skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why you need a dedicated and experienced sales person. Selling to a small company is one thing, but selling to a larger customer is an entirely different skill set. And then selling to enterprise is even more different. The sales cycles differ tremendously depending on how large the organization is.

If you are targeting SMBs, you can get away with direct sales, etc. But once you get into the "bigger fish", the sales cycle lengthens incredibly, as do the requirements from the buyers.

One of my previous employers made the transition from selling from SMBs to enterprise, and it was a difficult transition. Our product was usually bought by a department head that required it, and it would spread across the organization organically. However, once we entered enterprise companies, instead of talking to the department heads, we needed to talk directly to the CIO/CTO, who would make the decision on behalf of the entire company. This required a lot more patience, and a completely different skillset from our salespeople.

So in the case of the OP, trying to land a big fish by talking with contacts like this is likely a huge timesink, because experienced salespeople will eat guys like him for breakfast. If you're going to target bigger fish rather than smaller shops, it's best to get someone who knows exactly what the process is and is actually focused on sales. The charm of working with a startup is lost on bigger customers, who have bonuses based on uptime, SLAs, etc.
When you start it up Microsoft even refers to it as a PC. It should be obvious to people that Microsoft sees this as the future of PCs and don't want them to think of it as a "tablet".
What a wonderful piece of programming history! This deserves more up-votes. How many programmers are alive today who can speak about their experiences in computer science in the 60's?
5 colors, so:

P(color) = 0.2 = p

Expected number of, say, blue, in N = 55 skittles is:

E(N_blue) = Np = 11

Standard deviation:

Sdev(N_blue) = sqrt(N p (1-p)) = 2.95

So you would expect to see 11 +/- 3 skittles.

(If you take the largest discrepancy of the 5 colors, it's harder to compute.)

If you want to look at a large deviation from the expected:

P(Nblue < 7) ~= P(Nblue = 6) = choose(55,6) p^6 (1-p)^49 = 3.3%

which is pretty significant, especially considering you were looking at large deviations over any of five colors. In the other direction:

P(Nblue > 17) ~= P(Nblue = 18) = choose(55,18) p^18 (1-p)^37 = 0.98%

which is still pretty significant. With probabilities this small, and events like these that are lightly-correlated, the second-order terms in the relevant Bonferroni inequality will be pretty small, so

P(any color = 18) ~= 5 * P(Nblue = 18) ~= 5%

(You could do all these calculations more exactly, but they are within a factor of 2.)
Steam is open in the sense, that if you don't like their rules you can distribute outside of their ecosystem.

The Windows App Store is more inclusive, but there is no distribution outside of their ecosystem unless you have an enterprise license.
Haskell is painful for "real" programming because people have been doing "real" programming in C-like languages for decades, whereas the state of the art for a lazily-evaluated, extremely statically-typed functional language influenced by category theory is still a bit immature.

Haskell is a great language, but I understand hesitancy on taking it into production.

Clojure and Scala are a joy to work with. Scala's problem is Java-culture hangover but the language itself is excellent (and may be what you're looking for in "a more powerful OCaml", although I'm not sure I'd describe it quite that way).
Support-status would be a more useful indicator than is-latest. Of course you can't scrape it, but you could crowd-source it.
I was going to say you're wrong, but I agree that if I had to fill in dozens or hundreds of items, I'd prefer filling in lines. Your wrist is more stable and it seems like a very quick motion.

