skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The risks with CC payments are much higher due to identity theft. Paying with CC online without chargebacks is really dangerous. But paying with BTC is like handing a couple of bucks in cash. Not a big deal. The smallest shops taking small payments can easily earn good reputation and be transparent about how many transactions they processed. So they start with people around them or willing to risk, and then earn better position. When you've done sales for 50K you don't want to steal next 12 bucks to ruin the rest of your life.

I don't see how BTC is cementing big boys. On contrary, BTC is liberating all sorts of small shops. Today they bear huge risks with chargebacks and have to go through a lengthy and complicated setup to even start accepting credit cards. Not even saying that PayPal easily freezes accounts from time to time. Bitcoin solves all of that and allows much more people to enter the market and offer some new awesome stuff. (Both online and offline.)
WF: What are your margins?

FF: Approximately 50%.

Gross, EBITDA or other? There's a world of difference.
Nice list!
I kinda think that these apply to all jobs, not just start-up ones.

I also like how the articles points out that these are signs that you like your job, it's a nice reminder that the onus is on the employee to be in a mindset where they enjoy their work.
The templates are on disk and their contents passed to the template function on initialization. So yes, the app is not a single file. I forgot about these files because they rarely change, hence are rarely deployed.
5-Pound UAV Flies For 50 Minutes, Streams HD From Over 3 Miles
Office suite, sure, but keyboard? In both cases, a physical keyboard is an add-on that you buy, and the quality of the keyboard is pretty much up to you to decide then.
Hangouts clients talk HTTP or some network protocol, not Borg/Spanner/GoogleDataCenterMagic

Google doesn't need to build open-source apps, just give users a documented way to send messages on their own accounts to the Talk system.

At most, the extra engineering effort is to implement an authorization and rate-limiting (anti-DOS/spam) system that doesn't depend on obscurity-via-closed-source-client. Most of that probably already exists, for obvious reasons (attackers).

Federation is a different problem, because Google has less control over off-network spammers. Personally, I think it's fine to say that if you want to talk to Google Hangouts users, you need to create a Google account for that purpose. But it would be less evil to have a system by which trusted developers could interoperate, as long as the "trust" filter is non-discriminatory. (Any reasonably public/accountable organization can get an interop key.)

And Google should provide a way for users to send Hangout calls to other servers that choose to implement the Hangout protocol and accept incoming connections from Google, a trusted network. Doing so in its first-party app would be non-evil.
Guns are tools only used for killing.

Not true. Sport-shooting of various sorts is a very popular past-time. You have things like skeet shooting[1], ISSF shooting competitions[2], IPSC Practical Shooting competition[3], etc.

And some of the contexts in which they are "used to kill" are hardly negative: hunting for food (very commonplace in many areas) and self-defense come to mind.

No, a gun may not be "general purpose" in the same way a 3D printer is, but it certainly has no inherently malevolent intent.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeet_shooting

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSF_shooting_events

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Practical_Shootin...
Uh, it would be wise to see and doctor immediately! The electrical shock may have damaged your internal organs, even if there are no apparent external burns.
It seems like a purposely mean way to conduct business. I also found this way of advertising gross and unappealing. It makes me think a lot less about the company advertising.

The information in the ad is biased and self-serving, so right off the bat I ignore almost anything they say.

I dont get that feeling at all when a company boasts about "best x, or won y competition" but bashing another product looks childish, mean and immature. A "my kid is better than yours" kind of debate.

I honestly embarrased for them when I see an ad that portrays competitions as mentally inept or comically retarded.
s/buggy/non-existent/
Peripheral Intimidation
One shared menu bar at the top of the screen is supported by Fitts's Law, which says that targets at the edge of the screen are faster and easier to click:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law

No comment on the rest.
> To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort.

So what. More effort that's required to do things properly. Create a protocol, publish it, start deploying (especially if it breaks what's working now). Doing things the other way around creates a horrible mess.
Consumers Are Now Choosing Content First and Platforms Second
Finding your photos more easily with Google Search
See a couple of my comments around this thread. I think irreversible transactions is precisely what is Bitcoin major selling factor. Many merchants will be able to give you a nice discount and eliminate their headaches. You as a customer will get more stuff, cheaper and with a friendlier look at you (living in Paris I see how merchants detest credit card payments for risks and losses involved).
This guy gives responsible consumers a bad name.

Sure he does. He makes me want to say "cut it out, you're going to ruin 'unlimited' for everyone"... and that sets off an alarm in my head right there. Just like those deplorable Westboro Baptist folks yelling "God hates fags" test our commitment to what we mean by "free speech", obnoxious outliers like this test the limits of "unlimited".

