skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, it's these predictable replies that are even older.

>Facebook has enriched the lives of millions of people

Right. So, not saying Facebook has no utility. Yes, we know it serves a purpose for a lot of people. Clearly.

>it has allowed me to stay in touch with family and friends who I otherwise would probably speak to more rarely.

Yes, we also know that's the number one use case, which serves as Facebook's crowning contribution to humanity. I won't argue what it means to you or anyone else personally. I do think it replaces more meaningful interaction with a relatively superficial pub/sub model. I also believe that it isolates people and I am aware of studies which have indicated the same. That you and others find some value in it doesn't make it a net positive for society, or even for you for that matter. But, that's really not my argument anyway.

>they live halfway across the country, so it's not that easy.

Well, you could call them and invest some one-on-one time if they were meaningful relationships but, in any case, I am referring more to the overall tendancy of people to marginalize an increasing number of relationships (even local) to a pub/sub tool like Facebook. But, really, I am objecting more to this never-ending devaluing of relationships by Facebook whose motive is to capture your social activity (relationships) by any means necessary, irrespective of the actual value-add (or subtract) to those relationships.

Of course we all know that their purpose is to make money. I wasn't dropping that as a great revelation. My point is that it should and does matter that we give so much of our relationships over to a company whose interests may run orthogonal to the preservation of value in those relationships.

>The fact that your comment on an online forum suggests otherwise is particularly rich.

It's really not. You just missed the point.
I think he/she was saying that as an example of a way that "most people" rationalize things. It follows this sentence:

"When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. [...]"
RawGit serves raw files directly from GitHub with proper Content-Type header
Show HN: the best funny keyboard picture
OpenXcom's not really a clone though, it's a repolishing of the original X-COM. http://www.xenonauts.com/ is another clone/spiritual successor.
LinkedIn has been almost useless to me ever since I joined ... all I get out of it is daily spam in my inbox.
Zaarly... Taskrabbit... can anyone get this notion of "bid for the right TO service" done properly? or are we all just reduced to having to FIND our contractor, on our own.....
I'm not sure how both you and rodgerd could mis-comprehend me so badly.

What I am describing is exactly how things work in the U.S. now, except that if you cannot find a job and your benefits run out, the government will give you a job. The free market for all other jobs still exists. You don't have to take a job if you do not want to. The only difference between the current America and my proposal, is that in the current America if you cannot find a job you go without food and shelter, while in my proposal you always have the option of getting a job. I do not know if you are trolling or arguing in bad faith, but I don't know how you guys are spinning this as some prison camp or soviet style thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7908527
Live programming with Overtone
I continue to wonder why No one has ever used it as part of the CPython / CRuby compiler?
So I won't knock on you enjoying it, because thats subjective. How do you use it though, you'll need to eventually sell all your facebook friends to use it as well since you like it so much. You'll have to convince them why forcing to send you a picture to see what you send them is better for them.

For this reason, I see it literally as an uphill battle for it to gain traction. Hoping that you are right, and that Facebook as learned something from their mistakes and will take their edge and use it - instead of building a completely separate app with a disjointed use case and calling it social innovation. Give me a break!
I'm not at all against drones. They are clearly working for us and others; for me to try to claim otherwise would be trivially wrong. There will always be a tension between cheap-and-fast vs expensive-and-precise.

I've spent my career doing this stuff. I'm telling you, it is not trivial. It is being worked on, but you can't just strap a missile onto a drone and call it good.

A piece of context I left out. I don't want to kill people. Yes, despite working on war machines. I ain't tossing out cheap, disposable, optimized for operational cost out there, because that means you are, eventually, killing children and other innocents. No thanks. We aren't talking 'cool robotics here'. We are talking corpses, burned bodies, melted faces, families broken, futures destroyed, blood, pain, horror. There are no words for it. I worked on this stuff because I consider the alternative to be worse, but it's ambiguous. I'll spare you the "A Few Good Men" speech, as I'm sure you get what I mean.

"Move fast and break things" is a great way to build a Facebook. Not so much for war machines, IMO. Feel free to chalk that up to trying to preserve a career, but it's not (you, ansible, didn't say that, someone else did). It's the realization that everyday, when you go to work, you are designing something to cause unbelievable misery, often for political rather than ethical reasons. It's hard to live with. I'm not denying that there is politics and all of that other stuff happening, it certainly does, but it is not the only thing going on.

Sorry, I realize this is a downer for HN, where we are supposed to be chipper, enthusiastic, and supportive, but we are talking about killing people here. It's not a situation for being 'disruptive' or whatever SV meme you might think of (again, you didn't use that term, I'm responding more to the thread at large).

