skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many did you call? When cold calling around a 5% success rate is quite good, so if you called 100 agencies and got 5 meetings you'd be going well.

Also how big were the agencies you were targeting? And were they the "digital" agency or the "above the line" agency? You'll have more luck with agencies that already do trade promotions through SMS, Web and other "tech" solutions.

So maybe "ad agency" is the wrong word - you want marketing agencies and probably more specifically the ones calling themselves "digital marketing".

(warning: I'm from Australia, terminology may be different ... )

For example: a few years ago I got on the phone to sell some SMS services. I wanted to sell to real estate agencies, so I started calling them and asking to speak to the person in charge of marketing. I called around 20 RE agencies and got one actually talking for long enough that they said "We use WORLD FAMOUS AD AGENCY for all our SMS and MMS". So then I called WORLD FAMOUSE AD AGENCY (which is a global marketing/ad agency with both above and below the line services) and spoke to them, and they were sort of interested, like didn't blow me off immediately but as you said, kind of "run around", but one thing is they weren't interested in SMS, they were interested in MMS.

I called my SMS provider and asked if they could do MMS, they said no, but I should call LARGE SMS PROVIDER IN AUSTRALIA. So I called them and asked about MMS for WORLD FAMOUS AD AGENCY, but LARGE SMS PROVIDER actually gave me the full story: that WORLD FAMOUS AD AGENCY uses UNHEARD OF DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY who use TINY TECHNICAL GATEWAY PROVIDER who use LARGE SMS PROVIDER. This was just an off-hand comment, so I called UNHEARD OF MARKETING AGENCY and pitched MMS to them at a price point I thought would be undercutting the competition.

I got a meeting with them, but they realised that I wasn't doing the MMS - I was using the same guys that the guys they use now were currently using - basically because I wasn't presenting technology I had created but technology they had already seen. We had a good laugh about it and I got some web/hosting work out of them.

Now I didn't end up selling them the MMS, or SMS but this was the level of marketing agency that would talk to a small, independent operator, and also that really explored every new available technology such as Bluetooth, SMS, MMS, Web, trade promotions etc. rather than huge ad agencies that are directly talking to the big brands. They generally hold a relationship with the big ad agency, then the big ad agency has the relationship with the brand.

Short story: just start smaller down the food chain. You'll find that big agencies are rarely doing all the work themselves - at some point it's always just a lonely dweeb sitting at home coding in his underpants.
I think the kind of people who just look at the size of the screen and not the number of pixels, are likely the same people who will just buy the same size Windows PC because it's several hundred dollars less.

In other words, the people willing to pay Apple prices care enough about their computer purchase to actually read the specs. Like if you buy a high performance car, you at least want to do enough research not to look like a total idiot in front of your gear head friends after you've spent that much money.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and Apple customers really only care about how nice it will look on the coffee shop table.
I rarely exercise my ability to downvote but I feel I should let you know that I did for your comment. I appreciate your opposition on the matter, but your comment is entirely based on your opinion, provides little substance, and does not promote any forward thinking whatsoever. I agree entirely with jpd23 that this isn't just "political crap" as it has many, many implications of the state of the world... which greatly affects not just the startup world but everyone.

The term hacker is not limited to tech and business... it means analyzing all aspects of life, tearing them apart, figuring out how they work, and making them better.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of things I didn't think of which would make this somewhat ineffective.

> one ends up evaluating secondary things and overseeing essential things like the ability to rationally defend the code and explain one's approach.

This seems to describe exactly the problem with the exams I had, which tested more the ability to memorize a solution and regurgitate it in a test setting. This is of course anecdotal, but I've heard of similar exams in other schools. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement there.
Cooooool... /me sets to 0

Thanks! That's much better.

Odd that one thing calls it "Window Color and Appearance" yet the control panel calls it "Window Color and Metrics"... the latter is more accurate, but wagh inconsistency.
Congrats to Jason, Paras and team.

More here: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/24/140fire-video-advertising-...

140fire, you guys need to post your LAUNCH presentation - in person the simplicity and power of the agency & analytics tools are really what brings the idea to life - nice execution and good luck -
Do not know of anything directly, but a few years ago I had good luck with some law offices loaning me space and conference rooms in Manhattan. In most cases it was a good deal, the office admins treated me like the rest of the actual employees. Paying $25 for an office or conference room and having an admin in $400 stilettos bring you coffee or order your lunch is a highly motivating environment. YMMV.
This book is currently out of copyright (published 1910):

http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf
What do you mean a misspelling of a rodent has nothing to do with travel search?... umm... yes... good point.
Okay, but they do offer it, do they not? Or they simply won't show your ads? Then why do they have CPA ads for paid apps?
Actually, at least the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does apply to them.
I can get a twin-card for my phone so it's tied to the same subscription and I don't have an iPad. In that case, it makes very much sense to me to be able to use that twin SIM-card somewhere useful.

