skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coin is a great step forwards for consolidation, and it will probably make future post-credit-card technologies more palatable. In that vein alone it's a win.

That said, there's lots of reasons to be worried about Coin from a security perspective. But, at least in the US, consumers bear few of the penalties and costs associated with fraud -- only the credit card companies and banks do. So we will likely see significant adoption from savvy consumers and some resistance (or outright revolt?) from CC companies and banks.
I don't know if they will accept liability, but they can try to prevent it as much as possible within their ecosystem.
py-mysql2pgsql is good too: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/py-mysql2pgsql
I was going to say the pay telephone but...
Ask HN: GO or Ruby on Rails?
Seem like there's a lot of Go > Rails speak going on, and as someone who's currently using Rails but never tried Go I'd like to hear your opinions. Should I drop Rails?
Progress? Do you think that is air you are breathing?
Google Petition to Reform ECPA: Tell the Government to Get a Warrant
Simple fql for idea evaluation
With my new card I always get a dialogue when I pay where I have to choose between something like "direct payment" or "pay in three installments". I suppose that's the kind of applications you're talking about? I didn't know this was possible before (and I don't remember my bank ever telling me about it, not that I really care, but it's a useless step slowing me down).

I see it on every terminal I use here in France, so it seems to somewhat work already here.
The Ullman book is intimidating to say the least.

I'm frankly humbled at how little I know. Thanks for posting it. I'm going to be spending a lot of evenings on it.
Also Heroku is not available in Japan region. Simply funny.
If it wasn't for the quality control, I wouldn't be here.

I wish HN would be more strict, it would drive the quality up even further. I want users to think long and hard about what they are writing and submitting.

HN is a right, not a privilege.

The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design. If you don't get why these rules exist and you can't understand their purpose, you shouldn't be here.
You guys don't use chip and pin? This is where you have to enter a code to do the transaction
Most people on HN are either programmers or in the startup world. I'll assume that you are the same. In that case, I challenge you, if you think copyright is bad. Release ALL of your work, including all the code you have on your servers, every bit of code you have running your project, and every bit of code you have powering your business, into public domain! Today! Why not? I am sure you'll make money from it still, why shouldn't I and others try to make some money from it too.

What, you don't think it's the same? Why not? Is it because you enjoy the kind of work that has automatic intellectual property protection in the form of server side code or binary compiled code? While book/music/movie authors entire final work product has to be made public in order for that author to monetize it. Yes, first to market is great. But when second to market literally means a day later in todays day and age, where is the advantage?

Any way, if you really believe what you are saying, start public domain releasing all of your work, you have the option. Prove that you can make a living that way, and maybe others will follow you and the world will change. Though, something tells me you will fail, but I can be proven wrong.

As to your slavery argument, ignoring the historical facts which truly resulted in the awful circumstance of "limited term slavery," the condition of being a slave or a free person is not an example of 2 extremes. Having a bunch of white people own a bunch of black people as slavery is extremely bad and evil. Not having slavery is good, it's basically norm. The other extreme would be to free all the black slaves, and give them a white person as a slave each. Clearly and evil extreme as well.
https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/
Hmm, if there's no MR involved, I'm not sure our GPUs would be very helpful for this type of job. What do you think?
The US government took down egold when it reached ~2 billion in annual transactions. I suspect they will take action against bitcoin before it reaches a trillion dollar monetary base, but only time will tell ;)
I'd imagine it hurting a lot.

Not a dropshipper, but I believe one of the greatest costs is finding profitable niches. IE many sites won't make any money at all because there's no demand.

When you do find a profitable niche, being transparent can invite competition.
I didn't realize European automated machines would basically never accept my cards. On a subsequent trip I tried to get chip card, but neither my personal banker nor the branch manager at Wells Fargo had ever even heard of them and insisted I was confused about the problem.

Shopping for a new bank, for many reasons.
EMV where you need to input a PIN Number is simply a way for VISA/MC to push all the liability onto the customers for stolen credit cards. If a purchase is made with the credit card and PIN, then the issuing bank can simply let the liability fall on the customer, instead of the bank eating the costs, like how it's done today.
Imagine making a portable device that use watson to analyze your blood and health, you could give your self an medical exam every week.
I never could stand the Ruby syntax and after a few days with Go I loved it. I would definitely recommend giving it a shot. Web work took some time to get used to but once you get the hang of it things just feel natural (and I guess that's what happens when you have the brains of the Go team).
And, how would you phrase that in a legal document like a terms of service?

Who determines "abuse of resources"? Who determines "being malicious".

If the sole determination of whether somebody is crossing the line for termination lies in Github, then the legal result is exactly what currently exists in the terms of service.

