skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see I need to add more specifics about my situation.

I work at a university developing research software (primarily - some is also external customer facing). My customers are internal customers, thus profitability and other business measures are not directly my concern.

The biggest issue I face with this is that my customers are non-technical people, so if I were to tell them that our infrastructure is now software defined and I have implemented analytics that will allow me to optimise the caching layer, they will most likely look at me with a puzzled expression and perhaps wonder what I'm actually doing since those things don't provide direct value to them.

The types of internal tools I am thinking of are things like; analytics, automated deployments, CI server etc.

One comment suggested I do a simple calculation like any other business decision. This is something I cannot for the life of me work out how to do. Internal tools will increase my efficiency in the future, so I guess at best I could estimate a payback time for some of these tools (like automation). Even so, how short a payback makes it worthwhile? For other tools, like analytics, how can this type of calculation be made?

Additionally, there are some things that are the "right way" to do things, such as software defined infrastructure vs managing it manually (which I currently do). Investing time in this won't have any immediate payback, but is nice to have in place in the case of a large failure when I need to recover quickly. These types of value calculations for me are not easy to make.

sourthyme, I like the idea of spending one day a week working on this stuff. Perhaps I need to have a conversation with my bosses/customers about this and try to explain to them the value that internal tooling will bring.

Thanks for the answers so far, please keep them coming.
The auto industry (in the USA at least) has a huge negative reputation for unethical conduct by the dealerships, especially in sales and service (for which they are claiming protection). It's going to be exceedingly difficult to find sympathetic jurors.
That's how I read it. Not that you've insinuated otherwise, but if you take a look at the requirements for starting a dealership, they're typically not 'small' businesses.
>> Still, only 16% of respondents said they were using their phones to browse the internet.

> The iHub report I read said that 88% of Kenyans browse the Internet with their mobile phone

Maybe 18.2% of Kenyans browse the internet at all, and 88% of those (16% of all Kenyans) do it on their phones?
"In Mexico relatively few people take drugs. "

Really? Where are the stats to back this up?

"the president, has said that if Americans cannot bring themselves to stop buying drugs, they ought to consider “market alternatives”, by which he means legalisation. Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, the two previous presidents of Mexico, have reached the same conclusion."

So, the leaders of Mexico can't seem to stop corruption and blame the US.

"That would make it more expensive than imported Mexican pot. But home-grown marijuana is much better quality than the Mexican sort."

Which is why there will always be a market for Mexican pot. You would think that people wouldn't buy junk quality items...but Walmart is still a billion dollar business.

Legalizing it will just make it easier for the cartels to get over the borders with their product. The violence will not stop because the Mexican government can't get their shit together and police their own country.

The reason the end of prohibition in the US meant the end of gangster-owned territories is because you couldn't buy off any cop, official, or judge in the country.

"IMCO reckons. Exports of other drugs, from cocaine to methamphetamine, would become less competitive,"

Less competitive? Let's say the Cartels are all selling 3 main drugs: cocaine, MJ, and meth. MJ goes away. cocaine and meth are now more competitive than ever.

For being called "the economist", the sure don't understand how business works...
Why does having a Walmart raise such ire in small towns? These types of companies expatriate dollars from local economies. I think that's the reason for the original laws.
Actually, it was the cold war that led to all the cutting edge research. Call it consumption by governments to protect themselves from the bad soviets; crap redirected. Having a bogeyman to focus our attention from consumerism to nationalism was very useful in this regard (and is all to easily abused, of course). China should be today's bogeyman to get us to invest more in education.

The cookie monster as a capitalistic symbol of consumption, I love it! I'm pretty sure this is not what the late Jim Henson had in mind, though.
Thanks! I'm in agreement with you, I don't like spending a lot of time on tooling if it isn't needed. I like only very simple tools, as I find complex ones inevitably add friction in the workflow and thus end up unused.
I also live in Rwanda and whilst I don't agree with my friend's argument that playing football with a piece of trash is as much fun as playing with a real ball, I do agree with his conclusion that this a solution looking for a problem.

There's no doubt that kids will be happy if you give them a shiny new football. They'll also be happy if you give them a secondhand t-shirt or new pair of shoes. That makes for lots of donor 'feel good' and nice photos on your Facebook page, but that doesn't make it good aid.

If the priority here is to do something helpful for the developing world, and that's why they're willing to put all the required effort and money into this project, then why not start by asking the developing world what their pressing problems are? Ask a few developing country governments and see how many of them report a lack of good footballs as a pressing problem.

When people don't ask questions like that it's usually an indication that the aid is more about the donor than the recipient. This project sounds a lot like TOMS Shoes Buy One Give One which has been frequently criticized for being a donor oriented initiative with little long term benefit [1]. It might sound completely harmless to hand out free shoes to kids, but it ends up undermining local producers and sellers, and perpetuates a 'handout' aid culture.

