skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm from the UK, I've never written a check and never saw anyone write a check until I came to Canada. Chip and Pin was fully implemented in the UK in 2004, we're just getting it here in Canada in late 2009 and it's certainly not implemented well with some places swiping only, some using the chip only and some use the pay-pass system up to $80.

Not to mention debit is barely accepted online through the Interac service. Back in the UK debit is accepted everywhere online and when it's not (usually only certain cards, IE non visa/mastercard debits) it's such an annoyance that I've actually called the company and bitched at them (yes I'm talking about you expedia.co.uk).

Since I've come to Canada, everyone seems to get paid in checks (archaic), lots of people use checks for transferring money and for payment of large purchases. It just appears as though the country is lazy to adapt, and I'm not even blaming this on the ineptitude of Harper and the previous administrations protecting their monopolies from outside competition and inside advancements.
My experience with this kind of transfer system is limited to the posted article, but the benefits sound enormous!

> 1) They take time to process, so if you have to move money around, you can give someone a check and then go put the money in that account.

With the giro transfer method, it sounds like you're in more control -- it's a push, not a pull.

> 2) You control when the vendor gets paid. If you give someone a credit card number, they can just charge you. With a check, they have to ask ME for money, and I decide when or if I'm going to pay.

Right, but after you give them the check, it becomes exactly like a credit card. They can charge you at-will. And, just like your credit card, there are stiff penalties for fraud. And just like your credit card, fraud still happens.

> 3) Signed, written, record.

How is physically stepping into your bank and personally authorizing a transfer of funds any less of a signed record than a check?

> 4) NO FEES attached for the vendor. I LOVE getting paid by check because I don't have to give 5-10% away to some bank.

Why do you assume that there's a vendor fee here?

Personally, if I never saw another paper check that'd be fine. They're nothing but a hassle. Having a quick and easy ability to accept deposits and authorize transfers without the use of a paper check is such an amazing convenience that I'm shocked we haven't adopted such a system.
Also, the US is a fairly trusting place, compared to other places I have lived (namely, Italy). It's something I miss, to tell the truth.
First of all -- did I see a post on here saying that the people "launching rumors against MS" need to take responsibility? That seems odd.

This press release is a masterpiece. Here's the bit that sounds the best:

We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users

Possible Translation Given That Wording: 51% or more of our customers have kept their Sidekicks charged, so the data is still on their phone and they are not "affected" by data loss.

We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as
soon as possible, starting with personal contacts,
after we have validated the data and our restoration plan.

They haven't even begun restoring data. "Recovering" it from a hard drive in a broken cloud infrastructure is the same as recovering it from a broken physical hard drive -- if you ever find yourself doing that for your customers, and explaining that the situation is under control, you screwed up in ways that are difficult to fully expletize.

But then to brand this press release as

MICROSOFT CONFIRMS DATA RECOVERY FOR SIDEKICK USERS

Whoa.

I suppose it's a necessary level of ass-hattery; the situation is entirely negative. Your mobile cloud infrastructure just lost peoples' data, and did it so spectacularly that your corporate partner fed you to the sharks; it's probably worse than a Blue Screen of Death during a product launch.

So that title is technically true. In that they are planning on trying to recover the data ("after we validate the data and our plan").

Beautiful, PR people.

slow clap.
I heard some of them also still use pagers! ;)

One of the big scams when Cheques were still in use in the UK was that banks would take 7 working days or so to 'clear' the cheque. There was no technical need for it, but it made them quite a bit of cash in interest since it was neither in the source account or the destination, the bank could "use" it for 7 days.

Many places in the UK refuse to accept cheques now. Which is good. Nothing worse than waiting for students to pay for their drinks at the bar by cheque :)

On the down side, AFAIK the change to chip+pin meant the burden of proof also changed - with signature forgeries it was up to banks to prove it was you who signed it. Now it's up to us to prove we didn't tell anyone our 4 digit pin.
I have been using free acct for staging. I could not use service for deploy as we're using sphinx, plus will be processing incoming emails. The lack of total customization is the barrier -- but if that changes the overall fluidity of the service is incredibly appealing.
"Every person who has ever held a check -- ANY CHECK -- from you in their hands, regardless of what is written on it, can debit your account at will. Every waiter, every grocery store clerk, every person involved in the processing chain."

And what's to stop every person who has ever held your Credit Card from doing the same? Thankfully many institutions are now asking for a zip code when you use a credit card online but most still don't and that means every waiter, grocery store clerk, etc... who has held your credit card long enough to write down the number could use it to go on a shopping spree.
OTOH, if someone misuses your Visa, you aren't out any money. If someone empties your bank account, your rent check bounces and you have to fight to get your money back while the bank investigates.
Great. I saved many of his articles on my old BB, but lost them in the great crash of 2008. By the way, am I th eonly one who wondered why he stopped blogging so abruptly (long before A-H). I worried he got sick or something (and he does not look that healthy to me today either)
Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain's secrets
The biggest reason you never have to pay back technical debt is because the company doesn't exist anymore.

