skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is some thought that the Epsilon [1] development was primarily a launch vehicle that could strike back at the PRK should they decide to do something. That thinking was motivated by the design criteria of 'solid fuel' (easy to store in a bunker, no delay in fueling it in responding) and 'minimal crew' (not like you can station 20 or 40 people at a missile bunker). Of course I have no insight into whether or not that was their thinking but folks I know who are part of the 'establishment' seem to think that is the rationale Japan used.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_%28rocket%29
But a waiter doesn't ask for ID when taking your card... so even if the Coin identifies you as John Smith when you pay your check, the fact that you are Steve Jackson who presented the card doesn't mean anything. And you can have multiple cards with multiple names in your Coin.
Today is World Diabetes Day
Dart seems interesting, but its sponsorship by Google creates a major problem - what incentive does Microsoft, Mozilla, or Apple have to implement Dart support? What about JavaScript devs who choose not to support Dart? I don't think good answers are available to these questions, which makes me hesitant.
Thanks! I have a hunch that this way of selling might get more traction in the future as well. When you're selling a business, usually the more attention and publicity you get the more buyers (and higher price) you're likely to have.

There are a few things I'm not sharing (like the top selling products, for example), but for the most part, I think the advantages from being transparent far outweigh the risks.
"We weren’t able to hack HN, but we didn’t have to; by putting effort into publishing high-value content, we were able to get our readers to do much of the heavy lifting for us."

I understand folks want to market their business, but I'm glad this is not an easy forum to so.
I really like Dart and hope it - or something like it - replaces javascript soon, but I'd heavily recommend learning javascript instead. I'll be quite some time, if ever till Dart is even 1/4 of the client side market.

Even if you did learn Dart, you'd inevitably have to include external javascript libraries, so you'll have to know javascript anyway.

And Google is still actively promoting javascript in things like AppScript and Angular js.
If you hate a behavior you're engaging in, then try not to engage in that behavior.
Thanks, Juan. PuPHPet is great. We should talk about ways for PuPHPet and ServerPilot to work together.
Well said. It's frustrating how much people want to do price comparisons on the commodity instead of the service.

You're paying for the "as a service" part of PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, *aaS.
> Once he was on board, I went to work lining up a team of upvoters from different IP addresses. Following Alex’s strategy, we wanted to get as many upvotes as we could, as quickly as possible.

That's pretty scummy.

> Less than ten minutes after executing on our bulletproof strategy, our post was nowhere to be found.

Good. If you're going to try to game the system, you deserve to get your posts deleted.

Also, this:

> And interestingly, he changed the headline from "7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year," to "Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year".

> Shorter, simpler, more direct. Flies in the face of the copywriting wisdom I had been reading about specificity and numbered lists. And yet, it worked!

is a really revealing thing to say. It means that your plans to make the front page somehow didn't include reading the submission guidelines [1]:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

1: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hmmm...I was wondering why MySQL is still much more widely used.
I forgot to add SF to that list. I admit most of time was on the BART and not on CalTrain.
I think this is great news... PostgreSQL is definitively my favorite open-source database. It's also nice to see Amazon get into the game, as hosted pg options have been fairly limited. I am slightly disappointed to not see the server-side JS support baked in, and that apparently you can't do reads from distributed replicas. Just the same, I think there will be a lot of progress in this area.

Administering databases is a full-time type of responsibility. Yes, you can get pretty sane defaults, and up and running without much difficulty with MS-SQL, and mySQL has been a defacto standard in the LAMP stack. That said PostreSQL has been a rock solid RDBMS. The commercial extensions for replication have been cumbersome and expensive. Here's hoping that AWS will grow/expand the replications options/features, and that they'll grow to include JS procs as that feature stabilizes.
I wonder how this would fare in an ATM. What happens if the ATM accidentally presses the card selection button? If the ATM gobbles the card, now you've effectively lost your entire wallet. What happens if the cashier presses the card selection button while running your card too? Oops, now your boss wants to know why you've just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and why you've cloned your business credit card!! The first can be an innocent mistake, but the second can be grounds for disciplinary action.

I can't see the banks being happy about customers cloning their own cards. In fact, it will probably be a convenient excuse for them to absolve themselves of all liability in the case of loss, theft, or misuse. Some, if they found out, might pitch a fit and close the account.

This also is going to pose a lot of problems when used with non-domestic cards, as they point out in their FAQ. It's possible to use an EMV-based card with just the magstripe, but it's a pain in the butt and the bank may well be aware that all your meatspace transactions are not using the EMV-chip. They may assume that your card is broken or (quite correctly) cloned and block it. A call from the fraud department may well lead to a fit being pitched.

