skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great recommendation for a startup looking to differentiate based on customer service.

I don't buy the implication that this isn't a great use of "executive time". I'm not the CEO, but I run a business unit and the buck definitely stops here. I still make time to:

- respond to random emails I pick out of our customer service email queue

- read all customer feedback submitted from the "feedback" tab on our website, and pick out any submissions that I think need special handling

- put my email address on many, if not most of the automated emails that get sent out, especially renewal notices and anything else we view as "really important". This usually generates a few hundred inquiries that I need to respond to, or route to another staffer

- troll social media looking for opportunities to perform random acts of kindness for our customers and prospects. This year I've sent t-shirts to Norway, a custom order of premium teas to Capetown, a box-set of books to Lincoln and many, more little gifts to surprise our customers.

- personally manage our primary twitter account, @hover to make sure it has a consistent voice and purpose. This account is in addition to the group-managed accounts we operate in support of the primary account.

So what's the pay-off? Why should a founder or leader be concerned with such trifling things? In the three years since making our commitment to providing real customer service (as opposed to lip service), we've built a culture where everyone understands what we each need to do to meet or beat customer expectations, and fix it when we don't. I don't think it hurts for my team to see me working alongside them helping customers and fielding inquiries day-to-day. The rest of my senior team works similarly and it really makes it easy to raise the quality bar when the leadership team is "walking the walk".

In our business, this extra efforts means that our renewal rate beats industry average by light years and our customer sat metrics are world-class.

(edit to fix formatting and some stupid grammar that crept in while I was distracted)
Even though Lunascript the reactive web language has been scrapped, Luna the reactive web Javascript framework is still plenty interesting. Building a web framework is much more reasonable for a prelaunch startup.

However, that's from a quora post written almost a year ago. We'll have to wait and see.
ICO = Information Commissioner's Office, apparently.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Commissioner%27s_Of...
Sounds like filing away some documentation when you do your taxes would be a simple solution to this annoying problem. But I'm not self employed, so what do I know.
Also;

http://www.question2answer.org/
Title of news paper article == "FIZZY DRINKS MAKE TEENAGERS VIOLENT"

Last sentences of news paper article == ""There may be a direct cause-and-effect-relationship, perhaps due to the sugar or caffeine content of soft drinks.
"However there may be other factors, unaccounted for in our analyses, that cause both high soft drink consumption and aggression.""

Frustrating that the people doing the research are being cautious about the cause / effect relationship and that's being ignored by the reporter. At least the newspaper mentions the journal, even though they don't link to it.
I would sign up, if that's any consolation :)

More generally, it's one of those things that you don't want to change if it works well. Maybe the best model is an short term contract (e.g. 3 or 6 months) which can roll into a multiyear contract.
Front page looks good, but I don't really like the popup format for the apps. It feels too cramped.
Agreed. But I'll just add one option that worked for me. I dropped out after the first semester. Then I found a job as a software engineer. In 4 years I'm a valuable senior java developer that everyone is trying to hire. Have I graduated? Yes, from the school of real-world software projects. I didn't have a startup business (well, I had one which failed, and I'm having one right now, on the side), but it was still a better option to drop out.

Btw, I signed up for a external program at the University of London so that I could still get a BSc without actually doing anything academic - so now I'm 24 with 4 years of real-life work experience and a BSc (not that I need it, but it's there)

So, perhaps it is better to summarize it that way: if you clearly see opportunities for yourself that are better than staying in university - drop out.
La tienda del espia
La tienda del espia - espia productos importador de cigarrillos electrónicos. Electrónica en el conducto, mini cámaras, grabadoras de vídeo, para los escarabajos
It seems to be one of those things the media and politicians repeated so many times that people started to accept it as truth. I still haven't seen a reliable link between a release and someone dying.
GTA 5 Announced
Nigeria-Biafra Civil War Made Jobs An Atheist
I thought you were joking till I checked:

19 staff/founders and 14 board/advisors? No wonder it took them 3 years to get to beta with a fancy to-do app -- too many cooks in the kitchen!

(on closer inspection, not everybody on the list has something to do with the app, they also list their chef, a "coordinator" (whatever that means), and recruiters and sales folks)

with all kinds of ex-FB and ex-Googlers (and an ex-Palantir and Yelp) including data scientists, mathematicians and machine learning folks, I have a feeling they must have more in store than what they show here:

http://asana.com/2011/05/new-asana-intro-video/

And which Trello does much better.

If not...this is way too heavyweight a team.

Oh, and a $9mil round.
I went to the link using safari and got the message:

"Sorry, we don't support your browser just yet."

