skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much of the American population (including a majority of pregnant women) are deficient in vitamin D. Odds are good that you are too.

A big contributing factor is insufficient exposure to sunlight. Some have speculated that seasonal winter flu season is attributable to vitamin D levels.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-07-13-vitamin-d-tes...
China Wants to Become King of Electric Cars & Hybrids
I do work for a very large enterprise. Monkeypatching isn't something that is used liberally, but it's the right thing in certain circumstances.

It's not luck, simply put, it's not hard to fix well written software.
I skimmed through the documentation. What's the main value proposition? What do I get by using Kite that I don't get if I use Python or Objective C?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/20/121018/65
If there are tons of people using GS's unofficial support forums instead of your own, that tells you that your system is broken, and needs to be repaired.

SNAP!
Thankfully these issues have been completely solved by passenger/mod_rails. Deploying Rails apps is now trivial and stability (at least outside of extreme loads) isn't an issue.
There are more bioabsorbable metals than titanium, like magnesium, calcium and various composites of each.
There are also golf and windsurfing classes.
I'm a woman, of course I'm not always logical ;)

Seriously though, I personally find that the longer I leave something the less likely I am to get worked up about it. After a few weeks it's probably gone from my mind altogether, so yeah, 10 months does seem like a really long time to wait.

I don't really know that much about 37signals apart from what I've picked up here on HN, but I believe any company - any person - is capable of spinning a story for a little drama to bring their company PR. Maybe I'm just a cynic though :)
Replied to your thread with this link: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/20/121018/65
> B is the only one who is qualified to make decisions that only affect him. How can you possibly think that taking options away from B is a good idea? Options that you or I may think are stupid shouldn't be taken away from B, just because we don't see how they are useful to him.

Ok, so for example you support B's right to sell himself into slavery if he feel that that is the correct course of action?
Because acting this way assures that the problem will be noticed and acted upon. Private letter would achieve nothing at worst and maybe some tweaks to 37signals page on GS at best. Customers of the other companies would get the same confusing message making it easy to take GS pages as official support.
As you can see I don't believe in GetSatissfaction "mistakes". All the design decisions (which eventually led to the trouble with 37s) they took look very logical.
Yes, making it exciting is more important than making it easy to develop for.

"Excitement" is a benefit, not a feature. This distinction from advertising is obvious, but hard to drive into engineering (even when it's me).
http://www.truthwinsout.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/obama...
I was awaken on march/28/09 God said there is a code ,i desire you know,i said o.k Lord,i figured it out,then asked Jesus Christ,why?He said i have a special reason,ill show,confirm soon why,on march 31,i found out there was a world wide alert on a person causing trouble,on computer,hes a hacker,must be stopped,he has linked into 10,000 or more sights,in world,there is a 20,000.00 award,i can stop him.
GS shouldn't set up anything for companies that don't want to use their service, full stop, end of story.
Following Twitter's issue blog, most of their problems appear database-related. I wonder whether a shift to Scala would have any real effect.
Users end up on GS because of a Google search. Does that necessarily mean that they looked for and couldn't find a proper support channel first? I don't think so.

I'm sure there are plenty of people (me included) who google first, and navigate the site to a support page as a last resort.
Scientists Say Workplace Social Networking Increases Productivity
Reposting my comment from the post itself:

"@Tom: “why call them out so publicly on it, did you try an email and that failed? Why do it so angrily and so publicly?”

This is such a weak claim, that pointing out things on blogs rather than keeping them private is somehow wrong.

A) If you, as a company, are doing something that is arguably wrong, underhanded, etc., it is entirely fair game to be called out on that in public. The best analogy I can come up with at the moment is, it’s like being angry at whistle blowers for going public instead of solely trying to resolve the issue inside the company. Tobacco, Enron, etc.

B) Doing stuff in public - and getting the momentum of other people behind you - gets things done a lot faster than being pissed in private does. It’s also a lot more transparent, which is a part of what the web is all about.

We all open up criticism of ourselves from anybody and everybody through blog comments, it’s totally natural to do the same through blog posts."
Link should point to:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/fatalexception/archives/2009/04/... ?
and olympians http://www.newsweek.com/id/189296
He could have also just sent a cease and desist order from his lawyers. Point is that the way Jason reacted was his choice. Notably, it was pretty much in the same form that GS promotes as a part of its service.
Could not have been said more succinctly, Daniel.
Even more tangential thought:

Like many issues, the real problem is the education system.

