skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At that level it's similar tradeoffs. Consider what the code would look like if it were purely functional. In fact a good answer to your question would be for a thought exercise take a look at how XMonad is implemented in Haskell. That would be a completely different approach to the large, heavily coupled messes that OOP can sometimes lead to when modeling the state as mutable object members.
I think this is especially relevant when discussing things like this story from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513237

A competent programmer realizes that there's a reason for 'spaghetti code' and seemingly inefficient classes/methods/architectures—the real world (read: production) is rarely as pure as the programmer's conceptualized structures, and compromises lead to large code bases full of warts.

The key, I think, is to turn those warts into something beautiful. It can be done.
I don't see why I should expose myself to avoid being flagged.

Because it isn't worth PayPal's time to cater to you. Seriously, go and use a different provider.

I know that sounds incredibly flippant, but it's the reality- PayPal will stop blocking VPNs when it is financially prudent for them to do so. Of all companies, would you expect anything different from PayPal?
I didn't say that there aren't people in the process--but you shouldn't be letting emotions like righteous igdignation that someone didn't apologize enough dictate the decisions of a business if your goal is to make money. If you are running a company, either you're signing up to be one of those "economic rational actors" game theorists talk about, or you're signing up to fail.
I'm extremely skeptical. Nowhere in PayPal's terms of use does it mention restricting use of a VPN. The only similar restriction I can find is against using an anonymizing proxy which seems like a reasonable restriction.

However I'll take the author at his word for a moment. Judging from the content on the author's blog, I think it's fair to assume he lives in Europe (where PayPal is regulated as a bank). Where does his VPN reside? It's certainly possible that it resides in a region that is regulated differently. One could look at this situation similarly to how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, BBC, etc, block by region; not because they want to but because they have to. In the case of the mentioned sites, because of licensing terms, and in PayPal's case, because of financial regulations.
I think the name's great. I'll definitely remember it, and it's not obviously risque.
I believe you mean "abused" not adapted.

I spent most of last week cleaning up and replacing an email-the-Excel-file-around "solution" with one out-of-the-box sharepoint list. Fortunately, the change was mandated by someone with the knowledge to see that the Excel based "solution" was a horrible idea, and the power to enforce the replacement's use. Unfortunately, the data is now at the mercy of sharepoint, at least that problem rests on others.
Thanks for the shout out David!
If there were zero or one slashes there, we could use urls starting with a colon for the same purpose.
Exactly. This is part of the make me money now idea: you need some information from the printer to get back to using it, so to make you money, it has to first teach you what you need to know to use it. It doesn't have to bow and scrape while doing it; it just needs to get you back to it being useful.
Can you click a button in the notice to override the error and display the content anyways?

If not, this is going to be a colossal pain in the ass.
I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes more sense.

UPDATE: Here you go!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...
I followed your tutorial and got briefly hung up by an error saying that Canvas wasn't defined. Turns out I was running it on the newest version of Meteor, and in 0.6 they started putting local variables at the top level in an IIFE. Functions declared using the named function syntax (function name() { ... }) are locally scoped, as far as I know. I fixed it by changing it to Canvas = function() { ... }.

Other than that small problem, cool article, thanks!
I was doing that like a year ago. Now I have moved on to using "hipster" ironically.
Agreed.

If you have a website dedicated to chronicling just how badly you suck ( http://www.paypalsucks.com ) it probably means you're doing something very wrong.
The number of legitimate VPN users (among general Internet population, not HN) is miniscule...

VPN usage is increasing, not decreasing, even if as you claim, a "miniscule" group of users are using VPNs it's a dumb move by PayPal.

Many corporate environments require the use of VPNs for mobile equipment (laptops, phones, etc.). Now imagine a business that uses PayPal and requires the use of VPNs for all of their PayPal account managers.

