skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No need to build a new financial system, the new financial system is already in place. It needs wider adoption.

In the time it took him to write the post complaining about Square, OP could have integrated BTC payments via Coinbase. He could even offer a BTC discount, since he's saving 2-3% on processing fees. If his product is in demand, customers will find a way to pay for it, even if they haven't used Bitcoin before.
From the recent story - Square faces rancor from merchants over customer service:

"Barry said she grew so frustrated exchanging e-mails with customer service representatives that she drove two hours to the company's San Francisco headquarters to get some help in person.

Instead, she cooled her heels in the lobby for a couple of hours. No one would speak to her, she said, and the security guards threatened to call the police. Then Square deactivated her account, saying "high-risk activity was detected."

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Square-faces-rancor-f...
The descent to C
If your credit card is in their system then the only option is to login.
I had a similar experience recently when I tried to get my free annual credit report. To verify my identity they asked me questions about my financial history, mainly about my credit history. Well, I haven't had a loan in many years, so they had to dig deep into the archives and asked me about the monthly payment amount on a car loan that my wife had over ten years ago. My financial records actually go back that far, but hers don't, so I was unable to "prove" that I am me (with "prove" in scare quote because IMO it's highly questionable whether getting the right answer on a multiple-choice quiz can possibly "prove" anything about anyone).
They only banned me from accepting payments. I can still use them to pay at any establishment that uses Square, which, here in the Bay Area, is a very common sight.

Aside from the refusal to explain why I cannot accept payments, I haven't had any negative interaction with the company. They just seem unable to provide any further information, for either legal or policy reasons.
Opinions on dating are opinions on gender

Right, and frankly they're not professional. An in that sense, why are you hung-up on them? Its a bit of a stretch to assume everything that is <not> professional is "un" professional.
> This includes the thousands of people who are beheaded each year by the Mexican/Colombian cartels, which, if you look at it this way, can be blamed on the US government's 'criminalization of victimless drug use'.

Why should it not be blamed on the criminalization of victimless drug use? Where would the cartels get the immense capital with which to terrorize whole provinces and take on state actors, if not for those highly lucrative drugs - their profitably grossly inflated by their illegality? If our societies would stop burying their heads in the sand over the issue of drugs and the immense demand for them (which remains remarkably static no matter how many billions are spent on 'war' against them), the cartels wouldn't have much left to fight over.
KBA (knowledge based authentication) is what that question-answer type of system is called. Typically companies don't implement it as the sole form of identification for the exact reasons that you mentioned.

I found it very surprising that Square doesn't provide an alternate method for identification, it's mind boggling even. Something like Instant Bank Verification (similar to what mint.com or venmo does) would be a good alternative and carries no additional overhead for Square.
Microsoft contributes designs to Open Compute
Did anyone else's email address get auto submitted without having to hit submit?
No, I think this means PayPal recognizes tptacek's CCs and forces a log in. Even with a new card, perhaps they'll just base it on the name and refuse to process it without an account login.
Which, incidentally, Android does.
would they be correct by an attacker?
If I needed to make a long road trip, I'd lease a car that is good for long road trips and rent my Tesla to someone (or not).

If I wanted to make a long road trip, I might not mind more frequent stops.
Sounds really silly and backwards. Why they simply don't use strong online identity detection? Should be simple and secure.
Ask HN: who's hiring h1b?
Well... the lawyers want you to think it's not really yours, it's the copyright holder's...

Ditto for "My Computer", "My Documents", etc. I think Vista was the first to get rid of the "My" prefix - and whatever reason they give for it, I still think they want to slowly separate users from the idea that they own (and thus are in control) of their machines...
One of my first professional projects out of school was a client/server system using WinForms. I wrote the server, another guy wrote the client.

We worked hard and fleshed out a good design quickly. We iterated a few times, then released. We soon got a major bug report from the field: the server would lock itself up after some time! I was baffled; I didn't write much in the way of threading code. I pored over the entire codebase several times looking for any possibility of deadlock. Nothing.

Finally, I went out to the customer site when it happened again. Someone had selected text in the console window the server was running on, which effectively halted the process. I wrote a small wrapper around the server that launched it as a service, and that fixed it.

(I probably should have written it as a service originally, but I was fresh out of school, so I instead took it as a hard knock.)
Stupid enough to vote for him twice.
I'd really like to see less FundersClub header/footer/sidebar spam on the page. HN itself has very little from yCombinator on the site, but subtle is powerful.
Thanks, I edited the prompt. Hourly.
Quite frankly the Freemium games get on my nerves for the following reasons:

#1 Most people just want to play a game, but they have to keep making these 'microtransactions' for some sort of virtual currency that speeds up development or certain items in the game can only be bought with virtual currency that is really hard to earn for free. If it was easier to earn the virtual currency it would not be so bad, but most games make it next to impossible to earn virtual currency to buy these items.

