skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As BigO said (or implied at least) above any such device needs to be mine. I should get a transaction ID from the seller and use an encrypted text message or other interaction with my bank to forward the money to the seller - on completion they see their tx-ID as paid and I go on my way with my acquired goods.

The Square system is like me handing over a pot with all my money in it and saying "take what you like". Whilst the above is akin to me passing the money to an esscrow (my bank) and them checking it is OK and telling the receiver of the funds.

Sure a fraudster can get hold of a fake merchant ID and encode the transaction value, ID and their merchant ID with an acquired private key - but that merchant ID can just be locked when fraud is spotted and decrypting the data off the wire is going to require lots of resources.

What am I missing.
Maybe they are faddish, but it doesn't matter, as long as your payback period is short. No one is putting millions into developing rendered polygon worlds for these games. The challenge is to keep it fresh and come up with new ones that will get people on board.
I've been playing one of the zygna games myself.

To the level I've got, plenty of things would be easier if I was willing to spend money, but I haven't found anything I can't do for free.
Google has to be involved because their policy was that if what you display is different from what they are indexing, you are gaming the index and are dropped from it.

Now they have modified that stance to say if what you display before a user makes 5 visits to your site through google is different from what they are indexing, you are gaming the index and are dropped from it.

The new stance is pretty lame on Google's part, and IMHO it breaks the web.
I don't really see why. We can pretty much all agree that the lottery is also 'stupid', but it works, and it's quite clearly understood why it works.

These sort of games work because they get people addicted, and then blackmail them into paying money to make the games easier for them.
Performous brings Karaoke to Linux - Linux Critic
Why e-mail has become the new snail mail
What I find reprehensible about this is that while he believes he'll never repay WB, it looks to me as though he could be at least a hell of a lot closer to $0. So why should it be OK for WB to say keeping him further from $0 is OK?

You are not being a jerk by trying to zero out your balance. If what you said about your other albums is correct, you could be at $250K currently rather than the $400K. That means reaching "recouped" (whatever that means in this insane contract you're bound to) could be possible in 10-15 years.
I'd point out that C++ might be overrepresented in the GCJ solutions. Many of the successful GCJ competitors come from TopCoder, where the only available languages are Java, C# 2.0, and C++, so C++ is the favorite there by a wide margin. If languages like Python, Perl, etc. were available in TopCoder, I bet you would see more people using them both there and here.
His point is that the company is misrepresenting money promised by the contract; if the contract were actually enforced, the band might completely repay their advance in another five years and be owed money.

It's like in The Producers... Whether intentionally or not, the record labels are banking on the fact that people do not look too closely at the accounting of a losing enterprise.
I think there's a middle ground. By acknowledging that people come in all shapes and sizes and mindsets, you can consciously find people who compliment you or your organization well.

I never think that biology should be used to discriminate, since the 90th percentile line of women may be the 85th percentile of men (or whatever skew you want), that doesn't mean that she's not better at whatever task than 85% of men, and hence a good hire. Basically, the macro scale says nothing about the micro scale. But what I wanted to point out was that using macro level statistics and saying "this is inherently wrong" is reading the skew, and not the individuals.

As with everything in life, I'm guessing the real answer is some combination of socialization and biology.

One other ideas has been kicking around in my head, a comp-sci idea even... If you have women being approximately equal members of college (I think they have a slight lead by a few percentages), and you have few women in comp-sci, by the pigeonhole principal, they're the majority in another major. Why isn't there a clamor to get men into those majors? The example of biology was used elsewhere in this thread I think.
Facebook's dual class shares: another reason to avoid this company
Dane who ripped his DVDs demands to be arrested under DRM law
...and, oddly, the old snail mail might not be as bad any more. I get so little non-spam snail mail that if anyone were to take the time to send me a hand-written letter, I would make reading it a priority.
Agreed, interesting article but horribly inaccurate title. I'm not sure if the poster was intentionally inaccurate or if he just badly misread the article.
This article seems a bit stupid. Most of those are not lessons, but pieces of advice, and they're generally unsubstantiated. Some of them I would outright disagree with. For example:

Have an office.

This should not be someone's apartment. It should not be a bunch of couches, though a couch for naps is good. It can be a coffee shop, though that's far from ideal. It should have tables and good wifi -- and some whiteboards if possible.

How is that a start-up lesson? Or even a valid piece of advice? Maybe the author(s) needs an office, but not everyone does.

Other pieces of advice are borderline useless:

Don't take too many shortcuts. Brute-force algorithms should be used judiciously. Encourage modularity when possible. Remember that ultimately components of your product might be worth money independently of the whole.

If you need this specific piece of advice, you can't understand this description of it.

All in all, this seems like a pot-pourri of oft-rehashed advice from blogs about starting up.

