No problem. I've absorbed the following techniques from a wide range of sources (blogs to books to observing my savvy natural networking friends).

Please share your own observations or techniques (i'm not an expert - I just paint myself as one in news.yc land)

1. On your way to the event, choose to smile and say hi to almost everyone you pass. The first ten may not even register a response but once you get to thirty or event twenty hellos, people start to sense your warmness (you're warmed up socially)

2. When you get to the event, pause in the entrance for at least 10 seconds.

3. Silly technique but don't diss it until you try it. When you walk into an unfamilar room, make friends with it. Say (silently) 'Hello wall, nice to meet you. Hello table. how are you" Later you can extend this to (silently) sending out 'Hello person - it's nice to meet you' as you walk around the room.

4. Do not walk around with a drink. Keep your hands free. Walking around with a drink or worse a plate and a drink is like a 'don't bother me. i'm busy feeding myself' Put down your drinks/food and be open.

5. Talk to single individuals and bring them into a group with you (Do not say: "Nice meeting you. Talk to you later" - that could make a temporary enemy, Say: "I'd like to go talk with that group over there." (if they don't want to, then you can gracefully leave the singleton)

6. Remember names. Google will show you that there are many memorization techniques to do this. Some are pretty outrageous. All require practice (especially the visual mnemonic ones). All require hearing the name in the first place.

7. Wear your nametag (if there is one) on the right. Wearing it on the right lets another person see the nametag easier, during a handshake (assuming right-to-right)

8. You're not there to chat 30 minutes with a stranger (unless you want to). Mingling is not standing by the bar talking with one or two people. You're not there to build relationships (that's not possible) - if you enjoy talking with someone - get their contact info at the peak of the conversation.

9. Here's an example for holiday parties. The whole idea is to transition from (something shared) the environment to (you and your conversation partner) personal. A: 'Nice food' B: 'How are you enjoying the party' C: 'I like Holiday parties because' D: 'I'm looking forward to visiting my family in X during' E: 'What are your holiday plans'

10. Don't use close-ended questions. 'Are you having a good time'. That's boring. That's lame. Instead try making statements 'I like how that buffet line is as packed as I-280'

11. Follow up within 24-48 hours. For real bonus points, hand-write and mail an actual note in the postal mail.

(advanced) 12. You have to show initiative and commitment. If you walk up with a lame 'How are you?' you'll get a tepid response. However, if you walk up with a 'Nice to meet you. I'm wallflower' and the feeling like you already know them/they're good friends, then wow can happen

(Super-advanced) 13. Work the room like you own the place. The most natural and savviest of my friends do this. Confidence and a smile are the best icebreaker, not alcohol.

Does http://news.ycombinator.com/ count?

The only one I use every day.

http://www.reddit.com is the only one I use everyday

This information is too important to get second-hand on the web. Go straight to the source. Cosmopolitan magazine can be purchased at the checkout counter of your local supermarket.

Microsoft doesn't want to admit that they had the inbox backwards all along. ;-)

He's right to worry. I worry too. And in fact our abuse detection code is suspicious about this story, because so many of the first upvotes were from newly created accounts.

Important world news, which is why it's on cnn.com and pretty much every other news site out there. Pretty much irrelevant to hackers.

The set of things that matter, in world terms, far more than what Paul Graham thinks of trolls, or startup school, or memcached is large enough that it could easily crowd out the 'hacker news' without breaking a sweat, as this page suggests: http://www.ft.com/world

I don't see what the problem is with taking this kind of story elsewhere.

It's not a bad story or uninteresting, just that first this one...then a Musharraf one, then another one about the US primaries, and on and on. All of them more important than the regular fare here. And after a while, the value of the site is diluted in terms of its original purpose.

Sure, they realized interoperability would be important. But by 1995 customers were already whining about how often the file format changed. Nobody would buy Office (n+1) if it would start writing documents in a format that Office (n) didn't understand, because interoperability means precisely that you can't get everyone to upgrade at the same time. So they did a remarkably good job of holding the file formats stable and backwards and forwards compatible for about ten years. Look in the Excel spec and you'll see how much work when into allowing old verisons of Excel to preserve and roundtrip future features they don't understand.

Reading the description, my thought process was "So don't we already have pdf and Acrobat for that?"

Looking at the actual demo, my thought process was "Wow, Acrobat really sucks."

http://disqus.com/ is the best IMHO

The embargo should have never existed.