skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Building tech stack for a dozen Realtor franchises - advice please
I have been asked by a trusted contact to implement a complete technology solution for over 15 real estate agency franchises he is acquiring. They all run on their own ad-hoc systems at the moment so they are basically 15 different systems. The goal is to get up and running with a robust platform that can cover the following and expand as and when new offices open:

- managing all customer data (crm functionality)

- storing all documentation centrally and securely (contracts, documents etc for each office plus shared documents provided by the master franchiser)

- email with calendars, blackberry support etc (I think hosted Exchange?)

- managing property listings, photos, floorplans, data sheets, flyers etc

- a shared collaboration space like MS sharepoint but I personally don't think SP is useable for the target audience, likewise wiki might be too technical

- conference calls, video conference (is Skype viable for business use?)

This is a lot more low tech than the usual HN startup but I wonder if the good people of HN could share their thoughts or recommendations. Thanks.
Can you override the native ctrl function in Chrome?

I can't get ctrl-click to work because Chrome (Mac) brings up a pop-up context menu only.
The physics argument against your "Argument for a finite upper limit to human knowledge" is that outside one brains lightcone, nothing can be known or matter. Inside that brain's lightcone, the ratio of states between particles in the brain vs particles in the lightcone is "pretty good" such that it could, possibly, never become the limiting factor. Not "all the particles in the cosmos" but more like all the particles in the light cone plus whatever light arrives from further away outside. Its really pretty small now.

Also you can't use a scientific argument to discuss non-scientific things. "stuff outside the lightcone" is defined as non-scientific by its very nature. We'll never observe it by definition, we'll never be able to test a hypothesis by definition... Way outside the scientific method. You'll need a non-scientific argument. May as well use religion.

Now you might get somewhere with an argument a little more advanced based on some kind of communications theory theoretical maximum signal to noise ratio over a lifetime implying a maximum theoretical bandwidth of information. Perhaps some kind of (related?) thermodynamic argument.
wow, how long have you been writing that editor for?
Sounds like you need a consultant with experience rather than just some free advice, IMHO.
The original, german text does not state that ABP actually rewrites amazon affiliate links. It mentions "Amazon" once, in a sentence which could be translated at "..how to justify drying up financial base (which are amazon links) for thousands of small blogs.."

(That doesn't mean ABP does not change amazon referral links, though)
Actually I went through Schiphol-USA and back over the weekend. I compared directly between them.

Schiphol->: Got questioned for about 30 seconds before going through the scanners. I have dual nationality so the guy was extra thorough with me. No delays (good), no opt-out possible from millimiter-wave scanner (bad). Scanners just before boarding gate. Get on plane.

->SFO: Half an hour queueing while looped video of a cute puppy about it being bad for everybody if you bring carrots numbed my higher brain functions. Finally in front of customs, guy takes about 4 minutes checking my passport and visa, taking pictures and fingerprints of me. Get on BART.

SFO->: 20 minutes queueing. TSA guy questions me while drawing nonsense on the boarding ticket (psych technique to distract you while they look at your reaction?). TSA guy in the background screams "Keep your belongings in sight! We are not responsible if you lose something, but I don't want to fill the paperwork!" (not paraphrasing, those were the words used). I Opt-out, TSA guys screaming between each other "We have an opt-out! Male!" several times until another agent comes by. Instructed how pat down is done, get groped, get tested for explosive residue from the agent's gloves(do they think that an opt-outer is more likely to be "bad"?). After 30/40 minutes of the TSA dance, get on plane.

->CDG->: Get out of plane. Go through customs (<1 minute queue, <30seconds with officer). Get on plane.

->Schiphol: Get out of plane. Go through automated customs (5 minutes queueing, 30 seconds with the machine). Get on Train.

All and all, although I think the mandatory scanners in Schiphol are unnecessarily invasive, there was nothing shittier in that entire trip than TSA, may be the exclusion of the schizophrenic woman that threw a soda can at me when walking by...
From the article: Investors in Adblock Plus / Owners of the company behind Adblock Plus also invest/own ad-network companies, which they put on the white list while they keep out competitors. The article claims one can buy oneself onto the whitelist.
I have Adblock Plus installed, but comparing an Amazon affiliate link in Firefox with Adblock Plus, with one in Chrome (no Adblock Plus) shows no difference.
Chrome does it by default, just click on the padlock. Example:

http://i.imgur.com/k1bhh77.png
"there were no blowbacks to Google"

That's a factually incorrect statement. I'm sorry, but people who make factual claims are supposed to care when they're proven wrong.
I loathe the trite "citation needed" when challenging disagreeable opinions. Especially when statements are so easily fact checked.