#2 The really wealthy will just buy their way to the top players in any Freemium game with little to no talent or game knowledge. The really poor will be battered and taken advantage of by the really wealthy in the freemium game just like in real life.

#3 Most of these games you level up by gaining experience points. In most freemium games I played I leveled up and then hit a wall, and the freemium developers didn't add in new levels but instead focused on adding new items to keep selling new items with virtual currency and most of the new items were just dupes of existing items with the color changed or reversed.

#4 Most freemium games copy each other so much that if you play one freemium game, you've basically played most of them already.

#5 I'd rather pay $30 to $60 for a video game and then not have to deal with freemium stuff that requires me to pay thousands of dollars just to compete with the wealthy players. I get tired of Freemium for example and find myself playing Civilization V instead that has free mods and other stuff for it. Sure I had to buy DLC, but over all it is cheaper when Steam has them on sale and I don't have to keep making microtransactions to keep up with the wealthy players.
Why in the world would I pay these regulators? It's an extra cost and their service is provided even if I don't pay because somebody else will pay for it. Why should these protection firms cooperate. How do we know the regulators aren't influenced by whichever of the protection firms they buy from? Remember it's only illegal for these regulators to lie if your own protection company supports the particular laws that require this other company to be accurate.

If people are apathetic about the property rights of their neighbour what right does the government have to step in and stop them taking that property?

In fact how would that even work in this pay for protection system? The neighbour will buy into a protection firm that will take the property back and a fee? If they can't pay the fee they will be placed in a work camp to deter the same action from others? Unfortunately the cost for board is higher than what your paid in the work camp. Is this perfectly acceptable under your system? If not how is it prevented? Does that man buy protection from a second company that will go in and storm the workcamp? If you're too poor to buy protection from one of the companies how is it illegal for them to just be collected and put in work camps? I just can't see your system of pay for protection being less abusive than one with a government.
1. Warren Buffett's is.

2. If that's his plan, why did he buy indemnity insurance?
Taxes took care of that already. Money laundering rules are designed to make it hard to conceal how you earned large amounts of money.
I agree. This is definitely a bug. The correct instruction is 8b 15 B1800408 or a MOV EDX, [0x080480B1]. I hope I got my register number correct on that.

The movzx/movsx is only needed when you're doing something like movzx EAX, BX. That way you're sure the CPU does what you expect when moving from a smaller register to a larger one. Man do I hate x86.
Yeah, if you're going to call all of these bootstrapped you could include Wordpress, which is dramatically more successful than the ones on the list.
They did start out their compute cloud [edit: I mean appengine] with python, and I think they started out offering mercurial hosting first on code.google.com? And they famously employ Guido. I also seem to recall something about reimplementing git in python for code.google.com, but I could be mistaken.

[edit2: According to http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht... "Python is the main scripting language used at Google."]
On First Thought
Eris makes some good points on her blog:
http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=455
> Until we accept that centralized payment systems only benefits the central entities, we're going to be stuck with these problems.

That's beyond ridiculous. The main reason here is that they are trying to prevent their service from being used for fraudulent purposes. How would Bitcoin change that? Realistically, there would still need to be some form of identity verification. The actual problem here is that it's really hard to verify a person's identity over the Internet. The questions in the article can be answered by a determined attacker, so it's clearly the verification system that's broken.
Building a Vagrant Box From Start to Finish
The response "I'm sorry our decision is final and we cannot communicate any further" that vendors give (Google, Square in this case, etc.) is nothing short of stomach-clenching maddening. Just reading it fires up rage inside me.

I understand why they do it -- it's pretty clearly related to their anti-fraud / anti-spam / security systems, and I understand that by giving any further information, they're exposing those prevention measures to weakness. And I'm sure in cases of real fraud / spam / security risk, this is the right approach.

But man, does it stink for everyone involved when there's a false positive (i.e. in this case). There's got to be a better way of handling this. Some sort of escalation / appeal process?

(And if there isn't -- hint hint, companies that haven't gotten big enough to be immobile on this issue: Implement one.)
Wow, amazing. I always thought Square was going to rise to top by being better than Paypal in the customer support corner. Guess I was way wrong.
Why do you need them? With Bitcoin, your credit card can't be skimmed or stolen, you can't be charged twice or for more than you authorized.

