skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who's sat on both sides of the table in enterprise software sales I understand this sentiment, but there are many kinds of software where you really do need to talk to a salesperson.

I once worked for a company that had an average sale well under than $100,000 but that sale typically included several licenses for at least two different products -- one a desktop app and the other a SaaS offering. There would always be at least a day of training, and possibly some consulting services and the possibility we'd bundle in something from a vendor we work with.

If customers tried to set that up with a web form they'd screw it up and hate our product.

Similarly, something like an ERP or Library Management System is going to take a considerable amount of attention from the vendor to fit it to your needs, so the salesperson isn't just there to harass you, he's there to make sure you get what you need to succeed.

----

I'm working on a product now that I could have sold through an impersonal automated process for $50 a month... If I could get enough subscriptions.

I didn't believe that I could, and decided to price the product much higher and sell it through a "high touch" process so I could make a living selling it to a handful of customers.

One issue is that anyone who sees the price would get sticker shock. However, the price per year will be between 1/3 and 1/4 of what it would cost to develop in house, and it would be charitable to estimate that most organizations would have 50% chance to produce a product that works (almost) correctly... After losing a few months on the schedule! Plus my product is documented, supported and comes with a pretty bow on top.

My guess is that for the value this delivers to customers it's worth my time to explain to them the value they're getting.
yes it's the main problem actually.. How to pick the best one between to many ideas to start.. Maybe they can start a program for it, apply with many we help you to choose one..
White House Email Was Down for 23% of Obama's First 40 Days
Same =(
That's no excuse, it just means their pricing model is too complex.

Why not offer default packages with a fixed price for small and medium sized businesses and encourage those that have specific needs/concerns to leave their details to discuss the possibilities and get a quote?
This is what was discussed a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649828

Joel Spolsky's blog post, mentioned in the discussion, is worth a read too: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

And so is this post: http://blog.boundary.com/2012/03/02/selling-in-2012-its-comp...

As the later says, it's complicated. Personally, as most of HN readers I guess, I also can't stand this sales model. But some buyers demand it. And they happen to be the ones with the most cash to spare.
The post raises a few good points -- those are real problems in using Scala -- but the problems are mostly a result of the compiler targeting the JVM as its primary backend. Obviously, a JVM-based language can leverage a rich infrastructure of libraries, but it also will have to deal with the fact that the JVM is primarily designed for Java, not as a more general backend (such as the LLVM or the CLR).

(That the compiler is slow has other reasons, but is also something that they've been working on simultaneously for 2.10, so it's not as though that has been pushed aside by macros.)
Since I have the DNT+ extension installed on Chrome 17 / OS X, the message reads, "Feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can also be a kind person and tweet this."
Excellent viz!

What tools [libs] did you use?

I assume this is all js.... Correct?
Google May Call On Ring-Back Phone Ads For Revenue
I think about this, a time ago and create a drumbeat project:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q-BEBq4...

but, sadly, nobody follows this idea...
I have an IFTTT recipe to get Push notification if you have a server outage http://ifttt.com/recipes/25122
This would actually be an interesting blog post.
Obat Gondok | Obat Penyakit Gondok | Obat Herbal Gondok
A visual Guide to the Ampersand
The Southwest Airlines Stripper Plane
Really? I have lots of WD Green's and none have ever failed me. In constant operation (however, mostly parked and idling) since the first generation came out. With me for a long time, they're been around the world. What do you suggest instead? Where do you see problems? I guess my usage profile is very different from yours..
IFTTT recipe: Push notification if you have a server outage
Change the email in the recipe to the address of your monitor service email alert. install boxcar on your iPhone. and get a backup Push notification to your phone.
Easy Nests to make for Easter with the kids http://pegasusle... on Twitpic
I moved mine from Tumblr to GitHub recently and used a migration script to grab all the posts and turn them into Markdown files. There's a script that works with Posterous too: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/blog-migrations
In Socialist Yurop as well, in most countries, there are different rules on when and how much paid holiday you get in your first year, meaning you cannot get hired and take a month paid holiday, it has to accrue. So you would get a week after a few months, for example, then more, and so on. It looks fair to me.

And yeah, in all tech hubs I know of, everybody's looking to hire, the market is, maybe not red-hot like Silicon Valley, but pretty hot anyway.
Without success because people like you have been fighting them every step of the way trying to hold back progress. It's hard to overcome inertia, and it's almost impossible when there is an organized resistance. It becomes absolutely insanity-inducing when said resistance uses its own success in warding off progress as ammunition for holding back progress.

I'd say I was exceedingly un-harsh, even downright polite, considering the long-term damage that has been inflicted.
In the UK the minimum is 20 days.

