skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did a little bit of cold calling when I was running a start-up. It's supposed to be really intimidating, and I have to say that before each call, I'd take a few minutes to warm myself up and think 'the worst they can do is say no'.

However, I went into EVERY call, knowing the person I was calling. I'd research via LinkedIn, and find out everything I could about that person, and the business.

I was amazed at how many times I'd contact somebody and they'd already heard of my business, and were keen to do business with me.
At the same time, more often than not, things didn't work out. But as some have said the key is to know what you're selling, and you're not selling your product, you're selling what your product can do for them. Make sure you're able to speak to that.
"I thought it would be great if you guys had x,y,z and could do a,b,c for your customers. It would ease problem a for you, and I'd estimate, based on what I know of your company, increased revenues of y".

Make it easy for them, hand them your business on a silver platter. Like I said, most times you won't get the sale, but you'll make more contacts in the industry, they may recommend you to other potential partners, or who knows.

Don't think "I'm going to sell them", think "I'm going to help them".
I bought a really expensive coffee maker that comes with a 3-month supply of coffee beans from a 3rd party supplier. I chose this pricier coffee maker over a competitors because of that included supply made up the difference.

That supplier is refusing to send me the coffee beans, so I now have a loss.
Patent licensing is in D&C Licensing, not Commercial Licensing.
Whoops, my mistake!
Ahhh the Flying Piano...
Less punishment for controversial comments in controversial topics.

Difficult to explain. In short, I actually have a six years old account with karma in the top 100, but today I wouldn't be allowed into HN anymore. I temporarily disabled my main account for productivity reasons a couple of months ago, and since then I created 3 new accounts when I was drawn into controversial discussions. After a good start, two of them were hellbanned, both times rather to my surprise (that's why I am on the 3rd now). I don't expect this one to last very long either.

I felt a bit guilty for taking part in controversial topics, but at least I figured the controversy stayed in those threads. I am not a troll, merely somebody who wants to understand things as objectively as possible and therefore is not always aligned with the mainstream opinion.

I was going to suggest to ban controversial topics rather than controversial users, but since that would sadly involve all topics involving female coders that is probably not workable. So perhaps an idea would be to punish controversial comments less if they appear within controversial topics? I assume I was hellbanned because I received too many downvotes, or maybe the majority of mods just don't like me.

I'm sure I won't be missed, and perhaps all is working as you want it to be. I don't think we really can escape our own filter bubble. But HN is pretty much my only news source, so naturally it saddens me that today I apparently am not welcome anymore - and probably lots of other people feel the same.
Thanks for the demo link; I hadn't heard of HTMLBars.

It makes for a good demo I suppose, but I prefer React in a couple places: there's no separate template, style construction is done with an object and not a string (constructing that style string for HTMLBars seems error prone), and the connection between the values on the Ember object and how they will be used in the DOM is guessed only by naming convention. You could use `this.set('hotdogs', count % 255)` and reference 'hotdogs' in your template in place of 'color'.
From the article,

"a) never cold call each other’s employees; b) notify each other if making an offer to an employee of the other company, even if that employee applied for the job on his or her own without being recruited; c) any offer made would be “final” so as to avoid a costly bidding war that would drive up not just the employee’s salary, but also drive up the pay scale of every other employee in the firm."

I think it's clear how this would affect wages.
And honestly, the A-10 is still the plane they want...
"Wage-fixing" is probably more accurate than "wage theft", but it is most certainly illegal under antitrust law.

The key issues I see in the case:

1) they agreed not to do counteroffers

2) some of them shared salary data

3) they agreed to disallow active recruiting (cold-calling)

4) they agreed notify each other when hiring from each other

The third seems a little weak, but it definitely crosses the line when you combine it with the fourth (and emails between CEOs to stop hires that were already in the works).
We can't avoid the collection of secrets without talking about the power of secrets. Governments collect secrets because uncollected secrets can actually be very powerful.

One of the sources of power that a secret gives you is the element of surprise.

Probably the scariest instance of this, to a government tasked with providing security to its citizens, would be a unique, valuable operational capability, particularly one that has to do with technology, that one country develops in secret.

They are paranoid about this because of the lessons of the 20th century. Sonar, fighters with jet engines, radar, and so very many other things. All the way up to something as dramatic as the atom bomb. All were secret at some point, and all conferred tremendous exclusive operational advantages at one point.

So that's one extreme and obvious example of the value of secrets: secret operational capabilities can mean that when conflict comes between nations, the nation with no idea of its neighbors' secrets could be terribly unprepared.

There are solutions to that that could avoid the need for secrets, but they're impractical: stop having wars, or get all nations to tell each other what their capabilities are (and would they be believed anyway?)

