skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With more companies going more and more to a purely online presence, I've found customer service to be rapidly degrading. They provide no phone numbers to contact them and they take an age to reply by email with a standard copy and paste response to everything.

It's annoying as hell, and a lot of people's response if "well it's free, so don't expect customer support". Except it is the customers that make Facebook worth $100bn, for example.

More companies need to learn from Amazon, their customer support is first rate. I can see a lot of people turning their back on Facebook/Google due support issues.
If I would have finished reading to the end before commenting, I would have had my questions answered. Valve does not grant ownership to employees. However, excess profits are distributed to employees for the most part, which does make Valve a de facto worker's cooperative.

Yanis does discuss the standard arguments against a worker's coop: malfeasance, access to capital, and scalability.

I grew up in an area (Saskatchewan), where for a long time the largest "company" was a cooperative. Access to capital is probably the main reason why Silicon Valley firms are not worker's cooperatives. But that can be solved by granting worker's cooperatives the same legal privileges as corporations. Instead of selling shares, they sell "bonds" which do not pay interest but instead pay a fraction of profit. This is in practice no different than buying insubordinated shares, like those sold by Facebook or Google. Such shares do not give you a "proper" shareholder vote, voting shares are held by the founders.
"As we all know, at some point the biological alarm clock starts ringing in a majority of women's ears and they want to be a mother."

I have no idea if this is common, or if I'm a rare exception, or perhaps if it's linked with being gay, but I'm a guy who feels that.

Anyone else (male) here, or just me?
>Meanwhile, other people study and work their whole lives trying to cure cancer or end poverty.

And lots of people spend their time driving a delivery van or installing windows, but we don't belittle that. Bringing entertainment or inspiring seems a good way to spend a life to me.

>Doing sports seems to be a very self-centered, egoistical thing.

If you have ever met top class scientists and acadmeics, I think you will see, unfortunately, that some of them can be equally self-centred and egotistical too. I'm sure the same could be said about execs of pharma companies. So, I guess I wonder if there are egotistical people or egotistical activities?

>The only thing I can accept is that it motivates people to push harder and explore boundaries of human achievement.

+ the benefits of encouraging people to take up recreational sport - for exercise [more than an @officeworkout though ;-) ]and the friends it leads to. Also for some people it leads to a nice career and gives them opportunities to see the world.
The only option that is even remotely realistic is Amazon's App Store, and that's only available in the USA.
Sun - simple weather app (iOS web-app)
Thought this was a pretty impressive demo of what the future of mobile web apps could be. Surprised that I didn't find this through hacker news.
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Yes. Maybe you're a particularly savvy 19-year old, but when I was 18 those two numbers were as equally unfathomable to me. I'm not saying I couldn't tell the difference, I'm just saying that they were so large and incomprehensible, it didn't matter.

It's the equivalent of trying to wrap your head around the difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion dollars. Sure, I can SEE the difference, but really can't comprehend it, even though they are orders of magnitude apart.
It's hard to take this seriously when it omits one of the most obvious ways to get to the top of the ranks: buy a domain with your name in it. Or a variation thereof. In fact, even the social site profiles, you should go for urls that have your name in the slug. If that's not a service offered by the company who built this infographic, then I have to suspect whatever methodology they used to come up with these rankings.

* Edit: Also worth noting. Their "1 billion names searched in Google every day" statistic is suspect. If you follow the actual bit.ly link (bit.ly/MWEFQT), it goes to a paper that references that statistics to some 2004 presentation. There's no indication that "1 billion" isn't 95% searches for "justin bieber/kim kardashian/lindsay lohan". A minor point in the bigger picture, maybe, but hey, it was their choice to headline the infographic with it.
Alternatively find some people who take joy in building robots to deal with the sewers and other joyless tasks. (Or some people who take joy in building robots that build robots that deal with such things.)
A guide about what to tweet and what not to tweet
To be fair, I am very involved raising my three-year-old, but I am lucky if I can tell his pajamas from his proper clothes, and as often as not fail to dress him in an outfit his mother aproves of. :)
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Walmart is a unique nonword. This is more like calling it Wall/Wal or Mobil or Target, which all seem fine to me.
Of course javascript is crap...

...however, this is also true of every other part of web programming: HTML and CSS are similarly a mixture of academic navel gazing nonsense and ugly cludges designed by committee.

