skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps include some translation samples
We have been extremely happy with HelpSpot.

The software is awesome to use and was clearly made by someone who spends lots of time using help desk software -- minimal clicks to get things done, automation rules based on predefined responses, etc.

It's also extremely flexible, and fairly affordable. We manage a pretty decent request load (many 100s/day) with a fairly minimal support staff.
I've noticed this myself. Any idea why that happens?

I've noticed that sometimes adding a blurred shadow disables sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and sometimes that makes things look better. I think, though, that there's a separate effect that makes the font look thinner when a blurred shadow is added that I don't really understand.
Perhaps a small datapoint suggesting an economic recovery?
Don't think so. The total amount of energy you could send forward would always be finite. That's assuming you just have time-travel in the forward direction.

If you can time travel into the past, maybe. But I think paradoxes like that are a big reason why Hawking predicts time travel backwards is not physically possible.
Hi Joshu,

1) How aggressive are you in getting deals done? Are you more like "lets have a chat, sign here" or more like "okay, call me if you ever need funding."?

2) I'm actually working on a site similar to Delicious, http://www.howl.com. Its not quite bookmarking, we call it link blogging. What do you make of the market? Thanks
Did you ever make someone a mix tape off the radio?

And why were record labels so anxious to stream for free over the airwaves they got themselves in trouble?
Out of curiosity, why do they only list YC in their quick facts (bottom left of page)?
The Aldiko and Opera issues you mention are bugs in those programs, not in Android. They aren't properly saving their states.
EDIT: I've updated the front page as suggested, thanks!

That's a good point. I've had some translations done through the site and needed to ask my native speaking friends if it was good quality.

For now, translators are untested as I don't have the resources to do it. There's the option of retrying the order with another translator or getting a refund.

It's the best I can do for now, and I'm keeping a close eye on any abusers/poor quality translators. There will be certainly something set up for trusted translations once the site is further on its way.
What browser is that in, and do you have anti-aliasing enabled in your OS? The 'original' text in your screenshot isn't anti-aliased at all, which I don't think should happen unless you have AA off on a system level.
You don't have to recompile, you can control it through proc (/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq)
Actually, this is dosbox running Windows 3.11, and the Android port of dosbox.

http://www.dosbox.com/
Lessons Learned While Being a Freelance iPhone Developer
why no digital distribution (as in PDF)?
FYI, we did kill a huge fraction of the world's megafauna before agriculture.
May I counter with this: http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20100428/panel-no-evide...
New Hotmail takes aim at Gmail’s top features
I'd also recommend HelpSpot -- has worked great for us!
irony:

If others have ever noted that you're borderline perfectionistic, this is the job for you!

(on the customer service job posting)
Perhaps it already is. The Internet Archive has an S3 like API too: http://www.archive.org/help/abouts3.txt

I thought the interface was patented, though? I wouldn't expect Google to copy it precisely.
LTE vs WiMAX Shootout (infographic)
Katz Fired From Oil-Spill Team Due to ‘Controversial Writings’
This comes to mind as a particularly shoddy episode:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358446

There is an answer embedded in there:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358624

It's a pity that the company actually took the opportunity to communicate with their users and that because of killing the story the response will not be seen by many.

Their customers should probably read that second link.
Super heroes start as side projects. And sometimes they become startups.
The other way to read this is that DB2 licensing favors POWER.
people with bad taste in flooring the link to autism?
The only question is - why did it take them so long?
You know what, it just dawned on me that at one point I had my IE7 ClearType disabled because I didn't like it's smoothing effect. I don't know if that setting is carried on to Chrome or not.

I'm on XP + Chrome.
I can think of a startup that recently screwed this up quite badly, though this second time it's not really their fault I think (I don't know the whole story, just seen that someone's been covering up the discussion, which is generally not a great starting point).

I wrote about the first time they screwed up, as a kind of "Learning" post, on my blog. It did quite well here (to show that not all negative posts get killed).
The way that I understand Airbnb's business is that they're providing an "inferior good" at least when compared to a hotel room (this is not a slight on their business). Inferior goods usually do well in poor economies (if I remember correctly, Hormel was doing really well with Spam just after the recession hit).

So the fact that Airbnb is doing well probably may not be indicative of a positive trend for the economy.

Then again, one company's success or failure rarely has much to do with the economy anyway.
Mobile app simplifies San Francisco parking, using city data
"Google To Buy Dropbox For An Undisclosed Amount" does not sound far-fetched to me given this announcement. From a strategic viewpoint it makes perfect sense.