It may not fit your needs, but in the parts of the world where 3G is way more ubiquitous than wifi, it's very neat having. And it's extra neat to have without the need to bring up the phone and setting up tethering.

Dell offers it as an option, just like everything else. I fail to see why Apple can't do the same.
I can imagine her taking cash but what would she plant?
>The companies enjoy a relatively stable environment: roads, power grid, and security do to US soldiers willing to risk their lives. In my mind it's perfectly acceptable to make them play by certain rules.

This line of reasoning can be used to justify the majority forcing the minority to do literally anything. Your claim is that their reliance on society trumps one of their fundamental human rights. Do you really find that acceptable?
What you described is not what we mean by the term "instruction level parallelism." Yes, it is parallelism that involves instructions, but it is not ILP. Instruction level parallelism (ILP), data level parallelism (DLP) and task (sometimes thread) level parallelism (TLP) are all orthogonal. I can have data level parallelism that is not at the instruction level.
> That requires professors to be much "tougher" than they often like to be.

In my case, students were being failed (actually, given 0 credit) because the solutions to the exams wouldn't compile. That's pretty tough, I think. Especially for CS 101.
What you're looking for is called coworking space... there are plenty of places that do it (especially in SF). Usually the rates are monthly, but I'm sure if you called and asked at a place you could get a 2 week price. Just give a search on google or yelp, you should get dozens of results.
According to this tweet they are up:

https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/39911086518050816
Totally agreed on ditching optical media. I'm also wondering when they'll get around to adding mobile broadband support.
The complaint is that his buzzwords are not getting published. Google Adultery, the addwords add is for a competitor...just the issue he's complaining of.
Gradual castration victim or easy pickpocket victim? Tradeoffs, tradeoffs...
> A mass boycott isn't out of order.

Okay, I'll boycott Paypal and use... oh wait, no alternatives :(
$20 says it was Intel's idea.
I noticed you included planetmath in your list of encyclopedias. They used to be an excellent source for definitions and theorems in pure math. But for the past 3 years, their search has been broken and their rendering has been slow (each page view lands on a yucky page of unrendered typesetting syntax, which is replaced by a blank page for more than a few seconds before some 'jsmath' plugin does something?). They hemorrhaged most of their users during that period. I found some notes from their board meetings, and they've know about these issues, they discuss them continually, but they've done nothing for 3 years. It's really sad, because it could have been an alternative to wikipedia for pure mathematicians.

Another hidden gem for academic mathematics is york university's ask a topologist: http://at.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/bbqa . Regulars on this forum routinely answer and discuss graduate and research level questions (in algebra and geometry too, not just topology).
MySpace Music hurting, loses President
How to frustrate developers and alienate teams
You make good points. This process would always be a two-way street, though. Nobody would ever be able to land a job just by having an interesting RescueTime profile. And I'd argue that, for some jobs, coming up with a way to hack this system would be more than enough justification for hiring that person. :)
QuaDror, a New Structural Joint to Build On
Can you substantiate your claim that this is a fabrication?

Are the quotes from Rand's journals where she idolizes Hickman fabrications?
I would like to point out that the whole WikiLeaks saga is more hacker-ish than the average article on, say, the minimum wage; also, PayPal is quite relevant to the many small-ish businesses here.

Yes, it's not exactly on-topic, but we've seen far worse.
How we choose to act in the absence of treaties or guidelines says a lot more about us than it does about inalienable human rights.
The effort given to discredit Rand is surprising. What about her makes people behave so?
Some entrepreneurs also deal in cat pictures.
Don't know any specifics but have some doctor friends in Silicon Valley. It seems like it's a healthy job market for physicians.
Intel details Thunderbolt as exclusive to Apple until 2012
I would re-purpose the apps for other platforms that are easier to monetize. Specifically, I'd make it a monetized app on Conduit.com and I'd make a smart phone version and sell it on GetJar.com.
FreeBSD 7.4 was also released concurrently.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.4R/announce.html
The linked article is naive as to GC algorithms used in current Java VM's. These go to a lot of trouble to avoid tracing or scanning the heap. Card marking (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11253/#2...) is one way to avoid this cost. As to building something like memcached, you can use native memory directly using direct byte buffers in Java; this is essentially what Terracota BigMemory (http://www.terracotta.org/bigmemory) does.
A which point they'll call it Lightning? Nah, too obvious :)
*Any language that can reference memory locations directly.
It's not easy to game in that a lot of the data relies on proportionate comparisons (i.e. time spent in .py files vs. time spent in .java files or on IM). Not only that, but there'll be a level of human interaction involved. If we were going to vouch for a candidate, I'd want to at least look at why we were vouching for them myself, or have someone else audit that conclusion. At this point we're pretty familiar with (and have a lot of reference points for) what a real human usage profile looks like. To your point about the lines of code problem, really the only thing we can do is provide a filtered list of people who we'd be sure spent a certain amount of their time in the technology areas companies are looking to hire in.
As work is currently so busy I reckon I only visit 3 sites, HN, Twitter and Engadget.

