skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Understand that money talks. There's nothing that will motivate a good salesperson like cold hard cash.

So make your commissions generous and (allowing your is a service people can believe in) you're going to find your guy. Make your commissions more than generous and you're going to find your superstar.
The base salary entirely should depend on the length of your sales cycle. Typically longer sales cycles require a larger base, or you get grumpy sales people who are looking for a new job rather than selling.
Is that a Vonnegut reference in the title?
Advanced students can move to the CARDIAC!

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/02/cardiac-paper-comput.ht...
Is this belie definition 2, "To tell lies about, esp. to calumniate by false statements", definition 4, "To give a false representation or account of, to misrepresent; to present in a false character", definition 6, "To call (a thing) false practically, to treat it as false by speaking or acting at variance with it; to be false or faithless to", or definition 7, "To show to be false, prove false or mistaken; to falsify (expectations, etc.)"? I don't see how any of those makes sense, given that it's an action by some person being said to belie an attribute of something. (Maybe that would make sense if you were one of the developers and reading the changelog demonstrated that the project's complexity were somehow "false"?)

(OED 1ed. vol. 1 p.782, 806 of 1270 in the PDF)
Absolutely! That's why I try to avoid lots of fighting online. It's way too easy to take things personally.
This is bad for the health care proposal because Obama wants the rich to pay for it.

Edit: Downmods for a factually correct statement, without any comments? Wow, healthcare is a seriously political thing.

Edit2: And even more downmods. Here's a link showing what I wrote is correct: http://www.necn.com/Boston/Politics/2009/07/22/Obama-Middle-...
If we just take his examples though, then the problem is on its way to being solved. So he puts movies on his queue that he doesn't watch? Great, he should give them low rankings. If the algorithm is good, that problem is solved.

He likes some movies at night, some on the weekends and some with his wife? Well, okay, rate the movies how you thought they were when you saw them. The algorithm will recommend some movies for each situation.

Your preferences change over time? Thats a bit harder, but was also out of the scope of the challenge. They were given static data. If you want to account for changes over time, then give the ratings some weighting that decreases over time or only use the last x months of data.

But, like you said, he probably doesn't know much about the algorithm.
Mucuna pruriens Increase muscle mass, strength and improve libido
Mucuna pruriens is a well-known aphrodisiac - the seeds are useful in increasing sperm count,muscle mass & strength. It is a good nervine tonic - helpful in Parkinson's disease.
The "minus lab" is a severe problem for science classes.
i grabbed this from the app store as soon as I heard it was released. its def a shirt in design and functionality for a iPhone app. While very easy to use I'm still kinda figuring out what its for.
Why was this posted?
I'm sorry to hear it you guys; best of luck with your next venture!
sandbox name: spherop
Your comment reminds me of something I saw once. I worked a night shift in a video factory in London years ago when I was backpacking around Europe and running low on funds. At one point I was working next to a guy whos job it was to prevent videos going into a shrink wrapper crooked because they'd get stuck in the machine. Thing was, they were all going in straight anyway. The guy was so tired he'd occasionally try to "straighten" the odd video to show he was doing his job - it would then get stuck and start melting. Fortunately after about 20 mins of nodding off he actually fell asleep in his chair at which point everything worked perfectly. Here was a man who was more productive while asleep.
Uggh. If privacy must be protected by civic order it's already a lost cause. All these good people standing up for privacy--it only serves to increase the market value of violations.

Honestly, I think it's better to throw out the notion of digital privacy entirely and start pushing the notion of universal visibility, and accountability. Once everyone is naked, we'll stop obsessing over the naughty bits.
Wow, that's interesting. Can you tell us more about what kind of vehicles people get converted? I was thinking the other day that if I had more money I'd get an electric conversion done on a DeLorean.
Sad. The thing about "ramen" profitability is there's another level to be achieved after that, which I refer to as "opportunity cost" profitability. It's often much more challenging, and I sense it being an issue in this article.
The Encryption Dance
<sarcasm>I bet they reprinted this article and substituted 1999 with 2007.</sarcasm> Comparing a 30 year trend vs. a 2 year trend is a bit short sighted, especially when there were other dips in some previous years when the rich were on the rise.
Don't get a senior sales-person. Get someone who can transition into handling existing customers along with one or two of you. Then one or more of you can focus on sales. Then get a junior person who will grow with you. Then once you have two or three junior sales person, hire someone to manage them.

