skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a popular brand selling accessories on eBay and Amazon. One of my duties is replying to customer care inquiries. We are a small start-up, our team is small, therefore happens quite often to spend hours every day replying to customers having a number of problems (postage problem, usage problem, etc..).

I do totally understand the seller, they have done everything they could to make the buyer happy. The buyer, instead of giving a chance to the seller to make things right just left a bad feedback. I guess anybody can see how unfair this is.

Feedbacks and reviews are supposed to give a hint to potential buyers about the service or product they will get. The truth is that more than often they are a "weapon" for frustrated buyers to revenge and damange the seller, without being anyhow responsible for it. This is unfortunate becouse bad reviews and bad feedbacks damage sellers not only with their reputation but also kill sales. Having a bad review on Amazon means to simply not sell that very particular product, doesn't really matter if the bad experience was due to inexpertise of the buyer or from a delivery problem (all things that are completely out of the sellers control).

When you are a young company, it's hyper-frustrating to be damaged and see your sales killed or importantly reduced by a customer that was unhappy because of something you couldn't control in any possible way. While in such a situation the company must anyway step-up and take action to mitigate the problem (and they did as they offered a refund) the buyer must be responsible for actually damaging their business. It requires experience to understand that sometimes customers are just trolls spoilt by life and to just let it go. If you have a great company providing excellent products and services you'll make it up with future orders :)
I hate to do this.. but..

" The Morlocks could have descended from today’s social network or hedge fund owners, while the ancestors of the Eloi undoubtedly felt lucky initially, as free tools helped them crash on each other’s couches more efficiently. What is intriguing about Wells’s vision is that members of both species become undignified, lesser creatures. (Morlocks eat Eloi, which is about as far as one can go in rejecting empathy and dignity.)

source : Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future? . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Other issues such as immigration process is a major cause of discontent at US aiirports when compared with other countries immigration workflow, particularly for non-locals.
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel predicts bleak future for innovation
Personally, I think lawyers should be dis-barred for bring a frivolous claim to court solely on the hopes of winning because the defended cannot afford to defend themselves. It is an abuse of the power they have been given with their right to practice law.
It is interesting that one cannot see how many people liked or disliked the videos on YouTube, and comments are disabled. They clearly are not that confident about their campaign.
He got me to the point where he divided number of packages by number of years (hell, I did not have internet in 1991, so why would there be packages???)
Three cheers for startups that manage this!

I attended a talk given by the Hyderabad Angels some time ago and found their outlook to be very strange. "We only fund companies with a proven and existing source of revenue. We don't fund ideas. We are here to sponsor growth of an established idea."

For angels level investors to take this line was very strange for me. It is likely due to this that mostly clones are getting funded in India.
Those ads don't appeal to me either. But if they are aiming at a teen to mid-twenties demographic, which I'd imagine they are, it seems fairly spot-on.
BrowserStack +1!!
They reset the passwords on Friday. Even assuming that they've been working for the last four days on discovering the extent of the intrusion, there's a pretty big gap between Friday's announcement:

"This activity appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access the account of one of our customers. This customer is aware of this activity and we have determined its extent and impact. We have found no evidence that any Linode data of any other customer was accessed. In addition, we have found no evidence that payment information of any customer was accessed. ... Out of an abundance of caution, however, we have decided to implement a Linode Manager password reset,"

and their disclosure today. I find that I'm uncertain whether they would've released today's disclosure if it weren't for the IRC chat log getting passed around online.

I don't get why they thought it would be prudent to reset everyone's manager passwords "out of an abundance of caution", but didn't bother to mention the possible leak of payment information. We don't have any information on the strength of the passphrase used (nor can they provide any, of course); we have no idea how feasible it might be to brute-force it.

Even if the full credit card numbers are never broken, the last four digits are still available in the clear. That has been enough to give unauthorized persons access to accounts on other services in the past (see the Matt Honan thing from last year: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona...). Depending on what other information was stored in the database, customers may be at risk of having accounts compromised elsewhere using the billing information from Linode. Linode really should have included that information in Friday's announcement.

Also, ColdFusion has had 103 different CVEs going back to 1999 (http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=coldfusion). Adobe doesn't really have a sterling record when it comes to this stuff. A nice example is the recent CVE-2013-0632 (http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-0632), a remote code execution exploit that was discovered already in use back on January 4th but didn't have a fix available until January 15th. Linode -- and their customers -- are a really big, juicy target for future CF vulnerabilities.
As for cleaning it, it will work no matter how you point it, so put it vertical, aim it at the neighbors you like the least (or you could aim it at an angle into the sky as well).

