skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some bigger schools now teach with their own set of materials that the professors put together. I think it might be precisely because of this reason.
>but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.

It's not only email. I got my adwords account banned in a ridiculous manner (got banned out of the blue 18 months after a supposed offense), the email replies were so generic and unhelpful (and obviously not written by a native English speaker), it was really infuriating. Fortunately for Google they can do without my $200 yearly spending on adwords.
Why software projects are always late (part 2)
It's not only email. I got my adwords account banned in a ridiculous manner (got banned out of the blue 18 months after a supposed offense), the email replies were so generic and unhelpful (and obviously not written by a native English speaker), it was really infuriating. Fortunately for Google they can do without my $200 yearly spending on adwords.
Z3X BOX: Samsung 3G tool 12.3 released. Time for change
Visual Age for Java Micro Edition (re-written in Java) became Eclipse framework.
It is always a fine line. It will be interesting and telling in how Kickstarter will respond to this. You remember the Air BnB set of events...
Awesome jQuery File Upload
Something more than italicized text. Yes, screenshots of the emails, with headers would be better. Something more than a mere rant. I'm not suggesting that anything displayed would hold up in court, but all anyone here seems to care about is italicized text. Here, let me demonstrate.

amirmc,

The post on my website is a lie.

Truly,

Rachel

There. Case closed.

> What kind of 'proof' would satisfy you?

What kind of proof would satisfy you? Italicized text? A blog post?

> I don't see how anything here is particularly knee-jerk.

Unsubstantiated claim is made. People here are already assuming KickStarter is guilty.

Don't misrepresent what I'm saying. No where am I suggesting indisputable proof must be provided. I'm merely saying that nothing has been offered up.
That's what I thought. When Google Apps for businesses came out I was interested in subscribing, so I asked their customer support about what migration paths they offer. I never heard back from them.
Ask HN: Which websites have the best support pages?
I'm trying to build a website's support page that will have everything someone needs in order to help them get their answer quickly and easily.

I have some ideas, but I figured it might be good to ask you for some advice. Which websites have the best support pages and why?
That's why I want to make a great, revolutionary hardware.
> Rachel is a very real person that can't raise money on Kickstarter because Kickstarter can't deal with one asshole posting 400 spam comments.

And again, do you have anything to suppor that claim beside italicized text on a blog? If not, then you only have an accusation made.
Preface: Valve is one of those companys I admire and wish I could buy stock in them.

Saying that, Its too bad they have said they will never go public/sell. Working there would be even more awesome if you knew there was a possibility to become a millionaire before working there for 20-30 years or getting lucky and advancing up the corporate ladder to where you could make 200k+ a year.

I wonder if facebook would have been such a hot place to work at if zuck said right at the start he would never go public and never sell the company.

Its obviously in a startup guys DNA to look at day jobs and retirement plans in disgust ( we are all trying to make tons of money now, right? ). I accept that type of thing is fine for most people and thats cool with me. I could personally never work for a company knowing that the most I can hope for is a higher salary though. (Unless you climb to the truly top of the ladder, where bonuses and whatnot await you). Working at valve, I wonder if there is going to be any stories of chefs/masseuse's who become millionaires because they took the risk early on. Probably not.

Again, not that there is anything wrong with that. Valve is never claiming to be a startup. Just saying, I wish they were.
"She is, by her own admission, mentally ill"

Well, not really. From your link,

"I am on disability because I was kicked out of this "mansion" at a young age and locked up in a mental institution. Among other reasons that I don't feel like discussing with you."
> Are those really the figures he cited? Working only weekdays, and only eight hours per day, that comes out to five lines of production code per hour. Even with the overhead of testing and occasional widespread refactoring, that seems incredibly low.

Fred Brooks cited 10-12 lines of code per day, constant across languages and projects he surveyed. As far as I know, it's not been shown to have changed since then.
> She is, by her own admission, mentally ill.[1]

I see that she says she was kicked out of her home when she was 16 and placed in a mental health facility[1]. But this is not the same as having a mental illness. Certainly it's been the case before that a perfectly healthful individual has ended up in such an institution. Especially people suffering from emotional trauma that they are unable to handle on their own.