Looking for and collecting lots of secrets is the only way that governments striving for security can do their job, because you don't know what you don't know. Unless you look.

That's a big problem. And changing that value proposition seems unrealistic for humans -- or at least, it seems like the kind of change that hasn't happened since they started living in groups!

Realistic solutions to the problems raised by the Summer Of Snowden probably have more to do with drawing lines about what secrets are out of bounds, and trying to establish better oversight, than in trying to get rid of Intelligence by making governments transparent.
In the midwest, I've been to a handful of information security conferences in the past six months and I've seen at least two Surface Pro tablets at each one. When I ask about them, the users say their work has provided them.
> Circuit breakers have pretty dramatic attenuation. You go through at least two to get from your power sockets to your neighbor's.

Yes, but not enough attenuation to block powerline communications.

This is not a theoretical concern. People have tested HomePlug units and successfully connected to neighboring houses. There's even explicit provision in the spec for neighboring networks, so that they share the bandwidth instead of stomping all over each other.
>literally worthless

I don't think you understand hacking...
SwiftKey is amazing. Almost reason enough alone to prefer an Android phone over other options.
JavaScript Plugin author sells 4500 copies overnight
As tech VCs pile into NY, Massachusetts falters
My understanding is that since React has a virtual DOM, it can just render everything on the server with Node.JS, instead of evaluating it in a browser.
I don't think they're trivial to automate, actually. Take the Home Depot self-checkout counters. They're already present in most (all?) Home Depot locations that I've visited. But Home Depot hasn't gotten rid of clerks entirely. This is probably in part because the self-checkout counters don't always work properly. Furthermore, there are things Home Depot sells which the self-checkout machines can't process. Based on that example, it seems that automating clerks well enough to eliminate clerks altogether is actually a hard problem.

As for call centers, they already are heavily automated, and have been for some time. Every touchtone menu you're forced to deal with is evidence of this fact. Nonetheless, there comes a point when touchtone menus can't solve the customer's problem. (I for one only call a company if I'm facing an unusual situation, so the touchtone menu never solves my problem.) Because artificial intelligence cannot yet listen to a person's problems and devise a solution, human operators are still needed.
I must say I agree with your points and wish more people would approach the area logically with probabilities and cost benefits and the like. Many seem to treat it more like a religion where the high priests of the IPCC pronounce man has sinned by causing warming and we must atone by putting up solar panels which may be ok to feel righteous but is not very effective from an engineering point of view given CO2 emissions keep rising regardless.
Our Investment in Jelly
Actually I do employ somebody to "sweep the floors" fulltime.

Some random service doesn;t take any amount of care of interest in the job.

You are far better off to pay somebody to do it and be invested in the task with a sense of pride then to employ a random cleaning company and whatever worker they happen to send that week.

What I do find is that employee's think hiring is like being on a talent show.

Clearly you have never done any hiring. Once you get out of tech you'll be lucky if 50% of workers show up for work the day after they have been hired.

Fully 10% of workers will be hired, you will arrange a day to start work and they won;t even show up. You'll never hear from them again.

Companies can spend time training people over and over. Millenials expect to be promoted in 6 months and be constantly feted for their work.

Hopefully one day you can own a company and spend your time training workers to have them leave when they become competent.
Citadel Golang Library
I learned the most with VimGolf (http://vimgolf.com/). It's also pretty fun.
> salaries would likely fall without them

The median salary would likely fall, the mean would likely rise (or stay around the same) but the very top salaries would rise dramatically, in line with what these same players make on the free market as brand ambassadors.

This brings to light an uncomfortable truth: incentives are not really aligned for the very top talent and the majority of workers. To extend the sports analogy, Roger Federer recently opposed spreading prize money more equally in the grand slams, saying essentially that players should win more to get more money. (right now tennis prize money is essentially a power law distribution).
Azure is pretty good VPS, Skydrive is usable for anyone deep in the MS ecosystem, they still sell their VS, Office, and Outlook pretty much at market saturation.

And they make more money per Android phone than Google. And more money per Android phone than per Windows phone.
Free YouTube Channel Art/g+ Profile Template for Sketch2
It's hard to say, from just this snippet. You forgot to mention that Chizen tried to slime his way out of the problem by claiming he was only hiring junior-level staff. So Steve responded, rather sarcastically, "Okay, so everyone is open game then?", and then Chizen goes "No I was just kidding! Let's just be friends! Tee hee!".

I mean, Steve was a douche for a lot of other reasons. But this is savvy business right here. He had Chizen by the balls. Considering there's no mention of Apple intentionally trying to recruit from other companies in this article, I have to assume (until other evidence is provided, of course) that Apple was not doing such things.

