skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you think phone support is needed?
Today our payment processor shut us down w/o much, if any, warning and a very vague reason. To make matters worse, though we made several attempts to contact them we got zero help. I did eventually contact a staffer via Twitter who told me 'someone was looking into it' but that was it. So we spent the day checking email, twitter, and logs looking for some sort of sign that we're back up. Not fun...

Putting aside we were down for a day, and the fact we've done around .5M of business with them so far this year, we have no way of contacting them via phone.

I've been a champion of the concept of not providing phone support, instead use email - providing email is fast and reliable. However, after today I'm having second thoughts.

Over the last few years I've seen more and more substantially successful companies not offering phone support. This idea has been interesting to me as I think its not only cool but efficient.

For instance, in many cases phone support may be just a place for a customer to take out their frustrations, not really helping matters or delivering a solution any quicker. In my experience I often can help people out quicker via email because it saves me the emotional drama.

However, I think in order for this to be successful, email or web chat support needs to be efficient. I'm talking turn-around time in minutes not hours or worse yet days.

Even if a solution can't be resolved quickly, a customer should be notified that the issue is being worked on. Metaphorically speaking, not doing such is like not providing a spinner or progress bar when doing a lengthy web request. It builds tension - tension needs resolved.

That being said - more companies seem to be doing this. I'm asking the HN community on their opinion of this trend. Perhaps this will shed light on the concept and spike those doing it to be speedier on their emails ;-).

Do you think phone support is needed?
The insult doesn't have to attack the point he was making to be relevant to the discussion about the article. The insult was directed at the overall quality of the article and how it was written. That makes it relevant to the discussion about the article. The article came off as whiny with little redeeming qualities, and that is reasonable to discuss whether you agree with his point or not.
I've recently been working to get a set of Puppet scripts running along side of Vagrant so both Server side and Client side devs can get working on projects faster.

Personally I've found dealing with Ruby and the various versions rather irritating. I kind of wish I had started with Salt or Ansible because I know far more Python, than I do Ruby. I started down this bunny trail before Vagrant support Ansible and/or Salt. I guess it's not to late to start over... hahaha Maybe I will after the initial release.

I guess the only advantage of Puppet was that I'm able to do most of what I want using major modules...
Tips for Finding Problem Solution Fit by Interviewing Customers
The experiences I have had in the Valley have led me to call it "The Valley of my Discontent"
neataroni
First thing I do when I have a problem is see if someone else has solved it for me.

I have limited brain space and learning something really well often forgoes learning new things unless they are evidently superior.

That being said, I don't often spend time learning new technologies. Instead I invest in learning fundamentals.
Meet the whiz behind The Facebook (2004)
>There are good reasons why OOP is more popular than FP beyond the vacuous "they simply don't get it" arguments.

I think the main reason is simply historic. OOP is a lot easier to implement (in terms of reasonable runtime efficiency) than FP. Because of this, it had a huge head start to get itself into common usage. FP has only recently gotten to the point where it is actually competative on performace.

In terms of 'getting it', computers and programing were originally the domain of people who were much more procient in math than now. I suspect many of them would have been more comftorable with FP, but implenting it was way beyond their time.
Yes, I can understand it while at the same time not agreeing with it.

It seems to me that one of the biggest questions on this issue that Americans need to face is: are you punishing or are you rehabilitating? I don't pretend to have a universally applicable and useful answer to that question, but societies should at least be very clear about which option is being chosen and what the consequences of that choice are.
Everybody has different hardware etc., but for what it's worth, OpenSUSE never let me down. So if you feel like you have another go in you before you completely give up on Linux, try that maybe.

As for the videos, if you aren't already, use VLC, it seems to have a trillion obscure codecs baked into it.. I would go so far to say if it doesn't play in VLC, there is either a problem elsewhere, or it's not a video file.
Not sure if the license is the reason they choose FreeBSD, but they have made some contributions back to FreeBSD

A patch for AVX support was submitted from someone at Sony

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2011-March/...
As opposed to all that they gained from their treatment of Bradley Manning.
Show HN: I wrote a crowd-source supported "aisle finder"
http://cartcombine.com

I dislike floundering in grocery stores wandering around looking for things. My goals were to get in and out of stores as quickly as possible. I've looked into products like aisle finder but it's behind a paywall and the reviews were bad for the product.

For right now you can make searches, create products, create stores, tie them to individual stores and give them attributes. I wanted to concentrate on making it easy to use with a clean interface. This isn't limited to grocery stores either. If there's an aisle with a price, it can go into this site.

I am the only developer, it took me six months to write from start to MVP and I'm really excited to show it off.

I'm hoping I can make this grow into a self-governing grocery delivery service too, but that's phase 2. I don't want to have to wait for instacart to come to my city, and really it should be publicly supported anyway.

