skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>America just seems to be particularly bad at implementing broad community affecting changes - and extremely bad at anything to do with banks it seems - like this, until they're dragged kicking and screaming into it.

Eh, I think there are a couple of things at work here.

First, I'm still not convinced there's a really compelling advantage to contactless payments from a convenience perspective. I still have to pull a physical token out of my pocket, and given I only use a couple of cards regularly, I don't really care if that token is a card or a phone.

Next, when you start talking anti-fraud, I think there's a reason that the push for that had to come from the payment processors.

From a consumer perspective, there's absolutely no good reason to care. Credit card fraud liability is one area where the US has incredibly strong consumer protection laws. If my credit card information gets stolen ala the Target breach, I'm not legally liable for any charges resulting from it. The most painful thing I have to worry about is disputing the charge and getting a new card issue. That's not a big enough deal to generate consumer demand for more secure payments.

Merchants have a bit more reason to care since they're usually the ones that get stuck with fraudulent charges, but it becomes a matter of whether occasional fraud is more expensive for them than upgrading all their POS equipment. The answer from Wal-Mart and Best Buy appears to be "no," and I know it's a pretty common sentiment among small business owners who often hate any spending associated their merchant accounts.

So that really leaves the processors as the ones who stand the most to gain from this. I don't see why it's surprising that the push had to come from the supply side as a result.
The current incarnation of ride shating is fatally flawed. I imagine a superior model in which there is no direct reward for picking somebody up, rather a network of normal people, who can submit and receive requests to pick up. The only compensation would be that in a splitting of gas, which could potentially be done automatically.

The main difficulty in getting a network like this to succeed is the fact that there is no incentive for new drivers to join.

Until then, they are just a taxi company with lax employment protocol.
Lem is easily my favorite science fiction author. His intelligence, breadth, and sense of humor are unsurpassed in the genre and rarely found in any writer.

Anybody with a math or software bent that hasn't read his "Cyberiad" should rush out and buy/download a copy right now.
Looks great. Could someone explain which libraries and technologies are used here?
I love Mark's writing, and "Dive into Python."

I was originally intending on having the guide by driven by sample projects, but I had a hard time making it work when introducing just one thing at a time. I think that's the difference here: I want to build up from small things, rather than say "here's a big thing, you may not understand it all." That approach is the one I'll be using for the abridged guide.
Monopoly leads to Hegemony
That's not even close to true. The top comment is very negative.

A ridiculous bikeshed did get downvoted a bunch though. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8310203
The Impossible Star
Local SEO Tools
Did you read the article? Because it doesn't claim everyone should adhere to the exact same rhythm.
Fundamentally disagree. Terse is bad for teaching. There's value in having something terse for those who know they want it, but it's bad for primary material.
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
You should ask the poster for clarity, not downvote his post. He stated his opinion and his reason for it. That post deserves to been read, not buried.
Interesting that they are working on OTR. I generally applaud any OTR implementations (or any form of encryption), but why would a company need plausible deniability?
Keep in mind that women buy a lot of clothes for men. So even if you're just making menswear, don't forget to target women in your marketing and research.
Very nice. Looks like you've put a lot of work into it this theme.
In theory it could be rule of machine, if the justice system was composed of some kind of immutable law-enforcing robots, but you're right that in practice rule by law is just roundabout rule by man. Nevertheless, I'd take "dragged through the courts for 20 years" over "beheaded on the spot" any day.
Nice work! It might be cool to allow people to share designs. So if I was creating a web page, I could browse through web pages other people have created and import one, then use that as a foundation for my own design. At any rate, this is pretty cool.
Has anyone here manage to figure out the secrets behind this apps blazing fast performance ?
A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking
Comparison with `null` is strange. First thing I thought of was JavaScript's `undefined`.
Show HN: BasisPoints – Hacker News for payments
No GCE?
I'm not sure on the details on Apple Pay, but the Google Wallet app is a US only product.
> The only reason for it to use less RAM than the hash table is if it uses disk instead of RAM, and that's what happened in op's post, too, by way of swap.

For further reference here's a modified setup that won't use any resources that wouldn't be used anyway:

1. stat() /sourcedir/some/path/to/file and find out the hard-link count and the inode number

2. if the hardlink count is 1 copy to destination and this file is done (go to 7)

3. if the hardlink count is >1 copy /srcdir/path/to/file to /tempdir/$inodenumber if it doesn't exist yet

4. stat() /tempdir/$inodenumber and find out the destination hardlink count

5. if the hardlink count is the same as the source hardlink count move /tempdir/$inodenumber to destination (we're creating the last hard-link for this file)

6. if the hardlink count is less than source count hard-link /tempdir/$inodenumber to destination

7. Repeat until you run out of source files

8. Recursively remove /tempdir/ (if there are any files left there it means there were hardlinks to files in /sourcedir/ from other parts of the filesystem)

By doing this we're using the destination filesystem to keep the map for only for the files with hard-link > 1 and doing it without using any more resources than will be used by the end of the copy as long as there aren't any hardlinks to the same files outside /sourcedir. If there are we'll be using an additional hard-link for each of them by the end of the copy.

