skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked as a cold-call telesales rep between the ages of 19 and 21.

If you have a product targeting SMEs, then I would highly recommend you consider cold-calling. It's cheap, fast, highly effective and every owner/manager of such a business is used to fielding these calls.

I was able to consistently secure my employers £1k-£2k of business per week, selling a pretty mundane (non-tech) product. Not figures on their own that will make anybody a millionaire, but any early-stage startup should kill for that revenue.

Selling to larger businesses is more difficult and time-consuming, because it's rare/impossible to be able to get an instant decision over the phone. But it may still be worthwhile to try.

Making the calls is quite hard work. I crafted a rough script, but as I practiced more I'd deviate increasingly from it: it's important to sound friendly, confident and non-robotlike. And you've got to have a pretty thick skin, and accept that some days will be relatively barren. On the other hand, it's a great buzz when you get a few sales in a row :)

Good luck
Good point. "A reward for determining the most liked of the two movies" probably would not fly.
I think you could do it, but unless you are funding it through some other means, it's not going to be able to get very big.

What defines Commercial? If I have a website for my side project and I ask for donations, is that considered commercial?
How about a website that will aid in classifying your something as either a nothing, project or a startup?

OK. I think I've just found my new startup. YC look out!
Yes. Cold calling is part of b2b sales.
Will Mar 19 'Supermoon' trigger natural disasters?
I respect your opinion. However, I would say I WAS disillusioned - but no longer.
Upvote/downvote isn't meant to be agree/disagree, but rather something like insightful/irrelevant.
If the tasks were things the company needed directly, they'd be accused of trying to get people to 'work for free'.
The Apple iPad 2 Review
This looks pretty great, I'll definitely keep an eye on it. Thanks :)
If someone gets violent or even offended because of what I call something I worked on for a couple days and threw on the web, then I'd say they've got the bigger problem.
Agreed. I think the fundamental underlying error is not having a reason why a particular elements is fixed or full width.

If you can answer the question "why did you go with a full width header and a fixed width body?", you're probably OK (unless that answer is something like "well, the theme I downloaded from themeforest was fixed width, but the client insisted I use their old header in the new design, so I just mashed it into the template...")

Like most "design errors", I think what the author of e article is ranting about is designs that aren't fully though out - if you've asked yourself the questions "fixed or full width, or both?", "what sized fonts should the forms have?", "how much of the site it going to be long enough to scroll, and do the scroll bars behaviour need to be considered in the design?", then you won't have made these errors, or at least will have good reasons why they are not "errors" but behaviours you chose.
YC has repeatedly said they care much more about the founding team than the idea. It's a sound principle. A strong team is probably the minimum you need.

Just apply. Don't disqualify yourself. It doesn't take long and you have nothing to lose. But your expectations shouldn't be too high, especially after posting something like this.

BTW, I have no idea what OPAAS does. Maybe that's the problem.
It should be noted that up to 4,000 microSieverts was measured near the plants. Measurements have been in the 3,000 mSV range. That's over the 2K mSV "severe radiation poisoning" level cited in the chart
What's the difference between now and then?

As an entrepreneur, you're going to get rejected over and over again. Why should that change how you approach potential future rejections? As investors, YCombinator wants to see that you won't give up in the face of setbacks...you are now giving up in the face of setbacks. The value of a YCombinator investment does not change depending on whether they have chosen you or not. Why has your decision whether to pursue it changed?

