skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never done it myself, but I'm currently participating in TechStars seattle and have seen some mentors speak to this topic. The general consensus on how to get into the press seems to be three key points: 1) Be an area expert 2) Establish personal relationships 3) Leverage your expertise through personal relationships

More concretely:

Do everything from conduct surveys and independent research, all the way to writing articles that could more or less be published in whole or in part by a target publication. These should be things that have compelling stories in them and are about your industry and your desired press narrative, but not necessarily about your company. Use this process to establish that you are an area expert. Feed this to journalists. Make their jobs easier and make them trust you as an area expert. Once you've built trust and provided value to a journalist, you can ask them to provide value to you. Provide them more article fodder and ensure that your company forms a part of the narrative.
Ask HN: How do I make friends?
My story:
I had a few good friends in my college days, but since I left college and moved on to other places, I have no way of regularly meeting them anymore.

I don't go out very much. I know that to meet people you should go out and stuff, but I don't know where to go. I mean after my hectic office hours there is not much time to go tout and meet people. (I am good friends with people in my office, but cannot say that they feel the same way. I try to help them in any work they have and people tend to like me because of this. I don't know if I have any behavioral traits that alienate people.)

People say that it is near to impossible to make good friends after college. Is this true? What are your experiences?

I am really alone in a big city and I am desperate. I am ready to give up anything to get some good friends. Without at least a single person to care about me, I am losing my self-respect. Please advice me.
No I don't think I did. I helped to write an optimized operating system kernel and virtual machine monitor for high performance computing. We absolutely treated C as high-level assembly. C provided a cost-saving measure in that we didn't have to run off customized asm blocks to do trivial one-liners that would be the same in the VMM implementation but slightly different in object code (two different opcodes). Not only is this common practice in academic and production systems development, but it also the recommended practice from most of my colleagues that added the intrinsics for their subsystems (Intel and Microsoft being my personal experiences).

You missed the guy's point, which was essentially that C code is munged and transformed by a good optimizing compiler, whereas assembly is left untouched by a good assembler.

That's irrelevant. They are both restricted on the basis of being functionally equivalent to the input code.
I found your piece to be a much better read. It exactly hits why I've never really found TDD to be very practical in my work.
Ask HN: IE and my web app: keep trying to support it or give up?
Im developing a web application that uses alot of advanced user interaction. I test primarily in firefox and chrome. After reaching a milestone, I test in IE. Of course its broken.

Supporting IE is frustrating. Should I drop IE support (request users use another browser or install chrome frame) - or is it worth the trouble?
I don't feel comfortable posting their messages without their permission, but it was a no-frills, direct answer to my request.

And how could this be a scam? They can easily see the traffic on the instances in question. The scam is that I only pay them $300 this month?
I dunno, in much of southern Europe it's certainly not expected that people will be there to the minute even for one-on-one meetings. Probably not an hour late in that case, but I don't think anybody would bat an eye if you had planned to meet at a coffee shop at 2:00 and someone showed up at 2:15. You'd just get a coffee and read a book or the paper or something. (Being exactly on time, and being angry if someone's 5 minutes late, is seen as a stereotypically "German" sort of thing.)
30 - I actively 'dislike' social situations that require the well-worn path of meeting someone, breaking through the glass wall of politeness and actually talking about something interesting and pretending to be interested in what they are saying. Concurrently I am trying to ensure I am projecting the mannerisms of someone that is interested while waiting for conversation signals that they are: interested, disinterested, hungry, thirsty, a douchebag etc

Sometimes its just seems like so much work.
I'm really excited for when piracy and IP debates beings to extend to the physical world. It is going to be super entertaining to watch the DRM debacle over my right to print objects.
Agree: 5,6,7,12,16,18,19,23,42,43: 1 point
Disagree: 8,17,30,32: 1 point
Score: 14
Clickable: http://www.hobsonfiles.com
no..handicap..as in a deficient immune system that gives you a distinct disadvantage at life.
I hope this is not "above me" I don't know as much as the average hacker would probably know about markets. I'm 20 and don't have THAT much knowledge.

>>give up, and invest in index funds.
Alright, Any book recommendations for that?
Two potential solutions:

1. Plan around it - be somewhere where the person being late doesn't affect you. Have people meet you at your home or at a cafe where you're doing other work or reading a book and it doesn't adversely affect you. Oftentimes, if I'm traveling with a group of people, I give a time range - "Be there between 7:30PM and 8PM" - that lets the early birds get there at 7:30, and the "oh shoot! gotta run!" people ideally get there by 8PM, but the early birds don't get offended and feel disrespected (I'm more or less an early bird, I hate being late - but I've got some friends and acquaintances who just aren't that way).

