skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi ipince,

We use a different local payment channel in each country to transfer funds directly to the borrower. In Kenya, for example, we use the M-PESA mobile money service to electronically transfer cash into the mobile phone account of each person. M-PESA has an online interface, so we can do this transfer entirely online. Our first loans back in 2009 were disbursed to Masai nomad communities located over a day's journey from any paved road or electricity. It was an amazing experience to send cash electronically from our US bank account to the mobile phones of people in such a remote place, which had been unreachable even by local banks in Kenya. Recent innovations such as mobile phone-based payments are what make a platform like Zidisha feasible.

To address your second question, yes, 100% of lender funds go directly to the entrepreneur that you fund. (We accept optional tips from lenders, and borrowers also pay a 5% service fee for the loans to cover our operating costs.)

It is true that it is incredibly expensive and time-consuming in most developing countries to register a formal business with the government. Most of the entrepreneurs fundraising at Zidisha are in the "informal sector" - though they do very often employ others as a result of the loans.

Zidisha does not provide any kind of business or other training services. We are purely platform for direct P2P interaction, closer to eBay than to the Grameen Bank.
CSSOM Value API Proposal Dump
Vastly over-used quote. I've heard that more from people who have eventually gone on to lose than winners. Sometimes the people being laughed at are just clowns.

Also, bitcoiners are not even in the same ballpark as Ghandi.
All he's saying is he doesn't care about the features, just what they let him do with them. Type safety in and of itself isn't interesting to the author but he appreciates it's benefits.
Could someone please help me understand how can changing a headline on some websites cause five-figures damages?

Honest question, really. Every time I see articles about computer vandalism or hacking I see these big numbers and don't understand how they are calculated.
Under-delivering article that discusses SEO 101.
I'm surprised there aren't many books like that already in English. It was a Russian children's book that spiked my interest in programming when I was a kid. I didn't even have a computer, and neither did my school at that point. I don't remember the details too well, but it was basically about some boy in some imaginary land learning about algorithms, computer viruses, etc. in a really fun way. There were tons of very clear analogies, like algorithm and a cooking recipe.
Presumably the fact that Snowden took what he did and yet they still have no idea what he did take is ample evidence that the emperor is wearing no clothes and anybody could have anything by now. The security crime here was to aggregate all that info because this was an entirely inevitable outcome.
> The Matlab clones available (Octave) are generally unimpressive. I think this has to do with the big effort of copying Matlab and the need to develop the whole tool stack (parser, interpreter, libraries). Contributors are hard to find

Nah, we have no shortage of contributors:

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/052cc933aea6/do...
I assume from the way you worded your response that you are the one sending "cold email."

That's spam. That's the definition of spam.

You and your company are spammers. You need to stop.
Well Microsoft has blundered into trouble before by not paying attention to the real world. The whole antitrust thing and the amusing cock up over contractor/permanent employees.

I bet China and Russia might be interested in Billg's phone both from an industrial espionage and other more political point of view.
Not sure if it is a quality one for posters but for potential candidates it provides one of the best tools.

- Upfront salary/equity range. No need to spend a month and later hear 'sorry your salary expectation is not in our pay band'

- No middlemen. You know the company behind the job upfront.

- A lot of information about the company upfront. I am not sure there are any job sites that provide this much of information.

- Simple and useful filtering.

To me it has all the best things a potential candidates looks for in a job posting.

I only wish these guys don't go around screw it up with insane fees. Off all the things in agel.co they want to go after jobs?.
I tried it out as an exercise, just imagining a vague area of my desk as the single row of keys. It took a minute, but I was quickly able to shut off the "Y axis" part of my touch typing skills. Obviously, I wasn't actually testing on the real software, but I suspect I would be able to achieve reasonably good accuracy and speed.
Most of the people I talk to say things like "I would vote for this independent candidate because I believe in his ideals and his statements. But I cant vote for him because it's like throwing my vote away."

IE People in my circles generally vote against democrats or against republicans (actually Im Canadian so it's more like vote against Liberals vs against Conservatives... but you get the idea). They dont care about the person their voting for, they are voting to keep someone out.

My concern is that the two major parties are basically the same, so the dichotomy isn't rep vs dem; it's voting for what you believe in vs voting for what you don't believe in. If you vote for what you dont believe in, you are truly throwing away your vote.

There is no proof that an indy would be better than mainstream, but politics is never about proof, and always about trust. You have to trust that the person you're voting for will do whats right for you. If you get your trust broken, that's a different kettle of fish entirely.

