skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Faster, which is not a trivial thing at all if you've got a line of potential customers (some of whom may change their mind or never get in line in the first place if things take too long), and there's additional data on the magstripe that proves the card is really present, which allows you to get better rates with your merchant account. If you have to key in the number and expiration, you'll pay higher rates.
I see this and I think...why hadn't PayPal done something like this already? It would make perfect sense for them have come out with something like this a long time ago, but who knows...
I've noticed that for some reason the default color scheme for vim seems to color Strings in pink. What is up with that?
A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you uncomfortable?)

A messy environment does not make me uncomfortable.

I wonder how much people’s dislike for disorder relates to the amount of time they look for things. It seems like the people that keep the most ordered desks spend the most time looking for things. However, I rarely need to find physical stuff in my environment so it's just not that important to me.
HTML5-style Workers are coming to nodejs.
how do you get women in product management though? mostly it seems to be via programming careers/degrees.
Isn't this happening already by definition?

lone_ly \'lo_n-le_\
1a: being without company: LONE
b: cut off from others: SOLITARY
2: not frequented by human beings: DESOLATE
I don't suppose that wildly inflated salaries during bubble years had anything to do with it.
Close to what paypal started as. Then they realized people didn't want to send payments using their PDAs, they wanted to send them via email.
People will want receipts on site. For day-to-day transactions, it looks like a hassle but I could see this being great for paying back friends or whatever.
Unwelcoming is kind of funny. I wonder how welcoming would they consider the working conditions on an oil rig, or in a coal mine?
It would be great if our community of Ruby hackers could read this spec and supply feedback via their comment system. Remember that classes and methods that aren't included may not be present across implementations.

A few omissions that jumped out just from my quick scan:

- String.index & String.rindex
- String.strip
- Array.compact
- Array.pack/String.unpack
- Array.index & Array.rindex
- Array.uniq
- Enumerable.sort_by
- Dir
- Marshal

Would you be interested in a language that lacked these classes?
True, but why not revisit the concept at some point especially since a lot more people are walking around with PDAs/smartphones/etc. now than when they first started.
Let's start with the basics. Climate change is inevitable - it has always been a continuous process and always will be. Looking back at the past one might well assume that the world will be ice bound again or that the world will be (again) a warm watery place. So the question is not really about climate change per se but our part in the process. The evidence supporting the proposition that climate change is currently driven by the actions of mankind is all bound up in computer models. As an (ex?) computer modeller I have doubts about our ability to model something as complex as a climate.

My general view is that in 100 years or so it will be warmer than now (following the long term trends of that last couple of thousand years) or it will be cooler than now - if the next ice age has started. It almost certainly will not be the same as now - and (generally) that has always been true.

The science is hamstrung by a lack of good data and the influence of politics. We should be looking for more and better data - and crunching that - not getting involved in belief systems and their inevitably poor resulting decisions.
...and obviously paypal was ahead of it's time, and I doubt the execution was as clean or user-friendly as square.
Have you looked around good enough? :-)

Clozure CL and CLISP are pretty solid as well, although the latter might have performance issues.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one with a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer on its way to tatters as a result of chronic re-reading; I'd begun to think I wasn't getting out of it what I should be. I likewise recommend it to other programmers, new or otherwise.

I avoided The Passionate Programmer when it was called My Job Went To India, deterred by the title and lack of reader recommendation. Maybe I'll give it a look now. Somewhat related, I found Land The Tech Job You Love to be a comprehensive and insightful resource.
Oh please, comparing a few billion distributed over years and years in government projects to the multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year oil cartel is shameful "journalism." There's no science in this opinion piece, it's just Glenn Beck style arrow graph tin foil hat nonsense.
Starting Up: 1 or 2, 3 is Too Much
Ok. I'll officiate. What's the dollar amount? I recommend $100, and that the winner donate the proceeds to their preferred charity.

