skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shameless plug: we built http://www.kanbanpad.com because we wanted something simple and intuitive. Basecamp never fit our flow.
I would say it's because that's conventional, it's what users expect, it's what many applications expect perhaps most importantly having ACLs is just not that important. It's not necessarily that it's "easy to use an understand."

In Windows, it's there by default. I'm not claiming that windows is better or more secure, I am simply answering the question that was posed.
A single variable to control them all
The experience of an employee such as Aaron Patterson is pretty much irrelevant to the bottom line given more than two orders of magnitude difference between the number of employees and customers (~260,000 employess vs ~100 million wireless customers without counting landline, internet, and TV customers). [http://www.att.com/gen/investor-relations?pid=19251]

The fact that they are leveraging legacy business processes rather than reengineering them for the sake of aesthetics (keep in mind thtat even with reengineering Aaron would still be scanning his receipt and the person in accounting would still be dealing with a PDF and it doesn't cost them anything to use idle bandwidth because they own the pipe).

Don't misunderstand me, ATT doesn't get any of my money because of my past dissatisfaction with them. My point is that it is a mistake to misinterpret their webpage in the way the article does.

[edit] In fact the process of converting PDF's into faxes and back into PDF's makes a lot of sense from a document management standing because it will convert Aarons 2400 dpi 32bit scan of a Chili's receipt to the 100 dpi 1 bit image which is sufficient to do the job. Thereby reducing long term storage costs, standardizing the stored format, and almost certainly integrating with the initial portions of the office automation system which no doubt were designed to convert faxes from the field into digital documents for use by accounting staff.
If you should learn anything from reading tech sites it's this: Opt-in.

Always, always, ALWAYS Opt-in.

Using the names of others to promote yourself until they tell you to stop is unethical and possibly illegal.

This is a stain you can never cleanse from your business. Everyone will always say 'Loopt? Wasn't that the company that used other companies without the approval?' And that's if you're lucky.

Because it if goes any further and a company gets a bad name from this, it'll be 'Loopt? Wasn't that the company that destroyed the reputation of Company X?'

Saying you were 'trying to iterate on it' is not enough. Saying you're trying to fix it is not enough. You need to outright admit how wrong it was and publicly apologize to every company you did this to.
I find it downright wrong that Loopt is enriching itself at the expense of local businesses

It would be impossible for Loopt to enrich itself at the expense of the local businesses. A local business wouldn't take the deal unless they felt it was to their advantage-- unless it was a "win-win" scenario.

Let the businesses decide what's at their expense.
Computational biology. I had studied math and philosophy as an undergrad (after I finally got my stuff together) and had become interested in mathematical approaches to biological problems.
We're certainly trying to figure out how to make this work the best for businesses. Certainly helping better utilize resources is part of it, and so is driving repeat visits.
At 5:55 his "saying no to customers" mantra sounded eerily similar to 37signals http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php
Ad revenue, mostly.
When in doubt, use common sense.
Ask HN: Should I sell my side project?
Hello Everyone,

I'm currently in a very bad situation and I'm not sure what to do. I thought maybe someone could help me find a solution.

About two months ago I got in touch with someone who wanted to pay me about 5 grands to develop a software client which gathers ingame statistics of a game called "League of Legends" and eventually hire me later for developing a website to present some of those statistics. ( there was no payment in advance )

After working about 4 weeks fulltime, almost around the clock, I finally developed a client which does all the magic the customer asked for.

Well the client was working but the customer wasn't a programmer, therefore he paid only half of it and wanted an additional evalutation period ( about 2 weeks ) just to be sure everything works fine.

4 weeks later he still didn't payed the rest and I really got pissed off ( you know I really had to pay my bills and worked very hard to develop the client at a low price )

With those anger feelings I started to build my own statistics site ( www.lolstatistics.com ), it went Ok the first days but really took off within last 3 days. ( from 5k to 80k pageviews per day )

Okay now to my problems.

The guy who asked me to develop the software client responded finally

I showed him the website ( which just had 5k views at that time ) and he finally agreed to buy the site for 6 grands ( splitted into 3 rounds ) and pay the rest of the client

Now my pain is. I still haven't seen any money yet and he's already spamming on boards and communities to get "more" visitors.
I didn't gave him the site yet and he's already starting to ruin the sites reputation.

