skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I expect from customer support
1. I expect you hear what I'm saying (or typing), and not ignore the essence of it.

Example: If I say "I want to cancel my account", you cannot respond: "I understand you are having trouble with your account." That's not what I said.

2. I expect that you respond in a timely manner.

Example: I do not have time to wait for 4 minutes between IM messages from you. And you certainly can't hang up the chat if I take 3 minutes to respond to one of your messages if you keep taking 4 minutes.

3. I expect you to remember what I said earlier in the conversation.

Example: if you ask me for the last order number, and I give it to you, you cannot ask me the same question again 2 minutes later. In particular you can't do that if it's a text chat and all you need to do is scroll up.

4. If I ask for a supervisor, you need to connect me to a supervisor.

Example: You cannot pretend that you didn't hear that, or claim that they can't help me. At the very least, they can listen to what I have to say about their employee or their process.

Is that too much to ask? I'm not even asking for competence, or friendliness, or that you apply what you learned in emphatic response class. Just that you don't drive me insane!

(All of the above just happened in a 45-min, unsuccessful chat with Skype support. I was attempting to close an account and refund a cash balance. I would have posted the entire transcript but their web chat app deletes the transcript as soon as the chat is over. To protect the guilty I'm sure.)

The January 2012 Worst Customer Support Experience goes to Skype. Congratulations, it's an accomplishment.

P.S. The account is still open and I still don't have a refund.
I'm just speculating here, but another option is that one of the entrenched players with millions committed notices the success of Dr Chrono with smaller clinics and decides to acquires them to get a leg up on the competition.
How Do You Look When Merging Fails ;-)
MakeLeaps - A Shortcut Through Japan's Invoicing Red Tape
I'm curious about the RFS's: Is YC still looking for responses to all 9? Are there any in particular you feel have been met, and any that have disappointed in solutions?
His point is wrong, then. Does he think that in the 70's there weren't COBOL programmers hacking out yet another set of flat-file database systems? So garbage collection is a solved issue - thank God - it just seems like he's quitting his job as patent clerk because everything's been invented already. And that's just not close to true. It's never true.
Google app engine is listed in the comparison chart (scroll to the right if your screen is too narrow). Amazon EC2 isn't a PaaS it is an IaaS and that is why it isn't covered in the roundup.
I absolutely loved the humorous tone!

I reckon some integration with social networks could be a good way for you to gain some leverage. People would be able to tag the friends they'd like to bang and see who would bang them back. I think curiosity would send some traffic your way, especially because there's a natural virality to your app if you approach it that way.

The best of luck, and please keep us updated on how things develop!
Open-book exams should be ridiculously difficult, as they are intended to test understanding rather than rote memorization. Anyone can memorize a formula; figuring out when and how to use it is what the class should be teaching.

Similarly, in a programming class, the exam should not be testing whether or not you've memorized the Java boilerplate code. Sure, if you use it enough you will memorize it, but that's not what makes a good programmer. Either provide the boilerplate or let the students look it up; the focus should be on solving the problem.
Being such an influential product for the "tech scene" (I've never really seen its benefit over visiting only a couple of blogs, they all cross-link anyway, but I digress), surely there'd be lines of highly talented young designers queuing to get the opportunity to redesign Techmeme for free?

I know sites have to make money, but the sponsored area detracts massively from the main stories and is the main area of focus, the page doesn't scale well at all, the font's too small and the characters are too close together.

In a world where The Verge and TechCrunch will cover (I'm guessing) 80% of the stories featured on there, there has to be something compelling to get people scanning, and I don't think this redesign is it.
The moment you hire someone who is average or doesn't fit, the entire work force degrades gradually.

I agree, as long as you're talking about a socially conservative work force. There are plenty of companies comprised and tolerant of unique people. This doesn't make anybody "average," either, and I'd venture that the less tolerant of outsiders a workgroup is, the more average they are. They're certainly insulating themselves, regardless, which can't be good in the long run.
CANVAS/FLASH-powered 3D anaglyph and animated GIF creation tool from NYPL Labs
You are correct, if you include addon's. If you don't include addons it is tied with dotCloud.
Twitter Will Censor Certain Tweets In Certain Countries
Is it possible to say goodbye to all the buttons and replace them with UI gestures?
Sadly, I've been that person. I read pg essays, blogs about programming and watched various videos about programming for about 3 years before finally deciding to leave my relatively comfortable small-business as an EFL cram-school partner and start actually coding stuff. People have been absolutely amazed by how little I know compared to how much I sound like I know.

Fizzbuzz wouldn't have filtered me out of getting my first (and current) real software job, but any sort of Google/MS-style interview would have. It may not be the wisest thing to admit to on the internet, but I'm basically in the opposite boat of your general target on HN: I'm fine with selling, but limited (non-EFL) skills to sell!

