skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done many tradeshows (as an exhibitor) with various budgets.

People are going to walk around and surveil your booth from a distance before moving in to talk. Spend the money to get some decent size displays. Have some demo loops or videos with VERY BRIEF text that deftly articulates what you do, and your value prop.

Put together a 5-10 demonstration. Rehearse the hell out of it. Find a presentation style that works for YOU and go with it. Rent chairs for people to sit on and watch your demo. They're walking around all day, a comfortable place to sit is welcome.

Don't be afraid to have a little confidence or swagger. People are taking their time to see you, so they have a presumption that what you are offering has value to them. If you are timid, or too overly grateful for their time, you will look bad.

Everyone will be giving away T Shirts. I don't think they're worth much. Have CDs with your docs and info and demos on them. That is, IME, what the "serious" attendees are after. Bottled water (just generic water) is a better give away. A case of water is $5.00, and the exhibit hall will be charging $4/bottle. Don't worry about the water with your logo on it.

Stand in/near the aisles and directly engage people. Don't be overly stalkerish about it, but don't let people just walk idly by either. Make sure you scan badges or whatever and collect contact info. You may have to practically demand it in some cases, but that is OK.

Don't eat or drink in the booth. Be clean and happy and appear approachable. Don't play iPhone games, or get all hunched over your laptop checking email or passing time.

Budget ALL DAY to set up and debug your demo. Even if it's just 3 slides on a laptop.

Go to the local Wal Mart, buy some plants to add a little character to the booth. Return them at the end of the show :) (done this more than once myself ;) )

Everything you buy or rent there is 2x more expensive than normal. Find out where the local retailers are so you can get last minute items in a hurry. Ship down whatever you can. Contact local exhibit company and see if they can cut you a really good last minute deal on some basic booth furniture demo pods/etc.

I personally think that tradeshows can be very effective if managed well.

If I think of anything else, I'll add it in later. If you need more help, my contact info is in my profile.
And to be be fairer, they're not encouraging others to go out and built IE-only sites. They've just designed this site (presumable through a simple JS browser check or UA check on the server side) to only allow entry via IE8.

But still, kind of a dick move. The whole "get lost" message isn't really a good marketing move either.
Palm Pre notes
Also, turns out one of Microsoft's updates to IE8 actually breaks this contest from working: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090617/internet-explorer-... I can't reiterate enough how absolutely hilarious that is.
Actually that's not true - you can try any plan for 30 days for free, then you pay.
Search wasn't even a business when Google blossomed in the late 90s. Altavista was a halo product for Digital. Yahoo used it to drive traffic to its services that made money. Etc. Etc. Etc. Every search engine then had a "Try this search on [Yahoo], [AltaVista], [Excite], [etc], [etc]" snippet at the bottom of each results page.

GoTo changed everything with text ads and Google was the first company to turn search into big business.

In other words, I agree with your larger point :)
Even if it was better than GMail it would take at least a year or two to start replacing Gmail users, until there google will be workig harder adding new features to Gmail what will make users don't switch to Zimbra.

So Zimbra isn't Gmail's killer and won't be anytime soon.
"[O]riginally heard about" is a weak analogy. The issue with Associates is that actual money is changing hands. It's almost like having a storefront physically in NC, which would traditionally require a multi-state retailer to collect sales tax in that state.

I am a very anti-tax individual overall but the cross-state-delivery sales-tax loophole, which advantages distant sellers, has grown with the rise of e-commerce and efficient long-distance shipping to now seriously distort economic activity.

Why should a distant seller have an 8+% cost advantage over local sellers? Why should extra fuel/pollution/time be expended because of that jurisdictional anomaly?

Consider the similar case of NewEgg vs. Amazon for purchases by California residents. Amazon has subsidiaries in California. Amazon employs people in California. Amazon advertises in California. Amazon enters into long-term business agreements with California residents and businesses, including through the Associates program.