Will the chrome web store _ever_ support other browsers? Seems like bad copy otherwise.
Selena Gomez Adopts a Dog with Justin Bieber | NEWS 365
Siri meets Eliza
Patio11 talking now at Business of Software
Here: http://businessofsoftware.org/
I use this formula instead.

10,000 emails x 0.1 ctr = 1000 leads
1000 x 0.02% sign up = 20 users

I want to make sure I got enough leads or first time users and assuming only 2% of my leads actually sign up. I want to still have a decent monthly recurring income.
Sounds like Freebase (http://www.freebase.com/).
Doing it 1000 times may show you a few ways that automation can screw that up.

Also you may see someone you know.
A jump address table could be even faster since it's not branching...
A fascinating idea is to use solar and wind power to power factories or mining/production sites that are in remote locations - often, that's one of the main limiting factors.

The main disadvantage of solar power is that it can't be used 24 hours a day, however besides the expensive batteries, solar power can be stored in other ways - for example, you can use every minute of idle time or free capacity to power compressors that pump air inside a few large tanks, and use that compressed air at night to power the generators.
Its not an engineering problem, its a customer service, business and relationship problem. I contend that the more you humanize these types of interactions, the better your results will be, the more you will learn. Look at it this way, 30 seconds to send each email works out to a bit more than 8 hours work to get some amazing customer feedback. Some organizations will spend this much time in planning meetings just to setup a discussion to strategize customer sat approaches. You can get the feedback for almost free. For me, its an easy choice! ;)
+1 to this response

I've recently been reading into making use of sprite sheets with Canvas apps, and the drawImage method makes using sprite sheets a breeze. You simply need to keep track of cellsize, number of cells, and your current cell.
World's First Spherical Flying Machine (VIDEO)
How to Design a Mobile Responsive Website
I wondered about that too, but I see that it does come with a bracket that covers the wall if you need it.
In python there's no such thing as a char, there's only single-character strings. The above would actually be doing 6 string comparisons. That may still be faster... or may not. Measuring is the only way to be sure.
I've mentioned this in another thread before, but Wufoo sent me a handwritten thank you note for being a (paid) customer one year around Christmas.

Now THAT made an impression.
here's their white-paper PDF: http://assets-www.nest.com/white_papers/efficiency-simulatio...

"The auto-away feature is based on algorithms that
interpret occupancy sensor data and provide a confidence determination of
whether or not the occupants are away from the home. When the confidence
level is high that occupants are away, the autoEaway feature makes a decision to
override the existing schedule to save additional energy"

it has sensors for movement, temperature, humidity, and light.
Lead acid batteries are 85% to 95% efficient. A good AGM is 98% efficient.

As a data point, I sized the batteries at my cabin to provide two days of power under total cloud (more than enough for getting to 24 hour solar power) and the batteries cost about half what the panels did.

(That discharges the batteries to 60% capacity. You also need to consider that the batteries will last about 6 years then get recycled. I mentioned AGM because they can charge much faster. If you are only interested in 24 power shifting, it might be cheaper since you'd need to buy more capacity in lead acid batteries to tolerate the charge rate. )
That's true. In my case I was not fired on the spot from a legal point of view. I had just to give up the keys, and my access to the company network was revoked, but legally I was still an employee for a while.

And maybe you are right about me being a potential entrepreneur. It's something that's in the back of my mind, but so far I didn't find a business idea.
Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?
You are ignorant about life, and a troll.

It would be best if you disconnected from the internet and get a clue.
If you want to learn Lisp from a more practical perspective, you should probably learn Racket or Clojure. Racket comes with excellent tutorials and documentation as well as an IDE with debugging, REPL, etc. You can read How to Design Programs to learn the basics of Racket (Racket started out as Scheme and still contains an implementation of standard Scheme). Clojure is an even more practice oriented Lisp. It is a bit harder to set up and get started with, but there are books on Clojure, e.g. Programming Clojure and The Joy of Clojure. Compared to Clojure, Racket is a bit more academic and has many advanced language features like contracts and first class modules, but is also has a good standard library. Clojure's strong points are functional data structures, concurrency and using generic operations (meaning that you don't end up with vector-ref and list-ref and hash-ref, but just a single function to index into anything). Clojure's syntax is also a bit terser.

If you then decide you want to learn Lisp more deeply:

How to Design Programs is a book that teaches basic Scheme programming. It is oriented towards beginners, so if you want to understand recursion, higher order functions and data structures this book is for you. Conversely, if you already understand those things, this book is not for you. http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum.html

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming is a more advanced and probably challenging book that goes through all aspects of recursion, data structures, symbolic mathematics, generic operations & implementing an object system in Scheme, continuations, writing a Scheme interpreter, writing a Prolog interpreter, and writing a hardware simulator and a compiler that compiles Scheme to that hardware's assembly language. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

While Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming all about code=data, it doesn't actually teach you about macros. For that you could read Paul Graham's On Lisp, which is essentially a whole book on macros. It is a good book to learn about macros which are useful in any Lisp but it uses Common Lisp which I'd not advice using.
Much more interesting than the early (over-) reactions we saw last week. This one puts Dart in a sensible context. Thanks
Sleep deprivation. Drunk people. Final exam stress.

