skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty much everyone needs to deal with a bank, so in a way it doesn't matter that they all have customer satisfaction issues, since people have to put up with it. If a bank gets really bad, people will switch (I think it'd have to get really bad, since switching seems overly painful for me personally - then again, I'm Canadian and our banks work a bit differently than in the states). If all the banks suck - or at least, as you say, the "big banks" who obviously have the biggest mind share - then people just sort of put up with it.

The same goes for airlines. If you're in the position where you're considering flying, pretty much all of your options suck anyway. By this, I mean that if I didn't fly home (a two hour flight), my next best option is to travel by train, which is comparable in price, takes 10x more of my time, and is (warning: unsourced memory of something I may have misread) actually les safe than flying. Flying is a hassle, but its typically an infrequent one, and it's a lot better than its alternatives.

Phones, however, are pretty much a dime a dozen, and the range of products is immense.

I've had a "dumb phone" for four years, and I don't really have a reason to upgrade. I can call, I can text, and if I really really need to I have web access on a browser that makes Lynx seem state of the art. This is enough for me.

For those who want a "smart phone" there are already great options:

- Blackberry is still a big name, and when I tried out my dads a few months ago, I liked it and considered buying one of my own.
- Apple is now the big name and iPhone has huge mind share (I can't speak to its market share off the top of my head) and people who like Apple like it a lot.
- Google is a trusted name, and they're marketing the hell out of Android. Their sales are pretty decent IIRC, and they're growing.

My point here is that there are already three large, established names that can compete "on name alone." The Facebook name, in a lot of circles, doesn't have a great reputation, particularly when talking about privacy.

I'm sure there are people out there who would buy a Facebook phone purely based on the name, but there are an awful lot who would do the opposite. Personally, when I saw the title "Facebook is Secretly Building a Phone," my first thought was "...and I would never buy it." That's based entirely on the Facebook name, based on my perception of the company.
Autism is a gradual thing, not a binary thing. It's not you have it or yo don't there is a whole spectrum of the levels that people exhibit and it can go from being an advantage at times to rendering it impossible for an individual to function normally in our society.

People with a physical disability have a whole lobbying system in place to force society to make room for them, mentally challenged people, by their very nature, do not have anything that compares and likely never will.
Then he would be 71 clicks away from his original location (this page).
The wired article c3o links to below (his post is [dead] for some reason though) is a fascinating look at how Demand Media works.

Spamming the internet with millions of articles of marginally useful content... I have to admit it's an audacious idea.
I'm probably going to be dead wrong about this (based on my track record), but I think this will be a total-loss.

Facebook is not a hardware provider any more than google is, if google can't put the N1 out there and make it work I have a hard time to understand how a site like facebook would be able to.

They should concentrate on improving their applications on existing mobiles in stead of rolling out a mobile of their own.
The cat is already out of the bag - lots of people are starting up HFT shops every day. All I did is save people half an hour of googling.
I've gotten the recommendation to encrypt my laptop drive already from a few people, so I've been considering whether I should do that or not. My worry now is that if my drive is encrypted, then isn't it much more easy to corrupt the drive? Also I suppose there is some chance, probably as high as getting my laptop stolen, that I would forget my own password and lose access to my own data that way.
Arı Ürünlerimiz | Asya Bal Arıcılık
A foolish consistency, hobgoblin, blabla.
It could still be comforting and not lousy though.
Good Essay Examples Are Of Great Advantage When Facing a Challenge
As essay writing does not come naturally to many students, the best advice they will be able to receive is the perusal of some good essay examples. These essay examples will provide them with the knowledge to write their essays in the best manner possible.
It's going to get their merchant account blocked if and when it reaches the card companies.

Such 'stuffing' of charges is a long time trick used to push the total charge volume so the chargebacks are reduced. Nobody is going to charge back $15 sent to charity.

So 200 charges at 150, 2% chargeback rate, vs 400 charges, 200@135 and 200@15, 1% chargeback rate.

Some billing companies that have since gone under used to do this with a 1$ charge added to every sale.

This practice has been banned for years and I'm quite surprised to see it revive.
As usual, life is not black and white, it is grey. The best performance can be obtained by:

Idea(s)
Plan(s)
Action(s)

Of course, the trick is to know when to switch from one to the other. Generally, I like to take an idea (or ideas) and think about them for a while. When I feel vaguely comfortable that there are no obvious roadblocks, start planning. When I'm vaguely comfortable there are no subtle roadblocks, it's time for action. If you hit a roadblock, it's back to the ideas phase.

