skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High pressure sales techniques are awful, and they exist because they work. I don't think having to say "no" 50 times is reasonable, and it makes you feel like an asshole just for not being an easy mark that can be pressured into buying something s/he doesn't want. I've learned to close the door in the face of over-aggressive solicitors, but I know people who have trouble with it, because it's objectively rude to do something like that. The only reason I find it acceptable is that these sales techniques are intentionally designed to exploit people's hesitancy at being rude to other human beings.

So yes, it's common practice. That doesn't mean it's not a practice that is loathsome and bad for society.

Note: I think strong arm is a completely reasonable description of this. The sales person offered multiple carrots, and then upon being rebuffed, brought out the stick (keep in mind that the context is someone cancelling on the last day of their subscription):

>Chaitra: Devon, you have purchased a subscription with annual commitment, since you wish to cancel the subscription before the end of one year period, you will be billed 50% of your monthly rate for the remaining months in your annual commitment as early termination fee.

>

>Chaitra: If you pay early termination fee, you will not be able to use the product, however If you continue with the subscription with 2 month free subscription you will be able to use the subscription and also get two months free subscription. In this case, I would suggest you to take an advantage of two months free subscription.

This wasn't a good faith misunderstanding, this was a situational script aimed at maximizing retention in the particular context. This is a lever that is being intentionally applied to cow people into buying an extra year of a service they don't want.
Only if fueled by natural gas.

If we were creating an energy infrastructure from scratch today, nuclear plants could be used in off-peak periods to split hydrogen to fuel both fuel cells and peaker plants for peak daytime use.
Anonymous Exposes 1GB Data Belonging to Thailand’s Supreme Court
There isn't much reason to. Without the Apple libraries and XCode support Objective-C isn't anything special.
I'd need to take out a mortgage for that.
This sounds like Comcast tactics, if you ask me.
Ecosystem and community. Most of the time you can find what you need in C already written, in Rust it's do-it-yourself now.
"The existence of a billionaire is a clear indicator of one or more market failures"

I have been banging this around my head for a while since PG's infamous essay. There are plenty of reasons to see wildly successful people as talented, special etc. But nowhere near enough to believe them to be superhuman. Nor as rare as might be expected.

Becoming a billionaire (or member of top 1% or what have you) is not something that can only be achieved by a certain fraction of the population, like being over 6'6'

There must be market distortions that fail to share out the vast wealth of the Russian oilfields? Similarly for not sharing the license fees of MSWord or the markup on Amazon books.

Maybe PG is right and we need thousands more entrepreneurs out for themselves, and we shall see the inequalities of the world sort themselves out through "market" action.

Which would mean still we need politicos action (why not more female entrepreneurs? What about highly regulated industries?)
Well actually newspaper and magazine subscriptions pre-date cell and software subscriptions by decades. When you called to cancel, it's cancelled that day, and you get a pro-rated refund for the remaining balance, if any. The idea that it actually costs the company money to compute a pro-rata, and give your money back for unused/unwanted service or software is bunk. It's only because they've decided that's how they want it to work, and wrote it into the contract that way and their customers passively agree to that contract.

So it's legal, it conforms to the written contract, buyer beware and all that, but it's simply incorrect to say that auto-renew is part of the definition of subscribe. No, that's how it works in some contracts.
You may have heard of Amartya Sen, welfare economist specialising especially in inequality and poverty.

His wife, I learned recently, is Emma Georgina Rothschild.

So: not all that improbable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen
"Most capitalists would say that property rights naturally exist ..."

I would like those capitalists to show me the "property rights" molecule.
Much appreciate the wisdom.
yes PG, but .. Inequality is a pretty good proxy for all the 'evils' we really want to address -

If we could turn one knob to fix things, we would turn down the big one marked "Inequality".

I think the high emotion around the issue, that most of us feel, arises from a kind of pre-cognition that something is totally broken in our system of commerce and democracy...