Perhaps if inner city public schools were more like schools and less like prisons we would not have significant parts of the population lacking rudimentary critical thinking skills, and we would not have to worry about entire segments of the financial system existing solely to exploit them.
Most places like Uservoice only the site owner can sign-up.
I don't understand why this is top of HN. Sure, GetSatisfaction screwed up their text on one of their badges, but that shouldn't have been cause for Jason to go off on a rant.

Also, I think that GetSatisfaction could have notified 37Signals when the page got created as per this quote from Sarah: "customer himself pointed me to the GS page he had created to ask 37signals a question".

However, these are all issues that could have been handled differently, most notably NOT being aired out to the general public. If Jason Fried thought that GS has "blackmailed" him, isn't he stooping to their level then by publicly denouncing their service, thereby essentially blackmailing them into action? Seriously, let's all be adults.
Engagement Loops: The Levers And Metrics Of Engagement
Bankruptcy Imminent For Personal Genetics Pioneer Decodeme
Space elevator is the greatest scientific hoax of all times.
As I said in a comment just posted, the user who wanted satisfaction, no pun intended, created that page on GetSatisfaction forums. If anything, the failure was technical, since GS did not notify 37Signals that a page has been created for their company.

Matter of fact, same can be said for any third-party service that lets users create pages/forums for companies they have beef with.
All About QTP (QuickTest Professional)
All About QTP (QuickTest Professional)
Microsoft Looks to JWT to Market New Search Engine
Discuss with HN: Does anyone besides me look at the ratio of comments to points?
I find that if there are more comments than points, then the article has a good chance of being controversial. When vice versa is true, then the article is either being ignored (if there are few points), or a lot of people like it. Maybe this can be made into an official metric?
Excusing peer-to-peer file-sharing because it falls under the nebulous cloud of "non-commercial" use seems ridiculous. Espousing a social-contract model for copyright doesn't suddenly mean that only the end-users get to dictate the terms of the contract.
But, that's the point. Things usually only have value based on scarcity, at least for luxury items.

The problem is that data is never a scarce resource. It's, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. So trying to put a price on a collection of bits is virtually impossible using classical models.

So what you end up with is companies trying to recreate this 'scarcity' with encryption schemes and lockins and all manner of other protective measures. Which all inevitably fail, rendering the production cost of this new item extremely close to zero.

Now, some people argue that you must take development costs into account, lost sales, etcetera and then you end up straying into wild, untamed territory. After all, you don't see car companies suing the manufacturers of bicycles for taking away sales, or anything like that. But yet, when it comes to digital information, this seems to be par for the course.

And of course, the counter-argument to it is thus: If I make say, 1,000 copies of a game and keep all these copies on my hard drive, does that cost the company more? No.

But if I give these new copies that I made at my own expense (as little as that is) to my friends, this is somehow a transformative process and is treated as costing the IP owner profit (or increasing effective cost or somesuch).

It would probably serve better to just give up on this and focus on creating product in a way that follows traditional markets. Give away the music for free, it's only data. But make your revenue from shirts, concerts, etcetera.
1) No transmission/conversion loss. It is probably soldered directly to the DC power regulator on the mainboard.

2) The servers are frequently removed for maintenance. Thus, the batteries will also be checked/replaced along with the machines they serve. As a bonus, there is always exactly the right amount of battery capacity in the system.
"Unofficial" isn't enough. The post itself explains why; pretty much every part of the UI suggests that the GS page is coming from 37signals. Things like "report a problem" which imply that it will be reported to someone who can do something about it (rather than GS). And using "we" ambiguously.

Furthermore, many companies offer "unofficial support" pages on their own websites, which are meant to allow people to help each other resolve problems in the case that they are waiting for an official response. GS should not allow themselves to be confused by that type of forum.

They need to remove company logos, remove excessive mentioning of the company's name, and put a big description at the top of the page that explains that GS is in no way related to the company being discussed.
I don't agree with anyone who has replied here. The public rant equivalent to shouting through a megaphone, while 80,000 people who might have their own, smaller megaphones intently listen.

There was no need for this, unless the private e-mail did not resolve the problem. Refer back to what Sarah said. The user who had a problem with 37Signals created the initial page. How is this GetSatisfaction's issue and more importantly, how is it a justification for publicly slamming another business?
I know for certain there is money in Chicago... It's not meant for software startups, but you can find healthy sized Angel investors / investor funds there that are interested in fishing.
AMEE - The World's Energy Meter
Perhaps "ripping off the work of thousands of dedicated users" needs to be included in definition of Web 3.0 ?
I'm glad Jason stuck to his guns and didn't back down. He's right.
I read your post and had to go look up some the numbers.
- 28 million 360s sold since 2005
- 50 million Wiis sold since 2006
- Nintendo has sold 2.7 billion games to date
Nesson's a character, no?

