skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advice: don't cold call hoping to sell. Unlike inbound methods, you have no idea where they are in the buying cycle. It could be years before you close, so don't bother trying.

Instead call to get information. Most people want to help. Ask them questions about things relevant to your service to qualify them. Ask them if they want information about your service and collect an email address. Add them to a nurture campaign so if they ever are looking to buy you're at the top of their list.

I got a marketing assistant to make these type of calls for a couple of weeks with a 60% success rate of getting an email address. In Australia email permission is opt in. I don't know what the conversion rate of the nurture campaign ended up being because I left the company.
How is this anti-intellectual? Most languages are designed by language geeks by definition. And language geeks tend to worry about the things mentioned. And he doesn't care about these things because they've been largely irrelevant for the work he's had to do.
This. I'm always surprised how people think that Europe is going to kill them with taxes in comparison to the States. If I add up all the taxes that you mention for any high-tax US state the sum is going to be right up there pushing 40%, maybe more. The difference is that as far as I can see the Germans, like Canadians, are getting some their tax money back in the form of social services and social protections. Here we just feed it to the military-industrial complex all while carrying on about how "the country is broke".
I don't wonder. It's simply that, while certainly no one is perfect, almost everyone is better than almost anyone imagines that anyone could possibly be.
Organizing my contacts is a huge pain. I'm going to sign up and check this out. I'll give you feedback once I'm in.
New Apple TV Coming Soon?
How is the x86 server business doomed? Do you think there will be an abrupt shift to ARM servers?
I get cold-called all the time. Here are the mistakes people make:

1. They waste my time (which is also a waste of their time).

That is, they are selling something that I don't need, generally because they don't know anything about me. If you're cold calling me, you should have read through our company's web site already. It's only fifteen pages or so; you can skip the press releases. You don't know what business I'm in? Why should I bother with you?

2. They are wasting my time.

Frequently I get called by salespeople who don't know what they're selling, except the name of it, a two sentence description that they memorized but don't understand, and they want to set up a meeting. You have a software product? What OS does it run on? Does it have a web interface? You're selling consulting services but you can't describe them because your answer for everything is "we can find people to do that, they are experts!"?

Go away.

3. They are wasting my time.

I already talked to you yesterday, last week, last month or last quarter. We discussed your product or service and it was clear from that phone call that we would never be a good fit for each other. (Your product only runs on Windows. Your service is Exchange consulting. You want to help process our customers' confidential data...)
You mean Satoshi-sama
To see the War on Terror as chiefly about domestic power grabs and pointless expenditures is the prerogative of US tax payers and US citizens, but it's also a pretty narrow point of view.

If you're going to make coarse, meaningless comparisons and only after that narrowing it down with qualifications, I guess the original article was right. Hacker Panic is the new War on Drugs. Except for all the ways it is not, of course.
Is it possible to raise the IQ of an entire country?
> Now imagine that someday all robots are connected to each other with a robot cloud. That's inevitable. You'd want all robots to instantly learn what any robot anywhere learns. If one robot learns how to mow the lawn, all robots acquire the skill at the speed of light.

Why this idea doesn’t apply to humans? We are almost connected to each other. It’s not automatic, but we can share and learn knowledge from Internet. But still not everybody can do correctly calculus or knitting.

Some robots will be silly and the knowledge they share will be unintelligible and unuseful. Some other will be better. Perhaps the robots can upvote the usefull shared knowledge, let’s call it Robots News, with r-karma. Can the robots process all the information they receive?

Furthermore, there will be different robots models. Can a little robot ask for something with the same intonation than a big robot? Does the robot have wheels or arms?
Julia does not compile the C code; it links against shared libraries. It helps that Julia types can model C structs easily.

Manual entry on calling C: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/calling-c-and-for...

Blog post on passing Juila callback functions to C code: http://julialang.org/blog/2013/05/callback/
How about you don't respond to tone or tenor at all? It's a bad argument on the best of days (PG's hierarchy has that near the bottom, one step above straight up ad hominem.)

It's a diversion at best. If you feel someone is being unpleasant, deal with it. You needn't be pleasant to be right. If they're being unpleasant and wrong, reply with why they're wrong, or alternatively downvote and move on. No need for meta noise in any case.
Because there was a fairly intelligent discussion going on here, in which people call other people Jackass. :)

And honestly? I was't being a hater. I was apathetic towards this whole thing before reading the GP.

In any case, I got nothing against the project itself. If it succeeds (which is fairly evident at this point), good for the people involved.
> Its harder to get published if you release all of the data prior to publication.

IF you succeed (and I hope you will).. just think how AWESOME would it be that the authors of one of the most significant achievements of the 21st century boicoted those greedy journals.

