skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Their chargeback rates are obscenely high". I've always understood that porn companies have difficulty finding a friendly payment processor, but I've never heard that they recieve a high chargeback rate before. Do you know why that is? What do users gain from chargebacking porn websites over chargebacking dropbox, for example?
Seems to me like all of these companies solved problems - they were just problems that not many people knew they had.

Airbnb - I only use my place 90% of the year, but I pay for using it 100% of the year.
Coke - Water doesn't taste very good.
Apple/MS - secretaries are expensive. Can they be automated?
You can't create opportunities for people without solving a problem first.

Airbnb offered affordable rentals compared to hotels, it solved a problem/need. This created an opportunity for other's

Uber made hailing a car much easier (solving a problem), creating an opportunity for other's

I don't see how tackling this in reserve works. How can you create an opportunity (let says for truck drivers) without solving a problem somewhere?
Intelligence is the dirty-but-necessary stuff that makes it possible to accurately guide diplomacy, economic policy, trade, and military action to achieve the desired goals of a nation-state for a minimum of cost. It includes internal security.

Generally, intelligence cannot operate openly, even under a strict set of guidelines. Further, there will always be situations where efficacy runs into guidelines and something has to give. Would you be willing to violate the privacy of one person to prevent an attack that would kill five thousand? How about a dozen people's privacy? A hundred? A thousand? A million?

As I understand it, those aren't purely theoretical questions in the world of intelligence.
What is a boundary function?
A Whistleblower's Horror Story
More Great Lakes Ice Now, Than Last Year (PHOTO’S)
>but the above assertion is not a particularly helpful description of List and Maybe

Good. If my description of a Monad was a good description of List or Maybe, then I described Monads wrong.

Your complaint is like saying "Your description of a shape was not a helpful description of a dodecahedron." Indeed, a dodecahedron is a very specific instance of a shape.
I think this is an okay idea, but the comparison to Clojure is really lacking. Why build on CL when you can build on Clojure? I get the inter-operability, but when Multi-Threading and Multi-Processing is listed under Deferred, Clojure could provide so much of that for free. On Clojure, etc.
I believe this is click bait. Seems that way to me anyway.
Since both Opportunity and Curiosity are on the surface of Mars how can their present distance from Earth differ by 6+ mio. km? And even with Mars Express in orbit it doesn't appear right that it should be 20+ mio km closer to Earth. I wonder if these were the distances relevant when th probes were launched?
Apple Aiming to Begin Electric Car Production in 2020
It's called STEAM. There's a movement in education - http://www.risd.edu/About/STEM_to_STEAM/
@desdiv: If you happen to read this, you appear to have been hellbanned. Not sure why. Just a friendly heads-up.
I think it's the other way around. Airbnb had to be solving a problem on the demand side for a supply to arise.

Similarly, Apple/MS must have found an early market of professionals to sell to that need excel, calculators, whatever - solving a problem for them.

You don't start by automating out secretaries. You start by solving a problem for an existing set of people.
That's kind of my point: If a non-hostile, non-forked, major version upgrade to an established language like Python encounters pushback from library maintainers and the community, what chance is there that a hostile fork to PHP will gather support from a critical mass of maintainers and community?