Probably this "article" seems to bad because it is not actually an article, but a wiki page where people have added their pieces of advice. Not a great strategy for writing a good article.
Since C++ templates are Turing-complete, and at least OCaml's type system is not, I'm fairly confident that the claim that OCaml's "easy genericness" is "more flexible than C++ templates" is demonstrably false.
How on earth is that blackmail?

From the couple of games like this I've played, it is still entirely possible to hit the limits of the game without spending a dime. It will cost you quite a bit more time and effort, but still possible.

Its more akin to an arcade game where the first play is free, but if you want a continue you have to pay a quarter each time. Sure, its a little bit shady, but its still a valid way to get money from a user. Look at all the sites/service that use a freemium model. Look at things like DropBox. Is that blackmail, since you will eventually fill up your free 2gb, and have to pay for it if you want more?
Digital Bfast: Video Intv. Bill Rosenblatt-Google Books: Jack Dorsey's Square
"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

So many questions from these two statements.
This reads like an Onion news story. If only it was...
Hi Tezza,

good point on the recent account creation, does make me look like a stooge.

It was/is my personal opinion and I'll try and stick around and establish a track record. I mostly don't do that sort of thing any more (used to be very active) because I got tired of all the armchair quarterbacks telling me I was doing it wrong. There are millions of them and only one of me :)

One slight quibble, I am the head of a (small) bay area software company. I'd kinda like to not be, I'm tired, but for now it is what it is. To all you folks who want to run your own thing my only advice is have fun along the way, spend time with your family, friends, whatever you like, but have fun. The time passes faster than you can imagine.

Anyway, thanks for the pleasant reply, I'll try and emulate your civil tone.
Is a paragraph a logical or a visual concept? Can a paragraph have a name/speaker attached to it? The author answered these questions differently than you, and kudos to them for thinking about the problem. Markup is "terrible" when people don't think about structure at all.
A good example of why nice error pages matter
If Craig himself isn't anti-business, he certainly hired an anti-corporate CEO. See my favorite line from an online CEO bio:

"Possibly the only CEO ever described as anti-establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist..."

http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim_buckmaster
Given that it's happened before there, I'd favor commodities to currency. It's hasn't been a bad strategy when your government is creating new money at rapid rate and calling it quantitative easing either.
I notice something like this in the snippet:

(function() { ... })();

What's that all about?
> The theories that are taught in architecture schools today are of a different sort, and in the belief that the field of architecture should be grounded in intellectual speculation, rather than pragmatic observation, students are more likely to be assigned French post-structuralist texts than A Pattern Language. Which is a shame.

It's just astonishing, decades after Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that pragmatic observation is still on the margins. What, a half-century of abject failure in building and neighbourhood design isn't enough to demonstrate the fundamental wrongheadedness of dogmatic, a priori design principles?
I read this post with great interest thinking, "This all pretty much makes sense, good advice, but nothing really earth shattering." Then a strange thing happened. I went back and reread the first paragraph under #1...

Be able to name names of users or potential users. They need to have a specific problem or pain point. Master that before moving on to bigger or better things, even if those bigger and better things are really tempting. If your product can serve multiple purposes, make sure it serves one of them completely before moving on to the others.

I realized that this is the most important advice that my mentor ever gave me. If you do this well, you really don't need to worry about anything else in this post.

I understand that this is tough in a B2C web app; you're not always sure who your consumer will be. But in a B2B app, this is the same advice as, "Find a Customer."

Working for a consumer (or consumers), busting your butt focusing on what is important to them, cures most of the other ills that the rest of this post addresses.

Just take a look at the rest of the bullets:

- Have a clear and consistent vision, but refine it as often as needed.
- Design is important.
- Build your product well.
- Iterate often.
- Do your homework.
- Work (mostly) normal hours.
- Have an office.
- Have a budget.
- Be direct when dealing with personal differences.
- Hold one another accountable.
- Leaders need to handle company resources impeccably.
- Provide communication channels.
- Use your human resources wisely.
- Poke your users often.
- Build a solid and regular communication network.
- Co-author any outgoing messages.
- Use language your users (and potential users) can understand.

These are all important, but if you think about it for a moment, having a customer automatically forces you to do most of these already. You won't even have to think about them. Your customer(s) will make you do them well.

Even if what you build for your first set of consumers isn't exactly what you final product will be, it doesn't matter. They will make you get good at delivering something and that will be a good starting point for a more "industrial strength" product for everyone else.

Refining something built well for your early consumer(s) will be a lot easier than constantly thinking about what you're doing and how to do it. Do #1 well and the rest will follow.
It seems almost like a "pooled stock" from what I read: you invest in all the pirates at once, then make money when any one of them makes money.