(Full disclosure: I've been rejected 4 times from YCombinator. Also rejected from FriendFeed, LikeALittle, Twitter, and Harvard. Stupidly passed up DropBox. Accepted by Amherst and Google. My opinion of any of them has not changed based on whether or not they rejected me. I haven't applied to YC since SFP08, but that's because my interests at present lie more in technology than in startups, and other opportunities have been available to me in that area. That does not mean I would not apply to YC again should I have a burning desire to start a company.)
Can't seem to edit my post but I remembered what my issue was. I was having trouble, at the time, getting it to work properly with RVM. I don't know if it was something I did wrong or if it was an actual issue. I will investigate tomorrow when I get back to work on the project.
I'd add that it didn't succeed in creating it's own subculture. Yes, it was very popular back in the day and lots of people were excited about 'digging', but censoring content and alienating specific communities didn't let them create something Reddit did - a loyal fanbase using their product in various different ways. Redditors identify themselves with the site, while being diversified among various sub-communities of interest - that's awesome. Also, opposed to Digg, Reddit gives the choice to be anonymous - throwaway accounts are what drive one of the most successful subreddits - IAmA.

Digg vs Reddit is an interesting case, where a technically similar idea is implemented in a socially different way.
A post about... Programming? This isn't the HN I know!

Good post. I need to ruminate on this some more but it might well apply to something I'm working on.
At one of my old jobs, some of the other employees jokingly referred to me as "the master of the arcane."

Any time they had a problem they couldn't figure out, they'd come to me and ask me to help with it.

My trick was to listen to their problem and then go take a walk. Our office was in a nice area with plenty of sidewalks. So, I'd get the details of the problem and then go take a walk for about a half hour while I thought about the issue.

After the walk I was able to sit down and my computer and implement whatever weird thing it was.

These days I do work from home (freelance) so I find myself pacing around my house while trying to figure out something odd. I think I've worn a groove in the grass at this point.

It really does do wonders for the brain.
And so, we're now involved in three wars.
SXSW Pokes: 50 stories about making a ruckus [pdf]
Top 100 Socially Networked Cities in the U.S.
I agree. There's times where you need a debugger and there's times where you don't. Learning to recognize those situations are valuable, in my opinion.

Sometimes good old pen and paper is the best solution when you find yourself getting into a bind. Other times, stepping through the code and watching what happens to the data/memory is the way to go.
Meta side note: Why is this not on the front page? It has more upvotes, more comments, and was posted more recently than several things that are, I don't see a [dead] next to it, and yet it's sitting at #67.
And once democracy hits $120/barrel Iran as well
The funny part is that quite a lot of us out here wouldn't mind "failing" at Digg's current traffic levels.
It looks like pretty minimal chance of ground involvement, though. If airstrikes count as a war, we've been at war with Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. way before 9/11.
M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye
Why does he mention .NET? I have not heard of Clojure being available on the .NET stack.
Does that mean you'd consider joining them if they asked you to? Also, given the concerns expressed at [1], once you get a healthy dev team would you guys look into maintaining redditOSS a little more thoroughly? I imagine personnel shortage has made that impossible to date, but if you had a sizeable group is that something you'd do?

[1]http://www.deserettechnology.com/journal/reddit-the-open-sou...
It failed? Last I checked the jury is still out.
iRobot also makes robots for applications like IED clearing:

http://www.irobot.com/gi/ground/510_PackBot
There seems to be a certain air of pride and vengeance spilling through here. Which is fine, and can certainly be a motivating force, but it's an "attitude" if I ever saw one. I'd know, I was once like this, too.

But as has been mentioned countless times, YC cares about founders, not ideas. And if you come across as someone that will be difficult to work with, it will make any business transaction (funding not excepted) that much less pleasant and that much less likely to happen.
I can't help but be reminded of the Team America film.

