skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see that you offer a 14 day free trial. How does someone go about doing a trial of software that transforms the entire process of running an apartment building? You get all your tenants to sign up with this system, then change your mind and make them sign up with a new system again?

It might be more useful to have a live demo system people can log into both as a tenant and landlord to see how it works.
Learning self-control as a kid makes for a better adulthood
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (PlayStation Phone)
How would that be so? How do you 'believe' a factual thing like this? I can charge one guy 10$ for a pie in my bakery shop, and the next guy 100$ because I don't like his face. There is a narrow set of classes on which it is not allowed to discriminate but all else is fair game.

I'm not claiming to know this of all jurisdictions, there may be specific circumstances in which this does not hold, but these are the exceptions.
It is relevant because it speaks to their honesty and tolerance for hypocrisy.

If I'm a person who habitually does certain things, but I publicly advocate denying those activities to others, that's very significant information.
The problem is the landlord-tenant relationship is asymmetrical. As a tenant you want to live in a particular place, whether its for location, or amenities, or price etc.

When you lease an apartment, the landlord's record of customer service is almost never a factor in signing the lease. It just never comes up. And the cost of moving is so high that its unlikely someone will leave a unit because the landlord sucked (I know this from experience). So the landlord doesn't have to compete with other landlords based on customer service, they compete based on the price, location and amenities of the units they offer.

So there's really no incentive for most landlords to be better landlords. The only ones who try, are mostly just doing it to follow the law or out of a sense of fairness.

The market just doesn't really reward landlords enough for their customer service ability...
That's not productive :)

Dan isn't a bad guy, I can almost guarantee you. Tenants can be difficult to deal with, and there's just a certain status quo in the industry that everyone has come to accept. I'm just saying that there's a better way, and things like RentPost.com and RentMonitor.com are a step in the right direction.
We had a private beta.
Given the rest of the comment, yes, that's a typo.
Android In-App Payments Coming Soon
"A Creationist can not perform what he thinks is correct science without performing what the rest of the world is incorrect science."

I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. The whole Science VS Faith thing is a false dichotomy, the two are not inherently incompatible except in the minds of unfortunate extremists on both sides of the argument. Implying that they are ignores the fact that the vast overwhelming majority of science has been performed by so-called "creationists". Society simply didn't tolerate atheism prior to say 1960.
sounds like perverse incentives - surely there is a lot more cost (human review, for one) to processing a check than an electronic transfer. here in NZ the bank fees for automatic payments or debit card like transfer is less than checks and consequently checks are phasing out fast, almost gone
You are aware, of course, you are questioning a completely different thing, right?

The deeply flawed reasoning is implying that, because we agree with the observations of a creationist astronomer on the big bang, we are also creationists.
well, I recall few months ago you criticized climate scientists for using incomplete models for their simulations...
Dan, all of your comments in this thread seem to assume that if you can't hear a customer's complaint it's not a real complaint; and, more importantly, that if you can hear a customer's complaint you have to fix it.

Just like any business, you have to set boundaries on how much you will do for free. But why not set those boundaries intelligently, based on how the customer's actual desires match up with your ability to provide services?
You can define a category within your implementation file (.m) and redeclare the property like this:

@interface MyClass (PrivateMethods)

@property(readwrite, retain) NSObject *myProperty;

@end

@implementation MyClass
...

Now only your implementation knows about the generated setter methods, and you don't have to implement them yourself.
The bigger question is whether, given that real wages in the US have stagnated for the last 20-30 years, the outsize compensation given to elites is a function of productivity gains increasingly depending on them or just an increase in relative bargaining power.
Pedantic note: face recognition != face detection != face verification.
Prolog's macro system does, but given it's model of computation (search/pattern matching are built in), it ends up being used far less than Lisp's.
Pshhh... I was using John's Phone while it was "still" underground.
It's not so much the beliefs that people hold, it's whether
or not they stick to those beliefs in the face of mounting
evidence to the contrary. If they do, then their reasoning
is not based in reality, which makes any other reasoning
they do that is also purportedly based in reality suspect.