The bet is over when I demonstrate to you that (a) I didn't invent the term "localhost vulnerability", much as I wish I had, and (b) this vulnerability isn't strictly a "root" vulnerability. I'll withhold any further description in the interests of routing money from your bank account to a deserving charity, and I will match any dollar amount that davidw agrees to.
You don't get to his position by being disconnected from reality in any way. This is simply about Rupert Murdoch wishing he could get money from news aggregators, and using all his influence and clout to try and make it so.

If his company is the only content provider that will block the search engines, he will lose big. However, if he can convince several other big content providers that they all should block the search engines as well, he gets more bargaining power towards the search engines and could eventually make them pay up.

From Murdoch's point of view, he has nothing to lose on this. It doesn't cost him anything to lash out like this, except making a lot of nerds like us angry, but we're pretty insignificant. And if he succeeds, either by getting a lot of content locked up behind payment walls, or by securing exclusivity deals with certain search engines, he gains money. If he doesn't succeed, he didn't lose anything, so trying it is a perfectly valid business decision.
Is it not obvious? Why don't retail stores type in your credit card information instead of swiping it?

Chip and PIN doesn't seem to exist in the US so I'd imagine they're not targeting it immediately. I don't see why they couldn't expand the hardware to support it though.
Very cool - congrats to PK for being involved in this too. Looks beautiful.
Good point; a complementary theory would be that women wish to obtain high status for themselves, and the perception that CS is low status turns them off. I don't see how we could distinguish between your theory and the 'Roissy theory', so it is equally valid.

As for intolerance, I'm not sure how we could consider your unwillingness to tolerate certain kinds of offices as anything other than intolerance.
"I recommend that you start a company by yourself and own 100% of it. Once it’s set up I recommend bringing in a co-founder and giving them 10-30% of the company depending upon when you bring them in. I advocate treating them like a co-founder in every way except when they join and how much equity they get."

I'm glad he said this. This has been my plan, not so much by design but just by circumstance, but it's nice to have validation.
You know what's funny: I know of several design firms that are using sass to generate their css and they deliver the generated CSS to their client without ever telling them that they used sass to make their development process faster.

If they had given you their Sass code, you would be empowered to make design changes much more easily that you could have with CSS. If I were you, I'd be demanding that my designers use it ;-)
Interesting idea, I really like the hardware piece.

Not sure how large of a market there is for this. Mom + Pop stores use CC terminals (cheaper than an iPhone), so that leaves this open to mostly people who accept payment outdoors at farmers markets, sports events, etc..

For that to work you'd have to be comfortable giving a merchant your credit card, which isn't a sure thing considering they can disappear without a brick+mortar store. Also, the merchant would have to be comfortable giving a customer their iPhone. I know I wouldn't want to hand out my phone to random people on the street.

That being said, it looks cool and if I had a store I would definitely give it a try.
Do you actually forsee that, given human nature, or do you just like to wish it were so?
I don't really understand the niche it's aiming to fill. Most stores/restaurants have portable card readers these days, so is it a poor-mans one of those?

I guess I'm wondering what use-case it's aiming at.

Also I absolutely would not trust someone swiping my card through one of these. I like a closed box that is obviously provided by a bank, which cannot be tampered with. Not an iphone that could be doing anything with my details.
to address that last point, here's an interesting discussion I saw recently on a women-in-$foo mailing list:

"is it just me or do you get your hackles up a bit when there's another woman around" - with several posters agreeing, even though they didn't like it. catfights, drama, bitchfests -- call it what you will but women don't always react well to other women being around. a typical female CS of today, wearing a star wars t-shirt, running gentoo and drinking out of a thinkgeek mug just won't react well to someone who's not of that ilk coming along onto "her" territory.

slight tangent, but interesting to consider.

