skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So much glorious Schadenfreude at the thought of all the panic meetings at Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon today. And probably a lot of other places as well.

My experinces with all three of those companies have been horrendous.
=====================================================================

1. It took a month of weekly calls to get a refund from Comcast for a "modem installation". My apartment already had a modem, they literally installed nothing and charged me $80 for it.

2. It took me four months to realize that I had an overdue AT&T bill. Despite having my phone number (obviously), my email, my credit card info, and my other phone number, they just sent paper snail mail to my summer internship apartment, where of course I no longer lived. I found out four months later when I finally did get a phone call---from a collections agency. The bill had swelled from $90 to $250 by this point.

3. Verizon sent a phone I ordered online to the wrong address. (They skipped the apt number, so the phone was returned to sender.) They then proceeded to refund the phone, but charge me monthly charges for the plan! This, too, took a month of weekly calls.

Every single time I called any of these three companies, I had to sit and listen to elevator music for 3 to 30 minutes. Every individual rep starts over from the beginning, asking you your "first and last name please", as if they had no CRM, no DB, no internal communication whatsover.

It is highly gratifying to see these companies get bitchslapped by the Invisible Hand. They have long deserved it.
Show HN: My 1 week project - STREAM•O•MATIC
Then for that, I apologize. I was not trying to say he was dishonest - but in my experience - I tend not to take every thing I read in the valley for face value (yes, I know they are in NYC).

I am happy to be wrong, but given that I do not, as you pointed out, know Alex - or anyone at Simple, I have no option but to speculate on motives and things going on in the spaces I follow.

What I was upset about is the level at which you attempted to censor me, call me indignant and berate me discussing this online.

If we were in a room face to face and i disagreed with you in person would you have conducted yourself in the same manner? I doubt it, you probably would have been more polite in telling me how you disagreed with me.

You're welcome to come over for dinner any time, BTW.

Also - I'll teach you how to throw knives.

Have a good night. (the dinner offer is still open)
Only until the Wikipedia Mafia reverts all of those changes and then bans your account for "vandalism."

One of the best ways to get contacts in a field is to volunteer for an organization that does exactly, or something in the neighborhood of, what you want to do.
Yes. Thinking of adopting a 6% transaction markup. So if someone lists a TV for $100, we list it for $106, and keep $6 as our fee.
I have no snide response to this comment.

We would not have gone this many rounds on this in person. I'm pretty sure (as everyone who works with me will tell you) that I'd have used the same words as my first response, but regardless of how you took that, it would have blown over. Conversations don't hover on a screen in front of you after they're concluding, begging you to push them forward.
I don't know what your agenda is, but either you're overstating your experience in the business or wilfully exaggerating the risks.

We know where these panels came from. LG manufacture this panel for Apple. Apple's extremely high technical standards combined with the very high pixel count mean that yields are exceptionally low. LG's contract with Apple forbids them from selling these panels to any brand-name manufacturer. These cheap monitors soak up supply of otherwise unsaleable panels that had previously been an expensive waste problem for LG. It's not too good to be true, just a quirk of the economics of panel manufacture.

There is no reason to believe that these displays would present any greater safety risk than a typical item of consumer electronics. If you really are in the trade, you'll know that not a damned soul knows exactly what they're buying. Everyone got stung by the electrolytic plague, from Apple and Dell to military contractors. Shit happens in China. Personally, I don't trust Dell any more than I trust the Shanzhai boys. The PCBs look good, they've obviously spent the money where it needs to be spent and the panels have no worse provenance than those in any other value-priced monitor.
After living in Australia for about two years (probably worst internet in the developed world) and now living in Japan with gigabit speeds I can confidently say:
Do thank Google for this and do give them all your money!
"Prefer" is a stretch. It's not like consumers were presented with a choice between two carriers that were similar in every way except that one went with the subsidized model and the other did not.

The choice consumers had was either a crappy carrier, or one which forced you to go with absurd monthly plans.
Google's currently doing the best job of anyone of disrupting the cell phone industry. I have a $350 unlocked, contract free handset that's near the best you can get right now and I can run it on any pay as you go plan (like a $45/mo Straight Talk plan).
Dealer Platform Announces Addition of Mobile Sites
Ultimately, a private company should be able to ask anybody to leave their property for any reason.

The checks and balances against abuse of this power are basically that, if Yelp's a jerk, they get bad PR, as is happening in this case.
I've basically given up on rails - and I wrote a 2.3.4 site - until it stabilizes a bit...
Editing isometric game worlds, perhaps?
Do you think they're substantially different from the cheapos from Dealextreme? http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-rechargeable-3-ch-palm-size...

(Just because those I can get shipped to my country for free...)
> At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc.

