skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it true that any random company I once did business with can call up a credit ratings agency and claim that I owe them money?

Anyone can report to a credit ratings agency. However, you first need to be approved by the corresponding agency, and each one has a process. It's similar to getting API access to a proprietary corporate API; they want to know who they're dealing with before they hand over the keys. For example, here are the instructions on reporting to Experian:

[0] http://www.experian.com/consumer-information/reporting-to-cr...

> What standards of proof do the credit agencies require?

They take your word for it once you've been established as an authorized reporter. In the event of a dispute, the credit reporting agency is required to open a formal investigation.

If you don't produce the appropriate documentation, they remove the item from the credit report. You may also be subject to various civil penalties and fines under the FCRA if the reporting error was egregious, malicious, or otherwise not merely a clerical error of minor import.
Devblog of europeans biggest music store
Been following this through Popehat, latest: http://www.popehat.com/2013/11/25/kleargear-reaps-the-whirlw...

It gets worse, it looks like the "non-disparagement" clause wasn't even in T&C at the time they bought their item.
I don't usually do this, but the timing is just so perfectly aligned with today's SMBC:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3188#comic
They are supposed to guard the people but job security and mission creep means their priority becomes guarding themselves. This should come as a shock, unfortunately it does not.
Awesome way to exercise the brain.
"a public service lawyer has agreed to take the case and fight back with demands for $75,000 in compensation."

. . .

"Michelman said the $75,000 compensation amount is in the high range of a typical award for acts in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act."

This is an old story now, already discussed extensively here on Hacker News. The new information here is simply that the couple has a lawyer, who can afford to represent them on speculation because of a federal law that allows recovering damages from a company that tries what KlearGear is alleged to have tried in this case. We'll know the final outcome after the litigation proceeds, but I predict a good result for the Utah couple.

The previous discussion eleven days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6742410

went back and forth over most of the issues raised by this story. Bottom line: the couple has to follow certain procedures to respond to a credit agency report about their behavior, and the credit agency report about their personal credit history seems to have other adverse information (reported in one of the sources discussed in the earlier thread). All's well that ends well, and I expect this case to end well for the couple and badly for KlearGear.
Is it just me or do the videos not have playback controls? Seems absurd not to be able to scrub through these.
I definitely agree with you. I subscribe to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism.

That said, many, many, people believe that most people are not competent, and need to be taken care of/controlled/limited.

Arguments I usually have to fight against are: What to do about crime. What to do about "evil" people. What to do about property rights. What to do about control in decisions.
Wait, so isn't it server-less?
What HTML5 features are in use here?

Do you just send the message to the server and back to the other client?

How is this different than chat rooms we had 10 years ago?
This is a really stupid mistake for a company to make, the outcry is way worse than one bad review. Googling "KlearGear" now brings up a ton of bad press. I guess it's relatively easy for a company like this to change their name and do the same things though?
As http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/an-alterna... explains, patents and current pharma corporations are an extremely inefficient middleman, and the exclusion of poor people from live saving medicine is not serving a useful purpose.

Similarly, copyrights are discouraging authorship as well as encouraging it, and empirical evidence suggests the former factor may very well be stronger than the latter. So we might be paying the huge price of copyright restrictions for negative benefits.

> No, it only bans unlicensed derivative work

Requiring a license negotiation is a barrier so large, that it prevents virtually all derivative works. Most authors do not license any derivative works. Many creators of derivative works do not do so for a profit incentive. The cost of a license deal will often overwhelm the cost of creating the work itself.

In short, copyrights outright ban the vast majority of derivative works.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically works got funded was through the means of patronship or commissions from rich people. Not a terribly scalable process

Not only patronship. British authors did not enjoy copyrights in the early US, so they had struck deals with publishers for right to be the first to publish. They often made more money from these deals than from their copyright-based publishing.

Contemporary authorship of much software is funded without being based on copyrights (A lot of open-source companies).

Other contemporary authorship is funded by academia, and does not depend on copyrights.

The "9/11 commission report" was published without copyrights, and yet the publisher had profited at least millions of dollars from its publication.

> Yes, we apply artificial scarcity to copies because authorship is scarce. But that's the best way we know how -- that's how economics has always worked

Economics had always worked on reducing scarcity, not increasing it.

> But until we've figured out a better way we should not just abandon a model that's worked pretty well so far.

There's no reason at all to believe this system works well, as the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Consider that if today's copyright laws had existed in the time of Shakespeare, he would not be allowed to author his works without "licensing deals".

If we look at patents. It's working horribly. Literally millions of people are dying of curable diseases. 90% of drug funding comes from government, of which 85% goes to the pockets of the drug firms, and only 15% funds actual research!
NaCl is just native machine code with some additional restrictions, AFAIK. It can make use of existing compilers and optimizers.