But because of some legal maneuvering, and keeping a few offices and warehouses outside California, Amazon can avoid collecting sales tax, while NewEgg must. Simply because NewEgg has more operations in California -- operations that are already subject to payroll, property, and income taxes -- it also faces an extra tax on each customer transaction.

(And as much as I would like to eliminate sales tax for all merchants, the state's legitimate activities have to be financed somehow, and often the alternatives to a broad consumption tax like a sales tax are even worse: higher income or property taxes.)

The best constitutional solution would be for the federal Congress to equalize the playing field somehow. (Note also that if the sales tax base is broadened, the rate can go down.) But until that day, I don't blame states that see large-scale retail, contractual, commission-paying, operational activity happening inside their own borders and say: this counts as in-state commerce, and should be treated the same as other retail activity.
smart to wait for a couple of days to weed out any bugs, it's what I plan to do.
He is confusing giving a name to a piece of work with enveloping it with official theater and VP awareness. Anything above bug 1304 needs a name so you can communicate with others about it. Perhaps he is recommending a practice of making something a project so that you can ignore it, but that seems a trifle indirect to me.
Thanks for your answer. The thing is though that these skills are pretty specific. I already have a design and logo, I just need it "Ported" over to Wordpress.
Writing apps for the iPhone in Scheme
In this case, I might even agree with the conclusion, but it's easy to be misled by something like this. "Study finds x has benefited society" sounds all scientific and objective, so it's easy to forget to ask, "What do you mean by 'benefited society'?"
I agree. Yawn.

EDIT:

"Changing history in an ancient Islamic country."

1. wrong when done by the CIA in the 1950s.

2. great when done by someone whose viewpoints mirror yours exactly.
its a fake video IMO
IPhone OS 3.0 initial review
I actually set Bing as my default search engine just to actually test it out in day-to-day searches, because testing a search engine by searching for your name or "test" is completely useless.

So far it delivers very good results, except for development topics, where Google does much much better.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bing actually does evolve into a viable competitor to Google.
According to my server logs, Bing surged for one week and then fell off mostly.
Eating too much or only carbs will spike your blood glucose and insulin production. After the carbs are gone your glucose level starts to decline pretty fast since there is too much insulin.

It's better to eat more fat/protein and keep the glucose levels more stable than ride a rollercoaster.
Excellent. Exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

Another factor in selecting this as our first trade show is that it is being held nearby in San Jose. So, we're already familiar with the area, will have a car (or a rental truck), and can easily pickup all the stuff we need from local vendors without sweating over whether it will be delivered on time and without breakage, etc. And, we won't be groggy or jet lagged while talking to folks.

Unfortunately the terms and conditions of the show prohibit distribution of food or drinks, so bottled water is out. I was thinking along those lines, as well, until learning of that restriction.
Sheds For Living: Small Practical Prefab Living Space
Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE)
It appears there's a half-subsidy upgrade price of $499 between the $299 full-subsidy and $699 no-commitment price. Eligibility seems to be 1 year after your last subsidy.

If you spend a lot monthly, you might be eligible for a full subsidy at 12- or 18- months rather than the full two years' time.

And, it might even be possible to pay a smaller cancellation fee (perhaps $125-$175), then return as a full-subsidy new customer. One rep I spoke to a while ago seemed to see no problems with that approach.

Finally, an old phone may fetch $200-$300 without a contract.

So the net costs aren't as scary as $699 with a little extra effort.
There goes Microsoft's "commitment to web standards"...
Your feedback on BizTeen
Hi guys, could you please give me your feedback on my startup idea? I've attached a mockup for you to see, hopefully you'll give me your opinion. :)
BizTeen is a site where teenagers can meet other business minded teenagers! You can submit your business ideas to get feeback! You can find partners to join you on your journey! You can browse other peoples ideas and see if they interest you!

Here is the image link: http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/5941/bizteen.png

What do you think of this? Do you like it? Do you think it's a good idea? Would you use it? if not why not? WHat can I do to improve it? How could it convince you to use it?