There are titanic demographic shifts even in the last few years [ for example, look at the graph on this page, showing a 10% shift in wealth from the 99% to the 1% in the last 5 years, if I read it correctly : http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-peopl... ]

This is a bit like a 3 degree change in global climate - we feel it viscerally without understanding whats going on, we get the sense old rules/intuitions don't apply anymore. Weather is more extreme, something is different in the economy.

This may be a natural result of technology plus the magnifying effect of the internet to spread value out and gather X% of that Y value inwards to creators... which is fine and good, we all benefit from technology. Inequality may be even more extreme in future, and yet all boats may be lifted as that happens - so we all enjoy a better standard of living. But we are not seeing that now, there is a torrent up, but no trickle down. Right now, our rules for democracy have not caught up to this new norm, nor has our tax regime - and the current system is being gamed.

I think there is justified rational anger, because most people feel somehow they have been stolen from and lied to, particularly post GFC/2008.

While we are violently agreeing/disagreeing on whether != is intrinsically evil, lets drill down and discuss the real issues lying under the banner of inequality - poverty, tax, education/student debt, superPACs / campaign funding, influence of lobbyists, police abusing power when black lives matter, incarceration rates for petty crimes, carbon pricing / green energy incentives, minimum wage/basic income ... its a long damn list, and most politicians don't seem to be too serious about talking about this stuff - now is the time to demand that discussion of them.

We need to drill down, explore the engineering of our capitalist democracy, then fix it.
I've setup Minecraft/web servers which required no server for holepunching. Just plain old IPv4 with port forwarding.
I'm fairly certain that the problem is that users with catastrophically slow or spotty internet connections are the ones that stand to lose in that situation, and that > 50% of Bitcoin's miners are in China, which partially explains the rabid past support for a refusal to increase the max blocksize.
If you invest in equities and get a revenue stream that pays rent, you can "live in it". The only advantage to real estate is that the revenue stream is tax subsidized.

This is fixable in multiple ways; start taxing imputed rent (tolerable) or stop taxing capital income (far better).
Anecdote, yu-gi-oh; bey-blades; etc.

People in general don't really realise the impact that advertising has on them even if they are aware of them.
Neural networks rival primate temporal cortex for visual object representation
Well, I do know non-iOS devs whose dislike of C++ have caused them to speak in favor of ObjC, but I suppose they would simply use C with structs in that case.
Sometimes you don't even have to pay more. When we lived in France, we paid less than 3.50€ per day for my daughter's 5-course lunch. A few years earlier in a much smaller town, we had a teacher tell us that if we couldn't pack a 'real' lunch (not PBJs, even though my daughter loved them then), she would bring an appropriate lunch for my daughter herself.

At a school we visited in Paris, they publish the lunch menu along with recommendations for a dinner menu at home, to be sure their food didn't clash I guess.

Now, back in the US, she complains that all they have at school is cardboard pizza, and that isn't a meal. Clearly she learned to appreciate eating a complete meal.
"(By inevitable, I mean that it's going to happen. Images are the new packages.)"

Without packages docker itself becomes mostly useless to the vast majority of people. Packages will always come first no matter how badly people try to avoid them.
Notes on Hive Paper
goread.io is a Google Reader clone.
Show HN: Leave an anonymous voice/video message
A few more questions regarding your point:

- Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chief Executive Officer of E.L. Rothschild has what interest in fighting inequallity? A look at the list of investments of E.L. Rothschild http://www.elrothschild.com/investments paints a picture of an investment fund. So, the very 1% that is getting richer by moving money around while working population earns the dividends. Funny thing, one of the companies listed is The Economist Group. It would be interesting to know, how favourable/critical of Oxfam is The Economist.

- Oxfam had a budget of €947.1 million for the period 1st April 2013 - 31th March 2014. Almost a billion euros! And who has given them that much money? https://www.oxfam.org/en/annual-and-financial-reports has that data. Or, at least, that is what I have hoped for. The list of donors om page 68 of the annual report for 2013 - 2014 is just a birds-eye view.

