skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don't share your level of rage, I've used "Paypal Credit" and BillMeLater (before it became Paypal Credit) accidentally several times.

For a long time I refused to add a bank account to my PayPal account simply so my credit card would be my default payment option. Then BillMeLater had an attractive promotion, so I used it 1x and paid off my balance before it accrued any interest.

Since then, BillMeLater and now PayPal Credit are my default payment options. There's no way to change this, and it's a very consumer-unfriendly practice.

I'm glad they're getting fined, and I sincerely hope this results in their allowing user-defined default payment settings.
But again, look at the high profile shootings recently. The cops weren't looking for drugs. In all of those cases, they were stopped for basic harassment.

The nice car isn't a reason to pull over the doctor. It's an excuse.
REST vs. SOAP: When Is REST Better?
The problem with this analysis is that the VC's investing money in companies aren't choosing between various asset classes - they have funds committed to their investment thesis, so they aren't going to go invest somewhere else if returns start looking better in other sectors. It's the LPs who theoretically may allocate less money to the VC's if they see better yields elsewhere, but their fund commitments are long term and take a long time to change. Funds have a life of 7-10 years and lots of folks have just raised new funds, so there's a lot locked in that will keep going into startups for a while now.
Open primary elections for parliament for the first time in Portugal
Doesn't this significantly impact your ability to use eBay?
Implementing Alerts in Lucidworks Fusion
I can't pretend to know, but she always seems happy with their service.
This all makes perfect sense. My only problem is that this is not communicated with the seller clearly. If it is a stated policy that Paypal will hold the host of a conference's money until the event materializes to cover their costs then no party involved has a right to feel cheated. Instead Paypal is classifying this risk which is inherent to their business, which is the risk of the conference materializing, as fraud. This, in my opinion, is diseptive
That would imply PayPal started out good...
Amazing Maps
I've met some of the guys from Ufora and seen a demo of their technology; very impressive. I've always been leery of the claim that you can create smart software to make the problems of writing parallel code magically disappear, but what they've done has made me rethink some beliefs related to working with big data at scale. Definitely a company to keep an eye on.
Spotify now features videos and podcasts to add to your music mix
Questions:

1) Why would I want people submitting a request through this application rather than just using Github issues tracking? Using them would create an additional channel of communication that I now have to not only check but sync. Rather have one channel of communication for my projects

2) I don't see anywhere that the questions and answer will be share with the community like they are with StackOverflow. Why would I want to hide valuable information behind a curtain that no one can see unless they sign up?

3) I personally see no benefit for a CLI interface. I don't see the value in learning a non-standard interface just to get help with something. Yea I can see the "look this is cool" factor, but honestly, I think that's all it is.

I can't even count how many of these startups have come and gone since the time I've been on Hacker News. They never seem to be around long and, quite honestly, I don't think the creators get that they are fixing something that isn't broken.
BFG is amazing for helping you switch a repo from private to public, especially when you might have been lazy early on and kept credentials in your repo, even if you shouldn't have. You can replace your known credentials with REDACTED throughout history without compromising the rich history your git commits (should) record about the evolution of a piece of code over time.

IMO, your commits are just as important as the code its self for understanding how and why something came into being.
This is wrong on so many levels. The author assumes direct monetization strategies are viable for 100% of target demographics on the web. Not everyone has the ability or desire to pay for information. Take Google for example: the overwhelming majority of their income comes from ad revenue.

While I don't dispute the horribleness of some ad implementations out there, ads represent a way to monetize off one's entire audience — an infinite increase in accessibility as compared to a paywall. Freedom of information is one of the core tenets of the web. I'd rather pay with my time than see a popup asking me to pay up.

Although it might not be immoral to block ads (depending on your worldview,) the reverse is true as well. Webmasters aren't obligated to spend server resources on people who block ads. If the author is so adamant about all services having equal or better alternatives, I'd love to see his reaction if Google suddenly stopped serving requests to clients with ad blockers.
> If I make one hundred pieces of blue paper and I call it a currency and I start selling it to people

You just described fiat currency. Just change blue to green. (in the US - others than many other colors, so pretty). Bitcoin is backed by a cryptographic standard. The USD is backed by the government and a military force. Both are seen as valuable by someone. Both have little or no true valuable items behind them, other than confidence. One, the government and the guns, the other, the anti-counterfeit nature and provability via the global ledger.
Elon Musk and Craig Venter Want to Print Life on Mars
I think most people have an irrational dislike of s-expressions, but that at the same time, s-expressions are not as good as their proponents think they are. There's a certain aesthetic "purity" to them that's seductive, but from a practical standpoint, it is quite reasonable to adapt syntax to common patterns. The issue with mainstream languages isn't that they do that, it's that they do it too much.

