skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Maybe the problem is that most of these people are technically inept "

First let me say that your comments are dead on from my experience (and I'm even talking outside and before the internet dealing with small business in general as well as the people you mention.)

I don't think it's inept I think small business people are "shiny ball" driven and they react to things (deadlines, fines, customers, tax filings, supplies running out) they are used to going at their own pace and as a result have a hard time having the discipline to do things like this on any type of regular basis.

Perhaps the way to handle this is more or less some kind of mechanical turk.

If you tell the realtor "guy from India will be calling every 10am Tuesday" that creates the shiny ball that forces him (like taxes that are due) to get his house in order. Just a thought. I know when I was in a different business we did something similar and had decent results. We also did everything we could to make it easy for someone.

Obv. your time is worth more. But perhaps there is someone who could do the "teeth pulling" at a lower rate.

After all with video chat and all of that it's not a non-starter.
I think the editor must have removed the prefix "Preschoolers" from the title.

I can't believe that most people here haven't see the Dymaxion Map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
Ahh, see, I was under the impression that the customer was failing to understand. If they think the rep is wrong then that's a whole other problem. If that's the case then you're right, it does come off as condescending.

I'm not sure of the best way to convince a customer (who is wrong) that is questioning the rep's expertise. Provide more data and explain differently, I guess.
Would a Robotic Pilot Have Crashed at SFO?
So you are saying you are using a tool (telnet) to view/interact with the current protocol and this is good because it is easy to read and use.

Now we build a different tool, let's call it http2net. With HTTP being so prevalent, perhaps it isn't unreasonable to think it becomes part of most OS distributions.

So now you are using a tool (http2net) to view/interact with the new protocol and this is good because it is easy to read and use.

In summary, is binary vs text really the big problem here?
Hmm I wonder if users of "free apps" that currently show us advertisements would accept bitcoin-mining by the app instead of ad-display as a revenue stream.

I guess the issue would be that mining bitcoins takes a bunch of CPU resources and would thus actually cost "money" for the user in the form of an electricity bill
How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?
We should all remember that regular police in Britain don't carry guns. The guns are carried by special units that get called in when a suspect is thought to have a weapon.

I was in London in May when 2 men attacked a British solider and beheaded him on a public street, on the south side of London. One of the men was seen to have a gun, so the regular police called for the armed police. The armed police showed up 15 minutes later.

What was amazing to me (I'm a USA citizen) given the brutality of the attack, was the absolute calm with which everyone dealt with it. The public, the commentators in the media, the police, they all talked about the incident in a reasonable way, noting that tragedy can not be banned from human life. There were no calls for suspending civil liberties so as to keep the public safe. It was one of those moments when I realized how far my own country had wandered from its supposed commitment to freedom.

Also worth noting, the 2 attackers spoke to various bystanders, before the police arrived. Several bystanders captured the scene on their cell phone videos. The attackers repeated rhetoric that was Islamist in nature, and they used rhetorical flourishes that, I later read, had similarities to some Al Qaeda propaganda. Despite that, the media was restrained in its treatment of the religious/terrorist angle.

There may, at some point in the future, be a similar attack in the USA, where some men espousing a radical Islamist view kill an American soldier. I doubt the political reaction will be as calm in the USA as it was in Britain.
I think one possible problem is that there tend to be other positions in tech companies that do have to work fixed hours. (Tech support for example) In our company, the tech support people don't have flex time and everybody else does. It tends to create some ill-will.
I have a few bookmark keywords I use for searching

so ohgodhelpme will search stackoverflow for ohgodhelpme

g will search duckduckgo

go will search google.

I have noticed that as well, I gradually migrated from typing in "g whatever" to "go whatever"

Kind of depressing actually. Because I do like DDG.
Same in South America. There's really nothing novel here. I see Instacart getting taken out (not acquired) by Amazon within the next year or two.
Easily add trending data to your NeoCities.org homepage
I've been involved in competitive gaming since the early days. Asshatery is universal and found in other communities like counter strike, quake, unreal tournament, halo, et al..
COBOL isn't the problem, legacy systems, also, not the problem.

A severe lack of oversight, and Documentation, that's the actual problem.

Every sizable corporation has these problems, and often the new systems are worse, or can't handle the complex pay rules. But its the lack of documentation and oversight that makes any of these systems unmaintainable.

