skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the same naive analysis everyone makes when they first look at the payments system. "Look at all that money. 2-3% on every transaction. A $500B tax. LOOK AT ALL THAT MONEY."

The reality is this: Most of that money gets passed back to consumers via rewards, benefits and consumer protections.

It's not a tax so much as an incentive for consumers to keep using their cards. And so it is considerably harder to come up with an alternative that is appealing to merchants without taking anything away from consumers.

For example, the interchange on a Visa rewards card for a typical brick-and-mortar retailer is about 1.5 - 1.65%. (Processors mark that up, but that's the "wholesale" fee that goes to the card issuer.) But many rewards cards pay out at least 1% cashback, on top of other benefits. That leaves a much smaller margin to compete over.

And remember, a new competitive option faces massive rollout and adoption costs that the entrenched system does not. Even the acts of changing behavior, upgrading POS systems and training staff are adoption costs. So your new alternative has to offer significant benefits for both merchants and consumers. Significant enough to overcome adoption costs.

Oh, and there's one more thing: debit card interchange just got regulated down to almost nothing (0.05% + 21 cents) by the Durbin amendment. So there already is an alternative, low-fee option that merchants can steer consumers toward and that they already support fully. So that pretty much takes out the opportunity to offer a lower-fee, lower-consumer-benefit option. That already exists now.

That leaves what? A higher-consumer-benefit option? Why would merchants adopt that? A same-benefit option but at a lower cost? But how much lower would the cost be while still matching 1-2% cashback reward programs and whatnot?

But.. but.. LOOK AT ALL THAT MONEY. :-)

(Btw, the digital cash for micropayments and garage sales and whatnot does sound interesting to me. My criticism is limited to the project of competing with Visa/Mastercard/banks.)
Bitcoin ATMs Are Spreading Across the World
What is VISA? It's a group of Processors right?

So VISA can be thought of as a Protocol. Wether I'm a VISA Debit or Credit user doesn't really matter. I give money to my Bank, the Processor is going to (indirectly) get USD for my transactions. Then they're going to take a cut and give the money to a Merchant Bank, who in turn credits the Merchant.

So what if there was a "BTCP" Card that ran on the Bitcoin protocol? I see something I want priced in USD. I want to give them USD. My bank has issued me a BTCP card. So I ring up the charge. The bank sends the money to the Merchant Bank. Without a Processor. Merchants still carry an escrow with their bank for "chargebacks" and fraud. The two banks can sort out the rest of the details between themselves.

The Exchange price doesn't really matter. The Bank deals in USD. They can just agree to peg their debits/credits against the daily value of BTC. Or a Satoshi. Or whatever. It doesn't really matter since it's not like you're forced to sell your Bitcoin holdings at a particular offer price. You can send it to whomever you want for whatever you want.

So even if Bitcoin doesn't find success in replacing Paypal (and I think there's a good chance it will), the truly disruptive idea is that it's a simple standard that could replace Processors. (Though wow, that would be the fight of the century and I'm not sure I'd bet on the scrappy little guy there.)
Yep.

This also happens to be the basis for traditional teachings and methods along these lines.

Also: while emotions largely follow the average, individuals have specific variations that I think relate to habits or hangups accrued from living. In the meditative world, these bodily sensations that give variations from the basic emotions are called obscurations. If you focus your awareness on parts of it, then you can see memories and thoughts associated with that particular obscuration (as it arises from the body).

Even cooler is when you watch it long enough, you start seeing how the whole pattern/set of these different body sensations change in a predictable pattern, sometimes even "triggering" another set of patterns.

Finally, these very sensations also makes it difficult for people to "let go", like during meditation, or when things are going well. The mind is habituated to feeling these patterns of sensations, and when they don't happen, you literally start feeling like a different person ... and for many folks, that is frightening.
Then disregard that example and simply substitute it for getting sick with cancer or something if it seems too far-fetched to you, it does not seem that way to me.

Regardless, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States [1]. How can we live in a society where anyone but the wealthiest individuals could be struck down financially at any moment? How much entrepreneurship is completely stifled by the need to stay at a particular job due to proper healthcare coverage? I would venture to guess the answer is quite a lot.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148
Suggestion work precisely because people parse the suggestion into these body sensations.
I always wonder this as I'm using Xcode, too.
> it says 'Thou shalt not lie.'

Derailing, but I bet you it doesn't. :P
Minsk Family of Computers
Just waiting for someone to quote a snapshot out of context.
It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to Kevin Rose's idea for a writing/blogging platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6UW0JY5PUs
Apollo Computer DSKY User Interface Unit
Somewhat tangential to the OP but as someone who is much more of a consumer than a contributor, I've become increasingly less enamored with Stack Overflow over the years just because of the vast increase in times I'll search for some exact issue, find a link where the question exactly matched the problem I'm having, see that it has an answer with like 10 upvotes, find the answer to be wrong either because it is just straight up incorrect or because it is "correct" but not answering the actual question as asked, and often I'll see a comment to the answer from the original asker mentioning that the answer is wrong, but then no follow-up discussion.