As far as not shipping a product you paid for, economics takes care of that. Not delivering purchases is a bad business model.
I would look at it a slightly different way. It's not that the definition of Turing completeness explicitly says that a language must be able to simulate "infinite" algorithms. It's that it must be able simulate what a Turing machine can do. Turing machines are quite capable of running non-halting algorithms, so the language must be able to as well.

Contrived example: One algorithm a Turing machine could perform would be to write the characters "TM" every two cells on its entire tape. The tape is unbounded, so this algorithm is, colloquially speaking, infinite. Clearly, you cannot simulate this with a halting machine like the C preprocessor.
Do stuff for yourself, if other people like what you make they will buy it.

I used to listen to what others had to say, I would get all sorts of useless feedback and bad advice. It led me to a really bad confidence problem that effected my work and lowered my potential. When I started to do things the way I wanted to, I make things better and did better software and writing.
You can cheat a little bit and use RET rather than INT 21h to save a few bytes.

The way this works is pretty clever - the COM loader places an INT 20h instruction (the old-style terminate function) at offset 0 in the PSP (the 100h-byte-long structure loaded right before the contents of the COM file). The loader also sets up the word above the initial stack pointer to 0 so that a RET will return to address 0 and execute the INT 20h.
> pause linearly related to the size of new-but-not-so-young objects

Stop and copy still has to traverse all objects that contain pointers, even ones in the nursery (otherwise you'd incorrectly free objects in the nursery that are only referenced by other objects in the nursery). So the amount of scanning you do is proportional to all objects in the nursery (also the size of your stack/root set), and only the copy is linearly related to objects to be tenured.

> The second reason is that stack memory is usually a very small percentage of the total memory for interesting programs.

A small percentage of the long-lived memory, sure. But programs spend a lot of their time working on ephemeral data, and this is precisely why the generational hypothesis holds. There's no faster nursery than the stack: allocation fits nicely into the function prolog and deallocation requires no traversal of interior pointers.
Consuming monounsaturated fat is good for you. Consuming polyunsaturated fat, with the exception of omega-3, is not.

My understanding is that the polyunsaturated fat in virtually all vegetable oils are omega-6 fatty acids, which we consume way too much of relative to omega-3 fatty acids (which are also technically polyunsaturated but which are not present in any significant quantity in such cooking oils), and the huge quantities of omega-6 that almost everyone consumes is believed to increase our risk of numerous diseases, including cancer. Monounsaturated fat, the primary beneficial constituent of so-called Mediterranean diets, and especially the specific monounsaturated fat called oleic acid, is protective against cancer, reduces LDL (bad cholesterol), and possibly raises HDL (good cholesterol).
I think the problem is that Haskell is very much an academic project. It is the go to language for research in functional programming, and its strict insistence on its principles has resulted in many advances in the field.
In contrast, Go is a language designed by Google to meet their needs in programming code. This means that it takes some of the best concepts, pioneered by earlier languages, and combined them into a production oriented language.
Personally, the reason I use Haskell is because some of the awesome stuff they have developed has not yet reached production oriented languages yet.
Hm. I worked on the European space program. I contributed to a bunch of AAA games with fairly big names. I currently work on a fairly large OSS project. I think I can claim I created one or two things that have a tiny bit of merit.

And yet, I write about gender inequality - because it actually exists. I'd be very happy if it were a non-issue, but it isn't.

It's very rarely the big ticket items that are the problem, even if they grab all the attention, though. It's all the small things that say "you're not quite welcome here". The constant barrage of sexist jokes, followed by "present company excluded". The eternal "you're a programmer?" question at conferences. The media portrayal of computer scientists. And yes, the constant denial that there even is an issue.

Yes, I know the jokes are not meant to hurt. And the question is honest surprise. And media in general sucks. But at every step, women do get told they're "not part of the club". It grates, occasionally.

So please, do listen a tiny bit to the women who do talk about gender inequality. Don't assume a priori we're just doing it for the attention. I'd rather discuss the latest awesome CS paper, too - so please assume instead that we talk about a problem because there seems to be a problem.
Thanks for sharing. I particularly like your comment, "We haven't taken any outside money yet, but I'm not saying we never will."

It's also important to really believe in what you're doing, funded or not. You don't get a special medal for taking money or by bootstrapping. You're still a business and you're all competing.
> I actually like John Yoo. I disagree with him, but I find no fault with those who don't. But I think it would be intellectually honest for you to admit that you've aligned yourself with a very contentious neo-conservative strain of political philosophy.