The reason I prefer this to hand-rolling a solution is that it reuses well tested code (hard-links in the filesystem) and more importantly doesn't introduce any resource limits that aren't native to cp anyway, such such as having enough memory/swap to hold the map. Basically the contract becomes "if the copy can fit in the destination filesystem, cp will complete".
Requires too much watching of progress bars, for example if I click to download the software from the web just run it in background and once it's done let it show in software tab, going to process then clicking "complete" for each individual file is just too boring and the primary reason why I stopped playing it after few hours.

Some of them seem like they're running only when being watched.

A way to earn money, such as missions, should be available at all times - maybe based on some sort of rank.

Gathering money at the start is very very slow.

Users should be able to "bookmark" IPs both hacked and unhacked and organize them.

Upgrades are too simple and too similar so the whole gameplay is just repeated set of actions, you need to integrate the "multiplayer" aspect more into it.
Hi,

With all the news about payments, I wanted one place to see the best articles. Hence, BasisPoints.

The site is run on telesc.pe, an open source Meteor project, much appreciation to the contributors.

clickable: http://basispoints.co
What does the yc folks/alum think? Good enough to get into yc?
What's the exit strategy for customers?

The biggest problem for a potential customer of a new service like this is that there is a high probability that the service won't be around in two years. The cost of the service itself is almost irrelevant: the cost of switching to something else can be very high, especially if the customer has more than a dozen users.

That's why XMPP is so attractive, even though there aren't many features built on it: you can run your own server, on metal or a VM platform, you can buy service with a guarantee that someone can take it over smoothly if one business model fails.
Look at what some people are doing with their time/lives while others are trying to make the next dating app.
This looks incredibly similar to Gitter[1]. What about this justifies the much higher price point?

1. https://gitter.im
No, the contactless payment systems we have here use RFID, whereas Apple Pay (and other mobile payment solutions) use NFC

Apple Pay probably won't arrive here until next year and even then I doubt many retailers will take up on the offer http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/app...
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/15526 <- there's actually a lot of context for this, and depending on how the RFC shakes out, much of this will go away.
FaceRig – Map Facial Movements and Speech in 3D
Why do the sites piss you off?
Japanese woman is first recipient of next-generation stem cells
Writing is a skill. If you don't work on it, you will always be an average writer. The question then, is do you treat writing as a means to an end or a skill to be mastered?

I've been writing my own blog for 7 years. It still takes me at least half a day to write each of my posts (about 500 words). I post infrequently because of that. After all these years of writing on my blog, I only have a couple hundred subscribers. If I outsource it to post more regularly, would I be more efficient and effective? Probably.

The thing is, my writing is noticeably better over the years. I started out just brain dumping ideas and try to slip in screenshots whenever I can so my posts didn't look too pathetic (e.g. this one in 2008 http://www.quantisan.com/trade-of-the-day-bailed-out-of-a-wr.... Nowadays, I do the opposite. Getting your idea across simply and effortlessly for the reader is most important (e.g. this one from March, http://www.quantisan.com/more-problem-solving-less-solution-...). In recent years, my posts are getting more likes, more shares, and have been on HN a couple times.

Writing is like programming. Anyone can do it but to be good at it, you need to keep doing it and put in the effort to improve. Or, you can spend $300 for somebody else to do it for you.
https://github.com/quasado/gravit
No developer worth his salary is writing PHP this way anymore, so I just can't understand why one would consider to do that with Go. Inline script tags are most of the time a very bad code smell. Unless you are extremely disciplined and use them only as a templating mechanism, which your library does not restrict at all, then it's not so bad. You're way better off using a templating engine.
Gc<T> is not actually a garbage collector. It's a refcount + cycle detection. It was intended to turn into a real GC, but instead, it's in the process of being removed entirely.

I've gone through and cleaned up all the references to it in our docs and marketing, so we stop misleading people with this notion.
Splashbox 2.0 – Hi-resolution photos delivered to your Dropbox
Young Households Are Losing Ground in Income, Despite Education
The constructiveness of this is that people trying to find a solution for an already solved problem can easily take from them the solutions already implemented; instead of struggling through making their own solution. "Stealing" is highly recommended and looked upon favourably by Perl people.

