skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you improve this sales communication?
In response to an inquiry about prices, I got this today:

I'm not sure how a 5 minute conversation makes for a long drawn out sales process.

We simply to make sure that our customers expectations will be met, therefore we need to know a little about what they want to accomplish.

Not sure why that should be held against us...

You are obviously just shopping on price, so I doubt you will see the value in our service anyhow.

How would you improve this message, while still preserving the very important price secrecy that this simple service provider obviously values highly?
What changes to hate speech rules? These changes:

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...

I agree, they should have and should continue to be banned. It still caused controversy. Yes, their reasoning is that these subs have users that leave their cesspools and harass other people.
In all seriousness and concern for your well-being, please consider seeing your doctor or mental health professional. As someone with affected family members, your writing is coming across as extremely schizotypal and a serious episode is something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
> Greece had no real allies.

Not now, but they'll have plenty soon, after this German farce. Podemus will win in Spain, the PS on Portugal and let's see what will happen in Italy.
As far as I can tell, you can't start any tweet with "D." without getting an Internal Server Error. Not related at all to the "Tusk" part.
I think he was trying to point out the contradictory and incorrect sentence that got by whoever copyedits the blog.
We have done similar search engine for Turkish used car ad sites. It has been really fun to build such a thing since there are number of things to compensate and normalize data collected from various sources. I have learned a lot while doing it.

http://www.otomobul.com
ZuluCrypt is a simple,feature rich and powerful solution for disk encryption
Thanks for the heads up. I'll try that then.
App Lets You Get ANY Local Services with a Text
Responsate – the simple blogging service (blogposts, links, question and answer)
Build an API under 30 lines of code with Python and Flask – impythonist
San Francisco has been built by the grace of the grace of the 1906 quake. When the big quakes happen, they release all kinds of stress, and make a future local quake much more unlikely. It's called the stress shadow.

The stress shadow of the 1906 quake was (depending on who you ask) about 100 years. SF is coming out of the stress shadow, and is become "due" for a new big one.

WRT the rest of the valley, the main problem is that it's built on sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock slows the seismic waves, which since you need to conserve energy, results in larger shaking. In other words, a small quake further south could result in more damage in the valley.
> This promise, if made credibly, has the effect of preventing bank runs.

That, and the depositor's insurance, which is supposed to be for the first 100,000€ in the EU. The insurance is funded and legislated at a country level and the Greek insurance fund is simply way too small.

> They have made investments and loans that have not done well, in part because the economy as a whole has not done well.

Don't forget bad loans to connected people/companies.
i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
> I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?

Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.
Hello! I'm Rob, the CTO here at Willing. Thanks for your feedback. That's something we're definitely considering, and would be much more straightforward now that HealthKit is available.
I had one of the early beta units, and recently received what I guess in the production version. I never set it up and stopped using the beta a while back.

Overall I loved the idea, I like to keep my wallet slim and I have 2 credit cards, bank debit card, airline club membership card, paypal debit card (rarely used), and a rewards card with a magstripe. In addition to those I have AAA, drivers license, boat license,and medical/dental cards. So, being able to consolidate even 3 of the credit cards into 1 would be nice. I also have things like a Lowe's card, Home Depot card, etc. Those get used very rarely, so I usually have to look up the number at the store, it would be nice to be able to "carry" those without taking extra physical space.

The problems I've had with my Coin:
1) Too thick to fit into some readers at gas pumps and similar where you slide the card into a narrow slot. The coin is just a touch thicker than a normal card.

2) Randomly doesn't work at various locations, so I could never totally leave me credit card(s) home, Coin ended up being a +1 in my wallet, not a -3

3) Odd looks at some locations, refusing to accept it (though admittedly pretty rare).

4) Problems adding cards, this is mostly a 1-time annoyance, but now if you get a card replaced due to theft/fraud it's an extra step to deal with.

I agree, contactless or other payment options will likely eclipse Coin.
Agree. The few SPA sites I use annoy the heck out of me. garmin connect is one that I use, and when I view an activity and want to go back, I need to wait .5 or 1 second as the page loads. Sure, I have a nice empty list to look at as it loads, which just annoys me more. I don't know if this is a fault of SPAs, or just poor app design because there seems to be no caching. The delay is just log enough to annoy me.
As a matter of principle, there is a difference between:

- you need expertise in order to be able to safely do X: take these exams and you're certified

- the state sells a limited number of licenses in order to create artificial shortage, usually combined with guaranteed profits, like the 35% profit in the link. The certification is just a piece of paper and only loosely related to a set of exams.
How the Rich get Richer
> The company, based in Seattle, now sells more than a third of new print books, a level no single bookseller has ever reached before, and it closely controls the dominant e-book platform. Some publishers said Amazon was responsible for 85 percent of their nonlibrary digital sales.

