skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to handle pathological customers?
We have problem in our bootstrapping business. Occasionally, or better to say more often than we would like, we run into 'pathological customers'.
We wonder what is the best way to deflect and handle these kind of customers.
Basically, in our case, 'pathological customers' which do the following:

- they complain that "something is not working" or "have problem understanding" in order to extent free trial

- they complain about performances (everything is slow)

- if they pay, they pay the lowest plan ($4/month in our case) and only monthly plan but they require constant attention

- very often they want to use the service in different way that it is meant to be used

- in general they are not our target market (i.e., mainly geeks)

We looked our Streak history (btw, excellent CRM plugin for Gmail) and found that majority of emails/complains come from that kind of customers.

We want to have good customer support but we think we spent too much time on 'pathological customers' and too little working with our target customer segment.

In short, how to 'fire customer' but still be nice.
Was a little worried about if this was true or not as I was surprised by how small a story this is.

Another article about it (even fewer details):

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-28/facebook-to-star...
I tried to sign up a few weeks ago, didn't get a response.
> What could 20/20 people do that would be socially acceptable?

Wear glasses with non-corrective lenses.

I went from never wearing glasses for ten years to wearing glasses every day. (I was previously using contact lenses.) Hardly anyone batted an eye.
no we won't, stranger!
re: Google Glasses

I can never wear a pair of glasses that has a 3G connection.

For better or for worse, I experience heightened ElectroSensitivity to the point where a 3G device that's operating within a few feet of me gives me a headache.

Most mobile carriers are already starting to deprecate their 2G networks.

Wearable wireless devices like Google Glasses will be a hazard for me, and many others.

Within the next few years, I won't even be able to use a cell phone.
> Google did all that stuff too (almost 1:1, even -- remember that G+ is a facebook clone

That misses qq66's point; G+ isn't a 1:1 clone exactly because it doesn't do anything like a quarter billion photos per day.

I'm not doubting G's potential to handle Facebook scale, but they're very far away from it right now.
Get your spouse or SO's buy-in.

The challenge here is does SO really understand a priori what [s]he is buying into.
I think he's trying to say more or less: "boy, they sold 3 million of those without any kind of support for apps, imagine how many would they sell if they would run apps!".

That said, iPhone was selling like crazy even before 2.0, so I'm not sure whether that line of reasoning makes sense.
I think that OS choice agility is increasing rapidly. Consider the number of people whose primary computers are mobile phones (replaced every 1 to 3 years) and whose secondary computers are glorified web browsers. This is rapidly becoming true for businesses as well, as they adopt more web-based tools.
Struggling to Ramp Up Production While Keeping Costs Down
Ask HN: What are you Building?
I'm curious to see what interesting projects/startups HNers are working on.
Jenny McCarthy Body Count
By sheer numbers I may have more Facebook friends than phone numbers or emails, but a significant proportion of the people I communicate with regularly aren't on Facebook anymore or never were. So I agree that Facebook is more inclusive in the sense that people friend a lot more people on Facebook than they share their email address and phone number with, but when it comes to real friends and family, I can reach all of them through email or texting but only some of them through Facebook.
I know, but I think that reddit still needs an actual super-reddit bucket rather than a cumbersome URL hack.
Money well spent, I'm sure!
Should submit a pull request.
Woman fined for blowing whistle into phone
What's so disturbing about the FDA's actions? Prochymal was found to be no better than a placebo when used as a treatment in two clinical trials for graft-versus-host disease. Sounds to me like the FDA is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing -- preventing companies from selling snake oil as a legitimate medical treatment in the US.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090909/full/news.2009.894.ht...
What about processors that rather than accessing external RAM and levels of cache, instead a large amount of (register) memory (nonvolatile or not) is directly included within each CPU?
They do promise that it's easy to port your backbone.js app to Parse Javascript SDK, which implies it may be relatively easy to port back. Backbone and Underscore are open source frameworks, so they're not a bad starting point for those considering this.
offer a refund and an apology, and close the account. If you can't come up with a genuine apology, just do the refund. Just make it clear that you are closing the account with the refund. (I mean, don't just close the account, say something like "If you don't think the service is suited to your needs, we can give you a full refund and close the account"

If they do find genuine problems (and being slow is a genuine problem, even if the slowness is in some other part of the network, it's your problem.) apologise in a genuine manner. If you can explain why you made that choice (for example, hosting your servers far away from the customer) that helps, too.