It would provide their new storage service with the necessary intial momentum at the expense of S3.
No, everyone who pays attention to politics knows that. Which is the point of a dog-whistle reference.
Google Enterprise Blog: Putting email in context with Gmail contextual gadgets
Not really. You'd be amazed how easy it is actually. Read the book I linked, starting from the chapter on porn and haute-couture. There is very little overlap between those who'd spend $2000 for a PRADA handbag and those who buy the chinese version at $5. Analogously, there's little overlap between those who'd buy full price photoshop from adobe and the kid who will download it from rapidshare.
If you look at enough variables, you WILL find a correlation with whatever you are looking at.

Key paragraph:

Vinyl flooring is commonplace in Sweden, where only about 1 percent of homes have carpeted floors. But it is uncommon in U.S. bedrooms, so it may not be related to autism among American children. However, carpeting contains other contaminants, including pesticides and brominated flame retardants, which have been found to harm brain development in animal tests.

This makes me very suspicious, because it smacks of "our unusual theory does not bear out when we look at another country, so we will come up with another unusual theory to explain the effect there".

Also, while I am not familiar with Sweden, there are other places where vinyl/carpet flooring versus wood/tile correlates with socioeconomic factors.
I was evaluating both zendesk and tenderapp last week. Tenderapp had serious confirmed email problems so I had to wait one day to see mails appearing on tenderapp.

This is not the thing we would like as an early startup.

We've to evaluate other services now because neither zendesk nor tenderapp are usable (imho)
thanks for the ideas. next version be to make it more user friendly.

by comments, do you mean a description for each field in a search? or a comment field for each item?
"No e-mail service has really treated the mail messages differently based on who sent them,"

I guess my filters in gmail don't count...
Yep. I mentioned that Amazon should buy Dropbox recently for similar reasons.

Of course it remains to be seen if the Dropbox people would be interested in selling out.
Awesome! I still want the ability to run it on my own server, though. You aren't going to get people to use it by locking them in to the platform.
Good communication: Daniel Ha of Disqus. Why? Not sugarcoating, e.g. "Importing is possible, though admittedly harder than it should be.". How? Twitter and Disqus mostly. I bet he's using backtype and google alerts.

(Warning, slow page) http://friendfeed.com/search?q=from%3Adanielha+help
It's cool that you can pay in Ruby.
Not if the distinction is between "literally no" and "effectively no"
It's basically the same everytime a company gets taken over.
Any engineer at the victim company is automatically beneath the lowest engineer at the victor.

A few senior VPS get VP roles at the new company as part of the deal - but anyone at the code face might as well just leave.
That would be very interesting if they did it. I hope they could migrate all the data from S3 to GS very easily!

Plus it would be a real kick in the teeth for Amazon.
The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World
You might consider having an additional meta field where the person requesting can write notes about the translation request to provide context for the translator. I worked on large piece of software that had to be translated into many languages and often the translators would ask us for comments in our string files so the could come up with the most appropriate translation.
Ghostbusters attack budget cuts at the New York Public Library
Say What You Mean (in JavaScript)
I can't stress this enough.

DO NOT rely upon emails at this point. The company can simply ignore them and nobody is going to fork over the money for a full discovery search of those server logs.

Think again about how long this has been ongoing. Given the alleged written evidence, any going concern of repute would have long-since paid the amount owed xor provided you with a formal debt instrument, or proof of its inability to pay.

Since you are an individual and not a licensed debt recovery firm in Virginia, use ONLY brief & polite status-checking phone calls and registered return receipt http://tinyurl.com/7wrzm USPS mail (you could also use courier services, but nothing about this matter would seem to necessitate that level of timeliness).
Have you considered investing outside US, Central Europe for instance?
AFAIK, ClearType settings apply system-wide. It should be pretty easy to tell though; if any non-image text in your browser is smoothed, it's on. If it's not, it's off.

What it sounds like the white drop shadow did in your case was simply force ClearType on for that text.
I always thought dog-whistle references were more subtle, like anti-Semitic people denouncing "Zionists", or making oblique Biblical references most religious people wouldn't understand.
I hope they get the interface right this time. App Engine has an awkward interface that's not nearly as flexible and powerful as EC2.
You're being uncharitable to the researchers. They have no theory for why they found this correlation - they weren't even looking for it. They noticed something unusual in their data, they reported it and invited further investigation. That's the responsible thing to do.
I have recently started looking into Bottle for a personal project. So far I really like it.

http://bottle.paws.de/
Google IO conference 2010 – Watch it live on youtube
Even if it's in writing it doesn't mean the bigger party can't screw the smaller party.
C++ standard is not quite free:

http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ISO/IEC%20148...

has it for $363.

There are various draft versions floating around on the internet.
We user Tender and absolutely love it. They've occasionally have issues with delayed jobs, but they were minor quirks. We use it all the time and cannot recommend it enough.
Reading between the lines, I guess you are alluding to the specific example jacquesm & swombat refer to - but as a straight answer to the question, I'd say twitter's 'fail whale' was a fun way to take the edge off their frequent early downtime.
You could try introducing a tiered pricing model. Allowing users on a lower tier to trial features on a higher tier (or introducing the higher-tier features at a limited mode) might help convert users up.
Do you really think so?

