skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions

People also seem to flag stuff a lot even when there are new points made. That is, we have a gazillion articles about programming patterns, frameworks, or languages, NONE of which add "new facts"; which is fine, because they make new points, or even just old ones in an eloquent way.

The Snowden/NSA stuff was/is news, but there are also essays about the general situation. These also get flagged, and looking at dates, points, numbers of comments and positions on the front page is actually so SNAFU sometimes, I actually thought of scraping the first few pages and making a graph of position vs. time vs. points, just to find the interesting stuff that gets buried for some reason more easily.

frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.

Right. Then why do you and others engage in the political act of stifling discussion about a specific topic, for reasons you then don't apply to other topics as well?

I don't come to HN to masturbate about money and disruption; yet I'm sure if I just started flagging everything I don't like, I'd loose that privilege real quick.
Aye - our clients tend to be of the bigger, more established ilk, and as a result tend to either bring whatever odd solution they've selected along to the party. Regularly find ourselves integrating with Barclays and HSBC's Arcot-driven house of horrors, even though we'd never, ever, ever recommend either of them under any circumstances.

We have a few clients who are smaller, and therefore more willing to listen to recommendations and suggestions, but the big guys just steamroll on with whatever the advertorial in the trade journal told them to do this month. Very hard to convince a 40 year veteran FD that you know more about payment solutions than him.
Can Rejection Therapy help you get over a fear of being turned down?
It's available in a few other EU countries in beta: Belgium, France, Ireland, The Netherlands. Details here: https://stripe.com/global
I think there is a lot more upside in tweaking the business model. For example if you wanted a few employees working on a $1 million revenue business, that's 10,000 projects per year going to fruition in your current model.

The reason people use .me is because all the good .com's are taken, but folyo.me isn't a very easy name to say out loud to someone and remember. Your competition scoutzie.com isn't the best domain in the world but it's a .com and it sounds more like a brand than folyo.me -- I know domains are expensive if they're good so not sure if it's worth the investment in something better.
I'm curious. What maps and cloud services providers have been shut out of iOS? I recall that google maps has an app, dropbox has an app, there are even non iTunes music players. One of the criteria for the app store doesn't seem to be "can't compete with Apple." So this little diatribe about "wrecking the industry" is a bit unfounded. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from creating their own OS and their own hardware to run it on and marketing it to people and selling it.

Dropbox is a huge competitor to Apple's cloud services. While they're different, if Apple really was trying to be heavy handed, Dropbox would never have gotten on the App Store. By the way, what's the default maps application on Android? Google is a model of openness right? So open that your gmail has "no expectation of privacy." I wonder how they feel about things being done using an Android device. After all, if even your private person-to-person emails have no privacy expectation, then what expectation would one have for using an Android device?

As far as "wrecking the industry," I've never made more money from development as I have since the App store came along. So unless your industry is creating malware or porn apps, iOS has hardly wrecked anything. If it weren't for iOS, there'd likely be no Android. Apple essentially created the smartphone industry, at least as we know it today. Entire new businesses were created because of the App Store. I can't even on one hand the number of consumer mobile development companies that existed before iPhone. I'm sure there were plenty, but hardly the billion dollar industry it is today.

I'm not an Apple apologist, however when I see the same tired arguments about the "closed" ecosystem it gets frustrating. Especially since the App Store has over 900,000 apps. That's a lot of apps for such an oppressive system. A large percentage of them are crap, but comparing sales numbers to Google Play, it's pretty obvious that Apple is doing something right, at least from the perspective of the consumer -- which is the market. There are some notable screwups with the app approval process, however weighing that in the aggregate against the overall success of developers within the App store, the screwups are a drop in the bucket.
For stripe to be more expensive than Paypal I'd need to bill 15,000 a month.

That is a nice problem to have (and in fairness it's a .5% different or about about 75 quid).

On 15,000 billable I'll take a 300 a month hit to never have to deal with PayPal again.

Broken sandbox, flaky API, customer service reps from the Hannibal Lecter school of customer service, payment frozen, ridiculous demands on holding cash and proving you are who you say you are, high pressure sales.

Screw PayPal, I'll drive to my customer and take cash before I use them again.
It's a stepping stone for some companies. For many others, it's not (e.g. Netflix, Heroku).

I see a false dichotomy here: start off with the cloud, then move to bare metal servers. If you've got an OLTP database that demands high-performance, you may need bare metal. Many companies don't, though.

I've been a consultant to companies who've over-extended themselves on EC2 and ended up with huge monthly bills they didn't anticipate; in every instance, it was because they hand-built servers, cloned them, and then hand-modified them. The result was a set of servers they would like to be able to destroy (when they didn't need them) and then respawn (when they did), but couldn't because of the modifications. So, yeah, you can get in trouble with cloud services. But that doesn't mean you can't use it cost-effectively on a permanent basis. Like anything else, it requires planning.

