skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it really depends on the "fix". Most toilette problems can be fixed by a simple $5 part from the store. Hell, the last time a pilot light was out at my place, the plumber literally just scrubbed it with a wire brush. Just calling him out was $130. And no, I did not feel ripped off.

So, yes, there can be liability concerns. But there is also the line of thinking where "everyone should know how to cut the water to their house." Or "Everyone should know where the circuit box is to their house." etc.

Then there is the current reality. Getting stranded in a car accident is something that I would imagine is a lot lower in occurrence nowdays. I know how to change a tire, but I have to confess with cell phones being what they are, I am less concerned about my kids having this skill. I think they'll be ok.
Where do all you Chicago hackers hang out? I'm new to the city and I never see anything like a Chicago HN meetup posted here.
nope.

I use an N900 to this day, despite having to use a terrible service provider to get support for the phone's frequencies in my area.

Hardware keyboard on a phone I can ssh from or I'm not upgrading.
> You're going to live past 100 assuming you don't get hit by a truck or an asteroid, the game's barely started. Go do something amazing that no one else could have done, by hook or by crook, and whatever happened in the past will be forgotten overnight.

As I recall, he was given almost exactly this advice when he was having his meltdown at Google, except s/live past 100/become a productive employee/ . It didn't seem to help.
When you are your product
NYC Intern Group, Lets all meet up
Texas likes to boast about smaller government and more personal freedom. Except with cars apparently.

If the tea party were a state it would be Texas and Austin would be forced out.
Before I got into web development, I spent 4 or 5 years as a recording engineer. And people were constantly predicting the "end of recording studios".

Certainly, there was a big shift. Pro Tools got cheap, companies like Behringer started making affordable large-diaphragm condenser mics that sort of looked like the nice ones. Line6 and Amplitube were making reasonably convincing guitar amp simulators. And some studios did close.

But there is absolutely still a market for for experienced recording engineers and big studios. The difference is that now there are DIY alternatives at the low end of the spectrum.

This article makes the mistake of predicting the end of web development, when in reality, all that's happening is that people with simpler needs are finally starting to see alternatives. Just need a basic home page? Go to Squarespace. Need a high-performance single-page web app? Still need a real developer. I don't see that changing soon.
So the same thing as Dwolla?
That was sort of part of the point of Livejournal.
Another way to do this is to offer a discount for "early payment" but charge more initially. In other words, build the fee for late payment into the original quote.
"Vanguard had one job here, they failed at it"

How so? She clicked buy, did she not? And she got exactly what she wanted. Quite awhile later, she changed her mind about what she wanted. Oh well.

Its like buying a lottery ticket, then after the numbers are picked, deciding you don't want it anymore and trying to return it. You can get away with that kind of stuff at walmart or target, not so much at the lotto kiosk or the stock exchange. She had 12 years of stock trading experience per the article. Not as much as me, but she didn't exactly fall off the turnip truck the day before, either.
Not to be sarcastic, but this is the first time I've ever seen anyone on Hacker News say that "they're doing fine" with Paypal.
skateboarder?
So ... are you saying that Android phones don't have a contact application, that you can't get to social networks through the contact application, or that you're bizarrely sensitive on the iPhone-vs-the-rest-of-the-market situation?
Definitely interested. The less you assume about your readers the more helpful it will be to me.
I am guessing because Texas is infamously a red state, and Republicans are perceived as claiming to be against government regulation.
"Here's a really, really basic business concept, presented in about ten times the number of words it needs. PLEASE SIGN UP FOR OUR PRODUCT."

Good observation, and humour points for the light-hearted snark. I don't quite disapprove of these articles, but I agree once you see the pattern it is rather ubiquitous.

Where I am with these at the moment is questioning whether the person would have written it anyway and is tagging their business into it (reasonable) or writing something specifically to increase their visibility (I'm more skeptical).

Occasionally I imagine such a writer sitting at their desk with "the big book of business basics" saying "which one shall I write up today and post to HN to obliquely promote my product?". But then, if they're sharing something of value then do I even care? The ones which seem dangerous are those which have distorted something of value to specifically relate to their product. There was one a few months ago (re)defining "Technical Intelligence" in a really confusing way in an attempt to tie it to the business in question - absolute train wreck.
There were hidden details in the article, like she'd been an active trader for a dozen years, son has a degree in finance... You might be surprised.
Really? I wonder how they're justifying that when Paypal transfers are free.
Quality dropped then due to manual workbenches. Why was this operation shipped overseas?
I opened the tab and missed the intro completely. Had to reload to see it again. They could include a "replay" option.
I have been thinking for a while that what I get the most out of Facebook are events. But it's a poorly featured platform. Now take events (and local and mobile) and create a platform for checking what's hot right now. But don't focus on clubs and big parties. Focus on the the weird events, the house parties, all that stuff that's off the beaten path. Create a slot functionality so people can allow half-strangers (friends of friends of friends) to sign up for a slot, then the hosts can check before accepting or something. Also allow blind-accept events. The accepted/blind-accepted people are then given the address. I don't know, something like that. I think it could quite work out. People do love random, fun people when I bring them over to a house party (well sometimes it sucks actually, but those times also make for good stories). Foreginers especially.