However, that kind of efficiency isn't required at all in a ballot. Making a couple of crosses instead of lines isn't going to make a big absolute difference in terms of the entire voting process. You want to maximize other things, first and foremost making it easy to understand and easy to recognize clearly for both the voter and the people/entities who count.
Slightly off-topic, but I found this was an interesting article on Nate Silver:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/11/04/tarnished-silver-assessin...
Small developers are best protected by patents, which simplifies using the judicial system to enforce their rights. Otherwise they would have to use a more messy system of contracts, as rayiner describes.
It's worth nothing that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on who you are. By that, I mean that if you're part of government, it's a very good thing, since fewer parties generally means more government stability. Of course, that's quite likely to be bad for the general population.
Offensive tech headlines: "Barely Legal", "Score That Whore" etc.
In my humble opinion, the douche-dial on this site goes all the way to 11. The combination of risque imagery and sexual innuendo crosses the line from 'spicy headline' to 'totally inappropriate'.<p>http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/opinion/3551/barely-legal/<p>http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/3428/score-that-whore/<p>http://www.kernelmag.com/scene/3544/so-hard-right-now/
What I would love is a walk through on how to get the new cable-less HBO Go, now offered in Scandinavia for $10 a month, to work in the US.
You can use an app to set the display to the native 2880x1800 resolution if you wanted to.
Writing code, learning languages, figuring out new approaches, and struggling with foreign concepts until you finally get it... that stuff's awesome. I never noticed if it was hard or easy because I enjoyed doing it.

The part I dislike about software is reading bad code, dealing with inadequate documentation, and learning junk complexity that has no general-purpose value. Learning "to code" itself was a lot of fun.
In my humble opinion, the douche-dial on this site goes all the way to 11. The combination of risque imagery and sexual innuendo crosses the line from 'spicy headline' to 'totally inappropriate'.

http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/opinion/3551/barely-legal/

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/3428/score-that-who...

http://www.kernelmag.com/scene/3544/so-hard-right-now/
First impressions of Ansible: a configuration management tool
Forgive me, but:

> Microsoft is not getting rid of MS-DOS. MS-DOS is here to stay. In Windows 3.1, in 95, and every other version.

There was a time that everything to do with the non-consumer/enterprise market was done in DOS. Soon enough Metro apps will be first class citizens and desktop apps will be second class. If locking down the most important user-facing UI elements to only those apps certified by MS doesn't cause you some trepidation then you might want to examine history a little closer.
> Stop with the class-warfare nonsense.

Stop with the naive "we're all in this boat together" bullshit.
What have you used Haskell for? My experiences learning and using Haskell professionally have been nothing but pleasant, especially for DSLs. It’s been difficult at times to wrap my head around a new concept, sure, but sometimes you just have to work through it. That’s how programming is. I will grant you, though, that GHC’s strictness analysis is sometimes a bit too conservative, so I have had problems with memory usage in the past.
Politico seems to have more current information: http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/
What in the hell are you talking about? Way to completely derail a discussion.

EDIT - Oh I see, you're also the guy who thinks open source wins everything because Android is doing well right now. I honestly hadn't noticed. I just see a dumb comment and pounce, I hadn't looked at the username for either comment until just now.

However if I'm bothering you frequently, that's not a good sign. It means you're spouting a bunch of ridiculous BS with little to no evidence or point. Try to avoid that in the future, and trust me you'll never see my name again.

Continue to and you almost certainly will. I don't check usernames, I just reply.

EDIT - I just have to add that I love that two comment replies to you four days apart counts as sexualized stalking. Either you're the biggest prude in history, extremely paranoid, or possibly just not as quick witted as you thought.
Buffer is a brilliant team and a catalyst for how SaaS companies should be ran. I started following Joel and then eventually Leo about a month after the first landing page went live and from then people I spoke to about it could see that this was going to be valuable. Some asked if it was only a feature.

Though the product was relatively simple and wasn't compatible with all of the applications it is today. The team behind it were extremely passionate about it and were great at customer development. I'd send a tweet with a product idea or reply to a post on their blog and I'd near-immediately see a reply. As a customer this tells me they're in it for the long haul, they aren't going to pivot next week and it's worth devoting myself to this platform. They are doing all they can to make a great product and share it with the world.

