skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Customer Centric Selling" is an excellent book. You need to develop a repeatable sales process for your business - this book will teach you how.

Note: I have no affiliation with the above book/authors/publishers....I have been in software/technical sales for over 10 years, and I happen to think this is best place to get started.

Right now you are letting the buyer control the sales process. The other folks here are correct that you need to find out:

1) Do they have funds budgeted for this already? What budget will this come out of? When does their budget year end?
2) How does their buying process work? Who has final approval? Does this decision have to go to a committee if the cost is over $XX,XXX?

3) If your software solves a problem...how are they solving that problem now? What "pain" do they have associated with how they are doing things now? You need to find out what their "critical issue" is.

4) What is the business case for your product? People don't buy "cool features" or "neat software" they buy products that solve business issues. If you are selling something above a certain price point, the decision will eventually be made by someone non-technical....and you need to have a strong ROI case built for that person to get the order.

If you don't know the above information, never do a demo. If a prospect refuses to share this type of information, they are not serious and you should move on to the next one. Sometimes the best sales opportunities are the ones that you lose quickly....don't be afraid to lose the sale quickly. Focus your efforts on serious buyers who are willing to share information on their budget, purchasing process, etc.
Instapaper + calibre (news) + sony prs-650
On a semi-related note, one of the interesting parts of the Xanadu rule set was this:

Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
As a simple benchmark for the capabilites of GPGPU software, I've been testing a hotplate simulation. In a 6400x6400 grid, the future temperature of each cell is an average of the cells around it. I've written it in C (single threaded) and it takes 40 minutes to run on an Intel nehelem. I've written it in Matlab and it takes 7 hours. Finally I wrote it in Matlab using the GPGPU plugin Jacket. It took 20 minutes. That's a 2x speed up over the serial code, with all the abstraction and overhead of Matlab. Next is a test in C with CUDA, but I was still very impressed with the performance of GPGPU in Matlab.

In our HPC lab, we see plugins like Jacket to be a valid substitute for translation of calculations from Matlab to C/fortran. While not the most efficient use of hardware, it is very simple to do and can drastically speed up many applications.
Congratulations to Paul, Harj, and YC. Really glad to see important things like Y Combinator grow, since even a small change at YC results in a huge effect on the industry given the influence that YC has.
(Windows Media) video at http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=101...
Exporting your Google waves & "Wave in a Box"
How does he keep the feathers from getting pushed up against the cacti? I've been avoiding this problem with drowning-based traps. When I do use cacti, it's just to filter out spiders (which need a differently-shaped drowner).
Yea. It's too bad that Amazon's cloud is black-listed from most major email providers.
Thanks, that's good to hear. I'm working through the Little MLer right now. Good intro, but I'd be interested recommendations for other good books on ML.
Actually there's another guy from Apple on HN who is very clear that employees at Apple get all their core work done in 40 hours. They work extra hours to go above and beyond.

At least that's what he says...
I always wonder what the crime is in these scenarios. Is it that they invaded someone's privacy? Or that they invaded Palin's privacy?

Is this punishment for the act or the target of the act?
Jeff,

His name's David Wilkie (not betraying any confidence - he lists his name in those email threads he posted).

I don't know him personally, but he's been a regular in our IRC channel over the last couple of months. I believe he's a web developer living in Vietnam. Why do you ask?
I completely fail to understand what the complaint is here.

It looks like users can download the application packages separately from the WP7 magic install marketplace app. OK. Once you download the package, since WP7 makes you write in .NET, anyone can just look at your executable and get the MSIL back out of it, and decompile to C# or whatever.

So...what? This has been true for every C# application written since .NET existed, on every platform. Welcome to the world of bytecode. What is Microsoft supposed to do to magically change this on Windows Phone? Even if they encrypted everything all the way down from the marketplace, as soon as someone roots the phone, they could just look at the executable on disk, right?

Why is bytecode obfuscation no longer an OK solution?

What am I missing here? I don't know anything about WP7.

EDIT: After looking around, I don't think I'm missing anything, I think it's just FUD. However, it looks like there's a different actual issue, which is that you can go download any app from the feed right now for free.
There was a fantastic series of technical articles written a couple of years ago on building a poker bot: http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working...

