skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The person he replied to said it "seems highly unlikely". This isn't a peer-reviewed journal here. We're speculating. I will mention that I gave $20 dollars to a girl last week who claimed she had had her stuff stolen and didn't have enough money to get a train back to her house. There's a significant chance she was scamming me, and the point is, with a plausible story, I'm pretty sure you can find many "suckers" every day.
I'm pretty sure this is a risk borne by the credit card industry already. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this is essentially the same risk as that of handing your credit card to a waiter.
Shorter by token count, not byte count.
I prefer http://www.jqplot.com/ it's free and open source.
It seems like what you are suggesting is akin to credit card skimming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud#Skimming

How is this any different?
An End to Sarbanes-Oxley?
Video Games are Racist
Incandescents approximate sunlight better than LED's and most other light sources.

http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/images/news/article_main/q...

The health implications should be studied. Subjectively, incandescents are more pleasant than fluorescents and LED's. Our brains might be telling us something.
The Straight Dope has gone there:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2255/how-much-money...
The problem with healthcare software isn't the technology, its the people. Tons of entrenched stakeholders who have "always done it this way" on a committee full of people who have "always" done it another way. Then put more people on the committee, one or two from every department of the hospital. First you have to get the whole hospital to do their work all the same way. Once you tackle that beast, you then have to put software together that works with that single method, yet still accounts for all sorts of caveats.
I recommend Fusion charts free (and opensource)
(it's flash though)
barrier to entry is much smaller, you don't need to piggy back on a legit business or have to play a spy to install a skimmer at the bank.

All you need is a taxi, and iPhone, and you can go around town collecting credit card numbers.

And unlike websites, there is no paper trail to link you to the scam.
I’ve tried to learn Chinese, and I think I’ll take it up again.
I’d rather the world standardized on a constructed auxlang than on a language that’s tied to a particular nation.
Exactly. I can rent some storefront right now and set up a fake card swiper. Maybe the barrier of entry for this kind of thing is lower... but is it lower than creating a web page and stealing credit card numbers?

The beauty of credit cards is that you're not responsible for fraud. I know that when I go to a restaurant the server could easily take a quick cell camera shot of my card, but I accept that risk because I know that I monitor my card activity and that I can recover that money if it does happen. The same applies here.
I seriously gotta wonder how the iPhone of some random person (which has various third party apps on it, etc.) is going to meet the kind of security requirements the card issuer cares about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu...
Not sure if you took a close look at the site, but the problem isn't the name, it's usage of the word "bon" in places like "Search Bons".
Looking for some layout/design examples of modern list-like sites
I'm looking for modern sites that are list based, sort of like krop.com and authenticjobs.com

If anyone has an idea of one I'd really appreciate it. I'm just doing some research on layout & atmosphere.

Thanks!
Why do we gain weight?
I would have liked the room more if I were still in high school, now I'd be pretty neutral about it.
Please, don't alert me, it makes me unhappy.
How to handle 1000's of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS
It looks to me like the iPhone is the user's own iPhone, in which case the user will have installed the software on the phone side themselves. So I guess the flow would be: user starts software; merchant takes phone and plugs in device; software checks device and makes sure it is authentic; then UI presents signature page to user.

What is the hole in this? I'm not saying there is no hole, and I did like your question (and upvoted it), but I'm wondering if you can think of a good attack that I'm missing.

Edit: Instead of "iPhone" I should have said just "phone" since it will be on multiple platforms.
Oh, I see. Yes, that is a mistake.
You are assuming that the processes are memory bound. While this is a frequent situation for Rails apps deployed on VPS machines, they are just as frequently CPU bound when under load.
I've seen only a couple restaurants in NYC where the waiters have portable card readers.

And if they roll out person-to-person, this would be a whole lot nicer than, say, having your friend write you a check.
> .. appended to the beginning ..

Or, of course, prepended.
I'm kind of looking for interesting/fun/profitable(?) ideas...
That is why I submitted this article

Modularity and ability to integrate with almost anything(socket, events, http etc - that's just a guess) simply fascinated me.
There is much to admire about Knuth's contributions to CS, but advancing the field in an open-ended creative way is not one of them.

The startup community has done more in that respect than academia, but why should academics not contribute to inventing novel applications?

We need to acknowledge such accomplishments more, even if they appear less mathematical/scientific.
Apple opens up iTunes LP and Extras to developers
I guess the problem is reasonable to me is not necessarily reasonable to someone else. It still blows my mine that someone could make so much money begging. I haven't read the above posted article, but it still seems unlikely to me that beggars make that much money.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is: The average beggar doesn't make anywhere near that much. I can imagine some especially good ones that make a solid living doing it, but most don't make much.
ATL News.YC Meetup December 7th
I, too, think it's highly unlikely that a panhandler is clearing $90k a year, since that would place them in a higher income bracket that every working person I know in NYC. I meant his analysis sounds reasonable, not that it actually is. That's the problem with using simple models: you're seduced by simple reasoning applied to complex problems. The ancient Greeks analysis of matter sounded reasonable, too. It is only with further reflection that the reasonable sounding analysis does not hold up.