If you truly favour one politician in the mainstream, then by all means vote for them. But if you're just voting against someone, you are throwing your vote away.
Thank you very much for your response!
Unfortunately, I do not think you actually answered my questions!

* Why does Flow Pharma need crowdfunding when they are FOR PROFIT?
* How can you guarantee FREE vaccines for everyone for only $500k?
* What will the crowd founding be spent on and will there be follow on investing needed?
* What is the future of Immunity Project? Have you begun your application to be your own official non-profit?

EDIT: I seem that someone else answered a part "Dr. Reid Rubsamen, developed the vaccine is part of the Immunity Project", but does not explain the exact relationship with Flow Pharma?
> That's also the reason, I shiver when I think that the car industry wants cars that more and more take over control. That will become a big mess!

It's only a matter of time before any traffic infraction anywhere results in an automatic debit from your bank account, and then Google lets everyone know, with a sad-face icon next to your name.
I find you can get better results depending on what device you are streaming from. If I stream Netflix from my PC I get terrible quality, but if I use my PS3 I get 1080P Super HD pretty consistently.

I am guessing they route to different locations and some are less congested.
The Future of Marketing (as told 16 months ago)
There are a few startups tackling this end of the business. Integration here with restaurants is challenging and usually only applicable to people who use restaurants as a utility (not a luxury).

Spoke to someone yesterday about http://www.tabbedout.com/ which markets it's "Pay when you're ready" thing.
I think you are reading too much into what I mean with numbers game.

There is plenty of legitimate cold calling one can do without pissing someone off if you do your homework and make sure you actually are offering them something they might need.

(for instance figuring out if they have recently complained about current service X they are using)

Just keep in mind that your conversion ratio is going to be low and you only have so much time to build a business.
And even his charity work could be considered an expression of American soft power.
Even better than ^Z to run tests is temporarily mapping a key combination to run them. For instance, I'll do :map ,t :w\|!rspec<CR> which lets me type ,t in command mode to save the file and run the tests. Vim will show you the output of your command and then wait for you to press a key to return to Vim.
As I understand it, he's guilty, but potentially not as guilty.

He's an accomplice if he understood the goals of Anonymous, gave them credentials to further their acts, but didn't map out with them exactly what they were going to do --- accomplice liability is for all intents in purposes liability.

On the other hand, if he casually gave them credentials because what the fuck who cares, and had no understanding that Anonymous might deface a website, he have lesser liability, or might not be liable for the defacement of the website while remaining liable for a reduced or lesser number of CFAA charges.
I haven't made the switch yet, mostly because I am not enamored with elisp (when the hell is that guile-emacs thing going to properly get off the ground? Probably never...), but the basic design of emacs (C core, everything else built up around it with a lisp) appeals to me greatly.

If I ever do make the switch, I'll definitely still be using Evil mode though. I can't drop vi-editing, and don't want to anyway.
Ah, that makes sense! Been such a long time since I've run a Java applet that I don't think about them anymore.
I had the opposite response, I played around with julia and found myself so frustrated I went back to octave. However, it was at an early stage of development and I bet there were a ton of bugs still around. I'll have to give it another shot.
Big Web Crash in China: Experts Suspect Great Firewall
what if they fail to intercept you? free lunch?
Thanks for the breakdown. I've looked at loaning on Prosper and Lending Club.

They both focus on our credit reporting system which in my opinion is an absolutely miserable metric of reliability. I don't like the thought of not being able to assist someone with their cause because they missed a few phone bills 3 years ago. It should be purely at the discretion of the person providing the loan.

From what I understand you can't even join Lending Club without a near impeccable credit score. And at that point, why would you join as opposed to heading to your credit union for a personal loan?

I just don't see the point in what they're offering.

Anyway, that's a tangent.
Curious if anyone is working on - or knows of anyone working on - software that would facilitate a fully opt-in ad network as described in the post.
It's cool, you don't have to use JSX, you can just use the React.DOM functions. Or build a backend for whatever your preferred template system is, as long as the backend ends up creating nodes of React.DOM objects. Or you go with Om[0] and use EDN[1], Enlive-style[2] or hiccup-style[3] tempting.

Now if you want to physically separate the view logic and the corresponding markup generation, that's more debatable: they're extremely strongly coupled (and in fairly small chunks ideally) so you often can't trivially change one without the other, and thus keeping them together makes logical sense. See Pete Hunt's presentation which lumpypua linked, it tries to make that point fairly nicely.