If Github does not have the sole discretion to make the determination of abuse, then who does? A third party mediator?
Sriracha has become the new 'bacon' lately. Oatmeal has been proclaiming it for quite some time, with (I believe) another cartoon being written earlier this summer.

Combine that with the 'Big Government versus little sauce' angle and you have a situation Slacktivists froth at the mouth for.
What happens if you breath these things in?

"The challenges for Smart Dust are to create a package that includes all the elements needed to perform sensory measurements, while also being able to communicate back to a base station to gather the data."

I'm not sure I want radio transmitters in my lungs and bloodstream, especially not a lot of them, plus all the nasty shit that goes into electronics.
In Finland, crowdfunding concepts are actually illegal for that reason.

If you're collecting money without selling something, you need a license from the authorities. To get a license, you need to be a registered charity.

You can't just say "we'll probably use your donation to build something you might like and may send you one when it's ready".
This reminds me of an idea I've had. I think it'd be nice if there were a website where experts from a certain field could go and post their problems. Then knowledgeable people working in other fields with other backgrounds could weigh in on their problem and provide possibly novel solutions.

I have always thought that you don't necessarily need to be in a field in order to be able to provide new insights into issues.
I think a lot of the probable cause comes down to the venue and context. After all, someone going on a rampage in a MMORPG could not be pursued for being a potential murderer. Yet a random entity in a public, online chatroom is assumed to be human by default (despite all the bots out there), so if someone wants to get kicks from a robotic kid, a public venue like that is not the place and they need to engage in these activities in a suitable forum (like a game).
> but if some pedophile gets off on 100% computer-generated images, well, then that's probably a win for society that reduces violence and exploitation.

More research is needed. Some people suggest that users of pornography need to collect more and more of it. Some people who collect images of child sexual abuse are caught with hundreds of thousand of images.

A person collecting pseudo-photograph images of child sexual abuse might be a risk to children. (Data is tricky to find.)

But yes, if people can stay away from children and real images of child sexual abuse then pseudo photographs would be great.

(I agree with you about the bots too.)
Replace it with a kid and retry it and you will find its setting up a false premise.
Well, you fooled me. I thought you were serious and might know what you were talking about.
EV – Millionaire's Math
MinimaLT: Encrypted network protocol as fast as TCP/IP
HIPAA compliance, multi-region deployments, VPC outbound proxies, encryption at rest, cfndsl (CloudFormation DSL)
0_0 This is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Yes, let's put all of my cards in one card so that if it's stolen, then all of my cards are gone. @#$%^ing brilliant!
What service / tool do you use to test web apps?
Interested to know what services/tools you use for testing JavaScript web apps for functional and technical bugs.
"So in essence, this is geared towards a micro-niche of tech savvy SF/NY/LA crowd."

I disagree. I sent the Coin video to my technology phobic parents in the midwest. They are hesitant to use most smartphone apps and online banking but they were really excited about Coin and could see themselves using it. It really appeals to them that 1) it's only slightly more complicated to use than a regular credit card (whereas, say, online banking requires you to learn a relatively elaborate user interface) and 2) keeps them from having to actively worry about leaving a card or wallet behind.

When you make a user interface a slight variation of something the user is already very familiar with, you can draw in the less tech-savvy because it's less intimidating. It's the same reason why my parents are avid Dropbox users but it's hard to get them to try new web apps.
I think it all depends how you define winning here. Based on popularity alone - yeah, MySQL is still the king. Based on capabilities - I think it's fair to say that pgSQL is more capable and it's just that not everybody needs that one.

And even though I love PostgreSQL (and was working with all major databases), I still think that the real winner is sqlite :)
I ask this with kindness and no ill will -- because I am curious. If that is true, than why are you still using the site and contributing comments? There are tons of great places to read newsworthy and interesting articles.
I mentioned a reply to that as a parent above. The difference is the way Kickstarter presents the projects and the terminology they use. They are not asking for pre-orders, they are asking for pledges, and have a very clear disclaimer in the top right about what that means. If the product page itself were to claim that they were pre-orders for a product that couldn't ship yet, then it as well could potentially be violating card agreements as well as the rule from the FTC.
The company card I used had my name on it, as for all other cardholders; and cards with wrong gender are treated in shops as unacceptable if they notice, though in 90% cases they don't, unless if it's a large purchase and they want ID.
Would SO work? Or would you need different formatting?
Why founders don't sell
If you listen closely you can hear the sound of an army of devteams uploading DB exports to Amazon....

& it would be louder if the rest could figure out where to put the custom DB URL parameter ;D
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

You hit on something though; in the U.S. there are tens of thousands of ATM machines all over. They all accept PIN numbers, and I "believe" magnetic-strip as well (not sure if they're doing fancy stuff too with built-in chips or not). It's the standard that everyone uses; debit card and credit cards alike.

