skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am of the opinion that businesses are defined by how they handle the exit of customers more than by how they handle take-on of customers. A customer being difficult to manage or not profitable still deserves a professional exit.

These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable". In my experience, a user simply being "stupid" doesn't in itself mean that you shouldn't work with them - in fact, often with a little bit of work, they might even become a reasonable repeat customer.

Like a lot of people who have had customer facing roles, I have enjoyed reading notalwaysright (and the older http://customerssuck.livejournal.com/). But I have found over time the postings to have become more deliberate funny-making or actually problematic from an equality point of view.
I think the metaphor is mostly lost on people who have never taken a business loan. Generally banks don't like lending money to companies purely to cover normal operational expenses. If you simply have cash-flow issues then a line of credit/overdraft is better. If you can't meet your costs out of income, then you want to either reduce costs or find an additional equity injection, not take a loan. Traditionally loans are for things that will grow the business, with a clear path to being able to repay it out of the additional income generated as a result. Obvious examples are buying expensive new equipment to let you produce something you sell at a greatly reduced cost, or opening new retail outlets.

The business world has a fairly well developed set of nuances around whether the debt a company has is good debt or bad debt. AIUI Ward's original point was simply that the "all debt is bad" approach doesn't work in business, and shouldn't be applied in so blunt a manner to technology either. Sometimes it's worth going into some debt now to achieve a future benefit. But, a business should be just as careful with its technical debt as its financial debt: only going taking it on with a clear (and well measured) path out again.

But, as you say, like pretty much any metaphor, stretch it too far, and it falls apart.
Life inside Camp Bastion: The biggest military city in the world.
And how many non-geeky users know what a hard drive looks like?
No, the version that I'm using doesn't seem to support this so I duplicate the layer and work on the copy.

As for slowness, it depends on what kind of retouching you are doing. I'm retouching mobile graphics assets, which are small enough and I haven't seen any lags.
I image that things are very different when working with high quality photos...
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...

He explains that there was a valid reason for not being able to pay the bills (I.E. PayPal having a problem). This* then suspended all of his accounts (Including the ones that had already been payed for) and, from the looks of it, were very unhelpful in resolving the situation.

Yes, if the PayPal payment didn't come through the domains should probably have been suspended as they hadn't been payed for, but not the entire account and certainly not denying access to backups
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Isn't that pretty much...what he did?
Everyone using WWW in their URL? Look at the address bar right now. :)
The rich don't open tiny shops down town. The people who got looted were the hardworking poor.
Videos + Automated grading.
> I find file permissions just an annoyance

Maybe for you. However Mac OS X does manage them well for you, which means that you can set up limited access and guest accounts on your computer without worrying about someone fucking it up or looking at your shit.

> IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this.

I mentioned it because the products sparked a revival of the Apple brand in consumer's minds. But yeah, now you mention it, the technology did do a great job of scaling down to the phone. BeOS might have been fine too, but hey, Palm chose a Linux kernel instead.

We're discussing could-have-beens, which is pointless.

> there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk?

With that line of argument, there's been nothing new in computer languages for thirty years.

I'm sure you love your BeBox and spend your life porting stuff like Firefox to Haiku, but as cool as BeOS was on the surface, the world has past it by. Stop lamenting what could have been, there's no interesting arguments to be had there.

> i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit

Whereas giving too much credit to experimental failed projects like BeOS isn't?
Its not like we're each getting attention from the teacher. Probably more like a series of lectures in a big hall. :)
I took a look at the ones already online and downloaded them a while back. Also went through Khans stuff on the areas you mentioned after i realised i needed just a refresher on a few of the areas. After the refresher following the lectures was much easier.

I did a bachelors and a masters in comp-sci at usyd and unsw in aus, it was good but i remember not getting into the depth that the stanford lectures did so im quite excited to get back into it. Also decided to take some time of work to work on a few of my own things so got alot of time to have fun with the materials.

BTW thanks to standford for this material, its totally awesome :)
Now if only they had OS and Compilers :)
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The article makes a great case that Motorola is the real winner.

