skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When discussing B2B sales on HN, I often see black and white arguments. Either you're in the B2C space, or you sell your products for north of 50K.

This is IMHO a false dichotomy, there are lots and lots of opportunities between these extremes. I'm currently in a project at the intersection of software and shipping, it sells like hotcakes, we currently have a conversion rate (inbound prospects to signed clients) of more than 75%.

This is far from easy to pull off, and there are a few points I'd like to make based on my current situation (we're pulling a gross margin of $500 to $5000 by client):

* Selling pure software is hard. At the most basic level, we sell shipping rates and the accompanying software is the cherry on top (I'm saying this even tough I run the technical side of things). We're doing well because our target market understands the value proposition even better than we do, we manage to offer a free product and make money on it.

* Co-founders matter. I couldn't even have had the idea on my own, much less the resources (contacts, skills, ...) to launch the business. I'm very fortunate to have met co-founders that are beasts on the business and shipping & logistics sides of things, we form an awesome triptych, which is a very delicate balance to have.

* Everything takes much more time than you expect. You're at ease in the technical domain, this won't be much of a problem while developing your core product. But selling will take much of your time, it's is a time-consuming activity and you don't know anything about it. Plugging your product in your client's systems will take time, either because your client hasn't any in-house developer or they're less than half as skilled as you are.

If you're a solo hacker selling pure software in the B2B space, you are, I believe, in for a rough, rough ride.
The remarkable story aside, I really enjoyed the styling of the article. While I wish the text were just a pinch bigger, it was truly a pleasure to read.

Some things I noticed in particular:

- Subtle highlighting to connect names to photos
- Unobtrusive but beautiful section headings
- Anything not pertaining to the article pushed down below it[1]
- Beautiful use of photography

I might be late to the party here because I don't often read Slate, but I enjoyed reading the article almost as much as the article itself.

[1] I can't be the only one who finds "You might like..." sidebars distracting. Particularly when they incorporate images, they pull my attention away from the text and strain my eyes as I read.

I would be more likely to contribute to add impressions if more articles on the internet were like this.
Pretty much exactly my point of view.

We had the problem with low cost carriers too - though it was usually a quality issue, some customers because of the nature of their business (e.g. lots of fax calling) we would push them on to generally high cost TDM trunks via the local LEC versus lower costs VoIP trunks with level3 or other carriers.

I wish I could convey to people that they need to trust that their carrier is not just sharing their info beyond what is required to make the network work and what is legally required of them by the federal/state/local government.

I wish I could also explain more about how the telephone network, works. Like, how its virtually impossible to record every single call made in the US in a blanket sort of way, and that every transiting carrier from here to there also has a slice of their information.
Issuance for bitcoin is not "algorithm", it's all the resources expended in running miners and developing new miners. Storage of fiat currency is arguably very cheap as well, since only a tiny fraction of it actually exists as paper and coins. Scarcity is fixed for precious metals as well, since there's only a fixed amount available on the planet (unless you want to go mine on other planet). Security, Counterfeiting for Bitcoins should have a giant asterisk pointing to a footnote about the difficulty of securing them, and how often they are stolen from both individuals and exchanges. Bitcoin Fiduciary Media is possible and inevitable as soon as bigger banks and institutions (esp. insurance companies) get involved (there's nothing technically stopping the creation of Bitcoin 'derivatives').
DxVA passes tasks like iDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) to the GPU on Windows. If you are running ANY DxVA codec on any Windows computer, the process happens exactly as I've described.

In fact, Intel's DxVA implementation explicitly has an iDCT accelerator. See this paper for details: http://download-software.intel.com/sites/default/files/artic...

I assume a lot of people watch Youtube on Windows computers, amirite? The iDCT is basically a Fourier Transform as far as the math is concerned. Other portions of the H264 codec (such as motion compensation) are similarly increasingly hardware-accelerated... even on crappy integrated GPUs like the old GMA950.

Phone hardware on the other hand, is basically state-of-the-art. I wouldn't be surprised if phones of today had superior hardware decoders than the crap that Intel churnned out for the bottom-barrel consumers back in 2009.
The author here makes a convincing argument that there is a "cool factor" in internet apps but then overstates his case dramatically when he sees the end of FB on the horizon. Simply because a tool loses it's cachet doesn't mean that the network effects go away.

Or put more directly: sure, hip 20-somethings don't give Facebook the love they once did. Who cares? FB doesn't have to play the "I'm the coolest kid in town" game any more. As the author says, they can buy cool. All they have to do now is remain the only tool to wish Grandma a happy birthday.