You're mixing up two related but distinct issues. Neo-conservatives believe that the authority to engage the military abroad is primarily invested in the President, and he can act to a great degree without interference from Congress. That is a controversial viewpoint. What is much less controversial is that, whatever the division of power may be between the President and Congress when it comes to exercising the sovereign powers of the United States abroad, there is no seat at that table for the judiciary. The idea that the courts are fundamentally domestic institutions, and may not infringe on the exercise of military power abroad except in the narrowest of cases is very broadly embraced.
There's nothing to rebut. The guy is pointing out an inconsistency in the way law operates. Fairness hinges on consistency. He is identifying the whole affair as unfair which is a valid statement to make.

The "you are hypocrite" fallacy only applies when it is in the form of "you are a hypocrite, therefore what you are saying is false".
The implication that makeup and vanity have anything to do with one another in this context is suspect, though.
Just to add some context, this is a not unexpected consequence of Square's approach, which in many ways parallels what Paypal did in the ecommerce space.

Prior to Square the individual / very small business market was underserved (for real-world transactions). You had to go through a PITA application and due diligence process with a processor. And you typically had to pay significant up-front costs and ongoing fees to maintain your account.

There's a reason for that: the processor is financially liable for any fraudulent merchant charges. If a merchant signs up and puts through $10K of fraudulent charges and skips town with the money, it's the processor that pays.

So Square did two things. First it lowered the upfront costs by piggybacking mobile devices to turn them into low-cost swipers.

But the second very crucial thing they did is hidden on the back-end: they streamlined the signup process and support costs. They did that by doing exactly what you see here, using alternative ID and credit check methods. And making their customer support largely a self-service operation.

The good news is that the particular case you see here is probably fixable with continued improvement. But that's why it happened.. they are replacing an otherwise more costly and burdensome signup process with something largely automated. And there's a lot of money at stake if they screw it up and let fraudsters on board.
Don't stop giving a fuck about what people think. Do give a fuck. Give plenty. Make sure to give them a reason to think good about you. Take an interest in people. Think about them, for a change. A very smart person once told me "Listen, and they will follow."
@nathancahill http://xkcd.com/325/
How does this differ from Verbling (YC S11)?
Deprecating rustpkg
And the RET saves you one byte over the INT 20h. Oh what a different world we live in now.
>"...Holder has testified under oath that their killing would be unconstitutional."

If you have a citation for this I like to see it. Overall he doesn't seem too committed to this idea. Furthermore, he seems to think that the president is the only legitimate arbiter of the constitutionality of these actions. From http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/does_eric_holder_know_the_la...:

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Holder whether Congress could prohibit the targeted killing of Americans in America. “Do you believe Congress can pass a law prohibiting POTUS to use lethal force on U.S. soil?” he asked directly, explaining he meant the prohibition would apply only where a person did not present an imminent threat.

“I’m not sure that such a bill would be constitutional,” the attorney general responded. “It might run contrary to the Article II powers that the president has.” Article II is the section of the Constitution that lays out the president’s authority as commander in chief of the military.
Check out nerdy data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6102405

There's also a project I know less about called CommonCrawl
> (Originally posted elsewhere on 2010/12/25.)

That seems like a reasonable title edit. The author presumably still thinks that the article is relevant today, but it was written in 2010.
There are two standards for a corporate executive to consider:
1) What the majority of the shareholders say
2) What a court would rule if a minority of the shareholders decided to sue the executive on the grounds that they (and presumably the majority stake) are depriving the minority shareholder of profits they have a legal fiduciary responsibility to provide.

What you are speaking about is #2. There is a high bar for such lawsuits, but there is a legal standard.

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/20...
According to this http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-trucki... the average semi truck driver spends $70,000 a year on fuel. I have to wonder how this could change with a big rig sized version of the Supercharger stations. Nationwide trucking with (basically) free fuel.

The trucks could hold a lot more batteries.
You forgot to mention that Buffett is a reptilian from Zeta Reticuli, and will no doubt order his fleet of battle cruisers to annihilate the Earth rather than pay up, therefore I must conclude you are an NWO/Illuminati shill.
I know how it used to work -- I've been following Square from the beginning. I just don't think it would cost that much to outsource verifying a DL and bank statement that I upload to their website.
The whole "Prove you are who you say you are by answering questions a fuzzy computer system says you should know" seems very Kafkaesque.
There's no accounting for taste I suppose. I'll happily wade through a mountain of bad puns, but scatology and sexual dimorphism jokes are just wearisome.
Here is your mathematical odds of doing a perfect NCAA bracket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Smkv11Mj4&feature=share
Wasn't this on Shark Tank?
I am all for automation - but this is the same problem as Google has: there is no human intelligence available for the rare cases where the automation does not work.
There's no bitcoin equivalent for the experience of being able to have someone physically swipe their credit/debit card in your phone for point of sale payment. Bitcoin cannot replace all point of sale transactions that Square enables.
US, tech companies reach deal on spying data