Given all of that, is there room for innovation? Sure. And it is being worked on. I've worked on next-gen autonomous robots and UAVs for war. You may or may not read about it some day. But it ain't easy. Another poster brought up the IUD analogy. Sure, if you blanket the sky with fire you can take down a modern US jet. And kill everything else as 'collateral damage'. I don't want to fight war that way, and I don't think we ever should, except perhaps in extremis. Because at that point we have lost whatever it means to be human.

Sorry, I think about this stuff. A lot.

edit: a big reason for the expensive airframes and other weaponry is because we decided we don't want to carpet bomb and otherwise use non-precision weapons. Spend a million and hit the window where the target is sitting, vs 50K to drop a bunch of bombs that destroy a city block. Precision is often efficacious, to be sure, but we are doing this for moral reasons as well.
I've always viewed security as a layered approach. The more layers you add, the better protected you are. I subscribe to the thought that nothing is 100% secure, so I would recommend to put as many layers as possible. In my opinion, the issue you should be concerned about is the effectiveness of whatever solutions (layers) you implement. I think it is being accepted by the industry that detection and prevention methodologies based on predefined data (signatures, rules, etc) are only as strong as said predefined data. In layman's terms, it will probably protect you from most unsophisticated attackers, but that's it. Today's most sophisticated attacks are one-off (0day) and/or custom, so they probably won't be defined. In this regard, some of the newer generation security solutions are developing / using smarter detection and protection methodologies (real time adaptive models vice defined positive and / or negative models). I don't mean to paint a negative picture, but I am trying to illustrate the importance of multiple layers. ModSecurity seems to be the preferred open source solution with a more active community than the rest. But Intel and Oracle also have some interesting solutions in this space.
Oddly enough I had no problems with Descent / Descent II, but Doom and Doom II wrecked me. I think it may have been because Doom's camera bobbed as you moved to simulate taking steps but Descent's camera was smooth when you moved forward.
Now their tactics look more like desperation rather than well thought out methods to maintain growth. Its mainly the spam combined with blatent selling out to advertisers & recruiters that I have an issue with.
The only way I could see it working is if you could easily send an integrated experience to a user who does not have the app. This would need to be from the web, have access to the camera, or ultimately download and install the app in the background.

If the early adopters of Slingshot do not need to care about who uses slingshot, and its rather seamless for the receiver, I could see the install base spreading quickly. That will make things easier. Then again, its a trick.

I think what remains to be seen is what sort of interation this enables, which prudently I suppose I'd say its too early to tell.

Conservatively I'd say the numbers are against it.
why don't they mention golf balls? Golf balls used to be smooth, but caddies found that used dented balls flew straighter and golfers had more control.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Putnam#Diversity_and_...
If you know any hiring managers, they will probably be happy to connect you with the recruiters they work with that they think are the most effective. It's possible that very effective from an employer standpoint isn't the same as very effective for an employee, but I bet it is - things like "actually responding to emails with emails instead of calling your cell phone" are probably appreciated on either side of the bargaining table.
I feel sorry for you then. First, you can't understand what I meant, and, second, the basic life lesson is that money can't make you happy and feel accomplished (unless you're too primitive), but the lack of it, agreed, can definitely make you unhappy, so, it's not about hoarding as much dollar signs as possible, but it's about having enough not get unhappy and I think most of us here don't have the issue that most people around the globe have nowadays - I'm sure we're in the top 5% globally in terms of income. The whole vicious circle of greed never has a happy ending. In most cases, the inability to be happy is a mental problem, which separates the miserable mass from the blissful few. Don't get me wrong, I have this condition as well, but I've acknowledged my issues and I'm working to address them. All the wisdom of the ages can be compressed in just two words: "memento mori" or in the more accessible form for the masses: "carpe diem". Anyway, outside of the basic well-being, real happiness is helping our civilization advance a step ahead. An Instagram can make you more money than SpaceX, for example, but launching which will make you happier and more accomplished? Which one will put your name in the history books and leave no doubt that your life was meaningful.
I was totally feeding off his tone, and I also love how he believes his question deserves an answer.
It doesn't seem like it's a permanent situation - increase in temporary labor usually happens during high-traffic pre-holiday season (also known as the magical spirit of Christmas) and the reason Amazon had to bring in so many temporary workers is that at the time of the article the Kiva Robotics technology was not up to snuff.
As the original founder and CEO, I can provide a bit of clarity. As with many startups, ours was a thrilling but ultimately tumultuous journey. At the end of the day, we ended up with a nice profitable lifestyle business (filepicker.io) and a big ambitious change-the-world product that we were not able to get traction with (Ink).