This is peer-review. I'm curious what the truth is, so I'm going to consider the validity of someone's speculation and criticize it accordingly.
What I've noticed in looking at LED bulbs is that the packaging never lists an "equivalent wattage", the way CFLs will say something like "13W (equivalent to 60W incandescent)". They also are often labeled "accent bulbs".
probably not, but i've met three homeless people with iphones. they don't usually have data plans, they just have the phones. maybe wifi?
what if you were the owner of the iphone and square hardware and the business or person you were giving money to had a barcode/number/qr code that you would scan/enter which would go to a third party(probably square) service that verifies your account is in good standing and tells the receiver on their iphone/android then the transaction is completed square takes a small cut 1 cent per transaction for being the trusted middle man. No worry about using untrusted system or anything.
I have only been following LED indoor lighting as a non-participant, but from what I've read, you need to stick with name-brand at this point.

Cree has popped up a number of times in technical articles as a leader in white LEDs. Their product focus is on recessed lighting:

http://www.creeledlighting.com/residential.htm

The photo in the NY Times article is of Philips' entry into the L Prize. Time Magazine has a short blurb on the bulb, albeit light on information (pun not intended):

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...

My best guess is that 2010 will be a good year to start dipping your toes in LED lights for around the house. If I owned my own house, I would probably get the Cree recessed lights today. I enjoy a well lit house, and turning lights on and off to save energy annoys me. I welcome the day that I have my own solar panels, LED lights, and solar tube lighting.
there is a form on the page now
We've done the RGB led --> Arduino --> Internet trick.

This link will let you change the light color in the steering house of a barge in the Copenhagen harbour owned and run by artists and hackers. http://liljedahl.dk/christian/illutron/picker/

And this one lets you see how much power is currently being used on the barge. http://illutron.appspot.com/PowerGauge.html

Were planning on doing more with this. Throw me an e-mail if anybody wants to play :-)
I've heard the recommendation to never equally share power or you will risk deadlock. Always agree to either have a neutral arbiter or go with the old 51/49 split so that if it ever comes down to it the issue can be decided decisively instead of resulting in delays and over-compromises.
Yahoo, Verizon: Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers
Yes, and programming used to be an academic thing, done by adult academics, rather than something done by every pimply 15-year-old social reject. :)

And I say that as having been a pimply 15-year-old social reject. Girl.

The rewards in CS are just not as good for the middle-of-the-road people as many other industries. Biotech, for example, is at least as intellectually demanding (if not more), and has many more women.

Let's face it -- programming is largely low-status, exploitative work, where you are like as not going to get outsourced to India (or wherever), outgunned by teenagers, replaced by people who don't mind working 80 hours a week, and managed by people who think of you as a glorified typist, etc., etc.

And many of your best-skilled coworkers are likely to have very poor social skills, whether from atrophy or a genuine medical disorder.

Speaking of outsourcing to India, in cultures where programming is viewed as a respected career path, there are many more women programmers. Among Asians and Indians, specifically.

They don't seem to enjoy it all that much, though, based on my anecdotal evidence.

So, given the issues I raised above, who wants to fix them? Who will bother? Nobody. They will just talk circles about how there must be tons of girls who just long to spend 14 hours a day in front of a computer when they grow up, surrounded by Star Trek jokes lolcats.

I get off on technology, but I've always been different than other girls. I used to get all aggro about it, but as the years have gone and I've grown up, I've realized that's futile. Many women who are in tech jobs just cannot get over their defensiveness and accept that other women wouldn't be just like them, if but for their evil oppressors. I used to think that way too, but it turned out to be bullshit.
Has anyone used the paid versions of Highcharts or any others mentioned in this thread? What do you think of the Highcharts price points - $80 for single commercial site, $360 for multiple sites?

I'm working on a graphing app too and trying to decide my pricing.
The point is to trigger the response to the troll, and the hope that the CEO will be able leverage the response to better their own business position. Some trolls deliberately stick typos or errors in their posts. Some folks show their naughty bits. Some make outrageous statements.

I've always felt that News Corp was the journalistic equivalent of Mr. goatse.
The CTO at a startup I worked at read some book about patterns sometime before I got there. Guess what ? They HAD to start on a new version of their VoIP client right away, and it HAD to be architected using patterns. Right. The v1 is still the best.
It's easy to be fast when you are not worried about cross-browser compatibility. The RightJS $$() function is just an alias to querySelectorAll dumped into an array. queryselectorall doesn't exist in ie6, ie7, ff3, etc, etc.

