skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using slid.es for a few things recently. It's really well-made, gives you a workable GUI with the option to edit HTML directly, gives you free cloud storage for your presentations, and is a nice change of pace and extra bit of glitter compared to Powerpoint. A job very well done.
I ended up presenting my PhD with this and a mix of d3.js and inkscape-generated svg. You can do a lot with this, especially if you tune down the transitions, colors, and fonts a bit.
Well played Rch. Well played.
Thanks! We will :).

(Today belongs to Braintree, as you say -- congrats to all of the folks connected with the company.)
Left out of this argument is that The New York Times bestseller list has a bias towards physical retailers and against Amazon. Methinks this is a smart strategy towards getting on the bestseller list (which means enhanced speaker fees), disguised as a strategy towards justice in retail.
Addendum: There's an argument here about Intelligent Design that I thought I should elaborate on. High intelligence tends to slow down your perception of time, in a manner of speaking. Low intelligence humans can persist at drudge jobs long enough to make a career out of them, but high intelligence people will eventually find something more interesting to do.

So Intelligent Design states that something incredibly smarter than us front-loaded a ginormous amount of design work such that after the big bang, billions of years later, we'd emerge, like clockwork, no continuing intervention required.

Where'd it go? What's it doing? If you want to dislodge evolution as a directionless force, and avoid Occam's Razor, you need to account for this intelligence somehow, because evolution already describes a reality in which it's not necessary.
Yeah, because the NSA wants to buy stuff with your CC number.
People in general, perhaps. But for myself, my biggest problem with AGW is indeed the fact that its predictions have an ever-longer history of not coming true.

As a person interested in science, I consider this a fatal objection to any theory. AGW is not excepted. Anyone who has the mental gymnastic strength to talk themselves past this problem is merely demonstrating that they are not actually interested in science at this point, as the disparity between theory and fact is pretty clear at this point.

If "the public" are having problems with AGW for the wrong reasons, well, it's hardly the first time the correct conclusion has been reached for the wrong reasons.
Going from freelancing next to college for 10 hours a week to full-time freelancing and having to pay all the government fees all week is a beast. Nothing to sneeze at.

Your last few words explain what somebody fresh should do: "doesn't have much exposure or contacts to start with" -> get those. Work on finding contacts, here on HN works really really great, talk to people in the industry, attend events, give talks, gain exposure.
One thing for sure is that the list is too long to fit into NSA's hard drives. Proud to be a Chinese!
Isn't a better solution to live in a less populated area than stuff your face in a smart phone though[1]?

This is what I'm working on, slowly.

[1] I'm being a hypocrite there as I'm sitting in an ASDA car park on my smartphone at the moment.mm
All the short ones are taken.
BlackBerry shares sink on bid doubts, T-Mobile stops stocking its phones
Given that most of these are listed on the homepage for the editor, this doesn't seem like a very interesting article.
I don't think its fair to say that "it isn't good for anyone." I remember buying books before Borders, the big Barnes & Nobles and Amazon. It sucked. The selection was poor, it was impossible to order, because it was very hard to know what was available.

I even used order books by mail order. (In particular Dover published a catalog which had a lot of their math and science reprints. You'd fill in an order form and send it with a check through the mail; 4-6 weeks later your books would arrive.)

The current situation for the consumer is much better.
The plea to support my struggling local bookstore would be more efficacious if I had one. As it happens my only real options are to order through Amazon or take a 75 mile drive to pay more for the book in person at Barnes and Noble.
Want to live forever? Leave it to Google.
Google Street View arrives at CERN
This is a great answer, but perhaps you could clarify some points for me:

* I'm of a functional persuasion, I like to think about types before code, I already tend break things up into testable components (also known as pure functions). What benefits might I find by adopting TDD?