The next biggest reason is because that debt no longer applies - the idea, feature, or product you wrote that code for is unnecessary and has been scrapped.

The original context of this whole "debt" conversation was startups. If you can't find product-market fit, you are dead, no matter how clean your code is. You have to move fast and iterate quickly because finding that fit is more important than clean code.

All the rules change for established companies with clear product road maps.
> It's an ecosystem of vendors (targeting different markets), projects, technologies, and you can't directly compare it with standalone companies like Microsoft or Apple that (mostly) have a consistent and focused product/marketing strategies.

Saying that it's an apples to oranges comparison you're just dodging the problem.

Ubuntu competes directly with Windows. OpenSuse competes directly with Windows. Debian competes directly with Windows. So is Red Hat to a lesser extent. And these distributions have the same software on them, only organized differently.

So how are these direct competitors doing? You can measure that with the availability or lack of third-party commercial support (we are talking about the desktop here).

Adobe Photoshop isn't available for any Linux distribution, isn't it? I've worked there. Those people aren't interested in maintaining the Windows monopoly. They are only interested in selling their software. And there was at least one big internal debate over whether Linux is viable as a target or not (with the light on the horizon being Asus eepc and Ubuntu). The result of that is Flex Builder for Linux, and guess what, it ain't doing so well.

> Open development means not only is the source code open, all the joys and flames related to it are as well.

I've never worked for a company that had such internal fights. Maybe there are such bad apples out there, but I find them unacceptable and if they'd happen where I work, I'd quit on the spot.

And these fights are implicating end-users as well. I've asked on the official opensuse forum how to get my DWL-g122 ver.C1 wireless stick working, and some twit hijacked my call for help with a moral discussion about how that driver isn't "free software".

> you can find l33t people in most online communities

Yeah, well, some communities are better than others. The more pragmatic a community is, the friendlier it is. I've really tried being active on the Ubuntu forums, I really did. But the sheer volume of answers ranging from "that's not Free" to "it's your fault for not wanting to relearn everything you know" ... it's just overwhelming.

NOTE: I've also been a Linux user for like 6 years.
If you go to your local police station and try to file a criminal report on someone abusing your Visa or PayPal account, your most likely going to get puzzled looks as to what to do.

I'm looking for a piece of information in your profile like "I live in rural Afghanistan" which would make this crazy story sound plausible, but not finding it. If you live in a first world country like, e.g., the US, your local police department is quite familiar with the notion of credit card fraud. They'll tell you a) fill out this police report and b) bring it to the attention of your bank to get the charges reversed and c) the odds of us catching the guy are slim, which (they will not tell you) is the same as almost all financial crimes, including most fraudulent uses of checks.
Probably zynga.
There are similar laws for credit fraud, of course, so the stated benefit of "I don't have to give someone my details!" is confusing.

In any kind of "pull" system where I have to give someone else credentials to access my account, there's going to be the potential for fraud. A "push" system, where you have the ability to deposit into an account but not withdraw from it, sounds much more secure.
He's correctly pointed out that zero tolerance is a sort of promiscuous security method, that applies itself to situations where it should not in order, the idea goes, that it applies itself to /all/ situations where it should. It's a policy that says philosophically: we're okay coming down hard on innocent parties, because that means we won't miss any guilty parties.

Fine, but it's really difficult to study. We can make a list of all the kids who were caught up unfairly, but how can we make a list of those who were saved?

I'm not saying I agree with zero tolerance at all -- what I'm saying is that it's going to be really difficult to kill it, because we can't easily "prove" that it's doing more harm than good, and it'd require cajones for any politician to stick his neck out.

Still it's a valid question, even if we can't really answer it: we know that kids get swept up unfairly, but does the policy do more harm than good overall?
It seems weird for one to have the submit bookmarklet who has never made a submission. I don't really understand these type of submissions at all.
Apple's Tablet PC Will Reinvent Computing
I think the fact that checks worked (and continue to work) for decades says a lot about how, generally, most people are pretty honest. Sure there's some fraud, but it wasn't on a level that made the whole system untenable, like almost happened to PayPal.

It's not like credit cards or other forms of transferring money are immune to fraud either.
What's really interesting is that they're counting all Internet traffic in this study. They quote Web Traffic as making up 52% of Internet Traffic meaning Google actually accounts for more than double that 6%.

More interesting to me was the fact that 30 companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al.) account for more than 60% of web traffic. I actually thought that number would be lower.
How can Jupiter and the Earth have light coming at them from different angles?
During the question and answer session my heart was in my throat since like any good marketer, my depth of knowledge was no more than one level away from being a complete idiot.