i think it's perfectly possible to be geeky without turning into a one-dimensional stereotype. a lot of girls who aren't the picture described above still like the odd geeky thing, whether it's lolcats, nintendo cushions, an affinity for linux, whatever. the culture isn't binary, and it's entirely possible to fit in without having to live the entire lifestyle. i should know. i hardly ever wear my star wars t-shirt these days.
This could revolutionize begging. One of the last jobs that has not benefited from the computer revolution yet.
Monkey Analytics - SaaS approach to scientific computing
I recently replaced a bunch of 50W of Halogen lamps (came with the apartment) with 1W LEDs. It's quite a bit darker, but I got used to having more directed light. My energy bill dropped by about 70% without any other changes. It's interesting how quickly lighting costs can run up.
Disastrous by what measure?

I think the biggest problem we have in this country is that everyone is addicted to easy credit and living beyond their means. The government is moving heaven and earth to prevent the housing bubble from fully deflating even though the high prices were all based on loans couldn't people afford in the first place.

Any time someone suggested letting the investment banks fail, they raised the spectre of global economic collapse, even though A) no one really knows what would happen in that kind of systemic collapse, and B) the people responsible for predicting that had unfathomably huge incentives to paint it as a doomsday scenario. After all, those are the people who made billions from the bubble economy, and who stood to lose not only their millions, but also their prestige and employability in the future.

I do agree that electing Ron Paul would have caused some short term pain, but I'm more convinced that by not taking our medicine we are greatly diminishing our long-term prospects. However the weakness of democracy—especially in the digital age—is that people will always elect the feel-good candidate over the one with real long-term vision no matter how brilliant the latter or how ignorant the former.
Before you buy your servers make sure the "4U" space is really all about space and not about power consumption.

At Hurricane Electric in bay area California you can rent sub-rack space that could hold, say, 8U. However, if you try to fill all that space with SuperMicro high-density 1U systems you'll far outstrip the power they're willing to supply for the rental rate.

I don't know about your colo's policies but please double-check.
These folks +know+ about robots.txt stuff. If not directly, then because some staffer and most any sycophant in range has already pointed to it.

The folks have almost certainly explicitly told the staffers involved not to enable robots.txt, too. (If they truly were fools, they've have already enabled the robots block.)

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.

The point is not the tech. The point is not the truth.

The point is the the schtick, and the profit potential.

This is the basis of modern media.

It's an effective form of attention-seeking spam.

This doesn't mean I don't think Google should just "accidentally" drop one or two of these organizations from the search indexes. "You're not listed? Whoops. We thought you wanted out of the Google indexes. Our bad." But that'd be both juvenile, and would serve only to get the regulatory folks and legal teams involved all spooled up.
AFAIK reading the chip is non trivial, and involves heavy encryption and proprietary hardware/software. Maybe though :/
I'm not excusing their behavior. I'm just stating facts.
Yes, but this isn't your mess, this is someone else's mess.
Well, by creating and perpetuating an environment that is friendly to geeks, we are also increasing the talent pool from which we draw programmers among geeks.

Think for a second. If we're talking about adjusting the decor to market to a culture, what culture does it make sense for CS to target? Women? Athletes? Norwegians? Black Guys? It seems to me the alliance between geeks and programmers is quite natural.

You could redecorate the lounge in pink and put plushies everywhere. You might get a few more women who think, "Okay, I guess I could fit in here." You'll get a lot fewer geeks who think, "Thank God, I've finally come home."

Is that a positive tradeoff? Color me skeptical. Go found a Hacker Girls group, dominate the industry, prove me wrong. Until then, don't be engineering the culture.
Social Norms as Motivations
I'm disappointed that people (a) don't understand sarcasm, or (b) actually agree with the original commenter. Since no one left any meaningful feedback, I will assume the latter. If you're planning to start a company, thats a poor position to start from.
I made some tweaks (and a bug fix or two), left it running overnight (four instances, one per CPU core)... They all get down to 12 to 14, but it seems like they stop progressing. Haven't seen 11 yet.

