skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Confiscating bitcoins like they confiscate wages is not within their powers.

The government confiscates wages by sending legally binding orders to people who they believe might owe you wages directing them to remit the owed wages to the remit them to the government instead.

They obviously can do the same thing with bitcoins. The only current difficulty with doing that with bitcoins now is that bitcoins are currently used for so few transactions for so few people that its not likely to be worth the governments effort to find out who is likely to owe you bitcoins to serve them with such orders. If bitcoin were to become widely used, that would change.
My question is why would the scammers launder the money through Starbucks then to eBay or some third party service... there seems to be too many points of failures... Starbucks can easily deactivate all the cards once they have been notified... eBay restricts the number of gift cards you can list, plus there are the fees and the credit card charge back, etc... Seems there are better ways to do this...
Thanks for the comment. Work on the product started in October with a 3 week on product vs. 1 week consulting model (http://blog.statuspage.io/funding-your-startup-with-a-one-we...).
"Fake it 'till you make it" embeds the assumption that you are going to make it, which is a thing you need to constantly and actively work on doing.

Otherwise, it's just faking it.
But the bank as a company should be expected to know what it signs and so should not be protected from abusive clauses.
Citation needed. I'd say that a vast minority (that actually cares) wouldn't want the OS to change the timezone behind their back on a laptop.

On a phone (which also acts as a wrist watch for most people), yes. Laptop, just no.

What OS does this? And how?
Original 9/11 thread:

http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower...

The subject of one of the very top comments reminds me of why I've never cared for the Slashdot community: "We had it coming..."
Your home page link to your Terms of Service is https://koding.com/toc.html and it 404s.

The top of you home page doesn't have a link (that I found, anyway) which describes in any detail what you are, what you offer, what's your special sauce beyond social software development. Nor a link to your blog (that I found).
From the "Philosophy" section of ycombinator.com/about (the whole section is relevant really):

One concrete consequence is that Y Combinator funding lets you sell early, if you want to. It can sometimes make sense to sell yourself when you're small for a few million, rather than take more funding and roll the dice again. Google likes to do early-stage acquisitions, and we expect them to become increasingly common as other companies learn what Google has.

If you take a large amount of money from an investor, you usually give up this option. But we realize (having been there) that an early offer from an acquirer can be very tempting for a group of young hackers. So if you want to sell early, that's ok. We'd make more if you went for an IPO, but we're not going to force anyone to do anything they don't want to.

I think YC prefers big successes but doesn't try to pressure everyone to be the next Dropbox or AirBnB
"Everything you care about, everywhere you go."
yeah.
think about that, people.
Seeing depth through a single lens
He changed the url in the contract to point to his own website with his version of the contract.
Envelopes looks very good for sending emails and for reading emails there is another cool library - Imbox https://github.com/martinrusev/imbox
Yeah sorry about this, but we said to everyone that we are on a invite-only beta. Also all your files are backed up, just login and you will be able to download them :)
To mitigate the new detect visited vectors, browsers could render everything as unvisited and then asynchronously render a 'visited' overlay (in a separate framebuffer) at a later time. SVG filters will have to be processed twice for the visited-sensitive data, so a vendor may just wish to limit SVG filters to only processing the 'unvisited' framebuffer for the sake of performance.
Apple fanboy says Google killed the newspapers
I think the issue here is that Qualcomm won't even allow AOSP to distribute the binary blobs.
Just add the following: "Granting the account is considered acceptance of the terms."
I calculated that a Leaf should break even with a Prius at about 120k miles as well. Of course, that was the 2012 Leaf, which was $4,000 more than it is now, and less efficient. Now you can get a 2013 Leaf S for $21k after government rebate, which is less than you can get a Prius II for, so you break even immediately.

Anyway, it's true that it would take me ~20 years to break even with the 2012 Leaf, but I wasn't optimizing for economy. I was optimizing for the environment.
I'm starting to see this more and more. Thanks :)
1) Exactly. This doesn't help at all with server-side rendering of times, which is usually the use-case (times associated with forum comments, etc.). IP address detection is pretty annoying to do (and doesn't help with VPN's etc.), but a quick <script> in the <head> of any page that does an instant "redirect" to put the JavaScript timezone info into a server-side session variable is a functional, albeit hackish, solution. (If you don't have JavaScript enabled, then just serve up UTC times, it's an edge case.)