Thanks,
Emil Hajric.
"First, my memory isn’t so short as to have forgotten that it was Microsoft and their browser (Internet Explorer 6) that held back the web for so many years."

That's bullshit. IE6 may have sucked, but it didn't hold anything back. As Firefox proved, anyone could have come along and built a better browser and started sucking up enough market share to make it an industry again.
The carb sources you mention have very different GI loads.

Potatoes are very high, Grapefruit is low. The rest are in between.
Yes it's counterintuitive. Chronically high insulin (insensitivity) is bad. But chronically low is bad also. Many (probably most) people have the former. So in the blood they have free floating insulin chasing nonexistent glucose, screwing their metabolism.

I recommended fewer carbs (and other measures) would lead to higher sensitivity; better blood glucose control.

EDIT: I second enra's comment.
How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens
If you start the update, and then while it is extracting, disconnect your Internet connection, the update process doesn't try to contact the activation server.

http://twitter.com/JeremyCurry/statuses/2211487905
Starbucks, Coffee, and Coworking
Great article on hosting Git repositories the easy & secure way
Not that I use it every day, since my Gmail is not my main e-mail address, but what's wrong with using Gnus + Gmail?

This kind of answers my question, but I don't think it's relevant when you have Gmail (or use any other IMAP):

http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/2007/10/emacs-tricks-7-do-not-...
Community Building: Make affiliation more valuable by making people earn it
My previous company used Zimbra for 6 month, after 3 months almost everybody switched to Gmail, it was an absolute pain to use back then, after 6 months we got rid of Zimbra. It was 2 years ago.

We're using Zimbra at work right now. It got better, but it's not even close to Gmail when it comes to read/write/manage emails: it's slow, and has numerous quirks. But it has a built-in IMAP & SMTP server, so you don't need to use the webmail.

But it's also doing much more than Emails, it's definitely a good alternative to Exchange, but switching from Gmail to Zimbra? I wouldn't even think about it.
BrainGate used severely paralyzed adults from "spinal-cord injury, stroke, or muscular dystrophy". Like with anything implanted, the biggest concern is infection but which can be easily monitored at the implantation site.

Similar work has used locked-in patients (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-In_syndrome).
No need for rebooting, just keep trying.
Did they remove the PPC libs too? IE does Rosetta still work?
Ethics is certainly not a 1 or 0, otherwise humanity wouldn't struggle with the subject so often. Suggesting that they are a 1 or a 0 indicates to me that you are in no way qualified to judge ethical behavior.
What are you talking about? They couldn't be bothered to update IE6 for years, and it still holds people back every day. How much time is wasted trying to get things to work in IE6? It's a ball an chain that web developers drag around and it slows progress by wasting their time and limiting their applications. Only recently have some websites been dropping support for IE6.
California has something called a use tax. Turbo Tax will prompt you about this.

In theory, you need to pay a use tax for things purchased outside of the state from a vendor who did not collect sales tax (e.g. Amazon or other internet retailer outside of California)

So, while it is true that California cannot levy taxes on out of state vendors, they can levy a use tax on its residents.

http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/usetaxreturn.htm

http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/faqusetax.htm

Do I owe use tax?

You generally owe California use tax when you use, consume, give away or store tangible personal property (i.e., products you can see, weigh, feel or touch, such as clothing, books, computers, DVDs or CDs) in California that you purchased from an out-of-state vendor. If the out-of-state vendor does not collect the California tax on your purchase, you must pay the tax.
Ask HN:  Why does the iPhone/iPod touch use the shake gesture?
The shake gesture might seem cool to a lot of people but I can't imagine that it does well in usability tests. It's easy to remember, but it takes too much effort to perform.
Good catch: I took a hard look and have to agree that the number and phrasing of the exact matches seem to be well above the level of coincidence. I posted this on the site, curious as to what the reply will be.
---

I posted a pointer to this on http://news.ycombinator.com/ at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661440 and this reply http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875 pointed out exact matches for six sentences in an October 2005 essay by Paul Graham at http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

here are the matches:

[dating sites]
They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want.
And yet they work horribly.
Just ask anyone who uses them.