However, your thesis of more federal funding leading to raising prices doesn't square with my experience, what I understand of the current situation, and many of the sourced comments below. (I currently work in higher ed; funding, tuition, loans, worth of degrees are discussed ad nauseum. Though I sling code, many friends and coworkers deal with the money, budgets, and legislature.)

By "federal funding", do you mean research grants? I dimly recall that during my father's generation, Sputnik motivated huge influx of cash into both K-12 and higher ed. Also, my grandfather's generation benefitted from the GI Bill. Those initiatives lowered student costs.

It's accepted wisdom that our tuition has risen in direct proportion to the withdrawal of state funding. We're currently funded at 9%. It's completely, sadly accepted that we'll eventually be fully tuition funded.

I can't speak to the student loan gouging. Prior generations of students had very low interest rates with lenient payback enforcement. So your point seems counterfactual, leaning on some libertarian "free market" worldview.
Mozilla Collusion
Have you built anything using those technologies that you can show off publicly?
> What this means is that the major obstacles for going into space have been cleared (reliable engine, logistics around sea launch, active guidance) so the next launch will be Heat2x, which has the potential to reach an altitude of 130 km. Space starts at 100 km.

This seems to imply a ballistic trajectory. Still an impressive feat, but getting to orbital velocity seems to be as hard (if not harder), than getting to 100km.
Partner, as in domestic partner.
As for software, personally, I'm fond of GoboLinux approach: http://www.gobolinux.org/index.php?page=at_a_glance

Minor details (ahem capitalized directory names ahem) aside, having a designated place for each distinct software release (/Programs/Bash/3.0/bin/) in my personal opinion looks more practical than having a separate database of package-installed files.

Unfortunately, the projects seems to be dead or nearly dead.
Bluetooth tracking stickers on the market
Forgive me if this is a dumb comment to make, as I'm just barely starting to get into monitoring and the statistics knowledge that goes along with it, but adaptive fault detection does tend to scare me a bit. In the event that a problem isn't a spike, and instead gradually builds up over hours/days/weeks, I wouldn't be confident in something picking a dynamic threshold for me. I'd be afraid of it deeming the ever-rising resource usage as normal behavior, if it happens slow enough, and me not being alerted before it's too late (servers becoming unresponsive).
I think the difference is the decrease in scarcity. There's a reason that intensive agriculture marks the beginning of what we consider civilization. Aside from the fact that it requires sedentary living, it removed the constant threat of starvation and relieved us of our basest instinct to kill or be killed. Human progress and arguably human evolution has gone beyond our genetic destiny and is now shaped by our works. People who live in first-world countries are unlikely to ever face a shortage of high-quality food, potable water, sanitation, basic medical care. There are simply fewer things to fight about.
Who you callin' a moon, little rock ball!
Not to take anything away from this but that's not really achieving the desired effect. There's still a browser refresh happening so you lose your state every time. You're still stuck in the same cycle. In an ideal world you would be able to change code in your editor and have those changes reflected within the objects already loaded in your browser.
Is it just me, or did that entire article rest on the assumption that Snowden's data is not encrypted?
What should I do?
The company that I used to develop my software is now charging me outrageous prices for continued maintenance. Is it important to have the maintenance provided by the developer or is it fine to find another company to provide the maintenance?
A remote protocol is super-handy. Anyone who has used CL w/ SLIME and a compatible editor can attest to this. There's even a little project called slime-proxy[1] which proxies the javascript compiled from parenscript in a REPL to a connected browser via websockets. It is a much more elegant way to develop applications for the browser than the reloading hacks that are popular today.

[1] https://github.com/3b/slime-proxy
> You were saying?

My point is that talking about how human decency is what keeps people from committing violent, anti-social acts ignores the plain evidence that exists in the world around us, in places like Bangladesh where people aren't fortunate enough to have the kind of policing we take for granted in the western world. Human decency helps, without it society would be ungovernable, but it's police with guns and the threat of justice that keeps the bad apples from ruining the harvest.
Piotr, how would this hackathon have panned out in case you wouldnt have won? (which was the case for the other 95% of the participants ;)) Or worded differently: would it have been worth it if you wouldnt have won?
Tailored to Tech: My NYC Google Glass Fitting (Slide show)
The article in question? ~5 paragraphs from the bottom.

Or are you asking a commenter who disagrees with the article to provide sources for an assertion made in the article?
The Terminal: Snowden stuck in Moscow airport
Can someone explain justification for an 80 character line limit? Its 2013; large 16:9 and 16:10 resolution monitors are the norm.
I use the venerable (but still actively maintained) Privoxy, which is a proxy but still does most of what I want on HTTPS pages. It can't examine the page contents themselves, but it can block 3rd-party requests by hostname, which gets most of the web-bugs and such.
password field is clean ?
Could've been another journalist, someone working for a news-agency, or someone hoping to sell it to a news-agency / a gov't.
good tip, but he makes winning a hackathon sound easy. I am sure it isn't for everyone :-)
Ah ok, fair enough. I'd heard that Smalltalk had a really good environment for this but I've never looked into it.