This strategy keeps you moving forward, bring fresh information quickly, and avoids most roadblocks before they waste any time.

Depending on the scope of the idea, the planning could be anywhere from minutes to days. Scope and complexity also change whether the planning happens purely in my head, or requires some typing to get everything clear.

Luckily, life usually gives us ideas while we're working on something else, so there's time to think about an idea for a while before you even have time to take action, which gives some planning time.
It sounds like he may have visited the website of your email provider. Contact them directly and see if you can get an IP address from them.
Out of curiosity two questions:

1. Are you focusing on foreign or domestic charities (or just playing it by ear)?

2. Settled on anything yet?
Some people get songs stuck in their heads, I get words or phrases looping over and over. Sometimes I'll get both a song and a word repeating in separate loops at the same time! I think it's a similar mechanism though, it's a lack of closure. I believe they repeat because my brain is looking for connections, or trying to learn something from it. The annoying ones are when I can't remember the ending of a song, so the middle keeps looping over and over. Or if I can't quite remember the definition of a word, very annoying. The best ones are the ones I can remember all of the tune but it surprises me every time.

Edited for clarity.
I always thought the Buddha was big on giving up attachment to worldly things as a way of ending suffering? Now he's an anti-solipsist existentialist too?

Those famous religious dudes get to do all the cool stuff first!

(To explain my joke, enjoying philosophy is about not giving in to extremes. In one sense, of course, there is nothing new under the sun. But instead of "it's all the same" or "I have some problems with syllogisms and their relationship to empiricism" one needs to find a happy medium. This is much like the difference between watching an orchestra play Rachmaninov and saying "Didn't they copy that from that Christopher Reeves movie?" and "Yeah that completely sucks. The second cello is obviously flat." Both extremes, to me, aren't much fun.)

It's truly a subjective thing.
Anyone else seeing the sad irony of YouTube comments pointing out out-of-focus video for a clip of a blind man's demo?
Ah, okay, I got the irony with the non-standard Apple's meta tag :) Took me 18 hours.
East-village.org
Some people with autism are severely mentally retarded. In fact, classic Kanner's syndrome (the original autism) generally also means severe mental retardation. Other people are labeled "high functioning autistic" (also called "Asperger's Syndrome") and can be very intelligent but have some challenges in areas like social skills. Still, most their social difficulties are, essentially, a form of being mentally challenged. Though there are some exceptions. For example, the folks who are also faceblind (fairly common among autistics) face social challenges due to their difficulties recognizing people, which is different from just not understanding the social stuff but has a similar outcome.

(Both my kids fit the profile for ASD. No formal diagnosis.)
I believe, and IANAL, in California non-competes are not enforceable anyway. Ref: Edwards vs. Arthur Andersen
The Difference Engine: More precious than gold
I'm with you 100% on this. I think tech companies see Apple's success and want a piece of that pie. Unfortunately I think they underestimate how much of a fluke Apple's success actually is.
Intel has been doing this for years with 100% flawless chips. Crippling a chip is part of their business. Their yield management is fantastic such that they run entire wafers at the higher spec then choose what % to sell as lower-end SKUs purely based on demand. Perhaps 10 years ago this was driven by yield quality, but nowadays the number of chips out of a batch that can't pass the test for the top-of-the-line product in that batch are < 1%.
Didn't everyone see this coming? Isn't like 30% of iPhone app usage in Facebook?
Absolutely - the binning process is 100% commercially driven now. Yields are so high there's no need for this from a yield-management perspective.
Saturday morning cartoons are the big one for me.

My mom took the approach of just reading out loud whatever she read, so I grew up with Lord of the Rings and other good solid books. I personally read Madliene L'engle's books in 3rd and 4th grade then skipped directly up the ladder to Dune (making me the only 9 year old I've ever met that managed to make it through Dune Messiah (and man did I ever manage to miss the subtext and analogy and etc)) .