One of the most distasteful aspects of legal practice is that most legal arguments take the form of factual statements (or at least claims of fact), but the factual content of the speech is secondary to the effects it's hoped to have (on its listeners).

So put yourself in Nesson's shoes; he's doing this case pro-bono, and therefore has no real worried about being paid for his time. Thus, Nesson has no incentive to artificially shorten the length of his defense (out of concern for working longer than his client can afford).

Nesson also wants to win this case.

So you've got someone for whom: time is no real object, and winning is a goal.

In that circumstance, what's the harm in trying a "fair use" defense? It probably won't fly, but it's one more thing to try, and one more thing for the plaintiff to have to argue against (thereby further draining plaintiff's resources, because plaintiff is paying for their representation's time here).

It's not entirely harmless, sure -- a few too many wild conjectures and Nesson's credibility in court may be somewhat tarnished (though, even there, keep in mind Nesson's (1) something of a legend and (2) already known as a loose cannon, so compared to a run of the mill attorney the impact of one or two wild arguments on his in-courtroom credibility is harder to calculate) -- but it's one more thing that might work and it's one more way to try and exhaust the plaintiff's will to proceed (and I guarantee you this is not the only line of defense Nesson's got).

So, regardless of whether (1) Nesson thinks file-sharing is actually fair use and (2) Nesson thinks he can convince anyone else file-sharing is actually fair use (note: (2) is independent of (1)) it's possible to reverse-engineer the thinking that might make the risk/reward calculation on advancing this line of argument look promising.

But, due to the practical constraints of legal speech, you'll never see any of these statements:

- your honor, I personally don't think file sharing is fair use and I actually don't think I'll be able to convince anyone else in this courtroom that filesharing is fair use, but in the interest of exhausting my opponents with every hare-brained scheme I can conceive I'm going to spend a couple days arguing the point. Let's proceed.

- your honor, I personally think file sharing is fair use and am savvy enough to understand I won't convince anyone here of that via any amount of argumentation, but I am cocksure enough of my argumentative abilities that I won't say anything so immediately laughable that all y'all will be hard-pressed to give a reasoned explanation for why you should shut this line of argumentation down prematurely so you should plan on hearing me out over the next several days.

...or anything similarly candid, ever. Instead, you'll just hear something like what you've heard, which is a straight-faced assertion with no qualifications or caveats; it might be more honest to give a statement like one of the impossible statements above, but giving the statement such a form would be self-defeating in light of the intended effect of making any such statement.
Ah yes, a staple from the golden age of reddit. Anyone know why they haven't written anything since October?
See, but most third-party services aren't also trying to sell themselves as a legitimate, official thing too. Sure, I can post links to Amazon releases here, but HN isn't trying to offer itself to Amazon as "pay $X and you'll have your press releases up here" at the same time. The difference is that anyone can post things on here and there's nothing any company can do about it. I could post, "Amazon's new MapReduce is a plot to steal my data" and people could vote it up. Likewise, I could post that on GS, but it's different: GS then has this option for Amazon to stop comments/posts they don't like (for a fee). That's the difference. Most third party sites have this: "we'll let users post bad things about you". GS has this: "we'll let people post bad things about you. . .unless you pay us." That's morally hazardous.
Oh dear, nobody likes my humour :p
The best book about life in Paleolithic days is The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie,

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

who is a professor of zoology specializing in Paleolithic fauna and an accomplished artist and bow hunter. He cites all the best primary research literature on Paleolithic life in the notes in his book. One fact Guthrie points out is that the lifespan for Paleolithic Homo sapiens was only forty years.
quite similar to rubular.com
Rosetta Stone to be first VC-backed IPO in six months
> Unfunded liabilities" are an incredibly terrible and misleading measure of debt; it's like saying I owe two million dollars because of the money I'm going to have to pay over the rest of my life for food and housing.

Except that it's not. The money that you'll pay for food in the future comes from money that you'll earn in the future. Note that both are "the future". If you stop earning, you're only on the hook for future eating.

We've promised (via SS) to pay people money in the future based on what they've already paid, that is, in the past. If we stop taking in money, we still owe.

The food comparison would be that you owe money for food that you've consumed in the past and you're plannning to pay for it with future earnings. If you're eating in the future while you're earning, said future earnings will have a shortfall or will have to cover both future and past eating.

Unless you're really careful, and we haven't been, at some point, the "future earnings" will exceed what is owed for past consumption.