> Other than name and face

Well some of my most amusing and memorable house parties were ones where I barely knew anyone (besides a friend who brought me over) and pretended that I was given a girl's name (being a guy.) Never gets old.
Wow, I actually was just about to go check it out so I could say you were wrong, but I can't really disagree. The upper and left elements have some of the clean/flat trend, but the rest of the page is ridiculously busy.
Xbox 720 vs. PS4 vs. PC: How the hardware specs compare
In contrast, Linode ... but their support is there and very responsive.

People keep saying this but it simple isn't true. It is only responsive when everything is working fine and you have some OS/app level issue.

But watch what happens when their Fremont DC goes down. You will submit a ticket and not hear back for hours (if at all) all whilst your site is down. You're then forced to jump on IRC and listen to gossip about what is happening.

Linode's support is as good as their security. Smoke and mirrors.
For whatever it's worth, we use Jabber group functions. This is used exclusively in our tech office. No other group in the company uses it.
It's an observation. It looked and felt Different.
So, the next Facebook is Tumblr? You may be a bit late on that one.
For those of us who haven't done so yet, reading the original report that this post is responding to will be informative.

America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-n...
I would love to come, just to listen and learn.
Assuming I'm considered an "IT Professional" it sounds at least vaguely interesting. I would certainly welcome another measure of my skills to help keep me on my game.
When I worked for a Fortune 10 company, they would rarely pay a bill on time. To get a timely payment, the late fees needed to exceed what the company would earn off of interest on the same amount of money.
His birthday was last week, and we considered it but put it off because of the temper tantrums. The reason why we're still undecided is like you say there are definitely some positives there. Word recognition at 3.5 is great!

What we tried last night was to explain the sequence. Physical playing, dinner, then the phone. We also put a timer on which went off when he had to pack away the phone. It's funny, 5 minutes before the alarm went off he announced that he was finished and to pack it away.

Hopefully it wasn't a once off but we're going to be persistent.
The article brought up the point that Tesla owns all of the service centers. I don't care if Tesla owns all the dealers, but having a monopoly on Tesla repair would be bad for consumers. If the process for becoming a "Tesla mechanic" allowed competition with the Tesla service centers, that would be OK.
I had a meeting with Accel last year and pretty much went exactly like this video.
Memorial Day Weekend in St. Louis, Missouri
In-joke. You gotta know the guy. :)
In 48 hours ? That's very cool! I like the fact that it is minimally good looking website!
I grew up in Idaho. People there will talk about how important limited government is... until you mention farm subsidies.

Suddenly they'll speak convincingly about the benefits of centralized markets, price controls and protectionist trade policies with no sense of irony.
No idea why you're being downvoted--though I would like to amend your statement from "guys are creepy" to "guys are easily perceived as creepy".

I cannot help but notice that it seems like there may be a trend in faster binning of folks into creepy/not creepy among my generation; I believe this also may be because social skills are not that great in this magical interconnected age. People are so used to being able to pull up relevant data about others, I theorize, that being faced with a new person without that data or connection makes the newcomer more alien.
Ask HN: Best Hacker schools for men
Hey HN,

I'm a former front end guy turned biz dev. I've come to realize I can't stand not being able to do a lot of the work myself so I've decided to go to school. I've heard amazing things about Hackbright but it's women only. I've also considered going to General Assembly for Front End Development.

What schools are good as far as quality? I know it's all fully dependent on the instructor you receive but are there any in particular that stand out?
Are the app store / Google play rigged?
Judging from links like this http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=app+store&x=-1198&y=-125 it looks like there are quite a few people tying to game the app/play store. This looks like the tip of the iceberg. Taking the idea to its logical extreme I imagine call centers full of people in some third-world country solving captchas and posting positive reviews 24/7.

So is this as much as an issue as my speculation leads me to believe, or are Apple/Google taking steps to prevent this?
Check out the Intro to Stats course on Udacity:

https://www.udacity.com/course/st101

Just took it earlier this year. It was informative and I enjoyed the class.
New Flickr - Live press event
EBS is a slow turd. Running a database on EBS is running a database on network attached storage. I know tons of people do this, but I have no idea why. Provisioned IOPS will work, but it is expensive.