But you can't reduce the cost and danger of that monster significantly :

* a quartz : ?

* SiC : not exactly cheap in large panels, but ok

* MgF2 : this substance is NOT welcome in my house (you
can't safely touch it, and if it gets vaporized or granulized in a fire or because someone puts a drill to this thing, people will start dying), also : expensive.

* TiO2 : very very expensive

* Ag : silver. Surprisingly cheap.

This thing has the same problem as nuclear power. Solid state, yes. Easy, powerful and (probably) lasts hundreds of years. But it can turn a small misstep into a neighborhood extinction (exaggerated, but then so is nuclear power's dangers)
It's not for them, it's for users. It helps to know which of your CCs is going to be charged.
"Killing them like osama[...] means the terrorist have won,"

I don't understand the trouble you have with the Osama situation. The US attempted to apprehend Osama so they could bring him to justice but he resisted and was shot to death. How would you have handled that situation?
Well, if the seller relies exclusively on eBay for sales(as appears to be the case here) then the threat of having their account terminated over ToS violation would be a huge deterrent against doing so. It still won't prevent you from being sued but it would definitely reduce the chances of it happening to near zero.
I personally think the negative feedback was silly to leave (because it was trivial, not false). However, suing the person who left feedback has far reaching implications. What else could we start suing customers for using their freedom of speech to talk about? Sue them if they talk about long delivery times? Sue them if they talk about damaged products in shipping? Sue them if they talk about bad products?
I'd imagine the 'cover up' is because law enforcement is involved and this 'ryan' character is being looked for.
"When you get messages, you don’t have to go into a siloed app to talk to friends, messaging is pervasive"

Facebook Home is the very definition of a siloed app.
Boston cellular networks flooded, but service was not cut off
I wish there were a dating site mainly for nerds, really. I don't know how you could maintain that.
What concerns me is that as I understand it, my own country (UK) has been complicit with these detentions. I'm also concerned that the UK and other developed nations have similar black-ops illegal detention centres too, Guantanamo is public knowledge. Are there other centres?
This is interesting but really more in the cool/cute/novel category than the practical needs one.

I'm pretty hopeful and positive about bitcoin but that's one of the things that makes me still very suspicious of it. Seems that the places adopting it are doing so for fun, ideological or theoretical reasons rather than to solve some problem they have.

I'm waiting to see online retailers requiring bitcoin payments for high risk transactions (eg sending mobile phones to nairobi). Something that demonstrates it solves a problem and (ideally) enables commerce where it wasn't possible before.
"I had one email suggesting my book should cost $5 instead of $47. If I sold at that price, my hourly rate would be a couple bucks an hour. However, some people just have a sense of entitlement, or simply like to get things on the cheap. It’s best to ignore them, and focus on the people who are happy to pay for the value they get."

So true. Cheap customers also tend to be more of a drain on your support.
Can you point to your favourite approaches (import pdb; pdb.set trace() in console or wingide or ?
WTF, every single one of the ~20 links in that article points inwards!

I regret giving them a page view.
It's a nicely designed app, but it doesn't work that well. Told me I had 60, 62, 61, 59... BPM when in fact it was over 75.
> It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky.

I really wish they would start OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/) back up; it was really fascinating reading, the kind of analysis that's impossible to come by unless you have free-rein map-reduce access to some company's Big Data. Given their userbase I'm surprised they don't think it was a bigger PR source; I think every article from it has been hot on HN.
I agree with questioning their choice of ColdFusion, but I have some reserves about your proposed alternative to use Django. I don't know how secure Django is, but I know it's big. And my perception is generally that anything that big is bound to have a few loose ends, if looked under the magnifier.
> When you want to bill your customers you'd input the passphrase which wouldn't be stored anywhere, would be used to temporarily decrypt the CC numbers and bill everyone.