Sleep deprivation and final exam stress is mostly our own making. If you use SRS and study regularly, I am sure the college life is no problem.
Starfall
Play STARFALL free online games, adventure games, board games, educational games, sports games and more on STARFALL.
Yes, NY seems to place the onus on you so they can attempt to turn up more tax revenue that was not filed by mistake. I moved from PHL to NYC in 2003 and when I filed NY state taxes in 2004, I got a bill for my estimated taxes in 2003 based upon my current income. They assumed that I had lived in NY in 2003 and had not filed any taxes even though it was not the case. I had to send them a copy of my 2003 tax return showing that I was 100% out-of-state and then they dropped it.

If you think about it from a programmer point of view, their system detected me perfectly (whether or not they should be doing this is a separate issue), and once it knew 2004 was the first year I was a state resident, it left me alone. If you are constantly getting these, I'd guess that something is wrong in your computer record, causing it to not see your returns and to keep going after you.
Like i said, the interface would be unusable small with 1920x1080 on a 13" device.
Another CPython quirk is that global (module-level) variables are looked up in a dict, but a function's local variables normally get a reserved chunk of memory that's directly indexable.
Come visit Ontario in January.
Bingo. I should have written "GC only uses it as a source of roots."
Node rules!
But, again, what do you say in an email that is personalized? Do you switch sentences around at random, change "hi" for "hey", forget a comma, replace a dot by an exclamation mark?

Responding to "it's a waste of my time to write the same email a thousand times" with "you should reply to each email personally" is moving the goalpost. The OP is about sending a first welcome email to every user that signs up, not about replying to an email sent for customer service or technical support.

I would never reply to a client using a canned response, I hate those with a passion. But the first email being sent, the client didn't send anything, doesn't know you or your writing style, didn't offer you any chance of customizing because it's just a "welcome to our service, thanks for signing up, I'm there if you need me" email. My point is, write it as if you would send it personally, but automate the actual sending.
While I'm pretty confident in humanity's current understanding of physics, I'm not that confident to say that given a million (more like several billion) years and Jupiter brains, we won't figure out a way out of whatever the fate (if there is one) of the universe is. The more important aspect however is how can I actually get to the point of living a million+ years? When I'm there I can argue over some supposed necessity or long-term inevitability of death; right now it doesn't have to be that way.
IMO this is probably one of the better coded HTML5 games out there

I genuinely have no idea how I can improve the quality of the code in this.

I won't jump to conclusions, but this attitude is kind of indicative of the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect) being at play, especially given that you seem to be blaming browser makers for your game crashing.

Even the very best programmers can think of ways to improve the quality of their code. In fact, they're more likely to find problems in their own code - that's part of why they're the best.

In any case, assuming you aren't suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect, can you mention what attempts you've made to narrow down the problem?

Have you tried disabling parts of the game (like rendering for example) to see if the browser still crashes? That would be a simple, albeit tedious, way of narrowing down where the problem is. Come up with a minimal crash case.

If you find a legitimate problem across all 4 browsers, then you can use that minimal case to demonstrate the problem and file a bug report. Or, more likely, you'll figure out what's wrong in your code this way and fix it.
I second this. In addition to this, I've never had a problem with them, and their customer service is great.
Coca-Cola Launches Mobile Payment System - Partners with Google
>Good design is not "pretty" and has very few, mostly indirect links with aesthetics.

Good design is 'not necessarily' pretty but what I consider pretty is not in the traditional sense. I did say that both Wikipedia and Google search are well designed sites. Good design to me doen't mean it has to look like Apple or Outlook.

For me, even though I know Gmail's interface, I can't look at it for nine hours a day. It feels like I'm working just looking at the site, much less accomplishing the goals I set out to do through mail. For me, good design keeps things simple and obvious until I need something more advanced. I feel like almost everything in Gmail is being thrown at me at once even if that may not necessarily be the case.

This doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people and it doesn't mean you're wrong in what works for you.