This is exactly why I have always thought that it was better for a technologist to learn marketing than for a marketer to learn technology. For any technology product, sooner or later you'll have to get more than one level deep.

The technology industry standard of salesperson supported by sales engineer has worked fairly well, but for a start-up, you should be able to talk to anyone about anything regarding your business.

It's unlikely that anyone else would demonstrate the same passion for your product than you. Sure, you could enlist help that will keep you at your terminal more often, but you'll still have to be your own first evangelist. Too much gets lost in translation any other way.
The Methods of Stretching That Will Make You Flexible Fast
You can usually make certain forum threads that have specific member lists, granted it's not as 'ad-hoc', but it'd be reasonably easy to add the features to a forum.
Is this really relevant, or even interesting?

It's a complaint about politics, more over it's a complaint about policies that were developed by schools with parental approval to 'protect' their children.

In the UK when the government deployed a nation wide 'zero tolerance' bullying policy, there was widespread condemnation that it would lead to children being wrongfully expelled from school. So the real question is: why did it take so long for Americans to realise 'zero tolerance' policies usually cause more problems than they help to solve?
People will be studying Apple's marketing machine for decades to come.

What other company can have a device they've never even announced get so much press declaring it a game-changer?
If you hear Chris tell his story, he'll mention he landed one of his early jobs because of a PHP YAML parser he wrote. It's not like X has to be world changing or anything.
Yeah I think you're totally right on here. I would go even further and suggest that these pseudo-scientific valuation models were cynically exploited to make it sound like the risks were calculable.

I think an analogy to medicine is appropriate - for many years the desperation and naivete of the sick was exploited by frauds selling patent medicines. Many makers of these bogus cures undoubtedly sincerely believed in their efficacy. Watching this history would make you suspicious of anyone who claimed that they could cure your illness with a drug. Despite this sordid reputation, there really are wonder drugs. If medicine can be made scientific so can finance.
Just 6 flights - but it is fairly high (each level is fairly high).

At work it is 13 which is better exercise (the lifts are also shaky so the stairs at least feels safer).
Do you work for Microsoft? I just have to know. I mean, this is a joke post, right?

a system failure that created data loss in the core
database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system
component by component, recovering data along the way.

MS has to recover the data, hard drive by hard drive, like forensic scientists at a freaking crime scene, reconciling the corrupted backups with the corrupted originals, trying to piece together the real data.

We're going off of the press releases by the two companies involved, chum.

Microsoft's partner was apparently so pissed at Microsoft's incompetence that it threw up its hands and said, "Well, MS, we're just going to tell them what happened. Deal with it." And that's what most of the news stories were based off of.

And, frankly, it's pretty on-target. If they had or didn't have backups, the forensic data recovery off of physical disks would take about as long as whatever ad-hoc process they're apparently using to reconcile the corruption in live and backup data.

So I don't think there's any way a reasonable person would "get fed up" with the "MS backlash", as it's not based on "nothing more than rumors" but the corporations' own statements.
Never mind, I think I figured it out.
So then: Wave is an Outlook killer.

It definitely seems to fit much more than what we've been hearing over the last few months.

He's right. We've all been looking at this the wrong way.. Brilliant piece.
I also don't know anything about this, but ...

I'd guess that even if you can't solve the problem exactly you could find a tractable probabilistic solution that works x% of the time and traders spend their time finding such solutions. The real problem is that for the (1-x)% of the time when it doesn't work it wrecks major havoc.
Mars is in the middle with Earth towards the Sun and Jupiter on the other side of Mars, whatever angle they were at when the picture was taken, their different orbits, probably has something to do with it.
My read of the article describes a Linux desktop as a system that can be maintained without opening a terminal window. That entails a lot of GUI and a distribution that works well underneath it. Why exactly is that a good thing? Are all of these GUI users going to start donating to free projects? What is the upside?
X does not necessarily is a project, it could be a library, a feature. If somebody tell me he wrote the Oracle support for Django's ORM, and I'm looking for somebody that knows databases, he is the right guy.
That sounds a lot more like master-slave database replication than actual backups. The key difference being that you can roll back to your backups; when the slave replicates the invalid data of the master, you're hosed.
artists have made more money via licensing than anything else. even indie bands nowadays can make bank if they license a song to a commercial or movie or what have you. In that respect copyright is a winner. I firmly believe that if someone wants to use your art to support their product in some way then the artist should be compensated. whether or not the artist gets to say yes or no to the licensing of his or her work is a whole other debate.
i will say unless you plan to make small changes, you wont get much out of studying the source code. fixing small bugs in an open source project will expose you to lot of portions of source code and also give you some rep in case you want to become a contributor later
Seth Godin published novelizations of NES games under the name "F. X. Nine"
Why Detractors Are As Good As Mentors
Why, indeed? Paper checks are a security hole and an inconvenience wrapped into a handy slip of paper!