A new guy coming in at a senior level will, in all likelihood, try to sell your service the way he sold whatever he was successful with in the past - and fail to sell your service.
repeatedly mentions that you can publish to twitter, but not from twitter to an fb page, not sure if that would require twitter to build it or some joint effort, but it would really be good if you could add twitter as a tab on a Page and push updates in both directions.
Orthogonal to this is my all-time favourite, the paper enigma machine: http://mckoss.com/Crypto/Enigma.htm

More for teenagers than younger children, working with it highlights a lot of elements of cryptography. And its a real cipher, used by real Nazis! Also a great way to introduce Alan Turing.
"Unplugged" in the sense of "page not found". Or am I missing something? When I open the homepage I get redirected to: http://csunplugged.com/de/home that doesn't exist.
Agreed, there are analogs to everything mentioned here that are applicable to {hardware,software} engineering teams as well. One gem:

In order for highly hierarchical organizations to be effective, they require one person who understands everyone else’s work at least as well as the individuals doing the work, and other people who are willing to be subordinates yet are still good enough to actually implement the design. Given the complexity of most top game titles, this just isn’t practical — if you were good enough to do the job, why would you want to be a flunky? On the other hand, completely unstructured organizations suffer from lack of information and control — if everyone just does their own thing, the odds that it’ll all fit together in the end are somewhere around zero.

I'd go so far as to say this applies to organizations that are not so hierarchical too. A breadth of talent is necessary to get any large-scale project done, but having single points of knowledge, so to speak, is bad for two reasons; there is the ever-present hit-by-a-bus problem, and people without anybody to bounce ideas off of are unhappy and/or unproductive.
Has anybody tried it? How does it work?
We weren't ramen profitable. We ran out of money and didn't have a good environment or case for raising more.
I have a better idea that does not require an extra include file:

#define TASK_STATUS_ENUM(VALUE) ts##VALUE
#define TASK_STATUS_ENUM_COMA(VALUE) TASK_STATUS_ENUM(VALUE) ,

#define TASK_STATUS_VALUES(_) _(Normal) _(ModifiedLocally) _(CreatedLocally)

enum TaskStatus { TASK_STATUS_VALUES(TASK_STATUS_ENUM_COMA) };

#define STRINGIFY_VALUE(v) "ts" #v
#define ENUM_TO_STR(x) if (status == TASK_STATUS_ENUM(x)) return STRINGIFY_VALUE(x);

char* enumToStr(TaskStatus status) {
TASK_STATUS_VALUES(ENUM_TO_STR);
return STRINGIFY_VALUE(Normal);
}
Everything sounds great except the name. If it were called "Pete and Ray's Awesome High-Tech Stuff Event" I'd think it was the greatest thing ever, but the name "Singularity University" makes me want to sigh and/or giggle.

[edit: I really don't want to start a pro/anti-singularity argument, but even if you _do_ think that the "singularity" is near, the stuff mentioned doesn't seem to have much to do with it]
I've been following you guys for a bit and wonder did you guys really spend over $1m since inception? (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/24/tipjoy-raises-1-million...)
Some of the new models that came out of the Netflix Prize do take into account temporal changes. From a user perspective, it seems to be how a user's rating style can change over time and how a user's taste in movies can change with time. So the author is wrong when he says the models don't take into account temporal changes.

The author suggests that the decision making process around what movie to watch in the future is different from the process of deciding what movie to watch right now. None of the models I've seen involved with the Netflix Prize try to take this into account as far as I can tell. I'm not sure how being able to make recommendations tailored to these two different decision making processes would be of value, but it would be different from the existing published models.
Call me stupid but after 5 minutes on their website I still didn't really 'get' it.
Audio White Paper - Optimizing VMWare View VDI Deployments With F5
We were advised (in retrospect incorrectly) to be ambiguous and say "raised under $1M" when the amount we raised was actually much less. Our burn rate was slightly higher than most poor grad students, but not _that_ high.
Yes one of the problems sometimes is lack of interest and self-confidence. This second group of students even tend to study for exams with a 'buddy' or perhaps they are more social animals than the rest of us and their 'mimicry' genes are stronger!

We've been thinking to follow the student/teacher model partly and also allow teachers to enrol their normal student class for an online course. I am also hoping to add some method so that students can earn 'karma' for completing a course as well as helping and or answering questions from other students.

The intention of the 'qualification part' is that once you have amassed 10000 karma points the student will get a diploma that is equivalent to a BSc. The recognition part comes from the job market accepting this as a proper qualification.
No one will sell better than you. What about hiring a project manager to help you with your existing clients and you focus on sales?
Sorry to hear about the shutdown. FWIW, I'm impressed how open you're being, about profitability as well as money-raised (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777010).