I honestly think a better way would be to write a library that acts as a wrapper/translation layer to the non-intuitive commands that exist in PHP (thinking about it, I'm sure one probably already exists).
What is your definition of STEM disciplines, and what is your definition of the liberal arts?
I get this a lot. I have a Masters and several minors in nothing but Liberal Arts. But I work in CS at a fairly high level. It just blows people mind who have a hard time seeing how they can possibly ever relate to one another. To me they're all the same. I'm drawn and willing to learn whatever that interests me. If anything, I've always felt that I can learn CS on my own (which I did) but I wouldn't be able to learn Liberal Arts stuff if I wasn't exposed to it in a classroom environment.
My theory: during the cold war, there was "America is the best" propaganda which even though it was really anti-Soviet, ended up discouraging people from travelling anywhere. Berlin wall fell in 1989, the cold war propaganda tapered off, and travel to foreign countries slowly ramped up.
I had a similar experience to the author, using XNA during undergrad to explore building a 3D game engine (though mine was not voxel-based). Much like him I spent a ton of time developing the terrain rendering - generating heightmaps with Perlin noise, stitching them together, texturing, chunking, frustum culling, etc. I fondly remember reading and re-reading papers on things like Chunked LOD and atmospheric scattering, and having those breakthrough moments when, holy shit, the scene actually rendered correctly, and when I move around the terrain seamlessly switches between levels of detail...

Point is, the XNA tools and community were the base that motivated and enabled all of that, and I too am disappointed that it died an awkward and unceremonious death.
Never confuse “category you're in” with the “value you deliver”
I just use it to send money to myself internationally.
One counterpoint, if a minor one, is that Lenovo still maintains that this posed no security concern.
Oh it would be nice to have reminders for keyboard shortcuts, in status bar when you press the meta key etc. Since you're relying on a lot of memorising - that would be a huge asset.
fgsfds!
The best ever quarter Apple has had definitely was helped by hopping on the phablet band wagon, started by Samsung. I remember the universal mockery most reviewers had when it was introduced.

Also Samsung (Samsung Chemical) has been involved with battery business for a long time but they recently got rid of it.
Show HN: Count your stuff, learn from data
It seems like he would have been the only one in the position to do it (the employees were kept in the dark about a lot of things).
Is anything left out of this movement? What separates STEAM from just... education?
That Golden Ratio gets everywhere [xkcd]
Ironically, the main example is of a chemistry student who knows how to program.

I actually do agree with the article, I just think it is hopelessly vague. As a math major who frequently programs and has a great interest in chemistry in physics, it is not "liberal arts" that I find helpful, but philosophy, ethics, and things that were, until recently, considered sciences as well. (I love the metaphysical ramifications of Godel because my favorite part of philosophy is epistemology)

Analyzing a poem or learning about diversity or whathaveyou won't help me - not necesarily because it can't but because liberal arts education at the undergraduate level is hopelessly useless. There are two extremes I see in it: hopeless rigidity (you can't end a sentence with a preposition or your interpretation of this piece is wrong because I disagree with it) and incompetent formlessness where every opinion is valid and has merit - even when it doesn't.

It is too rare that I see education that accepts diversity of opinion while maintaining rigour in anything.
exactly. there's nothing wrong with making money legitimately. If the purpose were theft or exploit to make illegal gains, criticize away. But to make money legitimately, you have to create value for society. They are inseparable
Ironic that a product called "KeepMyFamilySecure" uses such an exploitable technology.
(Linked to from today's comic: http://xkcd.com/1488/)
There are 2.5 billion people in the world who do not have access to modern banking abilities vs. the 1 billion or so who do.
Sony shipped spyware, too. As has Samsung on their TVs. But, that doesn't mean it's OK, or that anyone should trust Lenovo because "they've been burned". Lenovo isn't the wronged party, their customers are.

I'm saying I would need to see a "mea culpa" from Lenovo before I would even begin to think about trusting them.
> It has ducked fundamental reform, which would probably involve breaking up Coal India, privatising local distribution companies and installing new regulators with teeth.

The Economist thinks privatization is the answer? Is this thing real?
I myself have a Bachelor of Arts in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz. I regard the courses I took in history, anthropology and social psychology to be invaluable to my work as a coder.
Freeing up unused IP addresses
Lenders need to start charging hire interest rate for loans made to non-STEM majors. Those loans are more risky. I know I will get flack for this but I believe it will be good policy.
Here’s some that have been found so far:

Komodia’s “Keep My Family Secure” parental control software.