The cheaper the customer is, the more pleasing the refund will be to them. And even non-cheap customers seem to respect you for the refund, if you take the attitude "I don't need to charge people that aren't getting value out of my service" of course, if the user isn't getting value out of the service, the user doesn't need to keep using the service.

On top of that, it's very important to clearly define what you will and won't do for the customer.
And thinking further, "something so trivial" sounds too harsh. I don't mean it that way; I consume plenty of unpaid media that I like. I even like Facebook, and use it daily.

But I think the fact that ad-supported businesses need millions of users says something: the value delivered to each user is pretty small.
It's a tiny bit frustrating that they only allow signing up via a Twitter handle. IMO,

Email-based signup > Facebook-based >> Twitter-based

On top of that, the permissions indicate that nReduce wants to post Tweets for me. Um, no thanks.
Don't we already expect that from kernel contributors? :-P
It would be nice to add this to App Engine so people outside Google could try it. There is an issue on Google Code for it.
I'm building a web package in Lua/Kepler. The idea is that you install it, create an admin account, and then decide what you want the site to be. If you want a wiki, then it installs wikimedia and configures all that. If you want a blog, it'll install a custom blog software with lots of extensibility. If you want CMS, then it will install Joomla/Drupal/Whatever, and you can configure all of that. If you want forums, then you can install phpbb/vbullshit/custom forum software.

Right now, I'm mostly designing blogging software and forum software. I plan on making everything first, releasing it all separately, then just packing it all up as a chameleon package once everything is finished.

You know, the usual.
And there's a little typo on the /how page "funtionality".
Romney's IPhone App: "A Better Amercia[sic]"
Doctors are never going to be perfect; if you ask me following such a heuristic is probably going to work pretty well almost all of the time. As long as the doctor isn't a dick about it (with a god complex) and is willing to accept that they may be wrong..

In reference to my first comment: Mis-diagnosing "cool, rare diseases" as the flu by definition can only happen very rarely. Coupled with the fact that people are often mis-diagnosed with rare stuff, means that your original statement that "it is far more common..." is obviously untrue.

It must be frustrating if you are the person with the rare disease. But "not looking for zebras" serves the other 99.9% of people quite well..
> I thought (s)he meant what would happen if a motion of no confidence were ignored

yes, that's what i meant. thanks for the info!
Ease of implementation mainly. Plus one less email/password to have to worry about. And what founder doesn't have a twitter account, it's sort of as essential as email at this point.

We won't post tweets. We added write permission so we could help organize groups together. Twitter doesn't really make it easy to choose exactly what permission you want to pick. It's write all or nothing.
Hey Brain,

I just sent out our mail chimp list, all those email address were people who came to our site in the past 3 weeks and gave us their email.

Was there some type of error? I am confused about the Disrupt NYC reference? Could you explain?

We don't like to spam people, we would like to fix the problem if it is there.
A Message from KPCB Partner, John Doerr
Can you try again?