And as you say, it also serves to show newer programmers that there is no need to badmouth older languages, there is only to learn.
Maybe, but not the case for Catalonia[1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-14/ex-catalan-leader-p...
> I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise.
> Edit: 2 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd.

Or the downvotes could relate to your unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than your own.
If this (from another comment) is true: "A quick google tells me Walmart has 11% of the us retail market and an estimated 18% of the grocery market, however again this is not a good indicator of their overall size of pos transactions, it does indicate that their numbers are likely better than 6%."

Then 18% of all SNAP sales seem incredibly reasonable given they make up 18% of the US grocery market.

Even without that stat, this has always struck me as a substanceless, emotional argument. If you have a program to give people money to go spend on groceries in grocery stores, then they're going to use that money to go spend money in grocery stores.

If you're super concerned there might be a margin on those products, then what's the alternative solution to whatever the stated goal of SNAP is?

I guess you could always scrap SNAP and create government farms and bakeries or something. That could never be less efficient or have any unforseen side effects...
Show HN: Weatu – Simple and effective trip planner
All I am saying is that importing a small number of really bright, highly educated MS and PhDs _is_ beneficial to _everybody_ in the US(creates jobs, etc). Yes, it is brain drain.

I am not sure why the US needs to provide work places for Chinese and Indian citizens? There are many US citizens who need a job these days.

I don;t think I am being insensitive - most countries are very protective of their job markets. Try to get a work permit in France or Europe if you are not from a EU country.
"You've ignored that, and instead chosen to beat up a straw man: the idea that I give credence to everything in the indictment..."

They may have been confused by you writing, "Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward." Either way, point is this is yet another NSA thread derailed by a smaller issue (insider trading vs. 4th amendment, domestic spying, etc). It's too bad people choose to engage and let it happen over and over.
It's on the roadmap with many other thigns (S3 for example).

edit: we'll be pushing the roadmap on the site this week so that people know what's in the works.
The Breakpoint videos: chrome development tools
I'm a realistic person. That's what it usually takes to fix these situations.

Pick up a history book.
I wouldn't assume there is a "YC tech stack". From individual blog posts I've read there is great diversity among YC companies' tech stacks. I also wouldn't assume that rails + angular is, or is even considered to be, the cutting edge of web stacks.
is the fundamental act of a card swipe broken ? On on hand, I can clearly see the value of Square... and on the other hand, I can also see the value of business models like LevelUp (that commoditize mobile payments and leverage marketing budgets).

But is a disruption of mobile wallets vs credit cards even possible ? Why would a 19-year old college student prefer it ... or why would a 30 year old professional switch to it over credit cards ?
The whole of Plan9 is written like that.

If you look here http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/9/

You can see that port & boot are the portable code. Each architecture can fall back on that less optimised code should it need to.

Then each of the directories: bcm, kw, mtx, omap, pc, pcboot, ppc, rb, teg

have platform specific c files

This greatly eases porting to a new architecture and also means cross compilation is significantly easier.

#ifdefs are rare in the source code and other pragmas are few and far between.

Conditional compilation is the enemy of readable code.
> Multiple people were offended enough to go and downvote every one of allegory's comments.

I can't downvote, so I'm not one of those who anger you so much, but allegory is most likely being downvoted for presenting anecdotes as conclusive evidence and dismissively referring to anyone who disagrees with him as having opinions lacking experience.

If we're dressing up anecdote as evidence then I have plenty of my own, but I'm well aware of how useless they are at informing debate.
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/12/the-anatomy-...

as long as we need to depend on javascript for crypto there will not be a secure way to do such things. im saying this because you can not safely assume the integrity of your crypto system to be intact if you have to download it with the page it's used on. thats about the same as always having to download your ssh client first from the server you are connecting to. someone could tinker with that download and give you something that uses the attacker as a proxy to connect to your server of choice and while you notice nothing, that malware would upload your private key. same thing could happen when you use some sort of crypto implemented in javascript.

lets talk about this when someone made it possible to have a website instruct the browser to make a call to a crypto library or some such
Young Hackers in Orbit with Low-Cost Launchers and Cubesats? It Can Be Done
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105286

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227071

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2223683
Oh what a terrible name because of

http://mbed.org/

Which is also an online embedded software toolchain from IDE to linker.
There are two problematic types of engineers out there, some have no clue what they do and some have too much clue and wave their flags all over the place. You are in the second group and have probably been doing too much C for too long.
I couldn't click on the Save item in the File menu.
Betalist, handful of beta and nonbeta startup directories, reddit and HN.

If its a good product that will get you +250 users (we got about 330 while we were still in private beta).