Or, as some FB'er put it years ago, they're the phonebook, dammit. Their goal is to be a utility. They want to be the radio station, not the rock band.
Journalists tend to have their own cultural biases--although more on political topics than technical ones.

You're on to more than you give yourself credit for there. Much modern journalism is an integral part of the political system, and many papers fit into your $PROPRIETARY_COMPANY variable quite neatly.

There is some separation between party and paper, but I think as far as politics goes, we're pretty close to the hypothetical situation you describe.
To solve this problem, Twitter is looking at a few things, including limitations on how many characters or words a user would be allowed to insert or delete.

Consider "Wish you were here" vs "Wish you were her" or "Buy Apple stock" vs "Don't buy Apple stock". It's amazing what a single letter or word can do to change the meaning of a sentence. If you can change the meaning of a Tweet in 1 letter, how could they possibly police changes?
I know we try to discourage random quotes and so on here, but that one was pretty much perfect.
Of course there are differences, but I'm talking about the similarities.

If you go around looking for signs, you will find them. Who/what was it that sent him that sign?
The "Weird Forest" of Big-O Asymptotics
I really enjoyed this post and found it oddly inspiring. Similar to the Steve Jobs quote about knowing you will die someday and how it helps make decisions. Thanks to the author.
Multivitamin researchers find no health benefits
> You could theoretically add all sorts of controls and access-limitations. There's really zero benefit to doing so.

Wow. That, right there, is the problem. You don't have to care about other people's privacy, so you don't. You're not accountable, and neither are the companies you work for.

I hope there's a disgruntled insider at one of the companies that uses your tools, and they vacuum up all the data they can find and leak it. Maybe a public scandal could make you care, if it affected your bottom line.
Same principle, as I see it, whether it's writing 1 byte, calling gotoxy/putch, or copying a whole bunch of bytes. Dirty rects! The insight is the same: you draw the things that have changed, and leave alone the things that stay the same.
$10 for 50GB? At 4 hours a day, every day a month, 50GB is only 1Mbps. 1Mbps of transit costs < $1/month. So in a way, it's only 10x markup, which isn't _terrible_ given the industry.

OTOH, people that exceed may be more likely to perform large transfers. If you're downloading at non-peak hours, there's zero extra cost to the ISP.

This kind of problem is unavoidable when the cost and price structures vary.
That reminds me of an 'interview' I went on shortly after college. There was a job ad in the paper looking for energetic people to fill a marketing position. My dad warned me against it, but of course I didn't listen. I went to the interview, and it was a big sales pitch on the company, with about 20 of us prospectives. The energetic marketers were doing a big rally, getting everyone pumped up, though being incredibly vague about what we did. They wanted us to go on a field trip with some of their marketers (or something... I don't remember the exact justification), and I'm embarrassed to say that I got in the car with a couple of them. We then proceeded to drive out to some town, get out of the car, and then they put on an AT&T (or sprint, who remembers) badge and started to walk up to people door-to-door to get them to switch long distance. Not quite as bad as getting beaten up or even having them shake me down for money... but still, stuck without wheels, two towns over, basically forced to walk with these dudes through their door-to-door slimy pitches. I think I pretty much deserved what I got.
The whole story seems to be fiction.
I joined facebook in 2005 and I think I'm just as engaged as ever.

I use it for sharing pictures with my friends and family. Hiking, skiing, camping, vacations, whatever. My family loves seeing that crap. My friends do too. The group album feature released a few months ago is AWESOME for that stuff.

Organizing events without facebook is tough. Facebook handles RSVPs. Has polls for things at the event (where should it be, what should we eat, etc.). Lets you post pictures. Lets you discuss everything.

Groups are fantastic also. I have a group where people post if they're going skiing this weekend. I used a group to coordinate 10 people training and participating in a Tough Mudder event. I have another group to coordinate a small semi-startup I'm a part of.

I can't imagine my life without facebook anymore.
Tone-Deaf at the Listening Post
Only with proper pragmas and loop constructs.

Besides, most ARM chips supported vectorized code anyway. You know, NEON? http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php

ARM64 does NOT grant you the vectorized instruction advantage. Qualcomm Snapdragon Krait have supported NEON for some time already.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5559/qualcomm-snapdragon-s4-kr...