Most human reasoning is not based in reality. It is very difficult for a well-educated and intelligent person to even approximate rational thought; see sites like < http://lesswrong.com/ > to see how much effort is required. All claims to reality-based reasoning should be regarded as suspect, unless accompanied by sufficient evidence.
Fourth time I've flagged a comment on HN iirc.

Congratulations. Calling someone a slumlord just because they own property and are willing to discuss their business online does not give you the right to slander them.
So since you're way ahead of the game. I would like to suggest this. The ideas behind rentpost.com have been on my mind for a few years now. I've never done anything to pursue it so congrats, the site looks great. Please, grow and hire people so that this saturates the market. Then, when large enough, please provide a clean interface for prospective tenants to view apartment listings. Searching for apartments have got to be one of the biggest pains to deal with. If you have a central database of awesome tech-savvy apartments with your website as a portal for great customer service, I don't see why you can't make your customers more happy by providing listings.
Would a cloud by any other name sell as well?
TOSHIBA SATELLITE Pro C650-D5010A Review and Price | TECHGADGETSITE
It would be a fine line to balance. As we know, it's a lot easier to write a super-critical anonymous comment on Yelp than to say it face-to-face. Closer together in that continuum is placing a work order online v having to make a call (or even send an email).

If it's easier, the PM will get more of them AND those extras are unlikely to be the important ones. (If your hot water system blows, you pick up the phone; if you don't like the shade of green in the living room, you send a web message.) And if you're a good manager, you still have to respond to them all.

I'm raising this as a genuine fear for a customer reviewing the product. It would be interesting to have some user stats that overcome that fear - eg, "support requests rose by 10% BUT the time taken to respond to all requests actually went down by 20%, saving managers three hours each week, AND this feature was identified by many tenants in their improved satisfaction reports."
It was a WestJet flight from Vancouver to Calgary, leaving (I believe) Dec 30 and returning Jan 3. I bought the tickets on the 26th or 27th. Not sure of the flight number itself.
I don't believe in Darwinism, and you know what, if some one refused to employ me because of that, then to hell with them. I personally would prefer not to work with someone who would judge me for my beliefs.

But that's just me. I'm the kind of person who wants his job to be more than "just a job".

There are people who consider jobs to be just jobs and they do their jobs for a living, not to fulfill their life purpose. This is actually the majority of people, and when you start discriminating against them, well, you're kinda evil. Or how should I put it? You'd be no different from a religious zealot who thinks he knows the truth and must force everyone to adhere to the same truth that he adheres to.

The root of most evil (often attributed to "religion") is when you believe you have the truth and that you must force others to see it. Discriminating against these people in their work and livelihood is just one tactic of oppressing people. The Soviet Union was such an evil government; they oppressed religious people in the name of liberating them from religion.

Having said that, I can flip the argument around. Would I trust a doctor who believes that humans are nothing but a lump of material, and that morals are just lies that we fabricated? It depends, and you can argue for a long time why you should (or should not) trust such a doctor. But the point is, it's a double edged sword, if you're gonna use it to discriminate against others, then certain others can also use it to discriminate against you.

When someone is an outspoken advocate for atheism, but is also a scientist, should I take his "science" seriously as if he's objective in his science? He obviously has a strong desire to fulfill his agenda, and is likely to bend backwards to support what he's advocating.
What the Tortoise Said to Laurie (computer science for kids)
It's not a "Western" value set, it's a value held by the scientific community he is desiring to enter.

