skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good strategies for networking while mingling with CEOs/decision makers
In the near future I'm attending an event where Brain Tracy will be holding a seminar about leadership, sales and management.
Besides him this event will be full of CEOs and thus hold opportunities for networking.

Now, this really feels like an opportunity one somehow should take advantage of.
Only problem is I can't really pinpoint how.

So, what would you do in a room full of people who actually can make and take THAT decision?

I'm mostly interested in pure networking to ensure future relations and potentially finding a future VC for my tech-startup, which still is in a very early stage.
And because of this early stage I'm not really able to pitch anything tangible and thus focusing on future relations.

What are your experiences and how would you take advantage of an opportunity like this?
This article has an underlying assumption -- that you have already created a product for which people are willing to pay $25 a month, if only they hear about it.
Which must include testing, revisions, etc, which can only be well done if you receive feedback from a customer base.

In other words, to build a Million dollar business, first you need to... build a million dollar business.
1. Stop using IM. Period. Not just when you're working. All the time. You don't need it. There's email, SMS, phone calls, Twitter, and other social messaging services. IM is the most brutally distracting and easiest way to waste time when trying to work.

2. Stop using Growl or equivalent. You're training yourself to constantly be looking for distractions in the periphery. You don't need that information, I promise - even for your fancy CI system that tells you when tests fail. Knock it off.

3. Quit anything remotely interruptive for the duration of your work session: IRC, Campfire, Twitter client, email client. This can be tough if you're working remotely, so let clients and coworkers know when you'll be available online and when you're focusing. As long as you communicate your goals and intentions clearly, they'll understand.

4. Get yourself some noise-cancelling headphones. I like the Bose QC 3. Added bonus: take 'em on plane trips and they help to dull the engine noise.

5. Listen to something engaging but not totally engrossing. Ambient music and noise generators were mentioned in this thread, and I like them, but sometimes you need something with more "oomph" to get you through a dull task. Minimal techno is my staple, as it rarely has distracting vocals and typically maintains a steady, not-too-fast, not-too-slow beat. There are tons of sites out there with free DJ mixes, just search around.

6. A personal preference: work standing. I find that standing helps keep me focused and helps to distinguish work from relaxation.

7. Get a really big monitor and cover it in your code, terminals, documentation, etc. The only thing that should be in view is the material you need to get your task done.

8. Make a list of stuff to do, and do that stuff. Doesn't matter whether that list is in some fancy GTD app, a bug tracker, or on a piece of paper. It's helpful to see the list and know that you get to cross off an item or close a ticket when it's done.

9. Block work time out on your calendar. I refuse meetings after lunch (from 1PM to 6:30PM), and I'll only make exceptions for truly exceptional circumstances (candidate flew across the country to interview, has one day, there's no other time to meet with him/her). This is essentially pg's idea of the "Maker's Schedule", although I'd been doing it for several months before he wrote about it.

10. Meditate. This sort of speaks to the comment in this thread about practice. Meditation is conditioning for your brain. It's really, really hard to do well, and even harder to find the time to do it. I don't do it as often as I should, but when I do, I find it much easier to concentrate on hard problems.

Hope some of the above helps.
That's borderline tabloid journalism...
There have been a number of targeted sequencing experiments of breast cancer cells before: using next gen sequencing platforms and microarrays. Comlpete sequencing is by no means a breakthrough. A complete sequencing (3bn letters) has not been tried for a reason - and that reason is that the increase in information content from complete sequencing is minimal - almost zero. infact it will be wasteful exercise to look at the whole genome when you expect to find problem in a handful of genes. Moreover the full sequence of a tumor cell varies from patient to patient and also between cell to cell in the same patient (unlike in healthy cells/patients). that's why no one does full genome sequencing of tumor cells - just targeted sequencing of selected genes.
Seeing as it is on MAKEzine I am upset there are not plans to build your own... Seriously that would be one hell of a weekend(s) project. Writing the software/midi stuff sounds fun too!
You sure about those figures? Last I knew they were pushing through legislation about tobacco based on the premise that it was costing the UK too much in healthcare. What is your source?

I and others like me have a problem with people like you who do not understand the principle of true charity. No strings attached.