[1] 'I am on disability because I was kicked out of this "mansion" at a young age and locked up in a mental institution.'
Or using your paid repository to story their own app data. The authentication credentials are running on the client. I'm wondering how I keep a troll from writing a billion things to my firebase.
If this quote is authentic, her accusations are anything but groundless:

Thanks for writing in. If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.

If this quote is fiction, then it will be easy for kickstarter to say so.
>Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done?

I lost my adwords account one day, I wasn't even using it at the time. From what I gathered from support I lost it because a year and half earlier I had run two ads that were against the TOS. These ads were running for a total of 4 hours BTW and were of course approved by Google before going online.

I have no idea how they tune their algorithm so recklessly. I posted about it on HN before and someone brought up the idea (from experience) that the landing pages I used (I did not own the landing pages) were changed during those 18 months to something that is against the TOS and my account was flagged because I had used them in the past.
Behind Instagram’s Success, Networking the Old Way
While I don't condone the attitude in the OP, providing background on the "victim" in this case is appropriate. She has offered nothing to substantiate her claims. As of yet, we know nothing, and calling her a "victim" is ignoring facts.
Olympics 2012: branding 'police' to protect sponsors' exclusive rights
I live in Atlanta, GA, USA.
I had my car stolen. Police didn't investigate.
It was found abandoned 2 weeks later.
Police didn't do anything beyond return it. I figured you had to be shot to get some attention.
Three friends have had their house robbed. No police response beyond insurance paperwork.
Later, a friend of mine was shot.
Police didn't investigate. He was told that he didn't die, so it wasn't murder, so they had more important things to do.

Unfortunately the authorities seem to have too much to do. If it takes any effort to investigate something, it isn't going to happen.
There is so much truth packed into that 36 mins -- so many juxtapositions -- it would take several hours to reference them all.

For starters, see Rich Hickey's talk on "Hammock-Driven Development" for more on the "background mind" (http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586), and then see how what Dan Pink is saying about motivation (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html) and what Sebastian Deterding is saying about gamification (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY) all connect into what Cleese is saying about creativity.
Does it need fixing? No, why should it?

If science could be done better, yes, we should fix it. The author identifies a very real problem - publication bias and data mining, and proposes a solution, namely pre-registration of experiments.

Only one of his mechanisms for enacting the solution (#1, "clinicaltrials.gov option") is centralized.
Walks And Walking - Essex Walks Epping Forest Jacks Hill Walking Route
Scientists Find Long-Sought Majorana Particle
Universal Health Care Pros And Cons | Cheap Insurance News
Everything you need to know to understand Google's strange stock split
I believe Kickstarter has an obligation to treat Rachel like a customer. I believe they are capable of building the tool needed to deliver a good experience to customers like Rachel. I don't support the specific language Rachel might have used, but I empathize with Rachel's frustration with Kickstarter's flawed process.

I met Rachel a few months ago. She seems nice. I know she has all this weird unresolved drama from the past, but I have a strict no drama allowed rule so I try not to dwell on it. I believe that people can change and become more rational and less dramatic and Rachel seems to be doing really really well, except for all these weird people from alternative music scenes that Rachel somehow made way too angry.

I ran across one example of the stalker randomly on the internet yesterday, which was the stalker writing a review of Extreme Futurist Fest saying it was really bad. The review was willfully inaccurate, I was at the event, and it was really good for a new event and the attendees really impressed me with their intellectual caliber. The review was posted unsolicited on a bunch of mailing lists that didn't care, such as the list of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

No, it's utterly ridiculous to post evidence related to ongoing legal matters to the peanut gallery of the internet. Any lawyer or legal TV show will recommend against that.
The morality of matchmaking
The top post has been for a long while not in support of the OP's unsubstantiated claims. I'm fairly certain it's not an accurate representation of anything, however, and suggesting it is is dishonest. A large number, if not majority of posts in this thread are supportive of the "victim," so much so they blindly believe her.

> You might have noticed that Hacker News has gone downhill lately.

I notice a lot of people here making the assumption the post is 100% correct, with nothing to back it up besides italicized text. If you have some proof of these allegations, provide it. If not, lets not jump to conclusions.

> Please be nice everyone. Think seriously before you make a comment.

Well, that goes both ways, doesn't it?
> She is, by her own admission, mentally ill.