My hats off to anyone with enough javascript mojo to create a library, but comparing its speed to the big boys when your library isn't usable because it isn't cross-browser compatible is negligent at best and deceptive at worst. Build in cross browser compatibility and THEN compare speed.
there are a huge number of legit businesses that would benefit from this. i showed it to a few friends already.

why are we naysaying this specific business and not other point of sale things that operate the exact same way? what prevents someone from running a fake newspaper stand with a laptop and CC swiper? why is this product vastly different?
I think there may be a danger in labeling yourself based on your weaknesses. It could lead to subconsciously shutting down options because they involve your "weakness". Essentially, if you don't explore your weakness and try to gain strength in that area then you risk letting it atrophy.

For example, if you're a "technically-savvy, introverted programmer" and you hire in a "outgoing marketeer" to handle all the customer relations then you may find that you loose touch with customers and loose sight of the company as a whole.
I wonder how much their advertising teams cost and if wouldn't it render better results just to fire them and replace all banners with AdSense (or something like it) and live off their ever elongating tails. Those teams are pure overhead - news companies are in the business of reporting news. They should get rid of their fat. This world does not tolerate it.
While commuting back and forth to Seattle on the ferries, my dad said he heard a couple people comparing how much they'd made begging that day and it was in the $200-$300 range. They had been disappointed in the "slow" day.
Its IE8 that has the issues it seems - switch to compatiblity mode and it eventually renders.
Yes, we use Flot to visualize some pretty beefy data with many data points. Flot has some very nice features and is a reasonably active project.

The big problem I see with a project like Highcharts (and other Flot alternatives I've tried) is that features like animation and pretty aesthetics are center stage while performance is typically hugely lacking. We've driven Flot to its limit, and by far I can say that the winner of JS charting APIs is going to be the library that can perform well not just on Chrome but on Internet Explorer too.

We've charted things here that take under 1 second to render in Firefox/Chrome/Safari while taking 10-15 minutes with the CPU pegged (yes, you read that correctly) in IE.

We've gotten around it with a bit of work, but it's still a glaring problem for the APIs, and a glaring problem for projects that use HTML5 canvas, can't use excanvas.js with the Silverlight patch, but do need to serve up JS-powered charts to clients still on IE6/IE7.
Less is Better: A conversation with 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson
When a field is young and small, it needs to draw the best people from a small pool. "Geeks" worked for this in CS. As it ages, it needs a larger pool, but it can settle for people who are just good, not necessarily the best.
Well, nobody was buying the ones from a few years ago, so most of them are still on the market.
I was just at Home Depot this morning looking for LED 'bulbs' (using that term very loosely).

Admittedly Home Depot might not be the best place to look.

In any case, I was very disappointed. They are super dim compared to other choices. For $35 dollars you can get something with the physical size of a regular light bulb (which matters because I want to screw them into an existing fixture) but they only put out 200 lumens (!) as compared to 800 lumens for a 60-watt bulb or its ~15 watt compact fluorescent equivalent.

Looking at the design of the unit, on the light-emitting side there was an enormous span of wasted black plastic, with fake plastic unneeded heat-dissipation fins taking a bunch of space, and with three LEDs arranged in the center. With better design, you could probably fit 12 or so LEDs in the same amount of space, and then it would be a product worth buying.

Anyone know the story about why LEDs are not subsidized by state energy programs as CF bulbs are in California?
It means that money has left your bank account. Literally everything else is negotiable.
I thought about this but I don't think it's any worse than the status quo.

A scammer can today get hold of a fake taxi badge, pass a skimmer back to the passenger saying it's going to take payment and achieve the same end.

Presumably the argument against square would be that it will desensitise consumers to the risks associated with this and they'll drop their guard.

I think this might make sense if consumers had any guard in the first place. However since I'm sure the average person would hand their credit card to a taxi driver to skim today it's hard to see that Square changes anything.

At the end of the day this will come down to people being careful about who they hand their card to - just as they are (aren't) on the internet.
I was looking through graphing libraries over the past weekend and settled on flot. It is really nice and fast, and works well.

You can see an example here, which took about an hour to build:

http://kong.ericholscher.com/tests/test-frontpage/personal-s...
I guess I just don't see why you need an education in that. Civil engineers can design bridges that are quite nice to look at. Mechanical engineers can build very elegant machines that can be quite expressive. To my knowledge, education in those fields is still overwhelmingly about creating something that satisfies the specific requirements.
Given the careers where women dominate (nursing, teaching, publishing, lawyering), I wouldn't believe any claims that women choose their careers based on their potenetial high status. Except maybe for lawyering. But I would bet that many more women lawyers are in social or environmental causes than not.