Inside one of the manila folders, do you keep an apartment building, with 12 floors, each floor with 20 apartments, each apartment with 3 rooms, each with 4 racks, 3 shelves on each, each shelf with 50 manila folders? Inside one folder, do you keep a wormhole to the 2nd bedroom in apartment 1409 in the building 2 doors down from the apartment building I first mentioned?

I think having levels of folders is a good idea, each level with different names, e.g. 4 levels: house, room, shelf, and folder.
I doubt it. I've edited far far more than a hundred pages (http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume), and I never got a job offer nor did it ever make any discernible difference to my life - which is inline with what I heard (or rather, didn't hear) from all my Wikipedian confreres. When I switched my efforts to my own website, then things changed a little bit.
Removing currency isn't the problem - removing the traditional dominant method of acquiring it is.
Yes, but there is no requirement to do so. Nor is that serial # available anywhere to look up.
Seems to me that Java's users are developers. No non-developer will ever install Java by itself, they'll only install it because something else they're installing requires it.
1. It's an easy way to charge for new development on platforms that don't have paid upgrades.

2. It can turn be much more profitable as long as you don't just take the price you'd charge for the upgrade and divide by the number of features. Games are leading the way with this business model.

For example, IIRC League of Legends is insanely popular right now. (I want to say it's the biggest game at the moment, but I could be misremembering. Anyway.) It's free to play, but unlike most games, you don't get any permanent characters or upgrades when you start. To unlock a character, you have to buy them. Buying all the characters with money would cost almost a thousand dollars. And if you want to customize your characters so they look cool – well, that can cost several times more. Suffice it to say, Riot Games is doing pretty well for itself by unbundling as much as humanly possible.
You added more here since I replied...

Again - I think you're a little emotionally touchy. And thats totally ok, but let me address a point you are making:

you are equating my belief that there could be more to the story than what i am reading in a blog post with accusing the poster of lying and that you find this really annoying.

Further you are using quotations around phrases that I never typed to imply that these quotes were my true meaning. This is a pretty low debate tactic. Why not mention that I also implied he was gay, or racist, or stomped on kittens for sexual pleasure.

I meant nothing of the things that you "quoted" -- I simply said, and I'll quote:

"Sure, It might not have been a good role, but sounds like there were relationship issues as well. I wouldn't imagine his cut and run solely on "I cant program enough" -- He had to be either under performing or frustrated with the others' lack of leadership/performance/flexibility/ability to listen/you-name-it

There are too many reasons to leave a company, but who knows the truth...."

Read that a few time, whilst leaving your emotional attachements behind and tell me where I am calling him a liar.

When i say "who knows the truth" I mean the empirical truth - as in the truth that takes into accounts absolutely all factors.

Not "this guy is lying and so I don't have the truth"

Anyway, I'm done with this thread, hopefully you'll cool off on the things that drive you up the wall and I'll be more specific in my language :)
I think this is the first time I've seen the spacing effect used for spam^Wemail notifications. I'm not sure how I feel about it.
A Deep Dive Into The Latest Eye-Popping Mobile Trends
Awesome. I have been waiting for humble to do music. The model is perfect for it.
There are too many greatest hit collections in this, all of which I already own the component music of. If there were some original albums, this would be great.
Monetizing Hangouts: Sample Code From Google+ Team
I'd say there should be two different pages: one for end-users, and one for developers. In his defense I'd argue the users of Java are developers, in which case they need to know specifically what it is. For end users who need it installed on their machines, the description should be "Java is a necessary plugin to make many of your favorite applications work correctly."

In the case of other tools, a lot of companies focus on useless buzzwords like "it's a cloud-enabled multi-tier architecture et cetera" instead of focusing on what the person using it cares about: "it's a content management system for blogs." OK, got it.
It is not complex, but it is very burdensome, usually because various garbage collection processes cannot act as long as the long snapshot is open.
Maven is evil. It needs to die.

Every time I've used it, it downloads hundreds of megabytes of who-knows-what from who-knows-where on the Internet. It's not like apt-get, which uses a central server where there's some level of QA to make sure all the versions of all the pieces work together.

Maven just shoves 100 different components from 100 different servers on your disk. If any one of those servers happens to be down, or moved, or the organization running it dies off, there goes your build.

I'll stick with Ant and manual dependency downloading, thanks. They're a pain in the arse, but at least you can keep the tarballs of the stuff you download around, and can have different library versions for different applications.
Hey man I gotta say I dug that writeup - did any more information surface regarding whether that pattern is indeed inside every retina Pro?
It's nice to see this taken from Mac and PC games to music, but I'm not sure it makes sense to keep the same charities for this initiative. Instead of Child's Play, which focuses on games, I could see supporting a music-focused youth benefit charity. Certain artists might also chafe at the notion of supporting the EFF, which they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as a force acting against their interests as copyright holders.