But cartoons, man I loved em all. Tried to watch GI Joe and Transformers a couple years back and could barely last an episode.
UK research team brings quantum computing closer than ever... or so they say
To me the annoying ones are the ones I can't seem to get rid of, no matter how hard I try. I've got the a short vocal fragment from an Annie Lennox song stuck in my head for days at the moment so I feel very connected to what you just wrote.
Efene: New Language for Erlang VM with Javascript/Python syntax
I don't think you realize that most people love Facebook and simply don't understand that there is privacy issue. They log in, see their friends, and play Farmville. A phone will let them do that when they're away from home.
They aren't spamming. The articles are only somewhat useful, but still better than nothing. Also, those articles are actually wanted.

Demand Media fares very well when compared to Mahalo.
gkoberger,

You have compassion for the human condition and an ability to put yourself in other people's shoes. That is a skill that is lost so easily today.

I don't know that many people that still can do this.

As expected, lionhearted's more absolute "He's a thief, QED!" opinion is a more popular reply (looking at the votes). lionhearted is surely welcome to his own opinion, I just don't think life is ever as black and white as we think it is.

Just added this comment because I know the mass majority of people will read your comment, nod their head in agreement and move on and with the voting trending the way it is, you might get the impression that you were "wrong" and re-think your position of trying to understand someone before condemning them.

I just wanted to make sure that didn't happen.
...beautiful and useful and not in any way lousy...

You have SHtockhome SHyndrom.
My point was that http:// is entirely superfluous - your browser doesn't need it and no one ever says it.

In most cases, the same is true of www., but sadly not in all.
... what about the old good trick: 1x1 image in mail reply, hosted in some controlled box? hopefully the guy is not checking mail with mutt. :)
>You can get a used computer for a few hundred dollars, that's like a week worth of saving at the most low quality minimum wage job.

While I mostly agree with you, this point is flat-out absurd. I can tell that you haven't ever supported yourself off a 30 hour minimum wage job before. Supporting a kid on one, and still saving hundreds of dollars a week? Not unless your rent is free.
My secret hope is that in 10 or 20 years, people will go back and re-read KJA's _Dune_ novels, and realize that us Frank Herbert partisans were right - they are a pile of bollocks.
That's what's puzzling to me. I have it set require login everytime it sleeps. Somehow this guy got passed this
I didn't understand the OP to be condoning theft and crime; he was approaching the situation from a place of compassion and understanding: "Alright, this guy stole it BUT he had enough human decency to email me... so he can't be a total dirtbag. Let me try and understand why and see if we can resolve this a different way".

I think that requires a lot more work and thought than slapping a "criminal" label on the guy and giving him the same treatment as a serial car-jacker, drug dealer, etc. because they all share that same "criminal" tag.

That being said... yea of course he would need to keep his wits about him and use some moxxy when it comes to spotting some additional theft/scam like "Ok PayPal me for the hard drive so I can make the backup" -- I'm not encouraging the guy to be half retarded -- but stopping the conversation after the first sentence and filling it full of pre-conceptions because the guy with the laptop is a "criminal"... I can't get on board with that.

At least talk to him and give him a chance to prove he's a dirt bag shithead first :)

In this particular case, I think a non-typical response would yield better results than a black-or-white/militaristic response of trying to get the cops to do something, but that's just my 2 cents.
Planning for planning's sake is not the same as planning to act. Big organizations typically fail to see the difference because the price of failure is too high for them compared to smaller, more nimble orgs.
Narcissism: Success never looked so good
MBT Chapa Shoes
Not really. I got the initial idea from readability, but I developed my own algorithm for text and image extraction using Python and lxml.
They're not really arrogant, they just come off as such. Programmers usually are pretty clever cookies and as a rule are more often right than wrong, even if the subject is not programming, that alone is enough to mark them as arrogant. We also tend to be an opinionated bunch.

Some of them compound the problem by no longer considering other people to be occasionally right and them being wrong and do cross the line in to arrogance.

It's fine as long as people agree on things but as soon as one party starts to ignore the other when they disagree then you have trouble.

For an encore, check 'mathematicians are arrogant', 'physicists are arrogant', 'surgeons are arrogant' and so on.

Anybody that has a job that requires a ton of study and a lot of brain work will tend towards this, it's human, nothing specific about programmers.

That doesn't help you when you're faced with a nice sample of a prima-donna arrogant programmer though, they do happen, just no more than in other 'brainy' professions.
Low six figures is a reasonably achievable salary for a youngish programmer working in a secure job in an unsexy industry (insurance is an example).
"Sibyl" is by the way from greek mythology and referred to a woman who could predict the future, a prophetress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl Wikipedia mentions there were as many as 10 Sibyls, although it does not mention that "the" sibyl was also famous for having predicted it's own death... ;-)
iOS developers: Are you shocked by how vengeful users can be in the app store?
If a user doesn't like an update, he/she might say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.