Switching to bare metal? Sure: as hypervisors to your private cloud. Projects like OpenStack, an EC2 clone supported by Rackspace and Red Hat (among others) make it straightforward and compelling to virtualize your environment.

edit: content
Just signed up. How crazy easy that was, no sending in a ton of information of waiting. Live account in 2mins. In fact it's cheaper than PayPal Pro! Paypal, Worldpay you are doomed!
(I work at GoCardless).

GoCardless and Stripe tend to solve very different problems. We're a Direct Debit provider, whereas Stripe do card payments.

In short, Direct Debit is great for recurring payments and variable billing. It's traditionally really hard to get access to in the UK if you're a smaller business; but we allow people to sign up instantly and start using it without having to go to the bank.

DD is a great solution if you're in a service business or are charging a similar set of people each month. It's a less good solution if you're doing e-commerce/physical goods, since you need fast payment timings/clearing. That's the sort of problem cards (and therefore Stripe) are optimized for.

More info here: https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/use-cases/
Totally. This is the underlying cause of why, since capitalist social and economic relations are inherently authoritarian.

I believe by some sort of Rule of Discussions I am required to mention that Orwell was a socialist, to the point of picking up arms in Catalonia.

Makes me chuckle every time I see a Republican quote 1984.
I managed a software dev team this way - by outcomes. It worked great - at least from a developer productivity perspective. I knew my devs, knew who worked steadily and who worked according to a Dirac delta function (one guy was particularly spiky and narrow, and he could cobble together library code like nobody else) and who were in-between, and knew how to manage them and what to task each with.

(FYI, RP, "spiky and narrow", was "I need this at the end of the day"; XY was "disappear for a week, come back with what I asked for and a mind-blowing +1 we couldn't have predicted"; CC was "disappear for two weeks and return with the most beautifully architected, extensible, factory-based systems that were rock solid, customer ready, no costly bugs, ever".)

Where it didn't work so well? We were part of a PS shop, with billability targets and revenue expectations. It took some finesse to map the above behaviours to billable hours. My boss was tacitly on-board (he knew the personalities of my team, didn't ask how I managed them, and appreciated the results) but his boss, our VP, didn't know and it would have been dangerous for him to know.

So there are risks involved.

When my boss moved within the company, I followed him, RP followed me, and we did amazing things in an environment where that management style could be public knowledge (we were out of PS and out of billable revenue days and into a SaaS/SoA sort of thing, basically priced by value to the customer, before those were buzzy).

Hmm, there may be some information leakage in this post - but RP, XY, and CC know who they are. Great team.
AFAIK debit cards are supported but limited to Visa and Mastercard.
They haven't shipped any product. Once again we have people spewing absolute nonsense pulled seemingly from nowhere. It is great that you hate soylent so much, but if you want to criticize it, take 15 minutes to at least do a quick google search and read a tiny bit about it.
Quick summary on the U.S. side of things. Only way you can get in here is through a H1B. O-1 will be tough in your case unless you have published a lot of papers (or have a PhD). Since you were not born in the U.S., you may want to look at the Diversity lottery too; i.e. see if you are eligible for that.

Oh, also. You would be eligible for EB-1 only once you have a masters or have hit five years of experience. In which case, the green card will arrive much faster than it would for Indian/Chinese people born in those countries.
The kickstarter is available here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch...
uspto.gov trademark search shows:

Word Mark	IT'S THE REAL THING
Owner	(REGISTRANT) The Coca-Cola Company CORPORATION DELAWARE ONE COCA COLA PLAZA Atlanta GEORGIA 30313
Registration Date	December 7, 2004

Goods and Services	IC 032. US 045 046 048. G & S: Non-alcoholic beverages, namely, soft drinks [ ; syrups, concentrates and powders for making beverages, namely, soft drinks].
FIRST USE: 19421231. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19421231

The registration/renewal date is no use, but the first use date shows 12/31/1942. Just as Coca-Cola asserts in their letter.
She's admitting she's a "sociopath" on the cover. Why should we expect one line of the book to be true?

She has no incentive not to lie (moral guilt) and all the incentive to embellish (profit).
Yeah I almost flagged this. There's nothing there except a title that might be provocative and a bunch of "Can you use math? If so, you might make decisions based on it" prose. (I didn't flag it because, frankly, the HN audience isn't what it used to be, and to many this actually might be news. Plus the comments promised to be useful for many)

I honestly don't want to insult the publication or author here. I'm sure for many people who don't use math, the cloud might seem like the best choice at all times.