Sure I agree that we need to improve the way we provide some of our benefits, there are probably too many people on incapacity benefit suggesting some (many?) of these are fraudulent cases.

However where we appear to differ is that in principle I have no problem for a single parent or someone else with "problems" being able to claim benefit. I'm happy to have some false positives if we can help positive positives. I'm lucky with my life, other people need a hand. It is not my place to morally assert how they should lead their lives.

I'm also puzzled how you think means testing is unfair. Those who have, have. Those who haven't get given. Do you appreciate what would happen to crime figures if the dole was abolished?
I expected something completely different based on the title...
as other posters on this thread have mentioned, i think it really depends on the community you belong to ... many GNU open-source hackers swear by C and won't touch managed code with a ten-foot-long stick because of their associations with Sun (Java) and MSFT (.NET) ... whereas if you're writing enterprise applications in a big company, your entire firm is probably on .NET and would scoff at those unix hippies still using command-line gdb :) joelonsoftware has an article entitled Biculturalism that addresses this issue:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
See related story- Most Successful IPO of 2010: Twitter
Simpler still:

$('#testimonial').load('/testimonial-3 #testimonial p');
Possibly - however there is a difference between "gleefully accepting" a big advance and "squeezing every last dime out of the bastard publishing company"!
Twitter in Google, Microsoft licensing talks
That was a bit of verbal slight-of-hand, yes. I meant to imply that if you're willing to say "the ends justify the means" to kill people at Tiananmen Square, you don't have very good standing to criticize the French Revolution, because it's in fact easier to make that same argument about the French Revolution than it is about Tiananmen Square.
Microsoft Leaks Details of 128-bit Windows 8
Dont' call them products until you've sold one of them. Or even made one of them.
>For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long.

Again, this is completely irrelevant to your argument. You can still evolve to live for a longer time while reproductively viable.

>Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).

Again, it's all about trade-offs. For some organisms, it's most advantageous for them to reproduce as much as they can all in one go, and for others it makes sense to live a really long time and reproduce throughout that time period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity

I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.
Thanks for the comments. I have started looking at the provided pointers.
Alternatively: get an ITIN (individual taxpayer ID number) from the US IRS, and jump through the hoops under the UK-USA double taxation treaty to declare yourself as a UK taxpayer. Double taxation treaties are bilateral arrangements between countries so that taxpayers can declare one of the signatory countries to be their country of residence and pay income tax earned in the other place in their home country. Result: you get back the US withholding tax money, although you have a larger income and consequently pay more tax to HMRC.
I can do it with any music, from crazy hip hop to smooth jazz ;) I get massive energy from the music and sometimes my coworkers catch me singing while i code lol !
Thanks for sharing this story. I'm always amazed how much faith Americans have in their medical system, which seems more-or-less completely unjustified if you actually look at the statistics. There are multiple problems, too many to list really, but I think the root of it all is that the medical school system is designed to choose candidates with zero intrinsic motivation to learn. That's why the vast majority of doctors can't name a single finding in their field in the last year, and it's why the average chronic disease takes 8 years to diagnose. 99% of doctors don't learn or think about anything they aren't made to by the government. It's pathetic. And sure, the fact that our government as a whole is super corrupt makes it worse, but really the best place to start would be throwing out and replacing the entire school system-- which is responsible for both destroying intrinsic motivation, and also selecting those who have none to run the medical system (and everything else).
> I wonder if it is possible to have a human learn the key sequences of the dominant frequency bands and make a piano speak a word or two.

I was wondering that too. Imagine if a composer in pre-digital history had figured out something like that and as a final "chord" to a piece had let the piano speak a word.

Literally awesome.
My brother got one of these. He said the only problem with it was the headband, which he didn't want to wear to sleep all the time.
The best way to use a book is to promote some other product or service, because for the most part when you calculate the time spent writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting you realize you're working for less than minimum wage.

This probably works out okay as part of an overall strategy for Mr. Cooper, who is building a publishing empire. :)

However as a money-making strategy, I believe most of the people here at HN could make more doing almost anything else.

In the mid-90s Laura Lemay (graciously) introduced me to her publisher after no more than a simple e-mail query. As a result I got to contribute a chapter to a Web-related title and officially became a published author (yay!).