That, along with seeing numerous senior iOS dev applicants struggle both with Fizzbuzz and with Macs in general, has convinced me that it's more than worth it to test candidates without code portfolios.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt
In an office LAN using MSVC, I've had good experiences with http://www.xoreax.com/

Apparently, they have a make solution as well http://www.xoreax.com/make.htm
You have sleep doctors in the US? seriously?
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I look forward to seeing the revamped job search UI. This really could be a great resource for founders looking for top-notch talent, and employees who are excited about working for startups.
I think a lot of the indie games that have come out the in past several years have been at least interesting and in some cases, innovative. Look at those like world of goo, minecraft, braid, space chem, sanctum, etc.
The golden age of everybody's discovery is high school, man. There are plenty of unsolved problems, you just don't have endless afternoons on your parents' dime to force yourself to think about them. Learn to think about them again, and you'll have some more golden experiences.

Also: there are seven billion people out there. It has always been an illusion to think you're the best at anything or even that you're the first - it's just that we can see everybody else more clearly now. But ignore that; simulate, if you will, the absence of the Internet from your emotional point of view. Go where your heart takes you, and you'll find what you want.
Clear: the todo app with the UI the iPhone was built for
One of my linode servers was compromised and was used to originate such attacks. Linode proactively shut down the machine after a 24 hr notice period.

Unfortunately, I wasn't expecting this, so I missed their email and only realized the problem once my linode was offline.

I wouldn't be thrilled about either linode OR amazon
Finance professor: In finance you calculate "Net Present Values" of project and you take every project with an NPV > 0, if they aren't mutually exclusive.

In this case it is arguably a scale problem. You have the company being only able to concentrate on one thing at a time, and even though the product is profitable with NPV > 0, there are better projects out there to take with an even bigger NPV, even if the rate of return might be reduced.

It's kind of like you have a block of land, do you want to setup a park that charges money to enter or build a skyscraper? The park has a 200% rate of return and the skyscraper only 15%.
I wouldn't think that 404 makes any sense for PUT, no. Similarly, "410 Gone" would be a confusing result, at least.

I did mean "POST" in paragraph 2, yes. Thanks. :)
Snide comments aside, I think you're missing a lot of value in slides 26 through 34, the section on communication. Reducing the 'spin-up' time for new employees and documenting even the one-off conversations seems like a great way to increase productivity.
> Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology?

I think that most medical technologies, at the least, can be considered purely defensive. Ie, a mobile defibrillator or penecillin.

Then again, inventions like spray-on bandages increase the effectiveness of an army, which would aid in offensives. But I think the inventor of any such spray-on bandage would agree that the benefits to humanity outweigh the fact that armies can march a little longer with the invention.

So I think there's probably a large class of inventions that have humanitarian uses that "outweigh" the military ones from a general conscious perspective. Spray-on banadages, canned food (which may have allowed Napolean to conduct more and greater expeditions than he would otherwise), etc.

Aside, there have been many purely war-motivated or wartime-motivated inventions that have gone on to aid the public at large. (See for instance the history of the tampon, or the history of canned food).
You are exposing your Wordpress config in plain text, including DB password and various salts. Please make sure to change your DB password and the salts before you go back online.
It's been there for several years at least.
This sounds like a mess to keep proper tax records for. Assuming nobody's giving receipts on either side of the transaction, how do you keep proof of what price you paid and what price you sold for? Audits aren't that rare.
Show HN: ChatFor.Us (very much in development)
How Many Lumia Sales? Nokia (and Microsoft) ashamed to reveal number.
I looked into Drchrono when I was looking for work last year. I turned away because I found the iPad-centric strategy obnoxious and short sighted. The iPad is a wonderful device, but any company that builds their entire strategy around their love of a device has dangerously blurred vision and a horrible risk (one adverse decision from Apple you're done). Besides which, the last thing healthcare needs is more walled gardens and information silos.
It was good some time ago but ever since the rumors of iPad started coming out every second headline has been about apple. The other half is about google, twitter or facebook. No diversity at all.
The nonprofit that is behind the B corporation initiative has this to say about legal liability:

Will the B Corp legal framework create additional liability for our Board of Directors and officers?

It is the opinion of our attorneys that adopting the B Corp legal framework to expand the definition of
the ‘best interests’ of the corporation should reduce the liability for Directors and Officers by creating
legal protection (called ‘safe harbor’) for them to take into consideration the interests of multiple
stakeholders when making decisions, particularly when considering financing and liquidity scenarios.
Adopting the B Corp legal framework will, however, give shareholders additional rights to hold Directors
and Officers accountable for taking into consideration these same interests when making decisions ‐‐
and that of course is the whole point.

From the FAQ for investors and directors: http://www.bcorporation.net/resources/bcorp/documents/FAQs%2....