There were some error in our form where peoples email addresses weren't saved correctly.
If speed matters more than compression then consider lzop(1).
Real world examples don't bear those numbers out. Look at Visa. 2 billion cardholders, $4 trillion in transactions a year, 80 billion transactions a year. And their revenue is only about twice Facebook's. Unless facebook becomes a merchant bank and convinces millions of merchants to use them they aren't going to see much higher of a per transaction profit margin. The math just doesn't add up.
For The Hustle -- Elon Musk And Obama Wallpaper
I'm not sure I understand this article. What is it that he imagines actors and athletes doing that they don't do with Twitter now? People hold up their phones pretty close to their face when capturing photos and videos so it is already the first person POV. And it is pretty easy to do, I'm sure it will be harder taking pics with Glass than a phone, it is more flexible taking pictures with your hands than your face. The only successful consumer head-mounted cameras that I know of are the Go Pros which are used mainly for niche action shots. If the main advantage of Glass is just that you can take pictures in situations where both your hands are busy that does not seem like the huge use-case that is going to take down Facebook.
I don't have a problem working with non-technical people who are 'looking for a technical co-founder', usually they identify as 'business guys'.

Just like 90% of coders can't write fizzbuzz, 90% of biz guys can't close a deal. The issue is not the 90%, it's finding the 10%.

The east coast has no monopoly on useless people.
Ajax Control Toolkit 2 - MS ASP.NET Ajax Server and Client Controls - Lesson 6
When I first read that you were a "long time linux user" that started with it in 2004, I chuckled, then I realized that 2004 was actually six years ago (a totally legit "long time") and that I am really old. :)

I'll give you that the way Gnome 2 was set up by default in Ubuntu was pretty annoying. I also spent some time "moving in" after a fresh install. I did, however, find that I could get it just the way I wanted it before too long, something I've been unable to do with Unity.

Here's the thing: Ubuntu's primary user base (to this point) is PC users. I'm all for a bright future where Ubuntu runs on phones and tablets and toasters, but seriously, where are they? What problem does Unity solve for PC users that a more "traditional" desktop metaphor doesn't? I can't get past the fact that it's obtuse and annoying solely for the sake of novelty.

To each their own, though. The magic of Linux is that there are plenty of options. Windows users, sadly, don't have that luxury, which is what the original article was pointing out.
Interesting point. However, I'll disagree with Amazon.com. Purchasing real world products is much more than just a database frontend.
The camera is a prototype for the direction they're headed. Driverless cars and glasses which provide information about objects you look certainly have more utility than a "camera you wear on your head."
Apple's TBA WWDC sessions
Ask HN: How many CPU cores do you personally own?
How many CPU cores do you personally own across all devices in your posession? What's the national average?
The idea people quickly find out how useful having ideas are when the doer people start walking out the door.
I think there was a previous poll on this that said that Christian hackers were ~30% of this site, give or take, but I might have misremembered that statistic.
All mobile phone OSes are still based on a filesystem. If you want to claim that the user's perspective of the computer is going to move away from a "file", then I agree. If you think the underlying software is going to do so simply because it got no-power-to-maintain memory, I think you're crazy.
Similar, but backed by Graphite:
https://github.com/mojodna/metricsd

It's awesome to see the community standardizing around a simple way of transporting measurements into a storage and analytics system.
Is this open to individuals? I've got a ton of ideas, and I'm a hacker. I just need some help with being able to leave my current job.
6

quad core pc
dual core mobile device
Were there any issues with swapping out Backbone's built in templating for handlebarjs?
Moving from talent acquisition to G+ to Google Ventures in just three months sounds like the "we're not firing you, but we'll call you "Director of Special Projects" and you'll have an office but don't need to come in until you find a new job" exit.
Here's the thing I see, Google has no meaningful history of monetizing things like self driving cars or video glasses or anything else except for via advertising. Yeah, they sell some web services, but that's a lot different from going head to head with companies that know about manufacturing like Toyota and BMW or those that know about consumer electronics like Samsung and Sony.

I guess they could create an advertising sponsored self driving car or vision glasses that pop up ads (ala Walter Williams recent novel "The Fourth Wall" ISBN-13: 978-0316133395). But how is either going to be more profitable than their current model given the fundamental retooling of their business which would be required and the radically different cost structures associated with making real stuff?