"X Mbit/s, Unlimited" has a very specific meaning. It means being able transfer at X-MBit/s continuously, 100% of the time. Anything else is limited. Which is fine, and may indeed be "so much I never have to worry about going over". Just don't use the U word.
Most books have pages that are taller than they are high, the text blocks on those pages are definitely taller than they are wide. Paragraphs don’t run in one line from the verso to the recto[1]. A ‘page’ is one side of a sheet, you don’t read two pages at the same time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recto_and_verso
It's "XMPP enough" in this contenxt. It's XMPP, it just isn't complete XMPP, might be a better way of putting it.

That's not to say I wouldn't like to see them improve their support for all of XMPP though.
The Github F**k Collection
Being famous isn't a problem. (It's a huge benefit, as we see in this article) Being on some official bureaucratic "troublemaker" list is the problem.
This is not only a problem that exists with Microsoft. Many PC makers push crap "widescreen" 16:9 displays with far less viewable area than a 4:3 screen, and obscenely little vertical res/height, and push it as a "feature."

I'm sick of Apple being the only one with decent displays. Why do the PC makers insist on using 16:9 displays when they HAVE the money and the power to afford 16:10, 4:3, or even 3:2, a la Chromebook Pixel?

If it's just to cut costs, then, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP, Dell, Acer, -- fuck you.

http://xkcd.com/732/
Didn't Google say that the reason for removing xmpp support was that Microsoft added Gtalk support to Outlook.com ?
Using someone else's brand, without their permission, in a way that will damage their brand, to try to sell your own goods, in a way that everyone knows is going to be fantastically biased. Seems pretty out of order to me. :)
I disagree with their mobile efforts they need to start unifying all these disjointed services, like they did with hangouts. It makes sense to associate your google accounts with your google mobile account along with your data storage as well.
Good catch. He meant gross margin. I'll see that it is fixed.
Yes. Non-science Americans use it for everything, in my experience, and can get confused by Celsius.
Did you actually click on the link and look at the timestamps, or are you just blowing smoke?
I don't know what you are talking about. That's about as close to apples and oranges as I can think.

In order to have mass transit, you need to have the MASS part. Mass transit only works in areas with sufficient population density and predictable traffic patterns to make the investment in that infrastructure worthwhile. Electric cars, however, help extend the reach of the existing electrical infrastructure into transportation.

In the area where I live, we have extensive commuter and long-haul rail. I also saw two different Tesla cars on the road in my neighborhood.

The first portable computers were large, heavy, and expensive. Given the technology curve and the total addressable market of transportation, I'd expect we will see much more attention to that solution given the wall we've hit with hydrocarbon based transportation.
That read like one of those "10 Signs that let you know your boyfriend loves you" articles in Cosmopolitan. I will love any startup job as long as they:

- pay.
- pay on time.
- dont have me meet every 2 hours.
- have reasonable hardware to work with (read: A computer from this millennium, running an OS that did not come out during the Clinton administration).

Anything else, is just gravy.
Context of the argument. "post_break" was complaining that people like this were the reason that unlimited internet was going away. "jpdoctor" asked why, postulating that it's because someone actually believed them, to which I responded that people abusing the commons (the common pool of bandwidth) is why offering unlimited may go away.

And you certainly can deliver "unlimited internet" where unlimited = max_speed_per_second * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31 + 1 Because that is "unlimited" relative the max throughput.
This is not much of a surprise at all. Corps have been doing this sort of lying right in our face strategy for years. Same as when T-Mobile started calling their HSPA network 4G and claiming they have the largest "4G" network in the nation. All complete BS but the masses are buying into it. It's just marketing after all.

I really think there needs to be a mainstream service perhaps run by the government to regulate all these commercials. After all, information is the most valuable commodity. And shoveling mis-information down people's throats might as well be poisoning people directly.
Why would it be slow?
Even though Facebook uses XMPP, they aren't federated, so they are cut off from the rest of the XMPP network. Therefore the benefit of them using XMPP extends only on using different clients. I.e. it's half good, half bad.
Just make a quick, loose, all-text-fields schema and dump your data as a CSV: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=ImportingFiles Then you can run SQL queries against it using the SQLite commandline tool: http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of hospitals, but this is one of those potential "oh, yeah, internal bleeding... that wouldn't have been quite such a problem if you had stopped in, you know, a few days ago, genius" moments.
The iPod isn't as dominant as ever, iTunes is only partially DRM-free (many songs still aren't available for sale that way), existing songs in your collection don't get unlocked, and users have to either pay per song or subscribe to iTunes Match to unlock them.
"Had to be abandoned"? Threat of 10 years in prison in 1933 does not sound like "people decided gold sucks". I guess, government had to take gold by force precisely because people trusted gold more than paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Executive_Order_6102.jpg
Sculptural light boxes with leds and plexiglass
To me "We Try Harder" has always sounded like a terrible slogan. In my mind it sounds like they try but fail, rather than actually doing things…
The odds of getting hit by a lightning is actually surprisingly high (1 in 3000 in an average lifetime). He should really go see a doctor though, since there's a 70% chance that he may be affected with serious long-term conditions.