In your particular scenario involving SOPA/PIPA, the company's executives can straightforwardly claim that they acted in good faith to promote the interests of the broader business sector that they are a part of, and thus they would not be liable for their actions.
Thats a really pretty illustration of the concept that "failed" designs are the most important part of the journey to the one that works. They've certainly explored a vast number of disparte approaches, excited to see where it ends up.
This helper + the PhoneGap network event monitoring would make this indispensable for a bunch of projects. I know I would love it. Anyway I can 'tip' your work?
Yeah, but even that Wang calculator was all about snapping pieces together - how much soldering did you have to do to get your quadratic equations to work?
I pretty much finished the basic design and available functionality last night. It's still very much untested by anyone except myself. Just looking for a little feedback and some people interested in giving it a go.

To join the beta please follow @chatforus on Twitter and let me know there. You'll want to log on to chatforus as well to establish an account so that I can flag it for beta as well. Later I'll write up an app that will make that not necessary.
10-4, thanks for the response. Congrats, and best of luck.
Looks like a very interesting approach to me given the recent developments.

Still I have a few questions regarding your numbers. Can you specify how much data you actually stream from disk? Because when doing some back of the envelope calculations (8 columns out of a 1.8B rows assuming 4b each) you would need to stream ~300MB/s from disk. Which seems very unlikely for your setup (except you have a super fast SATA drive, or SSD).

Now, with only 4GB RAM, your are constantly filling your RAM and transporting data to GPU. Plus you need to compress the data somewhere (on GPU?).

Do I understand the manual.txt correctly, that you can only achieve the performance when the data is written compressed to disk before? (While sorting it?)

I may be wrong, but the group by and join looked like versions requiring sorted data.

Can you please give a little more details on that?
'Another such victory and I am undone.' -- King Pyrrhus
I recommend these two books:

- Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites by Martin L. Abbott & Michael T. Fisher

- Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications [Paperback] by Cal Henderson

I think they are the best resources I have found about the topic. If you are using .Net, like me this is book has good tips as well:

- Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Build Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server by Richard Kiessig
Well, they did what they could. La Quadrature Du Net is a French site that also publishes in English. We should be glad that we could learn about this development.
Were they rejected at the application or interview stage?

Have you had many groups accepted after being rejected at interview stage?
I run my ruby apps (sinatra and rails) on heroku and scale with a couple mouse clicks.

You can also run a ton of other languages on heroku now too.
Here, you're gonna want this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
Roundabouts typically take up a bit more room. You would need to cut chamfers off (demolish and rebuild) the corners of buildings at junctions to make enough room for a roundabout that's more efficient than traffic lights.
We seem to get more and more who have. It hurts your chances slightly, but we wouldn't turn down a company just for that.

There are a whole bunch of things in that category (being a single founder, cofounders who won't quit their jobs, still being in school, etc). We wouldn't reject an application for having just one of these qualities, but when an application has several it starts to tip the balance to no.
It's not just arbitrage, he's providing pickup and delivery services as well. That alone is valuable.
Yeah, that's pretty much the way I see their future as well.
Can someone explain what exactly he meant by "throttling the google bot"?
> If you care to read a little ways up the thread you'll see that the parent was replying to the assertion that "drivers do pay for roads in the form of gasoline taxes".

Way to miss the point.

> Incidentally, registration fees are there to cover the cost of the beaurocracy overseeing the registration

They do more than that.

> sales tax brings in about $235 million (based on 1 car per 2 people, replaced every 10 years, selling for $15,000).

Cars are sold more often than every 10 years, the average new cost is more than $15k, and I wrote "car stuff" for a reason. There are a lot of taxed car stuff purchases other than "car sales". And, I didn't even mention other taxes on biz providing car services and purchases.

If you're going to argue that someone isn't properly accounting....

> Also, the fact that there are more car users actually doesn't tell us anything about which way the net flow of money goes

Net flow doesn't have the properties that your argument requires.

The subsidy argument says that folks who get deliveries by truck don't pay for the full cost of truck delivery in their direct payment for truck services. So, when a no-car-truck-delivery person pays a subsidy, they're actually just paying for the indirect truck-delivery costs.

And, as I've pointed out elsewhere, a huge fraction of the city costs for "cars" are required even if there isn't a single private car. Buses, "official vehicles", delivery trucks, and so on require roads. A lot of city road maintenance costs come from activities that have nothing to do with usage.

In short, you're assuming savings that can't happen.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300078153

"Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)"
Curiously, where do you live? I wouldn't let my kids ride transit by themselves; that's where the crum bums go to pee.

I also don't want to be against a grocery store as the noise from the large parking lot (and busy road) is annoying. Living by a park is highly desirable.
How do people actually test multiple client-side browsers?