The fact is that HTML5 is still really only version 0.1 of where web programming should be- But this doesn't mean it isn't improving. The fact is that having portable code snippets that can execute within a website is extremely powerful and right now javascript is essentially the only way to accomplish this.

You don't have to love javascript to love what it allows you to do.
While doing some research [1] on the 1990s "fun at work" trend, I ran across this amazing passage in a management book:

> Now make a log of your workday that records how much time you devote to playing, having fun, and actually engaging the world around you. Then note the number of times you and your colleagues laugh. Use this "inventory" as a baseline for redefining the role of play and fun in your performance.

Good news everyone, we're on track to exceed quarterly laughter targets! What a great place this is to work!

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html
That's a good question. LinkedIn ranking high makes sense but we were really surprised by about.me. Here's a high-level answer

1) LinkedIn tends to rank high because, not only is it a well structured page, but people tend to take the time and fill out all the information. From Google's perspective, the more relevant information about someone on a page, the higher it should rank. Think about it: Twitter gives you 160 characters, and most people barely fill out their FB profiles beyond status updates. On LinkedIn however, people carefully fill out their bio, their headline, all of their education and work experience. They post their resume, get reccomendations, plaster their name everywhere, etc.

2) Why does about.me rank so poorly? On the other end, about.me is structured pretty poorly. You aren't encouraged to publish much content and the page remains relatively static and sparse. Compare that to twitter. Sure on twitter you only get 160 characters in your bio, but it's constantly updating with new content, which Google loves. About.me basically has the worst of both worlds: Not much original content, streams duplicate content from other places, which Google doesn't favor
For some reason I end up in a lot of debates on relative school quality between countries across the world (presumably because I live in another country than I was born in, and because I work with academics a lot...) Many have an opinion on country X's school system being better than country Y's. Most of the time, this opinion isn't based on results, it seems (from my off-the-cuff analysis) that school are generally considered 'better' if they are 'stricter' (i.e., place more emphasis on discipline and respect, for example school who let people eat in class must be horrible), and the amount of hard science they teach everyone from a young age on (e.g., teaching everyone hard science more than the basics is better than just teaching those with an affinity for it, and teaching it starting at 6 is better than teaching at 12).

However, people can seldom back that up with evidence. For example, using artificial metrics such as scores in the various Olympiads (math, physics) or more 'utilitarian' metrics such as GDP (because people do use the prosperity of a country, for which GDP is a rough proxy, to justify their preferences, or rather they use it as a driving factor in the optimization function that use to determine which country's school system is 'best').

I get into a bitter argument with my mother, of all people, over this, with her unmovable stance being that in my home country, education is better because schools are strict, pupils address teachers with an honorific, etc; while in the country that I live in, that is much less important. (I'm not Asian and this is not an East vs West debate :) ) Yet in my current country, GDP is higher than in my home country, with many other things being similar; while I have no hard proof that the school system is the only or even a major driver of this difference, wouldn't it make sense that I'd send my daughter to a school in a system that has proven its real-world effectiveness, even if aspects of it go against the common wisdom or 'cultural intuitions' that I was brought up in, and that many in my old country still adhere to? While I guess it would be hard for many to admit that they've believed in things that turned out to be wrong for decades (I personally had that problem less because I never quite identified with the ethos of my old country that much), I'd say rationally that it's more likely that that part of the culture is wrong, rather than there being some extreme coincidence in which, despite having a substandard schooling system, many of the effects of that schooling system in my new country turned out better than those of the old country.

Sorry that this turned into such a long post - I just find it frustrating that, in this debate just like in so many others ;), it's common for people to ignore any evidence-based analysis of this question, or restrict themselves to that evidence that is favorable to their standpoint; and I do think that general prosperity is a direct consequence of a well-performing educational system.
Ok, so I looked at the article again, and got that they focus on population, social structure, state strength, and political instability. It's even more interesting that they identify two cycles with at least some dynamics:

1. the "secular" cycle: in the beginning of the cycle, supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.

2. the "fathers and sons" cycle: the father responds violently to a perceived social injustice; the son lives with the miserable legacy of the resulting conflict and abstains; the third generation begins again.

