skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more "cold email" for us, but yes to some extent. I think some of the keys are to be:

1. brief

2. relevant

3. professional

I think in terms of the cold email pitches I get, and think of which ones I'm willing to consider and which ones I don't. Given that, my thinking is something like this:

Regarding 1 - If you send me a rambling 6,000 word manuscript, I'm not reading it, and I probably will hit "delete" in after about 4 seconds of skimming unless something in there really catches my eye.

Regarding 2 - this may be the most important one. If you spam me with some random crap that has no connection to what I'm doing, and/or anything I need, I'm hitting "delete" pretty much from the get-go. And if you want to sell me something, you need to talk about my needs, not your product or service. And you should have done your research ahead of time. If it's apparent to me that I'm getting something that's the result of a mail-merge run with nothing to hint that you know anything what my company does, where we are, how we operate, etc., guess what? "Delete".

Regarding 3 - If you get the name of the company wrong, have shitty grammar and / or spelling, or otherwise send me something that is barely comprehensible, it's going in the bin in the blink of an eye. And being a non-native English speaker isn't going to buy you much of an exception. I'm in America, if you want to do business with me, learn to speak English. Likewise if you're emailing somebody in Spain... learn Spanish. And get somebody to proof read your message that's fluent. I'll tolerate a small amount of sloppiness in terms of grammar and what-have you, but you have to at least make an effort.

So, my theory is... do some research up front, find out as much about the customer as you can up-front. Write something in clear English (or the appropriate language) using proper spelling and grammar. Keep it fairly short, and focus on the customer's needs, situations and problems. But I don't mean to assume they have a certain problem. I mean, phrase things in terms of "We've noticed that companies like yours often have problems like X... We are specialists in X, and I'd like a few moments to find out more about your company and whether or not you are really dealing with X". Something based on the "Core Story" approach put out by Chet Holmes would also be received well (by me anyway) as long as it isn't too long, and is backed up with credible data, etc.

Do that, and I think you have at least a shot. In my case, if you email me like that, I may simply not need whatever it is you're selling... but at least I'll read your email, consider it, and probably even reply. If you send crap, it's going straight to the trash can, often mostly (or completely) unread.

Do this... go through a bunch of the spam you get, and figure out which emails you receive well, and which ones evoke the "delete after four seconds" response. Model your own communications more after the first batch, and don't do whatever the people in the second batch are doing.
Where Is Indie Gaming Going?
Let me make this clickable: http://a.fancyresu.me

Really fancy! :)
VPS.net paying $5 for positive tweets
No need to make this personal. It was the original blog article that concentrated on the negative things and did not do a whole lot at explaining Julia's benefits.

I really love Scipy and friends and I also think Julia is a promising system.
Saving Private Functions: Extending the Mongo Shell
I like the South Korean system. Stand up when you're ready to leave and walk out. They will intercept you by the door for payment. No high tech necessary, sorry YC folk.
They always say that you prepare to fight the last war. In that case, it's only natural that we're still preparing to fight the Soviets.
just add me on skype: fahad.ahmed225
I only said this drags the price down. In order for somebody to sell, there needs to be a buyer. My comment was that hoarders are in an internal conflict - they both want to spend it to drive adoption up and, yet, continue to hoard it as supply drives the price down decreasing the value of their stash.
Thats true, but my son has enjoyed typing in "moving asterisk" games from an old VIC20 book into an emulator, and has enjoyed playing them too. He would still rather play on an iPad though. Oh well.
Yeah it started out very in depth but then mentioned one very obvious fundamental SEO practice (something Matt Cutts bestowed upon us many months/years ago) and then goes off into bizarro land with the CMS stuff at the end.
"Potential customers" is a key part of your phrase. If you have someone's contact information and you have some reason to believe they'll be interested in your service, that's a lead.

Without a referral or lead, if you're cold calling, you're calling someone who not only hasn't inquired about your service, but whom you have no reason to believe wants to hear from you. In my opinion, you have no place calling that person. If you choose to do so anyway, it's your responsibility to waste as little of their time as possible in as cordial a manner as you can. Hard sells are absolutely awful.

I only get upset with cold callers that don't quit the first time I say no. No matter how qualified you believe a lead is or how it's been validated/verified, if the person on the other end says no, don't push it. Maybe they'll just keep saying no, but maybe they'll remember you as the pushy jerk whose product/service they'll now never consider.
I know about vsplit and split, what I meant was a better terminal than conqueterm. Now, the Emacs ansi-term is also not perfect, but way better than Conqueterm.

Org mode is a very sophisticated Todo and documentation and wiki and calendar and management and literal programming system for Emacs. I haven't found anything that compares to it. It is really really good.

The java doc thing is something entirely different, and that's usually made possible by the various language modes.
How a Garbage Truck Took Down Vendetta Online
As someone else pointed out, that's exactly the opposite of what I suggested. Here's more info why putting your blog on a subdomain is not a good idea: http://www.agent-seo.com/blogging/seo-subdomain-vs-subdirect...
You should trust expert opinion, unless you are expert in given area. To understand medicine you need many years of hard study. Several articles from wikipeida is not enough.
I agree with that all as a FIOS customer but one thing that is burning me up is their refusal to CDN with YouTube and Netflix. There are times where YouTube is unusable even with 50Mbit connection. They also are fighting hard in court to have this behavior by filing lawsuits against net neutrality.

The internet is great from them but when the 2 biggest bandwidth sites on the internet are slow it is a big deal. You cannot get HD Netflix from them but they offer a competing service which they CDN with and give you HD which is a conflict of interest.
I can't tell whether to believe him or not. As someone with pretty deep technological experience, his naivety to such matters is a bit off putting to say the least.
Samsung: Galaxy Note 3 Neo Won't Launch In US Or UK
Will you be webcasting?
I don't want to write a bunch of markup next to my javascript.
> Well, it's all good until it isn't. If the priorities of a few people impact so many (including you) and you no longer agree with them, then what do you do?

You have a good point here, but...

> I think it's actually a shame that you'd need to be a part of the "small group" in order to have a voice.

> It's actually harder for you to make it into the small group sans the blessing of the few who are in it.

... but I don't think it works like that. The "small group" I'm talking about is not a group of special people, either born into it or allowed to join. I'm thinking about a subset of humanity that actually gives a damn, and works towards a change. It seems that the entry exam for joining this "small group" is just getting out and doing anything - starting a company, starting a movement, starting a research project, etc. Because most people don't do anything, you can join the minority by just trying to fix something.

Actually, it's the whole Snowdengate thing that got me thinking about this issue. There's a popular meme here that "the solution must be political in nature, not technological", a statement I strongly disagree with. I've come to realize that an effective solution will have to be technological in nature, because politics means lots of talking that never gets you anywhere, while a simple technological solution can simply shift the problem landscape under people's feet. You don't have to ask anyone; you deploy, and they'll have to cope. It's exactly the kind of thinking you're worried about, but I can't really see any alternative.

You see, the world is full of short-sighted, uncaring, or sometimes outright stupid people who, if given the chance, will burn this planet down to the ground thanks to their sheer incompetence. I would love them to have the freedom and the equal influence over the world's priorities, but I also don't want my future kids to die a painful death because of a combination of stupidity and democracy.
Even though 'Nyan Cat' breaks things other plugins I'd like to use (like Powerline.el) - I still use it anyway.

It's silly and I'm glad you made it.
I just watched German's MY FRIEND, IVAN LAPSHIN a few days ago, it was excellent. Highly anticipating his final one, HARD TO BE A GOD..! I'll have to watch MY CAR soon.

Sokurov (mentored by Tarkovsky) can be good, though he's quite mainstream as well.

There's actually a STALKER parody by some other Russian, I forget the name.
Really about.com ROTFL - pull the other one mate its got bells on.

Good white hats knew that mega spun/thin content sites where on the way out years ago - even before Matt Cutts blog post a few days ago.

Your own unique original content still has a lot of value say if infinti red bull racing did behind the scene blogs about f1.
Google AI Challenge Post-Mortem (2010)
Once you have a symmetric fiber connection, it becomes surprisingly easy to find ways to fill that pipe. For instance, it's suddenly feasible to to fully mirror all of your local storage to multiple online services, or to run an OpenVPN endpoint for personal use and send all of your traffic through it when out and about.
Oops, you're right. Good catch, thanks.
Awesome product.

I wonder if typing on watches will be someday as normal as typing on phones. I would rather bet on speech recognition.

Off-topic, but I'm hoping one day programming won't be a desk job. You'll get to walk around, interact with a touch screen and just have a conversation with the computer about what should your program do.
"Incidentally, this is also why the Dvorak keyboard layout is exactly the opposite of what you want in a highly ambiguous scenario; Dvorak places all the vowels adjacent to each other, significantly increasing ambiguity. Intuitively it rearranges word-space to put many common words right next to each other."

I suspected as much when it came to Swype; it's nice to see someone who has actually done the work verify this intuition. I use Dvorak on my physical keyboards, but I find it sort of... ironic, for lack of a better word... that the suboptimality of QWERTY is itself the key to how these alternate sloppy-keyboards work. It's sort of nice that my QWERTY skills don't entirely go to waste...
I think it's more like Julia is what happens when "language geeks"/experienced programmers write a language that's for technical computing, with a deep understanding of their problem domain and empathy for their users.

Strings in Julia are meant to be addressed in for loops; they index by byte not character because it's slow to index by character once you include Unicode. Julia trys, in general, to give you control over low-level things rather than hiding them with magic.

I like Julia because it's homoiconic, because of it's type system, because multiple dispatch is fun and new, and because it's just plain fun to write. I do static analysis, not math/science.
It does work. This submission is literally an example of it working, and we will see 2 or 3 more today and again and again every day. It's not the single link on HN that matters, it's the dozens of automated tweets, posts and whatnot followed by manual links from people if the post is lucky.

I've started flagging SEO campaigns because it's getting a bit stupid that every jackass can write some dumb crap about "omg startup" and then have their coworkers or co-yc-alumni prop it up.

Google will eventually address pandering/gaming social networks - it's not very hard to detect when a company writes and hosts completely unrelated content for somebody else's audience like when a video chat service writes about blogging for SEO. 10 years ago it was "free articles" (http://www.articlesbase.com/) you could host full of juicy content + a couple spammy backlinks for the original author, 5 years ago it was stupid infographics, now it's "social media articles".

It's just a loophole that unfortunately hinges on exploiting us.
Android testing with JUnit, Mockito & Robolectric
Cost of living (comparing London to Berlin): http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Cost of living (as of Jan2014): http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/berlin

Map of rent prices: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/mietspiegel/de/...
"In general, I, like most of us, hate ISPs who advertise "unlimited" data"

It's unlimited which does not mean there aren't limitations. For example an "all you can eat" buffet means all you can eat in one visit and also means you can't expect to take home what you don't eat. Likewise unlimited would typically come with some restrictions and expectation that you aren't watching movies 24x7 but more like a normal person might (call it 12 hours x 30 days?).

"So instead of advertising as "unlimited", why not say "Use as much as you want upto xyz GB". "

Well for one thing most end users wouldn't have an idea of what that means. So right there that would be a fail in the brains of most normals. How many people can translate "x" gb or tb into something that means "I can watch 10 movies a night". So I guess that is the answer but then again they actually might not even realize how much bandwidth email takes or visits to the amazon store. Hence "unlimited" is much easier.

By the way at the 7-11 they don't say "you can have 10 ketchup packs" because then everyone might take 10 ketchup packs because it says they can. Leaving the ketchup and allowing people to take what they feel is right typically results in less usage overall.
> What if it isn't fast enough on your first attempt? Won't you wish your code was maintainable so you could change it to be faster?

From my experience, this isn't the case at all. A lot of the time my first attempt is in Python. The first attempt is really more of a prototype or a proof of concept. If the code works and I want to productize it, the code needs to be sped up. I have (at least) 2 choices: (1) make the Python code as fast as possible or (2) rewrite the whole thing in C/CUDA. If I take option 1, performance gains will be marginal and I still probably won't be happy with the performance of the software. Option 2 might take a bit longer, but at least I'll get something performant out. As I'm just throwing out and rewriting the first attempt, I don't actually care at all if it was maintainable code. I don't even care if the ideas in it were well explained/commented, because they're all my ideas and they're still fresh in my mind and I'm just going to rewrite the code and then document/clean up the fast version.

The appeal of Julia is that I no longer have to do this rewrite to make my code fast. Furthermore, if I don't have to do this rewrite, it is actually in my interest to make my first version of the code be maintainable and well documented.
There are also blurays of OFFRET, ZERKALO, RUBLEV, IVAN, SOLYARIS. Wow, only just realized STALKER is the only one missing.

Oh, and the fantastic VOYAGE IN TIME! This one is often overlooked, but it's in fact directed by Tarkovsky and has some beautiful shots. It's a documentary of some of the processes in making NOSTALGHIA.
The old Usborne computer programming books got a lot done in about 50 pages. But then they were quite textually dense, and by no means perfect as teaching tools either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7110676 .
War on IP/copyright is the new war on drugs. Attacking hackers is merely a byproduct.
I think you have a very, very optimistic view of humanity. It's entirely possible you and I have completely opposite experiences, because while I've known plenty of good, decent people, I've known more that fell somewhere between mediocre and horrid.

I'm also not sure how you could consume any sort of news for any period of time and still hold on to this belief. Of course we hear about the worst, and it's put as shockingly as possible, but with all the terrible things that happen every day, "almost everyone" just doesn't seem to me to work in your statement.
Jose, I appreciate that feedback. I tried to address readers of all levels of SEO experience, so I started out with the basics and then progressively went deeper into some more advanced topics. It sounds like I could have been more clear i my writing. If you have any specific questions about the CMS stuff, just let me know.
Do you mean predictable revenue, the book about salesforce?
I can't find predictive revenue on Amazon.
Natural Selection Source Code Released
Doubtful - he bought the device in January -2013-, went to activate it in January -2014-, only to be told they'd just discontinued the activation of new services.
I run Danish, English and Spanish on Swifthkey, and it works very well. As soon as I have typed one or two words, it knows exactly what language I'm typing.
I've heard many very smart people (professors, leaders of large HPC efforts, "language geeks") express the same sentiment over the years. Unfortunately, it's a btch of a problem, as attested to by the veritable graveyard of half-baked solutions out there. Apple's "Bridge Support" is the closest thing I've seen to success (haven't worked with MS's CIL) and it leaves much to be desired.

I'm not sure there is any way around the impedance mismatches between languages. They're all slightly different for a reason. Perhaps clean C APIs are the best we can hope for.
Look, there are enough laws and regulations on the books that you can get written up (legally, strictly speaking) for almost anything. Then, it is up to you how far you wish to assert your innocence--the DA will offer to plea you out again and again, and if you make it to court they will then try to make an example out of you, using whatever tricks suit them (all legal, mind you!). There is plenty of evidence and coverage of this happening, so don't pretend it is unreasonable to fear.

That all said, going back to the very first interaction--you and the cop--we see that it becomes purely a decision on the cop's part whether or not you are going to be sent down into the machine.

Justice should not be so arbitrary, but here in the US it oftentimes is; don't pretend otherwise.

EDIT:

As for safeguards...the state can deprive you of years of freedom and set you free afterwards with an "oops". That's bullshit, even if the safeguards finally kick in. And if you end up with "resisting arrest" or just antagonizing the system or embarassing a DA, those safeguards seem to magically fail.
Reasons To Bootstrap Your Startup
I just got this and tried it out.... awesome. recommend it. My friend and I watched the amusing video and i said, what's 2 bucks. It is just as fast as normal typing but gives me more real estate to see the convo!

also: took me all of 5 seconds to get fluent at it. no joke.
Do they not let you add to the dictionary? Honest question, I've only used Swype, but you can definitely add things to the Swype dictionary and they work just like any other word after that.
Think it's a typo for Java.
Not to mention that often, we'll use words in multiple languages in the same text (or email, or note...)
“Let's make a phone”
I suspect it will be a while for ebay, given that they own PayPal. Bitcoin directly competes with PayPal's business model.
> I've been a FiOS customer for about a year and I still wonder what's going on with it to make it so good. By all rights, nothing sold by Verizon should be this easy, high-quality, and free of problems. Yet here we are.

What makes it so good is that it is only available in a couple of dozen cities in 16 states (almost all coastal states), within any city focuses on wiring up affluent areas first,[1] is a premium product that starts at $60/month (averaged over 2 years), and is relatively unregulated compared to POTS or cellular.

[1] Check out the FIOS map for Baltimore (within 15 miles of 21217): http://fios.verizon.com/fios-coverage.html. That reverse-S shape is more or less a map of the higher-income corridor of the city. The pinned addresses are generally luxury apartment buildings. Also check out the coverage map of Philadelphia (within 20 miles of 19106). Zoom in note good coverage in Center City, particularly in Rittenhouse Square, no coverage in North Philly, South Philly, or West Philly, but decent coverage in the wealthier western suburbs. Follow Lancaster Ave westward from poor West Philly; note the lack of any coverage until you get to Lower Merion Township, one of the historically wealthy suburbs.
Seems to me that most peoples' points is that Bitcoin solves problems that most people do not have. I still haven't had any Bitcoin advocates explain to me why I should care. My credit card is vastly superior in pretty much every respect, and the decentralized nature of the network seems more like an albatross that makes it require vastly more resources than it needs (because I don't think central banking is bad). And yeah, no chargebacks is ok if you're a seller and can reasonably push risk off to the consumer without them shopping elsewhere. But I'm a buyer, so...
I ahd similar problem my phone dies when the battery meter says 20%, Apple genius bar suggested I have to setup my device as a new device and remove all user data(sms. apps etc) and not use the icloud backup :(
Programming is hard.
File IO in Rust
Perhaps there's a 'do not tap' list. If there is, he's on it.
Simple budget planner - my weekend startup
I needed a simple budget planner, hated Excel charts, so it does everything i need. Hopefully for someone else too.
I think a big part of the appeal of Dvorak in the dev community is that there's something very satisfying about a keyboard based on real research. That research was done for 10 finger full-size keyboards though, and doesn't really map to the current generation of keyboards. As I allude to in that footnote, we've actually done some really cool research into optimal keyboard layouts in ambiguous scenarios. We'll probably do a follow up post diving into that! (also stay tuned, there should be a paper coming out soon).
>>>> I own BTC, but I'm still wondering what's going to want me to spend it instead of my AmEx for my next purchase.

This is one of the appeals of paper money and credit cards over bitcoins at the moment. You have all the tactile experiences with money and credit cards. With BTC, people can't grasp the algorithm or the fact you can print out the promissory note, but its not the same.
I'm an Insightly fan myself.