[0] https://github.com/swannodette/om

[1] https://github.com/edn-format/edn

[2] https://github.com/ckirkendall/kioo

[3] https://github.com/r0man/sablono
Yeah, 50 pages of text might get you something. 32 pages of mostly drawings gets you... The Gruffalo ( http://www.amazon.com/Gruffalo-Julia-Donaldson/dp/0142403873... ), a popular book for kids that we also own. So there's nothing wrong with the format, but just don't over promise in terms of what it is.
Yeah...

Anyone know how much YC is contributing and what they get in exchange? Some kind of ownership of the company?

Do people taking part in the $482,000 fund raiser get ownership of the company?

Why doesn't YC just donate money as part of the fund raiser?
> Another example is the byte addressing of UTF-8 strings, which may give an error if you try to index strings in the middle of a UTF-8 sequence [1]. s = "\u2200 x \u2203 y"; s[2] is an error, instead of returning the second character of the string. I find this a little awkward.

Yes, it's a little awkward, but to understand why this tradeoff was made, think about how you'd get the nth character in a UTF-8 string. There is a tradeoff between intuitive O(n) string indexing by characters and O(1) string indexing by bytes.

The way out that some programming languages have chosen is to store your strings as UTF-16, and use O(1) indexing by two-byte sequence. That's not a great solution, because 1) it takes twice as much memory to store an ASCII string and 2) if someone gives you a string that contains a Unicode character that can't be expressed in UCS-2, like 🐣, your code will either be unable to handle it at all or do the wrong thing, and you are unlikely to know that until it happens.

The other way out is to store all of your strings as UTF-32/UCS-4. I'm not sure any programming language does this, because using 4x as much memory for ASCII strings and making string manipulation significantly slower as a result (particularly for medium-sized strings that would have fit in L1 cache as UTF-8 but can't as UCS-4) is not really a great design decision.

Instead of O(n) string indexing by characters, Julia has fast string indexing by bytes with chr2ind and nextind functions to get byte indexes by character index, and iterating over strings gives 4-byte characters. Is this the appropriate tradeoff? That depends on your taste. But I don't think that additional computer science knowledge would have made this problem any easier.
When I was GPU mining bitcoin in early 2011, I was also had to worry about stuff like:

* modifying the GPU firmware to allow more extreme overclocking (I was able to run my 5850s
at 945MHz - factory firmware capped them at 775MHz, default speed was 725MHz)

* figuring out how fast I could run them before the became unstable

* dealing with the heat

* convincing PG&E I wasn't growing weed (their billing system flagged my electricity usage)

* ensuring I could recover remotely even from the CPU locking up

* dealing with pools being DDoSed

* carefully planning which outlets things were plugged into so as not to blow the breakers

* ensuring all the miner software autostarted properly (one miner per gpu - multigpu miners weren't available yet)

and this was only 6 GPUs total.
The Future of NPM
> That the multiplication operation is overloaded in the Mathematical World with the same symbol as the "normal" multiplication is unfortunate, numpy's solution is as good as introducing two different operators

The thing is that the multiplication operation for matrices is matrix multiplication, not elementwise multiplication. When you apply a polynomial like x^2 + y to matrices, you do not want to apply the polynomial elementwise – you want to square the x matrix and add the y matrix to it.
Hey, that's great to hear, we'd love to get feedback from you after you've had a chance to use it for a few days. My email's in my profile, drop me a message in a few days!
Just wait until someone tells a robot to go out and gather carbon compounds.
Stupid Simple Things SF Techies Could Do To Stop Being Hated
"For example, if you set this header, inline JavaScript will not be executed, this includes added event methods directly on DOM elements. Also eval() and writing setTimeout() and setInterval() like: window.setInterval("alert('hi')", 10);"

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
I find the exact opposite problem on my old WinPhone - since I'm Canadian, I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. And unlike the letter-keys, there is no autocorrect for this status-toggle. So I accidentally hit the "ENU/FRC" toggle when I meant to hit N and suddenly the autocorrect is turning my words into French.

I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school.
Wouldn't this make it even more difficult for search engines to index your pages?

Also, I'm not sure we want a full rendering on the server. That will make the page appear to have a longer loading time rather than the other way around. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say.

It does sound interesting though. I'm looking forward to your follow up posts.
Any demo? Or I guess it's at the end of the series.
True enough, there's also the interesting question of the difference between radio/telegraph/phonograph and television . . . innovations that have "an inventor" versus a team . . . the starter definitely has a one foot on both sides of the line.