To me it sounds like Steve knew he had the advantage, and he exploited that to keep his top talent where they were.
Yes, I know a fair bit about who raganwald is; I was thinking of the guys who are even more prominent and more SV-centred than him. All due respect to raganwald's willingness to stick his head above the parapet on sensitive topics like this, though.

> But it's so much easier to play hardball with a new hire who doesn't know anything; thus this kind of thing is "ignored."

I don't know about that though: if I was, say for instance, in a line of business which benefited from skilled developers going into startups rather than established tech companies this kind of news would look like the perfect advertising to me—but I'd still want to keep my head down while it was being discussed.
>(beyond modeful editing, which Evil provides)

This is exactly my point. The Emacs mentality is that Emacs can do everything...it can even be Vim. Why should I do that when I can just use Vim? Maybe Emacs can do anything, but it doesn't do anything well unless you've got a dynamite mode. Evil is not going to be as good of a Vim as Vim. I can tell that even with a glance at the Evil website. One of the best things about Vim is the extensive documentation. Evil just has a 22 page PDF manual...lots of which is filled with Emacs Lisp. So if I use Evil, I then need to spend time learning Evil and how to customize it with Emacs Lisp. Or I can just use Vim.
I suspect that paying at the register cuts down on the amount of tips, which makes it hard for a single restaurant to buck the trend. That restaurant would have to raise menu prices to pay for the lost tips, which makes the restaurant less competitive.
I think it's important to add that "flawed" is not the same as "invalid." If their assumptions are incorrect, the conclusions of the paper are wrong. You have to start with some assumptions, otherwise your theory wouldn't be a theory, but rather data. Science is advanced by such assumptions and theories, even if the results are "wrong." It all goes on the pile.

As for why it's a paper and not a blog post - I think the conventions of academia are there to be questioned too. Why not form it into an abstract-methods-discussion format if that's what they think best suits it? Why does it have to be made into a more accessible and friendly blog format? Seems to me that open access will reduce the "scariness" of having a formal paper out there, as well as reduce the worth of same. Broadening access has that effect, and it looks like these guys are early adopters of a new, less formal process for describing the evaluation of theories like this one.

I guess what I'm asking is why this paper gets singled out for special derision when there are plenty of papers out there just as flawed (though no less "valid"). I think it's just a run-of-the-mill bit of science that, like many others, will simply be disproven in a positive way by experts. It seems ugly to submit it and its writers to such public pillorying.
Fiat is now an English word, derived from the Latin, which does not mean the same thing as its Latin origin. But really, look it up. if you don't believe me. That's why we have dictionaries, to help people confused about words!

Dictionaries are not written by goldbugs, and while dictionary definitions vary from each other and from prevalent usage over time, when dozens of sources over 80 years all emphasize the same decree aspect, and you are in fact complaining about people widely using it that same way, then both linguistic prescription and linguistic description agree: that is in fact what it means to competent English speakers.

I fully agree that 'fiat money' also has a strong denotation of 'unbacked', because at its origin and through its history, that always been one of its qualities. But that is in addition to, and often reliant upon, the government fiat – not exclusive of the fiat.

Really, the best clue to the term's origin and traditional use was the oldest I quoted, from a non-American source 80 years ago. It describes 'fiat money' in almost exactly the dimensions that you accuse goldbugs of making-up in recent years, which suggests that instead you are making things up.

And yes, Bitcoin isn't backed by a commodity of other value, and yes, it shares that property with fiat money. If you'd simply said that – it is similar to fiat money in this particular way – you'd be on firm ground. The deception you've attempted is the idea that lack-of-collateral-backing is the defining quality of 'fiat money'.

If people using 'fiat money' in its longstanding sense sound ridiculous to you, it's your stubbornly-eccentric definition that should change.
IBM says goodbye to x86 forever, sells server lines to Lenovo
There's that possibly-apocryphal quote about socialism in the US never having taken hold because Americans all believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I don't mean it as snark but when it takes 12 hours to reset all of your passwords, that's a lot of digital "stuff" for a minimalist. At what point does the psychic load of all the digital things equal the foregone physical things?
Yes. Building out a list of pre-qualified contacts, then "cold calling" by means of telephone or email is one of the best ways to get in front of people that your product/service can help. The key is to be respectful of everyone's time and come to the table with something of value. And of course, pushiness or over-persistence is never appreciated. Also, "cold call" doesn't mean "blind call". The sales person should have some notion of the prospect's business, their role in that organization, and exactly where this product or service might fit in.