"Mental illness" is a very broad term that can mean a lot of things, and the last thing people affected by it need is for people to perpetuate its stigmatization on the internet. That someone has suffered from some unspecified form of mental illness does not automatically make them untrustworthy.
iBluebottle.com is a new matchmaking website for Indian professionals.
> No, it's utterly ridiculous to post evidence related to ongoing legal matters to the peanut gallery of the internet. Any lawyer or legal TV show will recommend against that.

This is where you and I disagree. Regardless of real-world implications I consider it unethical to use the court of public opinion to court sympathy ("my stalker of 10 years..." "police are doing nothing...") and to trash companies you think have wronged you (this kickstarter affair) without posting all the evidence people ask for, or need, to craft an informed opinion.
Which fictional character was born on the same day as you?
But similar constructions in other languages (Python's with- statement, various Lisp versions, using in C#) can handle this cleanly. C++ doesn't give you "finally" and since you can't do non-trivial cleanup in destructors RAII is really a lot less useful than it seems at first blush.
Based on my experiences with Kickstarter, this is not surprising.

I don't think anyone can argue that they haven't built a great product, but I've yet to be impressed by the quality of their service and find their 'community at all costs' attitude to be immature.

Why can't they just IP ban the stalker?

Without all of the details, it's hard to know what's going on here, but the lack of empathy in the response from KS is peculiar.
It's also important to point out that I find your wife beating unacceptable...
> That would be her throwing whatever reputation she has away.

I'm not sure anything they say would make a difference. Personally, I inclined to believe what she's saying is true, but I believe there is more to the story that impacts what has been said already. Believing that, it would be unfair of me to suggest anything one way or the other.
I'm not really familiar with Nagios. What sort of active monitoring checks do you have that you use? I'd be interested :-)
DH3. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Entrepreneurs Have to Move Fast or Get Run Over
Awesome technology, thanks!

Crashed my Firefox and in Chrome it clips and moves worse than similar games on my 133MHz machine back in the day.

Now can you port it to pure CSS? How about ASCII art in streaming JSON?

i5/4GB MacBook Air
Facebook says it has ‘no intention’ to abuse CISPA
Don't forget that Valve is a 300 people company from america who has a fame of being an awesome workplace like no other game company I know of. They are already drowning in job applications from people who actively try to shape their CV to be a good applicant to them. They have the luxury to hire the 0,0001%.

I'm German, haven't finished my studies at non-famous universities and probably won't for a while since i'm working 75% of my time as a freelancer to support myself. I haven't worked professionally on any gaming project, my 3D Math skills are basic and most of my professional experience is in web projects working with Java, Javascript and PHP, although I've worked on 3D Stuff in C++ (Good old Irrlicht Engine!) when i was younger.

As much as i like the idea of not pre-rejecting yourself, there is a line to be drawn at the point where an application in itself bothers someone else simply because it's unrealistic and the rejection produces unnecessary work.

I don't want to be bothered to write offers for customers who can't afford my work either.
That's not true. There are many cases of posts coming to HN that have more than italicized text to make its case. We have someone here posting they know here, and indeed has a cyberstalker. That's a step in the right direction, a 3rd party providing information.

And I'm not suggesting, in any way, that KickStarter shouldn't respond (at this point, it would be insane not to).

What I am saying is that we shouldn't be assuming KickStarter is in the wrong at that this Rachel has been 100% honest and has told the complete story. That is all.
I don't understand. Care to explain further than that link?

Edit: don't bother. It's a needless deviation from the topic of conversation here and I disagree with your interpretation of that link anyway.
Why North Korea Sucks at Rocket Technology
"Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization."

I agree. Files (and version control systems) leak a tremendous amount of valuable information. They are a very '20th century' technology.

I'm working on a tool that behaves like a distributed version control system (branching and merging) but stores more fine-grained information about the programming process. This information can be played back and developers can tell a story about why the code is the way it is:

http://www.storytellersoftware.com
Yup. There's something ineffably hard about customer service. Ask Craig Newmark, who still does it full time. My company's most important competitive advantage is customer service. My secret to providing superior customer service is treating my customers like they are human beings. It works because my customers are in fact human beings. I think this works because I own the company and do some of my own support. You lose a human element when your customer support starts being done by unempowered minions that don't have incentives in place to treat customers like real people.
How I created and launched a website from the Internet café in Zimbabwe
> I have been a Gmail user probably since 2004, and I have tens of thousands of work-related and personal emails stored in my account, some of which being extremely important to me.