To change that to support different tech, you'd have to upgrade all of the ATM machines, all of the credit cards, and all of the backend tech. That's a lot of coordination between banks/credit-card companies. On top of that you have POS systems in stores which are all magnetic-strip based as well, accepting PINs and/or signatures.

Any sort of switch would have to be phased-in over years and require a lot of buy-in. Unless retailers, banks, ATM providers, and credit card companies have a good business case to do so, they probably won't.

I'd imagine it would be easier for some other type of technology which displaces cards entirely, like phone-based payments, would eventually replace all of this. An idea like Coin augments the current "archaic" system and has the potential to take off. But outside of the U.S. it sounds like it won't work without modification.
>> Visa requires that merchants ship a product prior to charging any Visa debit card

This is very new to me. This source here:
http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guide...

States:

>> You should not bill the customer until merchandise has been shipped

That is a best practice, not a requirement.
I once heard that described as "Trust is a common good," which really rang true to me.

I'd go as far as to say that the first world's biggest asset is the collective trust it has accrued over the centuries.
What Sells On the Black Market | infographic
> [Dart] is not an open standard

It will get standardized in the not too distant future. [1]

> Apple dominating the mobile web

Huh? Android's market share is over 80%. iOS got about 13%. [2]

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/news/Dart%20workshop.htm

[2] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/12/idc-android-hit-81-...
InnoCentive and Quirky do pretty much this.

> InnoCentive is a Massachusetts-based open innovation company that accepts by commission research and development problems in a broad range of domains such as engineering, computer science, math, chemistry, life sciences, physical sciences and business and frames them as "challenge problems" for anyone to solve. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria.
One can hardly count on users always having one of the big provider mail accounts and beyond the big providers, most email is still sent across the wire unencrypted. Email isn't generally script kiddy proof, let alone NSA proof.

While I like the idea of login via email link, it's only good if the login link expires very quickly.

Email is not an auth mechanism, if you want to rely on the big providers to do auth, they have systems specifically for that already.
Two issues with Coin. One is this has been done before, exact same approach, and it did not work out because the card issuers didn't buy in (a credit card is also part of the issuing bank's brand). Maybe that's changed in the past few years, but I am skeptical.

The second issue is it's solving a problem that isn't really a problem. I use two cards on a regular basis. I have others but rarely need to carry them with me. So I can reduce two slots in my wallet to one. Doesn't seem like enough of a benefit to me.

Lastly, I can see all sorts of issues with merchants not knowing what these are, and being wary of accepting them due to perceived fraud risk. Something that reprograms its mag stripe practically yells "FRAUD!".

So I appreciate the technical innovation behind this, but I think they're likely to get dashed upon the rocks. It's a tough space. I thought Google Wallet with Android NFC would be super convenient. It wasn't. I went back to the old fashioned swipe. So its hard to see this catching on with ordinary consumers.
For everyone who is poo-pooing Coin because it's not a digital wallet, please answer this question: How long from now will most merchants that accept credit cards also start accepting an e-wallet of some sort?

I honestly would be stunned if this happened in <10 years. I think we very often underestimate how slow adoption rate is for new technology and how much money can be made by playing nice with the incumbent technology instead of trying to disrupt it from the onset.
This looks much safer than the alternatives of forceps, vacuum extraction, or C-section.

The intuitive leap from "extracting cork in wine bottle" to "extracting baby in birth canal" happening during a dream is fascinating. Neurons rearranging during sleep cause the oddness of dream logic and can find unexpected correlations -- like the link he found.
Agree completely. How did this manage to bubble up to the top of HN?
Sony PS4 Makes Its Debut
Repeating the same thing is not productive. Nobody cares about your personal taste or what you do or do not prefer. That has nothing to do with the topic.
Depends on what you do. If you're looking to do freelancing then you'll find a lot more jobs if you're strong in Ruby.

Go is growing rapidly and we'll probably see quite a few full time jobs looking for Go skills in the years ahead. So if you want to invest in future hire-ability then Go isn't a bad place to use your time.
That's interesting. I too am not a huge fan of the Ruby syntax, but I've learned to live with it for the most part.

It does make me miss Python though.

One nice thing about Rails is that there are a LOT of resources out there for learning it like One Month Rails, CodeSchool, etc. I haven't seen the same for Go (yet).
This is as disgusting as the crime its trying to rid us off.

Its modern-day witch hunt and completely skips over the fact that many sex-offenders where in fact themselves victims when they were children.

Populism when its worst.
One of the major problems with law enforcement today is that so long as they carefully skirt the edges of what is legally defined as "entrapment", they can bait people into crimes, and arrest them for it even if otherwise they would not have committed any crime at all.