It's rare I go to any others, expect via links from the above...
Apologies for incorrect wording. Am I able to edit the title?
How Doctors Think: Listening can be a matter of life/death
It would probably be a net negative for the Banshee project. Ubuntu wants Banshee to be the default player because of the quality of the software, not the name. I don't think they'd mind being forced to rename it UbuntuTunes.
Should corporations have human rights? A human can get imprisoned for committing a crime. A corporation cannot. It seems only fair they don't get human rights.
An emerging data management architectural pattern behind web applications
YC. That explains how they have access to Instant Personalization. Such a huge advantage for an ad network. Totally reminds me why I disabled Instant Personalization in Facebook.
And just to add the SDHN wiki page http://bit.ly/sdhackernews
Ecmascript 262, 3rd edition, section 7.6
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

"This standard specifies one departure from the grammar given in the Unicode standard: The dollar sign ($) and the underscore (_) are permitted anywhere in an identifier. The dollar sign is intended for use only in mechanically generated code."

It was removed (or I can't find it) in 5th edition. Also, I can't find a reference for underscore.
I know at least 2 such Apple customers. It's an Apple, it's good enough, and that's all that matters to them; specs are the last things they care about.
Not that it hasn't been possible strictly due to lack of a suitable interconnect technology, but I wonder if this could facilitate using your mobile device as a sort of "personality module" that could plug into a monitor with a built-in graphics chip and maybe some additional processing power (accessed via OpenCL).

Obviously the OS would have a long way to go to support that kind of thing, but I would be surprised if in five years your typical "home directory" isn't either entirely cloud-based or uses a scheme like this.
When such a thing happens, initiate a chargeback through your bank. Additionally federal (US) regulations limit your out of pocket expenses of fraud to $50.
Find All The Broadband Options At Any Street Address
also it must be easier to upgrade just the add-on instead of the whole browser
Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church on Live Talk Show
Rackspace Cloud launches LoadBalancing as a Service
Really useful when searching for office space or apartments. I can recall many friends who get a great lease on an office only to find they have really slow internet available for their startup.
Infographic: How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?
Clickable links:

Homepage: www.copenhagensuborbitals.com

TEDx talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua9oGxNNGd0

Submarine Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC3_Nautilus

Submarine homepage: http://www.uc3nautilus.dk/

Booster test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RT8QfVYc4

Parachute test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_W_g878EdY
Awesome. Thank you. :)
I think it's right because I got through using Mathematica's MIP solver http://bit.ly/fr7YXu
Just FYI, the point of an active investor is not to accumulate wealth, but to _concentrate_ wealth.

Divide the amount of money index-investors earned by the number of these investors and compare the resulting amount, by the "per-capita" earnings of the hedge fund managers.

Why am I even telling you this?!

I really only have read your piece under the assumption, that as an ambitious marketing professional, you had made a bet with a friend of yours, that you can make the financiers of this world buy-in a marxist-leninist philosophy, by playing on their natural greed ("that damn Joe Six-Pack earned more than I did with my Ivy-League education! The nerve!").

Otherwise I'm leaving Hacker News to start my own private investment consultancy firm.
I have roughly 8-10 sites I visit regularly (probably driven by the tiles my Chrome homepage). When I find something particularly interesting though, my browsing becomes much more on the "exploration expedition" side. Kind of like this: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/10/21/an_unexpect...
My team did a workshop on wireframing user interfaces today, this is the result
The Echo Nest Partners with Island Def Jam Music to Launch First Major Label API
My work provided me with a 13" MacBook Pro and I hate how the display is only 1280 by 800. When we get our new budget I am hoping I can get an upgrade to a 15" with the hi-res display, but we shall see.