This is completely free except when creating shopping lists, which is more of a convenience, and swapping from store to store will update the aisles that the products are in. That feature is $5/month, but really, I feel the amount of time you're saving using something like this will be worth it. Also by charging money I can make phase 2 become a reality.

You can also use it to find where a product might be before driving around looking for it. Don't set a current store and do a search for it to discover it's location and price.

The data is sparse, but that's because only I am updating it right now. Jump on board!

Any questions please ask! It's been a long way coming but I feel pretty accomplished, and personally I enjoy using the site myself as well.
My time is limited, so I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others.

Before I build something using a new technology/framework/language/whatever, I look at popular open source projects that use it. Not only is it useful to pick up idioms, but browsing through the project's closed issues is a great way to find and avoid common pitfalls of the new technology.
Guantanamo and torture are pretty new for the USA.
Lua is a much smaller language and overall it is much more consistent and has less corner cases than Javascript since the language had the opportunity to evolve over the years instead of needing to retain backwards compatibility with browsers from 1995. For example:

* Lua has proper lexical scoping instead of the confusing "function scoping" of Javascript (so there is no need to use the IIFEs hack).

* Lua has a Python-style lexicaly scoped self instead of the error prone dynamically scoped "this". No need to use `var taht = this` if you have nested functions.

* The metatable system is much more flexible than the simple JS prototypal inheritance system (you can sort of implement "method missing" instead of being forced to only delegate to a concrete table.

* You can use anything as a Lua table key. In JS all keys are converted to strigns. Lua also supports weak references.

* Coroutines! Its sort of like ES6 generators and is super awesome. Async programming is infinitely more pleasant in Lua than it currently is in JS because you don't need to convert code to continuation passing style.
I am certainly not a DNSSEC expert so take my explanation with a grain of
salt.

Short answer www.paypal.com is a cname for an akamai box. That cname record is
secure:

$ unbound-host -v -t cname www.paypal.com www.paypal.com has CNAME record
www.paypal.com.akadns.net. (secure)

Everything falls apart when your resolver finishes the rest of the required
lookups to get an IP address from akadns/akamaiedge.

As I have been experimenting/researching dnssec I have often found it
is useful to use verisign's tool AND sandia's dnsviz[1] tool. For the
moment forget what I said about paypal's cname and compare sandia's[2] and
verisign's[3] results for www.paypal.com and see if you can spot the issue.

You are correct that it is a relief that verisign uses DNSSEC but if I may be
so bold I think you may be wrong about why it is a relief. (I am trying to be
helpful, i apologize if that sounds dickish it is not my intent) With DNSSEC
(just like DNS) everything flows from the root. Verisign manages the .com
tld so if they did not sign the .com you could not verify anyhost.com. The
same thing can be said for DISA, GSA and PIR for .mil, .gov and .org zones
respectively.

As far as NIST goes they are the second least surprising DNSSEC adopter as
far as the federal government goes. Because of NIST's standards function
within the government they are normally at the forefront for things like
this. Moreover DNSSEC is heavily reliant on accurate time and NIST is the home
of the government's truechimer. However if you go down this rabbit hole you
start to have some serious chicken and egg problems.

[1] http://dnsviz.net/ (NB: sandia's is so slow that its painful)

[2] http://dnsviz.net/d/www.paypal.com/dnssec/

[3] http://dnssec-debugger.verisignlabs.com/www.paypal.com
oops. meant "countries" not "companies"
This would look much better with syntax highlighting.
I'd be hard pressed to find another language that I'd want to use for my server side development work. It's hands down the most expressive c style language in existence. Coupled with Visual Studio, the amount of quality software that can be written in a short amount of time is nothing short of amazing. (This is coming from someone who was a Rails dev in their previous life)
Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh
For a second I thought that was Rumi. Not the same, but just as good.
I'm not sure it's really necessary---Lua 5.0 came out in 2003, 5.1 in 2006 and 5.2 in late 2011. It doesn't change that fast.
Simple starting point for rpg-like game
DIY “Reclining” Workstation: Proof of Concept
Correct. Also it seems that the whole island is covered by a marsh. The island's location is technically a river but it is very close to the ocean and ocean levels have risen quite a bit in the past 50 years.

So one can expect that the whole thing will be mud and it will be expensive to build anything useful on it.

But it would be interesting if some billionaire buys it to build a mansion on there. That would be the ultimate mark of exclusivity.
An interesting change in C# 5.0 involves the handling of foreach iteration variables when used in closure scope. This is technically a breaking change, although it is really hard to think of a case where the old behavior was legitimately desired.