2) Usually your times are stored server-side in UTC, so you never have to worry about timezones anywhere. It simplifies things a great deal. "Naked" = UTC. You assume that, whenever it's stored, it's already been translated from the user's timezone when the date was initially generated, or else the time it happened on the server was the actual time.
Have worked with the Streak team for a little while - they're incredibly sharp (and have helped us improve our product a ton). Congrats guys!
Contrary to what the article states, this is almost definitely not due to skimming of any kind. It is most likely related to a database leak or breach, whether it is documented or not is another question.

Also, typically these are not "actual" (card-present, pin entered) debit transactions. Starbucks, much like Amazon, authorizes some online purchases as pinless debit card transactions, due to the lower processing rate incurred by the merchant. This can all be done completely online, for example, via Starbucks Online Reload system.[1]

This is truly nothing new, Gift card fraud has been booming since 2006-2007, when companies (starting with Starbucks, followed by Subway, Walmart[2], Whole Foods, etc.) began offering reloads to existing cards. Unfortunately, most of these companies have laughably bad fraud detection.

For example, Whole Foods uses a platform formerly known as "Giftango", which was rebranded as "InComm" in the last couple weeks. They quite literally will let a credit card thief reload hundreds of dollars from an IP anywhere in the world, to any gift card powered by their platform. No fraud scoring, velocity checks, geolocation, etc. You can imagine how easy this would be just by taking a look at their default gift card management portal, used by Whole Foods.[3]

Conveniently for credit card theives, WalMart even offers an option to reload a spreadsheet, or a CSV list of cards off a single credit card, easy right?[4]

Overall, I think this problem is only going to grow, especially with Cardpool acquired by Safeway, and now offering instant cash for gift cards in stores. This is an extremely easy method to cash out these fraudulently created gift cards, conveniently located at your local grocery store.

[1] https://www.starbucks.com/card/reload/one-time

[2] http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift-Card/1097444

[3] https://app.giftango.com/GiftCardPortal/WholeFoods/GiftCardP...

[4] http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift-Cards/416242
I think it is an interesting product idea if the market is either:

a) People who are starving. If the price is right and it has the right properties as far as shelf life and nutrition, sure, it would make an excellent ration for feeding populations in food emergencies or natural disasters.

b) People for whom eating and food preparation is an undesirable chore. A good example would be combat soldiers who need to eat something and don't care what it is as long as it satisfies hunger and provides nutrition.

For many (most?) other people food is intimately tied in with culture and epicurean tradition. This product won't go over well in places like Italy and France, for example.
We have announced it for 3 weeks. Don't worry your files are safe. We have migrated them. You can download it if you want. Go to Develop tab and you will see the download link.
“suspicious activity” from store merchants (whatever that means)

To my understanding, the concern is a store merchant who is palming a card scanner and sneaking a swipe of your card through their scanner.
Firefox losing ground to Chrome
I don't see how that would prevent what he did. He provided a new contract that the bank signed. He didn't modify an existing agreement.
Tesla narrows net loss, shares jump 13%
Access The New Android Device Manager Website
I work for Qualcomm, and I never would have expected it, but apparently this happens. There are groups that buy busted phones, get the Qualcomm cellular modem chips out of them, and then put those chips into new devices. It's significantly cheaper than licensing, and I believe the current tactic to fight it is firmware-based.
Metasploit module & writeup for Firefox Tor exit node exploit
Waiting to hear someone comment about it being flash...
Most swords aren't actually all that heavy - at least not ones designed for combat. My backsword feels about as light in the hand as a walking stick.

Good idea - I shall store that one away for future reference...
I don't store any passwords in Chrome.

Regardless, what you suggest is an enormous invasion of privacy.

How about a, "Did you know that within 30 seconds, I can see all your passwords?"
> After the perpetrators skimmed my debit-card number (perhaps at a subway-station vending machine or a local merchant)

Incidentally, someone cloned one of my credit cards and tried to buy gas with it in NY (not a big deal -- AmEx caught it when they tried to use it). I'd recently traveled to NYC and the only times I used the card were the subway ticket machine and an LIRR ticket machine. I think they need to keep a more careful eye on those machines.
Did you read Jean-Baptiste's post? In this particular case, there's no video device support for Google flagship devices!

...can't boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support...

That sort of makes it useless. I'd only be willing to buy the device argument if we were talking about a microphone or webcam, but when you lack the most basic of support (video), I think that's not a useful argument to have.
While that's true, I can't believe that given its numerical bent it'll take anything less than an incredible push to move it to a more general playing field.
I loved the wings metaphor but i found it still frustrating - pg is clearly an intelligent, observant person, at the heart of some of the best and brightest entrpreneurs globally. And yet we still cannot tell what makes a child grow into a twenty something whose wings can unfurl and a twenty something with raggedy stumps.