I also realized that I probably sold my first real successful site, underpriced

I worked hard on it, bootstrapped it out of nothing, I created the client, designed the website, did the marketing and took and still take all the risk ( as the site may be shut down by the vendor of the game )

A platform architect from the vendor recently sended me also a email and wrote "I recently dropped by your awesome new site and it certainly looks great" and he wanted to talk with me with me.

So what should I do ?

Should I cancel the deal with the customer and take the risk to keep the site running on my own ( I still need to pay my bills )
or should I sell it and take the money for the website and maybe also some maintenance work ?

And what about the risk that Riot Games ( the vendor ) could take legal actions ?

Can someone give me an advice please ?
Yeah my mistake there, sorry.
Of course, a lot of this is plain incompetence, but there is a security motive explaining why enterprises only support specific browser versions, even if it's an irrational one. Enterprises fear people will blame them even when the browser is at fault. Celebrity's AT&T account gets hacked? "ZOMG AT&T doesn't care about its users' data."

It's not entirely crazy either, when you consider how mainstream media and consumers perceive security incidents. The problem, though, is when enterprises tend to be overly conservative, not acknowledging "reasonable risk". And being out of touch with browser trends, ie assuming that only a particular version of IE is safe. (In this case, IE is probably required because the developers didn't know any better, but in other cases, an out-of-date understanding of browsers is the rationale for supporting only IE.)
I can't seem to get the service to work. The page loads but I get a blank screen. Oh well.
I am a little bit surprised Microsoft seems OK with this. I believe they still can take a stand and tell Skype management they are not going to get away with this.
Program IOS apps.
I agree but it's an irreversible phenomenon. Some people will balance online/offline better than others, but we will continue to adapt to the times we live in, and not to a sense of what is ideal.
with apologies to ESR: "with sharp enough eyes, all bugs are visible."

"the impact [is] negligible as long as you follow basic security practices and can recognize when something looks out of place" is a worthless statement, because the majority of users have repeatedly proven to be unable to do that (hence MacDefender, hence the largest families of malware on Windows being fake AV.)

it also makes it too easy to hand-wave away security threats. you got a trojan on your MacBook? you obviously weren't following basic security practices.
Sam-

There's no way this should be an opt out. Loopt is trading on the business's good name and offering a "deal" that doesn't exist.

It's inconveniencing the business and potentially damaging their relationships with customers to the benefit of Loopt.

It's just plain wrong and indefensible.

(Author of the original post.)
IPCC 'considering sending mirrors to space to tackle climate change'
I've sent apologies to the companies that were at all upset, and I apologize again here (and we're working to get the companies that are excited about this up and running as soon as possible). They've been understanding.

I think if we use the name of a business in a "Loopt users want a deal at Place X. If enough users express interest, Loopt will talk to the business owners to try to make it happen" that's ok. But we definitely shouldn't imply that a business has given any sort of consent before they have, and we shouldn't use their logo or images.
>I literally forgot there was non web-based CS work

Surely there's not much of it, not with everyone's toaster now getting IP6 addresses and heart pacemakers having built in wireless web servers. </sarcastic-hyperbole-masking-genuine-enquiry>
When it lands on mobiles (not really if, as past trends indicate it's just a matter of time with HTML5 standards), it will certainly be a good thing for optimising battery consumption in a standard way.
Absolutely, and I love riding the train in Japan! I'm just saying that the reason ridership has been stagnant is probably because Amtrak itself kind of sucks.

I would be all for privatization (which I'm normally not for), since they've done such a miserable job on all fronts.
Merely publishing these deals enriches Loopt at the expense of the business -- even if none of them take it.

Loopt is building a mailing list of people using the business's brand name and causing customer service issues for them.

I've forward to this to some friends in the payments space. This might be considered credit card fraud because they are also taking people's credit card numbers in conjunction with a service they can't commit to delivering.
I don't really want it to be glamourous. Keep it unglamourous, supply low, and demand high. It's good for prices.

Once it becomes glamourous we'll have no end of professional certifications, professional organizations, etc.

There will be no end to the red tape and little increase in price and yet more people attracted to it because of fame / money rather than enjoying the practice of the craft.
‪Recover deleted partitions using TestDisk in Ubuntu
http://idelit.com/
I'm not quite so confident about this idea. To me, all you will get are people voting for discounts at places they already frequent. This is not a good measure of what customers want, nor the prices they're willing to bear for these goods and services.

I may be willing to pay $3 for a latte from my favourite coffee shop... but you're damn right I'm going to vote yes on $1 coffee. Why wouldn't I? This is going to result in a lot of businesses needlessly offering discounts to existing customers for little discernible benefit. On top of this, it sheds no light on the effectiveness of pricing structures, since there's nothing in the system that encourages the discovery of pricing equilibrium.

