skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm, Reid Hoffman is a very interesting example. LinkedIn is technically not easy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Voldemort#SNA_LinkedIn), and he and it have been quite successful. (From my viewpoint it is by far the most useful social network.)

Skimming his resume and recommendations (on LinkedIn :-), it's clear he's very good with people and social stuff (surprise!) ... and I would suspect that transferred to dealing with the technical people who built LinkedIn. His history prior to it would have also given him a chance to learn about them, learn to respect them, etc.
I posted it here because there has been a lot Chatroulette entries in recent weeks (most of them either about the business/startup side, or from the "let's hack chatroulette" angle). People on HN seem to keep voting for these stories, so there's definitely some interest among this crowd.

Personally, I think this kind of improv mixed with real-time video technology fits HN just fine.
I wonder if this experience is suggestive of a not-quite-CrazyEgg but still useful technique: add a default click-handler to the whole page, that (in the absence of any real outlink) records the location of the click, and sends visitors to a plausible default 'second page' (or 'third page' if enacted on the second page, etc.). You get the illusion of responsiveness for any click, and capture the regions-of-most-confusion in a log somewhere.
To me those numbers just come down to:

- Apple has good (the best) marketing -> many units sold
- Motorola/Verizon starts huge ad campaign -> many units sold
- Google had _no_ marketing -> few units sold

Google did _nothing_ except putting a website up with one page, no tv ads or alike, the nexus one only appeared in a few selected blogs and tech sites 99% of consumers don't even read.

To me it's proof how people are controlled more by marketing and advertising then everything else and in effect controlled by media overall which is kind of scary.

All in all, google will only look how android spreads around the world and not on a single device.

besides: 60000 android units are shipped per day, nowadays, thats what is important for google.
If you think content is inappropriate, make sure to flag it.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

In particular, this Applies to Eval.
Damn, I really like the fish analogy as well (as I should, since I'm poor at it and find it deathly boring ... which is interesting in a family where everyone else isn't (well, there's a conservation of boredom principle in play, I'm the only one in my family who likes rifle paper target shooting, which to many is as interesting as watching paint dry)).

Damn, as in I wish I'd though of it way back when. Then again, I'm pretty sure almost all my superiors were city slickers who wouldn't have really gotten it....
From the end of the article:

"Don’t be discouraged by the questions on your non-existent military background – their banking services are available to all. Select no on all the military questions, hit submit, and you will be banking with the best bank in the US (for now)."

And that's corroborated by the USAA website. However, I'm not sure if non-military members can deposit checks by scanner/iPhone/Android. The USAA site says you must be eligible for USAA property insurance, which is military-only, to qualify for their remote check depositing services (called Deposit@Home and Deposit@Mobile).
From the article:

"Don’t be discouraged by the questions on your non-existent military background – their banking services are available to all. Select no on all the military questions, hit submit, and you will be banking with the best bank in the US (for now)."
Ask HN: Downvoting etiquette
What is the etiquette with regards to downvoting? Although I haven't accumulated sufficient karma to downvote, I always thought that you should upvote posts you agree with, respond to reasonably argued posts you disagree with, and only downvote content that actually doesn't contribute to the discussion.

Is there some other standard people use?

(Yes, I'm asking because I received my first downvote today, in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207721 - where my post, while contrarian, did seem like it was part of the discussion).
Cassandra 0.5.0 released
Facebook Chat History Manager
Google is advertising it on Hulu.

The only problem I see is Google advertises with a "we do all this stuff" approach, where Apple uses the "here are some things you want to do.." which makes people want it far more.
Don't you need to compare the pricing difference between the different phones to get a more accurate count?

Iphones at $600, $400 or $200?
Droids at $200 or $500 ?
Nexus ones at $200 or $500 ?

Eyeballs are great in theory; however, if the units sold aren't as profitable as your competition, then I'm not sure it is a good idea to get far outside your core areas.

In addition, given the strategy and ideas for Android Google is competing more with Microsoft then Apple in the mobile market.
This is correct, at least as of a couple months ago. The home deposit feature requires the military-only insurance line.

I opened an account back around when the iPhone app first came out only to discover creating my account. My short time with USAA I can say they had very good customer service but the only thing that makes them better than Schwab, Ally, etc. is the home deposit feature.

Now my credit union BECU has home deposit as well. ~6-7% interest on the first $1000 and 0.5-0.75% for balance over $1000. BECU is only open to WA-state and Boeing employees though. If you can open a BECU account I'd highly recommend them. If you can't and don't need the home deposit feature Ally's website is pretty top-notch and they have very competitive rates and features.
In my harsh experience in trying to recruit programmers for companies or units run by a non-technical types, the pay is a trivial detail. Most of the really good people just don't want that scene, most especially if he's their direct report.