- In its report, Oxfam says very little about growing inequallity in developed countries. Does that mean, that only developing world has inequallity problems?
This isn't the most pleasurable experience to cancel, but frankly, some of the offers to stay might have been compelling.

This is a far cry from strong-arming.
Scheduling Lambda Functions with the AWS CLI
Well, if you work in the retention department, how else would your performance be measured except by the number of customers you retain? :-)
Wouldn't Adobe be better off if this story wasen't on Hacker News?

First rule of Adobe in 2016; Don't piss of anyone who falls for this pay monthly for our software?

Yea, I know it was the first day of the new billing cycle, but at this point in the game; give the customer a day of your software. Adobe is not on the position to lose anymore customers. On Tuesday, in Novato this incident will be brought up in office meeting.

I don't need Adobe like I did ten years ago. My last purchase was Lightroom 1.0, and when they wanted more money for every minor improvement--I said hello IPhoto.
>Are you seriously going to pretend that we're not?

Remember Obama's remark about people "clinging to their guns and religion"? That's pretty insulting if you're a Christian (or a gun owner). He was still elected president. Twice.

Sure, numerically speaking there are a lot of Christians in the US. But they're not a majority and they don't control any part of the press, academia, or the government. The people running the executive branch (including Obama) are downright hostile to both whites and Christians.

Come springtime if those guys are still there ATF or the FBI will take the gloves off.
This is one of the reasons Adobe's software gets pirated. Although I must admit 29.99 is not a bad deal why isn't that the price to start with?
You should just tell them you are moving to the platform that they don't support. When I canceled some services when I made my move to Linux, places didn't try hard to retain me. (Well, they can't if they don't have workable solutions available.)
Malicious Code Analysis on Ukraine’s Power Grid Incident
That's exactly what I meant, namely that for some kids, home preparation isn't an option. Maybe I could have changed the wording :)
It's definitely sleazy of Amazon to hide the pricing info like that, but I can't imagine seeing that sentence while making a purchase and not clicking through to see how the pricing actually works. But I guess that's just me.
A good article, but what disturbs me is that the author, while obviously aware of relatively good C++ and programming practices, has somehow arrived in a place where he discounts essentially all of C++s core competencies... like claiming RAII is "far from optimal", that exception safety is "a constant mental overhead", and that copy and move semantics involve writing "a lot of code". These are fairly outrageous claims, and it all smells of total burnout, and losing sight of the forest for the trees, to me.

I feel if the author refocused on his C++ basics instead of bemoaning lots of peripheral crap (like OOP, and the unsuitability of the STL for game dev) he'd reconsider some joy in C++ again.
I always understood it to be that the "typographic resolution" aspect of sparklines was an important characteristic and that you really couldn't display a proper sparkline on a screen because most screens just don't have the resolution of printed material. The idea was that the human eye could glean useful information from charts with 600 or even 1200 data points per inch and so you could pack an incredible amount of data into a small space. Even retina displays are only about half that, though most "sparklines" I see don't even attempt that density.

Does anyone know if sparklines are actually used that way? The only place I've seen really dense sparklines are Tufte's books. Most I've seen in the wild seem to have just a handful of data points.
Shun HTTP: Victory of the Most Intolerant
تأجيل اقساط اراضي بيت الوطن بالقاهرة الجديدة لمدة 6 اشهر – تراخيص
I cook maybe 3 meals a week from stuff I find online. Maybe curry or stews or whatever sounds good that day. Otherwise it's pasta or sandwiches or something quick.

My mom calls me a 'foodie' as if it's a pretty major differentiation. When I visit, I do the cooking. Cooking food (especially good tasting and healthy food) is relatively atypical among others that I know as well.
It was an example. An example that was on topic towards economic inequality.