I've spoken to a couple of business owners who have done Groupons - they see it as a marketing expense that seems to have greater returns than many traditional methods (coupons books, junk mail, etc). But Groupon works in a way that this idea does not: it gets new customers (whether or not they're good new customers is besides the point).
مشاهدة أهداف مباراة الأهلى والإسماعيلى 25-6-2011
اهداف مباراة الأهلى والإسماعيلى
مشاهدة اهداف مباراة النادى الاهلى والاسماعيلي
مشاهدة أهداف مباراة الأهلى والإسماعيلى 25-6-2011
تحميل تنزيل أهداف مباراة ماتش الأهلى والإسماعيلى اليوم 25 يونيو
اهداف مباراة نادى الاسماعيلى والاهلى مشاهدة تحميل تنزيل اليوم 25-6-2011 اون لاين
http://www.almstba.com/vb/t26573.html
Like 50,000 USD. About £31300.
This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor.

Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...)

So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut.

It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.
Yup. With a widget on the PC side to take the waves and shove them into Google.
>"Maybe I'm being too harsh on myself, but its hard to be proud of my work when every 30 minutes I have to lookup an example or reference of some part of an API, and then modify it for my purposes"

The time to invent something new is when it will take ten weeks to complete your project using existing technology or five weeks using new technology and it will take two weeks to develop the new technology.*

The wheel has already been invented, so there's no point in building your own hexagonal version - focus instead on what is important: shipping.

* Credit to Neil Stephenson
I think we need a consensus about measuring and defining hardness in the first place.
First question, probably the most relevant: what do you have on paper?
Is anyone else bothered by website designs like this one which have a fixed header like that, messing up the PgDn/spacebar style of scrolling by hiding some of the text?
Could be worse. AT&T let my mother-in-law sign up for service. She gets the modem, we set it up, blinking DSL light for days.

We call, after two hours on the phone they agree to send a tech out. Tech takes one look at the pole and says "you're too far from the office. They never should have let you sign up"
no contract; just an invoice and half of the payment for the client

Bests
max
I wonder about the <> never saw such a redirection for bash before. Is this a Mac trick? What should I RTFM?
The thing is that everybody says it. There are no real secrets to becoming successful.
Having something take over your PC is terrible user experience. Tradeoffs may be necessary, including some that degrade user experience if they can otherwise improve user experience.

UAC is, in principle, not at odds with equating good user experience with good engineering. It’s all about tradeoffs.
I wouldn't disagree that good engineering includes good user experience. But I would have thought that good engineering would include a bit more than that.
I found this article to be very poorly written, although it does makes some good points.

That said, I agree with pretty much all of what you said.
"The evolutionary basis for this is that the more things you find that break your world view, the more likely you will learn something to new that will positively effect your ability to survive."

This makes sense, but the "fitness" of such a trait (positive response to Wonder) will vary a lot depending on your circumstances. A positive response to Wonder might confer an evolutionary advantage if you're born into a middle class family in California in 1980. OTOH if you're born into a peasant society in 1580, being prone to long periods of daydreaming is probably undesirable!
Ask HN: Any alternatives to alcohol?
After getting better from pancreas inflammation, I'm still likely to keep my alcohol abstinence.

However I would like to experience the effects of it sometimes, so do you know any good and hopefully (more) healthy alternatives to it?
I always separate the person from the model. My criticism is of the model and the actions. The headline was to make a point as to how absurd what Loopt did is.

I have never met you, so I have no opinion on you. I know people who know you and they've said good things in the past.
"that was the only way to get into CS school"

Couldn't you just have gone into a community college and move on from there. It is a lot cheaper and lot of the professors are actually pretty good. If your grades are good you should be able to transfer into a decent 4 year college.
Thank you, Paul. I'm having a hard time reconciling the Loopt-haters with mere common sense. We have to remember this is the business world where (barring twisted government intervention) there is no profit without value created. Sam said it as well:

Obviously, it doesn't work for us unless it works for both of those groups [consumers and businesses]
China's Demography: The consequences of an ageing population
> The old standard file permission system is the default on most unixy systems because it's easy to use and understand

And that is exactly what makes it more secure than ACLs which are extremely complex and unwieldy to setup and manage.
Being liked is more than having a good personality
Since this is exploiting someone's brand to boost your own brand, I sure hope that the courts eventually rule it as trademark infringement.