THAT'S the real issue. Stop wasting time with the "Boohoo Amazon is disrupting us with ebooks when we wanted to keep selling paper books!" argument or even the "but we really wanted to sell the ebooks for $13 rather than only $10!" argument. The latter has already been lost in the Apple anti-trust case, and the former is lost as well - nobody really wants to live in the paper-book past anymore.

What they need to ensure is that readers can take their Amazon ebooks anywhere they want (DRM-free). For instance, they should be legally allowed to take their whole library of hundreds of ebooks and move it to Google Play Books or Apple Books or B&N Books and so on (whether this is technically possible already is besides the point).

Readers shouldn't feel trapped on a platform to the point where they think they can't leave Amazon because "all of their books are there".

Fight for this and the book readers will also be on your side and against Amazon. The last time most of them weren't because you tried to sell them the "more expensive books are good for you!" argument, and they didn't buy it (rightly so).
I paid $1 for my Galaxy S5 upgrade, with a two year contract extension. Essentially I got the phone for free because I planned on keeping my carrier for the next two years anyway. That cost was subsidized by my carrier, and probably indirectly by Samsung also. I've never paid sticker price for an Android phone, and I don't know anyone who has.

"One key to Apple’s profit dominance: higher prices. Apple’s iPhone last year sold for a global average of $624, compared with $185 for smartphones running Android, according to Strategy Analytics. "

You can't say the same when buying an iPhone. There's more complexity to this than sticker price. The numbers don't like, Apple pulls in 92% of the market's profits while selling less than 20% of the phones. Use logic and tell me what that means.
The script I use to disable/enable dnscrypt-proxy (multiple instances behind dnsmasq for HA) https://gist.github.com/steakknife/bf6967e2298b95da29b7

Sample output (tethering):

0 ~ git:master ❯❯❯ internet_access
Bluetooth DUN: Bluetooth-Modem dns 127.0.0.1
Ethernet: en0 macaddr xx:xx:xx:...:xx dns 127.0.0.1
FireWire: fw0 dns 127.0.0.1
Wi-Fi: en1 macaddr xx:xx:xx:...:xx dns 127.0.0.1
iPhone USB: en4 172.20.10.3/24 router 172.20.10.2 macaddr xx:xx:xx:...:xx dns 127.0.0.1
Bluetooth PAN: en3 dns 127.0.0.1
Thunderbolt Bridge: bridge0 dns 127.0.0.1
0 ~ git:master ❯❯❯

Sample output (wifi enable, unassociated, no tethering):

0 ~ git:master ❯❯❯ internet_access
1 ~ git:master ❯❯❯

This is driven by a non-privileged infinite looping event bash scripts which TCP connects to another pair of bash scripts running as root which can actually make the change because they're listening on two localhost tcp ports.

(I've tried these other event-based app/script utilities and they're fragile and buggy as heck.)

It seems like something Apple, for one, should take on... deprecate AppleScript and use something more common, accessible and make a common, standardized scripting platform far more comprehensively documented in something like Ruby. AppleScript is just too COBOL/Cucumber "English" and poorly documented to be practical for advanced users. (I've been gradually moving all new scripts over to Ruby because Bash scripts are fragile and not as inherently reusable as standardizing on a dynamic languages (like RedHat w/ Python).)
Why is an ex-employee (even if ex-CEO) being treated by the NYT as an authoritative source?
One of my favorite podcasts (really any NPR podcast) did part of an episode on this: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/382451600/entangleme...

The woman in the podcast is debilitated by it. It also includes her family, specifically her daughters, views on it (she doesn't believe it is real) but also hints she might be developing it as well.
While I agree (my boss and I are actually having this conversation presently), I would argue that if you're in any sort of cloud environment (which this article has set as a point of narrative), then just having an Ops s3 bucket or similar to send the files works. Although that of course still means SSH to get there "most likely". But could be accomplished without.

FTR, I'm in favor of restricting SSH/RDP, perhaps even disabling from the security groups (AWS), on a default basis, and enabling as needed for ops troubleshooting. If we have logging and monitoring in place cleanly enough, then we should be able to troubleshoot the majority of issues off instance. However that is almost NEVER the case (even if you have the tools, you still have too many edge cases). Case in point, I've been troubleshooting a Windows CPU usage issue recently. Our monitoring wasn't catching all of the disparate processes, so I couldn't see what was eating it up. Plus I would pull the node from the ELB prior to investigating, which then caused it to no longer peg CPU. Had I not been able to login while "live", I may not have ever seen what it was.