The team decided that the right thing to do was to sell to someone that would:
1. Value and support existing customers
2. Return as much money as possible to investors, and
3. Allow the team to move on to new opportunities.
(In priority order)

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the new team, and actually think they will do a better job with filepicker.io, because they are committed to its success as a company and a business rather than some distant vision.

For those who were fans of what we were trying to do at Ink (helping connect the apps and services that people use), I'm still committed to the dream and seeing if we can do it in a slightly different way at IFTTT.

At some point I may do a more full post-mortem, for now if you have any questions hit me up at <my username>@gmail.com
What do you think about using something like jwt?
Join WalMart or any other store as a sales man for 6 months
Most of the arguments fall into one of two categories:

1. Performance is linear(ish) with cost

2. The US operates at a global maximum in price/performance

I disagree with both. Performance is roughly linear with cost given a certain operational parameter envelope. Things change when you change the envelope though. Dramatically. And the idea that the US has chosen the ultimate operational parameter window which cannot be improved on under any circumstances isn't believable.

I do appreciate everyone arguing with me long enough that I could distill it so succinctly. You may still disagree with me and that's OK. But at least my crazy heretical thoughts are more easily digested now.
Hermione Way Gets Married
Ever think for one moment that a mobile RTS has a different use case and different market than someone who plays Starcraft 2? Don't you think there are more of "those people", than those that will be annoyed with week build times.

If these "RTS" (keep in mind, its just marketing) games are only designed to be played a few minutes a day, over weeks and months, it could be easily continually engaging. Much like a late night show or your weekly Game of Thrones.

For that reason, you probably aren't the target market. Having a fleet of IAP testers (who are humans and get sick, quit their job, change positions) that are fully trained in all the existing games as well as being experts in game mechanics and can quickly understand new IAPs and new game types as they emerge is a very myopic and naive view of the world.

The "scam" argument boiled down to its core is really a moral judgement. With that I'd say good luck attempting to scale that and not piss someone important off.
Yes if the F-35 does everything it was designed to do and performs as well as initially intended, it'll be a decent plane. Unfortunately that doesn't look like it will be the case.

Some significant problems the project is experiencing:

-F-35 can't fly in poor weather because it doesn't have adequate protection against lightning strikes
-Stealth coating doesn't sufficiently withstand temperature around the exhausts
-Exhaust gas is too hot for amphibious ship decks for the Marine Corps variant
-Rear visibility is poor, and 3D helmet designed to address that shortcoming isn't ready yet
-Onboard software is severely flawed and behind schedule.

This program is already wildly over budget and is only going to continue exceeding its budget as they address the multitude of issues it has right now.

The whole point of this aircraft was that it was supposed to be cheaper and more versatile than the F-22. The unit cost is already going to be well over $100 million and that's with the assumption that our allies will buy a large number of them. Chances are several allies are going to drop out, and I suspect we are going to dramatically cut back the number we acquire as well, thereby driving up the unit cost.

On top of that, it is becoming increasing unlikely it will perform as billed. Not to mention that from day 1 the F-35 concept was ill-suited for the close air support role.

The US military would be far better off cutting its losses now and starting from scratch to develop a light strike fighter for the Air Force, a close air support attack aircraft to replace the A-10, maybe an interceptor for the Navy, and scrapping the Marine Corps variant altogether. That ridiculous STOVL requirement is a large part of why this project has gone so awry.
What an inspiring story. The dutch seem to be particularly good at quantifying externalities and negotiating change, which may be due to their 'Polder model' of governance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
Fasting/roaming half-naked in streets are cheap tools/tricks used by Bania Gandhi to humiliate (not defeat) British regime during India's struggle for Independence.
I recommend taking a look at this post, along with the rest of the site. Lots of great insights: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/198499/Stop-Per-...

I believe it was Patrick who recommended that on Twitter the other week.
You'd be surprised how long poor CEOs can last. I worked for one large company where the market cap went to a 1/10th of what the company has spent on acquisitions alone during the CEO's reign and a continuous sequence of questionable business decisions that included laying off pretty much anyone who could have been instrumental in helping the company recover. I think there are many other examples.

A CEO can always blame the economy, blame the market, blame the weather, blame their predecessors or otherwise spin things in a favorable way. They can sell a story of tough times needed to make a turnaround. Sometimes there will be some secret scratching behind the back (I'm on your board, you're on my board). There's the cognitive dissonance on the board side of things, we've selected this guy therefore he must be good. etc.

As others have said, the incentives are set in a way that a CEO looks primarly after his own interests. It's safe to assume that CEOs that make a lot of money are even better at looking after their own interests. They are also very good at convincing others that they're not looking after their own interests.
Aren't these the job of a human editor? (or is this the reason why my e-newspapers have so many copy editing errors?)
Just a question for those of you here who've been around the block a few times; have you ever run across a company that acted like a cult? That espoused a messianic vision? That fostered an aura of infallibility around its leaders?