The buyout can't have been solely for the patents, because Motorola are losing patent battles. It's unlikely that it was just to own a phone manufacturer, because why buy a 3rd rate one at a 60% premium? So why? Because Motorola had Google by the balls and could have further fucked Android up for everyone else.

It's a shame how every discussion of a Daring Fireball article here collapses into 'Gruber is a fanboy', but it's particularly frustrating when it's an insightful article like this one. If he's half as bad as some of you make out, it should be easy to argue the points without resorting to attacking the man.
It was just an explanation of why the CSS syntax in the examples is ugly. By all means hack away.
It appears like you haven't got very many incoming links to your site yet. Naturally I'm not an expert on optimizing your site, but I would guess that organic search engine traffic should be a major source for you.

For example, I tried googling "books barack obama has read", and you site didn't show up in the first few pages. If I were you, I'd be more concerned about the search engine ranking than optimizing a facebook fan page.

In short: find out ways to get relevant links pointing to your site.
Help for a trip to San Francisco
>there was a valid reason for not being able to pay the bills (I.E. PayPal having a problem) //

It's an excuse, but it's not payment. Continuation of the contract would presumably require payment. A clients inability to pay ends their right to receive service.

Sure a larger company can usually manage to give grace in such situations (but often won't) but small businesses, as this appears to be, seem to suffer a lot more with cash flow problems.

So the story goes:

1. customer doesn't pay

2. customer and friend argue that not paying shouldn't get their account suspended

3. customers friend tells company to FOAD (or whatever)

4. company terminates all services

5. customer and friend start internet campaign

I'm really struggling to see how the company are supposed to have acted so badly - is it really considered such a crime to not let people have service without rendering payment?

Of course, as ever, there's a lack of detail as to the amounts left unpaid and the nature of the PayPal issue and so none of us should really be offering ludicrously emotional and dramatic judgements about either party.
and on that $2.95 your profit is $1.50 a month ... that doesn't buy a lot of "taking shit".
> Does the current version of GIMP finally support non-destructive editing (adjustment layers)?

Layer effects are planned for Gimp 3.2.
http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap

It will be achieved by integrating the GEGL library (http://www.gegl.org/) which enables the use of OpenCL acceleration (http://www.khronos.org/opencl/).
It's Time For HP To Throw The Long Bomb And License WebOS
I did a lot of training over the years, and this reminds me of the "three levels of mastery" I used to go on about.

"See one; Do one; Teach one"

You have to see it done first, then you have to do it yourself, finally, you have to teach it to others.
has the traffic that you've received so far translated into any actual affiliate business for you?
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I've found that the multi-window mode feels best when you're using a Linux window manager that allows you to move a window by holding a modifier key and clicking anywhere on the window.

But if you can's easily grab and move the floating palettes around, using the GIMP becomes more of an exercise in window positioning than in image manipulation.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the specifications seem to be almost the best around.

At that price-point, some thing like the battery life might not be very good, especially with such a high-clocked processor, but it seems to be a quite reasonable design from the pictures, not counting the buttons, I prefer hardware buttons.

I don't own an Android phone right now, but I am definitely considering buying a Xiaomi Phone, and if you can actually import it at that price, well, then it is competing with phones like the Wildfire S. Which may make it quite a nice high-end phone popular with geeks and developers, befriending those groups is always important.
The CIA hardly need exert itself to create crazy, unfounded rumors on the internet.
Having a fan-out directory instead of putting all files at the root would have helped to avoid this problem altogether.

Here's an example. The .git/objects/ directory can grow to have up to 256 sub-directories. If an object hashes to 0a1b2c3d then it gets written to objects/0a/b2c3d. Lookups are still fast and navigating can be done without resorting to writing an 'ls' replacement.
I don't think that's the issue, the issue was that they suspended accounts and sites that had already been payed for, and the only payment method the company offers is PayPal so there was no reasonable way for the customer to pay the outstanding ballance immediately (About $5 from the looks of it). He also offered proof that the small outstanding ballance would be payed within a couple of days.