It always struck me that there was 1001 support desk providers out there... is there really that much space?

(cos if so it's going on my list of maybe projects :))
That's the impression I've gotten from wathing a few EU software startups from quite a distance (across the pond).

Thanks a lot for the info and the more detailed essay on what this is likely all about; it fits in with what I know of the lay of the land (e.g. the U.K.'s recent financial history) while bringing me up to date on what's happening in general in this area, which isn't getting the attention that e.g. the sovereign debt problem is commanding right now.

Pretty much all of us have our own local and regional messes to pay attention to, so concise portraits like this about things elsewhere are most appreciated.
He's using a small table with only 100,000 rows. Let's see him claim rand() is fast on 1m, 5m, or 10m rows.
A blackboard + chalk.
I know how to read. The concept I am criticizing in your argument is "data". And I am saying that taking a statistical approach to these questions is misguided.

"Maybe if it would save 1000 lives per month? Or one million lives per month? I suspect you don't have any hard data on the impact of torture."

I didn't say you were advocating torture either. I am trying to show by example that this decision calculus can be used to justify all kinds of evil nonsense, torture being one example. You can always generate counterfactuals of this form to justify anything... so this method of justification is meaningless.

I don't know why you believe that we are not talking about torture. Maybe you don't know that you are presenting a family-based reformulation of the exact same ticking time bomb scenario used by Alan Dershowitz to justify torture. You are reusing these arguments, so maybe you should think about exactly what these arguments have justified in the last ten years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticking_time_bomb_scenario

It's true, though, that you are not talking about torture per se. What you are talking about is weighing some count of human lives against a moral imperative not to do some evil thing. Torture usually stands in for that evil thing because up until very recently, everyone agreed that it was so evil that the kind of weighing you are talking about would not be countenanced.

Let me tell a story that may explain what I am getting at. In 1984 (the year), a feminist named Carol Cohn went to a military school to learn about strategic nuclear concepts like mutually assured destruction, first strike, credible second strike, counterforce weapons, etc. What she found was that as she became immersed in that world, she learned to make similar kinds of artificial weighings of the destruction of cities against the loss of second strike capability. The decision calculus she learned to use allowed her to think about nuclear weapons in terms of numbers and geography rather than in terms of human life ("collateral damage").

"If I was unable to speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder even to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found that I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons, without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them."

http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml (the whole article)

I suggest you should not be acquiring "data" at all on this question. The only things the data could tell you would be artificial and dehumanized.
So was mad cow disease: phosphororganics are bad for brain.
I really, really like how www.lollyphile.com is communicating. Not very start-uppy, but very honest, up-front and providing lots and lots of value to customers. Just last week, they sent their entire mailing list an email with a 25% off code: becauseitsmondaysowhynot. Their writing is incredibly entertaining as well.

Another is www.influads.com who have been extremely open in their finances and process and at least with me, have gathered a lot of respect.

Poorly? Well, had I known posting that Wakemate post would give this much trouble, I wouldn't have done it. This doesn't excuse Wakemate themselves, though.
if it's cool with you ... didn't want to steal your thunder :)
Here's one bit of bad communication I'll throw in, and unrelated to the current brouhaha.

Some time ago, I signed up to FogBugz. A few weeks later, I got an email from... omg! Joel Spolsky!

I thought that was pretty awesome, that he got in touch with all his users to see how they were getting on. Great way to build strong customer relationships. Of course the initial email was probably automated, but the intention was there.

I took a good 20 minutes or so to write a fairly detailed but concise, 4-5 paragraph email listing some of the things I thought could be improved about Fogbugz from a start-up point of view.

I got a reply the next day, from some intern who basically explained how they wouldn't do each of the 4 points I'd raised. Not even "we'll look into it" or "it's on the plans, but I can't tell you when it'll come out". Just no, no, no, no. Basically, an email that not only had nothing to do with Joel Spolsky, but clearly had been delegated to someone who didn't yet have basic customer service sense.

With that, Spolsky lost all the credit he got in that first initial email, and then some.

Since then, I've copied the Spolsky approach. All our users get an email from me, two weeks after they join, asking how they're doing. But I am the one receiving and responding to that email.
Thanks for the link to Norvig's article. Still reading it.
Spotify puzzles me. How can it be sustainable? For my listening purposes, the free version is more than adequate. I don't mind listening to a new album with two or three interruptions for adverts (just turn the volume down), and I don't mind needing to be near a computer to hear the music (I have good comp speakers). I subscribed to the service for a while but didn't renew it because I'm happy with the free service.