Something seems wrong about this. A single user can have way too much power over sales. And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.

Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.
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Subject: Stolen Laptop
From: karma bad <101badkarma@gmail.com>
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Why the best products fail
I'm not really qualified to comment on programmers per se. But I am reminded of a personal anecdote:

In my mid-twenties, I had to have minor surgery on my face. My looks were very important to me. I thought I was quite beautiful and this was upsetting to me. I was concerned I would be disfigured but I really had to have the surgery. Trying to make my peace with it, I commented "I guess I can always have cosmetic surgery later." The surgeon was quite affronted and said "You won't need cosmetic surgery when I am done." The scar is nearly invisible -- less visible than the cyst that was removed. Even people who knew me before the surgery and know I had my face cut on have difficulty finding the scar.

I concluded that if you can bring it, maybe you aren't actually arrogant. Maybe you are just stating the facts, regardless of how it might sound to other people.
I don't buy this at all.

Apple has always been a hardware and software company with a very specific philosophy about user experience being everything. The digital music revolution gave Steve Jobs the opening to create the iPod that basically resurrected the company. That ply has been extended into phones and mobile computing.

Google is (from a revenue perspective) a search and advertising company. Their business model is predicated on how much you use the internet. So what Google is concerned with is everything between you and the internet. They've done Chrome, Android, etc to commoditize every link in that chain. Everything they do is about you using the internet easier, cheaper, in more places or more often.

Microsoft is about one thing and one thing only: selling Windows and Office licenses to enterprise and OEM customers. Nothing else matters. Look at the Kin: they bought Danger (with its once successful Sidekick) but then spent the better part of two years rewriting its OS as some Frankenstein version of Windows mobile. It arrived way too late and was dead before the first unit was sold (in large part due to the enormous data costs that Verizon saddled it with as they'd lost patience with the delay). Windows Phone 7 has the same goals.

Facebook is all about capturing and cultivating your relationships. They are a silo. They want to own that data because that data is their business and their entire value. Integration with everything else is about allowing other people to give Facebook more data.

What sense does a mobile platform make in that context? Absolutely none that I can see. How does it let them capture and control more data? Apple has had huge success with the iPhone because they have the industrial design, UI experience, supply chain management (which shouldn't be underestimated), iTunes (as much as many--including me--hate the application it is a near-monopoly in digital content) and retail channel.

For Facebook to succeed in the mobile space they would need most if not all of these things. It's a huge risk for relatively little gain and a small payoff. I can only thing that by leveraging a mobile platform of their own they could essentially lock out other platforms. The problem is that Facebook is usable with any Web browser.

I can't imagine Facebook doing any more than controlling the Facebook experience on all mobile platforms, an area they're still sadly lacking in (iPad app anyone?).

Basically this makes as much sense as Twitter making a mobile phone.
The reason you deserve to have access to the code you run is because it's the only way for you to trust it. Code you don't have access to has a tendency to betray you with various "features" (spying, arbitrary limitations…), that just wouldn't be there if you had access to the code. In my view, resorting to state violence to prevent such treason is perfectly justified.

What you call "purer freedom" is actually negative freedom, which is about not forbidding. The GPL promotes positive freedom, which is about enabling. As we can see when we compare the GPL and permissive licences, the GPL is more effective at enabling everyone to look at the source code. For me, that's what counts. I don't care about how "pure" the freedom is, I just care about it's effectiveness.

Lastly, you said "Free software […] is incompatible with privacy and property rights". "Privacy" was appropriately used, but I think you tossed "property" without much thought, using its positive and undeniable aura.
Is it really more severe in programming than the rest of society? Most of the programmers I've met have been quite nice, the only people I can recall meeting that I actually thought "I never want to meet them again!" have been a pair of young lawyers.
It would be nice if the OS could track the tip of my index finger and thumb so that I could move the cursor, scroll and click with a simple gesture.
I've noticed it countless times, from underground scenes' irc chans and meetups, to the office. Each case is different, that's the beauty of it.

At least, they will judge you on ideas, not on appearance. (edit: only if they consider you worth their time, which isn't easily earned.)
So are they really to blame?