Here's an (apparently old, with source material no longer hosted on EFF's site) example:

http://www.brettglass.com/effcritique.html

And recently from David Lowery:

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-...

Fifth paragraph: "... Further the new boss through it’s surrogates like Electronic Frontier Foundation seems to be waging a cynical PR campaign that equates the unauthorized use of other people’s property (artist’s songs) with freedom. A sort of Cyber –Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization for the good of the state…er .. I mean Internet. I say cynical because when it comes to their intellectual property, software patents for instance, these same companies fight tooth and nail."
Yes. But then the data is not available or other transactions will fail to commit during a long backup operation, and most people don't like that.
I was under the impression - formed long before Oracle bought Sun - that Schwartz bungled Java's chance at mobile, particularly in how they dealt with Google. Oracle just inherited his mess.
I think he means that his education helped him make these conclusions.
Sure it is. But I would say, more to the point, it's a problem for systems that support consistent snapshots. The question is: how does it deal with the failure condition?
How is this a disruption? Seems to me that they are building out their own fiber optic network to go toe-to-toe with the best-in-class internet/cable products on the market at a price point that doesn't really seem any better.
Yes. I'm the kind of guy who couldn't care less about retina screens (they don't look that much sharper to me)... but definitely can tell the difference that IPS screens make. In contrast with the TN LCDs that you buy that requires tuning to make the images and text not washed out, with IPS everything looks right out of the box without you having to fix anything.

Especially much better text rendering when you turn on subpixel rendering, which is a huge deal to me (I'm typing this on my 22 inches 2209WA which I had for two years and absolutely love).
Why Mad Finger’s Android Market Understanding might have been wrong
I really hope that people buy this bundle even if its not the particular songs they are looking for. If this is a flow then it wont happen again but if enough people buy it they will do it again with different songs.

Also if anyone from humble bundle is reading this. Linux users are usually your biggest donators insulting them twice in your video is not a great place to be. (im not even a linux user but it was a negative note in a pretty upbeat video). Edit: Yes I am aware that it was probably in good faith but it really did not fit into the video (hence my comment). I was not personally affected because I dont use linux so im not sure how actual users felt.
The beta version of Swype is really a major improvement. I'say I can write faster on my phone than on my pc, under certain conditions. The much slower part is copyediting, but it is mostly because sites like hn break the flow with some fancy textarea tweaks.
This seems to go back-and-forth and I'm not quite ready to crown the streaming model king just yet. What happens when you have gigabit ethernet and a tablet that can hold 80 days worth of movies? Do you stream them or just download them instantaneously without regard to how much space they consume?
Your problem is actually with the organizers. You don't care a bit about random venues except for where organizers of events you are likely to attend decide to use them, I would guess. Therefore, if you have a problem with the venue, you should take it to the organizers, and take it up with them at the time, e.g. by leaving with your student, because wrangling the venue is what they're doing as organizers setting up an event.

Other venues are much more reasonable about this sort of thing. I have a friend who is banned from all Microsoft buildings, including non-Microsoft events hosted by Microsoft. He was informed clearly in writing, and knew the reason for his being banned. That makes Microsoft-operated venues more appealing (on at least this axis) than Yelp ones, since organizers of an event can't be sure that attendees will actually be able to enter. In the Microsoft case, at least a person seemingly knows whether they can attend.
5 Reasons Why Blogging is the New Internet Marketing Tool
Cant check the video now (work) but what did they say about linux users?
That's not what happened.

Personally, I think the indicator for a serious bid at disrupting the wireless industry will be when a tech company buys Sprint.
A "daily photo challenge" iOS app. For those not in the know, it's sort of a sub-community of Instagram with over 1 million users (my wife is big on it). (see https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23photoadayjuly)

So, for kicks, I thought I'd try and build an Instagram-like app that is just for a daily photo challenge.

If anyone wants to be a tester, let me know.
The letter that got 2001: A Space Odyssey started
This one stood out for me:

"Japan will be the central economic power in the world, owning or controlling a significant part of European and American industries. This "economic dictatorship" will be beneficial to Japan's client states, since Japan benefits by keeping its customers healthy and wealthy. Indeed, a peaceful and prosperous world community will owe its existence to this Pax Japanica." --SHELDON GLASHOW

Replace Japan with China and he's spot on. The idea has also been given the name "Chimerica" by some economists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimerica].
I'm assuming that this in addition to regular classes?
If not - I feel that this approach is missing quite a lot.
Right on. Thanks for being so patient about this.
There is little empirical support that predatory pricing happens. The criticism section of the Wikipedia article makes some strong arguments in this vein. The support section contains 3 "citation needed"'s.
I'm working on http://callmemae.be - originally built it at an 8-hour Hackathon in SF and now working on turning it into something a bit more robust so it can be properly used for introductions and a demonstration of my technical abilities.
> We know where these panels came from. LG manufacture this panel for Apple.