Thanks for the Lawrence link! No idea . . .
JSX isn't markup - it's XML which translates to Reacts internal representation which looks something like:

<div className='foo'>bar</div> -->

React.DOM.div({
className: 'foo',
children: 'bar'
})

You don't have to use it - it's a convenience provided for designers (and arguably developers who have realised that templating provides a false separation of concerns). Om notably (https://github.com/swannodette/om) ignores it.
While I certainly agree that have blog.domain.com may not be the best move in terms of SEO, I do think it's important to prioritize users clarify/navigation above SEO benefits.

Next, I'm curious if you have a sitemap file? I see your using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which means typically it lives in /sitemap_index.xml. Clearly you have a custom url setup w/ your app, but I'm questioning whether this is setup? From my past experience, this is the first thing you should do.

Finally, your top navigation links apparently go to specific categories of posts, and I can't help but point out that your title tags could probably be improved (i.e. - http://www.airpair.com/backbone.js). Fortunately since your using the Yoast plugin (good choice btw), you can change this under Titles & Metas -> Post Types.
How about the fact that the banking system charges huge fees for the use of their networks and technology? Do you mind paying 4% more for all your purchases because the retailer has to take credit card fees into account? Do you mind paying $15 to send money to relatives overseas? Every time you want to transfer money from one place to another, it costs you way way way more than it actually costs because of marketing and profits.

This is disruptive technology. Credit card companies and international money transfer companies are panicking right now.
check out IPO roadshow presentations for an idea of what goes on at that level
Problem is that we've had deflationary currencies, and they were terrible. People will soon find out how easy it is to manipulate a currency with limited supply.
I agree! I love the thought processes of programming, but I hate staring at a glowing rectangle 2 feet ahead of me to actually synthesize those thoughts. My blue-sky hope for wearables is that they get me up, moving around, and interacting with reality while also producing great code.
Huge first year for YC alums, CreativeMarket
From the article: 6000 pen register or trap and trace orders (real time info of who called whom). And (drumroll, please): 1000 to 2000 National Security Letters.
DISCLAIMER: this post may contain buzzwords
Interesting, do you happen to have a link?
Straightforward.

* Employees of the company spend X number of days responding to the incident, and you take their fully loaded cost and divide it out by the number of days they spent having to deal with the incident, and that's a big number. Plus:

* If the site is disabled or degraded, you can often easily calculate outage costs based on the average volume of revenue the site generates during the outage period. Plus:

* In a high-profile incident, outside professionals will often need to come in, first because insurance and contracts require a full investigation, and second because once a site is compromised you have to assume there are backdoors that will restore access for the attackers in the future. The cost of an external forensics investigation can hit mid-5-figures by itself very easily. Plus:

* A high-profile incident is inevitably going to involve legal fees for the victim.

That's before you get into things like reputation damage, loss of clients/customers/advertisers, &c.

Like I said upthread, $10k-$20k damages for the defacement of one of the largest newspaper websites in the world sounds like a very low figure to me. I don't mean that in a normative sense. I mean, in the positive, descriptive sense, that sounds like less than what these incidents usually actually cost to their victims.
Exactly. If the bandwidth was being used for non-TOS-breaking activity (maybe he is a particle accelerator hobbyist, or whatever), it sounds like it wouldn't have been a problem. Verizon called to ask what he was doing to use that kind of bandwidth, not calling to say they were going to cancel his service.

Both parties look like the good guys to me. As a bonus, it was interesting to me to read about his setup.
Yes, that also sounds scary.
Ask HN: How does HN decide which news to show on the front page?
Hello HN,

How exactly does HN decide which news are on the front page? It's obviously not just the number of votes, the algorithm seems to be using the time of the last vote as well.

Thanks.

EDIT: There is this http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574 Is it legit?
Yes the providers usually have a contract based fee that they charge for each one.

This article ( http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-... ) is for wiretap fees but has this info:
"AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that".

According to this ( http://www.cnbc.com/id/101178369 ) article: "The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company's vast database of phone records, which includes Americans' international calls".

So yes I'm sure assisting government agencies in this way is quite profitable.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/nsa-attacks-thwarte...

Two weeks after Edward Snowden's first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. "We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany," Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. "So lives have been saved."

In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.

Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe — saving real lives," Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. "This isn't a game. This is real."

...

Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

"Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or no?"

"Yes," Alexander replied, without elaborating.

I believe this has subsequently been revised to zero...
Google also worked on a novel way to collaborate with one another. Everyone can see how Google Wave has taken over the world!
If that's the case, the author would be well-served by rewriting the first paragraph to make that clear. The way it's currently written does not communicate that to me at all.