[1]
http://goodintents.org/in-kind-donations/toms-shoes
http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=2345
TXDNS v 2.2.1 - Aggressive multithreaded DNS digger
Absolutely. Mackinac Island banned cars in 1898 (properly easier back then than now), with the official excuse that they would 'scare the horses' (http://www.hal.state.mi.us/mhc/autoshow/vehicles/mackauto.ht...)

They are still banned their today, but properly mostly because the town use it as a turist attraction.
To expand rapidly (play catchup is the modern term), GM started franchising car sales. No real protections other than the agreements. Then anti-trust laws intruded and it looked like franchising would be illegal (think Standard Oil), but later court cases clarified the difference between the franchise owner and the suppling company. The we go to stopping companies from owning the whole horizontal chain in some industries like theaters and stopping national companies from abusing the local franchisors (like car dealerships).

It is basically the story of stopping evil monopolies combined with need for companies to expand reach quickly in a non-internet world (see Singer sewing machines and GM) dovetailing into more anti-trust laws and then local job protection schemes meshed with laws codifying the 100 year old business model (we are talking stuff that started before automobiles).

Apple doesn't have a problem because they came after. If you think this is screwed up, then don't buy a boat.
I'm sorry, what I meant was that (stereotype warning) the British are particularly cynical-reserved about putting your identity/politics on your sleeve, and the Americans are the opposite, so part of your disgust might be from cultural differences

or to further quote, “The point I was making is, this idea of a statement of Britishness; I cannot think of anything less British than that,” said 25-year-old David Bishop, author of the winning motto.
I think you mean http://cocoapods.org
http://www.teslamotors.com/natick

> The Gallery does not sell cars, but serves as a place to educate visitors about our groundbreaking electric vehicles.

The website does not say this about Tesla's other locations.
Yep, all of these laws have been affected by anti-trust since the Standard Oil case. It is very much a part of these laws being developed.
Cold canned coffee is my new addiction, but I've been to Japan one too many times. Red Bull tastes like some bland pop to me, but they've really heightened their appeal by being the premier drink mixer (which ironically, used to be coke!).
Corporations have had entire armies and countries at their command (not to mention that there is no clear dividing line between corporations and the government). The lives lost due to turf wars waged by drug cartels are not even a drop in the ocean compared to the lives lost in real wars waged for profit.
Killer fail: how Romney's broken Orca app cost him thousands of votes
It's actually very obvious.
Actually when I purchased my MINI I had a great experience. I walked into the show room and the salesman asked me if I wanted to drive a car (they only sold 1 car with 3 options for engine and suspension tuning at the time). I said yes, he took my license and copied it then handed me the keys. Told me to go down the road and where to turn to get to some relatively empty roads. Then said see you later. I took the car out, drove it and knew that day I was going to get the car it was just a matter of figuring out manual or automatic and which of the engine options.

Fast forward a few days I walked in and purchased the car. They have it ready the next day. Problem is they forgot the temporary plates and we didn't notice that. I drove it 40 miles home and then discovered the plates. The salesman drove the plates out to my home address on his way home from work.
Can they order the car on premises (even if it is a computer with a web browser in the studio)?
No, it means that if you are going to police the morals of the industry, you have a lot of work to do.
Is haskell being used at CERN, NASA or any other research center?
How Network Virtualization has Helped Shaped HA and Disaster Recovery
I'm a non alcoholic who suffered from the same problem of HN/ Reddit etc. While I won't advise for or against alcohol I will advise against using any kind of substance to solve a problem of distraction. That doesn't fix the real problem because the sources of distractions will always be there. Someday if you want to start your own company from home what are you going to do? Drink the whole day?

I'd suggest using the Pomodoro technique for two whole months instead of the alcohol and then re evaluating your requirements to stay focused. For me, I gave up coffee, took up Pomodoro and re discovered classical music to find my zen zone. Now even if I'm told that I can't have caffeine for medical reasons it doesn't matter.
i actually see a great opportunity for a homegrown company to fill in this demand. Asus gives no fucks? Fuck them, well roll out our own
I think we should pause before having a serious discussion about an interface replacing a protocol.

This is like Google's pitch being "Our search will dominate because we use a single text field, and we have a 'surprise me' button."

If you want to "replace email" you have to replace its infrastructural value to the internet too, not just the superficial day-to-day convenience of messaging. As long as every website requires email to register, messaging is a secondary consideration.

I think that 750k could have been used for a failure-less-obvious.

EDIT: for tone.
My answer at this very moment in time is around 1/3. Which seems a lot. Though these projects have been less about automating drudgery and more about unlocking new workflows and ways of understanding things.

