skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just suggested the first exercise from there as something the OP might try out. :)
The whole Kenyon speech is good material. The kind of commencement speech everyone wishes they'd had. (I don't recall word one that Raymond Lane said at mine.)

The parts of it about traffic come to mind /every day/ I'm on the way home. Especially: "In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible... that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way."
Also, of course, working regular hours makes it easier for managers to compare one employee's performance against another, which unfortunately they have to do sooner or later if they're to fairly decide who gets paid what.
- "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as other mentioned here

- join a Toastmaster's club. practice your speaking and presentation skills.

- meetup.com is a great way to meet people with common interests in your local area
I'm also shy. I don't know of any instruction manuals, but I'll offer a tip. When you go to the next hacker meetup, sit down next to someone and immediately introduce yourself. Maybe that's the end of the conversation, maybe it's just the beginning, but forcing yourself to verbalize with someone at the start of the event will make it easier from then on. It's also likely that the person you sit next to is just as shy as you and me.
I strongly believe that the best path to changing yourself is experience (and screwing up), and that no book can help you be social, at least not at the speed you're looking for.

Get out there and try! You know that sinking feeling you get whenever you do something awkward? That's a feedback mechanism: don't do things that cause that. Eventually you'll find what works for you and feel comfortable introducing yourself to groups. Even then you'll occasionally have an awkward moment: that's ok! We're all nerds in our own ways, and we've all been there. Just keep moving past it and don't lose your stride (the exact same advice one would give to a dancer or musician for when they mess up).

Hackers and Founders is a great event for this: it's a really great bunch of people. Hunt down Jonathan, the organizer[1] when you get there and explain that you're new to the area and would love to chat with people interested in X, Y, or Z. He'll get you started :). It's much easier to connect with people who share similar interests. Even if you suck at it initially, practice will make you better.

Holding a drink that you can take a sip of is also a great way to avoid awkwardness. As lsb said, cranberry juice (or even water/soda) works just as well as booze.

[1] On the right: http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/6/5/4/600_168...
I like the analytics bitly gives. Noted for the future.
> I don't drink.

I hope not to offend you, but, speaking as someone who used to be very shy, I'd suggest you give it another shot (unless you're very attached to not drinking). You say you tense up and shut down in social situation -- this goes away when you have a few drinks in you. That's mostly why people drink!

You don't have to make drinking the cornerstone of your life -- just look at alcohol as training wheels for socializing. There are lots of tech meetups that happens in bars -- give it a shot!
That's a great tip, thanks! I will try it out.
Ask HN: is Google down?
6:30PM San Francisco. Google appears down.
It is up for me.
There's a similar avoidance of negative response in Arabic culture. It's hard to hear that something can't be done or is impossible to achieve, more likely someone will assure you that everything is fine and will call back, which never happens, so don't hold your breath. The reason behind it is "not to make somebody unhappy". Well, gotta love cultural differences :)
I think your point is worth making.

The technology is good, but sometimes it's not about the technology.
How would your loss compare to two years' worth of rent for a similar apartment? I pay much more rent than $15k in two years, and that's in Montreal where rent is fairly cheap.
Haha, thanks. I know, I probably wouldn't have this problem if I drank socially, but I really cannot stand the taste of alcohol. I used to drink here and there years ago, but the only drinks I liked were usually labelled "girls' drinks" and I was constantly made fun of. That probably didn't help my shyness either. But I appreciate your suggestion.
> By working at the building site, for example, you train your body and your mind to respond in constantly changing situations

You mean like most competitive sports in existence?

Your comparison is also overlooking the physical and mental aspects that are missing in everyday physical work. What you have to become both mentally and physically to deadlift 600 pounds or snatch 250 pounds cannot be emulated. It's a process that takes years and requires constantly overcoming your own fears and perceived limits. When you step under the bar and walk it out in preparation for a heavy back squat, the weight wants to drive you into the floor and you are struggling to even keep yourself standing. But now you have to squat all the way down and all the way back up, for several repetitions multiplied across several sets. That's one exercise for one day. You now have to do that several times a week, for years.
Sure, there are workbooks you can buy if you don't have access to a psychologist or therapy group. The only catch is that there is nobody to push you to go through the exercises and you won't have the benefit of external feedback from a counselor or a peer group. You'll have to force yourself to do the exercises properly and it will take longer than if you had professional help.

Anyway, here's a few workbooks I found with minimal effort. Go over the reviews to decide which to try:

http://www.amazon.com/Shyness-Social-Anxiety-Workbook-Step-/...

http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Social-Anxiety-Workbook-Cogni...

http://www.amazon.com/Shyness-Social-Anxiety-Workbook-Techni...

http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Social-Anxiety-Shyness-Beha...