From wikipedia: "Magnetic stripe cloning can be detected by the implementation of magnetic card reader heads and firmware that can read a signature of magnetic noise permanently embedded in all magnetic stripes during the card production process." [0] Oops, now your card is blocked.

Retailers might also get skittish if they figure out this isn't actual bank-issued plastic. They may well refuse it because of the risk of fraud. I would. I really wouldn't want to be running someone's cloned card, even if the cardholder was the one that did the cloning. In fact, it might jeopardize a retailer's merchant account if the acquiring bank found out the merchant were running cloned cards!

The best way to counter a bulky wallet is to not add bulk in the first place. How many credit cards and debit cards does one need to carry on a daily basis? I carry maybe two or three cards, some ID, my Oyster card, and a Costa rewards card that I use daily. I also have a backup wallet that contains a second set of cards in case I lose the first. The bulk of my wallet is receipts that accumulate, but even when I carried way more my life wasn't burdened by a whalelike wallet.

It'd also be a pain in the butt to use this with some rewards cards. For example, my Costa rewards card is swiped at the same time as I'm paying. Would I really want to fumble through pressing a button to find the right rewards card, give that to the cashier, have it handed back so I can fumble through pressing buttons again so I can pay? Certainly not, and even less so the impatient people in line behind me.

Sorry to promulgate the Hater News stereotype, but it's just too easy to poke holes in this idea. It has superficial appeal but I really wouldn't pay $100 for so many potential problems, especially as it would only make my wallet a few mm thinner.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card
That's pretty much what you get when colonist powers(France and Britain at the time) divide up the area between themselves without any regard for local sectarian differences[1]. The same pattern also played out in Africa.

In Lebanon as in Syria(I'm Lebanese but have lived in Syria for an extended period of time in the past) the population is extremely heterogenous with racist feelings and ideology being a very common thing. To arbitrarily divide up the area while disregarding this is either an extremely foolish thing to do, or likelier a ploy by the then colonialist powers to retain long-term control of the area by keeping its population ever-divided.

It doesn't exactly help, that into this already explosive mix was implanted the nation-state of Israel which as been in a state of perpetual war with its neighbours ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement
I do this sometimes, but no longer because I fear looking ignorant. Unfortunately, I've realized that most people are really bad at explaining things. It's not their fault, teaching is hard, but I often find asking questions to the wrong person can lead to a hard to escape, but well meaning tech rant that I can't remotely discern because it relies too much on domain knowledge. I often find that it's easier to just look it up on my own.
Fully agree on py-mysql2pqsql, awesome little tool.
This would be an excellent opportunity to add some encryption to credit card numbers. Imagine taking this, except for it has a pin-pad where you enter in your password/passkey. All credit card numbers stored on the device are encrypted with this key, so it's impossible for a thief to swipe your card. However, it doesn't solve the malicious waiter problem.. but of course, you could still keep it locked down so that the most the waiter could get is one card, rather than all of them.

Ideally, it'd be something like:

* Entering your key keeps exactly one card decrypted for up to 2 minutes
* Changing cards requires a reentry of the key

You could even go crazy and do things like allow different cards to have different passkeys. Not sure how useful that would be though
According to their FAQs, they do plan to implement chip and pin (EMV) in future devices. Not sure how - I would be shocked if EMV could be tricked into exposing cryptographic secrets.

Mind, regarding skimming, the FAQs also say "You can only add cards that you own to your Coin." That sounds more like an instruction than a technical limitation. If there are things like this that they've not thought through, pretty sure EMV will never happen.
Airbnb stole my design
Announcing Martini: Classy Web Development in Go
This Chrome extension shows the like/dislike ratio of each related video:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-ratings-pr...

It's unbelievable that Youtube hasn't implemented this themselves yet.
Why Facebook wants SnapChat but doesn't need it
I've got a few cards and travel somewhat regularly to Europe. I've specifically been asking various card vendors that I have for chip and pin/EMV based cards. For the most part, they seem to be rolling them out at the high end rather than making them available at the normal "consumer"/reward cards.
It's a button that requires more then physical contact.
You have to actually push it.
I went to the doctor when I caught it originally, and then a few years later again when it came back. Although the first doc warned me that it might come back and is hard to get rid of completely, so it wasn't entirely unexpected.
I was in the UK with my non-chip and pin card and there was a similar response. It took like 5 people at Tesco to figure it out.
Why don't you choose JSX or TypeScript? The latter is a superset of JavaScript, so migration should be a breeze.

If you'd like the same language for client and server side, try Kotlin or HaXe.