The series of articles goes into detail on how to write a successful bot - Statistics, OCR, hooking dlls, etc. There is a ton of information that lays a solid ground work for doing this yourself (if you have the time.)
Soo... basically whitelisting functionality. Something that we've had for a long time. Only this is automatic since people are (hopefully) more diligent about their Facebook friends list than their Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook address book.
Indeed -- and the problem doesn't sound any worse than it is for (say) .NET or Java desktop apps.
as a newcomer here, I'm not sure how to respond to this. it seems to me that there's a fair amount of interest in stories on the TSA that have been posted here. and a lot of us here travel, so statistically are at risk here. it's a well-written, short, actionable blog post by somebody who's an expert in the field. why is this so much more off-topic than some of the other things that make the front page?

and RiderOfGiraffes isn't content just to let it go by without reading it the way we all do with some of the HN fave topics that don't personally interest me. no, he also is going to downvote it and announce to everybody here what he's doing. he can downvote, and presumably so can his buddies; as a newcomer, i can't. so my karma is probably taking a hit.

suggestions on how i should respond?
What does it mean to be a 'partner'? Do they then get some percentage share of the company?
I think my reservation may come more from what I'm saying in this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898053

Even if a computer could translate netspeak to "Proper English," it would still be computer-translated "Proper English." The idea of allowing a computer to choose which words to use, or where punctuation should go, or anything like that, is unsettling to me. The translation model works for programming languages because compilers have no emotions, but any message that starts out in shorthand with the intention of being read by a human is intrinsically hamstrung.

In fact, this can be true for programming languages, too! C is like short-hand; the compiler is what turns our netspeak (C) into "Proper English" (assembly/machine code). It usually works, but sometimes you just have to dip into assembly to really express what you mean.
Nobody reads anymore... not until the iPad came out with an eReader... now reading is magical!

Steve Jobs is an absolute marketing genius. He's not exactly an unbiased observer.
Chicken, egg: which came first?

A: FAILURE

sigh So close.
Make a fake profile with an image of a hot girl. Send out friend requests to random men. Done. This is not hard to automate.
Ender was deliberately put in a position where he was forced to fight back or get killed. His "handlers" wanted a dehumanized person capable of everything, including genocide.

"The task of the training battalions is to crush and completely destroy the individual, however strong a character he may have possessed, and to fashion out of that person a type to fit the standards of spetsnaz, a type who will be filled with an explosive charge of hatred and spite and a craving for revenge."
Source: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov6/index.html

It's a book by Viktor Suvorov "Spetsnaz. The Story Behind the Soviet SAS". A quick and interesting read.

Violence and degradation is a common method of training soldiers. Some (not me) would say the school system is deliberately set in this fashion.
Hmmm... didn't get the reference originally. I didn't know who Stephanie Tanner was. It definitely ain't no, "What chou talkin bout Willis!". :-)
But then, how random is too random???

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2848/dilberttourofaccountin...
The beginning of the end of NoSQL
Will Paul take part in the interview/selection process? Will he participate more than the mentors dinner? & Congrats.
Ask HN: When is the best time to talk to investors?
We are ready to launch our latest startup and we would like feedback from the VC and angels community.

When should we start talking to possible investors.
Before we launch, to get initial feedback? After we launch, when we test the acceptance of our product? Six months later, when we are profitable or not?

What is the best strategy to approach them? Just send them an introductory email about our product?

Feedback highly appreciated.
Your article is about actual cheating, not just automated "bot" play
Launch strategy: before or after related product?
A product related to mine, but not directly competing, is being launched soon by a high profile company in my space. Should I try to launch before them or after them?
For my undergrad robotics project I created a lego robot which played blackjack - you fed it a card and it moved a light sensor over all possible 'pip' positions on the card to determine which card it was given, then it twisted until it reached a total of over 17. I wish I'd taken videos of it.
Apple has become so successful that people start attributing amazing strategies to them that are really accidental. I've emailed a high up Apple executive about something before and not heard a thing only to get a reply to my email 9 months later while he was on a flight and had time to kill. From what I heard, dealing with all of the legal mess around the major labels (e.g., contract upon contract numbering dozens to get a single album onto iTMS) was a huge part of the 2003-2004 era work at Apple. It bogged down executives and even programmers who had to constantly revise code to accommodate legal requirements.

It could be that Steve Jobs was somehow being manipulative and singling out CD Baby. Or it could just have been that the company was bogged down. You said yourself that hundreds of others were at that original meeting. That's like herding cats. In fact, the entire iTunes Music Store was an exercise in herding thousands of cats. I still have a hard time believing it got done.

Regardless, it's still a good tale. You never know, right?
I don't use facebook much. What features are they throwing out?
This sounds really close to what Mark Kostabi did (does?) with his art: He hires fresh or recent art-school students for basically teenage McJob wages and "collaborates" with them (basically affixes his signature on their work) and sells the canvas for US$10000-50000 each.

There is a market for this teen/young adult genre-crossing stuff, and it will _certainly_ get saturated at some point. Whether that some point is when Frey starts his Warhol/Kostabi factory or not is the key question.
"Ultimately the challenge has helped me take things less personally."