Obviously in order to perform such a function, one needs incredible reliability in your monitoring/logging tools. Sadly this is a more difficult function than it should be....
http://www.bortzmeyer.org/bgp-malaisie.html
Even if that was a possible outcome, it seems like the advantage of having it at a time of your choosing would be significant.
Show HN: ProtoTalk – Web and Mobile Prototyping News
Another ‘Too Big to Fail’ System in G.M.O.s
I haven't seen anything official about it, but I imagine it's been planned for some time. Sun/Oracle have explicitly warned against its use for a while. It seems less necessary when GC improvements in the last two releases have meant it's much easier to get great speed and latency with idiomatic and documented implementations. Further, what performance improvements are offered by Unsafe are obtained by breaking a variety of Java's guarantees, and I imagine that it is tiresome as an OpenJDK dev to hear about bugs "caused by the JVM" in libraries that depend on an unsupported undocumented API.

Just speculation, of course.
One big reason is because dopamine does not cross the blood brain barrier... you can't just give it to someone and have it end up in the brain.
He's saying publicly that Ellen was framed, so yeah. It's probably not a joke.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yishan-wong-says-alexis-ohani...
As with most things in life things are not that black and white. You are referring to the BFED extremists whilst the article is maybe referring too much to the cool frontend extremist.

I work for a large medical company in its platform department and for any third party package or framework we definitely consider if it is really worth adding it, or if we can do this ourselves. Sure, things like sass we take, as we do with grunt. But we have serious issues managing our resources (fte) and backlog items. Many teams, even within our company, all want a different new cool technique. They want angular so we made directives on our UI toolkit. Another suddenly used dojo so we made wrappers for that as well, next we had ember, backbone, and soon angular 2.0 no doubt. We test the angular directives with jasmine, the JQuery with QUnit, and have saltarelle in the party as well.

Next come the just out of beta frameworks as meteor, sure you can work with meteor and our REST api services but minor support is only officially added in 1.2 (not even out yet). O, less is much better than sass, give me less, no wait typescript! You are missing out if you don't use react! O, and nodejs and Mongodb not postgres! We hear it many times, as many as we have customers actually.

My point, there is a middle ground here. Teams have a limited amount of resources and you have to balance the supported techniques with actual functionality.

As always, choose the techniques that work for you, not what is trending (new) or well backed (old) just because. I guess big companies should be more boring than small entrepreneurs. Rather not have the aviation software of the plane I make my business trips woth run on beta frameworks.
> Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006, and the team moved to San Francisco.

> On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
>I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine

The search engine that holds the vast majority of the worlds traffic? The search engine that everyone is going to call on minutes after the earthquake to get news, but isn't going to be there so all the other search engines slow to a crawl. If Google search just disappeared for a week there would be a considerable number of businesses go out of business. You see it now in one off cases where a site is delisted and its traffic drops 99%.

That said, Google has datacenters around the nation and the world so that scenario is unlikely.
Tour of Programming Languages
What always gets me with this story is Couchsurfing, which had proved people were willing to host strangers years before Airbnb launched. I'm not sure why so many investors missed this data point.
Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services.

I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.

Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.
User tracking? Seems easy enough to me: https://github.com/kendagriff/backbone.analytics/blob/master...

We do mostly SPA's at our agency by now, and they're incredibly stable and easy to maintain. Each to his own, I guess.
Subreddits can't break rules, only users can. And the admins normally deal with this by banning the users.

But occasionally they ban entire subreddits for what some users do. Curious, isn't it?
I disable right click on my Website.
It's something that most seismologists have thought of before. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how much stress has already been accumulated. We also don't know nearly enough about earthquake triggering to be able to do it in a controlled fashion once, let alone repeatedly.

You'd have to do this thousands of times (log scaling, remember!), in a new location each time, to produce enough small earthquakes to relieve the stress accumulated on a locked subduction zone fault: Large earthquakes produce relatively similar magnitudes of stress drop to smaller ones; this stress drop is just spread over a much larger area. So you'd have to basically tile the fault with drill holes and then do whatever to produce earthquakes. And hope it doesn't cascade. Thousands of times.
Rob and Eliam here from Willing! We are excited to be in the current YC batch. We'd love to hear your feedback on the site, both from a consumer perspective and a technical perspective. Be brutal, we can take it!
Simulating fermionic particles with superconducting quantum hardware
Cool site, I just checked out on Android phone, works (as in fits on screen) in landscape mode; otherwise not. As far as SPAs go the initial page load is relatively fast.