You'll probably win a Nobel prize if you succeed, why care about a journal publication?!
The Need for APIs - or Why I Built a JSON API for the Plone CMS
I like how you ignored everything else in the comment.
Most of them won't though. It's a disincentive to your customers to dangle a cheaper, but more difficult option in front of them. When the customer is ready to buy, you don't want them to think "wait, maybe I'll get this tomorrow when I pay in cash..."

Because they may decide in the intervening time not to bother buying it at all.
99% of WP7 apps worked perfectly well on WP8. The only ones that had issues were usually the ones that had managed to get exemptions from Microsoft to use underlying private APIs that may have changed (hence private).
Most reasonable comment thus far
Facebook will LOSE 80% of its users by 2017 – epidemiological study
A Resolution for Moms: No More Fakebook
Ask HN: I quit. What should I do now?
I recently quit a tech startup I had worked at for 2 years (we weren't going anywhere). But, in that time I became immensely intrigued with all aspects of technology and running a business, not to mention the HN community (Love you guys!) My role was in Business & Product Development and I have a degree in Marketing. But having worked in Sales & Management prior, I dread the thought of going back to that sector (Now realizing this wasn't the degree for me). I just turned 30 (feeling incredibly unaccomplished) and am waffling on what to do now. I've considered going back to school for Computer Science or Sound Design/Music Production, but thought that might just be a cop out for the easy loan money. I could spend far less money and learn the equivalent if not more online. Do I just suck it up, find something to pay the bills and follow my new found passions in my off hours? Any advice and/or brutally honest thoughts?
An irrationalist revolt against the Enlightenment and the possibility of rational debate.
Other Minuum co-founder here.

We will be setting up an alpha with some Galaxy Gear users in the next week. Some technical know how will be required, but if you're interested send us an e-mail at developers@minuum.com.
That it's inherently deflationary is a fact (this stems directly from the fact that there is a limited supply). That it's popular doesn't change this.
Hero Culture in Operations Teams
His LinkedIn shows he just joined MS and Columbia
Can someone explain the last panel in the comic? Where emacs gets a spiral?
In Technologies of Consent section author makes interesting point. Modern surveillance is enabled by technology, we've never dealt with something like that before[1]. Technology is not going away, our digital fingerprints will only get larger. Essentially that means that we would need to restructure[2] social/political system in order to address that problem.

[1] - Interesting side thought about that - technology allows you to survey people who are doing the surveillance and maintaining the system with relatively low overhead. In theory this could allow for 1984 like totalitarian state, although I believe probability of such severe scenario happening is pretty low.

[2] - issue with just ending government surveillance is that private companies already have gigantic amount of data on individual people too. Consider this - how much money would it be worth to Google to subtly run A/B tests on individual users in order to present them with ad layout/content they are most likely to click on?
Does Julia have AOT compiler which produces a binary which can be linked to a C program? I am asking this because I have to consider availability on iOS - which is a platform prohibits JIT.
Hopefully Russia doesn't have a doomsday machine.
Pythia: web interface to the Go oracle
I went from using SwiftKey to Minuum. I would say SwiftKey has better prediction, at least for predicting the next word. Minuum isn't very good right now at predicting the next word you want to type based on the previous words, though I think it has been improving. However, I think on average I probably type at about the same speed on both because Minuum allows you to be much sloppier and there is only 1 dimension.

Overall, the only real advantage of Minuum currently is its smaller size which allows you to see more of the screen... which is point. SwiftKey has more languages and currently allows for faster switching between 3 of them. And since its been around for longer is probably slightly more polished (less weird behavior when encountering weird input fields).

Oh, the other thing about Minuum is that people who haven't used it might have trouble borrowing your phone :P
there was veeery recently a bio paper that got pushed to arXiv. I don't have the link, since I saw it float by on a facebook feed, but I will look for it.
Bill Bye the Science Guy on World Poverty
What Happens Two Years After You Swear At Your Users
> if the goal is to get a global adversary to pull their punches

And by 'pull their punches' you mean stop illegal abuses and basically setting up full Stasi apparatus? Frankly the KGB would be doing you a big favour in this case. It doesn't obviously serve Russian interests to put a spanner in the works of a program which is putting the US and Europe on the trail of a path blazed by the likes East Germany and North Korea.
The places you mentioned are all the hippest, most desirable neighborhoods though!

If you look into (relatively well connected parts of) e.g. Moabit or Wedding you'll find prices more agreeable.
React: Finally, a great server/client web stack
That would depend entirely on your conversion rate, cost per lead, and profit margin.
> I would imagine whatever social safety net is in place would be taken out of your wages in taxes, right?

It depends, e.g. in Belgium part of it is paid by your employer on top of your pre-tax wage, and a (larger) part is deducted from your pre-tax salary. Don't ask me why.