Like most South Park material it seemed crude and ridiculous on the surface, but underneath the surface its sadly accurate.
If that is a big problem, pass secrets as environment variables. These are getting passed and read anyway.
"Maybe it’s time to move on from the Commodore 64 software"
Articles that don't include a link (like ask hn for example) require more velocity to hit the front page.
That sounds like a very 1990s dot-com boom mentality.
This will be over quickly. The US involvement will probably be limited to a supporting role (missiles, not planes). We probably wouldn't be involved at all, but come election time, it wouldn't look good if Libya was "liberated" and the current administration did nothing.
SSD still costs US$2-US$4 per gigabyte. Spinning rust costs US$0.10-US$0.20 per gigabyte. SSDs are much faster but disks are still twenty times bigger at the same price. A developer hour costs on the order of US$100. If your service uses more than a few gigabytes per developer hour, it's worth some development time to optimize for rotating disks. Whether it's worth increased time to market is harder to calculate.
If you think the US went into Iraq for oil, you should also bear in mind that it would have been cheaper to buy oil on the open market than wage war for an extended period of time. Just my two cents. $120/barrel isn't high enough to go to war over.
Reading that article I could almost hear Steve Jobs over my shoulder saying, "I told you so."
Yeah, SSDs are going to totally kill 15krpm disks. But killing disks in general is a ways off. In fact, disks might actually be getting cheaper per bit faster than SSDs are.
Given how selective joshu claims to be in hiring, would be surprised if he turned down a developed who requested a mac pro and 3 x 24" or 30" monitors for both home and office, in addition to a macbook pro or macbook air.

A $20k pimped out setup or two is still less than a recruiter would charge, and hopefully about the same as the value of a developer's work to the company in 1 week.

I think Asana has the right idea, just letting people pick whatever they want within a $10k or so budget. There is some value in having commonality (spare parts, support, chargers), and I'd be surprised if anyone wanted anything except Apple or Lenovo laptops and high-end desktops with big monitors.
I wonder if it's more than that, and the formula was changed lately. "U.S. Missiles Strike Libya", 9 points 33 minutes ago and a link to NYTimes.com, is now at #67, while this is at #46. It used to be that 3-4 points (albeit at non-primetime) was enough to get an article onto the front page.
First job was creating the web presence of a newspaper.

saw all that. same thing. 10yrs old CMS when i was there in 1999... BUT in 2001 the new ombudsman started with his op-ed column talking how much he hated that not a single journalist moved his butt off his chair. There's no journalism going on. every editor just sit there, waiting for reuters or, god forbid, the TV, to bring in the news. Everyone just trying to hit ctrl+v faster than the competition. One smaller 'portal' even used to copy our news and stamp an hour earlier on the top... fun times.

In the end... the fact that the CMS is old and all means nothing, i completely failed to see the relation you tried to make. the fact is that people think that good journalism is the guy that press ctrl+v faster. so newspapers gives you that. Nobody wants source to have to read even more. They just want to know that wine is good for the heart. And the first one to publish it is the best newspaper.
I'm not sure we can say it 'failed' as it was a pioneer of many sites today. It's also still very strong going and could easily sort out its mess.

To me, the major reason I got annoyed with it was the 'mob'. You had this constant mob of people linking the same 'top 10 things something rather'. It became a sensational headline front-page with no substance and no soul.
Please reread my post in context to the post I was replying to. That should help you understand. Also, it is not about rejection. As I mentioned, in my original post, most successful people fail, on average 6 times first, let alone simply get rejected by a potential investor before they have their big success. Rejection is part of the road the road to success. Also, if you took away from my post that I am giving up, I probably could have been clearer. I am not giving up. I am not even giving up on investors. I am just staying clear of "micro-investors." Simply put, the time spent to present yourself the way micro investors want you to is simply not worth it in my opinion. If you are a programmer, the "special case" is not worth it :) The time is better spent working on the product/service/company. It is just a business decision.
A developer who can match his peers without using a debugger while they do, is clearly a superior developer. This should be intuitively obvious.

It's just the catalyzing power of the internet that drives people to the extreme of insisting one should never, ever use a debugger. Or a plane.
Idea is neat but the post is a bit mr
meta no?
In most cases, those plugins are there because some other app put them there, not because they're actually used. The most notable exception is probably Silverlight for Netflix.
The Marian Steinbach blog entry "Japan Radiation Open Data" referenced in the article has solid raw data links.
Which is currently sitting at 1.1B : 1.
On September 11, 2001, the Libyan government condemned the attacks against the United States. In 2004, the US ended economic sanctions against Libya; only crypto/munitions-related sanctions remained. In 2006, the US restored full diplomatic relations with Libya. In 2007, Libya was elected to serve on the United Nations Security Council for two years.