Thanks for the nudge.
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The problem is the stupid way raid systems (or at least linux md) handle these inevitable UREs. Make a raid5 of 2TB disks, use it for a bit, and it's virtually guaranteed there's one bad sector on each disk (or at least, you'd get one URE on each disk when reading them all). Now have a drive fail. No problem, you think, I'll replace that drive and rebuild. Put in the replacement, kick off the rebuild process. Linux will hit a URE on one of the drives, kick that drive out of the array, and refuse to rebuild any more. You can't even mitigate this by doing a weekly verify of your disks, because if that verify happens to run into UREs on two separate disks, bam, bye bye data.

This is not theoretical, it happened to me; maybe there are some magic parameters that get around it, but I read the available tutorials; if I made a mistake, others have probably made it. I asked a kernel dev how to solve this problem and he suggested a cronjob that runs md5sum on each of the underlying disk devices. I wish I was joking.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution, ZFS. A raidz1 will recover perfectly from the same scenario (again, this is not theoretical, I've done it); you will lose the particular blocks that suffered the UREs, but no others (and ZFS can tell you which files were affected). And you can run the "zfs scrub" command regularly to catch any sectors that've decayed before you lose a drive and can no longer use parity to restore them.
Since the Apple II was all in all just very basic easily programmable hardware for home users, I say no.

Our generation's Apple II is the ARM or any ARM based development board. It's ubiquitous and it's (at least compared to the x86 architecture) rather easy to program yet very powerful. Those are the reasons why the Apple II bred good programmers like almost no other machine in it's day.

Comparing a high-level language with tons of abstractions to Applesoft BASIC or pure 6502 Assembler is rather appalling to me. The reason why people who coded for the Apple II and similar machines became such great programmers is because they got a fundamental understanding of the hardware from it, which is something that JavaScript will never give you. It's not just that tinkering with low level stuff opens up new ways to be creative with the technology, but it does in fact make you a better programmer on all levels.

Additionally, JavaScript is (in my opinion obviously) an absolutely terrible language, with which we're just stuck with because it happens to be the only one that's well supported by all the big browsers of today.
It is not like checking that box allows other markets to just push stuff onto your device. It just gives you the ability to get things from other sources. You still have full control of not getting stuff from sources you are worried about.
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Health, Family, Career - pick 2

This is a false trilemma for only a privileged few. If you have unusually healthy genes, an unusually supportive family, or an unusually cushy job, consider yourself lucky! Both men and women need to make the same tough decisions to find balance in their life -- it's not a gender thing.
try exiftool http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
That's contrasting the University experience, which is wildly different.

And the "snooty British guy" stated he attended a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_school himself, which are most definitely state schools.
Managers and methodology pundits are focused on a dogmatic application of their particular religion regardless of whether it makes sense for the actual application. I have never seen a specific methodology work in reality when it was followed to the letter - people just don't work like that.

This is a very big reason why I doubt the effectiveness of creating a class of "managers" who's skill set is "managing". How can a graduated MBA lead a software development team without knowing the business or the domain?

Management, to me, is a skill that is learned through experience, not taught in a classroom. And it is in the classroom's where dogmatic methodologies are most prominent.
Security is as strong as your weakest link.

If that weakest link happens to be an employee with a naive ideas about password security, it makes no difference.

This is the same silliness that makes people claim that social engineering isn't actually a security breach "oh they just phoned up the front desk and convinced them to be granted access, who would fall for that, that's not hacking!", yeah, no, someone just got 0wned.
That's so cool, great example of what you can do with PubNub!
One way to cure this symptom of patriarchy is to try to stop being a 'troglodyte' as you put it. What would a non-'troglodyte' do?

If you shrug, accept the status quo and say meh, it's a cultural problem you're functionally no different than someone who is completely ignorant of the issue.
I agree that email #2 is marginally better than #1, but I'd not be thrilled by either one. Here's why:

1. I am all about respect, and I tend to take things personally (yeah, it's a character flaw, but whatever). If you send an email that even hints that you don't respect me and my judgment enough to just leave me alone and get my job done, it's going to rub me the wrong way and create an antagonistic feeling. My feeling is going to be "if you don't trust me, why am I working here?"

2. I wasn't consulted about a change that's going to affect me. Unilateral policy changes that aren't based on input from the people affected by the change are mondo bogus. This is also going to get my goat and annoy me to no end.

All of that said, I agree that people focus on the negative more than the positive, and that one "bad" email can outweigh 10 "good" emails (if there is such a thing).

