skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marketing Site Design for Startups
Ask HN: First sales call for new startup, any pointers?
I've been working the past few months on a new startup idea called RedemFit (https://redemfit.com). RedemFit is focused around incentivized corporate wellness. I did a soft launch yesterday on Reddit to get some feedback, and apparently someone thought it was worthwhile enough to get in contact and set up a call for today. I've done my due diligence and the company is legit and has been around more than 20 years with lots of corporate customers.

Since I've never done a sales call like this, let alone a sales call for my own startup, do you have any pointers? Things to not say, things to not promise, and what happens if I get a contract and/or paying customers out of this? I don't yet have a LLC formed so I imagine that would be first, but thats putting the cart before the horse.

Anyways, any pointers at all would be greatly appreciated.
I'm wholly in agreement with you. I suspect questions like this are used in lieu of a sane programming test. Although I guess they might have relevance if you have no library (embedded?) or there are weird constraints (can't think of any).
Not only that but the expectation that you can keep your AV vendor a secret is ridiculous. Especially with tens of thousands of employees having a system tray icon in direct view and hundreds to thousands of techs expected to be able to install/re-install said software.

Not to mention the fact that big contracts with AV/security vendors are usually public knowledge and easily accessible. Heck, they probably have press releases indexed by Duck Duck Go!
FxOS tablets already exist [1]. The Flame and ZTE Open C are higher end devices than the device talked about in the OP. Not quite Nexus 5 level (more Nexus S I think?) but are mid-range.

I'd like to see more pushing the envelope of what HTML applications on mobile devices are capable of. Currently devices use the Facebook, Mobile and YouTube mobile sites. These don't make great use of HTML APIs. There is little in the way of offline support for example.

I'd like to see developers, or Mozilla, provide versions of these applications that are equivalent to native. I don't think there is much missing in the web platform to make this difficult.

[1] http://benjaminkerensa.com/2014/05/02/unboxing-first-firefox...
When 29,000 students discover they can send to the all-students list
There are indeed a lot of opportunities there. But they aren't as drastically as in the early days of SEO. Partly because Apple gives you so few opportunities to affect your rankings.

But a lot developers just ignore ASO, which opens up possibilities for those who take it seriously.
Ask HN: How to get HN's Show, Ask, etc. lists through the new API?
World’s first carbon capture coal plant opens in Canada
They run non-deterministic automata. Their class of grammars is bigger than regexps.

I think it is a good thing they have built.
Infragard allowed me to create an account, which was also not even used to find a hole in their system. Yet I was still charged with exceeding authorization via CFAA.
A nice writeup. As for AppCodes.com, you missed some stuff we offer:

We've got competitor tracking, support for other languages and data export (downloading csv with the search phrases+results).
We also support the pre-launch analysis :) There's also an AppStore prediction tool that is quite unique compared to the competition ( http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-stor... )
Earlier events in the Voxel Quest timeline

"My Isometric GPU-Powered Voxel Engine" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358394

"My Isometric Voxel Engine 6 Months Later" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7487935
Well, it's kind of interesting. The billpay system leverages the fact that most payments for most folks go to companies, and those are all electronic links; the checks are somewhat rarer in the big picture and only to small businesses or people. The checks in this case are not "certified" in that they are not a guaranteed transfer; like any other check, they can bounce. But yes, they are printed and mailed, and there is a cost to that vs. the electronic thing.

The wire, however, including the account (the routing number can be looked up by your bank; it just saves time if you already have it) is a very specific approach to transferring money in a certified manner. It's older, and has some overhead and history in how it's tracked and managed, if for no other reason than that the funds are guaranteed. As such, there are still fees on it (and that's probably true in most countries, btw, unless you have a balance over a certain amount).

Most folks paying their babysitter $40 aren't concerned about a certified transfer, and assume they will have funds to cover the check when cashed, so they don't need to pay any fees and will just do a regular "check". And I would bet that the banks are working on ways to do a better job of making electronic links to reduce their need to print those checks (for example, perhaps if I keep paying my babysitter 2 or more times, the bank could automatically check the clearning house for the deposited check, and, in the future, autonegotiate a direct link with the babysitters bank and account for payment or something clever like that; I don't know if that would really work but sounds cool).
HTC launches RE, a portable periscope-shaped camera
Victoria, Central and Jubilee are all "driverless". But they have drivers. There are actual reasons for this.
Measuring whether or not a device is gaining market share is tricky. I remember iphone launching and weeks later, every website with substantial traffic had a noticeable number of visits from an iphone. Same with ipad.

At the start, there were more nokia n95s, blackberry's and other pre-iphone smartphones in the market. There were even more being sold as iphones were supply limited. But, none of these mattered because if you looked at it from a website's perspective, there were no visits. Sales don't matter.