[source : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_... ]
> "We have Smart Screen 5.0 technology unlike that TV"

Slightly offtopic: What drives me crazy is when Company A will say "TV A has FizzBuzz(tm) Technology, TV B does not!" and Company B says "TV B has BuzzFizz(tm) Technology, TV A does not!" When FizzBuzz(tm) and BuzzFizz(tm) are really just the same shit with different trademarks.

It is probably "different" technology enough of the time, in that it does the same thing but in a different way with a different set of patents... but still.
Proposed NY Gov Plan: No Taxes (really) For 10 Years For Startups At Colleges
The only reason this isn't worth a freakout is that nobody running Linux in a graphical desktop configuration could ever have assumed that the machine was multiuser-safe to begin with. The reality is probably that no Linux (or FreeBSD) system in any configuration is secure from an attacker that can run native code in an unprivileged process. But with X11 running, you never had a chance.

I'm always amused by the dismissive tone programmers take to findings like this --- "oh, any thoughtful C programmer could avoid these problems". No, they can't. How many billions of dollars does it take to prove this point? The very best secure programmers in the world, building C (and C++) codebases from scratch specifically to address these problems, almost invariably fail to do so: memory corruption bugs get found in these systems just like they do in '90s-vintage X11 code.

C is my very favorite language and I'm not saying people shouldn't use it (well... they should avoid it, actually), but people should work in it with their eyes open.
Python has bindings for pretty much everything, so I'd imagine that the database you're most familiar with, or that there is the most information on (most likely MySQL, Postgres, or SQLite)
I was going to say that too - those Lichtenburg scar pictures that are linked don't look good. While they might seem 'cool' aren't those just 3rd degree burn scars? You have to wonder about the 3rd degree burns on the inside that you can't see.
"The EMTs took my vitals and urged me to go to the hospital for testing. I declined"

At the risk of derailing the thread - is this because going to A&E in the US is expensive?

I wonder how his hearing is.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Go is the new hot language on HN. It's what startups are switching to and blogging about en masse.

Before Go a bunch of shops switched from ruby and rails to scala for various reasons. Before scala companies switched from either php or something enterprisey like Java/C# to rails. Before that people switched from C++ to Java/C#. Before that C to C++. Before that ASM to C. Before that punchcards to ASM.

Thus, in terms of the hype cycle, Go is the new Scala.
Apple not only refrains from focusing on numbers, but they actively go out of their way not to.

Apple simply does not list any number they don't think is important. For example, this is the sum total of their information, in their tech specs, about what kind of CPU the iPad has, how fast it is, and how much RAM it has:

"Dual-core A6X with quad-core graphics"

If you want to know the clock rate or RAM quantity, you have to go to third-party sites that have basically reverse-engineered the information.

To a techie, this behavior looks mildly crazy, but it seems to work.
This is exactly right. It is a false choice to suggest that "open" means "slow". But that is fostered in part by folks who think "open" means "community driven."

It is perfectly reasonable to publish the specs of what your doing with no commitment of support, simply for folks to see and possibly use at their own risk.

That said, the reason companies don't do this is often one or two reasons. Reason one is that it results in a 'noisy' side channel as people who read the specs share their opinions, but they also get bent out of shape if something they said, or think they said, appears in the spec later. The other issue is that there is always a sanitization/prep process to take essentially internal information about a service and create an external representation for consumption (even if that consumption is unsupported).

So the 'easy' choice is to not publish.
I have little issue with that. Though the problem is how they handle it. If you, for any reason (read: error on the part) get your account suspended, then you are royally fucked. You loose all of your data, across all services. What good does that do? But if I had a separate account for each one (with the same login credentials), then I would not be locked way from my data. If I have an issue with Gmail, then Drive would still be available. But no, they wont have that.
Probably to make it hard to convert to cash or easily sold goods. That way they can give them out for customer service reasons / free giveaways, etc. without worrying about them being traded in for phones and sold at cash value (or near to it).
The system is Retail Link and there's quite an ecosystem around it.
SMS: Text Messaging = Win/Win for Both Patients and Healthcare Providers
What is the benefit of having three ways to write strings?

\a ;; compiles to "a"
:a ;; compiles to "a"
"a" ;; compiles to "a"

This is not meant as destructive criticism; I'm genuinely interested in the motivation for that.
Real question; why do you put Nginx in front of Go? Is it because you have many apps?
Life-Size X-Wing Made From Lego
Yeah :) They're both linear. What confuses people is that degrees F are both smaller than degrees C and the 0-point is lower. They meet at -40 (so -40C == -40F) and from there, the F number changes faster than C, that's all.
That's a really low bar. The market (at least here in the U.S.) for talent is so competitive that a company has to go well beyond the basics of paying on time and providing great hardware.
Like the article says, SQLite is a good choice when you're starting out. It's included in Python and is great for the basics.