When I first started working at my job I sneakily built a suite of tools for visually working with NL grammars (instead of just buckling down and writing the grammars). Although I don't maintain it anymore, it's now used by an entire team. It was great that my then-managers saw that I was on to something and let me obsess about it for a few weeks.

I recently spent a few weekends writing static code analysis tools to analyze our codebase. There is some pretty exciting stuff that can be done there. It hasn't paid off quite yet, though I know it will.

Another project I've been juggling with my 'official job' is a nice new logging system with all kinds of cool features. There are so many challenges about making a piece of infrastructure work technically and culturally across a large team, however. It's much easier to estimate how long the technical part will take.

I've also written a bunch of tools that just failed to find any real use. In retrospect, these were mostly vanity projects of some kind, whereas the projects that have worked have always been about scratching an itch that I can see other people have (whether or not they articulate it).
As a Swede I'm always amazed to hear about this type of US laws. I know Sweden represents socialism to Americans, but when it comes to this kind of intervention in the market it's much less accepted here than in the US.
The dealers don't care about the economy. They care about themselfs.

Politicians just want to get reelected.
Internet Marketing 2013 – National Brands To Increase Local Investment
Even that 5 hours / 5 minutes is worth it if you're going to be doing it enough.
ModelKit: A better model framework for Objective-C
NetSleuth : Open source Network Forensics And Analysis Tools
Thanks for sharing the actual emails you sent.
When you really need tools, couldn't survive without them and couldn't buy some 3rd-party so then you have to create some internal piece of software. And it's not a matter of time or resources, just accurately calculate will it help or not and decide.

Of course internal software MUST be developed using the same quality standards as your frontend program (VCS/tests/code review/etc).
I feel this applies just as much to programming as it does to poetry and the arts...
Google blocked in China as government leaders meet
They have have advantages over non-manufacturer dealerships. For instance, parts would be internal and thus they may get them for just material cost which would allow for either lower service costs or higher margins both of which aren't available at non-manufacture dealerships. You could apply the same scenario to fully finished new cars as well.
Snowbirds Auto Transport Shipanycar
So, he gets to comment on other people who publish their work, but he is forever safe from the same sort of feedback? That sounds more like fear than pragmatism.
As you mentioned, it's the same for most of the companies. They sell products at atrocious premiums. Lets see what the Asus India guys do, now that this suggestion/complaint is on record.
Sure, it's hard being the first, but after Groupon became popular people started actively looking for other deal sites. It became very easy to throw up a site and gain a lot of traction. I helped one of my clients do just that and they continue to see a lot of traffic to this day.
Exactly! You'd be amazed at how many people use Twitter here in Rwanda - practically everyone in the government from the president, to the ministers are all on there, and if you've got a question you can tweet them. The main telecoms company also enable people to tweet via SMS.

People need to stop thinking of the developing world as a simple place with simple problems.
Recording for Building Better Web Apps with F#
My team and I spent a lot of time developing internal tools (and/or integrating them with other tools like CampaignMonitor and stuff).

Throughout our massive amounts of failures, we've learned some things (and some things the hard way): there are basics, and there are nice-to-haves. Get the basics right.

Our basics include an entirely zeroMQ based service-oriented architecture (after 8-9 different iterations over the past 4 years). We spent a lot of time writing a ZMQ based DHT, and service wrappers (kinda like zeroRPC[0]). Other basics include a standardized front-end A/B testing based off genetify[1], email service (with AWS' SES), paypal service, our fair matching services and many others.

The one thing to note is that these basics didn't come overnight though. It came through many many iterations of different products that failed. We merely picked up the components that worked best.

There were things that were nice to have like automated testing and deployment options that we considered. Even using tools like Puppet and/or Chef, we determined, were not quite a good use of our time, considering our release schedule isn't all that crazy, and deployments can be managed by one human being.

But our situation does not apply to you. You need to think about what fits your situation, and your styles. Maybe you are the kind that pushes a release to production servers every 5 minutes. Then yes, having an automated test and build system would be extremely useful.

Start with simple stuff like crons and tiny scripts. Let your internal tools evolve on their own. Don't jump in to write massive automation for your systems. Instead, do it in small parts, just enough to help you.

Hope this helps.

[0] http://zerorpc.dotcloud.com/

[1] http://genetify.com/demo/
Would a parent corporation that owns both the manufacturer and a separate distributor work?
I have not read the article, nor am I conversant in modern technology company acronyms, but congratulations on your Bed 2 Breakfast start-up!
The alternative is to 'bail them out' -- either through strong and enforced-by-guns legislation in their favor, or the monetary kind to 'create jobs.'