There's something similar with ChromeOS. People like buying them and maybe owning them. They're cheap and novel and the idea is appealing. But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook? Usually it's below the attention threshold.

I wonder if Firefox OS will be similar. IE, people could buy a $25 phone on a lark, to house a rarely used SIM or similar but not use it as their primary phone.

This isn't a problem exactly, but it might make it hard to gauge how important the platform is at any given time.
EMV tokenisation is a new standard that EMVco published this year[0], which allows the person holding the card details to generate an entirely new set of card details which are essentially aliased to the original card details. The result of all this is that Apple don't have to store the original card details.

However, the standard can allow for other things as well - it can allow for users to generate a new token per-merchant which could be used online or in person. Or merchants could generate a new token from a customer's card that'll only be usable with that merchant for storage, thus standardising what the likes of Stripe do while implementing a significant amount of backwards compatibility with the existing system.

[0] http://www.emvco.com/specifications.aspx?id=263
If you look at the study (which is hidden behind a paywall :/) only 150 infants were studied. That's quite a small number to make any definitive claim, given there are probably hundreds of millions of toddlers on the planet. The researchers probably mention it in the article, but the press release doesn't.
Firefox OS has a huge advantage when running on low-memory phones. The most memory intensive thing typically run on a low-end phone is the web browser. (Or an app that wraps a browser, like Facebook). So the ability to run a web browser is the limiting factor. Every other OS has to have enough memory to run a GUI + a browser. Since Firefox OS uses the browser for its GUI, it theoretically can run smoother in 128MB or 256MB of RAM than any mainstream smartphone OS. IMO, Firefox should concentrate on the areas where it's intrinsic advantages lie.
41 Amazing Internet Security Blogs You Should Be Reading
I'm surprised by the modern mistakes -- I would have thought that any post-Muybridge[1] drawing would get it right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
Just be sure to not mistake audience to your site with general worlds population.
On second thought: maybe the right metric should be 'Daily Tinder Searches' - DTS.
The number of toddlers on the planet is completely irrelevant for whether 150 is a large enough sample size.
Hagelslag is delicious, but yeah, even one piece of bread with the stuff on makes me a bit sick to my stomach with the sweetness.
Can Apple Predict How Long a Transfer Takes?
one of the nice things about their current position is that the hardware catches a lot of the blame for the overall experience. People expect next to nothing from these phones due to their price, and when they work better than was ever expected it looks favorable.

it may be in the interest of firefox-os to compete with the low-end market for the time being, where expectations are low, while polishing the OS for release on a high-end phone when high-end features are thought out.
To much for such a contentless slideshow.
This doesn't have to work always. This is obviously a huge risk. I'd say you just got lucky!
> The frequency with which there is "a passenger under a train" must have a tangible effect on tube capacity.

It does. Think severals a month, more in November, with almost an hour clean-up, usually at peak times.
I was surprised on my first visit to London to see posters advising passengers to carry a bottle of water and not travel when sick due to the heat and humidity on the underground.

We'd get on at one station freshly showered and hydrated then get off at another drenched in sweat and ready to pass out. We used the tube extensively on our visit and it was by far the most uncomfortable (from an environmental perspective) public transport system we've used.

I'm not sure what makes the London underground so different from the systems in Glasgow (admittedly very small), Munich, Barcelona or LA. Perhaps it really is so much deeper under ground.

That said, the contactless payment system was fantastic. Being able to use my credit card to move around the city without buying a separate ticket was very convenient.
I've never read any of his literature, so I may be either really misinformed/clueless but hopefully with some objectivity.

I think that your comment corroborates the Nobel committee's decision: "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation"

Despite what you say about a lacking plot, which you may have exaggerated, you still call him a "fantastic author." Which is either irony or there's something to that.
Agreed, totally.
DukeScript – Java Everywhere Again?
Nice rant against using MailChimp et all for the first contact mail. GMail dumps them in "Update" way too often...
First, there's a lot of aggregated data available online. Second, I think the traffic stats for chromeOS are so small right now that it probably wouldn't make it out of the 'other' bucket on most sites that don't specifically target the OS as an audience.

Who is the ChromeOS audience anyway? My perseption is that it's pretty general: Students, 2nd computers, postmen, etc. A lot of tech-savy people seem to buy them as an extra machine or just for fun.
Varnish left a sour taste in my mouth. We have used it on one of our high-traffic sites, and had some truly bizarre hard-to-reproduce problems with it.

The major bug it had was that it would work normally for hours, but then it would randomly let the flood of requests through basically killing our servers. It happened over and over and over again. We had multiple talented sysadmins look at it, and none of them could give us any explanation. The only solution was to restart it, and warm the cache all over again. We couldn't figure out what sets it off, it looked just so random.
Agreed. Surprised to hear Scrum. Because the Waterfall model was SO much better?