I've had account changes billed to my card within minutes, even (and especially) in the middle of the night (when I do most of that stuff). I'm having a little bit of trouble imagining that someone's sitting in front of a terminal and typing a passphrase into a prompt every three to five minutes, all day long.
I can personally confirm that cell phone signal was never cut having been in the area at the time. It was definitely degraded quality but it kept working.
> ... unperceivably redder

But why is he analyzing the green channel then? :)
I agree with rdl, I think classical scrolling would work better here. Also, could you make the app utilize the full width of the browser window? The comment box obscures the text on my 1680x1050 display, even though there would be enough space to display it next to it.
Legally, these guys are non-lawful enemy combatants. They have put themselves in a legal grey area, not by committing crimes, but by committing acts of war. Many, if not all of them have been trained, if captured, to try to disrupt the legal system by any means necessary. They are fighting a war.

Here is what happened to some German non-lawful combatants during WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pastorius

About 1/3 of detainees released have gone right back to the fighting: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/03/latest_gitmo_...

And these were the low risk ones.

According to the US Constitution, it is Congress that establishes courts (except the supreme court) and decides what their purpose is. The President does not get to decide this. Military commissions have been accordingly established by Congress to try the detainees. The current President halted this process. Thus the detainees are in legal limbo until either Congress establishes a different court to hear the cases or the President decides to comply with the current law.
Its actually a rather interesting / cunning behavior in contrast to the given ecosystem. Abstractly, this coupled with a suitable robots.txt could unravel the Google economy. Perhaps even establish a linear relationship between " yahoo, everything is free " people.
I actually prefer the Medium's implementation of sidebar annotations/comments. For example: https://medium.com/design-ux/926eb80d64e3

At least, the content isn't blocked when the annotations/comments are activated.
Now that you've explained why, I can tell you my experience is not like yours at all

This is what pissed me off from your first utterance. You already knew what I meant. And you already knew what you wanted to say. But rather than just step forward with what you had to say, you did this stupid fucking charade where I have to explain myself in detail before you'll deign to provide your side of the argument. And that would have played out in a way that both of us already knew. You could have just as easily said what you thought I meant and why you think it's wrong, instead of turning it into this stupid pantomime. And then if you had misunderstood me, I would have the opportunity to clarify. Instead you started an entirely predictable path of drek, and I thought 'fuck that, I'll go a different way'.

My 'high horse' was born of being tired of your "I say you're wrong with no support on my side; explain yourself further!" style of argument. It's lazy and unfair and requires minimal commitment from you while not making any statement of substance that can be addressed. That's why I went over the top in my previous comment, nothing to do with the particular topic at hand.

Also, if you want to lecture people about getting off high horses and not implying that one is better than the other, it would behoove you not to use condescending mechanisms like "(Hint:".
Sadly i can't downvote yet. So i will write that as text: No, as you merged two ad hominem attacks into your comment, I won't discuss anything with you.
pip didn't exist in 1991 though. CPAN got mature faster (and it has 120k modules), but such a comparison isn't satisfactory without a curve showing the yearly growth rate.
Apple also used to have an open letter on their website supporting the notion that all internet standards should be royalty free. Strangely it seems to have been removed.

http://xml.coverpages.org/AppleComputerPatentStatement.html
Even if we make your assumption that he's specifically referring to TDD only, just because good code that didn't go through the more rigorous definitions of TDD exists doesn't mean he's seen it. And plenty of crap code ships.

I'd argue Linux has significantly more than 'no' tests: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3177338/how-is-linux-kern... -- it's not TDD, and it's not centralized, but then again, neither is Linux development. And while you might convince me that pre-XP kernels went without unit testing, I'd point out we hardly call them bastions of stability and security. Try certifying a 360 or ModernUI title under the Microsoft banner and see if they'll let you get away without writing a single test. I'd wager anyone who successfully accomplishes this has spent far more effort arguing why it should be allowed than writing some tests would take.

And, given the sheer girth of their security processes (patching, QA certification, tracking) and toolset (through virtualization, fuzzing, unit testing, CI build servers), it would take much more effort to convince me that they do absolutely no unit testing whatsoever on their kernel in this day and age. Far more than you could reasonably give: I suspect such convincing would require breaking several NDAs and committing several felonies.
Can you go out and buy a reel-to-reel tape recorder at a store right now?
eBay has one of the tightest set of rules of any marketplace sit on what constitutes something that they will remove. The guidelines pretty much state that legal action is your only option.

Someone can for example leave a feedback stating 'item fake, seller a fraud' without the slightest piece of evidence (item may simply be from a different batch the customer is used to or defective) and there is nothing you can do, no process.