A significant proportion of people get 25 days + 8 public holidays
Bayesian statistics tutorial: video from PyCon
Personal possession of less than 1 oz of marijuana is a misdemeanor offense ($100 fine, not arrestable) in Massachusetts. That was passed at 67%. The police claimed that it would unleash anarchy in the state, that they didn't know how to deal with misdemeanors and didn't have any forms to fill out.

Nothing bad has happened.

We still have blue laws and dry towns, but they are increasingly regarded as eccentric anachronisms.

Remember that the people who were 50 years old and voting each other in to office in the 1990s... are now 70 and retired. People overestimate change in the short run, underestimate in the long run.
Works fine for me on Chrome OSX (17.0.963.79 and Lion 10.7.2 respectively)
We don't need Python in the browser. We need x in the browser, where x is every language and runtime.

Javascript isn't some sort of global optimum that's perfect for every possible application. The subset of Javascript that's supported by a wide range of current browsers certainly isn't. And the result is that people aiming for the web environment are limited by what Javascript can do - even though there are languages that are arguably more expressive than it.

The problem is right now, only browser makers get to decide what languages run in the browser. Browser makers have their own concerns, and supporting new languages hasn't been historically among them.

What would be nice to aim for is a model where browsers can support multiple language runtimes. Instead of the browser makers being the ones to support a language, that language's advocates would be responsible for the port - and I suspect the competition and cooperation would make them stronger.

Ideally, the language runtimes would be installed transparently. That's the big potential of a project like Native Client - if it lives up to its billing, it makes downloading the latest version of a language runtime to a browser safe, while giving near-native speed and abstract machine.

This would let Python, Ruby, Haskell, Scala, Closure, Java, non-legacy Javascript, and more exist in the same browser, giving the web platform the same diversity of languages as is available on the desktop.

(Mobile platforms seem to also have this problem. The recent move from general-purpose to language-specific platforms is sub-optimal.)
Symbolics.com: The first .com registered 27 years ago.
Mutual Fund & Investment
I'm a bit unclear, but I think they mostly mean "bytecode in the browser".
Cool! thanks, adding it now (IFTT rocks)
I found this became even more awesome if you zoom out the max in your browser, turn on showing the scroll path and then go through the links. Try it!
Sheriff's Deputy Hits, Kills Driver on LIE
I think we can. I had the idea recently of starting a small web/mobile consulting shop, and using that to build a stable income stream and also a strong team (technical, product, business guys). Once that's established, you slowly move towards trying novel ideas. It's a common model in the games industry.
Why was Gruber's review of the iPad the one chosen by the Hacker News mob? There are lots of other reviews out there, all pretty much as glowingly positive as Gruber's was, but most of them have two significant advantages:

1) some semblance of impartiality

2) the comments will be about the iPad rather than about Gruber
What did you use as training data?
In this specific instance it's $199 setup fee + $40/month + $4/month/user so really nothing too wild. I don't know what the others charge but I am not willing to play the game to save a couple of bucks here or there.

Also, they ask you to qualify the size of your company before giving you pricing (e.g., "Small business 1-50 employees click here"). I would be cool if they had a high-touch process for companies with more complex needs but at this level, it's really a plain-vanilla service.
You can compact a lot of whitespace out of python.

$ cat hello.py

def helloooo():
print "helloooo"
print "SLAM!"

helloooo()

$ cat hellomin.py

def helloooo(): print "helloooo"; print "SLAM!"
helloooo()
Lawsuits Over Job-Placement Rates Threaten 20 More Law Schools
They could just as easily qualify me by making me select company size, specific features, etc.
I think it's a very good start. The internet community needs to do more and more "offline" activities to effect change.
Wouldn't applying some of your extra productivity to an open-source project be more beneficial to more people?
Instead of having a difficult work environment with your co-workers you would have learned, created great stuff and been recognized by peers.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

-- John Steinbeck (disputed according to wikiquote)
AWS US-East-1 was down, but theres more to it...
The listed points are valid, but they are by far not as easy as the author thinks they are. I don't say they are not improvable, but they are not 'little things' that need to get fixed before new features come in. For example, the jars are large because every closure needs its own class (thank you jvm!). Compile time is high because of type inference. Error messages and stack traces are cryptic, because you do high-level programming but get low-level diagnostics. etc.
Doesn't dart actually do type checking? It's been a month or 2 since I played with it, but I could swear that it did type checking and reported errors when the type was wrong.
This is oddly unsettling and a bit nauseating, at least scrolling through it with the trackpad. It's a cool effect, though.
Don't be a hero, be good at your job.
For Common Lisp, think also of reader macros.

Similarly, in syntactically richer languages, macros could add syntactic constructs that are not akin to function application. With sufficiently powerful macros, you can add, for example, new infix operators, a new form of switch/case or a new way to declare variables.
I wish there were a price estimator for arbitrary things and services site.