Yes if it was +$100 maybe more serious action should have been taken, but it was just one domain on an account that, up to that point, had never had any issues with payments before (I'm assuming that but the support guy is so defensive I'm sure it would have been brought up before now). Even so there is no reason to just straight out cancel someones entire account without even contacting them, for all they knew the payment could have gone through without a problem.
C/C++ calling conventions demystified
This is false in at least the commonly understood case, you can elect to be treated like an S-Corp under an LLC and receive a salary and keep your SEP-IRA among other things.

The obligation to be 1099 is the default case for single-proprietor LLCs but can be overcome as I described above. It is not necessarily the case for multiple-member LLCs.

FYI:

I am not a lawyer, but I have done all this before.
Which version of ad hominem is this?
What do you perceive as the downside? Do you have strong alternatives?
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You know, SpaceX has made such a huge difference to launch costs, that it is imaginable that the US could do a solo Mars mission. To give a real-world example (well, sort of):

Juno was recently launched aboard an Atlas V, which launches for roughly the same price as the Falcon Heavy will in a year or so's time. Juno gets placed into an orbit that will take it out beyond Mars' orbit, before returning to the Earth for a gravity-assist flyby. The flyby is necessary to double the payload that they could otherwise send to Jupiter.

Falcon Heavy can left 3 times the payload of an Atlas V, so Juno could have increased in size, and avoided the 2 and a half years it will take to execute the Earth flyby manoeuvre, all for the same price. Alternatively, a spacecraft 3 times the weight of Juno (which weighed in at 8000 pounds / 3500Kg) could be sent direct to Mars.

What could you do with all of that? Well, the Mars Direct mission requires about 140 000kg, to be assembled in orbit. That's about 14 Falcon Heavy launches, which has a total price tag of about US$1.4 billion. Of course, on top of that there are in-orbit assembly costs, and the costs of the actual Mars-bound hardware, - which would roughly double the price tag to US$3 billion. Without Falcon Heavy, that mission cost is doubled to US$ 6 billion.

I wonder what Juno would have looked like if it had three times the payload to play with...
Here is another useful reference which discusses __cdecl and __stdcall: http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/win32-callconv-asm.html
Yep, a company that only uses patents defensively (Google, so far) would have nothing to lose by invalidating software/business patents as a whole.
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We're comparing things they did do, though, so that's not an option.
The biggest problem I have with GIMP is that it's not intuitive. Every time I open it I have to stop and think how I am supposed to do what I am trying to do, my work never flows.
This has such an impact on my productivity that I'm desperately looking for alternatives that don't involve purchasing Photoshop - now looking at Pixelmator. Other members of the team have switched to Paint.NET or other simple editors, but they are too simple for me.

Another problem that I have is with focus - sometimes the picture window loses input focus to one of the tool windows and then the keyboard shortcuts stop working. I have to click on the window and then use the shortcut, but when clicking the current tool will execute its action (such as paint a black blob in the middle of the layer), so I have to click outside the picture area (might be hard to do) or hunt for the title bar.
Furthermore, when the tool windows have focus they control some of the widgets in the tool window, popping up subwindows or changing settings by accident.

Yet another issue is text editing and selection. GIMP does not allow me to do live text-editing, instead it pops up a dialog box and I have to adjust the actual text rect in the background. Every time I click the text rect to adjust it the tool windows flicker into view for 0.5 seconds, very annoying. Selections are significantly harder to control compared to Photoshop, where you can do pretty much anything to a selection just by using the mouse and one or two keys.

General UI problems:

* dialogs that are too small

* dialogs popping up over other dialogs

* many dialogs that cover the image when shown and I have to move them out of the way

* dialogs that sometimes remember their position, sometimes show up at apparently random locations

* tool windows exiting the screen

* tool fields that just look like they were thrown together without any thought to spacing, grouping and alignment (check out the rectangle select or the almost invisible spinner arrows for the layer transparency)

* the layers tool window is especially difficult to use with a mouse (dragging & dropping, ordering, linking)

* tools that reset their settings (e.g: move tool rests to pick a layer to move instead of move active)

* general disregard for UI design that makes the UI look crowded (e.g layers tab icons)

* the design choice of clipping layers to the visible image area, forcing you to resize the canvas and the layers unnecessarily

I could go on and on and on. I can't remember using GIMP even once without being annoyed by something in the UI that breaks my work flow.