With Documentation, any system, no matter how old, or how obscure is maintainable.
An unorthodox theme for Octopress focusing on typography and images
I think you will find discussions on boards like HN more fulfilling if you avoid trying to personalize every statement. I don't argue against the hard working meme for self-interest -- I'm a rather successful independent software developer / consultant, and I spent half my day today enjoying coding while lying in a hammock.
Over the past decade, the American justice system has become fundamentally - and in my opinion, irreversibly - broken.

There has always been corruption in politics and justice, and that has been somewhat kept in check by the Constitution. But since 9/11, the corruption has become qualitatively different, because like you say, the government is no longer chained to the Constitution and can either interpret it liberally, or completely refuse to follow it using secret courts and gag orders and what have you.

It's not just the magnitude of this problem that is stunning, but also the scope and the depth. For example, you have surely noted that the number of people who care about being subject to perpetual surveillance is alarmingly small. But from their perspective, when someone is having to work longer and longer hours just to keep their jobs, and they have to constantly worry about missing mortgage payments and losing their homes, and on top of that deal with various health problems (due to rising obesity rates, among other things), and being able to send their kids to college, and whether they will be shot by some cop while reading a book... it's actually no wonder that they simply don't have the mental bandwidth to care about some nebulous government entity listening their phone calls and reading their emails.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the current situation in America is the confluence of a great number of seemingly unrelated threads. And the reason we won't be able to solve the problems this time around is that the complexity of this ball of yarn is simply too great for any one individual to fully comprehend, much even solve.
I think it's a combination of signaling superiority with body language, being friendly, greeting people with care and confidence, developing personal relationships, being proactive in meetings and in general, and most importantly just asking for what you want.

There was a time when I tried to conform or figure out what other people wanted, but these days I approach people with a clear idea of what I think should be done and say something like: "this is what I'm interested in", with the subtext that I'll just leave if I don't get to do that.

It's a kind of "take it or leave it" attitude.
I remember when I was 13 and first realized that I could HTML was what webpages were and that I could write it myself. It was 1997 and Geocities was my best friend. I was so excited.
This was actually a pretty decent read. The author lists a number of common use-cases for Github pull requests and how they can be used in practice.
E.g. from page 12 of the ruling:

The agreements also included a price parity provision, or Most-Favored-Nation clause (“MFN”), which not only protected Apple by guaranteeing it could match the lowest retail price listed on any competitor’s e-bookstore, but also imposed a severe financial penalty upon the Publisher Defendants if they did not force Amazon and other retailers similarly to change their business models and cede control over e-book pricing to the Publishers. As Apple made clear to the Publishers, “There is no one outside of us that can do this for you. If we miss this opportunity, it will likely never come again.”
I'm trying to imagine how you'd tell a cell-scale machine "go to that cell ... that one there", rather than "drive along this chemical gradient", or "bounce around until you match this receptor."
Relevant via The Wire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5za4VsskM
Miranda July explains how to make art out of email
Redesigned and Open Sourced Documentation for Balanced
It's incredible the things you can get done for $5. Just recently I had a professional quality commercial voice-over done. And I had my logo digitized for a very specific embroidery machine. I don't know how they can afford to spend the time doing such things.
Yes, there is a separate portion of the Jobs Act that deals with crowdfunding and non-accredited investors.

That is an entirely different can of worms, but there too, I think there is a general overestimation of how easy it will be for the average small business or startup to raise capital.
I've found that for utterly and moronically basic stuff that I've forgotten about, eHow does an okay job. Of course, I can't speak for anything remotely complicated.
Here's the source: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-docs
The Kickstarter blurb (and rewards options) talk about using multiple Plug devices to store redundant and off-site copies.

"You can install one Plug in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Plugs will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Plugs are enough. But with each Plug you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Plug, you can also ask your Plugs to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted, so your friends will not be able to read it."

Like much of their Kickstarter copy - for me that's enough to make me interested, but not quite enough to explain to me what's actually going on. (Having said that, it's probably _fabulous_ marketing copy - I'm _very_ close to plunking down a $129 pledge to get a pair of them…)
Well actually, your assembly example is a good one because C#, Go and a bunch of other similar languages all have refractor information compiled into the output binary because debugging machine code is a pig (even with assembly mnemonics). So even the average developer enjoys the luxury of wasted information in modern specifications.
If there is a voice or video medium in the call, you can be pretty sure. If you are concerned about MITM for text and other data media, better to use non-real-time system that would use signed keys and public key crypto.

It sure would be nice if some major internet service offered a PKI-like service.
Yeah, SWAT teams were created for a reason, to respond to crises that the regular police were not equipped or trained to handle (that's why it's Special Weapons and Tactics). The problem here is just that they're being used for routine policing tasks that really should be the purview of regular patrol officers. We don't have to get rid of them entirely, just limit the kinds of situations that they're allowed to respond to. Sending SWAT teams after suspects with no criminal record and who are not expected to be armed is absurd and wasteful.
Pinker's thesis is not without serious detractors. Edward Herman and David Peterson's critique[1] in ZNet is worth considering before taking it as fact.

[1] http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...
The API-Craft Conference July 29th-31st 2013
I wouldn't say the military has seen mission creep. Their job was always to stay until the fighting was over and the mission was accomplished. The difference is that we've found ourselves in conflicts where the fighting doesn't stop, and the mission might be "accomplished" now and then but it never stays that way. Judging by our recent conflicts, it's wishful thinking to try to separate the duties of fighting and interacting with civilians, and I think the new branch of the armed forces you're talking about is basically what the current U.S. Army is trying to be. Any nation-building and humanitarian relief force we create will have to deal with ambushes, mortar attacks, RPGs, and assaults on their bases, so it's not like they won't be fighters (and inevitably killers.)

Honestly, I think the army, along with a handful of progressive city police departments, will solve the problem of community policing long before most local U.S. law enforcement agencies. The army has greater ability to control and change its culture. It won't happen overnight, but we can hope that eventually U.S. cops will learn to respect their neighbors across town by the example of how U.S. soldiers treat people from the other side of the world. The army will also learn how to assess soldiers' fitness for interaction with civilians, which will have interesting implications for law enforcement.
And there are no gangs in London?
> SSL means you're already used to not looking at things through telnet.

Someone has never used `openssl s_client` before.

Very few people actually delve into and edit the TLS protocol. People, including devs, often delve into the HTTP protocol and craft requests by hand, or with a simple text-processing script.

To most people, TLS is transparent. This HTTP 2.0 protocol is not transparent.
I meant that what Amazon did with books wasn't much different from Apple with music.
just thermodynamics really. the cpu cycles spent mining bitcoins are in fact costing the user something.
FINALLY. I was going through every comment on this thread and I was wondering why no one was talking about security. This is one of the key features of the data warehousing business we have been contemplating.
As I see it, SPDY/HTTP 2.0 is for the next ten years. QUIC is for the ten years after that.
Sorry, that's what I meant: available on every server as a package. My brain isn't working today. I've set up a whole bunch of different servers for customers over the years, and as you say it's normally a single line to install mysql from a package manager. Some of the other databases may or may not be so easy to install.

Anyway, the point I was making is that mysql is widely available and highly stable.
Embedding instagram content on your website
I've heard a friend, who is an Army drill sergent, complain about how badly their new system works compared to the old one.
I don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being higher.
I believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.
Instacart is a really interesting business (it's a logistics play, not a retailer, and logistics is stealthily really sexy – it doesn't matter what sells, you win), but the thing is, US is at least ten to fifteen years behind the rest of the world in grocery sales:

http://www.ocadogroup.com
http://www.lse.co.uk/ShareChart.asp?sharechart=OCDO&share=oc...

(amongst many – every major UK supermarket has a popular home delivery service).

It's up there with mobile and wireline Internet, and cable TV, for areas where moving to the US has felt like moving back to the mid-nineties... there are other areas where the US is unquestionably the leader, but yeah.
Have you never had to send a specific request/response to a server? I've often found it easier to store the request in a text file and pipe it instead of using curl or another tool to craft it.

When I was a webdev (over the past few years) I did this at least once a month.

I'd daily look at the HTTP headers, though. Also, I'd often add custom headers for debugging purposes.

Edit: It's also not just telnet, it's being able to use simple scripts to automate requests or responses for many reasons.
After that you can see what? You also have to use something like sed, xxd, and nc at least to make a request unless you are really good with bitfields and a hex editor. You want to keep a connection open or use what comes back for he next request? Maybe you can quickly cobble together a crude client in expect and tcl, perl, or python.
The Unfinished PDE Coffee Table Book
Why should the armed forces be last?
4. the sneaky commit
when do I use it?

after the code has been reviewed and merged into master
I need to make a small change (eg a copy change or
bugfix) that’s not even worth notifying others about

what I do

just push the new commit to master.

ಠ_ಠ That's not something you're supposed to admit in public.