Knowing, for instance, that the unpublished standard Salesforce price is $50/seat/mo would be really useful when preparing budgets, without wasting time engaging salespeople.

Knowing the general price of various things makes it obvious if something is even an option (i.e. you do not have someone TIG weld your $3 item back together; you buy a new one).

Sort of like "jigsaw, for prices". eBay, Amazon, and Google work pretty well for cheap items with deep markets, but not for relatively obscure things. I'm sure Purchasing people have rules of thumb for various types of products, but I don't have access to this.

The prices don't need to be great, just within 20-30%. You could probably pay for this in leadgen alone, easily.
Security vulnerability found in Nginx
There isn't any "migration disaster". There was a five (5) year plan laid out by Guido. We are not even into year three (3) yet (or maybe just into it). If anything it is a "patience disaster".
I think the comparison of programmers to carpenters is really pertinent. There are so many analogies.. the modern computer programmer, as-is, is today's carpenter.
Anonymous Is Crowdsourcing Hackers With Their Own Operating System
That pricing model is about a month old. Before that you'd have to go through the sales process, and it was like everyone else, base fee plus surcharges depending on what services you want.

By sheer coincidence I'm sure, we (wavepayroll.com) launched with a flat rate pricing model ($3/employee/pay period, all in) back in November. I'm curious if you considered us, and if so, what your impressions were.
Thanks for these links. I hadn't seen the Alex' post. Exact same feeling except that he is clearly a much better writer than me :)
We're still collecting our baseline data at the moment, but we have implemented the design features into our community that should create more interactions of upvoting and removing content the user finds relevant.
If your prospects are going to screw that up with a web form then I'd say some or all of these things are true;

a) your licensing model is too complicated.
b) your web forms aren't usable
c) your website isn't helpful enough

And before I get flamed, I regularly sell services worth north of $2k via a web form that lets the customer purchase solely using a credit card. Instead of making it hard for people to buy and assuming that "high touch" means "call us", we have staff ready at every step of the way to help people with their purchases and the use of their services when they need help. Instead of investing in artificial processes that force a customer to call us, we're investing in real customer service, training and product development. Automated doesn't have to be impersonal, unless that's your frame going in. Also, I have a suspicion that real customer value can't be created in the sales process. No one has ever come out of a negotiation or sale (automated or otherwise) saying "Now that's why I do business with these guys.". Customers derive value from using your product or service, not buying it. I think its misguided to try and create customer value in the sales process (Although you do say that your sales process simply explains the value to come, it doesn't try to create value... I'm just riffing on an idea... :)
Without push notifications this application is a bit useless, no? Since iOS won't allow it to run in the background to poll at regular intervals (or to simply sit there with an IMAP IDLE) it's really on the user to open the app and check email.

I'm sorry but this is 2012. We've had push email for over a decade (perhaps slightly less than that on mobile phones? not sure of the exact figure). In today's world, not being constantly connected is a big deal.

Looks nice though and I understand that, due to iOS limitations, it's a bit difficult to provide push notifications for certain types of services (as they outline, they really would have to store your credentials server-side to do it); I just don't see the rational here.
He just means that there is no reference to 'Google does not share personal information with advertisers' on the internet.
Why? Why would Nokia want to enter the tablet market, when everyone except Apple is struggling with their tablets? Consumers seem to want ipads, not tablets. What could Nokia possibly bring to the table, with their string of failures in the recent past? This is probably going to be another half-assed effort on Nokia's part.
I kind of like this idea. If anything is going to motivate the political class to change things it's going to be when it finds itself on the receiving end of the problem.
No, they don't:-) A "Bitchin' Camaro" is not an actual car, it's a state of mind...
Now adjust for cost of living. The list won't look anything like this I imagine.
> ArrivalStar and Jones are making a direct play for taxpayer money, something that most patent trolls have avoided until now.

Surely, surely, this must provoke change? Now it's directly affecting tax payers people won't stand for it?

A "find prior art for this patent" website, with various gamification style badges and points could be insanely popular. Especially if it was accessible in small chunks on smartphones (so people could do 5 minutes of noodling while on a bus for example) and it had Facebook integration.

EDIT:

> ArrivalStar has even taken the bold step of suing the US Postal Service

You don't fuck with the postal service.

Last edit:

The patent (I think)

(http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...)
HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook Full Specification
For those curious about what Scala macros actually are:
"This facility allows programmers to write macro defs: functions that are transparently loaded by the compiler and executed during compilation. This realizes the notion of compile-time metaprogramming for Scala."
http://bit.ly/zeMjOb

http://scalamacros.org/usecases/index.html
Kay’s 8
I am constantly amazed that people seem so surprised that when people break the law, they get in trouble.