I also posted this awhile ago: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2614140

That is an example of a therapy group program.
You should try reading Hayek, rather than listening only to straw men who claim to have read his books. He was well aware of information problems, externalities, etc. You might dislike the fact that he believes politicians are also subject to these problems, but he is hardly unaware of them.

If you want to see Hayek followers concerned about such issues, go read the blogs of assorted gmu economists (Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, etc).

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/require-baby-paternity...

http://havemorekidsbook.com/

Or see anyone who pushes the signalling model of education.
No. It's you.
Welcome to RIAA logic.
Thanks, I've actually read that one about a year ago and it's on my bookshelf. I think it was pretty good, but I felt it was a little outdated and the suggestions were all things I already knew.
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Is Google+ Starting to Get on Facebook's Nerves?
The point parent was making is you can't slow the induction controller problem down because it would yield a completely different output due to the instability.

Slowing down the sort of pen and paper calculation the court ruled on does not change the result, it simply yields the same result more slowly.

I still agree this is probably not a sufficient criterion for patentability though. There are plenty open loop systems that intuitively seem like they should be patentable... for example video encoding methods.
From what I've heard the google cloud infrastructure hasn't exactly been a picnic either. For now I think it's best to host your own if you can.
Seriously. Companies retain these people because they provide value despite their poor social skills. Why shouldn't they keep them, if that's the case? If only those with good social skills were employable, the workforce would be cut in half.
6:38pm Irvine, CA: Down for me too.
> But I do need some sort of help (and I think therapy is a little overkill).

One on one therapy may be overkill, but don't rule out a coach or a group. Seriously - if this is something that you find you can't overcome from practice and a book, but want to, it makes sense to seek professional help in some form. For example, Los Altos has "The Shyness Clinic": http://www.shyness.com/shyness-clinic.html. I just found it in simple searching around - I'm not endorsing them in particular.

I'm a nerd too - and there's a ton of things that I couldn't just read and practice away. In fact, our intelligence often gets in the way of our progress - overthinking can do more harm than good on many social issues that plague us nerds. It's hard to stop overthinking by studying!

I've got a ton of friends who do group dance lessons to meet people and get out of the house.

General tips:

* Smile! It'll put others at ease and it'll put you at ease too.

* Leave when you're done - don't stay just because you feel bad you haven't spent n minutes there.

* Silence is OK - if someone talks to you, it's way better to take an extra 5 seconds (which will feel like an eternity!) and then start your reply than feeling like you need to respond the split second the other person finishes. It didn't feel natural at first, but when I listen to other people it happens all the time.

* Everyone loves to talk about themselves. Tell the person you're new to the area and ask them what their favorite drive, hike, day trip, restaurant, or hot new start up is. Ask them why. Ask them anything related. They'll think you're swell and you didn't have to have any deep searching to answer their questions!

What brought you out to the Bay Area anyway? And what are your interests?
Evan Weaver, the man who helped save Twitter from its Fail Whale, has resigned
I just assumed a protocol called "over the air rekeying" would be performed "over the air". But that's just me.
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Buying stocks and even bonds is an enormously different type of investment than buying a home and investing in it.
Well my very simple solution was to look up shy people even with a different mindset. In fact, we share something. So far, it has been great and it works. It works really well. I used to have no friends at all. I started by meeting one and now we are meeting almost everyday. Now I have 4 friends and we are socializing with other peers.

Get to know people like you :)
Try to think more about the person/people you are interacting with instead of yourself.
It's very easy to complain, cast stones, etc. I don't think I've seen a benchmark on HN or reddit where many of the comments were not smug complaints. Yet, I've never seen any of the complainers produce a benchmark with the exception of zedshaw and one other person whose name I've forgotten.
But node.js doesn't have any concurrency. It's single-process, single-threaded and event driven, so by definition it's not concurrent. It's just not blocking.

Also, was someone really trying to run performance benchmarks on a shared machine running on a VM and expecting to get anything meaningful out? Really? Like really? I'm embarrassed for you.
I agree that most things called meetings today are toxic and unproductive, but gatherings in the work place that occur organically and ones that resemble group work sessions are healthy. For anyone who wants more detail on what Zach mentions regarding "the zone", breaking flow and job autonomy lookup the book Drive by Dan H. Pink. Great Post thanks!
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google.com says it's down. Up for me, Ann Arbor, MI
As has already been stated, "How to win friends and influence people" is probably your best bet. However you'd be better off finding a way to practice your skills.