I will note that github has being particularly prolific in getting git advice out there, they're working to educate developers in git, full stop. Though one or two pieces (such as this one) seem to suggest it's github specific advice.
indeed. I always need coffee.
In theory I agree.

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not" :(
There is substantial evidence that lead poisoning, particularly that from leaded gasoline, is the causative element behind the violent crime spike and subsequent decline: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
I wish somebody had alerted me when a few guys in a Harvard dorm needed capital to pay the hosting bills for their new social network!

My missed opportunity to take a huge equity stake in Facebook for $20,000 aside, what you're referring to is the quality of deal flow of an existing investment firm. There is no shortage of investors already actively involved in funding startups who wish they could have invested in a particular company.

That's not what we're talking about though. Your prior comment suggested that the lifting of the ban on general solicitation will make it easier for small businesses that cannot realistically raise capital today to do so.

There's a huge difference between a startup that is already working the angel and VC networks and a group of guys who want to buy a bar as a hobby and, perhaps not surprisingly, have no contacts eager to pony up even $50,000 so that the founders can keep most of their money in investments that are producing better returns than the bar would.

In other words, you're confirming one of my original observations: a lot of folks seem to believe that general solicitation will enable startups and small businesses that are less-than-compelling investments to raise money from stupid rich people.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody somewhere has a list of accredited investors over the age of 80 who are likely to have Alzheimer's, that is not going to happen in significantly larger numbers as a result of this change.
I think TLS/SSL is the elephant in the room here. A large part of the web is effectively already using binary protocol (HTTPS), and frankly I'd wish the part was even bigger.

Think of HTTP 2.0 as a successor for HTTPS instead of HTTP if it makes you feel better.
I certainly agree with all of that.
I did exactly the same and I unfortunately also really got used to the "go" prefix by now.
It's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network

Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.
I personally don't believe results should be removed or altered based on human judgement. What if I decide to start a competing service that Gabriel takes a dislike to? Or decide to start a hate site for DDG[1]? Do they not deserve a place on the internet? Is it up to one person to decide this? For neutrality to work it needs to be neutral for absolutely everyone, or atleast that's how I see it.

[1] These are purely hypothetical. I'm a big fan of both Gabriel and DDG, and I'm not suggesting he would ever do these.
Exactly. What I really want is something that Aperture is aware of. I want to be able to click "Archive" with a Project and have the local copy deleted. Yet, it's still in the catalog/library offsite, so if I want it, I click "Retrieve" and can pull down the set and start fudging the RAWs. Or, if I want to work on just one, I can browse through and work on it as well.
You can always use Startpage to use Google https://startpage.com/. I use both Startpage and DDG frequently. Sometimes the results of one are what I want and sometimes the other.

The whole idea of there being just one useful search engine doesn't make sense to me. I only wish these companies would do more to differentiate themselves and that there were more options.
An issue with virtually all dedicated server vendors is the tendency to grossly under-equip servers with memory: My Mac Mini has 16GB (a $100 upgrade), and it is simply ridiculous that going above 4GB on a server is considered some extravagant feature the requires significant, expensive upgrades of every other component.
I'll give you two, both occurred to me in the past month:

1. Debugging which headers were causing Amazon CloudFront to MISS requests originating from Android. tcpdump, observe request, repeat using netcat until the problem was pinpointed.

2. Debugging failed authentication on a dovecot IMAP, on one specific scenario. Again, tcpdump, reproduce, isolate and fix.
> The stores themselves will just roll out their own competing services.

Safeway already has their own online ordering & delivery service, however it doesn't allow you to bundle items from other (possibly competing) stores. Instacart allows you to pick (for example) 3 items from Safeway, 2 items from Trader Joe's, 1 item from Costco, and 6 items from Target ... all in the same delivery. It would take a joint venture / agreement among all the major retail chains to make that happen with their own services. Instacart's model is actually safer than it seems at first glance.
I'd classify those under "refinements" ;)
This company will fail. I don't see it being profitable on 3.99 per delivery... Nor do I see the interest in the service outside the Bay Area. Enjoy the VC money while it lasts guys
There were no calls for suspending civil liberties so as to keep the public safe.

Actually, the incident gave rise to a lot of noise from some politicians about how they needed to introduce the "Snooper's charter" which was previously rejected, so that they could stop these kinds of crimes before they happened, etc.

This only got drowned out when Snowden started releasing the stuff that shows that they didn't wait for any Snooper's charter anyway.