For now, Dart doesn't have a crossbrowser VM yet (except for Dartium), so it doesn't give you any performance boost over JavaScript. Maybe one day there will be a cross-browser Dart VM as a PNaCl or asm.js module?
Software is like sex: it's better when it's free. - Linus Torvalds
Even at 20%, that is still a Very Good Thing. I've seen a lot of ecommerce sites (10x or more in size) with far less direct traffic.
The problem of killing bacteria, as I see it, will increasingly become something akin to the demarcation problem of philosophy. Why would it not be? It is natural that the optimal situation for pathogenic bacteria to be in is one in which they are indistinguishable from necessary cells. It may take an extraordinarily long time, but until we are able to completely eradicate a pathogenic bacteria from the earth, we will remain in that arms race.

Humans are creative at killing bacteria, though it's already not difficult to "annihilate them at will". It's much harder to annihilate only the ones we don't like, only the ones that harm us, and only the ones that pose the greatest risk.
How GitHub No Longer Works
Meow***, Thats my Twitter username buddy
I agree - I don't see the comments here as Hater News, but rather the exact sort of questions pretty much any consumer or business user would ask. There's a glint of "oh this is useful" and then there's the "oh, but what about this... and that...". That's not Hater News - that's pretty much exactly what any non-technical person would inquire about this product.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6731022
Because chargebacks are relatively easy with credit cards and the merchant bank bears the cost of fraud. With Bitcoin, if you steals your coins, there's no way to undo that.

On top of that, there's all the convenience issues that plastic brings when out in the real world. Using bitcoin requires a computing device of some sort that's significantly less robust than Coin, a chip & pin card, or a piece of plastic.
Question about phrasing:
"This is the first time I've heard of that" sounds better to me than saying "I've never heard of that before". It feels more like I'm grateful to the person who has introduced me to the topic rather than dismissive of this thing they may have just made up.
Also according to their FAQ, if your soufflés keep collapsing, you should add a little lemon juice to the béchamel. This strengthens the mixture and prevents tragedy.

I thought it was a cute touch. :P
Pretty much all web browser engines are full of use-after-free issues, not just IE.
Because once you allow statements at the top level alongside declarations, which statement should be run first? main() makes that clear.

In JavaScript it depends on the order of script tags and their attributes. It's really hard to determine what code is actually run at application startup, and what the initial state is.

Making the top-level only declarations means that the programmer knows what code runs first (the first line in main()) and the VM knows that the order of evaluating the declarations doesn't matter. It can evaluate them all and cache the result so that subsequent runs are fast, it can execute main() before other declarations and evaluate them on an as-needed basis, or something in between.
I've never worked with Node and probably never will, but it's pretty dishonest to conflate the sense of "blocking" as in "postponed execution" with "blocking" as in "executing an intensive CPU-bound job" to make a point that shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's paying attention.
Yeah I was disappointed to see this.. Can you configure pgpool externally to talk to the replicas or are those multi-az instances a black box? I've never used RDS before so I'm curious as to how much flexibility is afforded.
I was curious about this and browsed through their operating regulations. It says something to the effect of "Visa considers a signature box that only says See ID to be blank".

So the pedantic response to your second sentence is that they consider the See ID irrelevant (and once there is a signature, it is apparently a violation of the merchant agreement to ask for ID, but I didn't look for that in the operating regulations).
...spamming Hacker News with one-liners is not a good growth hacking tactic.
I post the job on freelancer, and let people bid. Sure, it takes more time than fiver and friends - but at least I can see an artist's portfolio.
How I Got a 2x Speedup With One Line of Code
It's a positive development that admission into a decent PhD program requires research experience. Some people somehow cannot make the jump from classroom exercises to production work, and you would rather that they don't get accepted, instead of having to throw them out a year later.

Besides, a research lab is a workplace after all, and some kids are completely missing the social skills that are needed in a working environment. You can't have that sort in a PhD program either.
It feels like requiring 5+ years of experience in entry level positions...
My ATM card always seems to start splitting right around the time my bank sends me a new one. Hopefully this device is more durable.
It's called American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. –George Carlin
> Sussman explores some of the issues surrounding mathematical notation

see this video, starting at 8mins:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Expression-of-Ideas
> "...a problem most of us have."

Is this a real problem? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you can't determine a problem by telling me this is a problem we all have. I'm not buying the angle, sorry. Not like I'm against this idea, but the sell is a little ridiculous.

How would this work with chip-based cards? In Canada, some of the banks have ditched the magstripe, so not sure how scalable this is - since the encryption on the chip is specifically engineered to prevent this kind of interception.
What do you call the thing described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economi...
This is awesome but I'm concerned about how it would be too easy to switch cards (accidentally). In the FAQ they say it's fine if its dropped, handed into a booklet, etc. Sounds fine in theory but what happens when you hand the card to the waiter/bartender and they happen just to grab it where the circle is? Won't that change the card?