But there are syntactic schemes besides s-expressions that allow for good flexibility. For instance, in my programming language Earl Grey[1], I use this very simple sugar: `a b: c` <=> `a(b, c)`. So you can use this todo syntax if you want, and it will just work:

todo "housework":
item priority(high): "Clean the house."
item priority(medium): "Wash the dishes."
item priority(medium): "Buy more soap."

Interestingly this has one advantage over s-expressions: whereas Lisp editors usually need to specify a special highlighting/indent policy for keywords like `let`, here editors can just highlight/indent `a b: c` indiscriminately.

I also think a limited number of infix operators are worth defining in most languages, and I don't mean arithmetic operators (although I'm okay with them). I mean ubiquitous or easily repurposed operators like assignment/declaration, lambda, pairing, or commas. In my view, Lisp-like languages hold to standards of purity that are unreasonable (don't get me wrong, they are quite usable, just not optimal according to any useful metric).

[1]: http://breuleux.github.io/earl-grey/
MuleSoft’s Massive $128M Round Could Be Precursor to IPO
Yes, that Ruby version is also insecure.
This isn't about who the NSA (or anybody else) chose to place their trust, and it certainly isn't about some right-wing-authoritarian[1] desire for social order (the world isn't going to descend into chaos if critical thinking starts taking over from blindly following orders.

This is about our duties to the great ideals of freedom that this country was founded upon... and the oath Snowden took[2] to defend the same. The question you should be asking is why isn't everybody else that took this oath doing something similar?

The oath in question: (emphasis added)

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will *support and defend the Constitution*
of the United States against all enemies, foreign *and domestic*; that I will bear true faith
and *allegiance to the same*; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation
or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the *duties of the office*
on which I am about to enter.

Note that it does include a reference to the duties of the office. The problem is when those duties are in conflict with the first part of the oath, to "support and defend the Constitution". This oath is very clear about what you're supposed to prioritize ("I will bear... allegiance to the [Constitution]").

So no, Snowden's actions were not unethical, illegal, or immoral. In fact, it may be one of the few things anybody could do that is by definition patriotic. Any law he may have been in conflict - and certainly any duties he had to the NSA - are lower priorities than his defense of the constitution.

I do not envy anybody who is placed by his superiors into a situation that forces a choice between following those same superiors or following an oath to a greater ideal. That has to be one of the hardest decisions to make.

[1] meaning Bob Altemeyer's term, not the usual political meaning

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/daniel-e...
> Poor Black neighborhoods are simultaneously over and under policed.

They are under policed ("guardian" model) and overmuch hostilely occupied by the police ("warrior" model).

They are the places most in need of effective community-oriented policing, and the places that get that kind of policing the least.
We are using Postgres as our queue backing store. I tried switching to Sidekiq but ran into issues (read here https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/pull/624). Fortunately our job throughput is small enough to not hit any scaling issues with Postgres, so I stuck with that because of my confidence and experience w/Postgres over the years. The issues I ran into on Sidekiq just made me skeptical of their architecture/code maturity, though that was several years ago and it may be much improved by now.

We use JQJobs (which we authored) to manage queueing and it's architected such that it could be ported to Redis or some other better backing store, or potentially even to QC/Que, which I wasn't aware of until your article (so thanks for that!).
Fast Forward Labs
In response to the sibling, that's an absurdist characterization and a pathetic strawman. There were free trade agreements before this ridiculous process.

I believe deeply in free trade. I also believe in democracy.

Thus I believe all free trade agreements should be negotiated in public with free and open debate, like all other laws.
Big Banks Plead Guilty, Will Pay $5.8B
Chrome 43 launches with Web MIDI API support
Norway only has a population density of 39 people per square mile which makes a huge difference. For comparison the UK is at 650 people per square mile. So 3% of Norway ~= 50% of UK in terms of people per square mile of farm land.

The real issue is food production costs are higher becasue of high labor costs, and poor weather / a relatively short growing season.
Yes, that's the critical paradox: the things that are more measurable or easier to measure are the things that are done, despite them having less impact on quality than things that are difficult to measure or unmeasurable.

Deming said it: "The most important things cannot be measured." How right he was.
"If I make one hundred pieces of blue paper and I call it a currency and I start selling it to people" - This is what modern currency is. Pieces of paper issued by government.
Hackers have really lost their sense of humor. This would have been at the top of the page had I come up with this name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-oafGPkqg (with an author name of Karl Hungus)
I've heard good and bad things about both of them. I've been looking for a better international alternative, though.