Today we're at war... How times change.
turn off the built in flash for chrome in "about:plugins" and leave flash from macromedia on and it works fine.
OPaaS is "Open Platform as a Service." Just think "Platform as a Service" but open.

Yes, there are some good solid principles at Y Combinator. I agree. To apply in a way I think is thorough, takes at least 8 hours of work - a day's work. That's doing the videos and providing cogent responses to all the questions. Sure you can do it in 20 minutes if you want to rush through, but I don't do that.

Now a day's work is not a great amount. However, the problem is that it is a "special case" application that really can't be reused. Y Combinator wants you to tailor an in-depth presentation for them. That's fine. More power to them. However, it says something to me that in return they offer zero feedback. Zero.
You can say it ain't so - for a price
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
how did you work out deals with local restaurants. Whats the deal structure ?
It's all about getting large groups of people. If the largest groups think you've failed, you've failed.
I think we are on the same page. In this particular article I was referring to the paragraph regarding paging results which is ancillary to the main point.
if you burn less coal you put less shit into the air, right?
I know this would slow down your integration tests and complicate them, but wouldn't you want to avoid mocking twitter this way to actually test that your site is integrating properly with the service? Mocking obviously has its place, but I'd avoid it if possible for end to end testing like this.
The secret of success (Google Translate from Portuguese)
Edmonton's like Calgary, but with all the cold periods extended :D.
Obligatory reference to Gödel, Escher and Bach.

(For the record, I do understand this article explores a different mathematical aspect of Escher than Hofstadter)
> Ever hear of John C Dvorak?

Come on. The man is endless fun. We used to have a copy of "Dvorak Predicts" at the office. Just about every page it was opened had something that gave us a good laugh.

edit: http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Predicts-Insiders-Computer-Indu...
Apple's Safari Browser Gives Search Marketers Headaches
Thank you for this. Can't wait to start reading the book he recommended, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It.

Marvin Minsky said in his influential paper Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence that "everyone should know the work of George Pólya on how to solve problems." - Wikipedia
First iteration of twitter was a side "project" that was built in an afternoon. End of argument.
It's interesting to read that 'collusion' to game the system is one Digg's weak links. Many crowd-sourcing sites face the same issue. My guess is that dealing with collusion requires balance between absolute crowd-sourcing vs. some oligarchy. A balance which can be left to the user.
Sorry for being unclear. I was referring to:

> Americans move much more frequently than people in most other countries.

That fact may be true, but my point is that it may hide the effects of uncontrolled-for variables
Minor nitpick: Linux is copyright protected, much like most of open-source. It's the copyright that keeps GPL products GPL'ed and open.
If you've been working at something for three years and have not shipped anything yet, you're not at a startup.

This is a perfect example of the anti-lean "startup", though, so I'm sure you've learned a lot about what not to do.

I would leave for sure. Wether you choose a safe desk job at a megacorp or at an actual startup this time around is your choice. Just keep in mind that real startups ship, iterate and learn. Constantly.
How come Digg still has a lot of hits despite a slow decreasing huge audience and virtually no participation from such audience?
A better strategy would be to cap your time investment to something you are comfortable with.
With the amount of traffic that Digg had I don't see that as failing.

What was the harm of leaving it up anyway? (my apologies in advance for not following the changes with Digg)
"All it needed to do was..."

I stopped reading right there.