Local storage on a $5 Digital Ocean plan will do 2000 IOPS, where as that would cost $200/month with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. I know it is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is worth thinking about. Running a database on a local SSD is a good option for many people, and it is not an option that Amazon offers.
Probably.

Family was surprised that the anti-Tesla legislation in NC was spearheaded by some R's.

Hasn't stopped 'em from voting red, though.
Will Elon Musk fold under the pressure and cooperate with the dealer network when they offer to sell at low to no markup to bring him into the extortion racket of Car Dealers?

I loathe buying cars so much because of the snakes that run those Dealerships. They want the car buying process to be so excruciatingly painful so people will leave money on the table to "Just take my money and make the pain go away".

How far are Dealers willing to go to make it illegal for Tesla to sell cars anywhere? Would they go so far as to outlaw the production of Tesla vehicles in America because it goes against the Dealer protection racket?
The 'knives of class warfare' aren't coming out because FWD.us supports a certain variety of immigration reform or because technology disappears jobs. The knives are coming out because as part of its lobbying, FWD.us supported some more traditionally conservative causes through two subsidiaries, Americans for Conservative Action and the Council for American Job Growth. Through these subsidiaries they did some television advertising criticizing Obama's health policy and supporting the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (I assume this political advertising was part of some sort of quid pro quo.)

You can be rich as you like as long as you don't go off the ideological reservation - for example, look at the entertainment industry, which outsources overseas as much as it can but consistently supports the right causes and donates to the right people. But support a conservative cause, for whatever the reason, and a lot of the press will try to make you as hated as Donald Trump or the Koch brothers.

The Daily Beast article was just a warning shot - I'm sure FWD.us got the message and won't do it again. If not, there's almost certainly more to come.
The big difference between traditional VPS and IaaS services like EC2 (or Google Compute Engine, etc.) is that the latter has dynamic scaling (and a pricing model built around the assumption that you will use dynamic scaling) as a core feature; for traditional VPS-style work on an IaaS, you are likely to end up paying a premium for flexibility you aren't using (and possibly dealing with some attendant management complexity from the same source), but, other than that, IaaS should be a complete substitute for VPS.
Regardless of whether you can diversify, fraud and things that resemble insider trading should still be punished.
Thanks so much! Can I quote you on that for the landing page?
Boeing 787 Dreamliner back in US skies
While I didn't find his comment particularly funny, I'm not sure I'm seeing the attack in it - just reads to me as a light-hearted joke about names, in contrast to the top comment which genuinely described you as a "whiner".
I can can recall numerous instances when I opposed to clients idea about the website. And most of the time it turned out I was right.

People will make sloppy decisions without good advice. I can buy a kitchen blender, assemble it, make it chop my vegies. But I will never know if it is any good. Unless it breaks.
I really don't understand this view that seems to be shared by quite a number of people: that Canonical shouldn't attempt (and some seem to suggest aren't competent) to build their own system components, but should instead confine their efforts into supporting other's projects. To me it seems that there's more than enough development resource available across the Linux community, and for system components where the 'right' solution is not obvious having multiple projects try out different approaches seems like an advantage to me. Let the code do the talking and then we'll see which solution works best.
One of my coworkers bought his three-year-old nephew a picture book as a birthday present. The three-year-old tried to "pinch-to-zoom" on one of the book's pictures and threw the book away in disgust when he realized it wasn't interactive.

When I first heard this story, I thought it indicated a worrisome trend in the youngest generation. Now I'm not so sure. The article notes that kids growing up with tablets isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the reasoning given makes sense.

The kids in the article play with iPads at the dinner table silently, but the author notes that it would be similarly bad for them to be coloring at the table silently. The current hypothesis is that spending less time interacting with people harms the development of some communication skills.

This is only relatively related to the article's content, but I would be interested in a study that analyzes the effects of children using tablets for creative purposes like drawing, puzzles and games, etc. versus consuming content passively.
Interesting timing with Google launching the "send money with Gmail" at IO last week.
Watch out for the cease and desist notices from Disney. :)
- Websites have become much more complex. It just appears that they are simpler. WP makes it seem like nothing to press a button and upgrade. Behind the scenes thousands of lines of code are doing work. When those lines of code break and you come to me to fix them. Fuck you for thinking I am going to charge you $100. You are going to pay me $1000 or you can do it yourself.

- If you want to use a theme exactly as it is then fine use it exactly as it is. If you want me to make changes to it, fuck you for thinking I am going to do it for $100.