I think this may be in large part a negative side effect of the "gamification" because this rarely happened back when usenet posts (searched via deja or google groups) or dedicated forums for topics would be my source for finding programming answers in subjects I was unfamiliar with (new API, new language, etc). In those places if I found a question that matched mine well, and it was answered, there was a very high percentage chance the answer was correct and not just someone guessing or answering half-assedly and too quickly to get in on the karma train.

These wrongly-answered answers seem to dissuade others from answering (question too old, already sort of answered, nobody will see my correct answer and upvote it), so this wrongly answered question just lingers seemingly forever. If the moderators spent half the time pruning out these wrong answers that they do closing topics that are borderline off-topic, the site would be a far better resource for me.
What's the highlighting about?
Rescission was vanishingly rare. Regardless, it is a side issue, since it's not what the quote from the USA Today article was discussing. New York may have outlawed rescission too, but it was the requirement that "insurance" be available to purchase when you're already sick that made their pre-ACA premiums so high.
You can easily setup a VPN and use the DNS servers on the other side. Connecting to the VPN can be done via IP.
I hope this happens soon. The ability to run current software on a 10-year-old computer (regardless of form factor) would be a great equalizer.
Not just attempts to appease. It also provides youtube with advertising options on popular content because some copyright owners would like to leave material up and take a cut of ad revenue.
> How does "median income" drop for "everybody"?

I believe the attempted claim is that "for these various populations that constitute 'everybody', their median income has dropped in each population".

So if "everybody" is these 6 guys over here ("say hi, Bob"), and you split them into 2 groups of 3 guys, and then check the median income of both groups, the claim is that both groups have a lower median income.
I chatted with a company that investigates affiliate fraud, they may have a blog post up after the new year about this. Will submit it if/when they do.
This is innovative, but sure to be cost-prohibitive. I hope they can find a way to may it something that is more than a conversation starter for the rich because it is really cool.
A mistake I made early on was trying to provide a product as cheap as possible. Constantly worried that no one would pay what we asked for.

Basically being afraid to ask for the value it was really worth.

I think there was a comma/period swap, but if I'm reading correctly it looked like the product was positioned at $30 / mo?

Assuming that's correct - it's really not a meaningful amount to any company that has enough employees and management to actually be a user of the product.

I think a $30 / mo with a free 30 day trial period (once product launches and they can actually try it ;) ) that requires a credit card for the trail could have worked.

Would still need a product to actually try, but that's not much different than saying get a free trial and just taking in email addresses.

If anyone remembers the Minimalytics / Small HQ folks - I thought they did a good job with their signups. The only thing for me was I disappointed by how minimal their product was in beta. It was so basic I didn't have any use for it, and running our own startup, didn't have time to wait. We ended up building it internally.

I probably would have converted to a paying user if it was more developed at beta. Not their fault though, they did a good job I thought(if you're reading Small HQ).
Show HN: see which of your friends' tweets are getting noticed
Ahh... DigitalPoint, those were the days.
> Since operating in good faith is apparently untenable, there is no particular reason for anyone to operate in good faith with respect to the RIAA. Thus copyright piracy proliferates.

Let's be real here. You're not operating in good faith when you link to a bunch of major-label content free on the internet. It's implausible that you actually believe that content to be legitimate. Rather, you're looking to profit from a loophole.
Cheaper and simpler. I don't like all the baggage that comes with Windows/Mac: ChromeOS auto-updates, has no bloatware, boots up instantly, backs everything up in the cloud, and has a clean minimal UI that I don't have to think about -- nor do the less technical members of my family (they never really understood how to use Windows after all these years, just memorized a few steps for common actions).

For $199 I have a computer that runs 10hrs on battery and does everything I need in the simplest way possible -- far simpler than the competition, that's for sure.

The question I have is why would I want a traditional laptop over this? They offer extra features I just don't need at the cost of complexity, maintenance, battery life, and price.
I was very impressed with your firm but polite tone! We'll done.
>How do you create that initial AMI? CMs make answering that question simple.