I'm fairly certain we're all sick of private-industry and government colluding together in the name of state-sponsored profit. No industry deserves a guaranteed profit margin.
I often wonder why we can't have something similar here already. Seems like the perfect way for parents to send their kids money at short notice.
> Deals are a win for the customer and the merchant (and Groupon too).

Not necessarily, it only would work if you can get repeat customers. There are many groupons that my wife sees that she would never have done if there wasn't a significant discount. These "cherry pickers" are what cause companies to lose money and make a Groupon not worth it. There was a blog/article by a woman who owned a Chicago yoga studio who was told she should do a Groupon. You can see her point of view at http://blog.tulayoga.net/2011/08/why-i-wont-do-groupon.html
In the UK, the Locomotive Acts[1] restricted speed and weight of autos and imposed signaling rules (cars had to be preceded by a walker with a red flag!) and required yielding to horses. Arguably, these laws hindered early automobile development and public acceptance and helped the development of railways and trams.

I'm not sure about the US, but by the early 20th century the American auto industry was on the offensive, setting up shell companies[2] to buy up and dismantle inner-city trolley lines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scanda...
SSLsplit v 0.4.5 - Man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL/TLS
Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
Hi, this is a project I've been working on for about 2 months. I am definitely not a designer, so I tried to keep the GUI to minimum and really make the presentation about photos and as fluid as possible.

Any feedback welcome! :)
Imagine that Ford only allows maintenance at company owned stores, because they don't sell replacement parts to dealers, then they charge $500 for a fan belt, etc.
Oh, just like the US auto manufacturers should have just gone out of business instead of being bailed out?
That's actually a really good startup idea. Would be nice if pricing wasn't stuck down in the footer....
Dev wanted asap
Hey guys, I'm seeking a developer that has rails, bootstrap and google map api experience as well as an eye for good UI/UX. This is a paid gig available immediately. Contact: dkisit (at) gmail.com
Happy kids doesn't equal good aid. Are those footballs helping to improve the long term living conditions of those kids? If we have money and resources to help the developing world, assuming that actually is our goal, then shouldn't we strive to find interventions that actually have lasting impact?
My experience with Groupon deals is that they are not targeted to a small enough geographic region.

People might be enticed to frequent a merchant outside of their normal shopping area to take advantage of a deep discount, but very few will permanently expand their shopping area.

I suspect most merchants don't see a permanent increase in repeat customers.
Thank you. It's fixed. Left and right arrow should hopefully work to browse.
Based on the organizations you say are signing up for your product, you're spending an awful lot of time trying to get coverage on a site that doesn't focus on your core markets whatsoever.

All the time you spent literally begging TC to respond to your emails could have been spent getting published in trade blogs/magazines/sites that talk directly to your customer.

Get out of the startup bubble and focus on your customer. Companies that stay under the radar and are killing it are way cooler than a rewritten press release on TC.
So if M$ patented this technology, does it mean that other companies can not use this kind of shit to limit their users? If so this would be a good thing.
Android's APIs enable easy implementation of a sqlite-based data model, where changes are always persisted.

That doesn't solve the problem for things like CAD that need an in-memory object-oriented data model, but the Android support for observer patterns can be wrapped around any data model, and the ability to quickly, which means, in practice, incrementally, persist changes is driven by both Android-specific issues like needing to respond to lifecycle events quickly, and by general mobile considerations like a battery that could fail unexpectedly.

In other words, you need to solve the "don't explicitly save" problem for reasons ranging from "it's more robust" to "it fits Android UI conventions" anyway.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

69 million people voted for him in 2008, and 61 million in 2012. This is the most objective metric available. These more subjective ratings show his potential for bringing people together: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/13/obama-does-...

"According to Pew, 92 percent considered him a “good communicator,” 87 percent deemed him “warm and friendly,” 81 percent said he “cares about people like me,” 79 percent thought him “well-informed,” and 76 percent judged him “trustworthy.” Since then, each of those numbers has declined between 10 and 20 points. But they began at such stratospherically high levels that even with the drop, the public’s perception of Obama as a person remains remarkably cheery."

And that was during an election with a flood of attack ads from both sides. The cause of the double digit drops will attenuate with time.
I am very skeptical of statistics touted by so-called "security experts", spy agencies, or anti-drug organizations like the DEA. They aren't exactly impartial observers, and have every incentive to greatly exaggerate the scale of their opposition. The bigger and meaner their opposition looks, the better the case they can make for increased funding of and attention to their own business.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media usually quotes these biased sources as if they were speaking gospel truth, without a shred of criticism or doubt. These sources are virtually never held to account, asked to justify how they came up with their estimates, or have their estimating methodologies critically scruitinized.
I think you mean group . sort
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