I hope that no one comes out of the "tube" of school and college without wings - but if that's true why do so few seem to fly?

What is it about those who fly that they learnt that others did not? Formidable-ness seems to simply be a tell for a good investor - not an explanation.

Please keep pushing them off cliffs - maybe we can work it out soon.
The difference between "Open" and "Free" is that "Free" continues that script with:

"; make install"
* Requires internet connectivity via WiFi or Mobile Data
If you wanted to find that information about one of your competitors, what would it cost you to hire a consultant to reverse engineer their driver and tell you all its secrets?
I very much want to try Tactical Haptics' stuff. Wonder if they'll be in Scotland any time soon?
Next Gen iPhone's Special feature?
Chips as complex as SoC's having GPUs are being produced by counterfeiters who are not just copying the package and artwork, but actually making clones working only from published documentation and redistributable drivers?

But they would be thwarted by license agreements making the drivers generally nonredistributable?
> requirement that the honest parties scale their work with the work done by the attacker

You're always repeating this as if it's an indictment. But you're applying the cryptography standard (comfortable asymptotic complexity results) to a coordination problem. If you aren't willing to use trusted (untrustable :P) third parties, something else has to define authority. And control of this will always be a struggle between competing groups, whether it's minor disagreements on protocol, or full fledged slash-and-burn attackers.

(And I say this as someone who thinks Bitcoin is an unfortunate distraction).
You can't blame capitalism for that. In a free market, consumers can just stop buying Qualcomm products for a month, and I can guarantee you that a choking Qualcomm would release all they have as FOSS as fast as they could.

But most of the population is uneducated in that regard. Blame the lack of enthusiasm for FOSS.
regular fighter jets or stealth jets?
anonymity?
How We Use Heroku Postgres Dataclips to Drive Our Business
I'm sure this stuff will be just as successful as baby formula. And I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible.
"The time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach some artificial deadline like a Demo Day. It's when you can convince investors, and not before."

Been waiting for someone to articulate this for a while now. Pitch people an idea a few thousand times and you get pretty good at reading if people buy it. Getting close to the "convince" threshold for investors and when we do reach it, watch out!
The Powerball Jackpot is $425M. Should you play?
I'll add some of mine.

* I can watch MOVIE XYZ on Netflix/Amazon
* Small indie movie is playing at the local Arts Cinema
* A band is releasing a new album
* I've spent more than my monthly budget
* Someone links to my blog from their blog
* Important European soccer games are being aired on TV
This was not a comment on ubuntu edge per-se, only the likelihood of it actually having free drivers at launch if they are only kickstarting 45k units.

The same thing would be true if it sold a million units.
Or you could just recognize that the Exchange Act is an exercise of Commerce Clause power and not Coinage Clause power, so, while whether bitcoin is "money" within the sense of the definition in the Exchange Act is an issue, it is an issue completely unrelated to whether it is "money" at all in the sense intended by the Coinage Clause, much less whether it is "foreign money" or some other kind.
b) Is me and a lot of people I know, probably most people I'd think, every meal isn't an important part of culture, no one is proposing eating/drinking exclusively soylent.
People's right to have their interests and values weighed in communal decision-making does not (in principle) deserve any "threshold of expertise" requirement. When discussions (quite necessarily) move into precisely how that translates into policy there quite definitely is a demand for expertise. Unfortunately, our systems don't do a very good job pulling those apart.
Now without utterly broken flash memory drivers that cripple performance after a few months of use and took a year to fix!
Twitter was the prime example of an API that was good, and had promised to become even better, and then - due to internal pivot towards more marketing and advertising - became crippled. What Dalton tried to say was, create a platform that could be everything, and it'll never become crippled.

Also, this idea stems from a time, a couple of years ago, where some people used to consider twitter a sort of data platform and not a social media platform. The fantastic api allowed people to hack together gadgets that used the twitter api to communicate with other gadgets, people used it as an api channel for real time chess games, etc. That's what Twitter, the platform, was in the eyes of many people. While Twitter nowadays sees itself as something entirely different.
In the platform-kind-of-way, the tweets are not imporant, they're only one example of what could be done on top of the API.
I used to write graphics device drivers so I'm going to bite. Usually most vendors think that their 'solutions', details about their hardware designs exposed in the drivers and optimizations are extremely valuable. Personally in my experience I found that most of what vendors considered secret was well known and not that novel and the majority of what was being done was application of the same or similar techniques in their hardware and drivers. Sure there are some novel things, but enough people have moved between the graphics card companies that the drivers really have very little truly unique information about the designs that would help a competitor.