The argument that most fraudsters use a particular technology so we should ban use of that technology is myopic at best.
One place that it could succeed is as an embedded browser in native apps. There is already traction for building "native" applications using HTML/CSS/JS and plenty of frameworks that bundle your web app into a native app. There's no reason they couldn't use a Ruby-aware (or Python-, Lua-, whatever-aware) WebKit fork instead and give the app maker more choices.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but I'm also not convinced it is a terrible one. I need to think about it more before I decide where I personally land, but my point is that there is absolutely a place for a tool like this.
Unfortunately, the vast amounts of medical research data is collected and stored in Excel "databases". Yes, you heard that right - Excel. The very studies that we use to inform clinical practice that we do when you get sick and come into hospitals are pretty summed up by that comic.
I hear their new technologically advanced nuclear missiles are powered by jQuery too. Can't wait for the inevitable Github repo.

function launchRocket(rocketid, amountToFire = 1) {

var theRocket = getRocket(rocketid);
var currentlyLaunching = false;
var rocketsCount = 0;

if (rocketStatus == fuelled) {
if (currentlyLaunching == false && rocketsCount <= amountToFire) {
currentlyLaunching = true;

var firedRocket = theRocket.fire();

if (firedRocket.status == 'success') {
alert('Rocket has been a success glorious leader');
}

if (firedRocket.status == 'explodedonlaunch') {
alert('Wait, my glorious leader I can explain.');
}

if (firedRocket.status == 'didntevenlaunch') {
alert('Glorious leader, wai.... Ahhhhh!');
}

rocketsCount++;
currentlyLaunching = false;
}
}
}
"We're checking for missed deductions and credits."
https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Account-limits-and-verif...

TLDR: It's against the legal agreement to access PayPal that way.
SmartTVs aren't even Android-before-iPhone, they're Windows Mobile.

I had a Windows Mobile handset, and while the hardware was fantastic, the user experience was horrific. That accurately describes any attempt to use the 'SmartTV' functionality on my Samsung BR/PVR box.
US Navy deploys combat laser in Persian Gulf
Unfortunately, this isn't free for the manufacturers, and most people are not going to want to spend the same (still less, more) on a TV with fewer features -- even if they'll never use them.
Adopting IPv6 Is A Corporate Business Issue
IE took a lead move in favor of security, kudos to them.

It seems like Chrome really forced the ecosystem to move towards auto-updates and sandboxing. Each of those have transition impacts for developers and publishers.

Mixed content though, I've got to imagine that's a hard area for Google to lead on, since its transition challenges primarily affect ad integration.

This follows on the heels of the "disable third party cookies by default" row. I'm wondering if a) Google's business interests will prevent them from being a first mover on security and privacy in browser development, and b) if other browsers will start exploring these issues just to force Chrome to make hard choices.
From the comments:

...I have uber security… and blocks against eavesdropping and MITM, and SSL and AES 256 encryption via an EFF sponsor, who runs a VPN… https://uwnthesis.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/paypal-terminated...

Looks like they were using a very public VPN that Paypal probably already had pre-flagged for fraud.
I'm a PHP developer who knows Python. I tried to learn Django awhile ago and to be honest I wasn't that impressed. Super leaky abstraction... nearly every single error message was something about string manipulation inside the Django code itself, with no reference at all to my own code. It made it totally impossible to learn by doing. Also, this was probably a result of my lack of experience with Django, but the way I was told to organize my Django project (with functionality kept in modules) felt very wrong in a web app (as opposed to a website) where all the pieces are interconnected. I ended up having only one custom module that would be totally unreusable for anything else, which made me question the point of putting it in a module at all.
Why conjecture when you can easily run the experiment?
Until I can walk into my local bank branch (or any of the hundreds of currency conversion stalls that dot London) and ask for a couple hundred satoshis, or deposit bitcoins direct into my bank account, bitcoin isn't ready to be a legitimate alternative currency, let alone an alternative to payment processors such as Paypal.
Dangit. I really liked shopping at the new JCPenny. Every price was rounded to the nearest dollar (and usually the nearest 5 dollar) and included tax. I could walk in, try the things on I needed, hand the cashier exact change, and get out, all without needing to do stupid coupon crap. I could buy jeans and shirts and the cognitive load was really low.

