skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the replies, I realize how mediocrity can settle in just through the inability to shake your head and say "There must be a better way!" I'm totally used to having my latter flight-segments canceled when I miss the first leg, the airlines are used to it - we've settled into a steady state of poor customer delivery and poor customer experience, without realizing - there might be a new potential out there.

I think a great deal of the success of ycombinator type companies, consists of people who have not yet accepted (or refuse to accept) that poor customer experience should be the norm. Mint arose from a team that realized they could do better than Intuit. Google came about _even when it was clear to everyone_ that search was a solved problem, with little reason for new entrants - except for the fact that search results were crappy.

The Meta-Meta lesson here is that one way of deciding what to do for a new business, is look for through your daily experience of disappointments, and poor customer service, and ask yourself "How could I make the pain go away and get paid to do so."

So, Okay - I get it. Rich Aberman, is not the type of person to accept, as granted, a poor customer experience. I am. But, then again - one of us founded WePay, the other is an Enterprise Network Manager.
I tried to make clear that this is my personal experience and impressions, not a declaration of fact: "seems to have", "my impression", etc.. I should have gone further and said "this happens to me, has anybody else had this problem?" My apologies.

However, and however anecdotal the evidence, the vulnerability was in the browser -- Chrome is what allowed the Java applet to run without my consent. Firefox, visiting the very same sites over the same period was not affected, nor at any other time in the past 8 years of using it. That was my point.
7 Towns Where Land Is Free
If its somewhat unique, be clever and call it a business method
That is truly a godawful AP article.

Here's the prior discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1956981
I think its even worse. Airlines and their employees know that you have little negotiation power at the terminal (cost, schedule, and security make you virtually powerless).

A story I have is years ago at Continental. I came to the desk to check my suitcase. It was over some weight and so the lady said I had to pay, I believe $75. I had some swag in the bag that I could throwaway that would bring me under. Of course she makes me leave the line to throw it away, although there was a trash can not 15 feet away.

I get back in line, get to the desk and its her again. She weighs my bag... it's under the weight limit. Great! Wait, she still wants $75?! Huh? Apparently I just threw the items away, but the bag was originally weighed more than the limit and her claim was their policy was not to allow reweighings. And certain I've seen people do it before and I ask to see the policy. She says I have to contact customer service, but probably won't make my flight if I do -- and she's probably right on that point.

I'm pretty irate at this point, and ask to see the supervisor and she says she is. She says if I have a problem to take it up with the corporate office, or get out of line. I pay the $75, get on the plane, write a letter to Continental and never hear from them again.

To this day, I refuse to fly Continental.
I have to call BS on that.

He bought the tickets, so how does not using them make him no longer a customer? If they gave him a refund (ha!), then yes... otherwise, no.
There's a pretty explicit selection bias here. They compiled a list of people who "started with nothing". Among the set of all billionaires, I doubt you would see a very high incidence of being raised by a widow(er).
An idea for an online app for tracking of bad roads (in India)
Jailbreak Tool for Windows Phone 7 Killed
Another "you suck for being poor" story ... [update] really? 4 neg points, nice.
It was cheaper for us to fly to San Francisco from London by first flying to Amsertdam and then catching the same flight that we would have caught but starting at Amsterdam which then connects through Heathrow.
I am starting a consulting business and am looking to hire subcontractors to work initially on a per-project basis (projects can be as small as a few hours) and potentially on a part-time ongoing basis. Focus is on developing Ruby on Rails applications.

The business is based in Boston, though you can be from anywhere in the world.

I currently need:

- HTML/CSS Designers
- Ruby/Rails Developers
- QA/Testing

Email me if you're interested (address in profile)
but fundamentally the web apps for airlines are dirty hacks layered on top of mainframe systems

Thats no excuse.
The thing that gets me isn't any one specific policy, but the general sentiment companies like United project to their customers. It's pretty much "We hate your guts and think you're dumb enough to fall for any number of ways that we're going to try to fuck you over."

A lot of these companies, if they were a person and not an entity, would probably be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.

They spend a lot of money on loyalty programs, but I think the best way to engender loyalty is to actually treat people like human beings.

