I am talking about public VPNs that can be anonymously abused by anyone - where you'd be likely sharing IPs with criminals. By all indications that's what OP was using if he wanted to hide himself. If you use VPN from work or coffeeshop you'll be identified by some innocuous-looking residential / corporate IPs.
I think that's more a sign of inexperience than a character flaw. The potential benefits of a Big Rewrite are obvious. The potential pitfalls are not.
There's nothing left to say except the people who hired Johnson are idiots. He was successful at marketing a high-end brand as high-end and had no clue on how to tactfully re-brand a company that had been around for generations. Especially considering it didn't need to be re-branded.

Do you know why Nike doesn't sell shoes in Target or Walmart? You'd dilute the brand. So they bought Converse. The opposite is true as well, however. You certainly can cause brand confusion where your old customers don't like the changes and your new higher-end customers - well, they are still shopping at Nordstrom.

Every step he made was fraught with clear consequences. Getting rid of discounts. Over-streamlining stores to a point they look partially empty. Trying to bring Target's successful ideas (like their mini-boutiques) into JCP just on a bigger scale. And trying to steal Martha Stewart from Macy's was just plain dumb, that's going to cost the company a lot of money.

The board should've hired a CEO from the ranks of Target, Macy's, or Nordstrom instead of Apple. The high-end tech marketing didn't translate to middle-tier consumer shopping marketing.
Firefox saves all assets to a _files directory then fixes the URLs to point in there.

If you really, really want to use //:

busybox httpd -p 8080
>they're not in countries like Australia or New Zealand or any other first world country that needs some Paypal competition

I guess that's reason why Paypal seems to endure beyond reason in spite of repeatedly showing the middle finger to customers. We in the US are relatively well off in terms of Paypal alternatives, but this is simply not true for a lot of other places. Plus Paypal has entered the status of being the 'default' for a vast majority of the non tech populace.

The good thing is, hackers are often the canary in the coal mine in terms of signaling future preferences of the masses, so we can hope Paypal will either reform itself, or die.
I can't wait until this launches in my area. The reasons I want it are basically the original reasons Cable TV came to be and precisely what they advertise. I hope that my use case isn't unusual because I actually need the very long cable attached to rabbit ears somewhere other than where my vacation home is located.

I have a vacation home on the US side of Lake Huron. I can receive two stations OTA... Canadian (CBC and CityTV? I think). To receive those, I installed a couple of bow tie antennas on a poll ten feet above the roof of the second floor. It was a pain to install, performed poorly and looked tacky. A storm solved that for us. I'm not climbing on that ladder again. DirecTV/Dish aren't an option due to the tree line. Comcast offers service for about $50 a month that includes 20 fuzzy analog channels. The signal was unwatchable despite the installers insistence that it was "fine" which ended up being downgraded to "the best we can do". No competition means no expectation of quality service (I'm not knocking it, just stating the circumstances).

Surprisingly, DSL seems to be the only thing we can get up there that performs at speeds I was used to at home say, 6 years ago, which are fine for 3 "HD" streams from the usual internet streaming providers.

I have no problem with just using Netflix (and Hulu/Plex/etc). My parents, however, love sports/local news/the comfort of what they consider "normal TV viewing" at night. We tried SlingBox App + iPad + AppleTV but it disconnected too frequently due to upload speeds being lacking in the home the box was installed. This would eliminate that issue, and would provide the stations the rest of my family wants to watch on the weekends.
It's apparently "Sold Out" now, but the image is still the same.
I couldn't find that addressed in the article, could you be a little more specific about where?
Even if this was meant as an critique to Git, I (some kind of a Git-evangelist) enjoyed it a lot. I even learned something new!

The critique is quite well established. One needs to understand these quirks to be an enlightened Git user.

However we make up with them, as the overall gain from Git's approach to version control is so big.