The nice thing about Scrum is that you are given up to a 3 week period, tasks, and you complete those tasks then re-evaluate. Creates a nice feedback cycle.

Plus if requirements change (as they ALWAYS do) you are more able to address that without going "backwards" in your Waterfall model or creating unnecessary steps.

That all being said, I'm sure you can make Scrum suck if done badly. But you can make anything suck via micro-management and political bullshit. If Scrum is done well it should limit micro-management to only the scrum meetings (which aren't daily or even bi-daily, so a weekly catchup meeting with a bi-weekly new sprint).
** What is the simple way to repeat a String in Java?
CasperSpy – Botnet for CyberSecurity Defence
Stealth Botnet

CasperSpy is a new generation of botnet created by combine of 2 different botnet platforms. Agobot (IRC-based) + Zeus (web based) it will improve capabilities such as: polymorphic infection,spread itself and form grabbing for latest browser to make it more dangerous and more difficult to detect.
Almost 2 years i developed this project and its open source too :)

Here the url: http://casperspy.com/

So what do you think???
CVE-2014-6277
I recently got a KitKat phone, and felt instantaneously trapped in Google Play land (no improvement over Apple Appstore I guess), not a good feeling. A 'web' based OS would be a nice thing to try.
Developers would be better off trying their apps on a $25 phone. Of course you might want to use a more powerful device for development, but the risk there is that low-end testing and code optimisation is left as a last minute step.
Um, you have 2 karma, 1 submission, and 1 comment... I'm sure creating a new account would be possible. You don't really have much to "start over" from.
Yup, same here. Nexus 5, Portugal. They probably region-locked it to the US.
{"key": null}

vs

null

I'm pretty sure they're both valid.
Ever heard of Series30, Series40 and Symbian mobiles?

Native apps + browser, best of both worlds.
Agree, although at some places being a ballet dancer is a formal requirement - e.g. I was thinking to get a PhD some years ago only to be able to work in places like Microsoft Research, but eventually decided that it was not worth it... Also, there were no REMOTE PhD positions :)
The cheapest devices ($25 are $35) are sold exclusively in India and similar low-income countries, AFAIK. In the western world, you can only get Alcatel, ZTE, etc.
The lack of a conventional plot is nothing unusual in literature since Joyce. I've never heard of him, and would be more interested in learning what you find fantastic in him - can you compare him with some other authors, perhaps? (Aside from what we know from the fact the he won the Prize: that he espouses leftist politics, for example.)
I use their free plan with several projects and love it. I am just a fan of their product and think other students/up-and-coming devs would appreciate it too.

I actually filed a support ticket yesterday trying to entice them to get on the list.
Not to be nosy, but do you take it? Do people you know?
True, but in terms of how to make money out of a huge mass of users, advertising is usually the best bet.

However, I often think there's room for more directly paid search as opposed to side-funded with advertising. Afterall, companies pay for (re)search all the time. They pay for their own employees to do research and write reports. They pay marketing companies for research, etc...

Do people really need a search result of just web addresses back in 0.1s, when they could get not just the address, but the actual information they need in 30s? I'd pay for a service that could do that.
Heroku development API is down
It worked for them, so good on them for trying something different and also sharing about it!

As always, what works for one company, won't always work for the next :-)
What "actual reasons" aside from inertia? The section danielbln linked to are UTO, they're fully automated and unattended (some of the trains don't even have a driver cabin, passengers can seat at the very front of the train) and most have been running for years if not decades without incidents (that I know of).
Not everyone at MSR have phd's, some of our best people don't.
In developing countries you can get feature phones that are more powerful, offer real native apps, a web browser and cost a similar price.

In other countries, Android and Windows Phone devices are already in the 100€ range. Specially if one is not looking to buy the very latest models.

Personally, I think it would be better to focus resources elsewhere.
You can, but cooling the line means cooling far more than just cooling the train cabins - passengers only accounts for something like 5% of the heat dumped into the underground, the vast majority is things like braking. And so costs of standard AC is an issue.

You also need somewhere to dump the heat, and part of the problem is actually that even re-opening existing vents is tricky and/or costly to do when many of these lines for most of their distance are 20m below some of the most expensive real-estate in the world.
I think the high reply rate is due to this phrase in the new mail:
"I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?"

If I wouldn't want anybody to call me, I would probably reply.
Speaking of usage rates for Chrome OS - We monitor traffic for many small business websites (across a diverse range of non-technical sectors) and typically see Chrome OS rank behind Linux (but slightly ahead or on par with Windows Phone/Blackberry) within our Google Analytics reporting.

