nhebb

From the article:

"While I am happy to share data with those that request it, I will summarize by saying that most restaurant customers that use OpenTable abhor it (for a few different reasons)."

His company, TableHero, is a competitor, so "most" may be an exaggeration. He's probably identified a few weaknesses in Open Table to capitalize on.

Interoffice memos were often used to document important issues that had been previously discussed. I'd be really surprised if this issue hadn't already been brought to management's attention verbally. In the early 90's (pre email), I recall having to put things in interoffice memos so that there was a paper trail of meeting discussions.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I actually liked Windows 8.1 better than 10. It's hard for me to explain why, but Windows 10 gives me the feeling that I don't own the system - that Microsoft does and they're just letting me use it.

There's already a built in solution for this on HN:

- Upvote posts you like.

- Do not upvote posts you don't like.

- Use 'Flag' judiciously for content that you feel is not appropriate to HN.

- Let the HN ranking algorithm do its work.

They should tier it. 140 characters for a free account. 280 characters for a cheap but paid ($) account. 1000 chars for a premium ($$$) account.

Hands down, Air Jordan is the best logo ever created. Designers might not think so, but people bought $2.6 million worth of products last year just because of it. It's hard to beat that.

> while the US Republican party has become more radicalized

Not picking on you specially, but I've noticed that the word reactionary has been dropped from the political lexicon. I feel kind of silly rooting for a word to be used more, but most of the time that I see "radical" applied to Republicans, I think "reactionary" would be a better fit..

> talks of a culture that has never made drinking a forbidden fruit

I had the same conversation (as a US college student) 24 years ago with my Spanish roommate. Alone, you and I are anecdotes. Together, we're data. ;-)

The only reason ad blockers work is because they serve external resources. When media sites really wise up, they will figure out a way to serve ads from their own domains. Building a system for ad bidding, rotation, tracking, advertiser monitoring, and external auditing is too big of a task for many sites, so I think there's a startup opportunity to develop and sell a platform that can easily be installed on a server.

Here's a performance test of Levenshtein vs Sift4 using UTF-8 strings for anyone interested:

http://jsperf.com/levenshtein-perf

One of the reasons that I don't buy more e-books is because my Kindle's battery charge is often depleted. Somewhere along the line, Amazon changed airplane mode such that ads are still displayed all the time.

I haven't been an avid reader for the last year or two, and when I do get the urge, I pick up my Kindle only to find the battery is dead. While it's charging, I find something else to do. By the time I get the urge to read again, the battery is depleted again.

When you're an avid reader who remembers to charge his device regularly, the Kindle is great. When you're an intermittent reader, it just another electronic brick.

> just plain break my mobile experience

I installed Firefox on my Android recently since it allows extensions and I could install UBlock Origin. I've found it helps quite a bit.

Right-click, inspect, then delete a node or two.

Just removing the font-weight: 300 helps tremendously. Personally, I'm becoming less of a fan of external fonts. I've noticed lately that they're often the slowest thing to load on sites that use them (especially Google fonts).

I haven't followed all the details of this saga, but my understanding is that this release is the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the emails. The emails were vetted by the State Department, and only those that do not have security clearance restrictions are being released to the public.

There must be a bug in the tabulation, because the data I'm seeing is:

    $5,740,989,156
    last 24 hrs ($239207881.50 / hr)

    $67,463
    last month ($93.70 / hr)

    $2,506
    last week ($14.91 / hr)

Either that, or someone bought an awful lot of reddit gold in the last 24 hours.

Has sentiment analysis successfully conquered sarcasm yet? Twitter is ripe with it.

Aside: I met Rick Goff when I was in high school. My dad lived in Yamhill and was friends with him. One day we drove out to his place, turning off the gravel road toward a barn. Stepping inside the barn was a surreal experience. There, out in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking barn, was a freshly painted 1950's Rolls Royce. It was beautiful.

I don't know if he's a good example of the economic class divide, though. I understand Kristof's larger point and that he's writing from his own life experiences, but I think Goff's situation is more demonstrative of the rural-urban economic divide than a class divide.

He had a skill that people were willing to pay him for, but he chose to restore cars out in the country, in his barn. I can't speak for Goff's life choices, but during my summers in Yamhill and having relatives that lived in rural areas, I met a lot of people who would rather eke out a meagre existence in the countryside than move to where the jobs are. Part of economic mobility is just plain mobility.

> but the RAM usage has gone up when compared to 8.1. On a device with just 2 GB of RAM, this matters, but not nearly as much as what’s coming next…

In that entire article, increased RAM usage was the only thing that piqued my interest. The rest of the issues were styling inconsistencies and changes to how some settings are accessed, both of which are problems Windows has had since Vista.

At the same time, though, it's impressive that a modern operating system can operate on just 2GB of RAM. The last time I had that little RAM, I was running Windows 98.

> the double-negative

Just speculating, but this might be a fail safe since bool's default to false in .NET.

Surprisingly, there was even a winforms update recently.

They could publish descriptive statistics of the salaries without publishing the salaries themselves.

They're owned by Disney, so it's not like the bills wouldn't be paid, but if (when) the bubble burst, it would have a ripple effect through sports and television.

Hypothetically, ESPN itself doesn't need to lose many viewers for this to happen. The ad revenues mostly just cover production costs. The bulk of their revenues come from the cable companies via cable subscriptions. Virtually all cable bundles include ESPN, so if cable subscriptions fell among non-ESPN watchers, it would still impact ESPN's bottom line.

> The financial stakes are especially high for ESPN because it earns the most carriage fees of any TV channel, about $6.61 a month per subscriber

That's not why the financial stakes are high. They're high because ESPN has fixed price contracts into the future for the rights to broadcast sports events. If their subscriber base falls, they're still on the hook for those contracts.

The article "Is ESPN A Giant Bubble About To Burst?" [1] does a much better job of explaining the whole picture. It also gives a reasonable argument as to why subsidizing channels we don't watch benefits TV viewers as a whole. (I'm thinking about becoming a cord cutter myself, but the argument is still reasonable.)

[1] http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-covera...

> It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on.

I just looked up the operating budget for my alma mater (Oregon State University), and if I'm reading it correctly, administrative costs are about 1/3 of the total. Interestingly, the direct instruction and research portion increased 5% since last year whereas the administration portion increased 15%. And looking back 10 years, the the direct instruction and research costs increased 85%, whereas admin costs increased 110%. So the admin : education costs ratio appears to be slowly increasing over time.

I posted this because of Sam's piece on Energy came on the heals of me listening to the organizer of the Survivor Library [1] on NPR this weekend. If the world experienced another solar flare on level with the Carrington Event [2], we'd be screwed.

In the US, bills introduced to spend the ~$3B to shield the power grid have died in committee several times. I'm not a survivalist / bunker builder, but it does seem like a relatively cheap insurance policy to guard against catastrophe.

[1] http://www.survivorlibrary.com/?page_id=1014

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

According to the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition [1], it was both - especially if you replace "people" with "men". I don't remember all the facts and details leading up to Prohibition, but the documentary did make me more sympathetic to the temperance movement.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/watch-video/

Can confirm. It's happened to us with Amazon one click. My wife stepped away from the computer and within a few minutes my then 3 year-old had ordered a game. The situation will be comical when kids can order directly via Google searches.

> I wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack

I hope for their sake, The Odin Project (http://www.theodinproject.com) heeds this advice. They recently announced that they started a Slack community of 20,000 members, so they'll probably be hitting the message thresholds quickly.

For anyone interested in anecdotes about boorish leaders, "What Would Machiavelli Do?" is a fun read:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Machiavelli-Justify-Meannes...