The value of interacting with your customers is an art that they have to an extent mastered. When you tweet or email buffer you quickly receive a reply, in any article about them the team is thanking users. If you build a great product and really engage with users. You'll definitely build a troop of evangelists willing to pay for the product and spread the world to as many as they can and as you continue to share your vision more of the free users will join this group. This is why they are gaining traction, being built into more apps as a sharing option and I wouldn't be surprised if more are paying. The pricing is dead simple, they could easily charge much more.
Well they would be mostly actual votes, but it causes Obama voters on Twitter to be more likely to mention having voted than Romney voters. You'd probably get more accurate results if you eliminated all these.
Follow the dpkg call by apt-get install steam, obviously (gdebi also works).
I went to their July "minicamp", which was an awesome experience.
He filed a bug report.
should clearly just return false. ^^
As an extra datapoint, a Kindle (170 grams) is trivial to lightly with a few fingers. It's no substitute for a tablet, but when all I want to do is read a book I love it so much more than any heavier, more capable device.
Bias is one thing (I'm a liberal and I fully admit that MSNBC is biased towards the left), making facts up whole cloth is another.

Call me when they verifiably lie, ala Fox, and then we'll talk.
Well that should be possible too. However if you add a package later, it would be easier to edit your own package file then to log back in to updateditis and re-upload a package file. Automatic for the people
Imagine this article, but in 1977 and replacing 3D printer with computer. It would have been wrong, because computers improved rapidly and got cheaper, smaller, faster, lower power, etc.

Almost all the reasons in the article are problems with the current price, size, and reliability of 3D printers.

Someday, there will be a machine that will whip out objects so easily that you'd use it to make a doorstop.
SpaceX VTOL rocket "Grasshopper" hops 5.4m
Except there wasn't two candidates. At the end there's two candidates, and there's good reason for it. Put in more and you have problems with splitting the vote.

If you want more options, vote during primaries. For long-term change, vote and push third-parties. Nationally, this punishes the two main parties for not representing you properly (and thus losing their vote to someone who does), and locally they actually have a chance to be elected.
Bing has the same: http://www.bing.com/elections/
Perhaps I was a bit sloppy with my wording. I was implying that people could decide with the option to not use a centralized coercive agency.
That would explain why they designed all-new spinners with dots twirling in circles or moving along a line in pretty patterns.
Poll: Who did you vote for?
Just wanted to get a feel for how the HN community voted in this election.
Romney
Didn't vote (US Citizen)
Can't vote
Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some sort of automated remote monitoring system which would randomly ping each machine for diagnostics data and shutdown machines if any issues discovered?
I agree with you. But I think the argument against this is that the elements will be slightly larger than they need to be on the full size iPad and you are thus not making the most of the available space.
Nah, if you read the PAC you see, only page requests are been routed through the proxy, actual media streams are connected directly.

Which makes sense. IP detection is done on web page, not actual media CDN servers.
You can always just set up an SSH tunnel into an EC2 instance (or your home computer, if you don't have an EC2 account). Tell Firefox to route its traffic through your local proxy and use that for streaming.
Of course this is very much subject to selection bias.
Sure, but there's a benefit to receipts: you can verify that your vote was counted correctly.
According to the current total vote count I see on both, Google is more up to date by a few thousand votes.
+1 for Moai!
"It is ironic since whenever I have met with our elected officials they are invariably thoughtful, well-meaning people."

Maybe they come off as thoughtful and well-meaning because many of them are sociopaths. Indeed, politicians are much more likely to be sociopaths and psycopaths; they're great manipulators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
> I'm surprised to learn the machines are not RAM upgradeable. That's a major negative.

Between that, the glued-in batteries, the on-board storage, and the lack of an optical drive (i.e. a slot for a second hard drive), I'm really put off the new retina MacBooks.
If you make it a holiday, people will go on holiday.

Instead, require employers to give their employees 3 hours off during the day, or something like that.