So many people are arguing here, but clearly few of you people have even worked with ARM chips at the assembly level.
Automattic is the first non-freelance job for many of their employees, but most of them are hardly entry-level like an intern. It's pretty widely considered the premiere place to work in the WordPress ecosystem, given they maintain WordPress.com and their employees are responsible for a considerable amount of the development to the .org project as well.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that BT has introduced an opt-out filtering process for internet access.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25400009
I have hard time believing Lutherans really go against direct word of the Bible (which is, as far as I know, according to their faith, a direct word of God) and practice divination, but I admit, I don't know too much about the details of the Lutheran faith. If I had to choose, I'd rather point at Calvinists with their predestination and signs of being among the saved, even though even there you can't really solicit those signs AFAIK. But as for Lutherans - could you explain which practice of Lutherans you mean - what exactly and using which procedures Lutherans are using for fortune telling?
IBM Helps Turn Plastic Bottles into Antifungal Drugs
You misunderstand my comment. I'm not talking about a world in which war doesn't exist, but one in which a given country doesn't have constant military engagement. There's no need to think about whether this is possible, because there are plenty of countries for whom this is already true. Obviously many of these countries (Europe et al) are able to do this in large part _because_ of the US military, so I'm not suggesting that it's as simple as "we should stop having military engagements entirely". It's naive to think that we don't also reap benefits from being in a position of what's essentially military hegemony. But this doesn't really debunk the theory one might have about industry's role in ensuring that the US stays in this position.

EDIT to add: The binary way you're looking at it is also way off from reality; It seems self-evident that the more often one has military engagements, the easier it is to convince those in charge that more money should flow to military expenditures (which includes peacetime research). It's not the simple case of "constant war = military spending" vs "utopia = no military spending" that you're describing.
He lost me at "All right, if I win a game of hearts with less than 15 points, I’ll do it.."

Superstitious to the nth degree, I can't stand this deeply flawed thinking, ie gamblers' logic. It makes me want to vomit.

E: And it doesn't matter what year, if you're going to let the outcome of a hearts game determine your actions, I have a oujia board to sell you.

E2: After going back and reading it again, this reads too closely to fiction to be real IMO.
IANAL, but it is possible to do this under UK law - employees in the UK can be fired for any or no reason for the first 2 years, providing they are not being discriminated against (religion, gender etc). After that, they can be fired if it is for fair reason, and a fair process is followed. Underperformed is a fair reason, and formal stack ranking is a fair process (i.e. no discrimination). The employer would need to update people on their performance regularly, and provide ailing employees with help to improve. Underperformed sales staff are fired regularly like this pretty much everywhere.

It is true that firing employees does expose an employer to litigation / tribunal, which can be expensive. However, an employer that is doing stack ranking and is prepared for that sort of thing would not fall victim to the usual things that get companies in trouble - not having good enough performance metrics to justify firing the only X in that department, or assigning unpleasant work to employees to drive them out (which can be seen as constructive dismissal).

I have also noticed some large companies hiring the bulk of their staff as contractors, and 'firing' them for 3 days a year so that they don't become employees. This would make them basically at will employees, but I am not sure how well this would stand up if tested.

This book is cool:
http://www.cm-murray.com/little-books/little-book-of-uk-empl...
Does anyone know the purpose of Sec-WebSocket-Key and the associated Accept? I know the hashing stuff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket) but I don't understand why it exists.
As a first generation Nigerian American, it is situations like these that encourage people to make jokes.

But being more serious, I really am sort of appalled at how gullible some people are. Honestly, some of these scenarios are the most shady and preposterous situations, yet they still believe it to be true?
Educational markets move very slowly because almost all the value in a degree comes from reputation effects, and those are mostly solidified for each person when he is young. So they change as people die off rather than as the underlying res changes.
> Also, polish beyond a certain level is a negative for me...Basically, the harder something is marketed to me, the more I assume that the marketing is a necessary cover-up for a flawed product.

That's an interesting comment. I understand where you're coming from to a certain extent, and I'm not going to suggest that hiring is easy, but you can only be so skeptical or cynical about candidates by nature before it starts to negatively impact your process.

I'm of the opinion that a candidate who has taken the time to put together an impressive, polished showcase of their work, where the showcase is something he or she built (not a third party SaaS service), should start out as a more appealing prospect than a candidate who isn't trying to knock your socks off.
I don't know. Right now they commoditize delivery (the customer doesn't pick who delivers the package, just the delivery terms) so they can take advantage of the best rates for any individual package. It will be hard to compete with that internally.
"38% of Americans say that they have done something because God told them to"

http://today.yougov.com/news/2013/10/25/god-told-me/

Prayer is absolutely "telepathic communication to God" in at least one direction. Prayer is something you can do in complete silence, and God is still supposed to be able to hear you. In any other context we would call that "telepathy".