Some things could be improved though, like introduce something like "git branch --current" to avoid the Hobgoblin...
HearSay:  Anonymous and Confidential P2P File Sharing
This kind of reminds me of Weev's AT&T hack. Changing some values to obtain information that should else-wise not be easily obtainable. A pretty big mistake to make on Apple's part here, but it's good they took the page down because of the issues and above all, no edgy hacker stealing information and leaking it was required to publicise the security issue, who would have thought?
It's not silly at all, think of how many people have done amazing things for the future of humanity on the basis of "this sucks, it should be better". Identifying deficiencies and looking for ways to improve them is the ethos of building a product. I don't see why this concept should be excluded when it comes to human rationality, which in many ways, is an extension of education, which is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped.
Kayaking through an active volcano
There is a way to successfully appeal to a broad range of consumers. Target is a master of this. Johnson wasn't or at least felt the scorched earth policy was going to get it done faster.

Too much, too fast for the JCP core consumer.
I meant that if I were designing a general-purpose retain-mode GUI library or 3d engine from the ground up and wanted to incorporate his principles as much as possible, how could I do that? Maybe a retain-mode approach is just inherently (too?) complex?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your answer is in reference to using such a library, and I can certainly see how my question implied that, so sorry for the confusion if this is the case. Thanks for your answer regardless.
Views are meant to be transient and just a step above the lifecycle of the html elements themselves.
I think you're reading too much into it. If China does standardize on a Ubuntu derived distro with their own specs and it gets released for public use (and by that, offices both private and government sector will also begin using it with government taking precedence due to the ruling party influence), that by default causes it to be pushed as the standard in homes as well. You wouldn't want to keep disparate OSes around; it's just too much of a hassle for most folks.

"Force" in that context means proliferation by standardization at work, trickling down to home, not in terms of "use this or else..."

Now I don't know to what degree console adoption fares in China, but if it's high enough, PC gaming won't deter enough users to prevent it actually becoming a viable alternative on par with Windows at some point.
Firefox 22 and earlier do not show a user-visible warning, but they do log bright red "[Mixed Content]" warnings in Firefox's Developer Console.

Firefox 23 displays a grey shield icon in the address bar for mixed content.
The Grantham Grocer Fallacy
PayPal is evil. They're not evil because of what they charge, they're evil because they treat their customers with utter disregard and contempt.

It appears there's an internal lottery that all their customers play without their knowledge. If your numbers come up, the fuckup fairy will come visit your account and you will have little to no recourse.
Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
The distinction here is that Hoodie is supposed to free you from dealing with servers, but that is currently limited to scenarios where you have users with uniform access privileges and no concerns about users messing around with their database information. So until they add modules most projects will have to get down and dirty in the end if they want to attach any kind of privileges to users. In both points 1 and 2 you need to have some server side logic beyond Hoodie.
In our defense, the last two presidential elections have shown a willingness of the country (particularly among younger voters) to begin to move away from some of the mistrust in government.

Sometimes people just have to learn things the hard way.
I really wish I couldn't say this literally, but I've been witness to that comic strip in real life.

A few years ago I was asked to build a database in Excel which would import spreadsheets that clients submitted, accumilate all that data then spit out a whopping great big CSV file every month. And the most insulting thing of all was that I had to build this abomination using VBA macros so I could guarantee that the CSV output was clean enough to be exported into an Oracle RDBMS we also ran. I frequently raised the point that we should be running all of our databases on Oracle, but I was refused every time (I could write a whole essay on their dumb rational behind this, but that's another rant entirely).

So off I set writing one of the most complicated Excel macros of my life (and wondering what I'd done in a past life to be lumbered with such moronic management). I wrote every piece of data cleansing I could imagine knowing full well that the spreadsheets our clients would be submitting are bound to have had their formatting messed around with (and trust me, I tried everything I could to lock that template spreadsheets down). Yet, and without fail, every month at least 10 spreadsheets would be rejected from my macro's import routine because the data was so garbled that it was beyond cleansing.

Usually it was a simple job to fix the spreadsheets - or a simple phone call to the client where I verbally slapped them as much as I dared; vainly hoping that might serve as a warning to them that they shouldn't be cocking about with the layout of the template. Needless to say, it never had any affect.

However this one time I was completely baffled. The spreadsheet look fine at first glance, yet my routine rejected it. Sure, I couldn't click inside any of the cells, but the spreadsheet was locked from editing so that was to expected......or was it?

It turned out that the idiot who submitted that spreadsheet printed out their completed template, then scanned it in on a MFD (a scanner with bells and whistles). Then got that MFD to e-mail them a PDF of the printed page and now scanned page so that they could then embed that back into the fucking template.