Qustodio’s parental control software

Kurupira Webfilter
None of these arguments are very moving. The best argument of the article is that it's good to learn programming even if your interests are in the hard sciences. But computer science is a STEM field. STEM majors already cross-train in other STEM disciplines because it's useful and helps give them a well-rounded education.

Why not make liberal arts students, who are the ones who can't get jobs and whose educations aren't doing much for society, take science classes? They're the ones who end up working at Starbucks. That's the part of the education system that's _broken_, but we're supposed to ask the most productive part of education to follow suit?
As usual bundling stuff together is anti-consumer practice. If we have laws against bundling then it would be better world because a lot of useless at best/malicious at worst stuff wouldn't be able to get money (like crapware no-one sane would order separately).

Here is something to start with:
"if you offer a product A bundled with product B you have to offer A alone for the price not more than A bundled with B"

while weak and not really addressing many issues with bundling it at least gets rid of the most blatant problem of malicious add-ons.

Then something like A for not more than price(A) + 1/2price(B) and now we are getting rid of a lot more useless stuff.
What exactly is she suggesting we do about it?
I understand perfectly... You guys have use cases much less common then mine. Sorry that I have use of more then one computer and my laptop is strictly a portable device that is stored in my backpack (I don't really want to connect and disconnect it all day long).

These were reasons to down-vote me?
Since you could now be considered 'big leaders' in the bitcoin world. You really should lobby for a BIP70 specification which allows for wallets to subscribe people to payments. However, then would be the question of how can both the wallet provider and Stripe agree on the exchange rate.

In short, I'd like to see BIP70 become like PayPal's IPN, so it can notify websites of subscriptions, refunds, payment requests, instant payment confirmation from a trusted third party (Coinbase would be considered trusted to tell us a payments been instantly recieved without having to wait for confirmation), etc.

I've have these ideas for a while but I'm not known in the bitcoin space so my comments don't make any impact. Stripe could considering thinking about such specifications, I hope?
You can use HACKERNEWS invite code to play around with it.
Why I Just Fucking Did It
> I have to use more fingers than on both hands.

If you're counting in decimal... Counting in binary should get us close to the limit case.
<trivia>
Interestingly enough, (c) 2015 philh does not meet the requirement. You need either the word, copyright, or the actual copyright symbol.
</trivia>
Firefox cannot guarantee the safety of your data on gitgo.io because it uses SSLv3, a broken security protocol.
Advanced info: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap
Glad to see another historian here.
History is fascinating to me.
In case you're wondering, the keys/certs are different for each product.

https://gist.github.com/Wack0/17c56b77a90073be81d3
This person (in the comments below, please upvote him), and my reply, best addresses the most important questions (including the boundary function):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969
Any idea what battery life might look like on the Linux version? Really hoping it can get near the 10+ hours of the Windows version.
I can understand the motive, however flawed it may seem in hindsight. They were seeing dollar signs, happy shareholders, job security - so they took a chance that massively backfired.

Am I the only one who thinks they deserve a little credit for getting their CTO to publicly deal with the issue on the same day all this came to a head, including saying that a guy was literally sat coding out a removal tool right now and due for release tonight? That's a damn respectable feedback loop for a megacorp if you ask me, and we'd have a lot less to whine about here on HN if all mistakes were rectified so expeditiously.
> Another thing I also noticed recently about the idea porn is that if I sleep on an idea, I will find it as a totally bullshit idea as soon as I wake up the next morning.

I can relate to this so much. Sleep is my very own idea killer.
so... read physical books and don't be afraid to write on it? does that sum up what the author is trying to say?
+1. People are still on Python 2.x.

If you want safety, add a nice upgrade path so people can actually start using it easily on their existing codebases.