This really isn't good, and that's what the anti-entrapment statutes are for, but law enforcement finds its way around them... That's one of the best ways to catch "criminals", and catching criminals is their job, right?
Yes, I've been quite happy to acknowledge the it may just be poor docs, as you'll have noticed. As the target audience for dart (I'm a web developer, who makes large apps, and doesn't already know dart) all I have to go on is the actual dart website, so you'll forgive me if I expect it's demonstrations would be showing the language as it's best.

Fix the docs, ditch the semicolons, and Dart may get more popular.

I think marking up blocks twice is a waste of time, and leads to the possibility of inconsistencies between indentation and parenthesis, but appreciate using indentation for blocks is too different for some existing programmers.
It reminds me of this patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US3216423
> No one imprints anymore.

that's not true at all; have you been outside of any major city in america?
It boils down to the project scope. As long as you are comfortable with delivering what they're asking for, you should go for it.

For example a client might ask, "I want to a simple web app that does x and charges users a monthly subscription for access." Can you build out the functionality to carry out whatever x is and set up something like Stripe? If so, take the job, if not say you're booked and move on/forward them on to someone else.

Also keep in mind, if they knew someone better for the job, they probably wouldn't be talking to you (for example, your non-technical friend approaches you to build a simple webapp, you're probably the most technical person they know, if they knew a rockstar or whatever, they probably would have asked them instead).
Advertising, Bundling, Community and Criticism
Not sure asm.js would make sense for something like Dart, since it is mainly intended for things like C and C++ (Dart is a dynamic language, and needs different forms of optimization).

However, I think it would be fun to explore that direction! I'd be happy to collaborate with Dart VM people on that.
I'm curious what the performance characteristics of this would be like.

A lot of people talk about how poor the storage performance on AWS is - but this seems to offer provisioned IOPS up to 30,000 IOPS.

I'm curious what sort of hardware/setup that translates to in the real world? Do you find your own dedicated setups have more throughput?

And there doesn't seem to be much info on the network bandwidth between RDS and EC2 either.
I'm talking about San Francisco, not the 5,500+ square miles of faceless suburbs surrounding the city.

Sao Paulo (city proper): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo (18,690/sq mi).

San Francisco (city proper): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco (17,620/sq mi).

The metro area density is mostly a measure of whether the suburbs are more or less urbanized. E.g. the LA/OC metro CSA is substantially more dense than the SF/Oakland/Fremont CSA, but nobody would say that LA is denser than SF. Rather, LA is surrounded by urban sprawl while SF is surrounded by suburbs.
That would be amazing. Sequel Pro makes MySQL management so easy. Have you emailed the author asking for that feature?

Edit: It seems they are working on it but I i'm not sure when we can expect a release: http://stuconnolly.com/blog/sequel-pro-postgresql-support/
Snapchat $3 Billion Rejection Letter to Mark Zuckerberg
I wonder if websites that show exclusively CGI generated underage porn will be illegal or not. Seems like if it isn't hurting anyone then who cares.
First Look at PostgreSQL RDS on Amazon
Yea but my credit card doesn't have a wireless radio built into it
But most of the traffic to sf is just users downloading the software. If you were to look at the number of commits per day on sf v github, I wouldn't be surprised to see a x100 difference.
Not to be pedantic but there's actually a fairly recent example of consumers choosing style over substance: the motorola RAZR.

Just saying...
Code is not an undercover cop. Undercover cops have cost restrictions that prevent their casual use. An undercover cop is also still a real person who may still be having a crime committed against them.

There's too many differences for this argument to hold. It is, at best, a good start of an argument, but one that needs to address the practical differences between a program and a human, in terms of cost, morality, sentience, etc. And I think at the end of that process you'd find that you can't just treat code as an undercover cop, and it wasn't actually that great a starting point after all.
Coin folks, please, for the love of god, ignore these people.
Yeah, that whole "marketer's dream" part is exactly what I object to. No thanks.
I had a car once that relied on the bank sending it a "payment was made" message to the car every two weeks. To say it was not reliable was an understatement. For a good two weeks after the original purchase, I could not rely on the car due to faults with their system working in an area with spotty cell coverage (which still exist even in the US).

To the last day of my obligation to that lender, I would have problems with it, typically due to weather, problems with the module itself, or any number of other factors.

I would hope that Renaults system is better than that... but I will be hard pressed to trust such a system ever again. Having your car shut down remotely due to faulty DRM really sucks.
I think we should not worry about the criminals but we should worry more about the victims. Objective should never be to put every sex offender behind bars but the objective should be that no child should be a victim of such crimes.

Once we get that clear, putting all potential victims behind bars becomes one of the way to have 0 victims. The question is how effective that method is and whether it is achievable or can it backfire.

I would say that a bot that can detect a vulnerable child is far more effective in preventing a crime than a one that detects a potential offender.