Mobile aside, what is really gained in the SPA approach here when you have what is essentially a brochure site? That is, there isn't a lot of content, and it's all static AFAICT, so why not just send the minimal amount of html over the wire and be done with it? Html fragments are already covered for FAQ et al so don't even need to make a round trip to the server.

Anyway, you'd get above checkmarks for free and, if you generate server-side content using a type safe language (Scala, OCaml, Haskell, C#, etc.), for the most part you'd avoid the code salad of client-side typing.

Obviously I have a server-side bias, am curious to see real world use cases where SPAs are a must vs. a trend.
I would say overall the situation looks ... not great, in the medium term.

"Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we can now say that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years," Goldfinger said. "And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent."

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426
Comcast's 2Gbit service
I really like this idea. Would be keen to see what your orchestration code looks like to handle that.
Perhaps it was for a reason that both parties want to remain confidential?

If she was terminated for cause, Reddit has no obligation to reveal what that cause was, and neither does she. Leave them be, it's not really any of our business anyways.
Last sentence of NY Times piece by Taleb and Spitznagel: "The G.M.O. experiment, carried out in real time and with our entire food and ecological system as its laboratory, is perhaps the greatest case of human hubris ever. It creates yet another systemic, “too big too fail” enterprise — but one for which no bailouts will be possible when it fails." If this is not scary enough for reading the article, I don't know what is.
:D . I stand corrected, have an upvote.
Imaginary.org – Open Mathematics
There is a great KISS principle. When you can effectively develop a website using only vanilla CSS & HTML and a bit of JS, why use some overhyped fancy tools like grunt, gulp, bower, less, sass, yeoman, etc.? I can open vim or any other code editor on any PC and start coding web pages right away, without spending hours on configuring complex toolchains, writing build scripts and so on. If web pages could be done that simple oldschool way 5 years ago, couldn't they be done the same way today?

Put it this way: there are still great C99 programmers who make fast programs, are they useless only because they don't use C++14 with all bells and whistles?
> New ideas often seem crazy at first (e.g. renting out an airbed in your apartment to a stranger)

N.B. I'm currently travelling and using Airbnb almost exclusively for accommodation, if that's somehow relevant.

Airbnb seems to have become the cliche example of a 'crazy idea' that turns into a unicorn and, honestly, I struggle to see why people think the idea, per se, was crazy or groundbreaking.

It's not a crazy idea. In fact it's a very natural, obvious idea, that has existed forever. People have rented, and sub-let, rooms for decades. The problem has always been high barrier to entry (on both sides) and therefore low liquidity in the market, such that short term 'holiday' type lets are too much of a hassle to be tenable, and only longer term lets have been feasible.

The idea has always been there, what's not really been there until Airbnb, and what is their remarkable achievement, is the building of a singular, reputable, trustworthy, easily accessible marketplace for this, to get the liquidity to where it needs to be to be workable.

It's the execution on this, not the idea itself, that's the remarkable thing. If it was such a crazy idea, it would have taken much, much longer (+10 years perhaps) to have truly caught on. The fact that they've had such rapid growth points to the fact that a lot of hosts and travellers were ready for it and just waiting for the opportunity to take part in the short term lets marketplace.
Thoughtbot had one and shut it down, was called copycopter.
The word "lazy" is an emotional appeal. The practical issue seems to have been that Greece had, at least until recently, a very expensive retirement system, projected to dominate GDP within a few decades, and vaulting them to the top of the Eurozone prior to reforms. Not only that, but even after reforms, large numbers of people were grandfathered in to a previous scheme that allowed people working in "arduous" careers --- a list that included such dangerous careers as hairdressing --- to draw a generous (relative to the EU) minimum pension after just 10 years of experience.

It's not that people are lazy for accepting generous retirement benefits, or for retiring early. They're being entirely rational by doing that. The problem isn't the people, it's the policy.

(Most of this is from The Economist).
How do you guys make money?

For example: Robinhood offers free stock trading but has other fees like any other brokerage firm. On your website this wasn't clear.

I see a bunch of fee related things in your Terms but not on your website. A show disclosure button would be helpful.
> What changes to hate speech rules? These changes

You linked to a page titled: "Removing harassing subreddits" that talks about harassment and doesn't contain the term "hate speech." Can you clarify why you think this has anything to do with hate speech rather than harassment?
From a technical perspective, it's useful to keep in mind that the closest humanity has come to drilling to the appropriate depths offshore is... Deepwater Horizon.
A kitten is going upstairs and while returning back
Until the last few sentences I had no idea what you are talking about and how this coud possibly work. Then I saw "CDN" and realized you mean WEBSITE not APPLICATION. Should probably clarify that
Please try not to come across as rude.