I agree that the binary is probably relatively efficient, but a) only if your code deals with 32bit floating point numbers, b) the binary (erm js file) is probably going to be bigger (hence increased download times) c) the compilation does not come for free.
Guy plays Christmas music on his teeth
Yeah, every time I look at my bitcoins and their value I think "that's way too high, I'm not buying at that price" but I hold out and don't sell, and every new day that comes it seems like the prior day would have been a great time to buy. I don't think this momentum is sustainable either, but I'll tell you one thing: I'd be a rich man (at least I'd be out of debt) if I had bought more bitcoins instead of spending the ones I had on preorder mining equipment from Butterfly Labs.
> At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen

Right, which was of course a terrible idea and I hated it so much I never ended up using full-screen support when attached to an extra monitor (even if I like it well enough when I was just using my laptop on its own).

It doesn't seem to be much different from maximizing in Windows but ever since full-screen support was introduced it's been a bizarre combination of good ideas and the kind of bad ideas that only come about from never actually using the feature.

There's other issues with multi-monitor support in OS X that it sounds like they're addressing in Mavericks, but these other issues as well as loads of app compatibility ones I've been reading about are enough to keep me from upgrading.
I can just imagine the conversations inside the NSA - about how this is a bloodless way to destabilise their enemies and bring down those who might hurt America. It's certainly kinder than blowing people up with drones, and probably produces less blowback. After all, you're using people's own hypocrisy against them.

But this isn't necessarily a weapon restricted to foreign soil or only bad people. The fact is that a lot of famous people have different public personas to their private selves. Who's to say elections can't be rigged this way, or election winners blackmailed?

I think this is increasingly an issue about how we regulate the watchers. In a media-centred age, being the gatekeeper of privacy is a position of immense power.

There's also another, parallel question, of course: should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives? Maybe after a lot of NSA-led outings, Facebook photo exposures, sackings for what people write on bulletin boards, etc, we'll one day allow people to be complex and multifaceted.
Dam.

Money will cone back into your life. Be grateful for your health and family health.

This may sound lacking - But - This experience may change you and you family in the better for ways you could not yet imagine.
No arguments about people lying on the internet.

I found his comment a little bit patronizing. Of course its the Internet and all kinds of crazy happens.

We are adults and can make up our own minds one way or another (even if that means donating to an unknown person).
this hits on one of my biggest problems with native android and ios development. the wcs/wchar functions are largely broken or unusable... it caused me a real headache from not knowing upfront.

the idea of the string type is just fine though (or a character array) broken implementations don't invalidate it, they just invalidate the myth of '3rd party libraries must be good because hundreds of programmers worked on them for years' - which is exactly a myth. it doesn't just apply to strings but everything. (not brokeness, just that you shouldn't expect them to work beyond what you can measure, and certainly shouldn't expect that they are flawless or even good implementations)
Ask HN: Why PHP is so hated or criticized?
I am student and i am trying to be a good professional developer. I have seen with high frequency several criticism to PHP. Course, i already saw that PHP has a lot of defects, but other languages has yours defect too. So, why PHP is so hated? Is a bad idea study PHP?
Online polls are dumb, but here's some background on the current one:

http://www.dailydot.com/news/time-person-of-the-year-miley-c...
I'm just critical of power and it's obligations. At many points in history, with enough power people can be made unaccountable. With less power, comes more accountability.

This is why personally I think it would be better if we released medicines and simply had "FDA approved" status post release/post approved by the institution, which would give people the choice to only use FDA approved products, but also give me the choice of utilizing other drugs I can research and make decisions about on my own.
Anyone compared MongoDB with other document stores, e.g. with https://github.com/triAGENS/ArangoDB ?
Why does beer foam when you tap the top of the bottle?
All the good and short names under .com and .net are taken.

I'd say we need a TLD for every dictionary noun to show the finger to the domain squatters.
One issue that plagues me is that full-screen apps sometimes don't take up the entire screen. They're still allocating space for the menu bar. Lo and behold, there is an invisible menu bar there. Sometimes the apps still draw a (totally nonfunctional) window title bar. This only ever happens with Sublime Text, iTerm, and Chrome Dev Tools. Id est the three apps that I spend 99% of my time in. Quick Look also has severe performance regressions. It takes ~20 seconds to open the first time. Not so quick, eh. I suspect App Nap is at fault here.
- Yesterday AM you could auth in with Twitter or Facebook and vote without posting.

- Yesterday PM Twitter was no longer an option.

- Today AM Twitter is an option but not for auth, now it opens up an "intent" page with a pre-filled tweet.