Just kidding. Apple, Google, Oracle and other tech companies are nothing like a cult. Not at all. In no way. It was rude of me to even suggest that might be a shadow of a possibility.
Interesting article. The farmer that requires visitors to shampoo, probably has very few visitors.
I'd wager that no sport makes more use of the Magnus effect than table tennis. The ball is extremely light, and top players routinely spin it at 6000 to as much as 9000 rpm. And not just on occasional shots, either -- almost every ball is spinning heavily in some direction. I'd have to check to be sure, but I think the Magnus acceleration can be greater than that due to gravity. It certainly can be of the same order.
I'm not ordinarily a fan of per-seat pricing but I think it makes sense in this environment, as software adoption will be top-down, the sales process is high-touch, they can build it into per-employee overhead, etc. I'd caution you that, as you likely know, employee turnover in this industry is insane and as a result of that and standard staffing practices the seats in use are going to fluctuate constantly. This isn't totally dissimilar to CS, so you might look at what ZenDesk and the ilk do with regards to floating seats, etc.

If you're really getting X0% to Y00% in per-collector productivity then I say start by asking for for $100 per seat per month, if you're wedded to per-seat pricing. You can price anchor it around "less than a single collector-day" and that leaves plenty on the table for your clients. I'd then start walking the price up (if it is worth $100 a collector it is probably worth $150/$200/$250) until you start losing lots of sales on the pricing question.

If you've got very heterogenous clients number of people on the phones might not capture value as well. You might consider doing N tiers (maybe or maybe not publicly disclosed). I'd be thinking something along the lines of $500 for the mom&pop shops, $2.5k for "real businesses" doing debt collection, and $10k++ custom pricing for large/enterprise accounts. You could have multiple segmentation levers between plans, such as e.g. size of the average receivable, total volume of receivables, type of collection, what data sources you pull in to do the calculations ("Pay more get more!"), etc.

The great thing about high-touch sales is that if you hate how your pricing strategy interacts with any one client you just change it for the next one.

If you'd like to discuss this in more detail non-publicly, email me. I have a weird personal interest in this field and am happy to trade informal consulting on SaaS pricing for war stories.
I was actually being quite intentionally sarcastic.

And I'm not 19 and haven't been for quite some time.

I basically treat HN the way Jenn Schiffer treats Medium, as a venue for satirical performance art.
Money has beenb poured into education, but not spent on actually teching people.

check out the budgets for the universities, and tell me where the money has gone.
I can't imagine anyone not liking your short pitch at a relevant meetup. The ability to chat with you afterwards, on a level playing field is a huge boon to making a good connection. It does take time though.
Have you ever seen a headline you enjoyed?
Hah, far from it. Being wealthy would be great but having seen several acquaintances sacrifice health, relationships, and happiness in pursuit of that goal, I've come to the conclusion that it's simply not worth it. I side squarely with the Mexican fisherman, you might say.
I've worked on a number of inherited projects of varying quality. The biggest trick is to figure out what is working and what is broken, what's minor vs major. In that regard, you should try and get someone who uses or used to use the application to walk you through it. Then like taproot focus on the important parts or the small-hanging fruit.

Also if the project is small enough, it's often very informative to manually trace out the main code flows.

Also if you're having trouble understanding the programmer's style it's often useful to understand their background. Often the style or technique they use is because they have a background in a different language/library that uses it.
EDITED: Personally I would avoid changing the style, because it's quite easy to make a typo or mistake that's hard to catch because you don't understand the application.
Thanks for writing, Morgan. It's thorough and I appreciate all the citations.

You point out that LinkedIn was able to prevent spam in the beginning through trusted referrals. I definitely receive unsolicited messages and see some clearly fake group members. Did you find any more recent examples where the company cracked down on spam even if it sacrificed growth?
being unemployed, with no access to resources you can use to build things, is a very different environment than being unemployed with full access to things you can build.
Cofounder of thumbtack here - left in 2010, which basically directly competes with taskrabbit now.

I can understand how you would be skeptical that there's much going on behind the scenes, but you have to understand that this is mostly on purpose. It SHOULD look simple from the outside.

But underneath, we're vetting, categorizing, and matching. How do you fill a request for house painting with a database of perhaps 100 house painters that are qualified? You don't want too many bids, but you want enough to give the customer a decent choice. How many leads to you send out to get, say, three bids?

It's all algorithms, and we've been working heads down on it for years and are getting pretty good at it. Not easy, though.