That's not to say Facebook is destined for significant innovation. As an advertising platform, they may be Yahoo 2.0 over the long term - too profitable from advertising to pivot and not growing fast enough to get love from analysts.
> I miss Japanese. :-(

がんばって！

(I assume the downvoter wants a translation? It means "do your best!" [on your startup])
It certainly seems to be the focus of their long term R&D spending. The ML part, of course, has always been a central part of their business due to its importance for search and ad targeting.
Yup, that's the world of academic publishing unfortunately. A tip: often you can get a 'preprint' copy of the paper from one of the authors' websites. Probably not strictly legal, but it does happen a lot.
I'm no expert but it seems to me that it leaves you without the legal protection that a company can bring.
>Google tries stuff, fails a lot, and stumbles on as many successes as they engineer.

True, but worth pointing out that often the best way to succeed, especially on anything truly innovative, is to be ready to try stuff and fail a lot.
Yeah... and a little hacked together PHP can be the top edge of that stack if you want, but I sure hope it's not handling the important business logic on the back end of your internal message bus et cetera. In fact, just about any other language in the world would probably be a better choice.
Nookd
Yep, if you can ship every week we'll take you. Take a leave of absence at your job and see if you can build something amazing this summer.
If we're only counting x86/ARM, 10.

x86:
* Quad core PC
* Dual core Macbook
ARM:
* Two dual-core android devices (phone, tablet)

Course, there's the PPC Xbox 360.
I have no idea what's in my internet blu-ray player.. I'd bet it's ARM.
If you're talking about warehousing/logistics - that is true.

However they only did it because they had to reduce costs and simplify processing. I'm pretty sure Amazon would be much happier to just dropship by making an API call to third party logistics - which is essentially an inventory database from Amazon's point of view - but they are just too big now.

I think they still do that with long tail items (don't store, but use third party logistics with an API call).
What about Youtube? Picassa? Indexing the whole internet? That is some amazing scale.
Improve Memory and Brain Power by Properly Using Your Brain
Interesting article, encourage you not to spend your time watching soap operas or pointless shows, but how to stimulate you to improve brain power. Every time when you learn something new the brain creates new neurons and new neural pathways. Little children have amazing ability to learn with ease and create something out of nothing. This way they develop millions of neural pathways, especially in age from three to five years. When we get into adulthood, we already have millions of neural pathways developed, but the thing is that we stop our mental effort to learn new things, we rather go do to repeatable things. We need that stimulation. Read more in the article how can you stimulate your brain power!
Badgeville, The Behavior Platform, raises $25M
The real problem is testing 'theories merging'

There are several areas where relativity and quantum mechanics merged, for example, in the discovery and theory of antimatter

But most of the experiments of relativity were on 'big things' like planets, and quantum mechanics on 'small things'

And between them, the real mystery: gravity. General relativity knows a lot about what gravity does but not so much about where it comes from

Edit: fixed GR for SR
What's the value in this versus a lot of the other competition out there?
There's a substantial difference between a service and an installed product.

PostgreSQL 9.3 is installed on your database server, the source is available, and it isn't going anywhere.

If Oracle discontinued their database platform tomorrow (unlikely!), your licensed copy will remain valid for a long time up until you swap it out for another closely compatible database.

If Parse closes their doors or exits tomorrow, that's it.

Compare to AWS: If Amazon discontinues EC2, other virtual hosting services exist. If they discontinue Beanstalk, then at least you were coding to a commmon servlet API. If they discontinue S3, there are some compatible competitors, but hopefully you wrote your data layer to be S3-agnostic.

I think non-standardized AWS services are more risky. More standardized fare -- EC2, Beanstalk, etc -- less risky. Basing your entire code base on pervasive use of Parse -- very risky.
I would say the scales youtube and google search operate at show that they could easily handle google+ at facebook's scale.
Nope, as far as I'm concerned they're still gonna be dorky. Wearing electronics on your face is irredeemably dorky, and I don't see any way around that.

Electronics in your pocket: cool

Electronics in your hand: cool

Electronics hanging out of your ears: cool

Electronics on your head, face, or built into your clothing: irredeemably uncool.