There also tends to be a really big issue with finding the first techie for the company, in most cases in my experience it was done through networking or the good type of nepotism (e.g. a brilliant younger brother who was just graduating from EECS at MIT and who turned down a good offer (IE when it was the very best browser, something he'd worked on in summer internships) to work for the startup).
CrunchBang Linux 10 “Statler” Alpha 1 released
When I first saw the Ben Folds video, I thought it confirmed my belief that Merton is Ben Folds, but after thinking about the title "An Ode to Merton", I'm confused. Are Merton and Ben Folds different people, or the same?
OK, the community has spoken "entrepreneur" is apparently cool
Well, according to the docs, the following code works:

repeat (4) {

forward(100)

right()

}

which implies that a lot of the usual Scala scaffolding can be omitted (kind of like immediate mode in Processing, which lets you eliminate most Java boilerplate for simple drawing tasks).

Haven't actually played with it myself, though, so I can't comment further...

Looks very interesting, in any case. I was excited when a Scala version of the Processing environment was released, but that project seems to have been abandoned (or rather, it was only a proof of concept anyways), so it's nice to see someone run full steam ahead with the idea.
Google advertises the Nexus One fairly heavily online.
In the current climate, I care more about solvency than services.
It's only now that it's available on the other carries. They did not spend money advertising the phone, all the advertising was on their property in a time of year when they had available advertising space, if they wanted to aggressively push it they would have run an ad on the Superbowl rather than the "Parisian love" commercial and they would have sold much more, but then it would cannibalized the sales of the Motorola Droid and Verizon wouldn't have liked that.
The N1 is the phone Google gives away in conferences and gifts to developers, it's the phone they demo new android features on control the fragmentation, it's now available unlocked and on most carries in the US which is a first for any such device which is good because the carries subsidised model is shit and should be done with.
To an extent, because it's extremely light. For the simpler kind of webapps, that is.
It's interesting how two identical comments are at the top and the bottom at the same time.
Give yourself a couple weeks to practice selling a product that you're not attached to and that's in an unrelated market.
Cool! Do you know if this ads much/anything to the apk runtime size? The documentation seems a little bit scarce at the moment.

I need to get around to doing up Hecl for Android 'nicely'.
Lately, I've been using a grid css framework to create the layout and focus zones of the template. Fast and easy. Then I tweak the colors and backgrounds in photoshop. I believe 960.gs even comes with PSDs.
Ok, i am not in the US, so i can only comment on what i can see "from here" ;)
But to me it looks like hulu.com is a webservice average joe user doesn't use anyway.
What counts is tv ads, posters, magazine ads and the likes.
What i have seen is, that Verizon/Motorola did a lot of advertising (super bowl ad, etc.). Now, google does hulu ads. thats a whole different level.
No, people shouldn't be downvoting comments just because they disagree with you. However, if you say something that goes against the grain, you're going to get downvoted every now and then anyway. It helps to develop a thick skin, or better yet, try to ignore comment scores altogether.
Couldn't agree more :) I cringed through many pages of "The World Is Flat" in the same manner. The book was quite insightful and was a worthy read, but his treatise of technologies was unbearable at parts.
Is it really necessary to add a library dependency like Mootools into a JS ORM?
This is really evil... But the title is right - if you were debugging with printf in the first place, then this is better. It doesn't mean it's good in any way. The better way to make printf-debugging obsolete is:

- catch exceptions where they might occur and log as much information as possible

- use tests before publishing the code

- use something like log4X so you can actually log what's happening at the level you need

- do not ever think "Assuming that /usr/share/dict/words is sufficient" - you were wrong at "Assuming"
People downvote duplicate posts all the time to express displeasure (and hopefully to get the author to delete the duplicate).

It's not more significant than that.
Concurrency in Erlang & Scala: The Actor Model
I'm still not sure Google was all that concerned with "flipping the distribution channel" per se. It seems just as likely they just wanted to sell the phone and didn't want to have to go through a carrier to do it, just to get retail experience. Did Google every say that was what they were after, or did the breathless tech-press just feed that meme?
I'm always wary of third-party libraries that have their own license: http://impel.simulacre.org/crm/license

It's probably not an issue, but if I were to use it, I'd have to spend time parsing this license to make sure that I could use it.