All I asked them to do was fill a couple of columns of data then e-mail me the spreadsheet as an attachment. But nothing is too simple when you're dealing with users who think they understand computers.
I think that's for the investor visa, I immigrated as a skilled worker (points system)

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/ , currently you only need to prove 11k in savings and the other requirements seem pretty accessible to anyone imho.
"Do not use VPNs if you do not want to be flagged or blocked." I hope that was sarcastic.

I do understand that legitimate VPN users are probably a small percentage of Paypal total user base and that a large portion of frauders use VPN (I don't know what percentage of VPN users who paypal are trying to commit fraud, could be the majority, I don't know) But using VPN should cause you to get flagged. It has a very legitimate use. A lot of people use them when on the go to protect themselves while on wifi. I use a VPN all the time when I'm not at home (well aside from working at home which I do over vpn).

I don't see why I should expose myself to avoid being flagged.
It's kind of a steep move terminating his account. My Facebook account was almost hacked once because someone from an overseas IP tried logging in to my account. Facebook waited for me to login via my Australian IP address and alerted me to he fact and asked if it was me, I said no and I assume they blocked that IP. If security is such an issue, why couldn't Paypal ask the account owner if it was himself behind a VPN and to provide some identification documents?

I remember a little while ago having to supply some identifications documents to Paypal (scan of my passport, scan of my assigned credit card with most of the numbers blacked out, etc). If an account owner is willing to provide that information and is say from a country like the United States, Australia or the UK, then Paypal should lower their suspicions.

I can see where Paypal is coming from here. IP scanning is one of many criteria that determines if a user is potentially fraudulent (I've used Maxmind fraud protection before and it operates with similar criteria).
Oh, come off it. 18 year olds make bad career decisions all the time as they lack the experience and information that would help them making the right choice. Sometimes there is external pressure. Also, people change. And sometimes you realise halfway through your programme that your major is really not for you.
My publishing focused startup will be decloaking very soon, I've worked in the fiction side of publishing quite a bit. Non-fiction authors have it rough, they don't have the associations that educate writers about the business and contracts.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America are very active and have a lot of resources, such as sample contracts read it and you'll learn a lot
http://www.sfwa.org/category/sample-contracts/
They also run writer beware, which is the publishing worlds version of the BBB.
http://accrispin.blogspot.com/

What I will say is this, almost all publishers have you assign them the copyright for the entire term. Rights to a publisher are broken into specific blocks and some of those blocks can be carved out, others you'll never get. Indemnification is possible for fiction but rare in non-fiction because you know more about the topic than the publisher they can't know if you're giving bad advice.

Really I'd suggest you get an agent, they've invested thousands of hours understand how the publishing system works and know what is possible to push for in dealmaking. If you're getting invited to write books you can get an agent. I know of one older agent near the valley that was an engineer for DEC in the 1970's.
Is it possible that they are using a VPN service (as opposed to self hosted) and other users of said VPN service have committed fraud and they just drew a bad card in the IP pool pot luck?
Are you serious? This was revealed over two weeks ago and Apple fixed it that day, I believe. This isn't "new" and this doesn't exist any more.
Don't forget the crushing heat and humidity!
Tabs are great, until you try to explain to a non-programmer why your tool doesn't parse their file correctly, even though in the word-processor they're using as a text editor it looks identical to another file that parses correctly.
Hoodie can only promise to free you from worrying about the backend by providing one that you can just use.

The sharing module e.g. makes heavy use of server side logic and database security and access control features. The Hoodie frontend just makes it accessible to frontend devs.
When you press the "shut down" button on your computer, it is going into a soft shutdown state. I don't see the problem here. The On/Off icon should be exclusively used for things that physically sever the power source from the device, which no computers do to my knowledge.
For those worried, this is not a new exploit. Old news:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353155

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425153

As reported, it's been fixed:

http://www.zdnet.com/apple-fixes-dangerous-password-reset-fl...
The real WTF here is that people still use PayPal.
Jeff Bezos buys it for 15% above yesterdays closing price. Rebrands it as the Amazon Store®. What do I win?
HN is running like clockwork, I see. Soon, we'll have another post about how the Apple App Store policies screwed someone else over, complete with the usual hand-wringing and justifications from believers.

Why do people still use PayPal? This stuff is not news.