I liked not having to think really hard while clothes shopping. I liked it a lot. But I suppose a target market of "people who hate clothes shopping due to the artificially high cognitive load" is a pretty slim market segment.
* Disclaimer - I run Extreme Startups *

Accelerators are a great source of private capital that can be great social proof for angels - just make sure the one you choose / apply to are VC backed because those will be the ones that force you to think big and shoot for the moon.
Could you care to clarify which countries in Europe do that?
Never heard of that before.
Just to clarify something: the OP appears to be Rory Blyth, ex-Microsoft employee, living in Portland, OR, and American if I'm not mistaken.
Fingers crossed Mendeley keeps existing for the duration of my degree. It's a lifesaver.
> Many corporate environments require the use of VPNs

And if they do, you can be sure they aren't going to be using a VPN provider outside of the country to get around geolocation restrictions, or to mask the originating IP. They'll be sending their outside data _into_ a secure intranet, not back out into the general net.

Basically, the OPs only mistake isn't using a VPN, it's masking his original location, intentional or not. It's a stupid rule by PayPal, but it's not very surprising that they'd follow a "common patterns of fraud" checklist word for word. Thats what they do.
BTU = 'British Thermal Unit', the common unit for natural gas in Europe and often seen in the US as well.
Can you sort by the delta in monthly pageviews? Absolute change in rank offers little meaningful information. (I would assume is much easier to go from 10,000 to 5,000 than 200 to 100.)
Type by playing guitar
Ok, I see your point. On my earlier post, I was typing on my phone, but it comes off as rude where I was trying to be brief.

I understand that a CS degree would've made things much easier on getting a job, and I would've been offered a higher salary as well, I'm sure. As I said, that's why I don't ask for sympathy, I know full well that my path is probably the less traditional one. But even so I had plenty of hours of programming on the courses I took -- C/C++, Digital Electronics (programming FPGA boards, tinkering CPUs/APUs), not to mention that I had an 18 month internship -- which is where I learned about web dev -- and I designed two relational databases in previous part-time jobs. All of this came up during my various interviews, and I wasn't ever given a callback until I was. So I'd say there's an abundance of candidates, even if there's potentially a skill gap on those candidates it's a gap that's easily bridged, but too many employers don't want to invest any time training in their employees, which shouldn't be the norm in any industry, but is somehow acceptable in our current tech industry.
Thanks for putting this together.
Also if you can't get your hands on the data from 2012 maybe taking the launch date vs their current Alexa position and averaging this out to see their Alexa growth over their lifespan. That would be really nice to see.

Thanks again.
Perhaps, but there are per-transaction and daily limits on ATM withdrawals.
Because the experiment ends with explaining to a few fine officers of the law that no, you weren't trying to rob the bank, you were just doing an experiment.

Or plain not being let into the bank. Most banks (in the UK at least) will not let people covering their faces into the bank.
I like most of your lists and creativity, but this one isn't very helpful and it feels like you're reaching. After a site cracks the Alexa top 10,000, it becomes a lot harder to move up and should be worth a lot more on rankings.
Heroku has made it very easy for multiple developers to have custom, local environment variables with Foreman, and their gem doesn't necessarily have to be used with Heroku for local machines. [1]

We use Heroku exclusively, so they manage configuration variables for us, but adopting an environment-variable structure on any UNIX architecture should be reasonably straight forward.

The nice thing about this setup is that many "if ( development && developer_is_bob ) or staging" conditionals disappear, because your app just swallows in the environment-specific variables by magic. They also help avoid "oops-I-didn't-mean-to-check-that-in" errors: yesterday a client's Login with Facebook button was down for a few hours because the client's developer developer swapped out the omniauth config by hand, then committed the new Facebook app ID along with the rest of his changes. I've told him to use Foreman in the future, which would have nicely avoided the problem.