Btw, apparently you have a decent amount of traffic (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipjoy.com/). Is the problem that very few of your visitors convert to tippers?
"Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites." "

Well, there's your problem. They didn't find a lot of things back in 1913, and the ability to detect cancer back then was about as advanced as their ability to detect neutrinos. All of the studies cited are more than 40 years old, with questionable methods or tools used.
Minnesota Criminal Law: To Condition Bail or Not to Condition Bail?
Bad analogy; if the parent takes your advice he is like a CIA agent who figured out chasing some guy is all for nothing, but then keeps doing it.
Anyone looking for hardware engineers?
Point well taken that the quoted criteria overstate things (though Sarbox does remain a real drag on IPO opportunities for many startups).
Sorry to hear the news -- wish you both the best of luck going forward!
I tried looking at http://whytheluckystiff.net on archive.org but he was why the lucky stiff throughout.
Printable inorganic LEDs have the advantages of OLEDs
You're generating the consumer price of N sandwiches of value every few minutes. Don't forget that, at least in the United States, many food items are heavily subsidized by the government. You (and to a larger extent, people richer than you) also pay for part of the actual cost in taxes.
Though I'm not and never will be a game developer, I'm quite enjoying the recent influx of game-related stories here on HN. Very interesting to see the process, which is so very removed from web development.
Thank you for the advice, and I just added my email address, I thought I had already entered it, but was mistaken :)
I have a G1 and still miss my N82. Mostly for the Xenon Flash but also the great battery life and headphone jack.
Compete measures iframe includes or javascript widgets - meaning our widgets on 3rd party sites. That traffic is roughly correct in direction, but totally wrong for the volume to tipjoy.com itself. But that doesn't really matter, because it is a service - one usable almost entirely without visiting tipjoy.com.

The twitter integration, for example, is completely unmeasured by compete.

Finally, traffic is a poor metric for a payments site. Transaction volume is what matters.

Ohh, and I'm not being that open. If we were profitable, we wouldn't be shutting down.
First off I want to thank you all for your responses, I was not expecting so much feedback in such a short amount of time. I will be taking some of these comments into account for our meeting tomorrow, and hopefully will have time to reply accordingly. As for now, I've got to crash so I can be ripe for the meeting! Thanks again :)
"Would you consider an online education?

No. I am an autodidact and learn mostly by working through books and papers and so on. So in that sense I "educate" myself "online", partly. That said, if I ever decide to go back to college for that PhD I've been planning to do for a while now, I'd do so to work with the people who define the fields I am interested in. Even for my undergrad, I wouldn't do it online if I could. The people you meet and befriend are a good part of an under grad education.
I know hindsight is 20/20, but would you be willing to be completely forthright and tell us what your business plan was at the beginning stages, when you were raising money? I would find that sort of insight very valuable, and appreciate it greatly.
In what sense do poor Americans eat better than European aristocrats from a few centuries ago?
And now for the unmasking! _why really is.... Bill Gates?!

"...and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you crazy kids!"
And another spectacular venture rise and fall: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=35025
Smartphone Apps Fuel Business
Surprised to hear it. I thought you had plenty of "mindshare", around here at least. Guess that doesn't translate to actual dollars.

Good luck in your future endeavours. Hopefully it's been a positive learning experience. Look forward to seeing the next big thing!
take a cut
Fair comment, but just how tangible was that $100mm valuation? McAfee anti-virus software appears to have grown primarily through paying for pre-installed trial version placement on new pcs - not through being a 'better product'.
If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead.
>If I want to learn a new field, I don't read papers. I read theses.

That's an interesting idea and I think I will try it myself.

But still, I think the two of us are 'insane' :)
The learning experience has been astounding. I have a bunch of things I will do differently next time. Karma on new.yc doesn't translate to usage unfortunately. And twitter as a marketplace is about as mature as @ev's kid.
> We believe that the entire world is quantifiable. Do you?

In my experience, this belief causes many serious problems. I hope it's not considered rude to express this here on HN, but I would suggest considering possible ethical issues before taking a job like this.
Is the problem that very few of your visitors convert to tippers?

Assume, for the sake of argument, that the highest number on that graph is accurate and sustainable. Even if it were, it is well below the level the business needs, because you need truly massive scale to make a living solely on transaction costs.

350k visitors * 1% conversion (+) * < $1 in transaction fees = < $3,500 in gross revenue. Now, deduct the cut of the CC interchange fees. Uh oh.

+ Where a conversion actually means cash money exchanged hands. I remember there being some notion of promises/pledges which could be swapped around without actually generating an exchange of cash money. Promises are lovely things but they demonstrate interest a lot less readily than observable flows of cash money (since they're cheap and ephemeral, presumably why the system was instituted) and it is difficult to spend your 1% cut of the value of a promise.
Whoo. I'm on chapter six so far - I really dig Cory Doctorow's work.

How much of the stuff in this book is real, and how much of it is made up?