Consider (stolen from the spec doc):

int[] values = { 7, 9, 13 };
Action f = null;
foreach (var value in values)
{
if (f == null) f = () => Console.WriteLine("First value: " + value);
}
f();

In previous versions of C#, there is a single value variable is in the scope of the entire loop, so the above code would actually print out the last value in the list because that was the value of value (sorry) when the loop finished. In C# 5.0, a value variable is actually in the scope of each individual iteration (so within the braces). So now if you use your iteration variable in a closure scope it won't change on you when the loop iterates and the above code actually prints out the first value.

The same cannot be said for a for loop. It still functions as it always has.
Two answers come to mind about that. First, according to wikipedia, the PS4 has been in development since 2008 -- long before FreeBSD 9.0 was released -- so the "enjoy updates to master" argument would have applied during the development cycle even if not after the product is released. Second, even if they're dealing with a mostly static platform, I'm sure there would be some changes -- in hardware, replacing components with newer/cheaper ones, and in software, patching security vulnerabilities -- so there would still be some incentive to make merging easy (although not as much as if they were continuing development, to be sure).

Of course, for all I know, they might be planning a PlayStation 5 based on FreeBSD 11.0 to be launched in 2017, in which case they would have very good reasons to merge as much non-proprietary work upstream.
Agents infiltrated Snowden's laptop before he left Hong Kong
Pick real world problem. Build solution with new tech.
As a former C# dev, here's my subjective view:

The stuff actually fits in the language pretty well. What has resulted, however, is that there are multiple ways to skin a cat in C#, and there's very limited guidance on what's considered idiomatic.

This is complicated by the fact that many .NET/C# shops have coding standards in place that don't go much beyond C# 2.0. The last C# interview I did, at an allegedly "progressive" .NET shop, the interviewer barred me from using null coalesce in a whiteboard example because "That's hobby project code. It's not how we write production code"

Great language, terrible culture.
I love the U.S., but it's not a perfect country. And Amnesy International has been pointing it out for as long as I can personally remember being aware of them. (nearing 25 years now)

This is not nearly the first time AI has accused the U.S. of human rights abuses. Just look at the history of the death penalty in this country for one example.
Rss-readers-list.md
This is a place to track the ever-growing list of Reader replacement apps that have been popping up in the months prior to July 1. If your preferred reader is missing, please consider contributing!
They used ELF (or actually SELF, Signed ELF) for PlayStation 3.
Google: Public Data
I am sorry but the amount of time taken to install visual studio is also not short of amazement.
If your time is worth more than $150 hour (but you still want roommates!), feel free to adjust the penalty upward and add some other communal benefit to the kitty threshold. For example, you could buy a new original Monet to hang next to the rocket car. :)

If I ever develop this into a full system, I'll make sure to make the penalty configurable.
I feel like developer-heavy organizations would be more successful at this. A major factor is the tools facilitate a lot of the communication (commit messages, bug tracking, build notifications, documentation, etc.). They're also comfortable using tools and generally adapt quickly to new platforms. And in my own personal experience, it worked with their personalities.

I'd like to hear more examples of this working successfully at scale in highly-cross functional teams, with distributed marketing, sales, design, support, and product groups. Communication always seems to be a complaint at companies, and I'd like to hear more about how this was addressed.
Single click starts a 10,000-core CycleCloud cluster for $1060/hr
http://xkcd.com/1138/
The Residency Mismatch
Wow, that's actually very very good for someone that seemed so harsh.

On a side note, this Bono guy is everywhere, does that mean that Jobs was in the same sect thingy?
I had PRK when I was 19 (almost 10 years ago) so I can say with confidence you'll want to go the LASIK route if you can. With PRK, they scrape away the outer layer of your cornea so a laser can reshape its surface. With LASIK, they cut open your cornea and operate on the lens itself.

While cutting may sound traumatic, it doesn't affect your vision (they put a protective contact lens over it afterwards, it heals very quickly) and you come out of the operation seeing 20/20. With PRK, your cornea has to re-grow the cells that were scraped away during the operation which causes your vision to be cloudy for around a week. During this time your eyes will be painfully sensitive to light and you likely wouldn't be able to use a computer for 4-7 days. Another downside to PRK - you don't know how well the operation went until your eyes have fully recovered 2-3 weeks after surgery.
Why not just use linux packages + scripts?

I asked myself this same question several years ago. The basic advantages chef and puppet (and salt, etc.) offer over client-side python alone are:

A thin abstraction layer for basic system/platform information (facter/ohai). System information that you'd obtain using various tools like dmidecode, uname, df, /proc, ip, are all gathered and made available in a single data structure. Overkill? Maybe, but makes for much cleaner scripts.

A library for performing common tasks: package installation/upgrade, directories, files and templates, services, and shell execution. A full list: http://docs.opscode.com/chef/resources.html#resources.