- Websites are complicated as ever (with tools that don't match their behind the scenes complexity), they appear to be much simpler because a lot of stupid people have spent thousands and thousands of hours providing services for free through modules and themes. But when those things break down or don't work the way you want them to, you will pay for my 15 years of experience or you can just do without.
DemandForce Employee Dies after falling off a rooftop party
working in the backyard late...I can no longer see...it's too dark.

Eyesight.Pupil.Dialate(DilateByTimeofDayEnum.LateEvening);
Besides possible legal issues (depending on your location, there may be a problem of discrimination) I think it' not a best idea.The culture fit you have described is just one aspect of competencies you need (attitude, values etc.) which isn't neither the only nor the most critical requirement to get the job done right. And btw you can find non-parents who will have enough empathy and adequate mindset to fit to your culture and vision. Just look at other industries - Medical companies do not select the candidates by their diseases ;)
>So why are we media folk so obsessed with the acquisition of a low-revenue blogging platform and so dismissive of an $11 billion combined revenue drug-maker? Four basic reasons:

Where's the "It'll get us pageviews!!!!" motive?
The New Yorker's Epic Fail On Innovation
Label.css v.0.1.1 released. Now with Less and Sass
After building a half dozen one-off sites, each with a simple, single-server config, I found that going sitting down and learning Chef was helpful for jumpstarting the next project. All of the basic needs are the same: nginx, unicorn, postgresql, etc, and I was tired of reading through my jumble of system configuration notes. Yes, I could have baked AMIs and created new AMIs, but not everything was Amazon-based.
Tesla sales 'misleading' says Audi blog post
There's a cultural aspect to this too.

In some types of business, putting late terms in contracts and hassling customers for payments is normal.

In other types, quietly putting up with late payment is normal. In those cases, as a vendor, you factor the likelihood of late payment into the price. For repeat customers, it turns into a game of tit-for-tat. For one-offs, it's harder.
Ha. Scrubbing with a wire brush is worth a dollar - knowing what to scrub with a wire brush was definitely worth $130, right?
> Until then, said O'Connell, Tesla will sell its cars the way it wants. If some states don't allow that, then Tesla will simply sell them elsewhere.

I think this last line of the article is very important. This has the power to get the consumer on Tesla's side of this fight. If enough of the right people in Texas (and other problem states) want this car and think the laws are stupid... they'll need to find a way to make that happen. Laws can be changed. If not then they'll just get them out of state.
yeah, i agree with that 100%. more than buying a car from a dealership, i hate getting my car serviced at one. the other complaints are just the dealers bitching because they know their unfair, shady practices are soon coming to an end.
MIT OpenCourseWare needs 375 donors for gift of $25,000
Isn't the entire premise of venture capital that you only make money off the big winners?
Assuming lifestyle businesses fail at similar rates as venture-backed companies, the way to maximize returns is to invest in the companies with the biggest potential upside.

In other words, how many $10/month SaaS companies would it take getting acquired to match the return of your average $300M VC-backed exit?

Don't say 37signals. 37signals is an outlier in the same way Instagram is an outlier. The existence of either of these proves nothing.

By definition a mid-growth business will NEVER generate the returns needed to sustain a venture fund.

I don't think it's fair or the most beneficial to society that VCs only invest in high-risk, high-potential businesses. But that's the only way the math could work. You can't argue with math. The only exception would be funds like YC that can invest very small amounts at very low valuations and make money from acqui-hires.
I saw this in the AWS marketplace (aws.amazon.com/marketplace) - http://www.enterprisedb.com/cloud-database/amazon

no experience or affiliation, though.
I work from about 5:00 am to about 4pm.
The fourth point in the article?
Austin is not near as special and 'weird' as it thinks it is. I say this living in the largest city in the U.S. with a gay mayor, also located in Texas.

You know nothing jon knee.
My company does automatic setup too (https://circleci.com). However, we went in a different direction than Heroku, and allow people to nail down the exact version of their platform they want to use (for example, our users use over 30 different Ruby versions). We haven't needed the same flexibility for DBs and libraries, but I imagine that will come.
But it wont last a lifetime. Buying a specific game for its returns would have a serious discount compared to almost any conventional asset.

And "time" is work. Building a house also requires just some materials and some time :). Even real state needs management (things break, rents have to be collected, risk of lawsuits, tenants that dont pay).
I've been using PayPal for 8 years now. Never have had a problem. I'm well aware of their actions with freezing accounts, but I think it's a hard problem when you deal with money and millions of users across the globe.
The fourth point is specifically about them chasing pageviews: "4. We largely cater to people who spend part of their day on the web, consuming content. Not surprisingly, those people tend to have a particular interest in things that involve the web and web content. It's a huge built-in audience, and we reporters know that our bread is ultimately buttered by pageviews."