Just because you can find some examples where economic normalization is occurring doesn't mean that excessive wealth concentration isn't killing more opportunities than it creates.
I'd rather have a core dump than a stack trace. There's so much more information in a core dump. The stack is there as well, but having all live variables in the program, all loaded code, and all process state makes it so much easier to debug what's going wrong.
If assembling a piece of furniture makes people attached to it, imagine how attached they would be to a piece of furniture they perceive that they have had a part in actually designing?

1) Have a set of standard template furniture items

2) Allow user to view the item through a WebGL viewer (or however its done these days).

3) Allow the user to adjust certain aspects of that piece of furniture within the viewer. IE desk surface height, depth, space between legs etc.

4) Use parametric algorithms to adjust the componentry accordingly within existing load bearing parameters. For example, "desktop needs attachment screws every 200mm". This kind of formula is already commonplace in many CAD packages [1].

5) Have the backend software export the parts as CNC cut files and create a bill of materials.

6) Package the cut parts and additional components (screws etc) and ship direct to client.

7)(optional depending on level of unscrupulousness) Have the parametric algorithms incorporate a fatigue based breaking point so they can justify throwing the crumbling desk away in five years and you can sell them more furniture "they" designed that is more in line with current trends.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GClGn1Y7bNA#t=3m58s

EDIT: formatting
Ask HN: Can you help me with my hosting solution
Hey everyone,

I currently run a website that delivers a monthly mailing list. It has over 15k subscribers and is doing ok. apart from one issue: The server is intermittently going down. When I asked my host provider they told me that there are too many resources running and that is causing the site to crash. I had no idea why until I read that a shared host is worse for sites that have a lot of visits.

I'm not terribly technical minded and only know what I have read. So this brings me to two questions

1) Is the service I need, called a dedicated Server?

2) Can someone recommend a service that is easy to set up for none technical people. I looked at amazon dedicated servers but their site is full of jargon and gives me a headache.

It would also be good to not be charged an arm and a leg monthly, at the moment I paying $100 per year - if I could get close to that it would be nice.

Much appreciated and thanks in advance.
How is this "strong-arming"? If we keep devaluing the meaning of words, we won't have any left when something serious actually happens.

The rep ran through a couple of retention scripts, and then got mixed up because OP called on the last billing day. Then he promptly canceled the service without any charges, which is exactly what OP was looking for. (And no, it's probably not because of the threat to contact his supervisor; customers overestimate how scary that is.)

There is literally nothing to complain about here, except maybe OP felt a little bit annoyed. I'm all for calling companies on their BS, but this feels just a bit too trigger-happy to me.
I wonder if there's any (paid or unpaid) alternatives to Lightroom (and Apple Photos).
No the real price is the price you're willing to pay. This is a negotiation or barter. It's the same with cable (Internet). And buying a home or car. And even late fees and interest on credit cards. If you're willing to pay standard sticker price, why should they tell you any different?

The fun part is that price is negotiable, but the contract is not. You can't say, "I'll pay standard price, but I want a month to month, no autorenew contract." Pfff, nope. They want you to forget that expiration date, because now they have a guarantee of at least 50% of the value of the next term at the non-negotiated rate.
On a rather remotely related note, when dealing with automated call routing systems (the jungle that is automatic voice recognition menus), I've found that resorting to swearing will connect me with an operator.
Virtual Feats, but a Real Sense of Accomplishment
and then iPhoto turned into Apple Photos and lost a few features - does it still work for you?
Rebuking the notion that all wealth is earned through directly creating value.

For instance, the biggest reason top actors in hollywood succeed in capturing so much value is because starting in the late 1970's CAA ([1]) moved leverage in negotiations towards actors, not because they are so much better actors. If talent had less leverage, they would create as much value if they were paid less, but studios and their owners would capture the value.

Economy is a wealth creation platform but it does not come with an automatic "fair scoring" system.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ovitz
You shouldn't have to "beg" website authors to "play nice" for you, as a user. Web Standards and browsers have failed you by putting that much control into the authors' hands.