To those that hate receiving cold calls, remember: most of these sales development folks that call leads are fresh out of school and simply trying to gain a foothold in a hyper-competitive space. Don't let them waste your time if that's what they're doing, but have a heart!
You gotta be kidding
A company that I started in the early 2000s used cold calling to generate leads. It was very affective to generate solid qualified leads. We were lucky that we go an experience cold caller that trained other younger sales people. Having someone (either an agency or a person in-house) helping you is key to your success.

IMO, a good cold caller will work very hard to get to the right person, if that person exist. They will be committed and relentless to generating the lead for their sales team. They will work on their script to a point where they have answers for most types of questions. They will use the tools that they are provided (e.g. salesforce) to ensure to keep a log of what they've done and their todo list. And they will be in constant contact with the sales team to ensure that all information is provided back to them in a structured manner.

If you think that cold callers are waisting your time, simply try and tell them that you are not interested or point them to a different person who may be interested (if that person exists). There's no point for a caller to place a call to someone who has no interest in buying their offering, that's just a waste of time. Cold callers are "not" telemarketers.
Can someone explain to me what "isomorphic" means in the tagline for the linked Director library[1]? I have no idea how isomorphism is supposed to play into all of this?

[1] "a tiny and isomorphic URL router for JavaScript
http://github.com/flatiron/director"
For another source on the woes bedeviling the F-35, check out this article from Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-figh...

Some of the highlights include:

-DoD skimped on requirements and instead relied on the contractor to fill in the gaps. This led to the plane being designed without protection from lightning strikes which means it can't currently fly in bad weather

-The plane was supposed to have 70 percent parts commonality between variants. It is now 25 percent

-The plane couldn't do supersonic flight because Lockheed Martin didn't test the stealth coatings at the higher temperatures generated in supersonic flight

-The DoD let Lockheed Martin skip a lot of real world testing in favor of computer modeling
nothing at all, cost doesn't matter security of the software is all that matters
Sure, make partner in a boutique software consulting firm.
Seriously tho.

Anybody that spends any amount of time in co-location data centers.

What percentage of machines are IBM when you look into a random cage?

Not many.

I hate to say it but Lenovo will do a much better job with servers as they further commoditize then IBM.
"Quickly" New App for mobile devices
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App for mobile devices
Make, Edit And Share Video Quick & Easy
Subscribe, we will notify you of our official launch in App Store..
Are there any other modal text editors in wide use?

All others I can think of have you strongly in one mode (insertion, typing) and you only drop out of it if you hold down a command key (Control, or pull down a menu, etc.). Before GUIs it was a lot more common to have 'entry mode' and command mode in your text editor/word processor, but vim is the only one I know of now where 'insert' is merely one mode, and by default you're in a movement/command mode.

Not saying it's bad; I spend most of my day in vim and wouldn't have it any other way.
> This starts to get murky from an ethical point of view because we are talking about a cancer medication, and I doubt that software IP would fall under the compulsory licensing. But, cancer drugs are expensive to develop. Bayer should absolutely be afforded some IP protection to recoup the costs of developing the drug. Otherwise, they'll just stop; or more likely, just increase the prices elsewhere around the world.

If they wanted to make money in the Indian market and be afforded IP protection, they could've priced the drug reasonably. Surely a smaller profit is better than no profit?
A open source minimalist HN reader
If tech people are in their own echo chamber, then how come this is not a problem with cities like Sunnyvale, San Jose, Santa Clara or Los Gatos which are also heavily populated by tech people?

Maybe it's because those cities actually built tons of housing. Didn't call them "affordable", but when you do have tons of supply on the market, like those mega-complexes in San Jose by Cisco campus, it does have an effect on price.
Most of the commands are suited for a en_US keyboard only, do you know a .vimrc that is optimized for a de_DE keyboard?
The true solution is to build more housing. However, no sane person who's dealt with San Francisco's red tape would suggest it.
One second in video everyday during a round-the-world trip, final result
I assume you mean "Soylent"... though drinking solvent would probably also make you give up food
The fact that I'm a 21 year old drop out making nearly 100k because I sat in my mom's basement for a few years and studied software that interested me is pretty crazy.
Most of these are $200-$400 in price range. These are full computers (just with limited storage). If Google starts charging in a few years, you can convert it over to a full desktop with [Crouton](http://www.howtogeek.com/162120/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-...).
Some say this is the most politically-engineered weapons system in history (along with being the most expensive). Production for the parts of this aircraft is spread over 45 states. So you can only imagine how difficult it would be to scrap or reduce the size of this project.
Can't you put it in DFU mode and reinstall the whole system?
From the article, the device was purchased in January 2013 (more than a year ago) and the Verizon plan activation was attempted in January 2014. This puts the device outside the return window of the reseller (Amazon). The only problem is the vendor website still showing the device as being sold with the plan.