The trolls seem like a great idea (and I think there's an inside joke there, too). The RFID tracking of your stuff is an even better idea... especially useful for checking out stuff I might lend to other people. (I always forget I've lent things, and they disappear, and I go into this unhappy phase where I stop sharing.)
Hyundai i10 Diesel Car Coming to India by 2010
The best advice I can give you is to read Inc. Magazine columnist Norm Brodsky's article titled "The Sales Commission Dilemma" at http://www.inc.com/magazine/20030501/25416.html

As a top performing - and top earning - sales person for many years in Fortune 500 tech hardware, software, and services businesses, I can attest to the fact that it's the company that usually creates their own problems, namely a coin-operated sales force. I found it laughable when company XYZ paid members of their sales team (including myself) 5X - even 10X - what they paid more experienced engineers, product developers and even executives.

When looking to add a new sales professional, be sure and keep an eye out for Norm's "Group Three" salespeople. They will add immeasurable value, insight and personal equity into your business for many years to come.
Well, lets not forget there's still that free() call which will try and free the integer value packed into the pointer.
I totally agree. The biggest thing I noticed my first few months of switching from windows to Ubuntu was that all my applications were managed through a secure pipe called the repository. The repository was filled using applications from a trusted source list which can be signed using a key. All my apps get security and functionality updates and I don't have to check every application provider to stay up to date. Nor do I have to hassle with more than the latest version crowding my hard disk.

If I had to make a top 5 list of linux features over other operating systems, #1 would be the package manager.
Well if it wasn't so baller to snort with a rolled up Benjamin, we wouldn't have this issue.
Transaction volume is what matters

Feel free to smack me if I'm prying, but I'd be fascinated to know a rough ballpark for what transaction volume was.
We were advised (in retrospect incorrectly) to be ambiguous
and say "raised under $1M" when the amount we raised was
actually much less.

Advised?! By whom.
The author of the article has a good point on the limits of knowledge: journalists seldom ponder their argument's proneness to fallacy. The author also well emphasises that it is important to have at least a little bit of information about how the news story was created. This gives the reader a greater possibility to assess the plausibility of the story.

However, the author did not cover the issue of interpretation: the journalist always writes from her personal standpoint. This raises several questions: can the journalist write "neutral" news stories? how her political and cultural background affects the news story? how could she clarify the background for the reader?

Knowing how the journalists know what they know is not enough. I would like to know something about the journalist's scheme of interpretation in order to understand the news story she wrote.
I don't get this though. At that point, the entire team had busted their bust and had actually met their goal. This guy basically took credit for the work that the entire team had done in meeting the memory constraint. He just reserved some bogus memory so that at the last minute he could say, "Hey look! We've magically met the requirement! I'm a genius!"
how did the math work out, taking a cut of tips (presumably small, and even smaller after payment processing fees?) how many users would you have needed to reach profitability? i actually tried doing the back-of-envelope math for your site a while back, and was perplexed. i'm curious as to your answer..
Agreed. I was just hoping to get actual info on:

- Conversions from 'visitors' to pledgers

- Conversions from pledgers to payers

- Avg monthly payment (volume of tips) per payer

(Btw, doesn't Compete often underestimate by a factor of 2 or so?)
We took 3% on top of any fees. The business model is pretty easy. If you need $N K per month, you need N/0.03 monthly transaction volume to break even.

I wish we had more time to make things like http://tatatweet.com, but better. We'd take 100% of the transaction volume, and help the twitter app market grow. I'll certainly build things in my spare time for that market.
I don't think people are down voting you on the basis of perceived correctness. Hacker News and politics just don't mix well, thankfully.
Google's Worst Ads Ever
Only victims make excuses.

You can close a deal faster, get them to sign and pay, then work out the details.

If you spend your life saying "that's how it's done", you'll never be in the lead, you'll ALWAYS be doing what someone else has done before you.
So basically UNIX, except not 40 years old.
I've had lots of ideas of things to do with a DeLorean. With a hundred kilowatts at your disposal you can make a very impressive flux-capacitor look-alike!

People get all kinds converted; DIYers tend toward older pickup trucks (carry lots of batteries, very simple electronics). I've designed all the electronics to interface with the ABS system, radio controls, etc in modern cars like the Mini Cooper. People also liked the RAV-4 platform for versatility, one of the reasons Toyota made that their first (production) EV.
In this case, it is because payments is a regulated industry. It's a bad idea to casually hold money for people.
> So generations were given every chance to try "Communism in good faith".

They weren't stupid. They knew the party line was an obvious load of crap, a fig leaf over a ruthless power grab. They went through the motions only out of fear of the secret police (in itself an acknowledgment the rulers didn't expect any loyalty). In particular, Russian cynicism about propaganda became legendary.

You don't judge actual democracy by looking at totalitarian hellholes and their blatant lies about how "democratic" they are, do you?
Focus Hard. In Reasonable Bursts. One Day at a Time.
Tips don't really work. You need to sell stuff. Branding in the name sucked when we were pushing long and hard* to become a general purpose payments company. Our twitter API could power a full freemium model, subscriptions, etc. - but not enough apps on twitter used it.

*twss