Post-Spotify, the only reason for me to spend money on the music industry is to 'support' their efforts. Previously I would happily pay for an album if that was the only legal option. And even if you do subscribe - £10 per month? I think anyone who loves music enough to really take advantage of the service could justify spending £40-£100 per month.

I don't get it. I'd like to see their revenues. And the opportunity costs. I have three theories

1)They plan to wean the public off any/all illegal filesharing by offering a far superior service for next to nothing. Then, when the public has sufficiently 'de-skilled' from piracy, they will start raising prices without losing customers.

2) They've decided the battle against piracy is futile and they're settling for a tragically reduced ROI over potentially nothing at all.

3) It's a massive blunder.
Friend launched a Chrome extension that auto-generates playlists from blogs
Btw, Google already has a BlobStore API which is in beta. Maybe they're releasing it at the conf. If so, not big news. It's the exact same price as Amazon and has a clunkier API (IMHO).

Competition is sorely needed in this space. I hope Google undercuts Amazon pricing. IIRC, Amazon has maintained the 15c per GB-Month pricing for 4+ years. I would have expected them to pass along at least some of the price reductions of bare HDDs.

I'm hoping for something like the $5 for 20 gig they offer for photos. I'll keep dreaming. :)
Shoe-fitting fluoroscope
Why New York will challenge the Valley for Consumer Internet supremacy
App Engine and EC2 don't really compete in my mind for this reason. App Engine seems to compete more with things like Heroku, although the interface complaint certainly applies there too.
Those type of widespread attack ads certainly existed in 1933. Candidates would often run grass roots mobs (for lack of a better word) that would spread that type of dirt (and some occasional violence). I've some some interesting pictures of presidential campaigns in Denver in the 20's and 30's that look suspiciously like a modern day attack ad (with less mushroom clouds).

Politics seems not to have changed much I reckon:)
Very cool; I've mused about raising catfish in the basement before, but obviously you can go a lot further, more diversified and more full cycle.

Thanks!
I think posterous are really good at communicating with users. A few times I wanted to switch to wordpress due to some missing feature or the other, but then when I said my complaint on twitter I'd get a message with some time line and it would keep me happy...for a while.

WakeMate are pretty bad at communicating and if I were them I'd hire someone whose job was really only to communicate.

Apple are pretty good at communicating nowadays and if you are doing well on their platform.

Microsoft is really good at communicating with developers. All their dev team are on twitter and blogging and you can reach them by email, and there are docs about everything, etc.

Google is terrible at communicating. Do they even communicate? They just never reply.

Facebook has the same problem. Don't reply. Probably too many users.
I believe producers of content should be able to reap rewards for that production.

Can't speak for most 'pirates,' but I only engage in piracy when rightsholders refuse to license their content to me on a timely basis and in an unencumbered format.

As the success of iTunes has demonstrated, most people will pay reasonable amounts for licensed content as long as rightsholders make it available conveniently.
Can you fix cut and paste?
Machines that learn better
Here's a more detailed simulation that I just wrote in javascript:

- I assume an error margin in our ability to evaluate employees.

- I assume an applicant pool that isn't necessarily centered on z=0.

- I evaluate z-scores, not percentile.

- I calculate the average number of interviews for a successful hire.

http://fizx.github.com/hiring/
for the right price everyone is willing to sell out. And by looking at the Google acquisition history they don't mind paying big bucks for a great service.
They were interviewed by Mixergy and Jessica Livingston recently and there's a LOT of great stuff in those interviews:

http://mixergy.com/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/airbnb-and-weebly-interview...
they will make company to gizmo in the freezer?
WebOb, Routes, SQLAlchemy, Mako. My favorite framework is no framework.

The bottom line is that its a sliding scale. Django will give you a large amount of functionality for free but requires that you do things the Django way. As you move along the scale towards projects like Werkzeug you'll inevitably lose some of the free stuff but you'll be able to make a lot more choices on how things work.

You'll want to check Ian Bicking's blog for some good reading on the no-framework approach. [1] is a great place to start.

[1] http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/12/a-webob-app-example/
I've heard the arguments and when you take something without compensating the creator -- or otherwise rightful owner -- it's stealing.

What, in your opinion, happens when I check a book out of the library and read it?
Language hacker becomes entrepreneur
I don't think the second comment you link to is by the Wakemates.
That's a great way of doing it.

I take all of our customer support 'problem' cases, that's where you can make the difference and where you get to hear what's up with your service so you can make it better.

This usually amounts to maybe one or two such cases per week so work-wise it's small fry but it really helps keeping your head close to what the users are experiencing.

And the problem cases are the ones where you learn fastest.

The other day there was a 'support is sales' post here that was really good.