2. If you really want to get people to cut it out, make real world consequences. Say "the meeting starts at 9:05 sharp, the doors will be shut and no one will be admitted after that." Think really hard if the situation calls for it, but it does work if you do stuff like that. If you're a professor, you could say to anyone coming in late - "get out. see you next week." You won't have people showing up late if you announce you're going to do that and follow through. Up to you to judge if you want that sort of environment, and you've got to really be on top of things and deliver straight out the gate if you're being hardcore that people have to be there. But it does work.
Gotcha. Thanks for the detailed response. This won't be my only startup; I figure that I'd better start taking notes on the other side of things now...
But these are autobiographies, I would like a book that gives me APPLIED knowledge on trading in index funds, options, stocks, bonds, forex..etc. I'll start with stocks/index funds because they're easier.

I want to invest short term(less than a year)
The decision to drop IE should be made after consulting your logs. How many users would you be turning away? If a substantial portion of users are on IE, it may be best to just support IE8 (or maybe only IE9) to ease development problems.
It is not a commentary on you, but rather on markets. On average, investor performance is market average minus expenses, and this holds regardless of investor sophistication.
I used to believe this too. And then I realized that for 99% of cases, the 5 minutes gained is not worth the long-term reputation damage.
Nice design.

Hobson as in Hobson's choice?
Google may be becoming more optimized for the larger number of non-tech/non-elite users, while becoming less optimized for the smaller number of elite users. If so, we've seen this phenomenon happen with other businesses in the past, nothing new. A side effect of becoming popular with the masses.
Personally i find being early more irritating than being late. When someone asks me to meet them at 2pm (eg: Job interview) I'll generally arrive in the vicinity 20-ish minutes early and hang out in a cafe or something and then walk into their office for 2-3 minutes before 2pm.

I've noted some people in my experience to consider this to be late, 15 minutes before stated time is what they consider to be on time. This pisses me off to no end. If you wanted me there at 1:45pm i'd have gladly appeared at that time, just dont say one thing and mean another. GRRRR
I'm looking for more applied advice. Your advice seems to have more of that, does Buffets' letters include such things?

Thanks for the entrance/exist point strategy. I am planning to invest for the short term so that should be useful
I distribute it to them, they don't have time to go and buy from the whole salers because,
A. Not enough space.
B. they can't buy wholesale

But what are some internet ideas that I can use? I know hacker news is more focused on internet/programming related businesses.
Clearly this is an omen for what this service will become: A haven for pirates.
I haven't had any problems making friends outside of college. Most everyone I know hasn't had a problem with it, so I find the 'it is near to impossible to make good friends after college' doesn't mesh with my experience at all.

If you want to make friends, find a way to do things that you enjoy that involve others. If you like music, get involved with others in making music. Like to code? Go to meetups for particular subjects that interest you and make sure to go to the social part afterwards. Ditto for conferences etc. Like reading? Join a bookclub. You get the idea, if you want to make friends, get out there and meet people; the friends will follow from that.
The Frankenstein Essay
Writing a Frankenstein essay will firstly educate you on who Frankenstein really is. Once that is understood, students will be able to select a suitable character from many and write accordingly. Whichever way you write the essay, writing it in the best manner possible is recommended.
One really cool startup in this space is cloudfab.com (AlphaLab '08). They're a platform/market for the mass customization the article describes.
Wow.

So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive.

Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year is great, and I was totally unaware of it. I'll update my post shortly with a note about that. Having something like that sticking right out on the left-hand side would be even better. :-)

I think I often see people complaining about search quality (here, and in the other HN thread I linked to from about a year back, as examples), but if you ask them about the specifics of the search, they don't remember. I think that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. Although it's at least partly laziness on the user's part, I think Google could view this as a huge amount of potentially beneficial information that they're missing out on. Trying to improve search results without knowing what problems people are having with them is challenging, at least.