Companies like JetBlue, Virgin, and Southwest are equally conniving, but they certainly work a LOT harder to hide it. And for that reason, I'll always take a flight from one of them, even if it's a little bit pricier. I know there will be less surprises and things that piss me off. I feel like they're actually working to try to earn my business.
Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy
YouTube Officially Launches Ads You Can Skip: Hackers are Happy
Seedcamp (of late, at least) aims at a much more mature company/idea than YC does. Although there are exceptions.
If you live in a metro area with multiple carriers, often the price differences are negligable. If they weren't, there would be no point of frequent flyer miles. They are trying to lock you into their airline even if their prices are slightly higher, but if the prices on the other airline are drastically lower (hundreds of dollars), it wouldn't make any sense to stick with your normal carrier.
Can anyone summarize other software options in the pub/sub market for me? I have a project now that uses Redis' BLPOP with a timeout to implement something similar to pub/sub, but I'd like a more robust solution that does that kind of thinking for me. Kafka looks interesting but I'd like to find something built in C or Erlang due to inherent and irrational distrust for anything running on jvm.
Google to buy Groupon for $5.3Bn
Pikimal is a great company to work for. At this point in my career, the opportunity to grow as a coder is super important to me, and I'm getting plenty of opportunity here.
Good point, but I think it's more general than that: A brain in a vat's need be in a particular location is significantly reduced. Interaction with remote things is limited only by light speed, and possibly bandwidth.

Travel costs for brains in vats are significantly reduced. Not only is travel cheaper monetarily, but the experience of travel can be completely hidden. Instead of sitting in a seat and looking out a window, you could spend your time in a VR world or interact via robots. The only reason you would want to stay in one place is to interact with the nearby environment at low latency.

In the end, uploads are the way to go. You can run them faster and travel cost is just data transfer cost.
Thanks a bunch for these pointers.

I understand that there's no one size fits all approach to NoSQL but rather it has multiple paradigms and such. It's just that i hadn't come across any book or text that would explain the basis of NoSQL, why it'd be preferred in certain scenarios, different types of paradigms etc. etc.

Thanks again.
"What is trying to be portrayed here?"

How dissertations in an area overlap with other areas.

Calling it "Stanford Phd dissertation browser" sets up the wrong expectations, but it's an interesting infographic.
I believe, by patenting their research results they can be sure no one will "overtake" research results in any way.
That is an interesting comment. How did SHA/RSA/AES cause more harm? Every other web developer has to use SHA for one thing or the other. SSL is the application of RSA.
Presumably because it's not aimed at those people so much as fledgling entrepreneurs in steady jobs afraid to take that risk.
Yes and no. I found quite useful and visual the way to show the relationship between topics. For example, you can see the close relationship between biology and psychology. I'm not sure a large table could the job.
The lesson here is if you get 1M users in 15 days, you talk about it at your own peril.
Actually, you might have a point there - looking at how Google licensed PageRank from Stanford seems pretty similar to this scheme.

I wonder who paid for that research though!
Mozilla

HQ Office: Mountain View, CA
Remote offices: Auckland Beijing Paris Tokyo Toronto Vancouver
WFH possible for many jobs (depends on position)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/careers.html
"And remember, this ‘fluffy’ little story about the cute little pig we’d all love to cuddle ended up with a 30% increase in the sales of sausages…"

I love the irony.
Well, even a simple text/email like "You have missed the first trip in a round trip flight, so your return flight has been cancelled as outlined in our terms of service" would have cleared everything up before he got to the airport. Yes, he would still need to find his own way bac, but at least he is made aware of the circumstances instead of being jerked around.
Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.
Perhaps RIM's IP attorney isn't working at the app store? Lucky for RIM though, I'm sure the app store legal agreements don't include anything silly like having an approval be a license for any RIM IP.
There are 1,011 names on Forbes' Billionaires List. Of those, how many do you imagine were born poor? My bet is that this list represents a fairly large selection of billionaires who "came from nothing."
How did you become a referrer? Is there any benefit to being one (other than the warm glow of watching an awesome company get funded)?
6 months of Olark (YC S09) for $17
Google maps is a bit out of date, so it doesn't show that there is a RIM building literally across the street. Like, it's the main building in view out of the Kik offices windows.
Almost every flight during peak travel periods is oversold, which means that the airlines are selling more seats than they have (which sounds like fraud, since if you end up in an oversold flight and no one cancels, they ask the PASSENGERS to make the sacrifice, even though the reality is that the airline sold something that they no longer had)... so there was almost certainly someone else who got his seat.
The problem for the legacy airlines is that they started in the pre-deregulation era with excellent pay and benefits for their employees. Deregulation eliminated the financial basis for those salaries, and as a result the legacies have been engaged in a decades-long war with their employees to lower costs. It shouldn't be surprising that customer service is poor when people work in such a hostile environment. There's always a huge difference in morale between growing and shrinking companies. The post-deregulation entrants dont even have to pay more than the legacies; the fact that they're not constantly attacking their own employees is an enormous advantage.
Airlines are one of the most economically marginal, shitty businesses out there. ("easiest way to become a millionaire in the airline industry is to start out a billionaire"). They're also not particularly good at software development. The legacy carriers are huge, and have built software over decades.