I can't explain why in words, all I can tell you is that the world sees these things differently. If you don't understand why computer-enabled glasses are unavoidably dorky then I can't explain it to you, but I'm pretty sure it's the case.

edit: That's not to say they won't sell well, to certain people. I envisage engineers on building sites walking around with 'em, or travelling salesmen, or police officers, or... I dunno, there's gotta be lots of good use cases for these sorts of things. But the very utility of 'em makes 'em desperately uncool, like Bluetooth earpieces.
This seems like one of those "sounds good on paper" ideas, like shells that pipe objects. In practice, file and process oriented systems are separate from REPL systems on purpose.

The most important property of a filesystem or the Unix-style pipes&filters that permeate them is the fact that serialization is a fundamental property component of persistence and communication. Any finite quantity of space can be addressed by a linear scheme and any unbounded sequence is inherently linear. Consider what happens as soon as you want to send a stream of data across the wire. Or checkpoint an operation. You need to store stuff in a non-volatile and linear form. And since data outlives code, you better invest time into thinking about that linear form.

Now, if you use immutable data structures (ie. non-cyclical) with a proper linearization and corresponding reader/printer (like in Clojure), you can get many of the same benefits, but you still need to have a whole bunch of other things to worry about. Just look at the weird things that Clojure needs to do with print-dup and the like.

I'm not saying that there isn't a kernel of a good idea in here. I'm just saying that it's going to have a lot more in common with filesystems and traditional shells than you'd first expect coming from a Lisp REPL school of thought.
I know this comment wasn't meant glibly, but "taking a leave of absence" isn't usually an option. FYI.
Chrome still can't handle cancelled page loads three years after bug report
Occupy The Banks - Let's Roll: #DOCUMENTARY TRUTH CAN SAVE #AMERICA #OTB
Wanted: A Few Good Women and Men to Serve as Presidential Innovation Fellows
I'm working on step 2 of a naming company (we create names for new startups and products). The plan is to offer a package with a name, logo, and business card, so I'm working on my logo design skills and bringing in some more designers.

Also, I'm building an copy editing service that's more transparent and straightforward. Most editors have complicated pricing schemes that vary depending on the topic, document type and whether they charge by the hour or by the number of words. Instead, I'm charging a flat fee per word, no matter what the project, and you'll be able to customize other features (like delivery date, format, etc.)

Hoping to get both startups rolling by the end of June.
How I Feel Satisfied with Every Day
I'm finishing up an ebook. I've found that startup founders struggle to tackle privacy issues. I'm hoping this ebook helps early stage startups find both a reason and a method to tackle privacy issues. If anyone is interested send me an email (in profile) and I'll send along a full copy -- I'd love to get your feedback.

http://startupprivacy.com
I don't consider speculation and rumours of rumours to be news.
There was plenty for iPhone to do without apps. Phone + web browser + email was pretty great. The Apple TV is ALL about content, there is very little point to it otherwise. Airplay, while awesome, is not going to sell devices in Peoria because it doesn't fit into an existing slot in people's lives. But if Apple has secured content deals that make the ATV a viable cable alternative, apps or no apps, they're really on to something.
A startup's homepage: evolution over time and video intros (maybe?)
Remind HN: DEFCON CTF registration closes tomorrow
Google's reCAPTCHA briefly cracked
> They saw the referrals from our sites, then saw that we were displaying showtimes without being licensed to do so (how they knew this I'm not sure)

The referrals are likely the headers you send when scraping. i.e. Referer: <your newspaper>.tld. Depending on whether you actively set the User-Agent header, that might also have contributed to them catching on (be it omitted User-Agent, "urllib2", "<newspaper> Bot 1.0 +<newspaper>.tld; don't sue us", and so forth). If you run a content provider, and try to protect your content/pageviews/API, the lack of either of these headers is also worth looking out for.
nicely done - I like the design!
For Backbone, wouldn't that just be editing the base URLs of your models?

Edit: Just re-read, I think you meant to say between Rails and Parse -- with Parse, you'd still need Backbone.