As an aside, I have a mother who knows nothing about technology. I had to set up her Gmail account for her and sometimes she forgets her password. She can't even use Gmail on the web. She can only understand Mail.app. I think she is representative of the average user.
SRS?
protip: setup a separate email account to this from
Show HN: Intelligent Social Media Management
Magnetic RAM could soon absorb and use waste heat
"Tube" in French (from France) also means "a hit" on the radio, a top-40 song. Plus, Tubalr has great Michael Oldfield resonance (Tubular Bells was the first record I ever bought). Ace name.
In theory, I think your approach is fine, but in practice, there will always be opportunity to personalize. If you are really motivated, you can google the person and see if something interesting comes up, or you might already know the person tangentially from a conference, or there was an issue with the order that your team had to fix (a great opportunity to reconnect with a potentially unhappy customer). etc. Sure, a number of them might be exactly the same, but many of them won't be if you commit to the exercise and look for opportunities to form a relationship with these clients.
Researching The Advantages Of Solar Electricity.
City of Columbia might alter rules for Skaters :( what dyou think?
Notice that all the lauded examples of "well, X dropped out and made it big!" entail X starting the business during schools and being so wildly successful at it that school was just in the way. Michael Dell was spending all his waking hours building PCs in his dorm. Gates was well on his way to selling DOS to IBM. Each had already gotten to where college helps you go.

Remember Gladwell's "10,000 hours" rule of thumb for success? THAT is what college is. 50 hours per week for 50 weeks per year for 4 years is 10,000 hours. You graduate from high school, and realize you haven't mastered a marketable skill[1] - so you sign up for a four-year boot-camp that will drag you, kicking and screaming, through your obligatory 10,000 hours.

Thing is, most the successful dropouts were already "practicing" well before they started college. Gladwell notes that Gates was putting in hours a day, for years, of programming before getting to college (at a time that programming required connections and money, being a motivated kid he was allowed free use at 4am). By the time they dropped out (perhaps long before), they already had their 10,000 hours in. A grade-school kid has opportunity for about 5,000 hours of "practice" available...and most use that time throwing balls or acting, building unmarketable skills.
I don't think (2) is correct:

You don't like to learn, and you need more money...Don't do it. Why? Because that stuff you learn you will need later on, and you will need it badly.

Of all the stuff I learned in college, I needed very little of it. This includes many classes I enjoyed. Most of it I've forgotten already. Not only that, I didn't even take the traditional college -> job route - I stayed in academia for 8 years after college.

Some of the many classes I took: medieval literature, women's studies, chemistry (3 semesters), population dynamics for environmental engineering, 2 semesters of economics, optics, and all of this is just the stuff I can think of. Most of my college experience was spent learning stuff I don't need to know and have now forgotten.

Stay in school for the sheepskin so that you can signal conscientiousness to the world. But focus on networking, not learning. Most of what you learn is a waste of time.
I suppose spritesheets would making loading time faster since there would be fewer files. But other than that, it's just a neat way of organizing sprites, which can also be managed with a good naming convention tying together related sprites. Is there any other reason to use a spritesheet?

Well, if you're using dom-based animation, spritesheets also work better for animations since it's much faster to adjust background-image-position in a div, compared to just replacing the background-image.
CL's generic functions are not a superset of message passing, and neither is message passing a superset of generic functions. Message passing allows an implementation of doesNotUnderstand or noSuchMethod or similar, whereas generic functions don't.

Not that I think that is a good trade-off vs all the advantages of generic functions. Besides, the things people accomplish with doesNotUnderstand are much better accomplished with macros anyway.
A Q/A site, like forum software, is not something that you can move away from easily once you have content in it

Why not? If it has a decent API it should be easy.
Five Basic Ways to Generate MLM Residual Income
I'm thinking about adding a set of features that allow you to register, login, and favorite songs. Maybe when you favorite songs they can also be "scrobbled" if your account is connected with last.fm.
A lot of students spend 2-4 years "trying to figure out where I'm going and what I want to be". Insofar as they haven't figured it out, and won't figure it out in that time, perhaps best if they take some time off and stop spending huge piles of money they don't have getting to where they don't want to go.

To wit: the First Law Of Holes is "stop digging".
Hehe, thanks for the correction; that's one of my "gotcha" misspellings that, despite knowing how often I get it wrong, I still write incorrectly nonetheless! :)
I agree with this. I left school because I realized what I wanted to do and it WASN'T I.T. administration.
I didn't want to end up at a huge corporation wearing a suit and hating my life.
Now I work doing what I love and I'm learning a lot from others using hands on experience.
Eventually I will start my own business which is what I truly want.
If you have a vision and the motivation; and you know you can do it without school, go for it.
Javascript template engine inspired by the Razor view engine
So This Is How Nokia N9 Is Made [video]
"Expression" as the author defines it seems to be very narrow. Users of Photoshop or InDesign or Illustrator or Maya or Logic or Premiere Pro most definitly do express themselves, even though they are operating a GUI. GUIs are widely used for expression. Does the author want to suggest that CLIs would better serve the needs of all who want to express themselves?