Maybe I just didn't read carefully enough.
I believe that is strongly tied to why they have become so popular so fast. You can go into the game, pick it up, and become fairly good quickly. If you continue on with it, you slowly get better as time goes on. You then get a friend to join, and they have to start at the beginning. They could spend the days/weeks it took for you to get that far, or they can spend $5 and get there in a tiny fraction of the time.

To generalize it, its easy to get a handful of people to do something. If you offer it to them for free, there are plenty of people who will go out of their way to advance as far as possible. Once those people start getting friends involved, the friends will want to get that far too. By offering them a quick advancement in exchange for money, you can then make a tidy profit.
node.js supports an event driven programming paradigm by default, so in that regard it is a bit different than some of the other server side JS frameworks.
I work alone. Why do you ask?
That executes the code in a local scope, so that any variables defined within that block don't leak outside of its namespace.
It's pretty simple.

If you don't want to buy software, music, or movies. Don't buy it. but don't pirate it either. You are trampling on the rights of the company, person, or business that created it.

Piracy may not be a 1-1 loss in sales, but you have to admit that does effect sales. Another effect is that when these pirate sites appear on google, many of them get keywords higher than the original sites. When someone searches google and they see the first result, which means they get the software for free, and the next result, which costs $49, which one will they choose?

Most will just download the free one. I also see a growing trend of people that feel that software is information and information should be free. People feel it is their right to download software that normally costs money, for free. This trend will only lead to the inability to sell software online.
This actually happened in Iraq after the first Gulf War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Swiss_dinar . Since the government was no longer printing the older currency, it was then immune to inflation by Saddam's government. The old currency appreciated against the newer, inflated currency until we deposed Saddam. It's amazing how little you need to back a currency, and how unbacked ones can be stronger than fiat currency.
I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form to everyone. For one, it's a delightful read (Alexander is a master linguist), but it's also tremendously helpful for anyone thinking about building a large system, especially software. The main takeaway for me was thinking in terms of systems of constraints. When designing a vacuum, constraints might be: needs to be reasonably priced, needs to be profitable, needs to be easy to carry, needs to be durable, needs to be powerful enough, etc. Adjusting one constraint usually affects another, so it's easy to see how complicated this can get.

Alexander formalizes the process, and demonstrates mathematics to solve the constraint problem. This assumes, of course, that you can articulate and quantify the constraints in the first place.

Web developers are lucky: unlike architects or product designers they can quickly test their assumptions (A/B tests) and move the system to a better state.
Sorry. I meant no offence. I just feel as if the news stories on this site should describe something novel, otherwise we'd have a thousand posts a day about people learning how to tie their shoes for the first time.
I wouldn't rule anything out in the DPRK.

As an example, here's Juche, the official state ideology, summed up in an exchange:

Peasant: "I am hungry. I need bread".

Soldier (part of the supposed "revolutionary" class): points gun at peasant. "Are you hungry now?"

Peasant: gulp "No".

Stalinism to its logical conclusion.
There is nothing to be lost in calling something stupid if you believe something to be stupid. The article gives a good illustration of why the author believes it is stupid.

Calling something stupid does not mean the author is saying there is no money to be made in such things.
This only works because the "gangs" are actually all members of the same tribe (Majeerteen.) If anyone else wanted to join in with capital, they wouldn't see a dime back.

Majeerteens are such pain the ass, they have civil war conflicts open in three fronts; they're fighting in the south for pan-Somali presidency seat while still maintaining their own sovereign entity in the North East as "Puntland". They're fighting the unrecognized Somaliland for territory. They're being paid by the U.S. to catch al-Qaeda and fight Islamists. And still, they're maintaining a successful business in piracy and smuggling, not to mention their own exports in livestock.

Only reason they haven't been cracked down on harder by the U.S. is that they're bonafide mercenaries and bounty hunters, chasing Islamist groups everywhere in Somalia.

(they never were fighters, btw; Somali lore is full of anti-Majeerteen poetry, calling them sissies. Every time the Somali tribes raided Ethiopia the Majeerteen were the first to roll and return the loot. They're making up for lost thievery.)
About to show my age here... I still have the hardcopy issue of "Maximum Rock n Roll" that this article first appeared in. Albini is one smart dude. And he totally gets that Rock can be a thinking man's music.
Unfortunately Ceauşescu's reign of terror resulted in a lot of horrible policies under the banner of "socialism" Just look at the ban he placed on abortion and the curtailing of womens rights, which is probably the most reactionary thing a government can do.
Certainly, but unless the Google searcher can access the content behind the paywall without registration the website is not following the First Click Free rules. If they cloak to Googlebot and don't follow FCF they'll be delisted, because as you said inaccessible content is by definition low-quality (in this case).
I think the NBGA API much nicer: http://925html.com/code/non-blocking-google-analytics-integr...