Let me rephrase then. There are amazing server side REPLs that allow me to change code on the fly, why can't I change code in my editor and have it reflected directly in my browser?
"Snowden was the kind of bar buddy willing to get into a political argument and never give up, even if he pissed off the whole room."

Most notorious troll in history?
tnx mate :)
It would be highly unfair if it got overlooked on those grounds.
I would not call it "embracing" at all. Node community suffers from NIH syndrome and tries to reinvent everything in JavaScript.

I love Node, my main products run on it. But I still use other specialized tools outside Node ecosystem to create environment for it. I use init/upstart/whatever is available on the machine to restart the process if it dies. I use stunnel to proxy SSL connections, I use HAProxy for load balancing.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Since 0.8 whose main goal has been to run on Windows, it seems that Node has taken a sideway path from Unix philosophy and decided to build everything into it, so that you can run the same thing on different platforms. A good thing is that everything is modular, so you don't have to use all those add-ons if you don't want.
Pointing out that neither Russia nor Iraq have evolved into liberal democracies the instant they escaped despotism, is hardly conclusive. The number of democracies in the world is always on the slow rise. When Russia overthrew the tsar, they thought they had a better idea and decided to give it a try. Not every experiment is a success. When South Korea escaped war with half a country, they traded occupation for an authoritarian Democracy that devolved into despotism and eventually evolved into a true liberal democracy. The process took a good 30+ years. Progress isn't linear, but it is steady.
well no, I was emphasising that these aren't just "some jerks" in the feminist community; these are quotes from central figures who have affected feminist doctrine in a direct way.
That's not at all a dumb comment. As I alluded to in the post, I think it's important that we understand how these systems determine what is - or isn't - an abnormality or fault. Unfortunately, that often means revealing their "secret sauce" and risk exposing their product differentiation. It's going to be interesting to see how these products earn our trust.
Python as a language requires the float type to have at least double precision. This is sadly not documented explicitly, but the big four Python implementations all respect this.
It's not wage stagnation per se, it's the implosion of the real economy. Minimum wage can't keep up because our economy is a shadow of its former self. From 1950 to 1980, America had on average half the total global manufacturing base, courtesy of WW2 having blown up everybody else.

If we matched minimum wage from 1951, or 1961, we'd need to be paying $40,000 to $50,000 per year. Anybody that has run a liquor store, or a fast food business, understands that's mathematically impossible.
Fair enough. But the average net tuition at public universities is only $4,900 per year. Assuming you make $10 per hour at a summer job, that works out to exactly 40 hours per week over the summer. Obviously there are still other expenses and considerations, but tuition itself isn't especially unreasonable. The bigger issues are the fact that education you'll receive is likely complete garbage, your degree won't be worth anything, and wages of the middle class have been decreasing for decades.
Oh yeah - short function syntax goes into the wild!

let square = x => x * x

Time to move over to stalking the Chrome devs...
That. And, furthermore, he is most likely not carrying his data with him, but has encrypted it and uploaded it somewhere, likely several places, just keeping the keys with him, also encrypted themselves.
I think his definition of progress is steady change toward an ideal version of humanity. The main problem is that the ideal changes with the age, and not in a predictable way. If you were to ask someone 500 years ago what a perfect person was, it would be quite different from the answer you'd get today. What does progress even mean if the ideal towards which humanity is moving keeps changing? It just becomes a random walk.

Also, just because human behavior is changing, doesn't mean human morality is becoming better in any objective sense.
TokBox launches OpenTok for Customer Service
Could it be a typo, i.e. that adblock plus charges (money) for allowing people's amazon refs through the filter?
Although if you check exceptionrules.txt there are only 3 domains that have amazon links whitelisted.

EDIT: apparently the 2nd page of the article writes about the possibility of changing links.
Snowden said some unwise things in his past? Well that definitely makes it ok for the government to spy on me!

Seriously Ars? You don't feel it's a little ironic to be raking through his communications like this?
Meet Prism's little brother: Socmint
Have you considered suing for access?
This looks great! The monitor feature looks interesting. We used node-usage for a while but it seemed to eat up a lot of memory. Maybe I could take a another look into it.