Also when you want things from eBay such as a higher selling limit they raise individual negative feedbacks in an accusing way despite them being 0.1% or less of total feedback.

I don't think this seller would have been effected by the feedback but I can certainly understand their frustration. The negative press from the case will do far worse for the seller. What buyer will feel safe buying from them?
Is this not how Medium comments work? And the pagination is a bit annoying.

That aside, What's the use case of this app? Is it like an alternative to disqus for my blog?
Changi airport is exactly what airports should be like. It's a nice place to be instead of a horrible warehouse with lots of signs warning you that you're an accidental bottle of water away from being labelled a terrorist.
So, you want to compile LessCss. You go to npm and have a look at the options. Which package to use?

assemble-less, baidu-less, buildr laessig, less, less-bal, less-clean, less-cluster, less-context-functions, less-features-connect, less-less, lesscompile, lesscw, lessup, lesswatcher, lessweb, style-compile, styles, watch-lessc, wepp

Number of packages is far from a perfect measure of how much interesting and important work is going on in a community.
"they exist to impart knowledge to attendees"

Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.
Yes. Great feedback, thanks.
Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace.

Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
Or someone mistakenly logging "Bad LISH Password: 'FOO' for user 'BAR'" somewhere that logs to the DB.
I agree with you that refusing to be terrorized is borderline impossible for the people who got hurt in the blast or their closest family and friends. The article is aimed at the rest, the majority who can potentially either panick or just carry on.
It actually expands far, far beyond that. eBay is extraordinarily merchant hostile and just a few back feedback over the course of a thousand auctions can trigger automated blocks that prevent you from listing more than a handful of auctions at a time[1]. For a major eBay seller this is basically a death sentence.

Additionally your detailed seller rating or DSR determine how much of a discount you get on the extremely steep eBay feed[2]. Again for major sellers, especially people selling ultra low margin items such as phone accessories the 20% discount on ebay's final value fee will mean the difference between being able to competitively price their product and simply going out of business.

[1]http://www.aspkin.com/forums/ebay-suspensions/29924-ebay-acc...

[2]http://pages.ebay.com/services/buyandsell/powerseller/benefi...
Normally I don't comment (at all) on posts like this, but this is just bad.

The comments overlay cover up the very text that you're suppose to be reading. This disrupts the reading flow, making it hard to find my way back to where I was reading, especially comments are merely secondary to the actual article. To get back to the article I have to press this tiny close button on the top left corner of the comments overlay. Plus, there's a huge amount of whitespace to the right of the article which you're not using http://i.imgur.com/1JvLWQP.png - why cover important content, leaving large amount of screen space unused when there's perfectly good unused space on the right?

The pagination scheme is terrible. The article is a blog post, not a book. And even if it were, no one would want to read something on screens. (Edit: Firefox 21 beta. I see Chrome that has transitions, which means this is not actually poor performance, but simply missing transitions. I still don't see any reason why Firefox shouldn't have transitions, though) The performance is terrible. I can count seconds between me clicking on the next page button and the next page actually showing up, with no feedback whatsoever that the page is loading.

Document annotation and comment UI isn't hard. When Microsoft Word has you beat in terms of UI, you're probably doing something very wrong.
Nice, South Africa's three major airports all rank in the Top 30.
From what HTP said on IRC, the credit card numbers were decrypted within the application context, which would be consistent with what you said. But during the IRC conversation, HTP willingly gave out the last four digits of people's CC#s, but ignored any request for digits before that, which would be more consistent with what Linode is stating.

It's all a very confusing world where nobody has a definite answer. Just 2 cents, don't act like I'm sharing a fact or anything
This is the final part of my series about one-way functions and password storage. Thanks for all the comments.

Are there other topics that could use a similar treatment?
I've been to many of the top airports listed. Honestly after a while, they are all pretty much the same. I didn't think Narita or Incheon had better airports than Dallas or Atlanta. The only thing I can think of is that people in American airports get annoyed at the extra security.
I agree it would have been more tasteful to exclude the commercials prior to the video about the Boston Marathon. I can see how it would be distressing to sit and wait for a commercial to end when you are fearing for the safety of someone you love. I hope your friends and family are safe and the same to the rest of HN.
Its not a "zero-day exploit" if there's been a patch out for it for N days, where N>0, right?