In terms of testing, Jasmine and QUnit both seem to have reasonable APIs, and I'd be totally happy to use either. I'm sure there are other reasonable options, too.

But how are people checking all of the client-side browsers? Are people using Sauce Labs? Testling? Custom internal Selenium setups? Just loading up each browser in a VM locally and manually?
I suspect it would benefit me more than the average New Yorker, but I'd love for the M60 to be replaced by a train line, something going from Columbia through LaGuardia out to Flushing.
I'm not sure there would be any emotional trauma. Historically, engineers have tended towards being amoral about building weapons. Even Da Vinci was designing trebuchets and selling himself as a defense technician.
Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard
Empirically big groups do noticeably worse. I'm not 100% sure why, but my guess is that the problem is not with big groups per se, but what having a lot of cofounders says about the founders. I think when a startup has a lot of founders, it's often because the founders are afraid of starting a company, and thus recruit everyone they know to be in it with them.

Another theory I've heard is that a startup does as well as its worst founder, and the bigger the group, the more chance you have someone who's no good.
Programming Depression
Hello Peeps,

I just have a weird sincere question regarding being a new developer. I finished school 3 mos ago and have been working for a company as a Jr. Dev for almost 9 months. As far as the company expectation I'm meeting my deadlines and everyone likes me. Where I struggle is I feel like I'm not even close to contributing as much a my co-workers(although they have all been coding 8+ yrs me 3mos +school which I did learn nothing barely functional). I feel like I spend much time on problems that it might only take another co-worker 20 mins and takes me 2 hrs to figure out and fix. I love programming so much that things like this is making me depressed. Prior to my education I had no programming experience but a few IT gigs which no programming was used. Question? Is it normal to feel this way as a newbie or Am I being hard on myself? Also I think sometimes the type of software has a peculiar type of business logic which is not easy nor fond. Sometimes I think learning all this business logic is making me discouraged because I'm not really into it..(So this makes programming the logic and understanding it hard.) The weird part is everyone seems to be okay with my work but I don't..

My solution to get out of funk:

Either take another gig that is Associate Programmer somewhere else with different product and client.

Go into a hybrid helddesk or network analyst role that includes programming.

Start some small home projects in the type of technology we use at work and post them on Github.(To grow and learn as well as be inspired)

Totally leave development and do something else..(program on side as hobby)
No sense of humor. Seriously.
Amen.

I agree that this isn't necessarily Y Combinator's responsibility to fill but somebody needs to create this.

I've interviewed plenty of entrepreneurs that built successful companies with families and/or not going at it full time for 3 months with insane mentorship.

It'd be great to see a dedicated resource that fit around this sort of lifestyle.
Apple’s profits built on grinding employees into dust - then blowing them up
We've funded people we previously rejected at both stages. I don't think we interviewed Drew the first time. I believe we interviewed the PagerDuties 3 times out of the 4 they applied.
> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them?

Some of us do exactly that. Many of the exams I sat in grad school (Brown) were that way, and nearly all of the exams I have set are open-book, open-notes, open-internet, and take-home. I've always felt that's a better reflection of what I actually want to be testing anyway.

I'm not the only professor that does this, but the cost is that exams take a lot longer to grade, generally. So it's impractical at scale.
So does this mean they'll only censor them in a certain country when that country's government asks them to do it, or also when the US Government asks them to censor them in that country?
I like the idea of this app a lot, but I wish people wouldn't announce iOS apps before they're available in the App Store. I just searched for it and couldn't find it. Chances are I'll forget about it in an hour and never end up buying it.
I have neither, hurrah!

As for the site, why is the JavaScript and CSS inline? Makes for pretty lousy caching...
Very cool to see this release; for the Couch folks out there that love the master-master replication but need sharding (disparate ranges of data in certain data centers) BigCouch brings one of the cooler features of Cassandra and MongoDB (datacenters) to CouchDB deployments.

Then the donation to Apache on top of that, very cool move and congrats to the Cloudant team. Here's to a lot of success moving the community and clients forward.
Pinterest Vs. Tumblr
I've been using List.js lately, submitted a few bug fixes on Github for it as well. Great plugin and an awesome lightweight alternative to DataTables. Shaved a nice ~80k of the payload of CRUD app I'm working on right now.
An Analogy of Cloud Computing for Dummies
Twitter : New Withheld Content Fields in API Responses
What gesture means "navigate from here to home and avoid tolls"? http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html
Videos of the 350 inventions competing for shelf space in Walmart
Dragging small traditional businesses into the startup innovation ecosystem
Facebook Credits-based Loyalty Program Debuts - MarketingVOX
Could you hire people on www.taskrabbit.com to go pick things up for you? You'd have to probably pay them on retainer to get the responsiveness you need, but it's a way to recruit in different cities.