Tag the old API as potentially dangerous/unsafe/deprecated/ugly and warn (or error out if you can opt into a strict mode per-file) so people can upgrade incrementally without waiting for all their dependencies to first (who won't because they have no upgraded users), and without breaking all their tests in one mega-commit.
fair enough, this is especially bad in the milirary... shudder
Lenovo customers pay $$, man. Lenovo is either incompetent or evil. you pick.
That is correct, at least in the USA. Photog owns the copyright upon creation. Model release is required for (certain) uses in publication, but not all - for example, newspapers do not have to get model release from people in photographs used for editorial purposes.
He is a very rare exception to the pack, I believe. How many biographies have you read that read like "Surely you're Joking, Mr.Feynman"?
Indeed, math was also once considered to be a liberal art.
My concern when making a purchase is whether the purchase will be good for me. I would definitely wipe whatever laptop I purchased, so this story is interesting and embarrassing for Lenovo but has no effect on my own purchases which are driven by what will function well for my preferences (like good Linux support and not requiring me to use a trackpad)

Given the general sliminess in computer, phone and software companies, there is no "pure" option except to buy some ancient computer and never use it on the internet, like RMS. This isn't acceptable to me. I will buy what serves my own needs, and you can do whatever you want.
Exactly. However, note I wasn't disagreeing with you; I was disagreeing with user thedufer that "the point" was that "the original description leaves out the easiest monads, which makes learning about them a lot more difficult. See: List, Maybe, etc." (That's why I replied to him and not to you)

List and Maybe are indeed the easiest monads, but thinking about them in terms of (>>=) and return doesn't give a good intuition about monads, Lists or Maybe. So I think that wasn't "the point".

"The point" was actually that state and IO aren't the only monads, and that the definition is way more general than that. List and Maybe being the easiest monads is irrelevant.
Robert Scoble – White Space
Their standard products limit transfers to under US$3k, and the fees are not much lower than PayPal.
The poor design part or the performance part?

The use of DISTINCT everywhere smells of denormalized tables. Now if you are in data warehouse or reporting position, then this likely makes sense. I tend to work in transactional applications and keep the redundancy down to an absolute minimum. I abstract away some of the complicated queries with views, procs, and functions where allowable.

As for performance, different rdbms implement this differently, but the general query plan category for GROUP BY and DISTINCT is SORT. If you are querying something where you have multiple subqueries with DISTINCT and you and ordering the final results, you are adding extra sort operations to the query plan, hence hurting performance.

I tend to design everything to optimize read operations because there tends to be much more read than write in systems I work in. For me this means denormalized and heavily indexed where table/index scans are extremely rare. On smaller data sets, some rdbms always scan tables because it saves operations based on table statistics.

I hope this helps.
First, when I say education, I mean Liberal Arts education. In this, I would include the humanities, and pure maths. The difference could be found in the approach to technical skills. For example, when I was a student of Attic Greek, our teacher liked to point out that our technical mastery of English grammar would serve us well if we chose a career in publishing. The acquiring of this technical skill was a side-effect of our pursuit, the study of Attic Greek, not the point of it. In vocational training, the entire point is in the acquiring of technical skill. I believe this is as important, and must be a separate pursuit so that it gets the resources it needs. A STEM example would be the difference between how engineering is treated in Canada, versus the U.S. After an education of engineering theory, a student in Canada is then qualified to enter into an apprenticeship where they then have the opportunity to become a qualified engineer, after their vocational training is completed. In the U.S., there's not as much discernment between theory and praxis, and one may not be entirely sure of receiving the right amount of each. The official certification one receives in Canada seems to signal the valuing of vocational training. Receiving an education in theory as a pre-requisite signals the value of theory.
I don't know of any ultrabook that lets you go past 8GB. Not this, not the Lenovo X1, not the MacBook Air. Do you know of one?

Edit: saw your pointer to the Asus UX303LN. Interesting.
As a non-Lisper, I can assure you beyond a shadow of a doubt that having "car" & "cdr" show up in the first few sections of a tutorial is not something that wins people over to Lisp.