The last time I read this on HN, less than 24 hours ago, it was clearly branded a rumour.
> The significance of this discovery is that it shows that, contrary to intuition, they do exist.

Do you know why wasn't it found so far? Looking at one of the stages, it consists of only two cells. That's something that should be picked up by anyone trying to run a brute-force search for gliders in well under a minute. It's a bit hard to accept for me that it's been an unknown thing for anyone who asked the question. Even the smallest glider on the standard grid is larger in all of the steps. Here you have to consider placing it in a number of places too, but... is this the first time different grid was really considered?

I feel like I'm missing some bigger picture here.
> It's not architecturally impossible for us to support long-running read snapshots, but it is expensive for our storage servers to keep snapshots alive for a long time. So our backup solution instead works by backing up transaction logs while doing a non-isolated read of the database. At restore time we will replay the logs to get back a consistent point-in-time snapshot.

Sure, it's all technically possible -- Postgres will simply stop collecting garbage via VACUUM, for example -- but the results are not usually very pleasant. But it sounds like instead your solution to the snapshot-read is more like how the online binary backups work, whereby you combine transaction logs with inconsistent reads. That system works very well. On the other hand, "logical" backups have been a major problem for me; sidestepping this by using lower level transaction log mechanics and dirty reads I think is a much better idea.

> The reason that we see higher burst than steady state performance has nothing to do with transactions. We have to do reads from SSD as the application requests them, and we have to make writes durable by logging them right away, but as you surmise we can defer the hard work of doing random writes to our btrees for a while. Even a workload that is 90% reads benefits a lot from deferring writes because writes have to be 3x replicated and because consumer SSDs are comparatively slow at mixed read/write workloads. Read only workloads will not see any initial burst (and might see a ramp-up time from cold cache effects).

I see. It's not read-only, it's 90/10, I misread. That makes more sense. What's your read-only performance? Presumably it would be impacted by requiring fencing to deal with cases involving network partitions, which is one of the problem with non-partitioned and consistent systems systems, as far as I can tell: reads need to check for liveness, and that's much harder than....doing nothing.
> Yelp isn't in the business of protecting civil liberties.

Why yes! Why would a company built on freedom of expression, freedom of association, and net neutrality care about civil liberties?
Oh, jeez.

This sounds miserable and antithetical to the very concept of education. If you're the kind of self-learner who'd honestly eschew a traditional education (liberal arts educations are incredibly valuable, even if liberal arts degrees aren't), then you're better off not wasting your time with dozens of 'business books'.

College isn't about developing your 'personal brand.' College is about doing the things that excite and challenge you, often with wanton disregard for your 'personal brand.'
10 social media tools that you can actually use to sell more
Ant makes my life easier.

It is true that more steps have to be done "manually," but the build is 10x more deterministic than Maven. For example, think about this:

With Maven I spend two months developing $APP on my machine. Maven does its magic dependency downloading at time t0. Then someone else starts hacking on $APP at time t1 on their machine, and as the first step, they do the magic dependency downloading and it breaks. Why does it break? Different configuration? Different OS? One of the 100 servers for the app's 100 dependencies broke? An incompatible change introduced in one of the 100 dependencies during an interval of t1-t0 = 2 months? Different version of one of the 100 dependencies?

At least Ant builds are deterministic. Maven builds depend on remote Internet resources remaining the same over time. Spoiler: They don't. Libraries are updated all the time. Often the changes are incompatible (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not). URL's become dead as businesses and organizations change their file structure, change CMS'es, change domain names, merge, go out of business.

With Maven, I'll admit that when things work, they're easier. But when they break, there's so much automagic going on -- including the contents of remote servers you don't control -- that it's tough to know where to begin finding the problem. Whereas with Ant, it's fairly easy to understand exactly what's going on, and you have a good chance of fixing it.

I'm sure most HN readers know exactly how frequently build systems of all stripes break, and how important it is to quickly troubleshoot build issues so you can get back to work that actually creates some sort of value :)
Lucky lucky lucky to be young and one of the 1 in 50 Knuth said have the brain wiring for this.

Tell him to learn Unix, C and SQL. They're gonna be around for a while.

Python is a keeper and while I love Ruby a lot, I think it will always take a back seat to Python in the industry ... :-(

That's it for me - suggestions, anyone?
Where Sherlock Holmes’ Popular Image Came From
Microsoft's hardware efforts are but grains of rice in a grain silo
There’s some science that disagrees with you http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/NeatLK.html
China has indeed replaced Japan as the bogeyman in our tales of decline, but does not Santayana have something to say about how this tale ends?