[T]ake a luxury and make it into a commmodity.
People must want something if they pay a lot for it.
And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.

Were you influenced by Graham's essay? The number and length of exact matches seem well above the level of coincidence.
I use gmail at home, zimbra at work.

Advantages of Zimbra:

-Group calendaring

-Folders (having to subscribe to a bunch of FOSS email lists at work I appreciate just filling away the mailing lists into a folder for later, way better than Gmail's way with the tags and searching and stuff)

Advantage of Gmail:

-Better search of archived mail

Zimbra seems to have some more quirks than gmail that are getting better. They both have decent iPhone interfaces. I wouldn't give up Gmail for Zimbra at home, but for work Zimbra does the job equal or better than Gmail.
How can they call FireFox 'old'? IE8 may be the best IE, but it's still a year or more behind the other browsers, and FF is very actively being developed. 3.5RC1 just came out in the past 24 hours.
As I said at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656493, I don't see why the communities for other dynamic languages are still investing so much effort into building new VMs instead of collaborating on something like this.
I asked a coworker who went to WWDC about this incident, and it went down nothing like Marco said.

Yes, Apple engineers skipped the Q&A, but were all available at the foot of the stage after the presentation to take individual (and off-the-record) questions.
So the author is complaining that Microsoft is restricting a contest designed to get users to download IE8 to, uh, users of IE8?

If they _didn't_ do that, why would they run a contest at all? Would having a Firefox user win the contest justify the marketing expense?

I agree that the promo is pretty thoughtless, but I'm not sure there was any thought put into this criticism either.
California residents who purchase from Amazon owe a use tax. Nevada Residents don't. The rationale is that if you are charging out of state residents sales tax when they don't pay it in their state, then they won't do business with you - unfairly creating an advantage for merchants in other states.

http://www.ftb.ca.gov/current/usetax.shtml

My company is pretty good about paying the Use Tax, and, in general, encourages our vendors to charge us California Sales tax where possible.
I guess its an attempt by Amazon to make sure NC residents know about this legislature and an attempt to galvanize them to act against it.
One of my top complaints is the lack of method combination. You can do something like it by locally binding a function name... sometimes, but CL does it right.
Apparently I'm dense; I don't get it.

Help plz.
Emphasis on the zoom in.
In case anybody doesn't get the "joke", microsoft recently launched a contest where they "hid" something on the web, but you need IE8 to see it.

The former is idiotic, this is cool :) Good job, mozilla team!
* Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications / games
(experimental)

YAY, FINALLY! I <3 you vbox devs.

I don't know how long I've been waiting for this to get implemented (8 - 14 months?); hell I'd either be willing to checkout the source code and spend some time in Java to help [well, maybe not help but pretend to] develop this feature until it can pass off as a builtin feature for future stable releases.
EcoWatercraft Introduces First Product - The Worlds First Green Jet Ski
Microsoft is a running a similar contest http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/
I remember filing in New York State in 2000 or 2001 or thereabouts where the state actually went after use tax. The form actually had a line - you could calculate your use tax or just give up and give them 38 bucks, which was their average estimated amount. I think everyone just gave up.
IControl Apps - #19 - Pool Membership Reverse Lookup
This reminds me of BMW's Checkmate on Audi's ad 1). Brilliant.

1) http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1675-santa-monica-bmws-ch...
Oh, neat!

And how typically Microsoft to engage in browser-specific marketing antics. If only whatever it was that they'd "hid" were the HTML 5.0 and CSS 3 standards.
Original story:

http://www.businessinsider.com/att-to-offer-iphone-3g-owners...
And so comes the totally unbiased voice of an ms fanboy ;)

Seriously. They employed anti competitive practices to grab market share from Netscape. Once they had completely obliterated Netscape, they decided to not update IE6 and leave users suffering.