Simple bank looks absolutely amazing (https://www.simple.com/), but sadly they are US-only. Does anyone know a similar bank to Simple that is friendlier to international travelers/EU citizens?
Is it difficult to become an "Enterprise Partner"?

https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...
If most of your cores are idle most of the time, you need to be doing things like searching bigger state spaces.
It's hard to care about anything new they are adding when their existing software is so inadequate. I mean, I love the desktop client. But Linux has no desktop client so km forced to use the web client. The web client is months if not years behind the desktop client. It is missing folders, drag and drop just to name a few. The web experience is just so awful compared to the desktop. I wish they would focus on what they have deployed instead of half baking this crap. /rant

But as a subscriber, I do still really love the desktop client when I have the option to be on a Mac or PC.
If some of these dev environments required you to implement HMAC yourself from the SHA2 primitive, I'd see some of the value of a "Rosetta Code"-style page for it. But all of these are just examples of calling into the environment's library interface for HMAC. In fact, except for Golang, all of these examples are essentially just calling into OpenSSL's HMAC.

Also:

* Do not use string/buffer comparison functions to verify HMAC. In incredibly common error.

* Do not use human-intelligible strings as HMAC keys. HMAC keys are like AES keys: fully random; they should come from /dev/urandom.

* Do not embed HMAC keys in your source code!

Ultimately: I'm not sure I understand the impulse behind pages like this. It's clear that the authors aren't domain experts (that's fine; they're probably better programmers than the crypto domain experts are). They know they aren't getting everything perfect. In fact: they know some of the examples on their own page have flaws, because they were corrected about timing attacks and only fixed Python.

Crypto bugs in your own code are one thing, but propagating crypto bugs to other people's code seems much worse.
The Journey of a Lead Through the Marketing Stack
I disagree. What you're arguing, in effect, is that async/await is bad because you should handle asynchronous APIs by taking a synchronous API and running it in a different thread, which experience has generally shown to be a recipe for buggy code, inefficient code, or most likely both.

The underlying idea behind async/await is that synchronous methods shouldn't exist in the first place--you'd only have the asynchronous API. Async/await enhances that model by turning the promises' functional interface (which requires interesting binding to handle loops/recursion) back into an imperative control interface.
It might be time for tinfoil hats, but maybe Amazon only competes with Netflix because Netflix demonstrated how awesome Amazon's servers work for video delivery?
I've mostly had coworkers that had fond memories of VB6. Personally, compared to what we have now, I think it sucks. I'm no parroting. I suppose there's no way for me to know whether I "have any idea what I'm talking about". The language itself is terribly constraining. No try/catch. No generics. Crazy 1-based collections. No type-safe lists, just fixed size arrays. No function references. And so on.
There is a Linux client and there has been one since I remember. They even have a proper .deb repo.

https://www.spotify.com/en/download/previews/
As someone related to the field, I see a fundamental lack of quality in in-house IT when faced with problems of this magnitude. Which isn't unreasonable.

IT evolved to be able to provision systems and roll out approved software. Maybe there's a development team or two to develop in-house extensions or software (though always viewed as a cost center).

Therefore, the department the organization's rules are set up to funnel you through is simultaneously incapable of fulfilling this need.

In practice, this leads to a ton of business specialty + devOps types from anyone who can hack Python in order to Get Stuff Done.

(For those of you that don't deal with 1,000+ headcount organizations, be thankful ;) )
It isn't quite a Windows application, but PocketCasts' web app works well for me (and syncs with my phone): https://play.pocketcasts.com
Where is the line? Everyone seems to think "cloud" services threaten user privacy, but "cloud" is a marketing term.

What about traditional VPSes? Managed dedicated servers? Ordinary dedicated servers? Leased servers collocated in a 3rd party datacenter? Owned servers collocated in a 3rd party datacenter? What if you use their "remote hands" service?

Is there a meaningful difference between your leased office floor and your leased datacenter space? I would argue not. Do you have to own the land? What about leased vs. owned servers if they're in your office?

Even if you have outright owned servers on outright owned land (unlikely b/c mortgage, but whatever), how are they managed?

In many small businesses (including medical practices), they're managed by a "small business IT consulting" company which has both remote and regular on-premise access. You're trusting them to the same extent you would be trusting AWS. Is there a meaningful difference?

What about the proprietary software you run? A large Electronic Medical Records package which probably contains extremely sensitive data about you is technically deployed onsite, but deployment and administration are performed remotely by the vendor's team in India. (I worked for a small biz IT consulting firm that supported the underlying hardware/Windows for one of these installations.)

What about the Windows and other proprietary software with internet access that's literally everywhere?