One thing that I think does cause problems for opening up hardware though is that many graphics implementations use the same or similar chips (to save on asic costs) and the drivers enable options based on the product the customer bought, but the underlying chip will actually still implement the higher end functionality. This is a common enough technique and to avoid people getting 500 dollar parts for 99 they can't open up the drivers. I don't understand why they don't push this sort of thing exclusively to device microcode (many do this or at least partially) rather than having software components that do some of this logic.
One thing that helps about credit cards - credit card companies extend you more protection, which means they assume more liability. From what I've seen/heard, this translates (as you would hope) to increased vigilance on their part.

Personal example - driving cross country, I filled up maybe 4-5 times across several states. Got a call from my credit card company after the 4th fill-up. It had been less than 24 hours since the "spree" started, and I got the call in the middle of the night, from a human! (I was driving through the night)
OSX for sure. "Set time zone automatically using current location". Checkbox inside system preferences.

I think it's pretty safe to say most people want their laptop's clock to match their local time, because how is a wrong clock useful? Of course, if you're travelling for business with complicated schedules and meetings in home times, you clearly might have different needs, but most people just want their clocks to be right.

And you certainly don't want to keep your original timezone but change the clock setting -- then just everything's wrong! :)
This is a very good point. When Android was first released, it was a unique opportunity to study the relationship between an open source RIL layer and the underlying RIL library, in part because you could build and run Android with the RIL library. There are tons of claims of secret sauce in RIL implementations, no less than there are for GPU drivers.
BDD Composition over Inheritance with RSpec Shared Examples
I'm a bit of a telecom geek (though josh2600 undoubtedly knows more than me, as he works in the industry), so I decided to check out your startup. I agree you should have nice, fat margins. Remember, you should be setting pricing based on how much your customers are willing to pay, not how much it costs you. For that reason, I think you should segment your plans based on max number of participants, even though this probably costs you nothing. I would think that this would be the best way to segment out customers willing to pay more: if I'm a small business or a freelancer, I'm not going to have many people on my conference calls, but if I'm a larger business with deeper pocketbooks, I'm going to have large conference calls and thus be driven to the more expensive plans. Even if your software isn't ready to enforce the limit, consider adding it to the pricing grid anyways to see if you get more signups on the bigger plans.

Your lowest plan also feels too inexpensive to me, especially since those customers are probably responsible for a disproportionate number of support requests.
Experiments reveal that crabs and lobsters feel pain
what surprises me most is the high amount these cards sell for on ebay, when they presumably get electronically wiped pretty quickly once reported.

the link from the article has many of these, eg currently a $10 card with 5 bids at $9.39 - surely there's more than 7% of risk that the card ends up worthless for a buyer?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Starbucks-10-Gift-Card-FREE-SHIPPING...

or is the answer just that some people on ebay are stupid? ...
Exactly. You could also make $1M tomorrow by selling gas for $1 a gallon. You'd have more customers than you'd know what to do with. But you'd lose $2M in the process. Many entrepreneurs confuse revenue with income. Positive revenue does not mean positive income. There was a good article on this regarding Ecomom's demise as a company because, in their case, getting more revenue meant necessarily incurring more losses. They didn't realize it until it was too late. They were better off not selling anything at all rather than selling something that increased their losses. In many ways, it wasn't a business. It was basically a charity where they subsidized the cost of a product for their customers without any upside for them.
Thanks for the invite. My mac air's fan was running really loud, so this way all of the stress from running the local server is gone and I'm not all edgy about it. It was pretty easy to get all setup this morning. Just deployed to production a little while ago.
It would a fraudelant contract in the US. When you alter the text of contract in the US you must clearly highligh the alteration in the riginal text or as an admendment.
So a question... how do you balance confidence from a well-understood solution to a well-understood problem in a well-understood market, with the kind of blue-sky dreaming that seems to excite investors? Crossing into that blue-sky world starts smelling like BS to me, but when I say "We could realistically get a $100M chunk of an existing multi-billion market", it doesn't seem ambitious enough?
You mean, like the people in the US weren't responsible for having signed a terrible home-loan agreement and then loose everything?

I know this is Russia, not the US, and law does not apply to the same extent, but I still hope the man wins.
Wow, it's come along nicely since the last time I saw it. I seem to recall they didn't even have macros and were doing everything with eval. As somebody with no interest in scientific programming, Julia still seems like a very well thought out language. I'll have to try writing an application with it soon.
Another up and coming Oakland based company!
You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6 months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid & misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.

So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if you want.

There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same time.
I would rather say: no paper contracts and use digital cryptographic signatures everywhere.