I do wonder if within the "education" industry (and of course across social media sites) Chrome OS usage is much higher as students are the typical customer.
Yeah, I saw that on your support site after I asked. Sorry for not checking before, but thanks for answering!
I don't know about how TFL will do it, but WMATA in Washington, DC did and will employ the same number of people under automatic operation as it does under manual operation. They were mostly just there to watch for problems and open the doors, but they were still employed (which should make the union happy).

Interestingly, the crash that made WMATA stop automatic operation[1] would not have been avoided by manual operation. The operator would've seen the same suggested speed that the train did, and wouldn't have been able to stop any sooner.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_tra...
Basic Sales Tips are always good to re-itterate

1) Create Urgency: Sale needs to happen now, not later.

2) Have the better product: Know the who/what/when/where/why you are better. If you aren't, or think you aren't, or can't BS your way into being better close up shop.

3) Relax: People can smell fear, even across a phone line.

4) Be persistent, but not pushy.

5) Understand the customer's use case: Most customers think this is great service. You care about them, you want to hear about what they do. You are making them special. But really you just make them show their hand and tell you why they're interested in you. Gives you more ammunition and potential routes to work a sale.
I once took a class on tracking. When the instructor discussed gaits, he said when an animal is being aggressive, its gait will change and it will swing the legs on each side of the body together, instead of alternating normally.

He said it's true of humans too. If someone walks toward you the way these artists depicted, he's ready to fight. If he's mouthing off but walking normally, you're probably safe.

I have no scientific references to back any of this up so take it for what it's worth. The instructor was someone who tracks down a lot of lost people and fugitives for law enforcement, along with teaching survival classes.

(And this was walking, not running. He didn't claim anyone would run this way.)
For some reason I hadn't thought about checking Van-Gogh, I was looking mostly through much older stuff. Thanks for that. :)
I think he's talking about the premise of the original post, that children must depend on adults to get angry at them (and ostensibly, parents that don't get angry enough will have obnoxious children who don't know right from wrong.)

Self-reliance, they can judge whether their actions are good or not without trying every bad action once and needing some adult to get angry at them in order to know which ones are bad. (you know, like our government. rimshot)
It seems to me that data-structures are the wrong level of abstraction for software engineering positions that aren't using C or an equivalent portable assembly language.

In most situations what matters is datatypes, not data structures. That is, queues and stacks, are the important abstractions...and reversing a linked list in non-trivial cases means that:

~ Either a queue was used instead of a stack

~ or vice versa

~ or perhaps a dequeue should have been used.

Does it matter if an ordered bag is layed out in memory sequentially or with links until profiling justifies refactoring? And when you're in Java, refactoring largely going to be a matter of swapping out one set of library calls for another congruent set...and hopefully, all this happens behind an interface.

Using off the shelf components when it makes engineering sense is a hallmark of professionalism. Reinventing linked list functions is, in most situations, a indicator that a person needs close supervision.
Show HN: NimbusFoundry – A framework for building front-end collaborative apps
"just now way this is true" is almost as absolute a statement. How about looking at a random amount of examples, creating an experiment and discovering the actual truth.
For me, I find value in knowing I got a welcome email as a subtle confirmation that I entered my correct details, and if I didn't, I have a way to recover it. I can now safely forget the name of the can't-quite-remember-how-they-spelt-it-startup domain name, my password, username, etc, knowing that I did get my email registered with the company and I have a record of it.

But the article isn't saying to ditch it, it's saying to use that opportunity for something much better. This is a good idea when the goal of it has a benefit to the user. It also builds more value to your brand by being a real entity backed by real people.
What route did you take to apply? I'm looking at a specific position posted in Google careers. Just fill out the form and wait?
> Presumably door closing would still require manual control.

What for? The doors can be on a timer (station-specific if necessary)
NYC has only hard plastic chairs.
The “Perfect Path” through programming
You might think that, but you've got to be careful not to let old phones update. I've got a Galaxy S2 I use mainly as a wifi hotspot with a data-only sim, and while it used to have a pretty snappy UI, these days it really crawls, almost to the point of being unusable.

To be honest I've not looked particularly hard at why this is, but how well a phone runs a browser, for instance, isn't frozen in time when the phone is bought.
If you're going to build a secure laptop, why not go all out and remove your WiFi and bluetooth cards and connect to a Raspberry Pi or old router running PORTAL? :)

https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi
> To me, what's really most important?

> Working on something important enough. Getting stuff done. Having fun. If I have these, not much else really matters. If I don't, I move on.

I agree with this. When it boils down to it, most people will stay where they're doing something important, getting stuff done, and having fun with it.

However, with the presence of most (and for some people, any) of these 10 things, you won't be having fun and you won't be getting stuff done.

It's not enough for a company to just aim for "having fun and getting stuff done" without figuring out the factors that add to and take away from having fun and getting stuff done.