If you just want a cluster manager then i'd recommend https://npmjs.org/package/cluster-manager
> Fuenfzehn Mitarbeiter, davon zwei Geschaeftsfuehrer, weitere Stellenanzeigen sind geschaltet, Bueros im Koelner Clusterhaus? Und das einzige Produkt ist eine kostenlose Browser-Erweiterung? Wie kann das funktionieren?

Fifteen employees, two of those managers, further job ads are taken out, offices in Cologne's Clusterhaus? And the only product is a free of charge browser extension? How does that work?

Additionally, this part seems important as well:

> Viel wichtiger: das ist also Till Faidas Verstaendnis von akzeptablen Werbeanzeigen: gefakte Testberichte und Auszeichnungen, pseudoneutrale Bewertungen auf anonymisierten Blogs. Artikel, geschrieben von der PR-Abteilung und Geschaeftsfuehrung eines Unternehmens, suchmaschinenoptimierter Content-Dreck fuer das eigene Produkt. Scam nennt man sowas in Fachkreisen!

More importantly: so this is Till Faida's understanding of acceptable advertisements: faked test reports and awards, pseudoneutral ratings on anonymised blogs. Articles, written by the PR-department and by the management of a company, search-engine-optimised content-dreck [i.e. crud] for their own product. Expert circles tend to call this scam!

[the translation isn't the prettiest but hopefully quite close to the original in both meaning and intent]

[edit] The whole "mafia" argument seems to stem from these questionable practices of "anonymous" and thus seemingly neutral feedback, originating from within the company itself.

[edit 2] fixed first translation, since I forgot the half-sentence "weitere [...]"
Thanks for the feedback!

I've updated it so that you can use either Ctrl-Click or Shift-Click. Let me know, if you're still having problems.
Your speaking in half truths, taking inflation into account the increase intuition is mostly related to lack of funding for state schools. Consider a few states hand out fee rides to a significant faction of students who meet basic qualifications. The real issue is most states have been poorly run over the last 50 years and face a wide range of funding issues related to pensions and healthcare issues.

PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.
Just build it in Kerbal Space Program!
Lesson learned in refactoring ASP.NET MVC3 routes
Yay. Sometimes I wish we still did release parties.
Want build a lifestyle SaaS? Be my guinea pig :)
I am writing a book on how to find and test SaaS ideas.

If you want to have a go at running through our process, then contact me at info@howtofindsaasideas.com

You'll get the book for free too, obviously :)
Apple manages public keys, not private. They'd have to lie to you and give you their own public key, and then man in the middle your conversation to get it.
FYI: The article is separated on 2 pages:

http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

The allegation concerning rewriting links is on this second page, for example.
I actually didn't get that impression at all. Just assumed they copied the entire contents of the drives.
You'd be way smarter to raise your price and offer free shipping. Especially when what you sell is unique - it's not like shoppers will find it elsewhere cheaper.

Online shoppers love free shipping, and shipping charges are a huge cause of cart abandonment.
Agreed. I just used both terms interchangeably. English isn't my first language :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the article begins by saying that a centralized system is bad, because you must use it to interact with the system's clients. Then it goes on to say "it would be awesome if everybody was using Ripple".

Beside the tongue-in-cheek comment, payment systems are already decentralized. You can send money to anyone just by knowing their IBAN number, independently of the bank you're affiliated to.
I love Firefox. But, it's about damn time to remove the scroll bars on Mac OS X. This was a Lion feature and we're almost two versions removed from that.
Sure.

Would you take a job that didn't require a degree? How much would you expect to earn?

If the GP had said "A degree is required to (hopefully) maintain your parent's standard of living," which is obviously implied by the context, would you be able to restrain the pedantry?
I simply look into /proc and see which log files are held open by the process. I automated it with a couple of sed/awk scripts, so I can restart whichever node process I want.

At least, that's what I've done before I discovered REPL module. Now I simply log into it on specific TCP port. You just need to keep a list of ports somewhere.
If you're a fan of Firefox I recommend using Aurora:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/

Aurora is basically the beta of Firefox. It seems to get incremental updates more regularly than Firefox. It very occasionally has issues with compatibility with plugins (usually when a version number is bumped) but I can't recall any stability issues in the few years I've been using it.
The allegations concerning changing referal links are based on a source file of the extension. Did anybody check that? Any real proof or is this just a leftover?
Interestingly, Amazon is changing the terms of their Associates program to (among other things) specifically prohibit browser plugins from being eligible for sales commissions:

7.	Except as agreed between you and us in a separate written agreement
referencing this Participation Requirement, you will not use any Content or
Special Link, or otherwise link to the Amazon Site, on or in connection with:

a.	any client-side software application (e.g., a browser plug-in,
helper object, toolbar, extension, or component or any other application
executable or installable by an end user) on any device, including
computers, mobile phones, tablets, or other handheld devices;

- https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...