Having said that, some businesses will likely go for this, and the legal penalties will probably be lower than your profits, so kudos!
The difference between great vs. good customer service is anticipation vs asking
Merely publishing these deals enriches Loopt at the expense of the business -- even if none of them take it.

That's not true. Unless this is genuinely valuable to enough businesses, it won't be sustainable. If too few businesses accept the offers made to them by buyers, the buyers will find the service useless and won't recommend it to their friends, and traffic will dry up.
The power of the brand with whom? Engineers or consumers?

I can guarantee that not a single person on my Skype contact list will be aware of this story; and many will probably have forgotten that MSFT are in the process of buying Skype in the first place.
Estonia wasn't really poverty-stricken.
You do not find that the unauthorized use of trademarks to lend credibility to an (unproven) business to be unjustly enriching? Or, as another poster pointed out, using the credibility of this trademark to gather subscribers for its own product?

I want to attribute this whole thing to Hanlon's Razor, but it's hard to believe that a bunch of professionals are so brazenly callous about the use of others' trademarks.
Bang on! Most people just want to be liked, if you go through the social motions of liking someone then they'll like you, if you share social norms with them even better.

Relate to their social norms and echo their values where you can with out compromising your integrity. Plato does a great job of talking about this with his Cave allegory, when you go back down into the cave you need to respect that in the cave remembering the names of the shadows is important, else you will be put to death. (Or in the real world have no friends).
Merely publishing these deals enriches Loopt at the expense of the business -- even if none of them take it.

How on earth is that? This is not an AdWords/web traffic model - Loopt does not make any money unless they can close a deal with a business. If Loopt really is what you say it is then it will go under as soon as they run out of cash, and you don't really need to worry about it so much, as it's just like any other bad startup idea.
نتائج الثانوية العامة بالكويت 2011 
نتائج الثانوية العامة بالكويت 2011
How I'd approach this problem:

1) Decriminalize & culturally normalize exploratory activities
2) Reform intellectual property law
3) Create a strong co-op/apprenticeship market that engages students from legal working age through college
Good UX engineering is good UX engineering. Software engineering / architecture / development in general is not necessarily the same.

An app can be beautifully engineered by have an awful UX. The inverse is less likely to be true (because bugs and obvious flaws like long delays and unresponsive UIs can quickly degrade UX), but still possible.
Unison works okay for me between laptop<->desktop. I don't think there are mobile clients, it is nowhere near as comfortable as dropbox, requires a crontab entry, and sometimes requires CLI intervention when there's a conflict.

But it's the best I have found to get folder-sync for sensitive stuff (my notes folder) without relying on a 3rd party for storage or security.
"[Unix permissions] were much better than what was available in Windows for the longest time"? Try DOS. Windows 1.0 - Me were never multi-user operating systems, which was largely the purpose of having permissions, until the world realised just what a mistake it is to have full, unguarded permission to your system files.

MS's first multi-user OS was Windows NT in 1993, which shipped with ACLs.
Funny thing...the startup where I'm working is about to face this exact situation. If the acquisition being planned does happen, I'll probably gross a few grand and that's it.

As the only software engineer in the startup I've apaprently been identified as a key person in the move. I'd like to think this gives me some leverage, it would take them 3-4 months to find a replacement and get them up to speed. It was my work on early customers and technology demos that helped land the deal, yet I feel like none of that is being recognized.

What would you do if you were me?
If the the post is accurate, it definitely hurts the business.

Suppose Loopt posts some deal, like this one with the bi-rite creamery, and then bi-rite is like "heck no!" What will the user think? They will think "bi-rite sucks, what the heck, those jerks aren't honoring their commitment. Dicks."

It is waaaay too much to expect users to have a thorough understanding of what's happening here.

Put another way: For myself, I like to underpromise and over deliver. Loopt here is making the promise, and then saying "Hey, so your users now have this expectation. It's your choice whether you meet it, which may not financially tenable, or fail to meet their expectations, damaging your brand."
>"and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet."

Right. There are ways to do it, but not any /good/ ones. Good here meaning "while still letting the software execute efficiently and without a ton of added complexity"
If we have a lot of users sign up for deals that don't go through, that hurts us a lot. That's the reason we pre-set the discounts at levels that make sense for each category of business, and why we're reaching out to businesses early in the process.

We're taking credit card numbers in the same way Priceline does for name-your-own price deals and Groupon used to when deals might not tip. Please let me know what your friends say, though.
So many of Google's products prove the contrary.