After that I somehow connected with an agent who started bringing opportunities to my attention. One was for the second or third edition of a semi-successful title; however as part of the deal I'd have to share the (already meager) royalties with the original author. Thanks but no thanks!

The next opportunity seemed golden: the chance to write a brand new title as part of a very well-known series (something like "Selling Online for the Technically-Challenged Among Us").

I started submitting outlines and sample chapters, and assembled a list of e-commerce software ranging from open source to commercial packages (mostly written in Perl). After each submission came the feedback and tiring rewrites, but I still thought it would work out. And that's when it happened. ;)

Apparently the whole department at the publisher had just returned from a Microsoft conference, and had learned about the new software package that was going to set the world of e-commerce on fire: Site Server (maybe Mr. Graham will get a chuckle out of that).

It was expensive, large, and proprietary, and in my opinion not a good match for most of the small-to-medium businesses I thought would most benefit from the book. But guess what (I was told) should be the focus of the new book?

In the end it just wasn't worth the hassle. So that ended my publishing career, but it was sort of fun while it lasted.

P.S.: IIRC some of the big guys, like the first Word and HTML authors, made seven figures.
Maybe this is Mike Arrington's way of announcing that the tablet will be out before the end of the year...he's a subtle man, you know.
It's surprising how few people realize that the shebang is implemented by the kernel, NOT by the shell. The shell ignores it -- hence the leading hash comment character.

I actually had a support engineer at Opsware argue with me about this, even after I sent him snippets of the Linux and Solaris kernel source :)
I have one and it does work or at least give me data that looks about what I am experiencing.

So far I found that I wake up far too much in the middle of the night than I thought where I would think I only woke up once I would wake up around 9 more times that were only a few minutes and would forget about.

I ignored the sleep consoling on the site and just did my own experiments with the data.

I have a sleep number bed and turns out I needed to deflate the bed more to keep me from waking up all those time.

Nothing like insomnia to make you look at a $400 alarm clock and say "Hey! What a good idea!"
The headband didn't bother me so much, yeah you look like a dork wearing it.
They've made several, though of course they're not for sale yet. But nonetheless.
First: Price are the intersection of demand and supply. Lifetime of movies is very short, so it's hard to tell what is the "right" price.
Second: Flat pricing strategy make it easier for customers to select their movies. A decision to buy a car is normally not spontaneous.
Kolmogorov tried to climb mountains, Gelfand built roads
To be fair, the "standard" part of this proposal doesn't really have anything to do with headless browsers. You could just as easily have a typical server-side app that generates these URLs as appropriate.

For example, a common approach to presenting content in an AJAXy kind of way is to just put a path after the hash. E.g.

http://www.example.com#/products/bungee-cords

It's probably really easy for the web app to figure out the right content to serve up for #/products/bungee-cords, headless browser or not.

I know you'll be saying, "Of course, but apps should be doing that anyway with progressive enhancement." That's all well and good, but that leads to two separate sets of URLs: one that most users see, and one that search engines see. This fixes that.
Over the past three releases of Windows, I've noticed that I've become more alienated from the UI with each release. First with XP, then Vista, and now Windows 7, it seems like each release is just a little more annoying to use. It's like the two stories Joel Spolsky tells in the first chapter of "User Interface Design for Programmers". About every minute I try to do something and I'm just a little frustrated with how the UI reacts. Consequently, the first thing I do on any Windows computer is make it look and act as much like Win98 as possible.

It's the same thing with OS X. Right now my favorite UI to use is Gnome, because it acts mostly like Win98 with a few improvements that make sense to me (primarily virtual desktops). It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey shaking his cane at progress, and also like those ratpoison and xmonad users I could never understand.

I have often asked myself why this is. The obvious answer is I'm set in my ways and don't want to learn new things. Certainly possible, but I don't see that in other areas of my computer usage (programming languages, web design, etc). Sometimes I wonder if it's because these new UI improvements are largely meant to help your average user, but don't help me much. For example, both OS X and Win7 are optimized for only having one window per program open at once, but I often have many open. It frustrates me that it's harder to switch between those windows than in Win98.