I think the low hanging fruit in the airline industry is to hire staff from outside the airline industry in all customer-facing roles (cabin crew, gate staff), which is what Virgin America has done (they largely recruited from hotels vs. other airlines. Hotel/hospitality staff are generally fairly awesome at customer service, even when enforcing rules). That is going to be way more appreciated by customers than doing a billion dollar ticketing overhaul.

United is definitely aware of how to sell tickets which are fully changeable and rerouteable. They also know how to run shuttle service. They just choose not to do so for the cheapest coach ticket price.

I do agree they should have been better at customer relations, even while enforcing the same policy (although if it turns into "please leave or we will call security", there are probably two parties behaving suboptimally). In their defense it's a heavy travel period, and if I were waiting behind him in line, I would have been pissed as well if they had devoted huge amounts of time to explaining their ticketing procedures in depth to him and trying to console him.
It's interesting how many of them dropped out of school.
Half of these are just wrong. The other half are just irritating.
I'd guess that everything posted after the Reddit link can be disregarded as fake, at least for a few weeks.
Sorry, the link goes to our horrible, PeopleWare-powered recruiting site that you have to access over port 8291. If you're behind any kind of firewall, it probably won't work.
Usable? Absolutely.

It's automatically clustering topics radially based on proximity to each other and to other disciplines.

Click on CS. Then click on CS again (now in the center). CS + Music is out by the Music field. CS + EE is all in a column pointed to the EE field.

It's a tool for discovery.
Being treated like a human being is "above and beyond" with respect to airlines.
You certainly can't copyright a game mechanic. But, as long as software, algorithms and business processes are patentable so are game mechanics.

Also, patents aren't so much about "what's patentable" as "How much are you willing to pay lawyers to uphold/get tossed out a patent"
There still are! Macintalk hasn't changed much since then.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...
When I run it twice in a row, why am I still unique?
United in particular amaze me at how little regard they show for customer retention. Last time I flew with them I stood in line as every single customer got into the same fight with them when they sprung their new "$50 extra to check a bag" policy on them with zero notice.

I watched a dozen people in a row vow to never fly United again in the span of 20 minutes. Amazing that they can survive except in a landscape where every other airline is just as bad.

In our case, we'd actually booked our flight through a different airline with a sane baggage policy clearly stated on their website, and took extra steps to make sure we fell within the free allowance. Only on arriving at the airport did we discover that we were "code sharing" with United and thus subject to their extra fees.

One day somebody will take Southwest & Virgin's attitude towards customer service and apply it to a major airline. And they'll dominate.
...I certainly never take to using WePay’s corporate blog as a pulpit for my attacks.

Then don't. Ever. Here's why:

It's standard knowledge that your second leg will be canceled if you miss your first leg. It's been that way for 30 years.

You have just demonstrated your inability to deal with a standard curve ball. No big deal. As individuals, we all run into that from time to time.

You also complained about customer service (in the airline industry, no less). That's like complaining about the weather. I suppose you deserve a pass on that, too.

But your mistake was using your company blog, unintentionally transferring your ineptness to your company. Big mistake. Now people might think, "If he can't navigate a weekend trip, can't handle his vendors, and then complains about it publicly, why should I trust him with my money."

Please do yourself a big favor and delete this blog post before too many of your potential customers see it. Don't make a bad experience worse by threatening your business. With all the hard work already invested, it deserves better.
> SHA, RSA, and AES have caused more harm than good

Do you mind elaborating or linking to a useful discussion somewhere? I’m having trouble imagining just what would be better without these algorithms.
I heard a coverage of you on NPR this morning. Good stuff.
You have that backwards. You can't patent a game or game materials (these can be copyrighted or trademarked or both), but you could patent game mechanics b/c they were "processes" which were patentable under the Federal Circuit's non-existent standard for patentability. In fact, several game mechanics have been patented.