My theory is that everybody has a mental balance scale tucked away in their heads, labeled "quit my job" with the ends labeled "yes" and "no". At any given time, neither bucket is completely empty, but it's usually fairly evenly balanced. But if enough little things build up and build up and build up on the "yes" side, eventually it tips the scale. Emails of this sort are definite additions to the "yes" side of the "quit my job" scale.
I'm actually going to include this as an example of non-innovation in my pitch to take us to postgres.
This is actually a big part of why I can't take any pleasure from the "bumbling/incompetent husband" stereotype in commercials, sitcoms, etc. It's supposed to pander to women, but it's actually insulting to everyone - insulting to men by implying they are too dumb to handle basic self-care, and insulting to women by implying that housework is their natural domain.
That's par for the course when Google bans someone. They intentionally don't tell people what they did wrong because they feel it helps people learn to cheat the system.
Should a top diplomat not work for a government because they are corrupt too? Or a talented young footballer in the favelas of Sao Paulo not dream of winning the World Cup and earning a good wage because FIFA is corrupt also?[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA#Allegations_of_corruption_...
That's a good point Danso. The BrandYourself software actually guides you through all of that. If you submit a LinkedIn for example, but haven't gotten your vanity URL, we guide you through the process until you have. If you submit a personal website and haven't applied a custom domain (yourname.com) we guide you through that too. Basically the service helps you make any profile or link as search engine friendly for your name as possible

This infographic is more of an interesting look into where different profiles generally rank on their own, left to their own devices. Since we track the Google results of over 130K people, millions of results and hundreds of thousands of profiles, we thought it would be cool to see where profiles generally rank.

Does that help at all?
I don't like either email.

Assuming we have open communication, I would respond to the CEO's email and propose implementing a different policy - if we are expected to come to the noisy distracting office where it is hard to get work done, managers must send an email asking us, explaining why it is necessary, and it will be up to the engineer's discretion to determine whether or not he wants to lower his productivity by coming in.
Sorry, I was ignorent about their distribution service. I completely forgot they did that.

Thanks for the correction.
> With Web/Local Storage you are limited to 5-10 Megabytes of data.

IndexedDB has unlimited storage.
> Let the team members in the trenches make the decisions and make them own the consequences of their decisions.

This! And this:

Maybe it’s an extension of the deeply held view that from an economic viewpoint, it would be ideal if people were interchangeable.

People are unique, each person has her own talent: you can profit from it and get a nice product, or you can try and annihilate it into a strict methodology and get a sloppy result - but you'll have obtained it with your favourite methodology!
Driving delivery vans or installing windows is actively helping other people, why would I belittle that.

I don't doubt that a lot of "scientists" don't do much of use - all I say is that professional athletes in my opinion definitely don't do anything of use, whereas at least some scientist certainly do. And if somebody cures cancer, let them be selfish as much as they want, they still gave something to society.

Nobody asks to admire pharma execs, but the notion that professional athletes should be admired exists.

As for inspiring people to take up a recreational sport: really? Is that what the Olympics do? It seems very unlikely to me, because the athletes are so obviously beyond the things normal humans can achieve. And if that is the goal, it could probably be had cheaper with some advertisements. Think not only the costs for all the branding, licensing and whatnot, but also the hours people waste in front of the TV.
There was a cool SIGGRAPH 2011 paper from Johannes Kopf from Microsoft Research and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University that presents a new pixel scaling algorithm that really takes pixel scaling to a whole new level. Check it out here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/
The logo/icon and the use of Instagram in the title were some of the issues I addressed in my response and I offered to make changes. It would be hard to release an Instagram plugin without using the Instagram name (think of all the Photoshop plugins). But in the end, I made no changes and they re-instated.
"only half of people own their first result"

For very low values of "own".
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Why? Marx is one of the more influential figures in modern history.

In this case, the reference to Marx was basically saying that corporations pay you a fixed rate for your time, but must extract a larger value than what they pay you. Reading this won't make you start hymning the Soviet national anthem.
You still get prompted for every single thing installed...
False positive with impending loss of market placement, reviews and app presence with their customers. No recourse for flagging Google's attention except for appealing to the court of public opinion?

Perhaps it is a "repeating scenario" because these app stores are rolling over in bed and squishing the poor bastards who get into bed with them and stake their business on cooperation?
The Olympics have very strict broadcast rules and everything that goes out needs to get pre-approval. Even just given that hurdle, it's a pretty remarkable achievement.