Once you have a lot of data, it really depends on your specific situation. If you don't have any preferences, you can try something new - MongoDB is interesting.
Those are 3 distinct types in Clojure; unfortunately they have no equivalents in JavaScript, thus they become strings.
You do realize that Go is an open-source project with contributors from both inside and outside of Google? I imagine more user's outside of Google use Go than inside.
marketing good.
Oof, DataNitro being Windows-only is a major bummer. Something like this could be hugely useful for slightly less technical analysts on my team.

Anyone know of a Mac OS X friendly alternative?
Indeed, like other relationships, it has to go both ways. No fun being in a relationship where the love is unrequited.
there is not a "one size fits all" economic plan.
Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.
Only in America would somebody think twice about seeing doctor after being struck by lightning.
When they performed the same test on a 13" MacBook Air, it held on for 6.5 hours. That jibes with Apple’s stated battery life of ‘Up to 7 hours wireless web’. Apple states the MBA 11" has battery life of ‘Up to 5 hours wireless web’, so it’s definitely more than 3.75 hours.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/macbook-air-review/
The terrifying rise of the political entrepreneur
Zoatron [requires WebGL]
I know that I've been on an xkcd spree lately, but for some reason the HN frontpage is filled with circumstances that match.

http://xkcd.com/795/
Lightning toasted my house in 2007, just arrived home 30 mins after it happened, glad I wasn't in the house given the magnitude of the destruction...TV exploded scrapnel everywhere, ceilings down upstairs and down....but worst of all, dealing with our insurance company for damages...

Can't believe this guy is not the only family member to have been hit, insane!
Free private Github repos for students and edu people
Yes, DataNitro only works with Windows versions of MS Excel. Maybe a VM/Parallels with Windows + Excel would work for you?
Nice! As a longtime developer using a "proper RDBMS" I was amazed at how feature packed and speedy SQLite is for having such a small footprint.
I've noticed this trend as well. Privacy is dead at Google. Sleep with dogs(US govt), don't get upset when you wake up with fleas.
A bit of both, but more column A than column B IMO. SF's transit is pretty notoriously bad - dirty buses and trains, never on time, very slow, stops (too) frequently, and there's a (probably well-founded) perception of danger on some routes to boot.

Mass transit coverage (see: BART or MUNI light rail) is also non-existent in the vast majority of the city, making sketchy, infrequent buses the only alternative.

This is combined with an extremely corrupt taxicab lobby that has successfully prevented the growth of the cab fleet despite an increasing population, making SF a notoriously difficult city to get a cab during busy times (Thurs, Fri, Sat nights). Taxicabs are also poorly regulated, quite often picking up a passenger on the way to another fare and simply abandoning the request, as well as sketchiness with accepting and processing credit cards.

SF is really the perfect storm of regulatory and governmental failure that has allowed the rise of Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.
Modelur 0.3.2 – Lançada Nova Versão da Suite de Projeto Urbano
well,they went pretty far with python, at the same time,and refactored their app when they needed it,that's the way to go.
Pick any business tactic using phone/SMS, and replace the nouns with other nouns. For example:

Papa John's sends me a text every Friday at 4pm, giving me a pizza coupon for the weekend. I suspect this drives a ridiculous increase in pizza orders for them.

What other business can send a coupon to a customer at a time they are likely to want it?

- Service for movie theaters to text concession coupons on Friday afternoons

- Service for web gift stores to text coupons to customers before holidays

- Service for restaurants to text daily coupon right before lunch
Wondering about the HN algorithm, not about what people think. And I like to wonder about things.

EDIT: It's #10 now. The three directly above it are all older with at least 100 fewer upvotes. It's gotta be flags. Apparently flagging front page stories lowers their ranking a lot. Interesting, IMO.
Wow, glad he's okay!
I'd vote for LuaJIT as a new, sane, replacement for JavaScript.
First, as others have said, if you get hit by lightning or have any sort of severe electrical shock, so see a doctor and be checked out. The reasoning here is that any of the current that passes through you will create internal burns, resulting any number of issues.

The second thing is that often these voltages travel on the surface of a conductor (called the skin effect) rather than through the middle so if you don't have a hole in your skin with a burn mark around it (that is what you are looking for in step one above) you might dodge serious damage.

A friend of mine in high school was hit by lightning why riding his motorcycle off road around Las Vegas (back when it was easier to do that :-) and was fine except for two pretty bad burns, one where his belt buckle was (apparently it got red hot) and on his feet where the metal in his riding boots was similarly heated up.