Finally, a framework for organizing your configuration in a standardized way, with most of it in one place. With chef, for example, the idea is to put all the configuration for a single application in one "cookbook" and then if you have two different servers that both use that application in different ways, you define two different roles that pass different parameters to the basic recipes. Obviously the extent to which this one a benefit depends somewhat on your needs and personal preferences.

But I do agree that both chef and puppet are over-engineered. Puppet's DSL and chef's server are mostly overkill that I don't have much use for. But the DSL can be dealt with and the chef server is optional. There doesn't have to be a single point of failure.
I'm just echoing what everyone else here said, but they do a great job at adding these features to the language. I believe that if you learned C# as a first language nothing would feel out of place.
I Knew Snowden. And He’s Not The Story
Raspberry Pi as a dedicated Bitcoin miner
Interesting - can you track back the reference?
Can the copyright owner opt out or claim infringement? (I looked it up, but couldn't make heads or tails of the legalese.)

If the copyright owner could opt out, then it would sound like a matter of the artist having sold their rights and not liking what the new owner's doing with them. But it doesn't sound like that's the case, and that's what's confusing.

Seems hard to believe that the corporations that own most copyrights would have created (or not prevented) a law that renders it worth less.
Nothing but flowers...
Here is Eric Lippert discussing the pros and cons of making the change.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/12/closi...
Correct. A SELF file is just an ELF-ish header with crypto abilities that wraps a normal ELF file. Many fields are duplicated... some are checked for validity while a different copy is actually used! ;-)

http://ps3devwiki.com/wiki/SELF_File_Format_and_Decryption
I've shown her exactly what "entry level graphic designer salary" is on the 'net. Moreover, she's been told that if she isn't delivering 100%, I'll let her go, because the company needs that full-tilt startup delivery. She knows what she's getting into. She's actually thrilled with it - she instinctively understands the value of giving 100% as a measure of self-worth.

Keep in mind she has no education beyond high school, no professional experience, and some pretty serious holes in her skill set. She's simply not equipped to land a $50k job on her own right now, even if that is "entry level". Her choice is between taking this, or bagging groceries, or taking tens of thousands in loans to go to college (which may or may not get her a job after). And when her skills are rounded out and the money is there, I'll pay her going rate, and gladly.

Moreover, she's not just my employee - she's my friend, and my daughter's friend. I'm not hiring her because she's cheap. I'm hiring her because I have faith in her talent, her drive, and her taste. I'd rather take her on and spend a few months polishing her skills than take my chances with a "better" employee whose taste I don't yet trust.

So yeah, far from exploiting her, I'm trying to groom and mentor her to build the kind of career I believe she should have.
Here is a version with all chapters merged into single file and Bookmarks/Outline links working correctly:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4Hlagvt6wuTNGY5SlB3QlZQYTQ/...
> You may think it's criminal/illegal activity, but the problem is it's completely within the law we have created.

That's a completely unsupported assertion. Clearly what the NSA has been up to is compatible with a small secretive framework of laws and courts, but a large part of the outcry is due to the fact that this framework hasn't been publicly subjected to Supreme Court challenges, so the compatibility with the larger body of law and the constitution is fairly uncertain compared to things like normal law-enforcement procedures. (If PRISM et al had been thoroughly tested at the Supreme Court level, there would have to have been a decision as notorious as Dred Scott or Roe v Wade, and a corresponding movement to amend the constitution in order to overturn the Supreme Court. Neither has happened yet.)
> This is not a form of brainwashing. This is not a form of brainwashing. This is not a form of brainwashing. There is nothing creepy about having children pledge allegiance every morning to something they don't even understand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=618U-_8o31k
Das my life, too.
With appropriate handshakes!
"Malibu homeowners intentionally obscure public beach access areas with fake signs and hidden access. This is not only ridiculously selfish, it is illegal."

Better or worse than just flat out preventing access whatsoever?

http://www.indiawest.com/news/9799-Surfers-Sue-for-Access-to...
That was a pretty cool crash course on Lua Tyler! Thanks for putting that together and sharing it. After having had worked with numerous languages over the years such as Fortran, Pascal, Ada, C, Java, C++, C#, Python and Objective-C, I must say that working with Lua is my favorite. I'm thankful to a buddy of mine for introducing it to me. My own personal experience has shown me that working with Lua really allows you to focus on solving the problem versus getting wrapped around the axle at the programming language level. Thanks again
Difference between Beijing and Silicon Valley on innovation
Should have been that way from the beginning; having the loop variable have function scope was absurd to begin with and forced developers to copy the loop var to a local before using it in a lambda.
Can't agree with you more!
Included in "infrastructure," but worth noting separately: NYC real estate prices are very dependent upon transportation time. Without any bridges, tunnels, or public ferry service here, actual distance from Manhattan doesn't really matter -- it's very far away.