It would be nifty if there were some kind of "these were not the search results I was looking for" quick form linked from certain types of search results.
You wrote it to a disc? It's better that marketers don't coin terminology - we end up with tweets and bings.
Awesome! I so want to apply for this, but cannot get the entry form to work. It says I didn't fill out all the required fields (but I did).
More People Got Their News Online Yesterday Than From A Print Newspaper
I also find doctors to be late in perpetuity, ive never in my life waited less than 10 minutes PAST the actual appointment time. This is both an easily identifiable problem and easy to fix, the receptionists could easily structure appointments more appropriately.
I'm inclined to think that if you can't see why a product is useful to use after a week, it's probably not worth it. But then, my experiences with DDG have mostly consisted of comparing its results with google, and finding that the interface is a lot less usable.
Mexico. From 10K to 30K usd per year. Then substract ~30% in tax. 50K if it is a very very senior job.

Life is a lot cheaper though. Still, engineering isn't very well paid back there, and options to work on something awesome are way more limited. Most options are consulting, business apps, or move outside to work for a cool company.
Thanks. Hobson as in the butler's name from the film Aurthur --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_(1981_film)
this happened to me on ec2 this summer- dozen idle instances running for two months because of a bug in a script.

I didn't get any sort of break though. :( June was a lot of hotdogs and Budweiser till I could dig out of that hole.
I get a php error when I visit this page. I guess the server isn't running low on resources, it is rude & selfish. Or maybe just misconfigured :)

Error 403: Forbidden
Your PHP settings have been disabled by an H-Sphere administrator.

Your current PHP configuration:
-->
This configuration was changed:
Please bring your PHP configuration in compliance with admin settings or request your administrator to re-enable support of your settings.

You don't have permissions to access this page. This usually means one of the following:

this file and directory permissions make them unavailable from the Internet.
.htaccess contains instructions that prevent public access to this file or directory.
Please check file and directory permissions and .htaccess configuration if you are able to do this. Otherwise, request your webmaster to grant you access.
Crap, can I borrow someone's hobby?
I hardly think a single global setting (set one time) counts as something that "second-guesses your customers' decisions at every point".

Less like a straightjacket and more like an (optional) seatbelt.
I didn't mean that it was based off of the original UNIX code base, I know my UNIX history better than that. As nailer said, this can be taken two ways and I meant it in the latter. Linux has elements of SysV - it has run levels and the like, unlike BSD's.
My confusion was along the lines of only the torrented web will survive?
Being Indian, I have to take a little offense at the generalization.

It isn't all of us. I'm never casually late for an appointment, and am always annoyed if the other party is, beyond the reasonable 10 minutes. And this is not because of any incipient effect of Western culture.

Please stop with the generalizing about pan-cultural differences in the perceived value of productivity, community, etc. Neither does an anecdote about a birthday party generalize to business situations.
hmm let me look into it!
I don't agree. It's not an issue of straight jacketing programmers. It's an issue of reminding a user they are incurring an enormous bill for no reason. A simple "Hi, we see you're using X widgets but your traffic would allow you to reduce this to Y widgets. If you'd like to do that, here's a link. If not just ignore this email." That would solve the problem with very little effort. It would keep people forgetting and having a heart attack, getting pissed and leaving. It really doesn't matter if it is the customer's fault if it causes them to leave with a bad taste in their mouth.
Content I will pay for: farts
I'm reminded of a talk at a medical conference about patient interaction.

The talk was scheduled. People showed up. No speaker was visible. The doors closed. People sat there. Finally someone got unhappy enough to leave. Discovered that the doors were locked. Soon the whole room was up in arms.

Then the speaker got up from the first row, went to the stage, and said, "I did this because no words are as effective as demonstrating the point. Yes, you are all busy people. But your patients are busy people as well. Many bill hourly so time is literally money to them. So don't waste their time and money by being late."
Was responding specifically to: " It doesn't have a noteworthy theater scene, or (to my knowledge) excellence in any of the performing arts."

I was assuming by "decent music venues" the OP was more referring to a rock/jazz/alt type scene, because of the "war on fun" reference. I get that they're not mutually exclusive terms, but I would put symphony/opera in different categories than, say, a blues club. Sorry. I'm a conservatory-trained professional classical musician, and I'd say that most of my peers would read this the same way.

I also see that this has been commented about above, and it's true that Chicago's symphony is equally outstanding. My point was that SF _does_ have a "noteworthy" and "excellent" performing arts scene, found, for example, in its excellent opera and symphony seasons. Michael Tilson Thomas, additionally, is a "noteworthy" and "excellent" conductor.
You didn't but I can assure you that many of my friends did. Also it was a much smaller break.
This is what I got when I tried the page an hour after posting to Hacker News:

Error 403: Forbidden

Your PHP settings have been disabled by an H-Sphere administrator

Now that is rude
That's true. When I've lived in Brasil, we were invited to a party for 7pm and if you came at 0730 you'd see the hosts wandering around in robes, comming about 2hrs late was the appropriate thing to do.