You may think you've achieved a morally superior position of trusting no one but yourself when you forego The Cloud, but I argue that's generally not the case except in the most extremely self-reliant cases (no vendor support, no contractors, no proprietary software). Those cases are not at all representative of the average business which refuses to go AWS.
Check this out -
https://www.pushbullet.com/
7 Hacks to Grow Your Email Subscribers List with MailChimp
Personally, I prefer having third party libraries available through a package manager like bower or npm. It doesn't take much to get these set up if you're already hosting your code in on Github
I would argue that most people contribute out of guilt rather than compassion.
There is a question no one ever seems to ask anymore, "Does the punishment fit the crime?"
with the volume that they do, they aren't paying the fees you think they are.
$20 in 'investigation fees'? can anyone confirm this? I won't use them again if true.
> It's long overdue for some serious regulatory oversight.

It's hard to imagine there being more oversight than the over 200 governments regulating them currently, including ~55 separate agencies in the US.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/licenses

PayPal is a fully licensed and regulated bank in some regions including all of the EU, and is licensed and regulated by each US state it operates in.

Many of the startup alternatives people recommend seem to be operating on a "try to grow fast enough that we can afford to operate legally when states start suing us" basis, as they aren't similarly licensed.
ThunderGate: An Open Source Toolkit for PCI Bus Exploration
Because contextual jokes translates poorly online.

Lets not hand Fox News headlines on a platter...
I name all my Hard Drives after Battlestar Galactica Ships - I have:

1TB 27" iMac - Galactica/
4TB NAS - Pegasus/
500GB MacBook - Colonial One/
500GB External - Majahual/
250GB External - Cloud 9/
16GB USB - Demetrius/
Any settlement which allows the company to only pay a fine and not admit wrongdoing is not a deterrent against future wrongdoing. The fine nearly always is far outweighed by the profit. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that the potential for fines are part of the product planning process.
Hilariously, I've never heard of ASN, and googling turns up a dozen potential meanings.
Finally, at least they listened. The decision to take out searching within a playlist baffled me (or I guess it was more of a oops we forgot it).
And it's always "death by a thousand papercuts". The configuration files and build system layer creep happens with the best of intentions. That interesting new transpiler, interesting new package management abstraction, interesting new declarative UI concept, interesting new tool to help with FooBar instantiation...

A few years pass, and the act of changing anything in the application will require working around bugs in an old transpiler that can't be updated because of mysterious bugs that some code relies on, configuring dependencies in an obscure package system, converting HTML into a UI layer that's a complete mismatch for the application's present design, and converting "new" calls manually into some upside-down system that is there only because of novelty value years ago.
Microsoft has open-sourced projects in the past and they have been given a warm welcome and really flourished under the open-source banner. Examples are ASP.Net, Roslyn and CoreClr.

As much as I applaud this move by Microsoft, WCF has a reputation for being a terrible framework to work in the areas where it is most frequently employed, and I doubt it will be given the same welcome.
It's not the worst possible option when you want to wrap a command you yourself wrote in some extra stuff. For example, in a test script, you might pass the command to a function that

(1) Prints some info about the test that's about to execute

(2) Evals the command

(3) Checks/reports the result

Given the choice I'd rather use lambda, but not all languages make that very convenient/readable. In such languages, a carefully used eval might be preferable to ad-hoc interpretation.
The reason blacks growing up poor in this country suffer bad outcomes isn't because they're told that they're victims by well-meaning social programs. It's because they're treated like criminals and given very few opportunities to achieve something better.
Side channel attack
Because the state can't function without keeping some secrets, particularly in times of crisis or peril.
Surprise this article makes no mention of the elephant in the room, namely Apple's imminent "Spotify killer" (http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-beats-spotify-killer-wh...). Spotify have evidently concluded that they need to be more like iTunes, which is unfortunate.
> In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. Or you may simply "disappear". In any of these cases, you're not considered a prisoner.

But are those really the countries you would like the USA to be compared with?
I was not expecting that.
To sum up: a govenment incubator for foreigners with 12 500 € per 6 months per person and various other benefits (mentoring...).
Just wait... I predict a Show HN: SOAP over (nntp/finger/bitcoin block) written in (go/rust/coffeescript/haskell) within 24 hours.
When did he get out? PayPal is misbehaving since essentially forever.
I think the big thing at the finance companies I've been at is that corporate IT was created to enable people to use Microsoft Office applications. There is no real provision for how to deal with developers writing code, and forget about hardware.
Well, if they could crack 1024-bit primes in under a day, how long would you anticipate 2048-bit would last? That's why I said eye it suspiciously.

I don't think the NSA can do this on demand.

> People should just use 2048 bit keys, or stop using conventional prime field public key algorithms altogether, is what I think.

I believe moving towards ECC (especially djb's work) is probably the right move.
No, I think they implemented a whole new view, probably more extensible, to allow future features (IIRC the look changed a bit). They just didn't prioritise fixing the regressions they introduced.
Looks like Amazon's EC2 ELBs have a common 1024 DH. I don't see a way to fix it without moving away from ELBs, or getting Amazon to fix it.