In any case, scientists are a lot less dogmatic than you seem to think. We willingly use theories as long as we get results, i.e. as long as the theories work. The point is that it's exactly there that Creationism fails.
In that way, it's not "ignoring an absence of facts as long as you get results" and more akin to "ignoring an absence of results as long as they believe what they're doing". I don't think you can spin that any way that's positive -- sooner or later reality will bite back if that's how you go through life.
A/B Testing Funny Signs from Homeless People
It is perhaps difficult to judge the material from a quick glance at the website. He has written many excellent books such as "The Creator and The Cosomos" which I would refer you to for a more in depth discussion.
Also check out how it looks on the iPad or simulate this by resizing your browser width so that it's at the smallest possible size without having a horizontal scrollbar. The content is right up against the browser edge with no space. You should add some padding on each side to avoid this.
Since there's some overlap in membership, here's a link to the Less Wrong discussion of this same article:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/3ze/richard_dawkins_sho...
CSS Tools: Reset CSS
I think another intention of this is making it more difficult for people to keep those fake profiles.
I'm in complete agreement that it's difficult. But to give up trying virtually ensures failure.
Your EDSL is only Pretty in Stockholm
As long as the beleifs do not obviously express a lack of common sense, yes beleifs should not be important.

Sure we can get in a fight about how obvious should the obviousness be, and what exactly is common sense. However disregard for evidence or strong unfounded beleifs should be a warning sign. The candidate's views on the technology involved in his job should be more deeply screened. What I mean is that a candidate firmly beleiving that the earth was created 10k years ago because the scriptures say so, is (imho) more likely to lack the open-mindedness needed by most jobs in science/technology fields. OTOH, if you "just need a programmer", i'm sure you'll be fine even with a guy thinking bananas are in reality dropped by storks.
"Chrome also tries to find out if someone is messing up with the DNS (i.e. “nasty” ISPs that have wildcard DNS servers to catch all domains). Chrome does this by issuing 3 DNS requests to randomly generated domain names,"

I have a question. Why would wilcard domains be 'nasty'? It's not that unusual, is it? Would Google discourage this?

I can imagine that a site uses wildcard domains to differentiate in the content it should serve, for example a blog provider: john.bloggo.com, luyt.bloggo.com, johndoe.bloggo.com etc... You wouldn't want to put a few thousand customer names in your DNS tables, instead use *.bloggo.com and let the webapp interpret the subdomain name.

Or in the case of some development server, ftp.domain.com, svn.domain.com, git.domain.com and www.domain.com maybe all should resolve to the same IP and find the corresponding service on that machine. If the admin were to add another service, say SMTP, he could just install a mailer on port 25 and he wouldn't have to adjust the DNS.
I think the secret to great customer service is to avoid the low end of the marketplace. My apartment complexes website does all of this stuff this stuff. Yet, I have submitted less than 1 work order a year for the last five years because well maintained appliances rarely break. They might charge more than the competition but vacancy rates are something like 3% for a reason.
C99 + GCC extensions + POSIX:

#define for_duration(seconds, body) \
{ \
pthread_t tid_task, tid_watcher; \
\
void* task(void* arg) { \
body ; \
pthread_cancel(tid_watcher); \
return NULL; \
} \
\
void* watcher(void* arg) { \
sleep((seconds)); \
pthread_cancel(tid_task); \
return NULL; \
} \
\
pthread_create(&tid_task, NULL, &task, NULL); \
pthread_create(&tid_watcher, NULL, &watcher, NULL); \
pthread_join(tid_task, NULL); \
}

Use as:

for_duration(10, {
while (true) {
printf("Infinite loop! where is your Godel now?\n");
}
});

Or with single brace-less statements:

for_duration(10, while (true) printf("something\n") );

Lexical scope is sane:

int i = 0;
for_duration(10, {
while (true) {
printf("%d\n", i++);
}
});

My comparison isn't quite fair, because your threading library provides 'with-timeout', while pthreads doesn't. If you factored this out, say with a signature like:

void with_timeout(unsigned int seconds, void (*func)(void));

(in analogy to the common lisp function), then the macro part becomes just four lines:

#define for_duration(seconds, body) {	\
void func() { body ; }	\
with_timeout((seconds), &func);	\
}

I acknowledge that the lisp solution is rather more elegant. Also, my C macro is potentially dangerous because it is unhygenic. (It shadows outer declarations of 'task()', 'watcher()', 'tid_task', 'tid_watcher', and 'arg', in the body of 'body'.)
Grubwithus (YC W11) Brings Strangers Together Over Social Meals
How the hell has this got 12 upvotes?
Sending a message is indeed equivalent to calling a function, specifically the function objc_msgSend (or one of its variants, depending on return type).

It's also very much like calling a virtual function in C++, only slower.
Taking Location Based Services Mainstream: Podcast
You're getting pretty defensive in the face of a potential customer.

He's made pretty clear that he's not a potential customer.

This product is marketed towards landlords, not slumlords.
If you're at risk of making a horrible pun, you should rewrite. A deliberate horrible pun is much preferable.
It's indeed very slippery, and it's the exact same arguments that have been used to keep blacks, gays and women out back in the day, and once they were in, keeping them from advancing on the career ladder.

Unless someone has personal beliefs that are entirely orthogonal to their work, those beliefs are none of your business.
Or, the symbol on the connector is exactly on the wrong side. I just unplugged it and compared it to a correct and lo and behold, it really is on the wrong side. So much for the spec.

I'd love to see a USB-port that can be plugged in both ways.
Yea, the fees would either be passed to the tenant or absorbed by the manager (in order to improve their collections, better to get it with a fee than not)
Just thought I'd say how much I love your color scheme to quiet write. It really puts me in a peaceful mood.
You just give a year's worth of post-dated cheques.
More like 200kb (17kloc), but that's still not bad. Heck, SQLite is ~500kb, and does anybody hesitate to embed that?

Lua has a pretty nice C API, too.
I'm currently managing approx 50 (?) units and I thought I'd drop my opinion:

Make me understand the pain I am in. Real estate is painful, but as you have undoubtedly noticed, people think the pain is a natural part of the package and they can't separate the two.

How about automatic late notices? Projected vacancy and turnover assistance? I mean, those are really painful and annoying processes (at least to me), present me with a punch-by-punch pain tour and offer the solution.

Additionally, for heaven's sake, drop the buzzwords and market talk. I feel like you designed the site first and tried to shoehorn some content in there. Property managers care little about the "cloud" or "we're easy to use!". They want to get paid on time, how are you helping them?

Best of luck! I think there is massive potential here but I tend to think you are going about it the wrong way in your presentation. As rwhitman has said, it seems like you are trying to solve tenants' problems, not the landlords'. Noble indeed, but not the best strategy.
Times change. In the past you could be killed (in the West) for not being religious, or for adhering to the wrong sect.

The way we're headed, religious belief is becoming more and more fringe. Basically, religion only "makes sense" if most people are raised in that tradition.

From the outside (i.e. to people not raised in a religious tradition) it just sounds kind of silly at best, or crazy at worst.

So, at a certain point, saying I believe in X religion becomes just as crazy as saying I believe that the earth was created by pink hummingbirds. It just has more pedigree.

The game's up for organized religion as soon as people see that there's more than one, and that those other believers aren't evil. It'll just take some time for this to play out.
Technical Rent
because you touch yourself at night.
Reset v2.0
UK

Free banking

No charges

No "convenience fees"

Free online banking, setup automated payments, one offs, transfer money to other banks in the UK instantly, etc

I assume you're talking about the US?
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. The whole Science VS Faith
thing is a false dichotomy, the two are not inherently
incompatible except in the minds of unfortunate extremists
on both sides of the argument.

Faith is, fundamentally, the process of maintaining beliefs in the face of 1) absent evidence and 2) conflicting evidence.

Science is the process of discovering evidence.