* I understand the there are different benefits to be had from the act of writing tests and the artefact that is produced (ie the test suite). Do you the expect the tests that you write find bugs immediately? Or does the artefact only help to document code/detect regressions?
The General Problem
> Name another end-user product for which you are even vaguely aware of what data structures were used.

Unix.

You are operating primarily on a tree of files and streams of text. To operate on these you have a wide array of utilities that perform simple tasks (and a handful that perform complex tasks as well) that, when composed, allow you to perform any transformation you want. You can get a freshman CS student off the ground with Unix like systems in what, one lecture?

Because the (bleedingly simple) data model is the focus when learning Unix, you don't need to memorize every single little edgecase of the system. Knowledge of the data model alone is enough to tell you what sort of things can or cannot be done, and general knowledge of the sort of thing that a few utilities do is enough bootstrap yourself. If you want to list out some files in some particular way, you may not know immediately what exactly to type, but you probably do know that ls or find is a decent place to start looking.
well, look again.
There are quite a few companies like this (and much better ones) that power infrastructure for whole industries. I'm always very much impressed by these submarine operations.

Try this one: http://www.iponweb.com/

imho it is much more impressive than AdCash.
But in the longer term, isn't it the global cooling rather than the global warming that is more disastrous to human beings and the eco-system?
Series A Investors Take the Gloves Off
This post is dripping with irony because it is, itself, a form of distraction. Why? Because it doesn't offer any objective evidence for it's assertions. It is prescriptive distraction, a kind of modern, well-meaning form of muckraking that is a kind of politically passive aggressive post-apocalyptic self-help piece. (Don't get me wrong, I love writing these sorts of things as much as the next guy, but I keep them in my private journal.)

The older I get the more skeptical I feel about any of my own attitudes that I don't have clear objective evidence for, especially the kind of vague forebodings that motivate this sort of piece. There are entire "hidden worlds" out there, where people are motivated by completely different things. "Ours is a culture of distraction." Which culture? There are so many cultures in the world, and even in the US, and even in Silicon Valley.

Yes, I too see people walking around with their eyes downcast at their phones, consumed by far-away happenings. And it certainly feels like "we" are more disconnected from each other. But these are feelings, and should be treated as an impetus to look more deeply into the fact of the matter, rather than rush to diagnose and treat an ailment which you don't understand on any objective scale. And indeed, the first and best place to start looking is within yourself, and within your own life. Because the flip side to recognizing any kind of pan-cultural doom is living the alternative. That's the really cool thing about culture, is that it is not enforced by law, you can indeed break from it in very meaningful ways.

An article documenting your experience breaking from the culture, with the implicit message that you found something lacking and went on a search to find it, would be far more valuable than subjective analysis. Because, as fun as your subjective analysis is to read, without action it is merely distraction.
While I like Cloudflare, it's worth noting you give up true "end to end" encryption SSL normally provides. It's entirely possible for Cloudflare to allow others to eavesdrop on your traffic, and in fact I think the connections between Cloudflare and your servers are normally unencrypted.

Basically, using Cloudflare SSL is good for protecting your customers from eavesdroppers on WiFi, not so good for protecting against NSA surveillance. But it's probably better than nothing.
Cue the quote from Rob Enderle. That guy pops up everywhere, he's the hallmark of lazy tech and business journalists on a deadline.
I object to calling this "test-driven development." The test is not driving the development. This is merely "development, with some tests."

Let the tests actually shape your workflow, and then get back to me about how your development is "test-driven".
So they'd have to refund everybody by that logic.
If the reporting of that data includes a one-sided interpretation of that data, including denouncing anyone who may question said interpretation, then how it is reported does indeed matter and is a big part of the problem described.

Almost everything associated with how climate change research is reported makes it reek of bad science and propaganda.
2-3W? That means it's only a 0.5A, right? A lot of devices don't even charge properly off of a 0.5A USB source.
I think there is a difference though between a tech guy who wants to implement an idea a business guy has, and a tech guy who HAS an idea already and wants a business guy to help sell it.