I think you're right to point out that there's two different – though obviously related – questions to ask: (a) are companies paying less? and (b) is individual taxation higher?
> Yes this does not sound nice for marketing but honestly

It's not a matter of sounding nice. The average person has no idea what a gigabyte is. But they know what unlimited means.

Figure out how to explain what a gigabyte is to the average person and I'll get behind your proposal. Otherwise, I'll just read the fine print or search on the net as to what "unlimited" means for that specific plan and company.
Hardly overkill, when you consider these weapons were designed for use against squadrons of nuclear-armed Soviet bombers, and the abysmal performance of fighters and interceptors against bomber squadrons during World War II.
Infinity AR: We'll fulfill sci-fi promise of augmented reality
> "Julia was not designed by language geeks — it came from math, science, and engineering MIT students"

This makes me a bit cautious about the language. Scientific computing people are often very smart but they are not programmers or computer scientists and may do funny things that a computer scientist would not. Like one based indexing of arrays in Julia. This is not a big deal but I'm a bit wary that there may be some nasty surprises for a language geek computer scientist like me :)

Another example is the byte addressing of UTF-8 strings, which may give an error if you try to index strings in the middle of a UTF-8 sequence [1]. s = "\u2200 x \u2203 y"; s[2] is an error, instead of returning the second character of the string. I find this a little awkward.

There's a flip side to this too, if you're dealing with scientific computing there seems to be a wide variety of scientific computing libraries available in Julia [2].

Overall I find this language very interesting and it is on my shortlist of new languages to take a look at when time permits.

[1] http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/strings/#unicode-...
[2] http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/packages/packagelis...
But then the rest of his article is precisely about how they're relevant. For example he says he doesn't care about type systems, and then his only code example is showing off Julia's type-specialization feature. Maybe he just means he doesn't care about the theory behind why it works, e.g. he likes to fly on planes but doesn't care to learn aerospace engineering himself (which is fine).
AOL acquires Gravity for $83M
It really was. At least once, known al-Qaeda terrorists did a trial run prior to 9/11. And for a month up to the day before 9/11, Agent Samit was desperately trying to stop Moussaoui by getting a warrant to search his laptop, but a breakdown in communication at the FBI let Moussaoui pretty much get away with it. Then we all know what happened 9/11.

This really presents an interesting problem, I think. Reading the effect of secret government surveillance from the past century, it's hard to not believe that that surveillance won't be abused. It's been abused in so many other countries and so often in this country (where we hold ourselves in such high regard). At the same time, the power to terrify and commit mass murder has become much easier as technology advances. So what to do?
In 1983, Gospodin Colonel Stanislav Petrov saved the world.

Somehow I don't see the value of a system which would've made it impossible for him to do so.
Coinbase could become a regular US cash service tomorrow and it wouldn't make a difference to their client interactions with retailers.

What's going on here is the retailers are forking the "risk" of Bitcoin off to Coinbase - they bill Coinbase in USD, Coinbase bills the customer in BTC and hopefully the BTC market doesn't turn against them in the interim and that Coinbase manage to keep enough USD on hand to keep cashing out Bitcoin.

Which is where the problem lies: for Coinbase to operate, the have to be selling huge quantities of Bitcoin for USD to people who want to buy Bitcoin. And they need to hope the price keeps going up to cover their position.
It's hard to believe a group such as the Gates Foundation would think this way given the stakes.
This guy's an attorney and he compares a local/county crime (vandalism) to a federal crime (CFAA) and expects the sentencing to be the same? I'm speechless.

I'm not hacker, but even I know pretty much anything having to do with any unauthorized access to someone's computer is a FEDERAL offense. Regardless of whether you were the person breaking into that computer or not. Even Keys should have know what he was doing was a crime.

It's the same defense people use when they're with someone in the commission of a crime. "I was only there, I didn't kill the guy, Jim did." which is not a viable defense. You're at the least an accessory to the crime, and at worst, helped in the commission of a crime like driving the getaway car, hiding evidence, etc.

The whole premise of the article is completely flawed.
I'm a bit confused. Who is the "you" here?
Contrary to your claim, the effects of CO2 are comparably simple formula:

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/atmospheri...

And no scientist disproved it. And anybody who is able to calculate the orbits is able to use the CO2 formula too.

And it's also nothing new, first such scientific work is by Arrhenius, 1895, that is 120 years ago:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Arrhenius/arrheniu...

And even then he also "stood on the shoulders" of other scientists:

"Arrhenius relied heavily on the experiments and observations of other scientists, including Josef Stefan, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Samuel Langley, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Angstrom, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall."
Writing you a ticket that he is legally entitled to do because you are being a dick is totally professional and in line with the constitution.
Crowdfunding: Interest Among Serious Finance Players Grows
For those who did not get the reference, Valve paid out 400K$ in the first week of 2014 [1] to item creators for Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which are purely cosmetic video game items ("hats") [2].