Whether those patents remain valid is another question entirely. In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down the ridiculously low bar for patenting business methods and software processes, which includes most game-related patents.
Thiel Fellowship: $100k grants to 20 under-20s to fund innovative ideas
You gotta hand it to Wikileaks, they've got balls. But I'm afraid it's all going to be for naught. Nobody likes to be told, let alone admit, their government/banks/military is corrupt. No good will come from any of this because the average person really doesn't give a damn.
a lot of corroborating evidence. there were numerous plagiarized articles. i even personally checked out an issue and googled some lines to see where they were taken from.

the email in this instance could've been completely faked.
That article doesn't exist.
I'm interested in seeing a mini-timeline of their rise to success. As in, at what age did they start their successful venture and how many failures preceded it. Humanizing these success stories is almost essential to fully appreciate their accomplishments but to also put everything in context.

Although just a fluff piece, it could be so much more with that additional information.
Funny thing is, Einstein did in fact pretty much said it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Def...

"When asked by his assistant what his reaction would have been if general relativity had not been confirmed by Eddington and Dyson in 1919, Einstein famously made the quip: "Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct anyway.""
Data Evaporation and the Security of Online Identities
Rate My Idea: OpenFunny
I own the domain openfunny.com and I've been meaning to do something with it, but like everyone else, I have a full plate of side projects. So, I have decided to show the idea and get some feedback. If anyone thinks the idea has legs and wants to do something with it, contact me by email.

Ok - the idea. OpenFunny is a place that aggregates all of the funny stuff on the internet. It takes RSS feeds from FunnyOrDie, Break.com, CollegeHumor, etc. and serves up all of their newest content on one page. So, the user can come and see the top 10 funniest things on the internet right now.

I have thought about adding pictures in addition to video so things like XKCD and Cheezburger could be supported but I'm not sure.

Another idea is to have Facebook connect and voting so there might be 3 tabs on the top of the page - funniest, lamest, newest, kind of like Digg.

So, that's basically the idea, what do you think? Thanks for any feedback or suggestions.

Kevin
I'll be in the same situation in 2 months, leaving my current job in a social network company. I'm going to spend some time on my own projects, and start freelancing while traveling in South East Asia.

When you'll have your day job, you'll have very little time to work on your side projects, so I would say take advantage of that now. That, or traveling for an extended period of time is also very eye-opening if you haven't done it yet. South America is still my favorite place. In 6 months you can see most of the continent, not sure if you'll want to go back home though :-)
Octocat Wednesday — Free micro plan for a month
Eh, to go blatantly ad hominem, it's StarDestroyer.net. It's a site devoted to arguing that the technology and militaries of one not-remotely-hard SF setting are "better" than the technology and militaries of another not-remotely-hard SF setting.

When I've looked before, there were straight-faced essays on there about the wonders of Imperial stormtrooper armor (augmented reality HUDs, sensors, etc.) that would have ended the Star Wars series about two minutes after the Millenium Falcon got tractor-beamed into the Death Star. There were deadpan articles about the military skills and discipline of those stormtroopers that don't at all fit with their getting slaughtered by Ewoks or a formation of them running in panic from a single charging man in their own base.

The wacky justifications for all the "canon" they contradict with their claims make it clear - this stuff is not meant to be taken any more seriously than the puddi puddi meme. It's meant to amuse people and troll Trek fans.

ETA: I mean, really, do we want to look at the engineering practices in Star Wars? Huge walking tanks you can trip or take out with one grenade, near-absence of railings, etc... It doesn't bear worrying about. :)
the first hit is free...
Would you be more specific?
I think it's a move to improve Google's local search capabilities. I don't know how sustainable Groupon's revenue model is in the long run.

I'd be curious to know the percentage of new repeating customers that businesses attract after a Groupon deal. Attracting deal seekers is very different from attracting someone who will repeat long term.
I strongly agree with this. It might be appropriate for a personal blog, but it makes WePay look like it's run by people who don't understand how to navigate complex systems.

Guess what industry is even more regulated, rule-bound, complex than the airline industry? Banking and payments. A startup already has a high hurdles related to people being conservative with their money; being an iconoclast isn't exactly what people want when it comes to a finance manager.
It seems like the airlines could make this experience a LOT better for the customer and really not cost themselves much money.

Here's what they should do. You miss your first leg, they send you an email/text/call saying, "Hey you missed your first leg. As you know our policy is that you must fly all legs. To fly the second leg, please pay $XYZ".

And $XYZ is maximum arbitrage opportunity that existed for the flight (you can also be more generous and just do it for the time the flight was booked). If there was no arbitrage opportunity there is no cost, but then the query is just to see if you're coming to the next leg, otherwise they can use the seat.

This would solve the issue the airlines have with people gaming their game. And solves the issue that less regular flyers have with getting caught off guard. And I bet a good amount of the time $XYZ is $0 or very low.