I wonder if any of you other power users are experiencing the same thing.
"The founder of XYZ, reportedly missing since last friday was found alive when some fishermen off the coast of ABC cut open the belly of a freshly captured shark. Along with the founder, the fisherman also found some kittens, a few pieces of string and a whiteboard marker."
The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"
fantastic! looking forward to it. [OT]the taj mahal in the logo might not have been the best idea. historically, taj mahal represents the muslim occupation of india -- a dark period for the nation
I think it suffices to say that you have a lot of revisionist views. Not that you're wrong, per se, but that you go heavily against the common understanding of these events.
Selling web applications that don't work without Javascript is legally dangerous (discriminates against disabled users). There's a lot more to accessibility than making sure your site works without Javascript, but if you're missing this piece its somewhat of a moot point.

There's never been a case that's gone to verdict on the matter, so its still somewhat of a gray area. But the reason they don't go to verdict is because the offending company has always agreed to a large cash settlement. Target's $6MM settlement with the Federation for the Blind is the most recent case.[1]

There's plenty of large websites that drop the ball here (e.g., Reddit), but that doesn't mean its safe to do so. Ignore accessibility at your own risk.

[1]http://www.webstandards.org/2008/08/28/what-the-target-settl...
John Furrier: Why Matt Cutts is Wrong on the FTC
Somewhat unrelated, but this strikes me as good news for FlightCaster:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/10/08/flight.delays/index.htm...
John: "Can you imagine if the fed regulated CPC in the early days with disclosure statements?"
Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story
Fundamental problem: the URL fragment after the hash isn't sent to the web server as part of the request. Am I wrong?
Has his original script for Half Baked ever been released?
I would take it as though most people are there to hear Brian Tracy and not so much for the networking. While I doubt it is a "no sales" zone event, you will probably find a the full spectrum: people who don't want to be sold all the way up to people who are trying to sell the shit out of everyone they meet. You aren't the first to think, 'Hey - if I go where the CEOs go, then I'll have a shot at pitching them directly!' so expect to see many doing what you are doing. As such, don't waste your time on them - they are your competition.

And unless your startup is somehow "For every CEO" (a la linkedin) then you need to find a way to know beforehand who to look for and which areas you want to focus on. What companies do you hope will be there? Ask around at the event and see if any of that company's employees are there. What areas are you wanting to sell into? Ask around for who is at the event in those areas and talk to them. Don't just waste time talking to CEOs; talk to CEOs in your target market.

And these are rhetorical questions; I'm not expecting you to answer them here :)
Obesity, politics, STDs flow in social networks
Is this site like the onion?
Perhaps this is infeasible for some reason, but why can't they just use a (higher performance) version of Selenium or something similar?

1. Use machine learning to identify page elements likely to produce AJAX responses. Not too hard to do this, especially if you actually render the page in (say) Chrome and use the 2D layout in addition to the 1D HTML/CSS as part of your feature set.

2. Use your (souped up, ultra fast) Selenium replacement to play with all those AJAX features.

http://www.reasonablyopinionated.com/2009/01/how-to-test-aja...

...on the third hand, perhaps they're thinking that anyone technically savvy enough to set up an AJAX site (or set up sitemaps or the like) can run this headless browser.
Great feedback. Square footage data is a bit too unpopulated for us to feel comfortable allowing that search (same with breaking up Brooklyn, sadly).

Your other points are very valid. The map behavior in the "search map" mode seems to be more popular, so we'll keep that in mind as we revamp browse listings mode.
I never said it required "superhuman abilities". It just requires some familiarity, obviously depending on how deep you want to go. The trend of developers running in guns blazing and changing a complex codebase they don't understand is bad. I'm glad your stuff was personally usable, but there's a difference between something that's adequate for personal use and something that you can distribute as part of your new _database engine_. That stuff requires serious stability and complex programs are complex and changes can often have unforeseen consequences even for devs already trained in these large projects.

I'm not saying one can't learn, but I am saying that most good developers who haven't changed the source code for ginormous things like MySQL and Linux _are_ scared to take a new job where they're expected to be able to make meaningful and/or significant changes to any ginormous thing they don't have much familiarity changing, especially if you want to changes that are immediately deployable in your project.

If you're going to give the dudes time to get used to MySQL and Linux and tinker and discuss adequately, then that's fine. If not, and you expect them to go from 0 to "usable filesystem" in 4 days, you should probably be more specific in your ad.