Score: 12
2 3 0 1 3 2 1 2 2 3 1 2 0 3 1 3 0
2 1 1 2 2 1 1 0 3 3 3 3 3 2 0 0 0
2 2 1 1 0 3 3 3 1 0 2 0 1 3 3 0 2
3 2 0 1 1 1 0 3 2 1 3 0 2 2 0 3 1
1 2 1 3 1 0 2 2 0 2 0 0 3 3 1 1 0
1 1 3 3 0 2 2 0 0 1 3 1 0 2 3 1 2
3 2 3 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 3 2 1 3
1 3 3 2 3 1 0 1 2 2 0 3 0 1 2 0 2
2 0 2 1 3 0 3 1 0 2 3 1 2 0 0 1 3
3 0 2 0 1 3 1 2 3 3 2 1 1 2 2 0 0
0 0 2 3 2 3 2 0 2 1 0 3 1 1 1 3 3
2 0 1 3 3 0 2 3 3 0 1 1 0 1 2 2 1
0 1 0 2 1 0 2 3 1 3 2 2 2 1 3 0 3
3 2 2 2 0 2 0 1 1 1 1 3 3 0 3 2 0
3 3 0 3 2 1 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 0 1 2 2
1 3 3 0 0 3 1 3 1 2 0 2 3 2 0 2 1
0 1 3 0 2 2 3 1 3 2 2 0 0 0 1 3 1

Edit: I can't reply to you, so...

http://pastebin.com/m33bccec1

It's not pretty, but I did a few things. Instead of taking the top n candidates and breeding them randomly, I kept all of them (NUM_STATES 200 and KEPT_STATES 200), but weight them according to score. So the best scores have the highest chance of passing their DNA down to the next generation, but the occasional loser gets lucky too.

Mutation is also weighted, so the most likely number of mutations is zero, but it's possible to have up to 4. Increasing this value made the performance go down, but it's also possible that there is no way to get to a solution by incrementally tweaking a decent attempt. Which could explain why I'm stuck at 12.

There are a few optimizations that may or may not make a difference, for instance in the scoring function. I think the pick_best_states function was not actually picking the best states. If you had two states with the same score, the first one is kept, but the next one is not. I fixed this. The stupid thing is, with NUM_STATES and KEPT_STATES at 200, it's basically an n^2 sort now. I never bothered to improve that.

Finally, compiled with -O3 and let 'er rip.
"A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you uncomfortable?)"

Nope. That's an established difference between men and women. I suspect it's because for men are on average better at using the part of the brain that processes abstract patterns, and worse at using the part of their brain that processes sensory data and emotion. So the mess is more salient for women and thus drains more cognitive cycles.

Also, I suspect people of both sexes getting better at using the other part of their brain as they get older. So it would possibly bother older men more, or possibly older women less. Just another one of my crazy theories though. :-)
Even the expensive $200 LED light that would go in my kitchen is only 750 lumens. http://www.bulbs.com/eSpec.aspx?ID=15695&Ref=LED+Bulbs&#...

The halogens are $7 and 1280 lumens. No contest really. Especially when I have 6 of them.
The sex industry could be a large market.
Interesting. I recently spent a few months implementing almost exactly the same idea. It’s at http://gotosale.net/

It’s been dormant for a few months now, after I realized people wouldn’t just magically start posting sales for the benefit of random strangers, especially when practically no one knows the site exists :) Marketing isn’t my strength, I sort of lose interest after the build phase. You guys have taken it further than me, with a much more polished iPhone app and the whole karma thing - kudos.

I am pretty certain that the idea has merit - everyone I’ve talked to about it were excited and said that they would use such a site, and probably pay for an iPhone app, but getting content has proven to be difficult. I haven’t given up on it yet, and I intend to give it a fresh go very soon, with a slightly different approach. I’m sure there’s room for both of us.
No, Pascal's Wager is foolish since you could not possibly select the correct god from the myriad of gods available (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc) given that belief is mutually exclusive.