On the other hand, the idea of being repulsed by hanging out with low-status men… as a woman, that resonates with me.

The best thing that's happened for my happiness with programming is the arising of more well-rounded, socially skilled developers, who started off as music professors or linguists, like the ones I found when I switched to Ruby.
One Of The Fastest Sites You Never Heard Of
Of course, your perspective on the money is about hospitals and profit making. Over here in the UK with a nationalised health service we of course have a much different view ;)

We are trying to implement a centralised patients records system, but alas it's not going too well. I am sure we will get there. I am sure most of these problems stem from contracts being awarded to large consultancies (Accenture etc) and from my experience, don't seem to have any actual decent development talent but merely people who can project manage, sit on conference calls and create pretty architecture diagrams. Small and nimble teams are the way forward.

"I've seen CardioThoracic surgeons who makes $750 thousand a year cutting into beating hearts struggle for an hour trying to put orders into a new computer system . A lot of physicians trained in the last 40 years never learned to type, and really don't use computers much"

Please! They should learn to type. Learn to join the real world. Why molly-coddle a few old surgeons who are on $750k / year? They'll be retired soon anyway and the next generation will takeover. They should either learn or get out
In the Mac community, emailing Steve Jobs is widely understood as an effective way to resolve the most grievous of grievances with Apple. I'm not sure if it has ever been the harbinger of company-wide process change though.
Why is Javascript your favorite language? What combination of properties does it have that make it special, apart from the ability to run in the browser?

I mean, it's hardly a bad language, but only the browser thing jumps out at me that says "Use this language for this problem!"
Having had an application approved and then later rejected for use of private APIs (WiFinder), this really pisses me off. Inconsistency sucks, as I told the AppStore reviewer I talked to on the phone. I'm fine with either nobody or everybody being able to use private APIs.

But maybe I'm just not hipster enough - I'm certainly not a "life-long user of all Apple products."
Director of Climatic Research Unit standing down pending review
Windows has had a good auto-update system since Vista. However, one of the biggest issues with IE 6 is that its use is still mandated by a lot of companies because they have old, unmaintained webapps that only run on IE 6.
Haha, well right we're all different breeds of nerd.

I was thinking about it more at lunch, and what really tweaks me is the whole "I do this cause it's a paycheck" vs "I do this because I hearts it" developer mentality.

So maybe that's a better way to express the last point. Assuming that CS culture actively drives women away the ones that are in it, for the most part, really do love it (I know a few "this is just a paycheck" female devs).

So trying to increase that raw percentage might mean "polluting" the pool with "paycheckers" instead of "passion-ers" (man I am a wordSMITH)

(I also say this in full disclosure: I get monies for codes).
This article is a very poor interpretation of the facts. RAID works (as long as it isn't RAID-5). High-end disks may have the same failure rate as low-end disks, but the higher performance and lower capacity gives a much lower MTTR, ultimately improving reliability.
The problem with this is that it's the same as asking a bunch of people how much they make - it's always overstated.
At first glance, it looks sleek, polished, and feature-rich. Not sure yet if we'll need charts for the project I'm currently working on, but if we do, we'll definitely consider it - $80 sounds reasonable.
Sure. I think what you're arguing for is probabilistic cost/benefit analysis, which I think is a fine idea.
It's very cheap but then you get what you pay for.

The best and fully featured graphing capabilities are from Dundas imo (www.dundas.com). They charge about $3000 / developer licence and then $3000 / server that you run it on.

If you priced it somewhere between the two and it had a good feature set I might bite. It would have to support printing though (and generating a PDF would be a big plus)
Print a graph and you get a blank space. Useless
Why Defensive Programming is Rubbish
Holy shit, the guy in the screencast has over 18000 unread messages in his gmail inbox!
It would be a good thing too. Sarbanes-Oxley is so onerous that it has killed the IPO market for small firms. IIRC $3-5M in legal and accounting fees for the IPO and yearly 7 figure amounts for compliance.
It's pretty darn slick on safari 4.0.4 on an iMac.
What sucks is... they'll probably NEVER be able to push an update since it's still going to ring all the private API bells every time it's published. Here's to hoping things start changing soon...
What makes you think diversity helps in any environment? I think that homogeneity is a great help for efficiency, which is often important. Diversity has its uses, but it's not for everything.
"As Sportin' Life says in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: ‘Methusaleh lived nine hundred years. But who calls dat livin’ when no gal will give in, to no one who’s nine hundred years?’ I may have mis-remembered that lyric, but you get my drift."

I think he pretty much had to wrap things up on that quote, as nothing else in the interview could possibly top it. At least it made me LOL.
Ajax.org: JavaScript Charts that blow your mind
I think you meant: http://demo.chartwidget.com/