My MacBook Pro 15" from a couple of years ago has a 1440 by 900 display and that is MUCH better than this 1280 by 800. Shame that Apple still thinks that is acceptable.
> But it's missing some stuff, what have you found?

The bottom line is, we didn't.

Most of these business admin services seem to offer little more than a very simple database, a pretty UI, and a monthly bill. We write software for a living ourselves, so producing an in-house bug tracker or CRM system or project dashboard takes a matter of hours, maybe a few days if we add more power to it later. It's only worth outsourcing the tools if the relatively small amount of time it saves us outweighs the many downsides: time lost to set up and maintain an external system, monthly cash cost to use it, having to fit our process around their tool instead of the other way around, interoperability issues if tools have related purposes but data is locked in, relying on external infrastructure for access, etc. etc.

That is only going to happen if the outsourced service offers a silky smooth set-up process, a tool that can be readily adjusted to our exact needs and still present a streamlined UI to match, immediate and convenient access to all the underlying data, and very low pricing, among other things. That's a pretty tall order, and frankly, none of the services we looked at seemed to be anywhere close.

We do use external software to run things like mail and web servers, but it's standard stuff running on our own boxes.

We are also looking at external services for tasks that are much more difficult/expensive to implement ourselves, such as payment processing and off-site back-up.

But for basic business admin, things like bug tracking, project planning, CRM and the like, we concluded that it wasn't even worth looking at the freebie software projects that do it. In the time it would take to properly evaluate a few of them and determine whether they could meet our needs, plus the time to customise them to do so, we could have just written exactly what we wanted from scratch.
I upgraded the resolution on my X61t to 1400x1050 on a 12" display.

"Retina display"? Hah.
By reporting what Microsoft is saying in their marketing literature, I'm neither advocating what they say is true, nor am I saying the work referred to in the article is a copy of their efforts. Evidently, you jumped to some conclusion like this. I am merely commenting on the behavior of their marketers. As a long time observer of the tech industry, I always find the behavior of marketers interesting, though not always in pleasant ways.

(I think it's wise to pay attention to how such forces change language.)
I disagree. He's just saying that the speed difference doesn't currently matter, not that it never will. The battle for adoption is fought based on today's usefulness, not tomorrow's (in most cases).
I seriously doubt it will hurt universities. The fact is, to accomplish anything mainstream, you are still 'required' to have a degree. You can certainly accomplish a lot without it, but the barrier to entry is increased significantly without one.

There are of course exceptions, i.e, most technology jobs and on the opposite side; medicine.
BitC maybe (if it ever reaches a stable 1.0 release):
http://www.bitc-lang.org/

Cyclone would be another candidate:
http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/

Cilk would be another interesting option, with its built-in support for concurrency:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-cilk-plus/
Things People Don’t Say About Web Apps
No Deposit Bingo Sites
One thing I haven't seen mentioned about retargeting is that it can also keep potential customers from seeing competitors' ads for a few days after visiting your site.
Motorola's zippy Xoom zap rivals as iPad 2 hovers
(One hour and no comments yet. Intimidating.)

This seems like a great idea with benefits for both sides. I haven't messed with too many APIs yet but are they the first to use POST requests this way?

I'll definitely try and hack something later tonight as I don't own an iPhone and would like to keep up with friends' instragr.am updates.
> if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome.

It doesn't. "*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."
we are currently trying out http://crossloop.com and we like it so far
Thank you for this reminder.
There is an ExpressCard/34 slot on the 17" MBPs, and there isn't really room for one on the 15" and smaller sizes.
The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop. Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better because of the new interface changes.

The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS.

Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms.

So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data.

The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.
This Is Why You Should Invest In Mobile Apps
You see this phenomenon in Rock Climbing quite clearly. There are only maybe 30 guys in the world who have climbed routes graded French 9a+ or harder. Of those, more than half are from a tiny region in Spain.

You might think that this is some weird genetic thing going on, but if you go there to investigate you'll notice something strange: your climbing improves. A lot.

Suddenly you're thrown into a world where climbing 8a (a lifetime goal for most dedicated sport climbers) is something that pretty much everybody does, often within only a year or two of starting out. Your concept of what is "hard" changes, and suddenly it doesn't seem so outrageous to get on a route that should be way over your head. It gets in your blood. You train harder. You climb harder. Just because you're there.

It's not a fluke of grading, either. You can take that ability you gained back to your home crag and demonstrate for yourself that it's real by polishing off projects that you'd been working on for years. Then you can watch it fade away over the course of maybe half a year as you slip back into climbing with your old crowd.