A couple things to realize:
many people are lonely (like you), and like to discuss their interests. In high school I was lucky enough to discover how easy it is to break through this with a few events where no one knew more than a few people.

The habit I adopted in college, and wish would be easier to do in suburbia was going to dining halls alone, (and this does work elsewhere ... but have a book handy in case no one is interested) look for anyone who's eating alone and doesn't seem to be working or already engrossed in a book, and ask if they'd like company.

I've done it successfully the two times I've found myself with the time to do it after college, and numerous times during college. The same approach works in many large group social scenes.

Good luck. Oh, if you really want to improve things rapidly, ask if there is anyone on hackers news who is interested in helping you break through this for a free drink or meal. It might be easier if you know one or two people prior to the meetup, in order to help with introductions.
Thanks, I'll look into all of that. At this point I think I can do it myself because I'm pretty self-disciplined and once I set my mind to something I follow through. However if for some reason books aren't enough I will of course consider going to some sort of therapy group. Thanks again!
I await the death of these stupid "WELL WHY DON'T YOU MANUFACTURE YOUR OWN CAR!?" responses.
Worked great for Rome. Oh wait...

Drat, Joshua Northey in the freakonomics comments already pointed that out.
It's not that different than an app store, youtube, itunes, etc. where there's virtually no barrier to entry. Most of it will suck, but so far we've done a decent job of separating the wheat from the chaff. The only thing that would worry me about books is how much longer it takes to review them compared to the other forms of media I mentioned. That will result in smaller sample sizes on reviews and a less accurate picture.
I feel this way every time i finish and 'ship' a project, especially when submitting an app to the app store. I'm like 'this'll never get approved, its rubbish, who'd want to buy it, stick to your day job...'

But, i submit anyway, and people end up buying the apps, and i never get an email asking for a refund, so i guess its just all in my head!

I guess the lesson is to ignore the cynics, even when the cynic is yourself.
Ah, the venerable cranberry. Bounce berries. Alone, so bitter. Almost inedible. But with a bit of work.... When I was young we'd buy huge glass bottles of cranberry juice. Let it ferment. Good stuff. Frozen cranberry juice (alcoholic or not) makes for a nice snack, too.

Drinking cranberry juice at a bar has a nice side benefit: Whenever someone asks what you're drinking, you can play the vampire card. "The blood of my enemies." If you're exceedingly pale like myself, and can deliver a line, it can make skin crawl. (OK, so maybe that's not the idea... or the best approach.)

The advice is good, though - just because you don't or can't drink alcohol, does not mean you can't hang out in (most) bars. There are many regular things used to mix drinks they'll gladly sell you.
CCapt America US Soccer Dunk High Tops Football Shield Pattern
I am using Google Docs with a simple form for daily input. Entries are automatically timestamped and the Google Docs trend chart works quite well for this kind of data.
"I wish you wouldn't do that in public"
Nonprofits are Required to Pay Taxes in California
Ask HN: best ways to recreate that college environment
I have a great group of friends from college who were generally willing to discuss anything in an entertaining and in depth manner. Unfortunately they are now scattered across the east coast (mostly).

I was wondering if anyone has found a good way of recreating that, and would be willing to share.

Oh, I'm in the Philly area, if anyone else is interested in following up on the ideas.
It was somewhat overloaded a few minutes ago, but I just upgraded the instance and it's a lot more responsive now. Hopefully that holds it.
Yeah, but non-developers who manage to install iOS 5 probably haven't actually signed the NDA.

The funny thing is as a developer you're not even allowed to mention in your description that something in your app is broken on iOS 5, since that would be breaking the NDA.
I spent a couple years as a tour manager(baby sitting bands on the road) and this write up seems a little naive.

Not because it isn't ridiculous that BMI wants that money, but because I've been in a handful of bars with walls COVERED in letters from ASCAP. This isn't new or uncommon. A mix CD can get you in a lot of trouble.
http://www.succeedsocially.com/

This guy has written a lot about this topic. I find his material very readable.
That looks suspiciously like my beard, for which I have just filed a patent application.
I pointed this out the last time this came up, but an additional measure would be to also crack down on sites that sell access to iOS betas, if they aren't doing that already. That would (likely) drastically reduce the number of non-developers running beta OSes since isn't it $100/year for a developer account, but you can install betas on many devices? There are sites selling access for less than $10. If it's not against the TOS of the developer accounts, it definitely should be.
I have found that doing a class in theatrical improv to be a fantastic exercise for removing social inhibition and gaining skills in group dynamics.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm seriously considering joining a toastmaster's club, I'm just worried that having to prepare speeches every week would be a ton of work that I don't have much time for. But if that's what it takes to get me over this I'll do it.
Foot ball betting
http://www.isup.me/www.google.com

Although it's working for me.
I started this thread pointing out how silly is the idea that phone makers will invest money in a product that has been, so far, a failure (because, let's face it, the general public doesn't want it) from a company that is doing patent extortion with them, that already has a partnership (and that's quite an understatement) with a huge competitor - Nokia - just because the largest contributor to the open-source software you use bought one of your competitors, despite the fact it has, repeatedly, stated the acquired company will operate as a separate business and will not enjoy privileged status. Ignoring the fact that now Google has 17000+ more patents to defend its partners against extortion.