In the case of SS, workers will see see 20-30% of their income being given to old people. They're going to wonder whether their children will pay enough to them to make up for that 20-30%. If they decide that their children won't, they'll figure out that keeping said 20-30% for themselves is their best move. At that point, where does the money to pay old people for their "contributions" come from?
I think the question of "honesty" in business is always more complex than we'd like it to be. It's amazing how powerful is the pull to make a business model "work". And very hard to balance that with being conscious of the fairness of it. I very much like how Jason broke down the various aspects of what "customer service" can be.

I think this incident is a great reminder, that we have to be incredibly diligent in balancing the pursuit of our business goals, with creating truly healthy communication and commercial ecosystems.
Consider the flip-side: how would you feel if Comcast went around filing crease and desist notices to take down 3rd party customer support sites like dslreviews?

GS has every right to create a forum where customers can air grievances. They should add links to the official support forum, and throw in a couple more "unofficial"s in there as well. But beyond that, they don't have an obligation to take down the whole forum. That's extreme.

The really sad part is: GS is easy to confuse with 37 signals, because they are both minimalist and elegant web sites. It's the high polish that adds to confusion.

GS should go the extra-mile to avoid confusion, but let's not lose our heads here.

Edit: It's been pointed out that I was using "DMCA request" incorrectly. I replaced it with "cease and desist."
It looks like standard behaviour defined by event cancelation and default actions in the W3C DOM2 Events spec. Whether this is cross-browser or not isn't obvious. Suppressing default actions with event.preventDefault() seems to work in Firefox, at least.
Not only is his heart in the right place, but I think he's diagnosed the problem with industrialized mass education extremely well.

And I don't think he's very wrong about the "conspiracy theories," either. Certainly the industrialists of the late 19th century were heavily invested in creating a new "mass man" that they could then employ more effectively for their own purposes, if the schooling were directed to dumbing everyone down to the same low level of un-independent thought and mindless compliance to authority.

(We figured out the same problem 20 years ago, and that's why we're educating our 8 kids at home through high school.)

But, like Neil Postman, another great societal critic, he doesn't really know what to do about the problem, other than "don't do that". It may be there's no real solution, other than to have parents much more involved in their kids' education, which is certainly the ideal.

But even if you posit a need for group schooling, one could do worse than returning to the "little red schoolhouse" approach of the pre-Horace Mann (Prussian-style mass education in Mass.) era, where parents band together and hire teachers/tutors for a smaller group of kids, and really keep their hands on the tiller.

(Yes, there are problems there, too, but certainly much less than the problems that Gatto identifies so well.)
I've never had a negative impression of him. He is confident and forces you to think in a different direction. I also know the "4 hour" week is an exaggeration. Pay close attention and he does a lot of work related stuff (including writing a book) that consumes time. Nonetheless, he is providing a road map for things most of us have thought were unobtainable.
I don't understand why this is top of HN.

Because apparently a lot of people need an elementary lesson in trademark law and the reason it exists.

Of course, you don't have to learn about trademark law before you build your startup. You could always learn about it after you've constructed and deployed an automated system for violating it.
Atom netbook chip propels Intel to top of market
When there are few comments and a lot of up-votes, I assume it's a very good bit of technical knowledge or a nice tip.

When there are a lot of comments and few up-votes, as you said, it's probably a discussion of a flame-baited blog post or controversial material. But in any such article, there is usually one post with a huge percentage of the votes in the first place that sums up the article very effectively.

A lot of up-votes and a lot of comments is probably a news release.

edit: I'm against about making this an explicit, official metric. I've come to learn from experience that once an organization or site tries to implement explicitly what emerged from its community, it's almost universally panned by the community.
Another interesting article about this on theoildrum..

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5260
People are not idiots

It sounds to me like you have not worked in tech support.

Considering that GS is a hosting site for tech support forums, my opinion is that they should be as close to idiot-proof as possible. For some reason, in my estimation a financial one, they are not.
The point of Get Satisfaction is to give people a way to corral ignorant and unresponsive companies into taking action. This a good thing. Concomitant with doing that, though, is a bit of extra work for responsive companies who are already good at support.

Fried's demands about unofficial badging and so on would destroy the good that GS does. If he can emblazon the page with UNOFFICIAL and LOOK HERE FOR SUPPORT, then what's to stop ShittyCorp from doing the same and pointing people to their own useless support pages?

To an extent, GS has to subvert the official support pages, otherwise it doesn't work. Fried's real argument is "this whole business model annoys me", but instead of just admitting that, he's going on about badges and design.
This situations reminds me a bit of yelp, where there are rumors of yelp accepting money to remove negative reviews.

I think this will start to become a trend. Anonymous feedback can be overly hostile and ruin companies. However, feedback moderated by the company in question might as well be a sales page. In the middle there are companies who try to play both sides, giving the appearance of openness while also being willing to take money to moderate the feedback.