Couldn't agree more. Life should not be lived in fear.
I don't doubt that jobs is an asshole from time to time. You kinda have to be to get where Apple is today, from where they were. But unless you were present at the firing of your friend, or he recorded it, I don't think it's 100% fair to quote Jobs, especially out of context. Just because he can be an asshole at times, doesn't mean we get to slander and spread hearsay. Your friend wasn't doing what his boss wanted. The boss said something mean for whatever reason. Anyone in a long term relationship has said something mean. So if an employee isn't the right fit for the company, chances are, every once in a while, something mean will be uttered when they are canned. You're making to much out of it. Unless that's the typical way Jobs fires someone. Then he truly is an asshole.
I would want to know two things that aren't always clear at the beginning of a project;

1. A 50-words-or-less summary of what the project is all about when it's finished. Scope creep and lack of clarity often prevent this sort of thing at the outset.

2. A summary of where the requirements ultimately derive from. For instance on a credit card processing system I worked on (I was in the 3rd "generation" of programmers to work on it), it seemed like requirements came from 6 main drivers:

(1) Real time authorization of payments.
(2) Search for previously authorized and settled payments.
(3) Refunds of payments
(4) End-of-day "batch" payment settlements
(5) Crediting settled payments to customer accounts
(6) The boogey-man named "PCI DSS".

Organizing requirements under "main drivers" would really help maintenance, and people reviewing the project.
Sometimes I get so frustrated with whatever I'm working on, that I start thinking about how nice it would be to quit programming and become a farmer or a builder.

Soon after that, I solve a little personal problem by coding the solution, or I discover a cool new tool, or I fix a little bug in an application I use, even if it's written in a language I'm not familiar with.

At which point, I remember that I'm never going to quit programming because it's so damn useful. And it can be fun too, if you work on the right things. Even if I go on to be a farmer, I'll still solve the odd problem by programming the solution. And I'll always have an appreciation of simplicity, bestowed upon me through endless nights of working against stupid, complicated technology.
Downvoted? What's wrong with what I said? I appreciated that site.
I struggled with the exact same question the last few days. Semantically both have the same features. You can find an informed comparison here: http://devtionary.com/?p=89

My initial preference was Less, because sass seemed framgmented with 2 syntaxes, and also less seemed more aesthetic, but I ended choosing Sass for the following reasons:

* Sass has Compass built over it http://compass-style.org/docs/ and this alone is the biggeast win over Less

Compass is a framework that comes with a foundation of components :

- compass core http://compass-style.org/docs/reference/compass/

- many plugins for different needs (search github for compass), special mentioning Susy liquid grid framework https://github.com/ericam/compass-susy-plugin

- with Compass I can monitor a whole directory of templates at once, and have them instantly compiled when I save from the editor, not sure if Less can do this

* Aptanta Studio 3 and few other IDE's know to syntax highlight sass and scss, not sure about less

* If you don't like the indentation syntax you can use the curly Scss, Scss and Sass are interoperable, you can call one from the other and vice versa

* The ruby version of Less is deprecated and I write a ruby based project (indeed, not all HN users are pythonists)
Moreover, I don't like the idea on compiling the templates client side (as in less.js) and waste precios miliseconds, nor use an external interpreter (node.js)
They don't give questions formatted in other ways, so I didn't include that in the logic. As someone else pointed out, even deleting the question mark would break it. (However, making the question mark optional would be a two second fix.)
LESS doesn't force you to change your CSS coding style too much, and provides you with the power you need if you want to.

The most useful feature of LESS is simply nesting / indentation.

Since it's not syntactically different from CSS, you can start a LESS stylesheet from a standard CSS stylesheet and move forward from there with LESS.
I think the Wave protocol had a similar problem. I decide to make an agent and just going through all the detailed protocol stuff discouraged me from digging in right away. I figured if it becomes big, I'll jump in again. On the other hand, I learnt plain-text SMTP as a kid and over time picked up MIME, TLS/PGP etc.
Review my Startup: Brainstorm Ideas and Find a Cofounder
there is a Google group - punestartups. also author of punetech.com is very active helpful person. hth.
Mr. Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational, is a great read for those who aren't familiar with Behavioral Economics. It contains a lot of solid insights that entrepreneurs should understand, particularly relating to how consumers think.
Another question, should we contact a bunch of them using pitching services like angel.co or is it better to contact them one by one, making it more personal.

Instinct tells you a more personalized approach is better, but pitching services look like a good alternative, if not, why angels subscribe to them?
Very interesting. I think loss aversion will turn out to be just as prevalent for self-professed entrepreneurs as for the general population, if not more so.
Yes, but Amazon's reviews are for products.. not hotels. Hotels get older and crappier thus newer reviews are more valuable.
It's important for the ability to use existing C libraries.
Dropping the mac line doesn't necessarily equate to terminating OSX.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys this sort of idea idea, and you have two hours free and want to laugh so hard you cry, go get a warm beverage then put "Boatmurdered" into the Googles. Short version: there are few games where the physics engine allows you to unleash Biblical disasters as emergent behavior and have it be a viable strategy.
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company
How long until someone writes an adware app?
Movement to opt out of full-body scans on Nov 24
You are correct, I look for a pattern and apply very very basic logic.