O Canada! http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq...
Glad someone posted this. The comments on this post should probably get turned off though as the results in and of themselves are what is really compelling here. Commets will just lead to arguments.
Woman Wearing 'MIT' Shirt Barred from Voting
I work at quantopian. We are working on broker integration, so you will be able to trade algos you develop live.

Our backtesting engine, Zipline, is opensource - https://github.com/quantopian/zipline

Zipline was unveiled at PyData NYC, and the presentation materials are here: https://app.quantopian.com/posts/hello-from-pydata
"My new MBPr13 is fast, gorgeous, and light. Sure it's expensive, but you get what you pay for."

RTFA instead of regurgitating platitudes to keep your cognitive dissonance at bay.
>and may be what you're looking for in "a more powerful OCaml"

Scala is neat, but the time I couldn't get sbt to run because it kept running out of memory, after having had no trouble with it for months, I decided it was time to rm -rf my scala install.

I have a lot more background with Clojure (Lisps, really) anyway. I'd enjoy something with a more informative/helpful type system but Scala and Haskell are too broken, irritating, and unproductive for me.

For people like KirinDave who've crested that mountain with Haskell, more power to them.

I have to ship product ASAP and don't have time to wrangle with parser combinators just to read some XML though.
I think you need to define "failed".

I've been working on my startup for some time. I haven't been profitable (or funded) yet, but it's far from being a "failed" venture.
This follows from the first test flight in late-September http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzXlUw2WhcE.

> "Testing of Grasshopper continues, with the next big milestone -- a hover at roughly 100 feet -- expected in the next several months."

This is preparation for the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) rocket SpaceX wants to build https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWFFiubtC3c

And the reason why they're doing this: http://www.space.com/13140-spacex-private-reusable-rocket-el...

> But a fully reusable rocket could change the equation dramatically. Musk illustrated the point by citing SpaceX's Falcon 9, which costs between $50 million to $60 million per launch in its current configuration.

> "But the cost of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only about $200,000," Musk said."So obviously, if we can reuse the rocket, say, a thousand times, then that would make the capital cost of the rocket for launch only about $50,000."
Odd. A spot check of a few states is showing a much higher vote count in Politico's graph.
I feel like the lack of manufacturing jobs in the US is very much still an unsolved problem.
I went to their earlier workshop in July. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive.

Since attending, I've been getting considerably more work done (my brother has noticed too). Anna Salamon's class on fungability prompted me to change the direction of one of our businesses. Plus, the CFAR people are just fun to be around!
Please correct the title - Entrepeurs is a pretty unflattering misspelling
NYT: Real time Election map
> This is one of many reasons I am still wary of VMs and 'cloud' computing more generally.

VMs have been used in the Real World for going on five decades now, in the form of VM (formerly CP) on IBM System/360 mainframes et seq.

The threat model may have changed, but I don't even know if that's necessarily true.
Maine is one of the few states where that's viable - as Nate Silver notes[1], it's probably the most independent-leaning state in the nation, as evidenced by its support for Ross Perot in the 90s. Rhode Island would be another, and I'd peg Colorado as a distant third.

Minnesota is an outlier in my mind - it's more attributable to the fact that the Republican candidate (Norm Coleman) was a terrible candidate (he only won his Senate seat because his opponent died right before the election[2]), and the race was irregular in other ways too. It happened once, but I wouldn't bet on it happening again there anytime soon, unless things change.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/in-maine...

[2] To Coleman's credit, John Ashcroft ran against a dead man and lost, so I guess Coleman had something going for him.
Yeah, I never said I don't want to learn new things. I still have a desire to be employable, and if something new seems novel I'll look into it. But I have, for example, no desire to learn any new OOP languages (aside from a quick look) until the ones I already know become irrelevant.
As someone who is often very nervous about sending "cold" emails to this degree, I really appreciate that you/David posted this.