Another concern is in bars - your CC# gets a tiny bit wet (drunk ppl, spilled drinks on table, etc.). Does this card stop working if its splashed a little?

My two cents.

This is awesome though.
I always use a credit card, just for the fraud protection...no idea how, but my CC has been used fraudulently 3 times over the years, and each time, with a quick phone call, the charge is gone, basically no questions asked (they assume fraud and go from there)...contrast that with a debit card where the money is actually being taken out of your account.

My wife recently used her debit card at a restaurant and they accidentally double-charged her. The restaurant recognized their mistake, but were being pains getting us refunded, requiring bank statements and such, so instead I called the bank (Wells Fargo), and it was 2 weeks before they said "Sorry, nothing we can do, take it up with the restaurant." We ended up getting the money back, but it was a real pain.
ahh... so that's why i've seen so much of your garbage.

stop doing what you're doing or a similar level of organization will form to bring wrath upon you
How on earth is that going to work? Theoretically at least, you can't clone an EMV card. That's kind of the point.
Google Wins The Right To Scan Pretty Much Every Book Ever
The first bit has to be the simplest thing to fix: just require the user to hold it to lock/unlock or some particular sequence of presses.
Lonely Planet Acquires Mobile Travel App TouristEye
Or how about another solution, compromise?

How about we open up a dialog and get people talking instead of just gravitating to one sort of ideology or another?

What if we open up the conversation to be more than just a binary opposition between the privileged nerds vs the privileged artists?

I'm afraid part of the issue is that engineers tend to gravitate towards binary opposition and reductionist thought.

The tech industry is very good at talking and terrible at actually listening.
Yeah, pretty easy to just store all cards in the app and switch out the infrequently used cards for things like loyalty programs when you actually need them.
"it will make its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in the cloud".

Future tense, and no bucket to drop an email into for notifications :( Would take no time at all to buy the parked watsoncloud.com
domain (or something!) and flip up a launchrock page (... or something!).
Part of the reason this is not a good business is you can't amortize advertising. ie no SG&A leverage going forward. unlikely to see decreasing marginal cost

why not post cash flow as well?

you will also get your ass kicked for posting projected financials without a series 7 & 63
Came here to say "This is huge!", found Django creator beat me to it.
Ya Boy Bitcoin - Holla @yaboybitcoin
Love the idea. But one of those "I'll believe it when I see it working well".
Why the FreeBASE - A Project You Never Heard Of - Failed?
These kinds of tricks hardly ever pass muster. The law isn't that stupid.
There's a Japanese saying I came across recently while reading the book Tokyo Vice:

"To ask a question is a shame for a moment. Not to ask the question is a shame for your whole life."

(The author of the book, a newspaper reporter covering crime and the Yakuza, gets very far in his career by asking "dumb" questions.)
They’ve admitted using bad methods to scam their way into HN. Why are we still seeing them here? Their domain should be banned outright.
You don't need a G+ Profile on your @gmail address to create G+ Page pseudonyms for Youtube. Your main address will continue to go plus-less, and other services which strictly require a Real Name/G+ profile (like Places/Play reviews) will continue to nag you to create one.
I have signed exactly 0 of my credit cards and this has not caused me any trouble. Nobody checks.
I thought the same thing. Must have some sort of double click or click pattern that only you know.
http://toogl.es does that as well. Disclaimer, I built it.
In regards to accidentally pressing the card selection button, I think a simple idea would be some sort of "hold to lock" functionality. You hold down the selection button for 3 seconds or so and the currently selected card is "locked in" until you perform the action again.

EDIT: What the person above me said =)
There are small amounts of toxins in every plant. Not enough to cause any real problems, but I doubt you could get them approved if you were to artificially create the exact same thing.
Ask HN: Good (non-USA) Micropayment Partner with API?
Hi all,

I'm exploring building a service that will take micropayments, even Bitcoin, but I haven't found a good payment partner, meaning someone to process the payments, who has a great API.

By micro, I mean that I'll frequently be doing transactions in the < $2 area, maybe even < $1. Unfortunately, paying 30c eats the cost of the business, let alone any potential profit margin.

And sadly, the new and awesome Amazon offering is US only. I'm Canadian.

Thanks in advance if you can help!
Would be nice if there was a way to physically unlock it. I can imagine my phone dying – preventing me from making any kind of purchase.
Feel free to use my referral code.

https://onlycoin.com/?referral=eHXIYcMX
Previous discussion on the same coverage from The Guardian:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722693