It all depends on the local culture. In Poland, besides business meetings, there's a 15 minutes space, only after that it's considered being late; and yes, in big cities we're also all into that western 'being always in a hurry' thing (which I personally don't like).
A recruiter calling other people rude and selfish? Now I've seen everything...
International shipping companies in New Jersey
We are a full service online International moving and shipping service provider offering custom designed shipping services Worldwide. Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia are as familiar to us as New York, Miami, Los Angeles and many more.
I think this would make an excellent poll question for someone with the karma.

That being said, dupe:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836167

I think it depends ( and I guess the split here backs me up ):

1. I'm fine giving a credit card number up-front if it's for 'serious business', i.e. something that would make money, reduce my workload, etc.

2. I'm not fine giving a credit card number up-front if it's a whim or a 'huh, that might be useful'-level of interest.

Without knowing what you are selling, it's hard to say where your example falls on 'my' spectrum.

One thing to consider is from a support resources point of view, do you want lookie-loos ( who you might convert ) but who will cost you x support time from paying customers, or do you want to prioritize your resources to paying only customers. Remember, you don't know when you're providing a free trial user support for 2 hours on their first day, if they'll be customers tomorrow ... if they've handed over a CC number you know they're at least somewhat serious in their interest.
> I had the opportunity to study at the University of Havana in 2009.

What are your impressions of the country?
Don't know about Russia, but here in Bulgaria we celebrate it by drinking bear, making small games, writing useless programs, and maybe doing some pranks. Basically, same as any other day :D
Thanks for the mention, Breck. :) If you didn't see this, a few days ago... I think the 'email Shoefitr' note is still in my inbox: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672993
I just tested the form and seems to be working. The required fields are the first four, try it one more time!
While I agree with the comment in general, my norm is to immediately cancel and reschedule or go on without the person.

The victimization aspect (3 wasted hours) could also be avoided by not passively sitting and waiting to start.
You probably don't even need to check the logs to know that unless you're targeting only Mac users, you'll have to support IE. Even with advanced UI tricks, it shouldn't be to difficult to support IE 8 and 9. 7 will take an extra stylesheet, but that's about it. It should be safe to ignore IE 6 at this point.
I think the best case is to ask for the discount. Start eating your hat if they don't. Why? Because it is your fault, and it would have been icing to get a break this time. But it's not their prerogative to give out free service, or to take the mass of requests for it if they started doing that.

The user sets up those limits, it cuts costs because they don't need techs to set it up. But the client shoulders the responsibility too. They last thing their company needs is to hire people to handle personal requests like funerals or "i forgots" which would only add more to their overhead. They above comment was perfectly honest with them and not at all condescending.

In terms of "wrong" ? You get what you paid for. Not every business model can include white glove service with freebies and "We understand".
Don't compare "East Asians" disfavorably to American punctuality within earshot of a Japanese salaryman.

The line beginning with "other cultures" is untestable horsepuckey reminiscent of the absolute worst tripe in American multicultural studies. And I have a degree in that. It survives only because it flatters the preconceptions of an Ameican subculture in academia who prefers to have a ready critique of Western culture, as if such a thing existed.
How is it better than (or different from) http://github.com/tomtom/tselectfiles_vim which is vimscript only?
But we're not trying to find out if this man falls into the 3/4 of all men with one or two sons, we're trying to determine if this man's two children are both boys when we know that one of them is.
But it consumes a lot of bandwidth of the service provider to burn these torrent, doesn't it? I'm wondering how the business to be sustainable?
The fact that I'm a huge gamer helped me decide instantly that this finding is correct.
People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better.

We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?"

I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.
ced, yes i was thinking that the order doesn't matter. I think this is what it comes down to. Do you think that order matters? If so, why?

yes i do find it easier to picture in terms of frequencies. in this case, take 1000 families which fulfill the criteria of "2 children with at least 1 boy". what is the probability that a family will have 2 boys? we have not sampled randomly. we have sampled according to the "2 children with at least 1 boy" criteria. we are not dealing with two random variables. one variable is fixed and we sampled according to it. now we are working with one independent random variable within that sample. that random variable has P = 1/2.

is there a flaw in my logic? if there is, please highlight it. i think the main confusion is:
1. we have sampled according to particular criteria.
2. we need to calculate a probability within that sample.
NOT the population that sample was taken from.