My guess is that a) it didn't go viral enough without forcing a tweet, b) Twitter was easier to fake or c) the Twitter app got blacklisted for a high number of "revokes"
funny that an ad comes up when you search that character on google. http://imgur.com/Y5vkbHF
I wonder if this article is confusing two different types of clean room.

I can understand why a lander like Phoenix has to be biologically clean, needing bio-isolation and alcohol-swabbed surfaces, but why is there this requirement for the Herschel space telescope? It stays in space. Surely the telescope would just require protection from dust, etc. during assembly in an environment similar to a chip fab? I'm not too surprised that bacteria could find their way into such an environment.

Disclosure: Obviously I'm not a rocket scientist.
> Python 3 gets so much of this right. It's one of the things I really loved about python 3 as it allows for correct string handling in most cases (see below).

One of the biggest things that I feel Python gets right with the string type is that strings are immutable. It makes a lot of things easier.

It really makes sense to have a good string type for small strings, stored in unicode. Immutability makes everything simpler.

The string type is not a good fit for handling large amounts of text. There are trade offs for efficiency that have to be made to create a handy string type. It really makes sense to have a separate "bytes" type or some kind of StringBuffer for doing big text operations.
isn't this solving the wrong side of the problem? how about not having to think about such things at all and just accepting that uppercase/lowercase conversion is never going to be language agnostic.

thats futureproof and powerful, rather than extra thinking and work...
I would look at the metasploit guys as a good example of how to move forward.

Keep an open source "community" edition with all its current features, then start on an enterprise edition. Still updating the community versions core but keeping some features just for the enterpriser customers.
Apparently my personal web-site is in the web's top one million.
My only real gripe is that none of my machines will sleep now and I have to shut them down. I constantly keep finding my Macbook Pro burning hot while still closed and on my desk. My iMac does the same. I haven't found a solution yet.
As the writer of the native compilers, I read the article as written from the kind of the developer who always developed in interpretative languages, who sees asm.js as "wrong" because "it's not the JavaScript he would write by hand.

And again. as the writer of the native compilers, I'm absolutely pro asm.js. I believe it's the best direction that JavaScript optimization can take, solving more hard problems elegantly. Including the fact that asm.js is a better representation than most of bytecodes (or even all). Seriously.
It is server-based. Server-less version will be later as I wrote. Yes, it is like chat rooms, it is like client-server and it is like web. There is a web session actually :). We've tested a way for linking (pairing) two devices. From HTML5 there is File Reading API
And Stalin won it twice.
So this is a combination of "Call my bluff[1]", using terms from the urban dictionary?

Might be fun, but it seems like a game that has a low replay value to me.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_My_Bluff
Bill Gates: What I Really Want for Christmas
There's only so much oversight such a bureau can have, especially if a company is willing to lie to them. According to Popehat, they've also done things like falsely list positive BBB ratings on their website, so it's not hard to imagine them coming up with some way to pretend the charge is legitimate.
Jgc-talks
I think I have the same problem with Chrome. When I open some links, Chrome loads the whole page but only shows a white background. As soon as I start to scroll, the content appears. It's pretty annoying.
It's a clear sign that Internet polls are as irrelevant as you could ever wish for.
Clueless and lazy because the amount of time to "get your head around" django and python is so absurdly minimal for anyone who has done any web development at all. It is incredibly straightforward, and finding that "too much" pretty much disqualifies someone from being a competent developer.
>In general, internally using unicode and converting to and from bytes when doing i/o is the right way to go.

I'm not sure what "internally using unicode" means. Pyhon's internal representation of strings has changed a lot. It hasn't even been stable in Python 3. Now they are apparently using an internal representation that varies depending on the "widest" character stored.

The only solution that isn't driving me insane is to use UTF-8 everywhere. The Python 3 unicode situation is actually the main reason why I'm not using Python much these days.
Which data centre are you hosting in? Even when I was colo'ing back at 500px that much RAM wasn't "cheap". "Fairly priced" is the way I would put it.
It wasn't hacked, just gamed.
Caffeine plays a big role for myself and a lot of my buddies that are programmers. I think it's appropriate for hacker news. But I'm sure you're content with the high quality instant coffee and Lipton tea that you drink throughout the day. Cheers hater, oops I mean slater*.
TLD = Too Long Domains?
OS X to me keeps getting progressively worst every release.

Mac Mail is now unusable with large inboxes, spotlight is slow, the finder is still stupid (explorer is better then finder at this point). New power management in the near macbook airs is the worst.
Party games need have no replay value. You buy them, play them at the party, shove them in a drawer.
AWK-ward Ruby
It's not only missing sites, but it ranks them very differently too. When I search for my own name on any other search engine, my own website comes up first or second. When I search here, it's buried way down at twenty-something. It would be nice to know how this data is being collected, collated, and sorted.
Congratulations! It's Fictionary for slang, as far as I can tell? I would be worried about the size of the dictionary and replayability. A real dictionary never runs out of obscure words.
Rails and SQL's Relationship Status: "It's Complicated"
Matthias Broecheler: A Letter Regarding Native Graph Databases
We used to be able to use PowerKey [1] to remap the power key to something useful like ⌦. Mavericks breaks this. The ⌦ still gets sent, but the computer sleeps before anything else happens.