While theoretically compatible, in practice, people performing science often discover evidence that conflicts with widely-held beliefs. When those beliefs are part of an ongoing faith, the faith-holders usually react violently against the scientists.

Implying that they are ignores the fact that the vast overwhelming
majority of science has been performed by so-called "creationists".
Society simply didn't tolerate atheism prior to say 1960.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here, since it seems to go against your main point.
Plugging in PS/2 ports is the one single single port that sucks even more than USB, because instead of flipping and putting it in right, you have to rotate the connector and try until you succeed. Or you give up the blind thing and look how the port is mounted.
after you design something like this, how does one actually go about getting it manufactured?
I'm working with a client at the moment that has this issue, only they're talking price points from £100,000 to £2,000,000. They don't have 40,000 clients, but they do have a retention problem.

The Source issue (which I won't share, since I have a reasonably small client base) is what we're working with them around; the outcome through which we sold the project used similar arguments and math to that presented by the OP.
Please make it obvious if this is available for international customers or US only. I dug around but not any closer to knowing if this service is available at all to me.
Who did your design? In house? It's AMAZING.
If you don't trust other people, that's even more incentive to use electronic systems.
why do you need to supply an email? Is that even necessary? Most people will fake it anyway
So if I write "Starbucks sells burnt sludge in place of real coffee," Starbucks will get to advertise right by my statement?
All ways that are extraordinary, not necessarily moral.
> I think the last thing we would want is to make it easier for the tenant to complain about things.

and

> "Dissatisfied? Click here for a refund"

are options that are miles apart. When you said that you don't want to maintain an easier communication channel with your paying customer, it is a good sign that customer service isn't your greatest selling point. One doesn't need to buy every product in a shop for 10 years before concluding whether the service is good or bad. A few customer reviews / purchases should suffice.
In the UK, we have a "direct debit guarantee". Basically if anyone ever takes too much in error, you just call up your bank and tell them to put it back, and they do.
Windows Phone 7 Shipments Have Topped Two Million
Depends what country your in really. Always check your local laws and regulations before taking advice on the internet; the laws for someone may not be the same as yours.
To an extent I agree with the sentiment of your post, but the practicalities are different imo, and "The pricing of physical goods depends on the market every bit as much as the pricing of software or web services." I don't agree with at all. Many non-software products and services (staples, pies, chimney sweeping, plumbing, ...) are much more commodities than software. Efficient markets, lemon problem etc. drive down the markup to a low (single to low-double digit) percentage. Since cost is also much less variable (costs in terms of resources, labor, capital investments etc. for a pie from one baker is going to be very similar to those of another down the street) the end-price is going to be not very flexible; and any eventual elasticity will just drive down consumption rather than price. The degree of availability of substitution options is a major influence. That's why even major supermarket chains operate with low single-digit profit margins, even on a product (food) where there is obviously a constant and high demand.

Compare that to software where no two offerings are direct substitutions (the degree varies, of course) and where one company can upset a market with new technology very easily without his competitors necessarily being able to duplicate (for skills reasons, legacy investments, ...). An incumbent can enter the market with fixed costs that are 75 or 50 or 25 percent of the established players. Such an incumbent can do two things: go deep on price to get market share, or get fat off 500% profit margins. I don't know of many such situations in physical goods businesses.

(of course the same could happen with physical goods, it's just much more common in technology)
Voting ring?
It would be cool if we could interact with the app via the tab. Example: I'm in another tab and can right click the pinned Pandora tab to pause the music.
Isn't this better? http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html
Lua's performance is dramatically better, and it has a more mature toolchain.

I'm interested in io, too, but I've had trouble even getting it to build on BSD.
It's not overly difficult to adjust your mental model of what a good rating is, and read the reviews people leave to see what the common complaints are.

It probably also depends on the area - my complex hovers around 70% and I didn't bother with anything below 50%.
Looking at human history, perhaps they are not so extraordinary after all.
Is African luxury a contradiction in terms?