[1] http://steamdb.info/blog/43/

[2] http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/04/16/how-to-make-a-living-s...
AR-2 Genie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie
I agree with the article.

Why can't we just pay at the register and be done with it?

Adding on to the Japanese restaurants. They have a call-button system which is much more efficient than having to flag down a waiter.

And, payment is more common at the register.

This allows Japanese restaurant to have fewer waiters and waitresses working.

You miss out on the interaction with the wait staff, but that's not really why I was there.

Japan is far from perfect when it comes to business practices, but their dining experience is second to none for the most part.
A lot of people who made their bones in the Cold War are in control of the government, so "if all you have is a hammer" becomes the plinth of US foreign policy.
To give some perspective to how hard it is for any consumer usage to reach this amount, assume one was streaming Blu-ray quality video 24/7 for the whole month:

(3600s/h)(24h/d)(31d/m)*(7MB/s) = still only about 18 TB.
In my young years I did telemarketing. It's tough but, one of the best learning experience of my life.

I will repeat this in the end. But learn who you need to talk to. (Don't accept a no from someone who cant say yes) a lot of your time will be spend with finding the right person.

Here is my advice.

1. Write down a sales pitch with some alternatives depending on what the answer is. It should be structured something like this.

Step 1
Who you are, who you want to talk to.

Once you reach the person you need to talk to:

Step 2
Who you are, why you are calling, what your product do, what your offer to them is (always have some kind of offer like 20% off or something like that)

Step 3
Answer questions, write down customer skepticism and learn from it. (you will become better and better at answering these questions and even able to forsee patterns)

Step 4
Close the deal, tell exactly what is going to happen next. Follow up with what you promised.

2. Practice this again and again.

3. Make sure your goal is to close something. (either a meeting, sales or sending more info)

4. Create a sales funnel where you places your customers depending on how close they are to a sale.

5. Make sure you understand who you need to talk to (never accept a no from a person who cant say yes)

Rinse and repeat.

Keep in mind cold calling is a numbers game.
Sign up and you'll be trapped. No easy way to delete your account.

Another red flag for justdelete.me
-How to the funds reach the borrower? Zidisha is essentially doing the work that the local partners do in the Kiva model, right? How is that scalable across different countries?

-As a lender, I can request the funds be given only to the business itself, right? In many of these places, it can be incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to create a formal "business". How does Zidisha help with that, if at all?
Apple Innovating: Planning two larger iPhones
What was explained?

The understanding of the effects of vaccinating kid #1 isn't all about kid #1 being immune to the infection. Instead it is that kid #1 is x% less susceptible to contracting the infection if exposed.

So you might wonder, how could Small Pox be much extinct if the vaccine is only about 95% effective, and how have we wiped out an enormous number of diseases that caused immense suffering in the 20th century using vaccines that were not 100% effective in protecting the vaccinated from infection on an individual level?

The lesson is that common sense can be a terrible guide for even the roughest approximations of the dynamics of a system. Dispersion models explain the limits to how far water will trickle down through soil or the conditions under which wild fires will burn themselves out. The models for infectious diseases involve variables for the likelihood of transmission, mortality rates, how long you're contagious until you show symptoms, the percentage of population that is susceptible etc.

While even common sense will tell you that the best way to avoid a disease is to avoid contact, it might not tell you that vaccinating populations is largely about reducing exposure. Assume our hypothetical situation has kids one through eight living on a street and they only play with their immediate neighbor. Then let's assume that the kids have a natural resistance of 20%, but 60% if they are vaccinated. If kid #8 has the disease, what is kid #1's risk of exposure if everyone is vaccinated vs no one is vaccinated?

(1-20%)^6 = 26%

(1-60%)^6 = 0.4%

I think those numbers are astonishing and beat the tar out of what common sense has to say. Of course more realistic models would show many more links between nodes as well as lower transmission rates, but differences of even a hundredth of a percent in a population of 320 million is 32 thousand people.

The conversation begins with: "The issue is not black and white — and laying the entire issue at the feet of non-vaccinated is blatant propaganda." If we're going to use extreme language, then it is "blatantly wrong" to say it is "blatant propaganda". The portion of people who defect from or cooperate with vaccination programs does matter. It isn't much of a problem if there is one Jenny McCarthy, but it becomes a problem if she advocates on behalf of defection to everyone else in her playgroup, or worse to other parents around the country.

While it is a good instinct to assume that issues aren't simple, it is tempting to see issues as having "two sides" and that the middle ground must be reasonable. I don't understand why newer/safer vaccines being less effective is being presented as a middle ground. If the "two sides" are not vaccinating and vaccinating, then this argument would not be in between the two, but instead it should be an argument that is more extreme than a mere decision to vaccinate. And yet, I think it serves to create uncertainty instead, and ultimately fewer vaccinations and lower resistance in the population.