No, they make it slower and more complex. The idea being that after you have built a config, future clones will be easier. But you already get a better solution just setting up a server and then making an AMI from it. Cfengine and friends offer quite literally zero benefits for this sort of scenario.
Many of the Superfund sites in the US were owned by the mining companies that left the extreme levels of pollution. The evidence is clear that ownership doesn't dissuade a company from polluting its own land when it can make a ton of money in the process.
The transition from x86 to x86-64 did not seem like a radical redesign of the architecture. The x86-64 bit chips are still capable of running code written for x86 chips without modification (even the 16 bit code I believe). Furthermore, the programming model (as exposed to assembly) did not seem to change between the two architectures.
I know, so was my reply. Watching a writer's face while they write is probably about as captivating as watching paint dry in a dark room.
>If your Ansible scripts are in Ruby

The popular options are in ruby. Just because you use a less popular one that is written in python doesn't change the main point.
About the app: we wrote this for people who follow a lot of people on Twitter.

It looks at people you follow, what they write, and how quickly their tweets are gaining Retweeted and/or Favorited. Shows you Top 5 tweets only.

Written in PHP, hosted on AWS ElastiCache and EC2 with Autoscaling (we shall see about that).

Would love to get some feedback!
I learned this one the hard way. Started as two founders, one techincal, one biz dev (I'm the biz dev).

We brought on a third (largely my doing), as more of the operations / finance side. Didn't set roles, and my biggest gaff of all was to not make him vest.

After a year, the third founder turned into a maniacal control freak and almost sank us. Finally departed, but took his equity with him.

My biggest lesson so far is be very careful who you partner with and ALWAYS vest. Or another way to put it, you don't need to worry about the good times, it's the bad times you need to consider and pre-negotiating the divorce is critical.
Can you provide some examples of out of date posts?
I'm not a member of any "Crypto Cabal", and I use the term sardonically, directed at the people people who come out of the woodwork to pimp/gratify themselves and their businesses by posting bullshit about crypto, especially on HN (e.g., the "USE BCRYPT USE BCRYPT USE BCRYPT" guy who claimed that the problem with an RSA exponent of 1 was that "1 is a prime number" (?), or ironic articles of the "I JUST LEARNED ABOUT [crypto topic] SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ENCRYPTION" variety).

My opinion, as someone who is not important, is that most crypto software is bad, and most software that is fun to use has bad crypto. The Silent Circle stuff looks good, as does the Whisper Systems stuff, and I personally use Pidgin + OTR, which is crap from a UI standpoint.

I totally understand the design/UI motivations behind Cryptocat, but IMO Nadim needs to stick with a protocol design and crypto primitives that work, fix any flaws and then leave it alone until he's more comfortable (perhaps he's done that already).
> At least in the US you can get a "free" one with a new plan.

Unless something has changed, you still end up with a data plan which is expensive if you don't plan on using it at all. I suspect something else is going on with the reported stats, but I'm not sure what it is.

I'd really like to see some more in depth research on this phenomenon whatever the cause is.
It represents "doomed" text that eventually gets removed from the final draft. You can toggle it by clicking "doomed" in the upper right. See http://paulgraham.com/stypi.html
The interesting part about watching this isn't watching it being written. It's watching it being edited. What to leave on the cutting room floor is always the hardest part, and Stypi's "Doomed" feature does a great job of showing you how someone comes to the decision to self-edit.
You can actually bring these emotions to any part of the body, and train to adjust the intensity and clarity of these emotions.

There's one bit about the happiness: it might be mostly in one's head, but it covers the whole body. Happiness is related to contentedness, that feeling that you don't need to go anywhere and you're good right here. If happiness did not cover a part of the body, then usually, that part will start agitating for attention. You are no longer content.
This was my favorite part of this product, the highlighted text is "doomed" and will be altered or removed at some point in the future. It's great to see how much editing happens after the initial draft.
We have to mention previous work in the intro and body of the paper to establish context, but the related work at the end is more of comprehensive since the paper has already been fully stated. If your paper is low on context, the reviewer might flip to related work after the intro to fill in the gaps, but you are in negative points territory at that point.
… there are many apps out there that show you Top X based on absolute values (e.g. most Retweeted) etc.

This one is all about the velocity. It's also interesting to see the dynamics, what keeps a given tweet afloat (e.g. many Favorites aren't as effective as RTs - and the tweet flatlines).
Nothing against the article because it doesn't falsify any of the conclusions, but Moore's Law is often mis-stated. Moore said that we could double the number of components in an integrated circuit every 18-24 months, nothing more. It had nothing to do with cost or power, although he did dismiss the thermal energy argument in a sentence or two in the original paper.

The interesting issue has to do with Dennard's Law for power scaling, which said that power density would remain constant as we increased component density. This isn't true any more and that's part of the reason why multicore designs are the future (2 processors at 500MHz use less than one at 1GHz for a fully parallel workload).
This essay was published in 2009, so it's more likely a replay of his writing process.
> Popularity does not mean a question is within the scope of the site guidelines.

True, but it might indicate adequate reason for modifying the guidelines.
> This is the first time I encounter the idiom Unix strings

The usual idiom is C-strings, but I wanted to emphasize the OS, not the language C.