And don't forget, even desperate as it was, Nokia wouldn't have gone WP7 without the billion or so Microsoft paid them.

I mentioned WebOS just to point out it's slick too. Sadly, this has not translated well in sales.

There may be some more WP7 phones in the future, but I am quite sure it's not because companies fear Motorola will enjoy preferred partner status.
Android 95.2% market share in South Korea
Excellent, thanks. I'll look into it.
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How about building a minivan or something else that will actually sell en masse?

And leave the "Zoot suite shoulders" off of it, while you're at it. (Regarding the recent "brickification" of U.S. auto designs. Together with shrinking windows, some of them look like rolling pill boxes.)
Viral start up looking for technical co-founder
We are a angel funded start up in Los Angeles California, we have outsourced most of our development but we are looking for some one experienced in php/mysql (back end) to come in as a co-founder.

We need to scale our application, we are currently hosting our application on amazon cloud and we do have the potential to exceed 1 million registered users in the matter of a few months with the right technical co-founder.

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It seems like they have a subset of the features that we have created in Lose It! and they are clearly going for simplicity.

Lose It! is a little more complex(?) in the sense we do full food and exercise tracking. But I do still have some insights into the observations they have written about.

We offer reminders to log your food if you have done so far today. Users can pick the time and then we use iOS notifications to remind them, similar to the way they remind users to log their weight. Tis feature is iOS only, no Android or web only version of it. If you compare users with reminders enabled to users without reminders enabled we see users with reminders enabled lose 1.8 more pounds. (8.4 vs 6.6lbs)

However there are two other observations that we see from the Lose it! base. First, weighing yourself daily is stressful. People get down on themselves all the time because they gained weight from one day to the next when they thought they were doing good. This is because people fluctuate weight so much day to day based on so many factors. Most users on the forums always recommend only weighing yourself once a week. We also had to build in a buffer range for users once they hit their goal weight because so many users complained that their weight moves around so much once they hit their goal weight they kept getting bumped back into a weight loss plan.

Another pattern we see is that users that have a Withings scale that automatically records their weight receive a lot of value (expressed in emails to us, posts on the forums, or written on their wall) from the device. We haven't had time to run stats (on how it effects weight) on this yet but we are starting to talk about the 'passive tracking' for users that have a Fitbit and a Withings connected to their Lose It!. Users cannot get over how much a better picture of their health they get after the values come in on their own. The Withings scale takes the textWeight idea to a new level. Sadly, both of these devices are pretty costly and out of the range of a lot of people. So textWeight might be a good way for people to track weight that are on a low cost budget.

All in all though, the most important feature that will improve your weight loss is accountability via social / friends both online or in real life. Studies have shown this in the past so we are not the first to notice or the first to say. In fact, this is the first thing out of the mouth of most health startup CEOs.
For a shorter article with a not as sharp axe: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/business/sec-illegally-des...
Software patents don't exist in my country. I could be blocked from trading in the states, but thats not my market anyway so I couldnt' care less.

I just read these threads because of morbid fascination. I truly don't understand the american psyche, its sooo foreign to me, it almost appears blood thirsty.
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Apparently Apple has noticed this issue and they have taken down a few sites. (http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/08/apple-takes-steps-against...)
In fact Apple can try to increase the technical barrier to install iOS beta. (Must upgrade in Xcode or must own at least one app in App Store to be eligible for beta access.) This way can block the vast majority of non-developers while not affecting real iOS developers.
For #1, older computers can still do web, email, and movies just fine. Unless you're a gamer, you have little need to upgrade as often as we used to.
It's not geeky. In some small towns, everyone listens to the scanner. Occasionally someone will lean on the "talk" button and the town will get some gossip broadcast to all the neighbors :)
It's been the year of the Linux server for quite some time now. The near future seems bright for Linux smartphones, tablets and other gizmos too.

The only non-Linux device I carry with me is my iPod. Both phones (personal running WebOS and work running Android), my notebook and my e-reader (a Nook, but a Kindle would be no different) run on Linux.