However I'd really like to believe that if you're creating a product involving technology, and you're busy creating a business model, that at some point you're going to be figuring out things like cost of a new customer acquisition, or overhead cost per user. This stuff isn't exactly arcane or even terribly complicated.
Turning trash into Ethanol
If you mostly export (i.e sell abroad), there are some additional considerations for picking a payment provider (I speak from the point of view of a UK company).

We've been using Shareit for selling software for many, many years and it's basically 4.9% as fees. The first interesting part for me is the currency conversion rate. We operate in GBP and all of our sales last month were in USD. Working out the average rate we got 1.54 USD to 1 GBP. Looking at the exchange rates for July [0] that seems reasonably close to the mid market rate.

I'd be interested to know how Stripe determine their conversion rates. If it's mid-market then we're looking at 4.4% against 4.9%.

The next issue when exporting is whether you have to register formally in the country you're selling to in order to avoid withholding taxes [1]

The countries we've come up against this to date are the USA, Portugal and India. The volume we do with the US justifies registering with the IRS and making a W8-BEN form available to all companies we sell to.

The process for the US is doable and the volume we sell there easily justifies it. The process for Portugal is awful and the process for India comprises about 6-8 weeks of utter bureaucratic bullshit [2]. The sales volume from these countries were not worth going through the process.

If we didn't go through this process and sell directly in these countries the buyer would have to withhold a proportion of the purchase, usually around 20%.

Shareit is an actual reseller, legally. Stripe isn't, AFAIK. So, Shareit can deal with the admin in these countries and pass over the same amount they do as for any country. A few years ago, we hadn't heard of withholding taxes, it's becoming more and more common as countries try to clamp down on tax evasion.

It's more strictly enforced the larger the payment amount gets, but my point is to be aware of the legal differences in payment processing services regarding foreign withholding tax rules.

Edit : There's actually a third issue as well and that's whether your insurance covers you to take card information on your site (up to details regarding the type of SSL certificate you have installed) and, if it does, whether you comply with all the security constraints the policy imposes. You may find that the additional premium is more than the cost savings.

[0] http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=1Y

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

[2] http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dallaway/pan-card-uk-company.ht...
Frak takes an entirely different approach to generating regular expressions
That was always the plan, as he said from the start. Why do you think a single person preparing test batches for himself in his kitchen is an indication that he intends to prepare and ship a million dollars worth of the stuff from his kitchen?
i think he means 2001.
What on earth ever gave you the impression that HN was any sort of a democracy?

Like most internet discussion sites it's rather openly a benevolent dictatorship isn't it?
Having used both in production:

- https://stripe.com/chat VS email

-You usually don't need to "send the docs in" (being hungarian, they asked for my ID, but email was fine), which reduces time to launch

-After having launched with Paymill, production started throwing strange errors. Root cause analysis revealed, that they don't have USD / EUR acceptance enabled by default; and they asked for extra paperwork to have that. This is not a good problem to have when users are hitting the payment wall.
This is a little off topic I admit, but ... how do people make those little book images - is there a service online to give you back a paperback book with your title on it?

Sounds like fun
This is really stupid. You don't have to be sociopathic to disregard convention and think things through for yourself. Much better to seek enlightenment and self awareness, and then make rational choices about which emotions you indulge and which you discard. Disregarding all empathy is only useful for obtaining material things, the desire for which is itself irrational and self-defeating for non-sociopaths.

To give an example, I personally don't say prepared anecdotes and eat extra food at parties. I have fun at parties and engage people in enjoyable conversations. When I meet new people I'm warm and friendly and I make an effort to form genuine connections. As a consequence, people like me and I have close friends who love me and enjoy my company. You can't look at all the fun and laughter and human warmth I have in my life and tell me I should trade it all in for some snack food and a more calculated image. That is completely stupid. Only someone who cannot enjoy human company should think like that, and those people should be pitied not admired.
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Interact Authentication - 1,500 client-side LOC
One 'feature' that would make a big difference in the UK is better debit card support - specifically for Maestro.
It is however very unlikely that he actually lost $12m in equipment. Most likely there was some damage done, but no where near that amount.

If someone broke a $12m machine, surely their career would be over.
Teleported by electronic circuit
"ETH-researchers cannot ”beam“ objects or humans of flesh and blood through space yet, a feat sometimes alluded to in science fiction movies. They managed, however, to teleport information from A to B – for the first time in an electronic circuit, similar to a computer chip."
Was college worth it for you?
Interesting, although a couple of these factors (wanting to just spend all day working on your passion instead of wearing many hats) don't seem inherently limited to designers. Programmers can have an appreciation for their craft as well!
What would you like me to expand upon?

I think the common-sense notion is that forms of power are interlinked. (Economics means ability to produce; military means capacity to inflict violence.)

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang discusses the problems when we try to draw artificial, ideological boundaries between politics and economics; the analysis also applies to military. (http://ineteconomics.org/blog/institute/ha-joon-chang-and-ma...)

And when the economic sanctions in Iraq caused a US journalist to ask Madeline Albright, "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" we see that economics can accomplish military objectives. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Albright...)
Oops, typo! Thanks, fixed
SORM: Russian surveillance of Internet and telephone communications
You should appreciate that you loathe it because it's effective.
I can't see anything other than some different font colors and a little more line height...
Yes, on the ground that it has no objective definition. Anyone can be assigned the label based on the right choice of anecdotes.

It has a precise psychiatric definition, based on the results of a particular psychometric assessment (PCL-R). Whether this qualifies as "objective" to satisfy a CS/math practitioner, I'm not sure, but it does have a well defined set of criteria.
Thanks for sharing this.

On iPad, starting portrait and rotating landscape redraws but same size (too small). Starting landscape and rotating portrait tries to redraw same size (too large) but breaks layout, pushing text below image.

I feel as though portrait mode on iPad might look better with white box below the otherwise extremely tiny image.

Looks fantastic on desktop Safari.
A fetishistic approach to security is a perverse way to keep us safe
Ah, yes. I was distracted by cake in the office and missed that this is a new endpoint on the API. I thought you were talking about the transfers endpoint.

This is exactly what we wanted. Thanks!
XML has lots and lots of complexity needed so that you could read the "underlying text" (by stripping elements) and for processing notation extensions. For example, you have attributes for out-of-band information, and, this requires additional escaping and content normalization rules. Comparison has multiple definitions because white-space is significant; or not, depending on context. XML specification is ten times longer; it has dozens of sharp edges you have to memorize in order to use effectively.

If you believe that XML's information model maps onto "any other language" just as well as JSON, please show me native mapping/object support in XML and, conversely which programming languages (besides XSLT) have mixed content and attributes.
Oh, Behave.js
Just wait until you try to get a visa using these titles. The government is pretty humourless about "ninjas" and the like, and I've even been questioned about my transition from "Software Engineer" to "Web Developer" before (doing the exact same thing in both).
I just graduated from college and got a very well paying job that has me using technologies relevant to my interests and thus, future startup ideas. The plan is to save up a lot of money and then boot strap my own company in a year or so.
Nice checklist! I really like Coda Hale's "You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance" [0]

I think part of people's frequent confusion is thinking it's "CAP: Pick two" when really it's "C or A: pick at most one for any particular situation".

0: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/
I made the image in Gimp and then uploaded it to http://www.myecovermaker.com and generated that image. It's $5 if you want to remove the watermark but it's well worth it, since there's no way I would be able to make that myself.
I think it really depends on your solution and what you are trying to accomplish. The cloud can offer levels of redundancy, speed and security at a much lower cost than if you needed to build it yourself. The process to scale requires less engineering and resources. The ability to link to globally distributed networks and a multitude of technologies with the "flip" of a switch will never be replaced by hardware. I think it takes a combination of the two to architect rock solid infrastructure. Just choose your providers wisely!
>> That’s $324,000 a year. But for just $120,000, the company could buy all the physical servers it needed for the job

What about power, cooling, rent in the building for the room you're keeping them in, backup generator, internet connectivity, administration costs (setup, repairs, installation), etc?

>> “The public cloud is phenomenal if you really need its elasticity,” Frenkiel says. “But if you don’t — if you do a consistent amount of workload — it’s far, far better to go in-house.”

Yup.
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Well, let's define "cloud": in this instance they seem to only mean EC2, which can be expensive if not used carefully.

So can bare metal. And what's worse, bare metal means a whole lot of care and feeding that you may not be prepared for.

There is no one prescription that will fit every company in every situation. But this article describes an anecdotal situation, not something typical. And, "the cloud" does not automatically mean someone else's services. For the vast majority of typical computing applications, companies should be using private virtualization (OpenStack, Vsphere, what-have-you) rather than just buying a bunch of pizza boxes or blades.
No.

This is impolite and unprofessional.

You don't want to work for a company that treats job applicants in this manner. They probably treat their employees even worse.
So whose the guy with the clumsy iron fist that keeps editing titles? LOL 'Steam Powered Blender" Here, I'll do ya a solid http://bit.ly/1a8j71D
Just looking at the screenshot compared to my Chrome inspector, what is the difference? I see some changes in the element tree, but nothing huge. Am I missing something obvious?
Google Glass in the Operating Room?