The other direction is not quite as clear, but clearly a lot of people believe it. Beyond telepathic responses, there are physical replies to telepathic requests, for example:

http://www.catholic.com/quickquestions/if-a-person-asks-in-p...

http://www.catholic.com/quickquestions/why-werent-my-prayers...

Note that the answers are not "this is bad and you should definitely not do it", but rather a simple command to trust that God or the lesser beings will do what's best.
Wow. At $4BN, Google could offer over $100 to every Snapchat user. That's sort of insane.

Like offering $6BN to Groupon - They could give away $5 million a day to companies using Google Offers for three years.

Obviously smarter-than-me people are behind these deals, but I just can't figure out how they make sense.
The telecoms legally own this data, its theirs, and its needed for all sorts of internal functions beyond just customer care - but lets focus on customer care:

Without this access how would you:

Create Trouble Tickets on call quality when the customer cant give very precise information?

Give credits on miss dialed calls to overseas destinations?

Explain charges on a customers bill?

Open tickets on calls that cant complete - the example above "someone called Germany on Saturday, can you check and see why it didnt go thru?"

I mean, I'd be interested on what form you think these access systems should take.
Premined strategies like Ripple chose certainly aren't the road to success.
Are multivitamins a waste of money? Editorial in medical journal says yes
The PC/Mac history is repeating with Android/IOS.

Exactly: Apple dominates the high end, and is at 0% of the low (some might say junk) end.
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Direct link to PDF of DOE report - http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/12/f5/IG-0900.pdf
My favorite quote on the matter:

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."

(Note: don't take my quoting of Sam Harris as an endorsement of him in general. I have no idea whether he's worth endorsing or not, having read essentially nothing of his beyond that quote.)
The doge brand is the USP. Most LTC clones are already largely undifferentiated, so this is actually a strong contender given it's technically almost identical to the rest.
Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 1 (2008)
An evangelist is selling something, even if they aren't negotiating price. Maybe "marketing person" would be more appropriate than "sales person"
Depends on the sort of journalism. Sure, you can do some sorts of writing on the side. But there's plenty of journalism that doesn't work that way.

A good chunk of news requires personal presence and connection. For example, if you're covering a state legislature or a city government, you just have to spend a lot of time getting to know legislative staff and other people around the capitol or city hall. And you have to have enough readership for them to be willing to talk to you. You might be able to do that in your spare time for a small town, but I don't think it's possible for anything more substantial.

The same is true of investigative journalism. Deep stories take months of research and writing. They take real budgets, real skills, real editorial backing.

I write a lot for fun, and have for years. But there's only so far that fun can take you, and those places don't include the most important societal functions of journalism.
Mandela's fight for peoples freedom
A very naive and trusting friend of mine got hooked on a Nigerian scam once.

After lots of back and forward, they sent an express UPS package full of $500 travelers checks in USD ($10k if I remember) to her apartment in NYC.

They wanted her to deposit them in her account, and immediately transfer 10% to them, and she could keep the rest.

We took them into the bank asking if they were real, after about an hour they finally told us no, and the only reason they had figured it out was because we asked, and their manager had just taken a course in detecting false travelers checks the month before. He said they were better than the fakes used on his course, and they passed all tests bar the very last and most time consuming one.

Likely a regular bank would have credited her account $10k, she would have transferred the 10%, and many months later the bank would come back asking for everything back. It would have worked, if I had not been visiting when the package arrived.
TL;DR version - if you don't apply security patches, or take basic precautions, you will get compromised.

It is sad that our government IT organizations are so poor, I would consider that a National Security threat much more than having the FBI help some whack job build a fake bomb so they can publicly "break up" a terror plot.
How long have you been married? Don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to at least be 1.5 people as your marriage goes on.
Have you ever worked in a support role?
North Korea erases official history: report
This doesn't even make any sense. Unions have nothing to do with turning companies into world leaders. That's management's responsibility. You just brushed off the parent commenter's argument that management was responsible for designing shitty cars that nobody wanted to buy because it doesn't fit your narrative.
> Mozilla has a new 'avoid vendor prefixes' thing

FWIW, Google Blink also takes this position: http://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes