skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Recommend customer-facing forum software / SaaS for startup.
Hey guys. I'd like to host a forum for our users to be able to chat with each other, propose new features, help each other if they're having issues, sticky a few posts here and there as FAQs for them to reference. We're getting a lot of customer support requests these days and they're too many to handle for a team of two, so we're better off addressing them passively through FAQs and self-serve a la Google.

I'm thinking I'd either host this myself or I'd pay a SaaS service to do this for me. The latter is preferable, since setting up configuration management to deploy and backup the forum is a pain in the ass I'd rather delegate to someone else for a few bucks a month.

Some candidates I'm thinking of:

Google Groups - nice, but no way to sticky anything
UserVoice - not quite a forum unfortunately, mostly a direct communication channel with the company.
A subreddit - I don't know if I'm totally comfortable relying on an external service (that I'm not paying for and thus might be down for random periods of time).
Discourse?
Disqus?

Anything you guys would recommend that worked very well for you?
Congrats on launching!

Reminded of when of a youtube video where you talked about this idea and how you solved your money problems through the rails tutorial.
This is actually brilliant... and funny. I stayed on the website and browsed it for the last 15 minutes.
> fn = function(){ var key = "shhhhh" }
> fn.toString()
'function (){ var key = "shhhhh" }'

Nothing is sacred in JS.
Atom Editor, no need invite. Mac only.
Well dodged
There were a lot of really complicated things added in 2.10, so now I wouldn't be so certain. I used 2.9, and personally I found it very easy to read and write, most of the time.

> Any languages gets easy to read & write once you master it

Perl :(
First Netflix attempts to subvert web-standards with WebDRM. And now they attempt to lock down the regular HTML as well by disabling legit inspection tools. I can't wait to see what's up next!

It should be clear by now that if you care about the open web, Netflix is not a company you can trust, much less fund with your money.

Cancel Netflix if you already haven't.
That thing is running on Yahoo! Is it an old Viaweb site?
Vote for UltraCoin (UTC)
What the situation in Ukraine means for me in Lithuania
My Eyes! The goggles do nothing!
It's the general story being "sold" in a subset of US news.

In large part of the rest of the world, the threat of "American conditions" or similar is a frequently used political insult.
Because I find it difficult too. :) Been using CSS for 7 years and still have some trouble with it, compared to typical programming which tends to be quite easy.
Now we know where Pinterest got the UI idea...
5 Tweaks To Your App Monetization Strategy
But think about how good of an overclock it will get while you're dousing it with enough liquid nitrogen to make that possible.
If you can launch without building X, launch without building X.
Among other things faster collections, faster compiler, less old cruft. More Java 8 interop too.
Citation needed. I've seen evidence to the contrary. Generally anything with cache-control (or equivalent) headers suggesting that it should be cached, will be.
Use Discourse, I'm using it for my own startup and it has basically eliminated email support.

I used UserVoice previously and it didn't work for me. The problem with UserVoice is that it is basically beautiful repository of feature requests - that is everything what is wrong with your software. This is not what you want your users to be exposed to.
No, but it's not easy (in fact it's quite hard to do well) because of how insecure the browser is.

You can take advantage of the fact that you can store private information in closures. To prevent malicious code from overwriting a native function to which you pass sensitive information (like the CSRF token in this case) you need to Object.freeze the prototype of things like XMLHttpRequest or take your own references of the native functions.

Naturally all of this assumes the user doesn't do something like set a breakpoint and then inject a script with access to scope variables. But if social engineering gets you that far, you could probably just have the user run any arbitrary code on their machine.
>>> . To exercise control of said money, especially in times of turmoil, you need an underwriter, usually in the form of police and/or army, which usually require the government to be functional.

You seem to operate under impression there's only one government. That is not so - in fact, there are many different governments and many different ways to store money, which allows to hedge the risks.

>>> It's a game of semantics.

It's not. There's a point when failing government resorts to actions which go beyond regular taxation - such as hyperinflation, confiscations, defaults, etc. In such cases governmental insurance is no good as there's much more chance it will hurt you than benefit you. For the private company, the minimum you get is zero, but for the government it can get way worse than that.
But if not building X can fail you then build X.
That sounds like semantics.

Couldn't you say the same for any service where you _actually_ distribute it as well? "I'm not distributing it, I'm simple charging for the service of easy installation".

(I'm also not AL, though...)
This just in: spy organization spies on important national political figures.

Did you guys never hear of intelligence agencies before Snowden leaked his docs? This is normal and expected. It's the reason intelligence agencies and spies exist. They're supposed to spy on the most important people in the world, and make sure that the important people don't plan anything the agency's employers may consider ... untoward.
http://slatur.is/slaturtid/
It's better. It uses geocities!
but, you get to sit in your chair, get fat eating fried chips, and consume content! Good consumer droid!
Octopress [1] is a nice static site generator that builds on top of Jekyll and has nice deployment instructions.

1. http://octopress.org/docs/
> Will even outlawing BitCoin depress the price at this point?

Yes. You might remember that the last big crash was because of China, a major and growing part of the bitcoin market, banned it.

> Why is adoption failing to slow down

Adoption is slowing down. The growth this year isn't remotely comparable to that of last year.

> It is a big enough threat at this point to the establishment that we're going to see one of two things happen.

The main threat that bitcoin poses, is that it allows criminals to make large international payments easily. Beyond that, it really doesn't pose much of a threat, as you can tell from the many governments that have explicitly decided not to ban it, and even praised its potential.

But they will probably regulate it to some extent, and the bitcoin community should embrace that. This recent string of fiascos shows how many untrustworthy folk are offering financial services in bitcoin. Some standards, some mark of reliability, is necessary. There's no way each individual user can check which exchange actually knows what they're doing. Just look how a bunch of ignorant amateurs managed to create the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world.
I doubt there would be games like that (same as now, but where spending time is the only option). The whole mechanic of spending a long time waiting is there to encourage paying to not wait.

But yes, it would not be abusive if there is no way to pay. If the mechanic exists solely for gameplay reasons, rather than for manipulating the player, it's not taking advantage of anyone.
For a user-based startups, it is all about traction. And it is really hard to become cashflow positive before a series A.
beefsack's comment and yours are surprising. I thought it was fairly intuitive notion, and generally accepted that language provides the basic concept and structure for thoughts. Basically the Saphir-Whorf theory [1]. There surely must be a base layer that doesn't rely on language, but anything most of the time we are handling higher level problems.

This is a theory, but most bi/tri-langual people I talked to experienced some kind of shift in their way of modeling their thought, sometimes relying on a concept only existing in a specific language (that's what makes the reliance on the language obvious).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I suggest to scan your computer for viruses, spyware, rootkits ... Today I checked my wallets and they are intact. I also run small mining pool and guess what ... no coins are missing.
Wow, that's almost a work of art.
Sounds like ie default header font size is absolute whilst other browsers go with relative. Each approach has benefits, but support for highly nested headers is pretty low on the list :-)
One of the primary goals of a domain specific language is allow people to pick it up fairly quickly. If CSS and SQL fail right there, then we have a problem. I bet most of the difficulties you mention are historical accidents, which could be remedied if only our industry pulled its act together.
2.11 is definitely more conservative in terms of new features.

I've been coding mostly in Scala for a couple of years now and am still learning new things. The more I learn the more I realise how powerful the features are.
The problem is that people forget where Obama comes from: Obama is not a progressive. Obama is not centre-of-the-Democratic-party. Obama is pretty much smack bang in the middle of the US political landscape today. Take him back to before the Republican Party went totally off the rails, and he might've just as easily been a left wing Republican.

The "Hope & Change" looks a lot more successful when you judge it based on an intent of returning US politics to somewhere near the centre, than if you take the unrealistic proposition that it would bring the US to some point well left of Clinton which a lot of people seemed to have thought and hoped it might.
It actually does require a chackbox - customer checks it when ordering ;)
Booting computer and manually installing OS/updates requires quite a bunch of [man] hours (given that they ship a bit more than few PCs a day when distributing a batch) so it is safe to assume they do not do that, but instead clone disks. it is most likely that master is kept up to date by a script.
I think you're missing the point. This article is not titled "How a busy place helped me solve my problem." No, the title fundamentally justifying being not talkative (which I'm not sure really needs justifying: everybody can feel out of place at a party of strangers who work in a completely different industry).

What gets me is this piece comes across as very defensive. Why deride the man missing his elevator when he's on his phone (maybe he's not in the moment because he too is working on a problem) ? Why deride a hoodie at an office party? Why deride Dan for having a different social pattern than you ("Talks too much") especially when it's in line with his career?
This page is possibly the best argument for XHTML I've ever seen.
> the idea of checks & balances is completely bogus.

Those checks and balances are keeping Gitmo open.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/26/obama-takes-...
The simplicity of coding is a beautiful thing indeed. A human being alone with their canvas, painting intricate portraits of abstract complexity.
wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.
You can do a JS hack with JPEG for RGB and PNG for alpha, but it's not ideal.
Creating software for sysops
I agree, I just count all of that as consumers choosing Android over iOS.

Developers are simply not the main factor.
Haha I think hacker news just sent me to the worst page in the Internet. Over-earnest, self-congratulatory guff about "blogging" and "innovation".

I think my friend Kris Marciniak (Rallynotes.com) first got me interested in blogging. Valeria Maltoni inspired me with the potential in conversation beyond the automotive forums where I’d experienced real world connectivity as a result of sharing ideas online. Now here I am, discussing blogging as it pertains to innovation on a blog about as geographically far away from me in phoenix as you can get, as someone who sees publishing as his life’s work. And it all started with a blog.

Kinda makes me want to write more. Thanks, Tim.
Not on mobile, mind.
Why Do Decent People Accept Bitcoins?
Nope -- the recipient doesn't even have to have heard of the service. Only the sender needs to opt-in.
> There is some kind of strange unstated assumption on HN that regulation magically makes banking safe all by itself, and until that regulation is in place Bitcoin-based systems cannot be safe or effectively risk managed.

Magically? No, that's not how regulation works. It takes a lot of work and diligence. But if done right, it will make it safer. If a regulator with sufficient authority had audited MtGox, it would have been closed down a long time ago, and people wouldn't have lost remotely as much money. Without it, bitcoin users are at the mercy of a bunch of utter amateurs.
> But there are always those who don't bother learning the language.

Those people are not polyglots.
Fielding literally has a blog post on the subject: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2009/it-is-okay-to-use-post
So you're extrapolating from the fact that people like Coke, Xboxes, CoD and pizza (which is Italian btw) that they must also adore America? That's way too much of a stretch.
somebody needs to write the script, maintain and debug it, handle customer questions related to the option, ... The fact that we can automate stuff doesn't make it free. Also, as any good consultant will tell you, the price you can charge your customer is not dependent on how much work something is for you but rather how much value the customer gains. Installing FF on a computer takes me like 15 minutes if I include everything - from asking the password, installing, migrating any bookmarks, cleaning the download etc. That amounts to an hourly rate of about 60 GBP, a reasonable price if you ask me.
I wrote a similar article 3 years ago, it's impressive how many arguments we have in common. http://blog.vjeux.com/2011/analysis/start-a-technical-blog-i...
What next? A React integration layer to match Om, perhaps?
fire a bunch of high rankers?
put every single one of them regardless of rank on public trial. Lengthy prison terms for everyone.
Agreed!

I find this sort of thing especially helpful when trying new medications/treatments. It's nice to have a chart that I can look over to help give me a better idea about what's going on with my body. "Oh, ever since I started this new medication, I get headaches when I don't drink at least 4L of water."

There's no way that I'd be able to keep track of my day-to-day symptoms without writing them down; the days often blur together.

Oh, and doctors love it, too.
Singapore police investigate Autumn Radtke's "unnatural death"
Honestly, This.

If you're really interested in /writing/, then just go with one of the hosted solutions such as Wordpress.com, blogger, whatever. It's easy enough to use, requires virtually no set up time to get running, and lets you forget about any techy details.

I know that it's often more fun and more interesting as a hacker-type to think about the optimum way to blog, rather than actually doing it... This is my problem too.

But what you want to establish is the habit of writing. Once you've got that, you can easily port your posts over to another system (and clean up any on the way).

I've recently set up a few Wordpress sites for some people. And much as I despise the insanity underneath, if you're just wanting to write, then it's a very nice platform.
>It doesn't matter what you believe. History has shown us that technology wins every time. Fighting against it is a losing battle.

Not really. That's totally fatalist and unworthy of a civilized society. It's a regression to pre-democratic and superstitious eras.

Of course that's an value judgement (an ethical statement). So, the question remains, is what you said true in a pragmatic sense, ie. a historical inevitability?

I say no. We have examples of civilizations that had advanced technology or techniques (that could have been used for lots of stuff), but opted to not deploy it or futher pursue it. The main reason a lot of technology was adopted was because other nations used it and had a war/economic advantage over yours.

We also have examples of technology that was superior but people opted not to adopt, from Betamax to Lisp machines. Smalltalk over Java. (Of course you can argue that it didn't won for economic/business reasons. Well, isn't that a statement in favor of technology not being enough to win in itself?)

(Plus, if we constrain the "technology wins every time" to only consider technology that actually won, then we're just making a tautological statement).
The puzzle is very vague. What actions can the company take? Can I add accelerometers to the bins and GPS to the trucks?
Sure, but projects like Rust have been very successful in terms of getting external contributors interested. A goal regarding getting more people involved and made aware of Mozilla Research efforts wouldn't seem out of place.
> why have you not been holding the vast majority of your BTC in your own local and triply (or more) backed up wallet

My guess is: convenience. In practice, convenience often beats security, and it's very convenient to trust your bitcoins to an exchange that offers a nice interface to trade them with others or exchange them for money.

Also: the vast, vast majority of people know nothing whatsoever about security. A currency that requires detailed security knowledge is only going to be used by security experts and fools.

(Disclaimer: I have bitcoins and I'm not a security expert.)
now, now, peter, let's not get cranky. :+)

you've seen other competitors before,
and will probably see a whole lot more,
and all of them won't be as incompetent
as those you have faced down in the past.

ok, for those of you who might not know,
peter is the force behind leanpub.com...

which is highly similar to this site, but
has been around for a few years already.

so, no, this is not a "new" model, and
there _will_ be similar tool-chains that
will come soon, and i can guarantee it,
because i'll be releasing one that i've
been working on for over a _decade_ now.

but we do not need internal squabbling,
because killing corporate publishers is
gonna be hard, no matter how many of us
are committed and dedicated to doing it.

yes, they are dinosaurs, and yes, they
_will_ go extinct, eventually, even if
we do absolutely nothing. but they are
also dinosaurs with _very_ deep pockets,
and that's a significant factor in the
greedy money-ruled world we have today.

so welcome to the revolution, softcover.
strap on a helmet, and let's get to work.

-bowerbird
Exactly. I have some depression (or maybe just standard human psychology that I have somehow failed to cope with) that will flare up horribly if I'm not eating well, exercising properly, getting enough sun, spending enough time not working, getting enough social time, and probably a few other things I have no idea about yet.

Left to my own devices I'll end up eating out for all 1-2 meals a day, only move from the bed to my car to my desk, forget what sunlight looks like, pull 12 hour days and 4 hour nights of sleep (or stumble into a 48 hour cycle), IM only my closest friend every few months, get suicidal and quit another job because nothing matters and the world is cruel.

For me at least, quantified self is not about trying to treat myself like a machine, it's about trying to remember not to.
Switzerland has strong redistributive system. From a layman's perspective, it would seem this can be supported by the very high profits in the financial and high-end finished goods markets.

In an economy without such high GDP and average household income, I wonder if it would still be such an effective or model system.
Why you shouldn’t buy Social Media Followers & Fans
As a Scala contractor I fear the day I turn up to a job and get presented with a frontend layer that looks like that. The notion of a DSL in LanguageX -> JavaScript is an interesting research project, but if the outcome is not only way harder to read than LanguageX but also JavaScript it is perhaps a dead-end street in terms of actual anything good coming out of it.

JavaScript really isn't hard, trying to avoid writing it by writing a more complex language which gives you more JavaScript than you would have had anyway really can't ever be a win surely?
There is no logical connection between the two following statements:

- x buys american products
- x considers US the best political system in the world
Different types of enemies. Sorry, not sure why they didn't work. It's the same type. I'll look into it.
I absolutely agree. Not to sound like I'm tooting my own horn...but at my job I jump around between backend work in java and some UI work with javascript/backbone with at least a good amount of efficiency in each. It's more of a change of environment/tools/goals (java - Use eclipse, log performance and errors with log4j, run unit tests. javascript - use a text editor, debug or maybe profile in chrome, test in different browsers etc)

However, I consider myself seriously unqualified to do anything relating to advanced styling/css.
C and C++ are specifically discouraged as programming languages in "Cryptography Engineering" (Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, Tadayoshi Kohno, 2010).
Ling is a marketing genius - that site is incredibly successful
TED-Government surveillance — this is just the beginning
Ling's Cars is intentionally bad. It's part of her brand. At one stage she had a site map which was laid out like a concentration camp, with the various visitors to the site shown in different sections with a stick-figure whose head was the relevant browser logo.
Digitally authentic, minimalist, grayscale... it's hitting all the fad buttons...
If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them.

Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.
I'd say it's not acceptable, it's not even inevitable, it's just obvious. You can't get that high in politics without owing lots of things to lots of different people and groups, and I doubt they'd let people who are not loyal to them that high. Maybe the first presidents had some real power, but the current system is designed to filter out quickly people who are too much of a trouble for the status quo.

I find this another reason to stay as far away from politics as possible if one wants to really change anything in this world.
I think the fact that so many people don't understand the point you were making probably means you didn't make the point clearly enough. If you has said "is regarded by Americans as ..." you would have been clear. As it is your comment gives another impression.
> 2 years of Ruby, 1 year of Python and 2 years of Java

She is anybody but a polyglot programmer.

So this thing the author writing about is common misconception. Yeah, if know some mainstream(ish) languages and can do some common tasks you will unlikely have problems doing some common tasks in another ruby-java-python. Now go write me something rock solid in Erlang. Or (oh boy you better forget your java) Haskell.
They do leave behind a body of code that's unsuitable to learn a language from, even for polyglots.