It is reasonable to consider that "web" maybe should not have this capability, and web browsers should provide intuitive UI controls for users to enable/disable the ability for sites to do this to you.
I think Dark Table is meant to be an open source version of Lightroom:

http://www.darktable.org
The keyboard doesn't work for me on Debian/Iceweasel.
David Campbell Destroys New App Sociabl on the Today Show (AUS)
The "with port forwarding" is the problem there. That assumes you have access to your NAT resolver to add the rule, which isn't a fair assumption to hold. People at colleges, businesses, hosted events, etc. need to do NAT traversal (or be on IPv6) in order to do P2P.

I didn't see that you mentioned UPnP in the OP though, sorry. I'd assume downloading metadata from a signalling server if you don't need it for traversal is completely optional - most P2P networks have an initial list of peers to connect to to bootstrap new clients.
Ignoring the obvious that it's a 'when did you stop beating your wife?' statement, one might ask to see the 'your wealth is mine while I can bully you into handing over a sizable portion of it' molecule.
Why would that be?

At a major defense contractor years ago, and in defense-specific departments (unclassified roles), my group of 10 had:

- a Cuban-born (immigrated as a child) who never renounced;

- a Kuwait-born (same). (and her Iraq-born brother was in a parallel department)

- a Taiwan-born, not sure when she immigrated

- and the project leader was China-born (pre-revolution)

Now, I can imagine that in higher-security roles, things could be stricter, but I've never seen a public job listing that said dual-citizenship was a deal-breaker.
I can't tell you whether something has you or you have it, but I think this quote by Albert Einstein is helpful:

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
Amazing! I might actually get to see a Lightning fly in real life then... I had given up on the idea.
What are the alternatives to photoshop? Gimp? Luckily I still have photoshop cs5.5
Author here. I'm positively surprised, constructive discussion on internet!

There's been some discussion about using Rust.

Rust is an interesting language, and has definitely potential substituting C and C++ in some domains. The main reason I'm not so interested in using it is for game development, is because it's more complicated than C (like C++), and the complications are a bit off from what I'd want (like in C++). Just a quick googling reveals that rust mangles names by default, and doesn't have reflection, so I'd probably be in for a lot of negative surprises. Add that with being indifferent about the absolute security, and soon my code is mostly inside unsafe blocks so that I don't have to spend time convincing the compiler my pointers are safe. Maybe. I haven't done much programming in Rust. There are some nice convenience features though, when comparing to C, but they seem to be rather minor things.

It comes down to choosing between two non-ideal solutions. I value simplicity more than some, so favoring the simpler one feels more natural to me. Sure, when you need the safety then Rust seems like a decent choice.
> how do we configure these services for multiple environments (test/prod clusters)?

Docker have config ENV varibale and VOLUME, just research about it
It is not as powerful as Lightroom, but it's a good start and it keeps improving.
I saw this TV in Dubai Mall last week. Even with $27/bbl oil prices, they told me they sell about one a week!
Would you say you have a disdain for the "evangelical tradition" because of their particular ideology or how they go about promoting it?

I'm not baiting you I'm generally interested.
I mostly agree. However, I think it's a little more than a proxy measure. I think people often conflate the notion of capitalism the resource allocation algorithm with capitalism the moral philosophy.

The former says that assigning people directly the fruits of their labors leads to an efficient marketplace and ultimately greater welfare for all. The latter says that the efficacy of the former grants those people a moral right to those fruits.

The former is almost certainly true - capitalism is much more effective at accelerating efficiency and innovation than anything else we've tried. But the moral corollary doesn't necessarily follow. And if you accept the former but deny the latter, you're faced with a question: Do we really need extreme outliers of wealth in order to achieve the benefits of capitalism? And if the answer is no, then does it really make sense to let those outliers keep all those resources?
3 things you didn't know about Steve Jobs (from his biography)