The latter is hard to find too, so it's not like tech guys have it any easier.
IAmA: We are members of the StopWatching.Us coalition
New nose grown on patient's forehead
In other words, you think it's a dickish?

LOL! Kids...
We seem to generally (east, west, whatever) lack the collective capacity to care about these things unless we can't ignore it in the short term.
Collection of student CS competitions & award programs
My SGS4 actually had a similar sticker ...
"European model - this product is only compatible with a SIM-card from one of the following countries..."
Apple still works with the carriers quite a bit. For example, you can't turn on tethering unless the carrier allows it (often requiring you to pay more money), and most iPhones sold in the US are locked to a single carriers.

But who can blame them? Of the $650 cost of a new iPhone, the user only pays $200, while the carrier pays $450. Apple knows where their bread is buttered.
Sounds like an economist's job, to me.

No offense to economists.
When are you guys going to release an official Android app?
unless they change PayPal for the better. If PayPal ends up more Braintree than before, I'd say Braintree got a nice exit and accomplished their goals.
Slavery in Qatar has nothing to do with religion.

This is the equivalent of taking some example of modern day slavery (say the 20 million alleged http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/19/19042103-modern-d...) and then saying this is part of US history.

Saying slavery is inherently Islamic is like saying slavery is inherently American. And then for proof, going over centuries of quotes about slaves, beatings of slaves, violence during desegregation and the whole entire ugly history of race relations.

Anyone remotely well read knows this is absurd. That what is happening is a matter of individual greed and not some systemic mind control.
Just today I went to a site that uses cloudflare and they were down - because of cloudflare. Now I don't doubt that the cloudflare people will be right on top of something like that and will fix it asap but they're not a 100% solution to prevent your site from going down during traffic spikes because sites can and do go down, cloudflare or not so the coincidence with a traffic spike can still happen.

The downside is clear: it's a more complex system, so the mtbf will be lower (now it is the combined downtime of 'you' versus 'you+cloudflare').
I think that this is a great opportunity to clarify laws. There are a few EU countries that require phones to be SIM-unlocked at the end of contracts. The question is - will this fall foul of those laws, as people can use the device with other carriers in Europe but not outside? There will presumably be a court case around this (as it's the first one) and the result will probably force even more openness for EU citizens based on Neelie Kroes' previous successes.
I'm sending random messages to random people just to see them freaking out. "Oh, this might be the bug they were talking about this morning"
Thanks for sharing! This looks very interesting.
I've been told Piwik (http://piwik.org) is very good. I'll give them a shot. If they're good enough, maybe I'll replace Google Analytics with them - then at least I own all the data myself.
Hardware companies are usually terrible at software - there just seems to be this incompatible worldview, even when they work very hard on the problems.
While it's hard to find a tech co-founder, it's twice as hard to find a tech co-founder willing to work on an existing codebase. Techies love to create new things from scratch.
My HP printer is region-locked. When I moved from Europe to the US it refused to accept ink cartridges bought in the US.
"And the weirdest thing was, as they came to, coming out of their smart phone spell, each and every one of them had that look of some one who had just woken up in the morning. Eyes blinking, rubbing eyes, the slow realization of where you are, what you are doing, what comes next, etc."

I bet the same would happen if they had a book or magazine and were reading or even just staring off into space and daydreaming or watching TV. Change of context.
Because you end up with a monopoly.
Part of the answer is in the next sentence:

>And because nobody seems to care about these issues

The word "quality" is very subjective in this case. Perhaps the driver already did everything Qualcomm needed it to do. Maybe the code isn't perfect, but if it's working and money is being made... "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm sure a non-trival amount of people on HN have worked in less-than-good codebases, but finite resources & politics kinda prevents you from cleaning it all up with weeks of re-factoring and testing. I know I've seen this.
Sweet. I guess I'll be ordering one after all. And thanks for the cpulimit code as well. I had no idea you could do such a thing at all.
Richard Dawkins' The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is an accessible account of evolutionary biology and goes to great lengths to disabuse even a sloppy reader of the popular [pre-genetic sequencing] notions of "missing links."