At any rate it's not the same thing. The precautionary principle is an insurance sale, not some metaphysical nonsense.

And you're being unfair about your characterization of Global Warming. It is just not any doomsday scenario. There's enough reputable scientists getting their panties in a knot that it should be cause for concern.
Can I ask what your costs were? How long do you estimate it will take to recoup your capital costs?
Men viewing nerdy women as potential dating material is commonly cited by women as one of the things they most dislike about being anywhere near tech events and tech people. So I would suggest that you ask yourself whether you, personally, have contributed to women not wanting to get more involved in tech. Because you just might have.

Seriously, everything works out better for everyone in the long run if you value women as people first and foremost. Admittedly doing so reduces your opportunities to make passes at uninterested women. But it significantly improves your odds of success if you do make a pass, and greatly improves your odds of eventually winding up in a decent relationship.
EZUnsecured.com-Unsecured Financing Review-Jade Rock Enterprises LLC-PPMP Group
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Chip and PIN is a standard. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer it or implement from scratch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_and_PIN
"forall x" is an open access introductory textbook in formal logic.
This is a class of problems that Monte Carlo optimization (GA's, simulated annealing, etc.) typically can't solve, because almost-solutions are generally really deep local minima that the search machinery can't climb out of.
Could be :)

Something like this could get merchants who don't traditionally accept credit to start
Poly/ML is a full implementation of Standard ML
I like it from the person to person interaction level.

What about wear and tear on the audio in jack? Gas pumps and grocery stores have card swipers that look like little tanks bolted on.
Thanks, I appreciate this article, despite my being essentially convinced that it's important to do something significant to reduce carbon emissions. The fact of the matter is that the climate science isn't settled. It's a shame that the nuisances of this have been glossed over for the purpose of the public and policy makers.
Correct, it doesn't really guide you here. It just tells you that you don't need to be certain of the outcome before acting due to the potential extreme costs of inaction.
Assuming that by "hard" currency you mean a gold standard or something similar, I'd suspect you've not thought your cunning plan all the way through. I've commented before on the problems with gold, and they generalize to many other things which are proposed to back "hard" currencies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629390
My room only looks disorganized and messy. Its actually highly optimized. My clothes stay on one pile on one end of the room. Naturally, they are piled in the order i took them off, so its easy to put them back on, its a stack. My desk doesn't have any junk on it, but the area around my immediate workspace is full with stuff. I have a lot of empty soft drink bottles, flattened and put in bags, all the leftover food and trash i have is in bags, on a separate pile, which i trow away when it gets too big, or starts to smell. There are NO objects on the floor, because i like to walk around my room and think. The environment looks unwelcoming, dirty and messy, but its effective. I know where everything is, and everything is either where it has to be, or is thrown relatively near the place it has to be. Holly shit, my room is like software.
For 1) That's going to be true of any resource that's used in spaceship construction. If you're building interstellar ships at such a scale that you might conceivably run out of stuff to build them out of, it's a fair assumption that you have the capability to go and mine the rest of the rocky planets in the solar system.

2) That 400 tons is not going to scale up with volume. Density of lead is around 650 lbs/ft3. Let's say you have a big ship, a mile in diameter. And let's be generous and put a 4 ft shell of lead around the whole thing. 4/3pi(5280^2-5286^2) * 650 * 1/2000 = 57000 tons of lead = 52000 metric tons. A drop in the bucket, tiny compared to the amount of steel and other material that would make up the rest of the structure. (Annual steel production is around 100 times more than of lead. We won't be running out of it either.)

The bottom line is that unless you're talking about transuranics or other extremely rare elements, or are building things at comically large scales (ie: thousands of ships) amount of construction material is not going to be a limiting factor in starship design.
Slightly less offensive, but similar...
If at a business where a receipt is important, it's easy enough to place a wifi receipt-printer nearby.

(I'd be very surprised if the main use of Squareup was "paying back friends".)