I don't mean that I don't understand it. I even know they come from assembler instruction names. And they still look weird to me and still have no meaning despite having read what the abbreviation expands to three or four times.

You'd be far better off shipping "first" & "rest" and whispering to the old hands that you're sure they know how to "fix" the problem in their code, than presenting new people with car & cdr and then try to wedge an explanation into a brain that just threw an exception and went "Wait, what?"
We need more people with a broad, diverse education. Because those people make better people.
XNA Vector3 doesnt use the simd instructions.

Further every

a+=b; (where these are vectors)

calls a function, which calls a constructor

You can tell by getting significant speed ups by inlining by hand.
Not quite a SaaS company, but I'll chime in anyway. For SSD Nodes we've done "trials" for enterprises with an explicit expiration date where the service gets disabled if we don't receive their payment. This tightens our AR and incentivizes them to push the payment through their channels faster.

Sometimes a dev from a large company will test us on a smaller package with a company credit card and expand from there after we push them through the sales funnel.

Most of our enterprise clients pay using either ACH or check, while the remaining typically use credit cards.
Often when you want to reindex you want to reindex a lot of data - quickly. You don't want to use your same hardware, possibly. So what you do if you're in AWS, for instance, is take your data mounts and mount them to an extremely high powered set of instances. Then, reindex with the new mappings. Then, move your mounts back to your smaller instances.

You save money and can do a reindex very quickly.

A basic "reindex" command would be a cool feature though.
In a company as big as Lenovo, I'd be kind of surprised if the person or persons who decide what bloatware to load onto the consumer image make any sort of hardware decisions.

There's also that this particular kind of compromise is basically inapplicable to hardware. What are they going to do, put a 3G radio in your laptop that broadcasts your "data" via the cell network to Belarus?
When you hold the Poisoned Chalice of Power you get to decide who is legally justified and who isn't. "Morals" doesn't even factor into things....unfortunately.
Sadly there is no money in the clean image option for Lenovo. Margins on Non-Apple PC hardware are now so razor thin its only through the pay to play software "value-add" can companies turn enough money to justify the whole expense.
A "how it's made" of the amazing product intro/page would be a very nice read!!
Sleeping tapes with Jeff Bridges
Show HN: Instantly develop web apps on-line with Rapidoid framework + Java 8
I would love to hear any concrete examples you might have.
How is it not faster and cheaper?
"PR project" is subjective and doesn't need to be the same for all parties involved.
I definitely remember complaining about this exact thing a year ago :P. At least you toned down the shadow a bit.
PE and Home Econ.
There's an interesting related article that goes a bit further than the NYT piece: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

I thought it was a pretty worthwhile read - maybe you will too.
Coding is refactoring. Writing is rewriting. Doing anything well is doing it again until it is done.
You can't use a politically-charged term as a name and then claim that it's purely technical. I'm not trying to inject a political issue in here. And in fact I don't even care about the politics. But what I do care about is the fact that naming a product "Gun" is quite distasteful and, as a result, I will go out of my way to avoid using it.
This person (in the comments above/below, please upvote him), and my reply, best addresses the most important questions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969

Please don't assume I haven't done the "actual work", I have. The academic side of the equation with proofs is going to take much longer than the timeframe from my investors for this seed round. I openly admit that, but I'd rather do good of getting this out in peoples hands to actually play and build stuff with.

To be honest, I'll probably want to get Jepsen tests and the sort built before the academic side of the equation is completed. Thank you for being skeptical (I like that), but please don't ignore or not experiment with something just because a paper hasn't been published yet. Who knows, if you did play with it, you might like it enough to help write the paper - but maybe that is me being too optimistic.

Blessings.
There are 7 billion people in the world, so your numbers suggest that about half the people in the world neither have nor do not have access to modern banking facilities.

Additionally, those with the least access to modern banking facilities probably don't have the best access to facilities for efficiently making use of bitcoins, either.