The main advantage of the Giro Transfer method (it seems) is that it's a PUSH rather than a PULL.

With credit cards or checks, I give you full run of my account to pull funds when you like. Feel free to request as much money as you like, and if there's a problem, I've got to fight to prove that it wasn't an authorized request.

With a push request, I have account info for you, but all I can do is put money in. You never get to pull money indiscriminately. Sounds like a big win to me.
Acoustic Black Hole Created in Bose-Einstein Condensate
I don't think you fully grokked the article. With cheques, the buyer gives the seller their bank account info and notes how much the seller should take out. With giro, the seller gives the buyer the bank account information, and the buyer decides how much to send to the seller.

I don't see why this couldn't be done online, so "GO"ing to the bank isn't an issue.

1) I consider this a bug: checks are inefficient enough that people can put you at risk while appearing to pay on time by giving you a check they can't honor at that time. It's debatable, but I'll give you that giro would not have this "feature."

2) You still control when the vendor gets paid. In fact, you control it more directly. With checks, you give the check then you have to pretend that amount of money is out of your account until the person holding the check decides to cash it. With giro you send the money exactly when you want to, and the money goes to them directly.

3) This is a potential point, but what is stopping us from using "reverse cheques" for the same purpose?

4) This also doesn't apply. We're not talking about cards, we're talking about reverse cheques.
I'm curious - could you please explain?
this is ridiculous. checks are useful for people to pay each other in sums larger than cash. i almost never have cash on me (speaking of handing someone paper that represents a value...).

i pay rent with checks, therapy and house bills. utilities are paid automatically from my coop's bank account, but normal people don't have credit card processers. the EASIEST thing is to write a check.

what do people do elsewhere? log on to Amazon or Paypal and send money to each other with a fee? Use an ATM to get hundreds of dollars and give each other cash?

i seroiusly couldn't tell if half the comments here were sarcastic or serious. most of the world is NOT as tech savy as this small niche. i personally don't have a smart phone or sms plan, and soe of the people i live with don't have a personal computer (when they want to finish an experiment after dinner they go back to the lab).
I'm not sure what you mean with "Backwards compatible with C". You can easily use ooc code from C, and C code from ooc. What more do you want?

ooc is indeed not a superset of C syntactically. Objective-C is there for that, and its syntax is (imho) a mess.

You can mix and match C and ooc code at will =)
"It all goes into my..."

This is where you lost me, because it just supports the real intent of the author's statement, which is that spam is a problem that results from design flaws in email. Despite the author's use of the word 'geek' being unnecessary, not all geeks are happy with myriad sometimes-adequate workarounds to fundamental design flaws. I'm glad you've made your peace with spam, though.
it all comes down to creating a dedicated, loyal fan base. they created this core of believers in the Apple brand, and that group truly gets excited about any new products
Digg as a newspaper
oooc
Buell is Dead
sounds right on to me
Class distinctions evident in social media
ENIAC Programmers Project
This looks trivial to defeat by simply comparing the top and bottom edges of each image, and picking the combination with the best fit. The faces might fare a little better under that test, but the logos and colourful shapes would likely be successfully matched every single time.
How to Embed Google Wave on Your Wordpress Blog
Isn't the use of checks in the USA partly path dependent? They worked fine as long as humans were in the check processing loop.

Right now, businesses in the USA like to use them because they have lower transaction costs than credit cards. The US government does all the check-clearing for free, as I understand it, while Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Discover all charge upwards of 1.75% of all transactions to shuffle all the (notiontal) money around.
College Readiness and the Impact of Course Rigor [pdf]
Agreed, although I don't think I've actually looked through my spam folder in at least a couple years. GMail's filters are pretty damned good. If an email didn't make it through, I consider it the same as the old "lost in the mail."
If anyone is interested someone also recently demonstrated an "acoustic" black hole

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883537
Yes it is, but if we learned one thing about people in finance, it is that they generally want to have the largest slice of the biggest pie coming from the tallest apple tree standing on the largest orchard...
Computer Rage: Types of Frustration
Tectonic Shifts Altering The Terrain At Google Maps
Because they're in different orbits. Earth is closer to the sun than Mars, while Jupiter is about 5 times as distant (likely more in this photograph).

Earth and Jupiter in this photograph are likely in perpendicular positions relative to the sun.

Mars is obviously near-parallel to Earth's terminator line, so to have Jupiter in the same picture it has to run on a nearly straight line through Earth from Mars, given this distance is likely ~7AU or more, Jupiter is on a whole different angle from the sun.

Crudely drawn I believe it should be something(!) like this:

M
E

(S) J