Beyond that we sank a couple hundred in ads at a $0.2 CPA to gain our beta base. Then a month later we got placement on techcrunch, venture beat and a few other major outlets while still in private beta
Hey guys,

Leo from ChatGrape here. We're focusing on two areas of innovation, to add a certain level of intelligence to chat based team communication:

1. Deep Service Integrations: Our integrations of tools and services like Gmail, GitHub etc function on a much more integrated level than what has previously been achieved. For instance, on ChatGrape, all your issues (GitHub) and files (Google Drive / DropBox) are available within the chat, thanks to a smart auto complete that attaches or references all your documents - right as you type.

2. Speech Act Detection (Natural Language Processing): This is all about the triggering of workflows based on normal, "day to day" communications. For example, if I were to write, "Hey Tobi, let's meet up tomorrow at 2pm to discuss the front end issue!" three things will happen: First, you'll be notified, second a calendar event will be added to your Google Calendar and third, the topic or issue will be automatically referenced or attached.

Natural language processing within ChatGrape goes much further, anyhow, and is a topic where our engineering team has gained many years of experience with previous projects.

We're using to make communication simpler and more efficient, whilst not disrupting your normal flow of conversation. (Another example of this is to automatically detect and mark whether / or questions, and mark them as such.)

ChatGrape went live in an Early Access Phase (Pre-Beta) phase about six weeks ago and not nearly everything of what'll ultimately make ChatGrape the first smart communication solution for teams is fully operational or even deployed yet.

However, what I wrote above will give you guys a better idea of it is that sets ChatGrape apart from all existing solutions like Slack or Hipchat.

I'm looking forward to your feedback and questions and I'm always available via lf@ubergrape.com! And we'd of course be happy about you guys joining our Early Access Phase to provide further feedback.
Thanks for pointing that out, that should say before the 1st of October! I'll make sure to change it asap.

Cheers,

Leo (ChatGrape)
You see this a lot in some Go newbies that never used the Mesa/Modula-2 family of languages or any other language with native code compilers besides C and C++.

Suddenly, language features known outside C and C++ world in the last 40 years, become new shiny features.
I don't think your first thought is relevant for all of this.

It has been quite clear for quite some time that mobile payments was not a technology problem but a policy problem. The technology was not just ready for it with the release of the Nexus S - it was ready for it for years before that! The problem was getting people to actually use it. Since most vendors were trying to use mobile payments for their own short-term gain, things were going nowhere.

Apple has not "caught up" in that sense at all since they weren't behind in any meaningful way. There was no important reason for smartphones to have NFC as there did not exist many use cases for it without payments. Although I had high expectations of NFC when I bought my current Nexus phone two years ago, things simply never got off the ground in that area.

The contribution that Apple Pay makes to the market is quite unique if you look beyond technical merit. It provides an intuitive user interface for anyone's payment product for use in mobile phones. It isn't tied to your prepaid Google Wallet card, it isn't tied to your SIM card, and it isn't tied to propietary point of sale hardware. Furthermore, it is being pushed

I'd argue that Apple is the only one with the required leverage to push something like this into a market obsessed with conservatism and self interests. They have the power to convince shops and banks to cooperate with it, moreso than Google. Moreover, because they have their own hardware, it is easier for them to integrate a secure element and a user-friendly authorization method (the fingerprint scanner) to have an integrated solution.

It's not as if Apple has reinvented the wheel or anything, and I hope nobody is claiming that. But their execution of this idea seems very good. And it is the execution of the idea, your second point, that is the important part here. I hope that Google can fight off its own and carrier interests, and follow suit with a similar application. Many Android phones already possess all required hardware.
Because nobody would use those chips for new projects. Legacy chips need legacy tools and run legacy software.
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project
Whether you eat the marshmallow at age 5 isn’t your destiny. Self-control can be taught.

The secret of self-control, he says, is to train the prefrontal cortex to kick in first.

To do this, use specific if-then plans, like “If it’s before noon, I won’t check email” or “If I feel angry, I will count backward from 10.” Done repeatedly, this buys a few seconds to at least consider your options.

Self-control alone doesn’t guarantee success. People also need a “burning goal” that gives them a reason to activate these skills, he says.
Zero.rs is dead now. Checkout http://zinc.rs :)
I wrote a small summary of the areas of technology where we're adding innovations to the topic of team communication or chat based communication. Check it out and let me know if you have further questions, I'd be happy to answer! Cheerio, Leo (ChatGrape.com)
> because at least English is a colossal mess of inconsistent jibberish.

Yup. Every natural language is. The reason we can work that way is that conversation is a tight feedback loop and people look for voluntary and involuntary clues telling whether the others understood them properly, and keep correcting until the (perception of) understanding is reached.
I had the impression that you couldn't make desktop apps with WinRT?
Of course, having a bucket of sand handy to put fires out does raise the question as to what would make the sand burn (at least if you are in the habit of reading Things I Won't Work With):

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...