Evolution suggests that creatures in similar environments are somewhat likely to develop similar adaptations without one species being the ancestor of the other. From a scientific standpoint the claim that modern fish are descendents of the extinct Placoderms is neither falsifiable nor for practical purposes verifiable - DNA simply does not survive that long.

Sparrows and bats have a common ancestor but it is improbable that it had wings.

Or to put it another way, the rationalist's notion of a missing link as expounded in the headline is as dependent upon the logic of the Great Chain of Being as that of an Ussherian creationist - their disagreement is large, but mainly resides in what constitutes the relevant details of a teleological account and the criteria for acceptance is the plausibility of the account to the individual and the intellectual communities to which they belong.
Nescaline, open source NES emulator, released for iOS 7
Seems to me that everyone involved is cherry picking the data to support their own interpretation. There's even been accusations of cherry picking of how the data is collected in the first place.
Most of the time, adding an option (particularly toggled modes) is a design failure. A much better solution would be to have the ruler be fixed to the border, but scroll along its axis.
My take:

1) Braintree is a dog fart compared to paypal. They certainly weren't bought for the user base. (although, their size probably probably affected the choice between stripe and bt)

2) David Marcus was acquihired from a team of 5 (a 'real startup') and has been working to startupify paypal. [1] Perhaps he thinks Braintree could be an example to the rest of the company.

3) Venmo is the most successful peer to peer mobile payments app. Peer to peer mobile payments will transition into wallet, and then banking. It's an important position to own.

4) Paypal's customer base is 'aging' like yahoo's has been. Braintree has a younger, hipper market segment (than paypal).

5) Stripe is cooler than braintree, but another order of magnitude smaller, plus they don't have the white-glove support of Braintree. From what I've heard, DM is continuously frustrated by Paypal's support. I believe BT's support is seen as a learning opportunity for PayPal. Also, Braintree was able to successfully copy all Stripe's innovations. Braintree has large, mature intl. presence, too.

Not an expert but thats my attempt to be 'objective'

[1]http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/12/if-its-not-broke-break-it-h...
"They have it, always(and the newest printing of it)"

The trouble is, Amazon knows that consumers think this way - so whenever they want to extort publishers into giving them a bigger discount they just make all that publishers' books unavailable on Amazon, knowing that everyone will just assume the books are out of print and not bother looking elsewhere.
From confirmation page:

"On tweeter, we are @hackerretreat, would be great if you could follow us there."

- Did you mean "twitter" ?
- The 't' at the end is out of the tag - <a ..>@hackerretrea</a>t
I assume because monopolists can demand economic rents.

But I imagine that Amazon is continuously under competitive pressure -- consider the disruption e-books caused. Had that caught Amazon flat-footed, it could have decimated their book business.
I bet Samsung was hoping to "quietly" trick customers and keep kickbacks from carriers.

Welcome to the real world!
It's not like anyone's expecting Amazon to make mountains of cash. It's not bleeding, either, it's re-investing, just like it always has.

Since the very beginning.

Stop screaming about the sky falling. It's just rain.
How a Full-size, Autonomous Helicopter Can Land Itself [+Video]
Lessons from Social Entrepreneurship: Creating Value for All Stakeholders
Last time I asked a Canadian shop (staples and one other I think) for local sim card I had to explain the concept of a separate sim card in detail.

Are sim cards more common now (or is this the one place where Americans has an edge on Canadians? ;-)
a lot of this is generally (d)vcs and applies equally to mercurial or even svn...

also if you think x pages of anything is a simple explanation then you missed a trick or two.

e.g if you have to explain why your arrows are pointing backwards you are doing it wrong, instead of using the standard notation for graphs and lists and stuff which are not generally well known, use what most people will understand on inspection.
Yeah, I use this myself a lot, especially when I'm in places with bad wifi.

