skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting example I stumbled across:

Match.com typically take your subscription fee every 6 months, they won't remind you before they take the money. They also won't let you unsubscribe immediately after they take the money, they claim that payment is still in progress, even though the money has already been taken. It's not until a few days later that you can unsubscribe. Essentially it seems that they've realised that the most likely time for someone to unsubscribe is immediately after they pay, because with 6 months of membership it's easy to forget that you've even got a subscription unless you're a very active user.

I consider this to be a dark pattern because it plays on people's forgetfulness.

My Rules:

- Give people enough warning before taking payment that they can reasonably be able to decline the transaction. The only real reason someone should miss this warning is if they're taking a long vacation.

- Don't do evil stuff after taking payment to prevent them from unsubscribing from the next payment

- Have a nice buyers remorse window, allowing a user to reverse the transaction that's already occurred.
Speaking Colors in 7 Lines using webkitSpeechRecognition
There are a number of hacks to do it as plugins, but I can never get them to play nice with other plugins :(
I think someone who willingly hacks the NSA is likely going to be smart enough to have a go bag and a very firm "get the fuck out of dodge" plan always sitting on the back burner. What person with an IQ over 100 wouldn't?
You want to see what a Crunch Mode Antipattern looks like?

It looks like the Obamacare software system.
Peldi actually lived in the US for a while, where he built up some savings prior to launching. He also incorporated Balsamiq as an LLC before doing the Italian equivalent (which is way more expensive and bureaucratic).
Avoid The January Security Hangover
>expensive to spend ages on hold while making an international call

Did you try using Skype? Or Google Voice? Or similar? They are much cheaper than actually placing an international call, at least in the US, it is only like 3 cents a minute (US)

When I lived abroad I called home with Skype (this was before Google Voice) and I could talk as much as a wanted for only a couple dollars here and there, actually cheaper than my phone bill now.
Happy customers bring you more money.
Irritated customers go elsewhere.
Let your users know because:

1) Optimizely's bad process is an opportunity for you to have something better. "All our competitors trick you so that's usual and don't be mad at us" kind of attitude is quite mediocre.
2) Showing that you care about customers would improve brand loyalty thus keep users and would benefit you in the long run, than a couple of tricky financial profits
3) It's the nicer thing to do and you'd keep your integrity.
Ask HN: Software Engineer Salaries in Berlin
Hi

Can somebody with enough karma create a poll with salary ranges for software engineers in Berlin?

Or you could post here, if you have something to share.

Thank you!
Or for lying to congress during a hearing and then admitting to it by saying they wanted to use the 'least untruthful answer' (which is false on its face because the truth is the least untruthful answer.) But c'est la vie power protects power.
Everyblock re-launches in Chicago
It actually did change. In early eighties it basically meant support from different vendors and the ability to extend the hardware by adding new components.

So for instance, the first IBM PC and Apple II were considered open, because you could extend it by adding peripherals. On the opposite side, the Apple IIc was closed because it wasn't upgradable from outside of Apple.

In the case of MS, they were really opened in terms of hardware that would accept since was the fabricant who would provide the drivers.

Lately, pretty much all PCs are open under that definition just devices like iPad or some smartphones would be considered closed.
The dubious comfort in the mobile phone market is that when you're weak, there's always someone doing much worse still.

While Nokia managed to sell 8.2 million Lumias last quarter, Blackberry sold only 1.1 million BB10 devices in the same timeframe. The old brands have certainly fallen quick and hard.
The project seems interesting. It actually doesn't try to teach Ruby, instead it explains very simple programming concepts for very young kids.
Emacs loves diversity. As a dinner.
AngularJS is the best tool for building views that I have come across thus far in javascript.

When I write a view (most of my web apps consume JSON and display it to our end users) Angular leaves me with the cleanest markup I've been able to write to date.

It does seem to get slightly unwieldy if I want to start using additional libraries outside the scope of Angular (such as when I needed to add Google Charts), but for iterating it's the slickest thing since the invention of the ice cube.
A scare quote isn't a manufactured quote, but instead is taking something someone (or some thing like a corporation) said and making one's skepticism/doubt readily apparent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
I did sign up. My customer service experience was robotic at best and didn't help me. I canceled the account.
Also his son appears in Werner Herzog's "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga", which is both odd and awesome.
Yeah, but you probably don't look like a homeless person.
I always thought Intel's revenue is mostly from enterprise equipment (including Xeon processors)?
Replace line printf("\x1b[H") with you system specific screen clearing function if you don't have POSIX.
I think a lot of developers, having grown up hearing stories like this, also see it as something of a rite of passage. It's good for confidence and team cohesion, but I agree with the author that it's not sustainable and no manager should be dictating overtime. If the team wants to push through, that's on them.
tickless is a lie, the kernel still requires periodic ticks for house keeping, nohz_full is completely tickless on all except one physical cpu (default: cpu0) that does house keeping.
The underlying API's don't allow for it (at least that's what Microsoft is saying). Although I don't fully understand what you could have against Windows 8 so much that it would stop you from developing an app. If it's Metro, you won't ever have to enter it.
Is the market for low end servers still viable ? The alternative to a low end server is the cloud server and it is much better option financially.

I think we would see a trend where companies would sell hosted infrastructure solutions ( e.g. MS Exchange, sharepoint etc. , Databases , firewall, etc.) and throw in a cluster of low end servers for free.
"Not one American has been found who has been demonstrably harmed by any NSA program."

As an American, how would I know? It is against the law to read my mail; but if the government has been secretly reading my mail without my knowledge, then by your logic (and I use that word lightly here) I have not been harmed, since I didn't know about it?

Do you even know the meaning of the word "rights" ? My rights have been violated; I don't have to demonstrate harm.
That's what I suspected. So essentially, mimic that git command in bash without calling the git command (including the header stuff)?
Show HN: Yosemite Spyglass for Oculus Rift & iPad
Truecrypt.org under DDOS
I would recommend a reminder email as more of a curtsy. In terms of tracking/updating CC when they expire or have issues, checkout http://churnbuster.io/ as a way to help with Churn.
Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript (2013)
Fellow Italian here, started working in Germany 5 years ago right after my B.Sc. in CS, will be moving to Paris in March. I have not been working for a startup, but if you love programming there are plenty of cool things to do.

I know what it means to feel isolated, but as you noticed you are only isolated "locally", online you can find plenty of like-minded people. Keep applying in the US if you wish, but you should know we have a lot of opportunities here in Europe as well.

I have no concrete lead for you, my professional network in Germany is limited and the companies I know require some knowledge of German, but feel free to contact me on twitter, would love to have a chat (username is the same as here).
Probably get accused of being a shill seeing as this is a new account (I'm not and I don't work for Microsoft and never have), but I'm a Lumia user (820) in Europe (UK) and I've had precisely no complaints about it.

The hardware is better than the software, I'll give you that, but the bad reputation is unjustified.

Not only has it never crashed, not even once in the year I've had it, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get music onto than an any Apple product. I have three iPads in my house for the wife and kids and it's hell keeping them all in sync with iTunes and managing apps and backups. Especially with the whole library deletion and Apple account thing. WiFi sync is a broken pile of crap as well.

I just plug the winphone in and use it as an MTP device. It even works on CentOS 6.5 to my surprise. Just copy mp3 files onto it.

I don't use any apps worth mentioning apart from Nokia HERE drive. The built in mail, people and calendar are pretty good and it connects to my gmail/exchange accounts fine.

Moto G is the only thing that gets close in price vs performance stats.

I think people just buy phones like fashion items these days. It's good enough but they don't like the club.
Agreed. A simple confirmation popup is a quick fix which might prevent a lot of headaches.
It's really pissing me off that in CM11 (Android 4.4?), when I go to add a contact, the message is "your new contact will be synchronized with <google account>". As far as I can tell, the option to store numbers locally has been intentionally hidden (the only way I can think of to do it is create the information on a different phone, export it to a contacts file, and transfer the file...).
Hey, I'm using the Soothe theme, with local modifications:
https://github.com/terhechte/emacs.d/tree/master/elpa/soothe...

The original can be found here:
https://github.com/emacsfodder/emacs-soothe-theme

Another nice theme is Cyberpunk:
https://github.com/n3mo/cyberpunk-theme.el

As jbeja answered, I'm using powerline with the default theme for the status bar:
(require 'powerline)
(powerline-default-theme)
Yes, but how does this particular privacy leak benefit Google? Google wants to have all your information themselves. Why would they want to give that info to your boss?

This sounds like somebody being really clever and whipping up a fancy feature, but forgetting to finish it with proper meeting requests and a freaking confirmation box and whatnot.

The idea itself is good - check for email addresses in meeting information and tying those to a Google account as invites. The problem is that the user isn't asked.
Known issue, but the team seems to be asleep. Seems like we have to wait.
The "just following orders" excuse has been proven to be bullshit. You are right on in bringing up the SS and the Nuremberg Trials when people try to spit the 'just following orders/the law' excuse or any derivative thereof.

Not comparing the NSA to Nazis, but the excuse doesn't work, its been prosecuted many times.
Yes. Let us blame everyone except the man who chose to take his own life.
From IBM's latest financial results:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43008.wss

Revenues from the Systems and Technology segment totaled $4.3 billion for the quarter, down 26 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.
Systems and Technology pre-tax income was $0.2 billion, a decrease of $768 million.

Total systems revenues decreased 25 percent.
Revenues from System z mainframe server products decreased 37 percent compared with the year-ago period.
Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), decreased 26 percent versus the prior year.
Revenues from Power Systems decreased 31 percent compared with the 2012 period.
Revenues from System x decreased 16 percent.
Revenues from System Storage decreased 13 percent.
Revenues from Microelectronics OEM decreased 33 percent.
Of Course this isn't a bug- It's a feature. the only problem is that there isn't a confirmation screen when it detects that you have put a person's email address in the incorrect spot. All that is needed is for a popup to ask "Would you like to send this event to email@example.com?".
I'm still not 100% sure Emacs is LightTable tolerant though.
This Guy Wrote 1,712 Yelp Reviews Last Year Alone, Receives Praise From Yelp
"would you agree that wiretaps (with warrants) can be useful?"

Nobody is arguing against that. What people are complaining about is, among other things, the bulk collection and retention of records; the gathering of records upto 3 degrees of separation from a suspect; etc.
The recommended upgrade path seems to be:

* Apply all South migrations to all database servers,

* Delete South migrations,

* Create new initial (create table) migrations for the current schema.

This makes sense, as migration code is supposed to be temporary. Migrations should exist in the codebase until the last database has them applied. Once all databases are up-to-date, it's better to delete them and "rebase" migrations to the current schema.

Old, fully applied migrations will still stay documented in the version control history, but they shouldn't be part of the master tree, much like obsolete code should be deleted instead of left commented out.
But moving to Android means they're running a commodity OS, and they're competing against all the low-price phones from China. That would kill the company. They needed to offer a premium phone with an OS that is just compatible enough with desktops to work.

I've had a Lumia 928 for several months now (after 3 iPhones in a row), and my concern is that Microsoft isn't releasing OS updates fast enough. I get updates from Nokia for their HERE apps, but the core OS needs some fixes (single volume control, compilation albums being split up in the music app), and I'm not seeing them.
People who like me got tired of Android's fragmentation and constant "clunky" feeling (I got so sick of flashing roms just to get my battery to survive the day) and don't want to buy into the Apple ecosystem. I've had a Lumia 920 for over a year now and think its absolutely the best phone I've ever owned. Co-worker also go the same phone, and switched back to iOS so he could iMessage with his mom but otherwise loved the experience as well.

It's a solid piece of hardware with a reliable and easy to use OS, other than a few missing apps (I'm not big into them myself), it's an impressive entry into the market.
What don't you like about Windows 8?

As someone who developped for iOS, Android and Windows Phone/8, I prefer (by far) the MS ecosystem and tools. It's just nicer to use, and I can build an app in a fraction of the time (for the same quality) as it takes with other platforms.

With Xamarin, things will get even better (I'll get to use VS for 80% of my work).
> But unfortunately, to buy it unlocked would cost $600, and the only carrier that was subsidizing it was AT&T, which I have sworn off.

All phones cost that much. 'subsidized' phones cost much more.

Unless someone's poor enough to need a carrier plan to buy a smartphone - which, then again, they should avoid going into debt even more - then an unlocked phone is by far the cheapest option.

A pity Nokia (and other companies that sell smartphones upfront) have to educate people in the basics of personal finance before they can sell a unit (not picking on you specifically, the belief that one 'saves money' by buying a carrier-locked subsidised phone is pretty common).
There is nothing to go back on...
Don't spend the mental energy to try and figure out if you should be "sneaky" or not -- don't be -- be open and honest, users will remember it, appreciate it and if your product is valuable, your business will grow.

If being sneaky with reminder emails is _what_ makes your business successful, then you are standing in quicksand.
This is so fantastic. Makes me want to play Portal again!
and the majority disapprove of Congress, how is that working out for us?

Honestly disapproval means nothing as apparently none of the mentioned have done enough to sufficiently get people off their butts. Well the Republicans offended a lot of their conservative base to cause a splinter group, but as whole most Americans are completely satisfied as verbally only expressing disapproval.

As in, doing whatever requires no effort or the least amount of it.
> And always refund customers who cancel right after the first bill

This. I signed up for an Amazon Prime trial, and forgot to cancel it (even though I'd setup a calendar reminder I missed). I remembered a week later, and was a bit unhappy that I'd been charged. I logged in to cancel it so I wouldn't be billed again the next year, and Amazon said as I hadn't used the service since they billed me they would provide a full refund.
I walked almost the same path.

For the first couple of months I was customizing the hell out of Emacs. Then the things started falling apart and I've switched to the 20-line long .emacs and empty .emacs.d (well, almost empty if you don't count key-chord/ace-jump-mode combo which makes file navigation a mindreading experience)
And one of LINE's core business is being a (mobile) video game storefront.
Those are nothing special, they are just buying two one-way tickets on different airlines because they are cheaper in a particular scenario. Airlines don't care if you do that.
I have a Lumia 920 and I find the turn-by-turn navigation to be abysmal. It gives distances in yards and the vocabulary does not extend much past "keep right", "keep left", and "follow the course of the road". It's also flat our wrong more often than not where I live. Google tells you street names and exit numbers, which is vital in large metropolitan areas.

Also, map searching is no where near as good as Google Maps.
I think a big difference between MySpace and Facebook is that MySpace targeted indie bands and teenagers - people who aren't going to be thoroughly married to a platform.

Facebook started with college students that are a little less ephemeral, but has spread out to soccer-moms and grandparents. Those folks are far less fickle.

Even if Facebook loses the younger users, it will have a rock-solid userbase for decades. The company might be doomed, but this is going to be a very very long tail. Its downfall will look more like Sears than FourSquare.
Reading, and understanding, an algorithm is hard at the best of times. Adding a funny story makes it triply so. I'm currently trying to read a Haskell paper where the authors seem more interested in impressing us with their shakespeare allusions than actually explaining the thing and I'm starting to wish the journal had rejected it.

The dry style of journals evolved that way for a reason.
If you're a one man show, keep in mind that all those users sending you emails about unwanted charges create a big customer support overhead. That's time taken away from marketing or improving your product. Instead of wasting their time and your's, just send them a heads up email.
I'm aware it is not NSA proof.
I see it, however when I was on YouTube while uploading a video and trying to watch a video at the same time I had a little blue message pop up below my video letting me know I can find out more about why load times are slow. I clicked it and it brought me to the page rating my ISP.

It's funny an ISP that uses the same lines as my ISP got an HD-Verified status, and then mine is only SD. Hmmm, throttling much.
As someone who's had to develop windows apps every few years, from Win16 to Windows 8, wow, I don't even know where to begin. Windows has always been a mess, long, long, long before CLR/.Net. The phrase "just work" came from the macintosh world, to contrast the experience you'd get on a mac versus the mess you had in the windows world with even the most trivial hardware devices (plug & pray) or apps (dll hell). I don't know where he got the idea that DOS apps "just worked" on windows -- MS spent a lot of money and effort getting the big apps to work when running on/in windows, but that effort really only helped with the big apps. Lotus 1-2-3 worked, but many apps wouldn't without setting up DOS-box settings.

But, let's put all that away. Everyone's guilty of looking at the past through rose-colored lenses. OWL was actually quite nice. MS's response, MFC, was an awful bare-thin wrapper over the windows API -- and that pig needed a lot more lipstick. MS was right to dump it. The problem was, looking from in from the outside, MS had too many cooks in too many kitchens, trying to do everything as fast as possible. In response, documentation was always pretty bad (there was lots of it, but the quality's pretty low), the APIs were rarely clear or straightforward, and you ended up single-stepping your debugger to figure out what the APIs really did.

Frankly, I think the APIs were always awful enough to warrant fixing, but they were never organized enough to do the real work in fixing it. It's not something you can grunt through, it requires a cohesive set of patterns, abstractions, mechanisms, and conventions. That kind of agreement just doesn't seem possible over such a large and contentious organization.
>> Sometimes I think computer science history need to be at-least an elective subject for software engineering/computer science courses.

This is a really great idea, never thought about it before. Possibly even a decent book idea. Something that covers the hardware/software landscapes over the past 30 - 40 years, say.
Independent review board says NSA phone data program is illegal and should end
I meant it does not offer as many components as the jQuery based version.
I run a Saas app called ReportGarden(http://reportgarden.com). It is currently my primary focus.

Our stack includes Rails+Postgresql+Delayed jobs+Pusher
I dont think the guy who wrote it had any interest in Go and Rust, otherwise he would be applauding Microsoft's approach to ruining their own developer ecosystem.

In fact, my read of the article is "Microsoft, we were going to make money together, why are you throwing out the baby with the bathwater?"

If MS develops an altogether new thing, what's the chance that it wont get thrown out in 2 years, again?

I primarily work in the MS ecosystem and it is something I meet with trepidation with every product announcement.

(Also, if this was posted every couple of days, wouldn't it need to be posted a little longer ago than Jan 7?)
I am rather sure that having so many phones exclusive to ATT is not helping their cause. I would call that sandbagging the numbers to have 1 phone (928), 2 "Nokia Generations" of releases behind on the largest (BY FAR) smartphone provider in the USA (Verizon). Lumia 929 has been FCC approved since November, WHERE IS IT? The holy grail 1020 still exclusive to ATT, if the numbers are so disappointing put a CDMA radio in it and SELL IT!
> but they do stop

Well..

* The NSA imbroglio resembles McCarthyism in some ways.

* Segregation and civil rights are still significant issues in some parts of the country; the battle has simply moved away from "offical" fights into more indirect fighting using tactics like "school vouchers" and "redlining".

* Muslims and people of Arab descent are mistreated rather badly at times.

* Women's suffrage hasn't been in question for a while now, but there are certainly a lot of attacks against women in recent politics with significant attacks against abortion rights and women's healthcare in general.

* We don't call it slavery, but the prison–industrial complex has a LOT to answer for, and is a growing problem.