To third-party library authors: please, pretty please choose a well-known open-source license for your project. If you are trying to turn it into a commercial venture, you can still do this with a well-known license (see MongoDB's license for an example: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing).
Understand that the sales conversation is just another engineering project. You are developing a speech-to-speech algorythm that converts any "no" into a "yes". Input parameters are 'features' of your product that have to be synthesized into 'benefits' by a sub-system, etc
You're just saying that because you don't like the man.

The real competition IS between YOU and YOUR IMAGINATION, nothing could be truer.

There's an ongoing struggle between your lazier and baser instincts and your imagination.

"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve"
Napoleon Hill
IT includes a proguard.jar file which I assume is used to remove unnecessary classes from your final application. I managed to get Scala working with Android a while ago by following online guides (a lot more hassle than this looks to be!) and I used proguard for this purpose.
OK, this surprises me. Rock Hudson was shocking. So was George Takei. Right, so who else from my 1960s childhood will announce? Just end the damned suspense. Statute of limitations and all that. And it's a new age too.
Another reason I am happy at USAA:

In 2008 "when most financial services companies posted record losses and the S&P 500 Index total return dropped by 37%, USAA earned $423 million in net income and generated positive investment income."

https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=newsro...

In 2009, they've done even better:

https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_blogs/Blogs?action=blogpost...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

Always
Be
Closing

"The hardest thing in life is sell"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/

* * *
The biggest step in my opinion is the psychological one. After that, everything comes in much easier than before.
I too am an introvert who's physically exhausted by talking to strangers (but not friends). Here's what I did when my programming and system integration work was behind ~ $3.75 million of $5M total for FY92 of the company I was working for:

Frequently the senior salesman, our "closer" (and he was good), would take me to a customer to convince them we had what it took, understood their problem and would solve it, integrate with their systems, etc. etc. etc. (For verisimilitude I'd be wearing my normal business casual attire of a dress shirt, black jeans and visually quiet running shoes.)

I'd spend up to a few hours before a whiteboard with their people and honestly sell our proposed solution, and it worked very well. I wasn't good for anything the next day, but that was more than an acceptable cost.

Anyway, my point here is to echo russell, you may be able to do this with a division of labor approach. Get some salesmen who are good at sales and good enough with the domain to do the work you find the most hard, and reserve your sales efforts for where you can make the most difference.

Good luck!
For a contrary (but perhaps former) view of the site founder, see

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."

A few months ago, the site founder, pg, asked about whether implementing more flagging options for marking comments would help make more clear what the community thinks of various comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589

There was some interesting discussion in that thread. On my part, I will just try to follow the local cultural rules and do what I can to contribute interesting content to the site, and to discourage postings that don't contribute to the site. I am just one participant among thousands here, and I don't get to set any of the rules.

I will ask an informational question here. You wrote, "I always thought that you should upvote posts you agree with," but that is not parallel to your idea "only downvote content that actually doesn't contribute to the discussion." In other words, is it possible that some kinds of content deserve upvotes even if you don't agree with it? And, on the other hand, is it possible that we all should downvote certain comments whether or not we agree with them? But let me emphasize the positive, as I have attempted to do before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084

and ask everyone reading this thread, "What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?" What comments are good comments, and contribute to the discussion even if you don't agree with them? I like comments that add new verifiable information to the discussion, even if they force me to change my mind.
USAA has consistently received the highest possible credit ratings, even over the last few years while other banks have been failing. They also haven't taken any bailout money.
Don't become a salesman. Become an evangelist for your product. Selling comes in all flavors, but if you're comfortable talking about your product and helping potential customers understand how you can help them, then focus on the pre-sales process and let your partner close the deals. You don't have to be a bare knuckled closer to be a salesman. Many CTOs in startups are actually glorified sales engineers--I know I was. After the engineering grew they became self sufficient and I spent most of my time with customers, helping them understand how my product could help them solve their problems. I never once negotiated a deal, we had "sales guys" for that--but I was most certainly selling.
My experience tells me that (1) people certainly do downvote simply for disagreement and (2) it's simply not much worth worrying about.

The Guidelines seems to me to get it just right (see link in the site's footer):

>> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This goes up here and now I'm so annoyed at myself for not getting better directions to the Friendly Toast for the Scala talk on Android SDK.
Thanks everybody for the insights, I really appreciate it. I have this idea for an app I'm gonna build it and see what happens :P. In the mean time I'll change my resume a bit so that it emphasizes the stuff you guys pointed out.
I did a hello-world in Scala for Android (without this toolkit) shrinking it with proguard and the apk increased by 800kbyte.