The features I miss the most are adjustments layers, layer grouping (this is so painful when working with a lot of layers).
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Technically you are not allowed to provide fake information, although you may use an identity proxy as long as they provide the means to contact you in case of a dispute. In reality, enforcement of valid identity information is essentially non-existent.
As a long time iPhone fan I can for the first time see myself considering an android phone. I trust google will do a far better job of delivering a quality product that will be properly supported throughout it's lifetime.
I googled for 10 minutes to work out how to pre order this phone, a website, something, anything. It's all just stuff about the MIUI ROM or news about this phone.
$12.5 billions for Moto, $4.5 billions for Nortel, that's actually more like 17 billions.
I think vinyl was still sufficiently popular for most folks in their mid-twenties to recognize it. I'm 25, and several of my grade school classrooms had record players, not to mention all the homes of my parents, their friends, and our extended family.

But as far as I can tell, few folks born in the mid-80s had significant direct experience with records, to the point where there were cultural references to our ignorance. In particular, I remember a sunday morning comic strip when I was young that centered around kids not being able to identify a record player. We were right on the cusp of its obsolescence.

To wit, I couldn't tell you the difference between a 33 and a 45 (well, it's rpm, but are they different sizes?), and I've never owned music on vinyl.

I'd wager that people born in the 90s would be the first to be completely unaware of the origins of the record scratching sound.
I'm not a supporter of Ron Paul and I understand the media will always spin the news one way or another, but when all media outlets openly collude to censor, say a particular political candidate -- no matter the reason -- it's terrifying.

Such an incident is a move from reporting the news to creating the news, and should not stand unchecked and unchallenged. Such an incident is a clarion call that should spark a major uproar, but sadly we know that it will only serve to upset a handful: the last in America to care about the freedoms that once made it great.
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What is so secret about it?
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Do you have different icons in Word, too?
Travel and accommodation costs are the downside. For two founders this could easily go upto 5K. Plus DEMO has an attendance fee. We are looking to understand what sort of return of investment we should target in terms of user acquisition if we are to put in this investment.
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But the displayed URL is truncated with an ellipsis at the end. The OPs URL is likely long enough to trigger that. Sometimes a long URL is all you want to share, but that is now impossible to do. A tweet saying "http://hotchickswithstubbedtoesmakingsexfaces.com/ exists" is a decent tweet, but a tweet saying "http://hotchickswit... exists" isn't as good. And sure, you can mouseover to see the full link, but that's balls.
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"will be available for pre-order on August 29th for October delivery"

Maybe the websites will come up by then.
yeah.. but very minimal. out of curiosity, why do you ask?
Thanks for the advice. I checked out your blog and your new site. Good luck.
Photoshop is necessary, but in my experience CS3 is usually adequate. CS5 only becomes necessary due to lock-in.

I use GIMP whenever possible. That's maybe 50%. The UI is maddening, but this is a big step in the right direction:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890397
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As a counterpoint, I have heard complaints about the Chinese political regime from a number of Chinese students here in the Netherlands.

Yes, I have also run into those who see no problem with (or even approve of) the censorship.

But there are more than enough dissidents.

EDIT: changed "oppression" to "Chinese political regime" as it more truthfully reflects my experience with Chinese students.
I was referring to the lack of SMP support in gzip (see http://www.zlib.net/pigz/).
Why does Y Combinator censor small blogs and not big ones?
Even if the content is just as good if not better on the smaller less traffic intensive or well known blogs? Are they not allowed to post here?

Is there some sort of a deal where if you pay Hackernews or just by virtue of being a popular site that spams links all over the internet they allow you to post unlimited amounts of links here without the worry of getting put in a blacklist filter? While if you aren't a super popular site you basically aren't allowed to post up even one link a month and if you do you get permanently blacklisted?

Honest question