[1]: https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey
My complaint is a strange delay that affects the command line, in iTerm and Terminal alike. My coworker also has the same issue. It's quite tedious to type faster than the computer; over the network, I can understand; but locally, with a machine that's not stressed?

I can't help but think the new App Nap is to blame for this, but I have no proof.
I tried Console2 years ago. More recently I tried ConEmu. Now I use ConsoleZ, and I thinks it's great!
> If you specifically make changes to your site in order to make faster on IE6, and it also makes all other browsers fast, the "all other browsers" part is best described as a side-effect.

So did the v8 team do something specially to make asm.js faster? As mraleph said, the answer is no. So the fact that asm.js is now faster in Chrome is side-effect.
Interactive map of programming language influences
By the way, someone has released an open-source Job Board project, maybe interesting to mention in this context: https://github.com/acapilleri/job_board
Bitcoin $1000
You would think they'd remember the problems that people had with the Reset button on the Apple ][ (it was right above the Return key). They eventually put a stronger spring under it to prevent users from losing their work.
The posting was linked by a tweet by Robert Khoo (https://twitter.com/rkhoo/status/405150202736418816) which was retweeted by several Penny Arcade staff.

Mike Krahulik participated in a few Twitter-based discussions. One indicates that this is a replacement posting (https://twitter.com/cwgabriel/status/405526125171843072).

That doesn't mean it's not real, it's certainly not above anyone at Penny Arcade to poke the hornet's nest, but there's enough indications that I think it's safe to say it's legit.
Prior to PHP 5.x the language lent itself to writing terrible code that got the job done but little else. Consequently lots of very, very bad (unmaintainable, unreadable, overly complex, spaghetti code, untestable, and generally slow) PHP apps exist (I say that as a PHP coder with more than 10 years experience in it). The thing is though, as bad as the language is, the problems are really down to the developers - you can write good PHP code and you have been able for a few years. Some frameworks (CodeIgnitor, Laravel, etc) actually push you towards writing reasonable decent code - as much as Rails (Ruby) or Express (Node) at least.

I suspect if there were as many Ruby devs as there are PHP devs you'd have just as many articles decrying Ruby, when they really ought to be decrying bad developers regardless of language.
Price is about to hit $1,000/btc - def. NOT early adopters, more starting to go up towards the bell curve.
The inimitable Ken White has a number of interesting essays on the case :

http://www.popehat.com/2013/11/15/new-from-kleargear-free-sp...

and

http://www.popehat.com/2013/11/25/kleargear-reaps-the-whirlw...
We are? Then in the real world copyright is effectively managed, things are unpublished or never published and brands are managed.

Again, if you think in the real world you lose control, talk to Micky Mouse.

You lose a small amount of control against small, unincorporated actors, but you retain large amounts of control in the markets you operate in, and against any institutional actor at all.
TBH, this is why I only have the one child. Children = big money. Also this is why people live in middle america where 50k buys you a nice big house.
No, at the time of posting it hasn't reached $1000 yet. Someone wants karma.
4 Career Fields Bitcoin Could Replace
I'm writing a book: "JavaScript Application Design: A Build First Approach"
It's hard to overstate how unimportant this is.

A non-binding online poll to help pick who will be on the cover of a dying news magazine. Notable recent winners include Vladimir Putin and, uh, "you" as well as "A Protestor".
Like Time magazine has any relevance left today? (Did it ever?)
IMHO the right asset to hold for reservation demand is either one you can directly pay you taxes with: the sovereign entity's currency in which you operate (or exist in case of a moral entity) or a marketable security with moat-protected earning power. It has worked wonderfully for Mr Buffet. I have done quite OK with the same principle; YMMV.

That being said, the idea of bitcoin p2p proof network and attached mining reward is fascinating. I dont think "reserve demand" is the killer app for it, something yet to come will be IMHO.

My current hand does not warrant investing my most precious asset of all, time, in this. But a killer app could at any moment change that.

I see you are looking at iOS applications. That may very well be where it resides.

Cheers and good luck,
This makes sense only if you only ever go to one party where games are played or don't mind wasting $20-30 every time you want to play a game at a party...
Litecoin 10$+ within 1 day
You can't see the difference between ballot stuffing and vote rigging?

Ballot stuffing can be done by anyone with motivation.

Vote Rigging (e.g. - deleting votes) can only be done by the people running the system.