Installing on a real device or the emulator is noticeable slower.
ZeuS botnet code keeps getting better… for criminals
New capabilities are strengthening the ZeuS botnet, which criminals use to steal financial credentials and execute unauthorized transactions in online banking, automated clearing house (ACH) networks and payroll systems.
I don't know about the sales, but I love my Nexus One. I never had an iphone 3Gs but the Nexus One blows away my old iPhone 3G.
The chatroulette stuff that's posted here should be posted not because it's "something related to chatroulette", but because it's "something related to hacking/startups".

On the other hand, maybe the high score of this submission indicates that I have a minority opinion.
Especially if you have ever visited the Nexus One landing page. Ever since, all I see are N1 ads.
I feel it's worth noting that JavaScript developers refer to "this" as the execution context.
Ever considered that you're just a bad manager?

When you outsource to another country you have to change your tactics and communication style. The fact that you failed at outsourcing is more indicative of your refusal to smarten up than anything else.
I would LOVE it if they could stop showing Nexus One ads to people (like me) that already have them. It must be possible to read my Google account cookie and see that I bought an N1.
> rolls its own object system

=== "Provides convenience functions for working with prototype chains." That has nothing to do with what makes the this keyword special in JavaScript, beyond prototypes affecting this' properties.
The New Startup Arms Race
> Which is sort of foolish. A big problem with being hyper efficient

I think you're defining a metric by which your life is a success, but I'm sure you'll agree other people can be aware of this and still have other goals. This person probably doesn't need to work for a living (passive income from his software), so he can afford not following your otherwise quite sensible rules about serendipity. He can dig deep into a narrow subject, which may end up bringing him more satisfaction than aspiring to be something of a Renaissance man. He doesn't have to be all HackerNewsy, entrepreneurial etc.

Besides, let him be a hermit if he wants to. It's kind of comforting to know that there is no high score or awards ceremony at the end of our lives. Local maxima don't sound so bad.
Agreed. I think there has been a mass exodus from reddit in the last few weeks.

To where? People don't tend to just quit their social media addictions en masse. I'm asking mostly because I don't want to miss out if there's a new cool site on the block ;-)

As a regular Redditor, I'd say the quality of stuff hitting the front page/the "reddit.com" reddit has been a bit lower these last few weeks, but the more mature individual subreddits have remained pretty good.
JavaScript: Better and Faster
Wow. First place for Scala. The world is becoming a better place!
You should be able to get the final size to less than 100kb, I can't remember exactly what I ended up with using Proguard but I think it was 30-40kb. It should manage to remove virtually all the Scala library code as hardly any of it would be used.
First, I'd love to have an N1. My MyTouch is woefully underpowered, and I can't wait for my contract to end. Google, if you're reading this, send me an N1. :)

While I agree that Google seemed hardly interested in promoting the N1, I don't necessarily connect this to Google not having higher expectations for the phone. There was certainly much back-channel promotional activity prior to the N1 launch that was setting up the public to expect the N1 to be the force to bring change to how phones are sold. Go back and look at the press coverage. Google had ample opportunity to manage those expectations publicly, but did not do so. Perhaps, as you said, this had to do with a desire to push the phone covertly so as to not upset their carrier partners (Verizon). It makes sense but is hard to know. I do believe that going into the N1 launch they hoped more from the device than it just being a reference standard and a give-away. If that was main intent of the phone, why even try to get it on all carriers? I also do think that Google wants to push device manufacturers to innovate, but with all the promise that people had in the N1, having it flounder doesn't help Google, Android, or help push device manufacturers.

I do believe that Google had/has every intent to disrupt the mobile phone market, and this is just the first step. Its in Google's interest to turn carriers into dumb pipes. And the N1 is certainly the first step. However, I can't believe that people within Google who worked on the project and management didn't have higher expectations for sales, and that Google wouldn't have used superior N1 sales as a means of pushing their agenda.

Despite all of the dynamics involved, the N1 hasn't sold well, and has been more of a nudge to carriers and device manufactures than a force for change.
Do you have anything to back that up? An implementor of a PHP static compiler commented that the PHP runtime is horribly inefficient and is only able to appear fast in practice because the majority of the standard library is written in C. If you compare Ruby 1.9 to PHP on the Alioth tests at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all..., Ruby is very comparable in both memory and cPU usage and scores slightly higher overall, beating out PHP. MacRuby and Rubinius are eventually going to push Ruby performance even further, and right now JRuby already improves CPU performance over the standard runtime.

Rails as a framework may do some inefficient things, and I've heard that the next version of rails will address many of these inefficiencies, but as a language runtime Ruby isn't any sloppier performance-wise than PHP and might even already be better at this point.
Good for him. It's sad that he felt he had to wait this long.