>> [...] probably a vain hope that Unix strings will vanish [...]
>If only we wait for them to vanish, doing nothing to improve.

The article is about the lack of Python3 adoption. In my case, Python3's poor handling of Unix/C strings is friction. It sounds like you believe that Unix/C strings can be made to go away in the near future. I do not believe this. (I'm not even certain that it's a good idea.)
From my substantial subjective experience with Vipassana meditation I have found the correlations very strong. When doing Vipassana, especially the form called "Mahasi Noting", attention will "randomly" move around during the session. At various points you might have spontaneous thoughts of fear or disgust. Without any scripting it will be apparent that the body energy changed which caused the emotions associated with those body areas to arise.

It's really really weird to be blissed out one second and experiencing existential fear the next, but that's what happens.
That is a lot of page views and a long average visit time. I make that a cumulate of about 20k years of time spent on reddit this last year... That's a lot of down time if I've got that right.
Edit:screwed the 1st try, maybe second is better.
Google Glass Invites to All Google Play Music Customers in U.S.
All this having been said, I think that the level of vitriol PG has been subjected to is completely unfounded. I think it's unclear whether YC is morally obligated to lower its standards for female applicants, or to make special efforts to encourage them to apply. The first is fraught, since it implicitly means you're selecting less-qualified people over more-qualified ones (the Ivy League universities do this for disadvantaged minorities, Caltech notably does not), the second would be nice (and I think basically all top-tier universities in the US do this for disadvantaged minorities), but it's not clear to me that it rises to the level of a moral responsibility.
For a moment I felt enlightened. Nah, next year
When the customer is spending north of $3k on a computer, why not toss in the warranty for free?
I was thinking the same thing: how will I use email on my phone?

I use Mailbox for iPhone. I wonder whether one could create Gmail filters that essentially map the Gmail multiple inboxes to custom lists in the Mailbox mobile app (which looks like "label:[mailbox]-later"). The result would make it easier to categorize new mail and to find existing mails.
> I suspect this means that there is room for significant improvements in terms of per transistor efficiency with the use of a novel CPU architecture.

I seem to recall a comment a while back from an Intel chip designer guy saying that the x86 tax isn't as high as people think. Sure, the instruction set is super-crufty, but according to this guy they had found ways to implement most of the backwards compatible stuff in a way that's transistor efficient. He may have been biased, but didn't think the overhead compared to ARM was too significant.

I tried to google for the comment but couldn't find it, apologies for that. If someone with direct processor design experience would chime in that would be great.
The only way pebble can get external messages is through your smartphone, which almost certainly has a vibrate option?
It seems the reason you disagree with PG's article is because you're making a transgression that people who contemplate political philosophy know not to make: you've positioned economic power antecedent to political power. Specifically, that money buys votes. This is false in a democracy of any economic flavor -- though admittedly deceptive by appearance. The data is indeed somewhat reliable for those involved in political campaigns: money appears to translate to votes. Philosophers distrust this. For them, the simple requisite of having to buy votes is evidence a democracy still exists; that political power is prior to economic power. The issue then becomes the character of the voter being bought, and thus the character of the people in general.

It is easy to dismiss PG's entire article -- from its foundation to conclusions about transparency -- if you've already concluded that democracy does not exist; that votes do not translate to power in any meaningful way; that capitalism has become the real foundation on which political power is merely a simulacrum. In doing this we've hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of pessimism, and the discussion ceases to be productive.

The law only codifies what the people, through their votes, decide to codify within it. Capitalism does not a priori codify wealth as political power. The law merely aids the confluence of capitalism: money, a signifier -- to represent resources: the signified. Capitalism is contained within the theater of democratically held political power -- until it corrupts that containment. PG's mention of secrecy in a democracy is a useful one: secrecy subverts the power of the informed voter, it is a breach of that containment. It allows the potential for capital to slip out into the realm of realpolitik -- which is reserved for the people alone through their vote.

I think if you review what PG is saying about corruption through the prism of philosophy without the distortions of politics itself (and all its frustrations) you might not consider it unsubstantiated idealism or what have you.
I think that is exactly the kind of niche they are looking to capitalize on. Think about the reasons to buy a powerful workstation computer. Games? You are probably going to build your own custom machine and put Windows on it. Server? Call up Dell and get a rack, or cobble some basement stuff together and throw Linux on it. The other case for needing a powerful workstation today is professional work like video editing, rendering, music production, and Apple already does will in that market. It's clearly one of their lowest priorities, as can be seen by the fact that they updated every other product line multiple times before they came back around to the Mac Pro, but at least they seem to understand the market. If they were marketing this as a gaming machine or a server platform, then they would be making a mistake.
Real time, as in a 1:1 ratio between the time it took him to write it and the time it takes for you to see it played back. Not as in live, where you see it as he's typing it.