I mentioned this in a separate comment, but I can use this as inspiration to try out Piwik (http://piwik.org), and see if it can replace Google Analytics.

I use Chartbeat for real-time-y stuff and alerts, which it's exceptional at. I think Piwik may have a harder time replacing that one, but I'll certainly try it.
Because once a company obtains a monopoly, their interests and those of the customer diverge, and there's no longer any control imposed by the market, because there is no market - just one initially efficient supplier with no incentive to remain efficient and every incentive to boost their margins at the expense of producers and customers.

This is why we have a regulated market, and rules about monopolies.
Rocking my nokia n95. I refuse to pay for SMS that should be free (requires less data to be transmitted than voice call). I don't like to text anyway, I'd prefer to call people.
And who's to say that ice would not have disappeared naturally over the next 1000 years if humans didn't exist at all?
+1 for reveal.js. In a talk I gave recently about a PHP dep management tool, I used reveal.js (+fragments) + `script` command + ansi2html.sh to create colorized, step-by-step terminal demos without running it in the console.

Nice cuz a) no live coding, no risk there b) dep tool requires network access for most operations; bad wifi at conference = "oh no" c) ppl can follow along at home or go over the steps themselves d) not an image so you can select/copy text.

Here's an example: http://sequoia.github.io/composer-talk/#/7/1 (press spacebar to advance). I plan to write a blog post about my strategies for avoiding live coding in presentations... one of these days :p
China was not invited to participate in the ISS-1 due to fears it would steal Western aeronautical technology. Well, it looks like they have taken anything they wanted. So we might just build the post 2025 ISS-2 with them.
Samsung has really bad support for their phones. Not a fan.
I find this whole report to be rather uplifting. I think that getting off of carbon is going to be much harder than doing something about the carbon. The cost of going carbon-free will be huge. I'm willing to bet that for less money we can find a way to pull it out of the atmosphere. And if there's money to be made, someone will figure out how to recycle it out of the atmosphere.
Fake ad tricks some iPhone users into destroying phone
I want to laugh :( explain...
Thank goodness I went for the HTC One instead then. I've personally bought local SIM cards in Germany, Sweden, Spain, UK (where I got it from) and South Africa.
As a young lawyer, you wouldn't have the experience or resources to fight back effectively. The trolls' lawyers would know this, and they might be more likely to litigate as a result.
The 'bureaucracy' has just put the man behind the Chinese high speed railway behind bars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun
Braintree, check, Ogone, Check. Who is next?
I hope the irony of this story being posted on Hacker News isn't lost on everyone. :-)
Except I'll pay another 63% for p&p.
really? its not that complicated, it just has lots of bad defaults in my experience

(i use mercurial when i start new projects, not because its fundamentally better - but because it has sensible defaults and i don't need to configure it our get bitten by gotcha x for the nth time - e.g. i can revert a merge without reading a document or configuring anything - a vital feature of source control imo)
Nice move guys!
Once i've heard of Hacker School, i also dreamed about
creating something like it here in Brazil.. (at least, after bootstraping my project, the one im stuck at right now)

So i know how you guys feel!

I hope more Hacker Schools like this start to pop all over the world..

We need to understand(and practice) education as something
not monopolized only by the academy, but shared all over, and continuously happening over the lifespan of a human being

Knowledge wants to be free!

Kudos to you guys!
I've suggested Stripe, but I know they have some geolocation restrictions.
nvm, I'm assuming the server was down at some point and it was a 503 error.
Show HN: Android app to save your thoughts into your photos
I was kinda tired of posting comments on my pictures to third party sites and startups only to find out they were dying or new cooler ones were coming up that I couldn't move to without losing all the data. So I wrote this app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arpitonline.picscribe