As to your first point, there's no reason you can't version-control your configuration files on your servers, but keep them in a separate repo which your juniors, open-source contributors, or the thief who ran off with your developer's computer don't have access to.

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile#developing-lo...
VPN'ing to your office isn't going to get your account flagged. PayPal isn't inspecting network data for signs of tunneling or something. They're banning people that connect from public anonymizing VPN services because they're used for attempted fraud on their service every single day.
Canadians can move to the valley with a visa but there are a lot of Canadians who want to stay in Canada.
I live in Waterloo and am a CS student and I have talked to hundreds of students who do not want to leave Canada, even if they are offered a very attractive package from a company simply because they like Canada. Myself being one of them.
Yes KIMBA, err.. I mean SIMBA.
HN is running like clockwork, but it's because everyone has become an entitled developer and not an actual entrepreneur that analyzes a business decision rationally.

Use PayPal or don't. Just don't expect them to let you use it anyway you want.
It's been a while since I was in the states, but last I saw most of the drive through ATMs had cameras pointed at where the user should be.
The first panel reminded me that Access exists. While I've been forced to dive into it on occasion (usually to do excavate some buried data), I can't say I've ever used it for anything productive (unlike Excel).

What's a good & defensible use case for Access? It always felt like a worst-of-both-worlds package both in terms of functionality as well as UI / UX.
Thank you, I will look into that. Sorry, forgot to upvote you...fixed!
How To Mine Bitcoins
Ha ha! Those non-programmers are so dumb! Good thing we're so much smarter and better than them!

(The irony of a three hundred word complaint about medium ignorance being rendered as a comic is the cherry on top.)
I don't think people would be any happier paying 10,000,000 satoshis for a pair of alpaca socks than they would 0.10 BTC. Some people in the community are pushing for mBTC (1/1000 BTC) which would give more readable prices (and probably spur another mini-bubble towards dollar parity).
Or it means you are a large company, or are in some way interesting. Google returns many hits for "Apple sucks," and "Amazon sucks," and "Linux sucks."

Seriously, if you don't have pages devoted to how you suck, it means you haven't done anything noteworthy
The problem here is that the TV hardware business is chicken feed compared to the TV content business. And while Apple is very, very good at negotiating with content owners, the money in TV is tied up in really, really complicated and retrogressive contracts, and the TV people perceive Apple as predatory, entirely missing the point of what happened to the record industry.
U.S. Navy Laser Test Takes Down Drone
I have a friend who works on some of those medical research studies. They are required to use Excel. It is a giant pain because it is difficult to share the spreadsheet, there's constantly different versions, and data corruption issues.

All of the staff want to switch to an Access database that they can all access within the office (it would not be a complicated DB and they happen to know how to use Access).

But a senior manager on the project believes that the study board only approved Excel, when the study was originally approved years ago, so, therefore, they cannot now use Access.

This costs them tens of hours per week across the team.
I suppose I should mention Wolfram's expedition into this domain-the CDF format:

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/how-cdf-compares.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format
use this app / plugin almost everyday.
Well, I don't think that holds any water. Multi-language support wasn't and still isn't a good idea; having one good toolchain and cross-browser environment is already a huge effort and far from done, supporting multiple languages would just fragment the ecosystem and slow down progress.

There is hardly any popular language today you could embed and get better performance than JS anyway, except for Lua, which barely qualifies as 'popular'.

Meanwhile there are a hundred cross-compilers/transpilers out there that give you the kind of syntax you want, without requiring a ton of changes in browsers.
FWIW, PayPal's CEO was on HN 6 months ago, promised substantial change, and then promptly disappeared.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidmarcus
You're severely mistaken. Using a VPN is a pretty smart move when you access your paypal account in a coffee shop on WiFi. I always use my VPN when I'm logging on to sensitive accounts (FB, Google, bank or corporate network) in public locations (hotels, airports, coffee shops). In fact, my company demands it.

I do wonder which VPN the OP used. If he use one of those anonimizing VPNs that is popular with bittorrent downloaders, spammers and the like, then he shouldn't be surprised if Paypal's fraud detection unit was suspicious.