I usually use an adaptation of this, to take out the extra code that supports prototype and YUI (my choice is jQuery). This thing is super easy to use:

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ga().config({ id:'UA-xxxxxxx-x' }).track(); });

It queues up any track calls and pushes them onto GA as soon as it loads.
You are not clear enough.
Fotopedia close another round of funding and shifts product to the web
The North Korean weirdness differs only in degree, and not in kind, from the everyday actions of every government that issues fiat (non-gold-backed) currency.
what's happening in north korea is an abomination of human rights infringements. i think most westners, especially those who's countries never experienced communism, can't really imagine/comprehend daily life there. I watched this documentary on North Korea a while ago and found it very interesting [http://educatedearth.org/video.php?id=2642]
Ironic.

While a lot of us are thinking about cool new tech, lisp, twitter, and all the other kinds of stuff we love talking about on HN, these guys are writing simple flash aquarium apps and raking in millions.

Perhaps running your own startup about a lot more than simple monetary success. I know I want to make people's lives better in addition to controlling my own destiny.

But still, sure looks like a sweet spot to be in. I bet the field is probably way overcrowded by now, though.
The open web lost a battle today.
Twitter isn't really all that novel at all.
Yeah. The lump sum transactions are not pro-rata they are logged as in the month they happened.
I don't see how the linked article supports your editorializing in the headline.
Affiliates are generating revenue by helping promote tweetminer. The software used is http://www.idevdirect.com
Thanks (and to nwatson), but the ISP in this case is pretty loose about the 4U & power. In fact, my "4U" is just a table top right now because my Xserve case didn't fit. They don't seem to care at all about the power issue.
I never would have been aware of APL without being in software, and I'd never read anything on architecture or building before that. It was one of the most interesting books I've ever read, and it made a lot of sense. Yes, if I were building my own home, I would definitely re-read it cover to cover.
This only affects paper cash though, right? So assuming they have most of their value in a bank, savings, stock, physical assets, or whatever it is they do in "DPRK," then they should be sort of okay.

But I have nooo idea how the banking thing works in DPRK. For all I know, everyone's "bank" is a box filled with cash. Which would make this currency switch suck a lot.
If anything, this article contradicts the editorializing - the cost effect increases the salaries of musicians and artists.
Good to hear from someone who didn't get in. Thanks for the tips.

Keep up the good work and wish you the best.
have you considered going open source?
Would this idea have ever occurred to you? It's highly counterintuitive yet also amazingly successful.
Free Christmas, Christmas Greeting Cards
The Citizen's Dividend is an idea with a long and respectable history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_dividend
This would work on gold-backed currency too. Stop issuing green bills-redeemable-for-X-amount-of-gold and start issuing red ones.

The only currency this wouldn't work on is actual gold, silver, etc.
This seems like one of those hypothetical microeconomics questions... you know, the ones that are never really supposed to happen.

"It also reported instances of wealthy people from cities rushing to rural areas on Monday in hopes of buying commodities with the old currency before people in those areas heard about the exchange process."
This guy clearly has an axe to grind against Zuckerberg.
Thanks to Yahoo, Facebook is King of Identity
Some good advice I think, though I would hardly call it a manual. A manual is all encompassing, not just a few tips.
Field is "never" overcrowded.

Before Google beat the crap out of everyone there was Yahoo, Altavista, Excite etc. Before iPod came there were numerous mp3 players. Before Zynga, there were numerous Facebook apps and countless Flash games.

So, if you want to do it and have a good idea, I'll say do it, give it a shot. Whats the worst that can happen, some time wasted. Lather, rinse, repeat...
A slightly ranting personal criticism of Facebook and the like
Imagine for the sake of argument that these cranks produced value and were installed widely.

What would actually happen is that instead of motors, sweating wage slaves would be charged most of their crank's output merely for the privilege of being permitted to stand near it and turn it. Queues would form. Men with guns would watch and ensure that "their" crank's pennies are not "misappropriated."

If you find this scenario outlandish, realize that I have just described the history of land (and all other natural resource) ownership.
If the card conditions of use say, or imply (eg by bearing a single name) that the membership is non-transferable and single user then it is fraud. Whether you find that reprehensible and whether it is illegal in your jurisdiction are different questions.
Parsing an RSS feed using Clojure
I think "blackmail" is too much. The offer is not misleading, even if it seems like a waste of money to us.
I wrote this a while ago, when I got tired of explaining why I don't use Facebook. The phenomenon does not appear to have changed since then. I've since gotten several responses from people telling me they liked it, and they thought they were the only ones who disliked the whole Facebook movement. I still feel as somewhat of an outsider. I cannot name more than a few friends of mine who are not on Facebook.