I just got 1,000 questions from the demo page and looked how they were similar. For example, there are many questions of the form "[list of something]: the [ordinal number] [type] is?" so I put that as a rule in the grammar file. I did this for about twenty different types of questions, each of which has three or so different phrasings.

And yes, they may have 180 million questions, but in reality they have only a hundred or so modulo the specific words they pick (for the items in the list, or for the day of the week, or for the letter that the word starts with).
That was not my experience. I'll leave it at that.
I'll be interested to see what responses you get to that.

A couple of points.

I don't think TSA stories are any less or more valid than some of the other stories that hit the front page - and probably I flag them too. As I say, my criterion is that I don't think they are of interest specifically to hackers or entrepreneurs. They are, and should be, of wider interest. To me, that means they don't belong here.

And for what it's worth, there are stories that I am interested in that I flag for exactly the same reason. Yes, I'm interested. No, I don't think it belongs on Hacker News.

And you're confusing down-voting with flagging.

And no, I'm not content to just let it go by. If I did, where would I draw the line? LOL catz (or whatever they're called? Hell, why not just ignore them too ...

I think articles that are not appropriate should be flagged. Hence I flag them. I need a way to decide. I have one.

I'm only one person here - my actions will mean pretty much zip if no one agrees with me.

My $0.02.
Yes, he's going to do everything we do. Kate Courteau is arranging for us to get a new, longer table for interviews right now.
Upgrades are only within an edition (aka revisions, I guess), not across editions. I just confirmed this with one of the authors.

I'm not complaining -- each edition must be a lot of effort; just noting.
Fred's article highlights the risk to Facebook if there's a bubble and it bursts. As well as looking at some serious security/privacy challenges at the platform level and a hard-to-sustain engineering pace, they also need to worry about how long irrational exuberance continue. If they IPO at $10-$20B, that'll be a sign of air leaking out of the bubble. If they hit the wall before IPO, or crash badly in the first six months out of the gate, it'll be a lot more dramatic.
I would suggest that it does those things, but not as well, not by default, and for a lot more money than many other options. That said, if it works for you, go for it. It certainly gets the job done.
> When such thing should be done? 1) If you measured your loop and it was too slow with a one assignment and one loop pass for every n. 2) you know that your compiler can't do the loop unwinding automatically -- modern compilers can do such things even if you write a normal loop if the compiler estimates that this can really help and when you give to it a specific direction to produce such code (e.g. aggressively optimize for speed).

Note that many compilers generate crappy code for duff's device. The switch statement, specifically the intermediate destinations, keeps them from generating good code for the unrolled loop body.

The compiled code can be so bad that a "not unrolled" loop to get to alignment followed by an unrolled aligned loop is significantly faster.

And, because this stuff is never simple, the fastest version may be range dependent, as in one version is faster for up to 100 elements while another is faster for more than 100.
I am very interested to see the result of this one. Completed + tweeted.
I do not know who HT is but it is nice to see 'promotion' from within (being that he previously co-founded a YC company and exited).
How To End School Bullying
similar arguments have been made in previous bubbles. there's always been an element of truth in them -- as there is now -- but the reality always proves different than the hype. maybe this time will be different but it's a mistake to count on it.
I have this problem: http://xkcd.com/303/

I find myself having to wait for the compiler or for the debugger to get to the correct breakpoint, and think that I'll check HN for a moment. 5 minutes later I realize the compiler is long done...
Ask HN: Is it even worth it to have automated translations on your site?
What I mean is, if the options are to either:

1) spend time putting a system on your site that will translate it into another language using Google Translate or
2) ignore translation altogether and just deliver an English site

...is it even worth it to do #1? Or are non-native English people already accustomed to running English sites through something like Google Translate, in which case me baking that into my site doesn't really add any value?

Note that providing a manual, human-made translation (i.e. The Right Way) is not an option here, hence this question.
Google is not evil by nature (though i have my own doubts) and Facebook is also not evil by nature. Facebook simply has a different philosophy on _sharing_. They believe that people should share everything and be more social. If this is not something people are not comfortable with, then those people have no business in signing up for facebook and complaining that everything is shared by default.
As far as Google's privacy 'glitches' are concerned, in my experience bugs make it into production accidentally. But pieces of code that are developed specifically to sample wifi packets that might contain sensitive data or code that exposes all my email contacts to the entire world do not make into production accidentally.