Feel we're not getting the whole story here.
A quick Google search shows "satoshis" (the currency) neither mentioned nor used almost anywhere. Also, asking people to understand an entirely new word "satoshis" is almost as confusing as the decimal places.
My bad. Language barrier! :)
This TV has significant trickle. I tested it with a Killa-Watt. You might be thinking of an energystar rating or something?
Rory Blyth, what are you up to these days?
Yeah, I almost acknowledged that myself in the original post. But most people don't know what British Thermal Units are, either. And you can't call them "Bitcoin Cents" because that would also be "BTC".
I'm pretty sure Alice is not a Disney Princess.
You sir, are a godsend. This is wonderful. Thank you.
Texas is known for many things, but not fashion. Neiman Marcus is more about luxury goods than fashion. JC Penney is more about the clothing, and even with the lower end of the market you still have to follow trends. Also you have to attract talent: And I just don't see people with a fashion sense running to Texas for the opportunities. And yes you can be an exception to the rule — but then you have to really work hard at it.
Benefits packages for employees are def cheaper :)
Based on my past experience with Elsevier, I would not be too hopeful. :(
Mr Leavitt is the coolest.
I haven't heard of many nice experiences with Elsevier either, here's hoping they don't mess up such a crucially useful tool.
App store rank to download volume follows a power curve almost exactly, I think it's safe to assume similar here. I was going to make the same recommendation as beambot.
It would be nice to see a second tab on that spreadsheet, without any filtering. In particular, I'm curious to see where reddit would rank on that list. It seems arbitrary and incorrect to consider them less of a startup than, say, DropBox.
Does Firefox 23 have support for TLSv1.2?

Please fix NSS and support TLSv1.2

As of now only IE and Opera are the ones which I'm aware of that support TLSv1.2.

There is a vulnerability for BEAST against SSL 3.0/TLSv1.0

With more widespread use of HTTPS which isn't a bad thing, it would help that all browsers support the latest security recommendations.

https://blogs.akamai.com/2012/05/what-you-need-to-know-about...
Also note that the 'git add' here is actually completely redundant - 'git checkout <filename>' automatically updates the index with the checked-out version of the file, in addition to the working tree.
Show HN: A social media index that tracks the S&P 500 with near perfect parity
http://elite.kredstreet.com/
http://elite.kredstreet.com/all (make sure to use the zoom feature)
http://kredstreet.com/
But most people don't know what British Thermal Units are, either

I'm guessing your utilities are included in your rent. Anyone who owns a home or rents an apartment with its own meter is familiar with BTU from their gas/electricity bill.
What Your Profile Picture Says About You (Hint: You're a Do***ebag)
What you're saying may be PayPal's reasoning but there needs to be some pushback on that. There are very legitimate uses of VPNs, not for providing anonymity, but for tunneling your way out of hostile networks. Everyone should use a VPN when they travel so they don't have to worry about things like insecure WIFI [1] or hotels injecting ads into web pages [2]. It would be reasonable for PayPal to forbid use of anonymous VPN services, but not VPN services like Cryptoseal (a YC company) or Securetunnel (by the OpenVPN folks) which are meant for legitimate activity.

[1] Remember, not all websites uses HTTPS, and even the ones that do might still be insecure (for example, by using non-secure cookies). Plus you have to constantly check to make sure you're accessing the correct HTTPS URLs or you can be sslstrip'd. It's much easier and safer to just use a trustworthy VPN.

[2] http://justinsomnia.org/2012/04/hotel-wifi-javascript-inject...
Make sure you zoom before you bash.
Do you actually have usage data for some public proxies or just making it up as you go?
HearSay: Anonymous and Confidential P2P File Sharing
One of the best I've heard was Dave Thomas's talk on the Ruby Object Model at Scotland on Rails 2009:
http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-...
Why use a VPN if you're accessing PayPal over HTTPS?
The most important tool is the one that people use.