Just because you don't like a law, doesn't mean you should be surprised when, like so many people before them, people get caught for breaking it.

I often wonder if I am the only person in the tech world who wouldn't mind much higher penalties for possessions of narcotics, instead of this current "illegal, but most of the time not really" business. I'd be fine with legalisation too, I just wish the law would go heavily one way or the other.
Why is there a checkpoint? US turning into 1940's Germany?
But my experience is that I burn out a lot slower if I am working at home and taking my breaks with my family. So that is a different circumstance not covered in such work.
At the very least, if you don't offer pricing transparently on the site (and signup), you should offer a free demo. Get the user hooked before talking about price is a viable enterprise sales technique (mainly to price differentiate and extract maximum revenue), but you need to accomplish the "get him hooked" part. Requiring payment at all adds friction, as does requiring human contact.
Link is broken. Any explanation of the article?
Exactly. Where I live (Argentina) we have a 40 hour week that usually turns at least into 45 hours because most people work from 9 to 18 with an hour for lunch in the middle.

Working part-time after a long time of full time work my eyes opened to the possibility of the 36-hour week. I usually discuss with a lot of people how they feel about their work schedule and what they think about working 6 hours in 6 days instead of 9 in 5, and surprisingly most defend the 40-hour week because they prefer two days of rest. In my experience, they're overrated. The possibility of dedicating time to yourself, your projects, your family, throughout the week is priceless.
Why Being A Scientist Isn’t Fun Anymore
<<Third, Rubyists possess an often exaggerated, yet nevertheless merited, reputation for being the quirky hug-everyone kids of the programming world. Their motto is MINSWAN, or Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice, a reference to the language’s legendarily sweet founder, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nom d’Internet Matz. We might just all get along.>>

For real? Most Rubyists I meet these days are annoying hipster types that I want to smash with their skateboard (yes, yes, I'm huge _why fanboy).
How far are you? Would we be able to test it out before release?
"Western medicine"? As opposed to what?
Uber Launches in Toronto to Local Competition
Scala already has plenty of syntactic sugar for chaining method calls, so you can write stuff like:

myObj explode 10 times

which translates into myObk.explode.10.times()

Through the magic of implicits, you can make any builtin type auto-cast to your wrapper type, so there really is no need for syntactic macros - scala is already DSL-enabled.
Some people are using this post as an opportunity to bash Texas, but the article says he was arrested by DHS (federal authorities) in Seirra Blanca, which is in New Mexico. This doesn't have anything to do with Texas.
Anonymous claims that the operating system, ‘Anonymous-OS’ is fake
Wow - what a great, simple pricing model!

No, I had not considered you because you did not come up in my search (Google + asking founder friends). I am signing up right now. Thanks.
I sympathize, partially because I get filled with existential dread every time I get a voicemail message to my business number. ("Who in their right mind calls to ask for information when it is all right there on the website?! GRUMBLE GRUMBLE." + )

That said: ballpark how many people work in this industry with decisionmaking authority on this. Ten thousand? A thousand? Let's call it one thousand. It is entirely possible that you are smarter than all one thousand of those people. They've devoted their careers to selling payroll services and success at selling payroll services determines whether their children eat tomorrow. You're unwilling to make a phone call because you find payroll services pretty boring. But nonetheless it is entirely possible you've found the thing the whole industry is missing.

I just would not bet that way.

+ n.b. I get phone calls from people whose budget is $9 a month (me: "Oh cripes, not again.") and people whose budget is $200 a month (me: "Now here is a call which I'd gladly take.") and people whose budget requires an NDA to hear ("Schedule a call for 3 AM in the morning? It can be arranged, sir!")

P.S. There exist interesting hybrid models where you have the self-service option and published pricing and then there exists the Call Me plan, explicitly or by implication. Find someone in one of those businesses, get them drunk, and then ask whether the published plans or Call Me makes more money.
مسلسل اكون او لا الحلقة 12 
مسلسل اكون او لا الحلقة 12

اكون ,او ,لا ,الحلقة ,12

http://video.qlbak.com/10331.html
Failure May Never Be "Accepted"
Homeless Hotspots in Austin, Texas: Told From All Sides
Researchers send 'wireless' message using neutrinos
Windows Phone “Tango” officially launches in China on March 21
It's the community that really makes Arch a great distro in my opinion. Because of them we have an excellent well-moderated forum with technically competent and helpful members, an outstanding wiki and a huge amount of software available in the AUR.
Better yet, a calculator, like Heroku.
Find the jQuery Bug #8: Suspicious Selectors
They may also be charging some clients far too much for certain products, so cannot risk being more transparent. That's why I'm put-off by services that don't quote prices, there's no way of knowing if you are one of the clients that are being ripped-off.
$ (cd /usr/bin; file *) |grep -i "python script"