Hindsight is 20/20 and this kind of talk really trivializes how difficult it is to successfully execute - especially over an evolving landscape of 6 years.
Las 4 Claves para gestionar tu dinero y dejar de trabajar a los 40
Whether behavior is good or bad is independent of the law.
Discovery of these communities though is hard. Unless you are particularly looking for a community (Maybe /r/sc2 or something). you don't really have any tools to successfully find them. Most people still subscribe to the main default subreddits reddit provides. Just an issue with having subreddits without the appropriate tool to discover them.
I don't think the screw that held my lawnmower wheel on went through several hardening processes. It might have been heat-treated to strengthen it, but I think typically you don't harden machine screws. Corrosion resistance, sure, it might have been galvanized or something. (But I doubt it.) The lawnmower wheel falling off as I pushed the mower did not constitute a "huge failure."

I think I adequately addressed the "increased costs and decreased performance, so no one will buy it" objection in my original comment. :)
If you define "luminary" ideas as those that aren't based on any previous ideas, then it's almost a given that none exist. Even when an idea is the logical next step, it can still be game-changing for those clever or lucky enough to realize it.
Did La France actually do a better job defending freedom than the U.S.? Whoa, the world has changed... that's like the U.S. leading France in croissants and afternoon sex.
I wonder what "clearly linked to increased cancer risk" actually means.

I don't have any idea whether that means it's more or less dangerous than, say, smoking.
Indeed. It wasn't so long ago that Apple had "failed." Maybe the new leadership will turn things around.

The founder doesn't have to come back (as Steve Jobs did at Apple); look up what happened with IBM starting in 1993 (when they brought in Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. as the new CEO).
> once you get a healthy dev team would you guys look into maintaining redditOSS a little more thoroughly? I imagine personnel shortage has made that impossible to date, but if you had a sizeable group is that something you'd do?

Yes, very much. We would like to make the open source software MUCH easier to run, so that it is easier for others to develop on. It will probably be one of the first projects for a new hire, because it will make it easier for THEM to develop too.
Using /all/ means subs appear to front page if a thread is popular enough. Far more better than the /random/ sub feature that looks in the whole set instead of the popular ones.
Some Japanese water supplies, food, farms contaminated with radiation
My databases professor at my university once brought up Jim Gray's data latency analogy to illustrate the costs of using different types of storage. Basically it goes something like this:

Using a register is like interacting with information in your own brain, using an L1 cache is like walking to a bookshelf in the room you're in, using an L2 cache is like walking across campus, using RAM is like going to Sacramento (we were in Berkeley), hitting the disk is like going to Pluto, and using tape drives is like going to Andromeda.

I never fully registered the consequences of hitting disk until then.
How do I get a Facebook app developed?
I haven't the chops (nor the time!) to get a Facebook app developed. I am technical and can guide and manage a project. How can a find a solid developer who can build a Facebook app for me?

I'm based out of the SF Bay Area.
this is a great story. whether it's fact or fiction, it's riveting
But with some significant technical advantages. That said, I'd like to shamelessly point out 2 articles I wrote (one before digg v4 launched and the other after) that sum up why I think reddit has triumphed in social news (and with only one programmer at the moment no less!).

http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...

I'm also a bit sad this article refers to these sites as social bookmarking -- delicious is/was the canonical one of those (where the byproduct of everyone storing their bookmarks online was a glimpse into good content being saved for later). Something like 1/3 of all reddit submissions are self-posts anyway (they don't link anywhere but to a reddit comments page) so the 'social bookmarking' classification is all the more absurd...
(I misspoke and said "profits" --- they were profitable, but not so spectacularly --- when I meant revenue. Sorry.)
I find that getting exercise really helps me think through tough problems.

Related anecdote: I heard that Seymore Cray used to dig holes in his backyard when he was trying to think through engineering problems and that his peers used to joke that he would end up getting killed by a cave in.
Inertia? Try taking a break from a website you visit at least once a day. It's really difficult.
Or smart detection. :)
> it's really worth treating them well.

> Showing up on-time for your appointment, not being a pain if they have a backlog and you have to wait a few minutes

Sweet juicy Jesus, that's not treating them well - that's just the bare standard minimum expected behavior, isn't it?