It's like their aim with IE6 was to kill off the web. Or at least make it suck so much that webapps would be delayed for 10 years - which they pretty much achieved. Obviously that was in ms's favor - their business is desktop apps, not webapps.
zimbra is great but it's not free for all unlike gmail.
Since it's not mentioned, I'd assume not.
I made a list of Tipjoy angel investors. It's actually a pretty awesome blogger list too. Add angels you know & admire: http://etherpad.com/ghtyLsk0a5
"You'll never find it using tarnished Chrome". Another pathetic marketing idea, one that really only Microsoft would think of.
NYT introduces small business/entrepreneurship blog
This shed is significantly nicer than any studio apartment I've ever lived in. So the answer for many people would be, "yes".
I dislike IE6 as much as the next guy (more probably), but people should stop harping on Microsoft like this.

IE6 created the first version of AJAX. It had browser based drawing primitives ages before anyone else. It turns out that IE filters were capable of CSS transforms all this time and nobody even realized it. IE6 was innovative when it was released, at a time when the competition was simply inferior.

It's unfortunate that it took Microsoft so long to release IE7, and it certainly has caused significant pain, but realize that it's not as black and white as people make it out to be.
because quirky is apple's "style"
That is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

Does microsoft need to houseclean THAT bad?

Really?
MySpace.com - G - 22 - Male - carson, California - www.myspace.com/gilbertdeezie
It's Java's stack trace alright, but the stack traces are not that useful since they mostly relate to tons of internal Clojure related stuff - - than the written code.

Like the blog author notes: "Stack traces in Clojure will often tell you little to nothing about what is causing the error, or more importantly, where it's coming from in your code." - - The most important property of a stack trace is to tell you where the bug is coming from in your own code - - and this is a non trivial task if you compile down to a low-level language.
I wonder if they are checking the firefox version number. For me on Firefox 3.0, it just says "you'll never find it with that browser".
Funny, I don't recall it being called "funemployment" when Bush was president.

I seem to recall more articles like this one about the "shadow workforce".

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_8_49/ai_n6171...
Not a proud moment for my state.
i guess we're supposed to be impressed...
Why Parrot is Important
This guy could easily be first Jewish President... I will not be surprised.
I don't oppose constructionism at all, but I believe state-run schools are fundamentally incompatible with real flexibility. The author's website suggests he is a Marxist -- I don't know if that means state socialist or anarchist in this case, but if it's the former, he would probably disagree with me.
California had a similar "Amazon Tax": AB 178. It was killed:

"Current law, under Quill v. North Dakota, requires a business have a physical presence or “nexus” in a state in order for the state to compel that business to collect and remit sales taxes. AB 178 represented an attempt to circumvent the federal interstate commerce law by presuming that a company has a physical nexus if business is solicited through a third-party advertiser that is based in California."

April 28th:
"However, a bit of rare good news for California taxpayers came out of Sacramento yesterday. Just as the bill was scheduled for consideration, the Assembly Committee on Revenue & Taxation voted to remove AB 178 from the docket, effectively taking this odious piece of legislation off the table, at least for this year."

http://www.atr.org/california-amazon-tax-bill-dies-quick-a31...
I Want The Bestest Logo You Have Designed - Ever
Their goal with IE _was_ to sabotage any serious effort into turning the web (as a OS-neutral entity defined by w3c standards) into an application-delivery platform. That's why they spent so much effort into obliterating Netscape, into fragmenting Java on the desktop and into preventing OEMs from installing any other browser on their hardware.

And they sort of succeeded. And that's why they have so much trouble on Europe.
Zimbra is used as the email system for a university I attended and it is a terrible, buggy pos.
While I agree AT&T is terrible (actually, exclusivity is terrible), how did AT&T screw early adopters? They followed the contract you signed and did what they do for every other phone. It's no different from other carriers either.
I agree. It was not IE6 that held us back. It was Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour and OEM ties that precluded OEMs from installing anything but Microsoft browsers. IE was only a part in this grand strategy.

Their grip was so strong they rescued Apple and made it bundle IE in MacOS.