We tell people they need backups. With a TOS like "we can shut you down at any time for any reason", you definitely need backups for Gmail too if it's important.
Ask HN: There's no tax treaty between my country and US, can I get an EIN?
Would it be possible to obtain an EIN as non-resident alien even if there's no tax treaty between my country and US? It's for compliance with withholding.
> What kind of proof would satisfy you? Italicized text? A blog post?

I try not to take any of these things as 'proof'. Also you say that "nothing has been offered up" which isn't true. Someone wrote a post and copy/pasted emails into it. Sure, you can question the veracity of the post but it isn't really fair to say that nothing was offered. It's just that what was offered doesn't seem sufficient to you (which is fine, btw. I'm not saying I believe it all just because of a blog post).

Yes, an accusation was made with some italicized text. People may be giving the OP the benefit of the doubt. You are not. Why aren't both of those ok? I doubt anyone here is going to start a picket outside Kickstarter's offices nor start flaming elsewhere on the net. They might post their displeasure at Kickstarter here.

Your issue isn't really with the post but how folks here seem to be reacting to it. I get that, but isn't it always going to be the case with David/Goliath-type stories?

If her story turns out to have any chinks in it then she'll lose all credibility with this crowd and if not, then Kickstarter should have something to say about it. In a couple of days this will have either been resolved, forgotten or a 'proper' news story (ie more than just a HN submission).

Edit: More downvotes? If I'm missing something please let me know what.
A Tiny MongoDB Browser Shell
I wonder why gmail can't suspend people by giving them readonly access. It could be time bounded, say 30 days, to allow people to migrate data off.
Twitter's new UI is simply awesome
I have been seeing this new awesome UI on twitter for quite some time...well done.
Adidas Porsche Bounce S2:Adidas Porsche Design US Stores
I live outside SV, and this article was a good read about how people's connections come into play when their startups take off. I don't think I will ever move to the valley, but that's part of what I love about HN. It seems that if I make something that starts to take off, I can reach out to this community and find someone with the expertise to guide me through the next steps.

If you're willing to work hard, be honest, and ask the right questions, it seems there are many very capable people here who want to help.
Make the Google Doodle animation in CSS3 without Javascript
EPICAWESOMEGAMAZING: what do you think of this word?
I thought of this word to describe how impressed I would be with Caine's Arcade if I had seen it as a child.

Caine's Arcade: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U

It's pronounceable and quite epicawesomegamazing in itself.
Kickstarter: Make a Better CoffeeScript Compiler
Nothing for that project.

However I was a quick study and learned that truly there was no I in team. I created a win-win situation, and soon our sales team was dramatically outperforming other regions. Turns out the sales staff knew who to call who already had the service and merely needed to be added to the billing system. There was no way that that much revenue could be sold by one person, it really did require a team.

The worst thing I found was a report that listed expiring credit cards and allowed entry of arbitrary dates in the future for which to run the report. I had to wait until the C-levels visited and hand them a stack of paper with the numbers on them to get anyone to pay attention to it.

aside: Seriously Oracle for OCaml? That's awesome, I'm a big F# fan.
Yeah. If Rachel could have raised $100,000 on Kickstarter, Kickstarter would have made thousands in fees. They have a license to print money and they will leave more and more money on the table over time if they don't add basic moderation tools like requiring comments to be approved when necessary. This looks like a case that requires customer support from someone at Kickstarter that doesn't normally work as a customer service manager. I wonder when the Kickstarter founders stopped doing their own customer support.
I think just leaving that portion out would be a good start. If the service garners enough interest from the user then they will genuinely tell their friends/family about it without feeling like you pressured them to do so.
When did notch get his own cult?
This. Also, if you use Google Apps for Business then it's only $50 per year and you get a dedicated, 24/7 support phone number you can call.

Seriously, Gmail is free, you really can't complain about something that's free (yes, I know you "pay" by looking at ads, but when you can upgrade to the "premium" service for $50, never have to look at another ad again and get 24/7 phone support, why wouldn't you?)