It really helps paint a better picture of what a good easy-going email should look like, in this case/scenario. I feel like I often over think more "important" emails like this and re-write them over and over. It's good to finally know that if I'm just more myself, it will probably stick out more than if I try to sound like a robot and someone I am not.

Thanks again! :)
Exactly. Tally votes with an electronic scanner in real time allowing the voter to fix any issues discovered by the electronic system. This is already done in some municipalities.
It's not that simple.

In the US, I think most places let you write in whoever you want. If they get enough votes, they win. Google "Lisa Murkowski".

The other problem is that unlike parliamentary systems, in the US we vote for multiple things and not which party/who your MP is. These are some of the things on the ballot:

1. President & VP
2. Senator
3. Congress Representative
4. Judges
5. Ballot measures

Unless each of these is on a different sheet of paper, counting them might be hard. Don't get me wrong though. I think that we should be using paper ballots. What does it matter if it takes 2 days instead of 1 to figure out who won.
Why can't I click on anything?

(tab works, except on the EULA screen)

Some sort of hidden window that clashes with sloppy focus?
3D printers are a bit odd. In their current form, I will whole heartedly say no one will use them (short of the tinkerers and creatives). It's not like email where I can go on and connect with someone. It doesn't give me something that I didn't have before. I can't print the expensive things in my life, I can print stupid things like cups, cases, boxes, clips, holders, etc. Light things, cheap things. I can customize them, that is the huge thing 3D printing allows - customization. Short of that, it doesn't have any of the fancy flashery that electronics do.

This isn't to say that it won't happen, but it needs a new spin. It needs the 'killer app' that makes people want it. 1 Kg of ABS plastic (1.75 mm in diameter) is ~$30. PLA is more expensive, but it is renewable (~$45 / kg). It's not free to make stuff once you have one (it will last for a while, but you'll still need raw material).

They are slow, at least for 1D printers (filament printers are parametric printers, we move our nozzle in a line that gets longer with time). SLA printers are faster, way faster. They print planes at a time. They also can have better resolution. The trouble with them is that the liquid material is significantly more expensive as they are UV cured (so they need special handling, and whatnot).

I've been trying to think of something cool for what could be done with the situation (as it would get me a lot of money), but it's a hard problem. We're spoiled by how luxurious electronics are, how precise they are, and how little we have to think about how well they work. Little electro-mechanical things would be cool, and I could probably hand out a lot of personalized presents, but do I really need one in my house? Yes. Do my parents need one in their house? No.
No, it's very clearly and visibly not, don't kid yourself. I have a 17" MBP and I compared them side by side.
That's awesome. Of course many of these were available before. But having a good selection together in Linux under the Steam brand is a huge deal. If you're bored, chances are you can pick up something there in a couple of minutes. Chances are, you already have an account.
That is a good thing, because it means that Chrome should be able to fix this fairly easily.
I love my Vaio Z. It's a beautiful design and build.
Seeking App Programmer/Designer
Hey,
I am in need of an experienced smartphone app programmer with backgrounds in iOS and Android softwares. My first project is a game where you can play against Facebook Friends. The second is a local e-coupon app. Please e-mail: micahgreen@comcast.net if you're interested! Thanks!
No election official has ever disputed my 1% statement. They've had plenty of opportunity to refute it (e.g. hearings).

I filed FOIA requests with USPS, which they ignored. The metrics are done by a private third party, claiming the data is propriety (privatization allows govt to hide uncomfortable truths).

I got the numbers client lawsuit against USPS. Bulk mailers do their own metrics / tracking (using test mailings). They claimed USPS's "UAA rate" (undeliverable as addressed) was higher than claimed, so they shouldn't be charged as much.
I'm a little skeptical of using an OS as a work machine that I can't/won't deploy to for my work. (I write network services and web apps that run on Linux servers.)

I also have a long and storied history of despising ports. I'm convinced that people that actually like ports have nothing better to do with their time than compile/tweak packages.
Time to Excellence