skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I used to work at Groupon. As one would expect, we tracked merchant satisfaction very, very closely. Most merchants were satisfied and most did repeat business. Of course, it's usually the angriest people who are the noisiest and even in the case of very vocally happy merchants, it's not that exciting of a media story.

Also it's worth pointing out that the value proposition for different types of businesses is wildly different. As you can imagine for an info product, Groupon is just like doing an affiliate deal with virtually no downside, for a high margin item like a spa it's excellent, and for something with very high unit costs, like a meal at a restaurant, the merchant has to be a lot more judicious about creating Groupons.

I'm blown away by all the hate, though. Maybe it comes down to how good / aggressive the sales team is. From a merchant's perspective, Groupon should be treated like marketing. You don't spend so much money on Adwords that unit economics are bad without some plan to create repeat purchases on the back end. Why would promotional discounts be different?
How much karma do you need to customise it?
Thanks for the response I would love to talk to you in more （perhaps extensive, if you're willing) detail. If you see this is there anyway you could email me? Or would you mind if I emailed you?
Epson L110 Driver Download
"Best Fit" memory management. Malloc three buffers, in order: 64K, 1K, 64K. Now free all three. Next allocate 1K. Guess where it resides in the heap? Yep: the middle! After a while, memory was fragmented with 1K detritus. Even though you were supposed to have 500K available, there wasn't room for a 64K buffer anymore. This was the default for Microsoft's C compiler, in 1990. How did I find out?

There was a project that was crashing into a blue screen of death after a few hours. The crashing library had #defines that went 15 levels deep. The stack dump wasn't very instructive. Even though the library ISV was based in Boston, I had to fly out to Santa Cruz to talk to the developer directly. He was somewhat belligerent: "you should have figured it out yourself!". 15 levels of #defines. He was the perfect example of the other side of Dunning-Kruger thinking his arcane shit was obvious.

But, that didn't solve the problem. His fix didn't. So, I flew back to Boston. I started to trace everything with -ahem- #defines of the main APIs. It was turning into a Zen Koan: the sound of one app crashing. Everything worked with the Borland compiler. It was just the MSC compiler that failed. The company was one of the top 3 ISVs back then. Meetings about what to do would last for hours. There were technical politics: "Can we use Borland?" No; the company had standardized on MS. I could talk to their engineers directly, though. But, they didn't have a clue. So, I read though the docs to see what compiler switches were available. And there it was: best-fit. Fixed!

So, I wrote an analysis about why best-fit was absolutely the worst possible memory management and sent it to Microsoft. It took 8 years for MS to change the default. So, the reason why software would blow up? Best fit. Why early versions of Windows with go into blue-screen-of-death? Best fit. How many developers had to deal with this? Worst nightmare in aggregate.
Here are hundreds: https://www.grouponworks.com/case-studies
"There are versions of Windows with no GUI."

Do they run in VGA textmode?

I have used a program called "window" and today I use tmux but neither of those come from Microsoft.

How do I obtain one of these versions of Microsoft Windows that runs in VGA textmode?

"The attack surface for any large OS..."

Well yes, because they are all large. But what if the OS is small?

Let me guess, now you are going to tell me that all OS, e.g., kernel plus userland, are the same size?
So I'm just a computer scientist, not a mathematician or phycist, but I don't think there is a direct connection. The words co/contravariance is used for two different things in mathematics, vectors in physics/differential geometry, and functors in category theory. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance).

The computer science meaning is inspired by category theory (and can be seen as a simple instance of it). But the vector/functor meanings seem to be unrelated.

There is a bit of a connection, because the operation ٭ which takes a vector space V to the set of 1-forms V٭ is a contravariant functor. (I.e., linear maps V→U give maps of 1-forms U٭→V٭). But in physics, we say that the members of V are contravariant and the members of V٭ are covariant, i.e. the physics notion is about individual spaces, not about mappings between spaces.
I disagree.

It's not insufficient data, it's uncharacterized data.

If more-or-less everyone with exposure to both cultures is in broad agreement about the differences, that's not "insufficient". It's probably actually more data than any formal study would generate.

But it's also lower-quality data, with a greater chance of being distorted by various cognitive biases. Which means that it doesn't meet current regulatory standards[1] for use on large protected-class[2] groups of humans.

.

[1] as loosely and collectively defined by the morality police, loudest / most extreme non-ignorable activists, Internet Lynch Mob, etc

[2] which includes pretty much anything these days
It wasn't the Vietnamese who did it. It was the French.
That and the fact that those customers were Groupon's customers, not the businesses'. Their loyalty was to Groupon and the never-ending stream of discounts they provided.

OTOH, the businesses that offered the discounts were essentially commodities in the scheme. They created the value via their discounts that Groupon then sold to customers. Few cared about the businesses, as people were not buying the underlying service or product from those businesses.

Instead, the product was the discount itself, which they were buying from Groupon.
Goodbye privacy: Amazon Echo, the home robot who hears it all
I would love to ask questions, but think I have too many to post as a comment, could I email you (or you email me at username@tabeth.com if you don't want to post your email publicly)?
TLDR; Muslims serve in Western Armies, so shut your pie hole about Muslim terror attacks in Mali, Paris, Sinai, Boston, London, Madrid, Bali, New York, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Off-Topic

Sorry for being a spoiler, but I scan every day through hacker news to find some interesting stuff about programming, IT and startups. I'm tired of all this nytimes.com spam and low carb diet stuff.
How to think real good
I used OpenModelica a number of years ago as a simulink replacement on a project which couldn't afford MATLAB.

https://openmodelica.org/

EDIT:
Also, although it's not opensource, I had used Mentor SystemVision eons ago in college. It now has a free web interface. I haven't tried it, but honestly, what could be worse than DxDesigner ;-)

https://www.systemvision.com/
Snapping Is the New Clapping
As much as I love coffee and I'm happy to hear that drinking it is actually healthy, I think I'm just personally too sensitive to caffeine for it to be beneficial overall. My baseline stress level goes way up even with one cup a day and I have a much harder time falling and staying asleep.

For some reason tea doesn't affect me as much.
Both fats and sugars are helpful too, if you don't abuse them (probably the same for coffee).
No, they are filtering on the criteria of "recently revised this stuff for an exam" i.e. "we want cheap and easy to exploit 23-year-olds but we can't say that in front of HR".
Ford makes suit to simulate drugged driving
You might be interested in the article, "The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet", https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document

The short version of it is,

The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages.

For example, on the phonology of 'ch',

Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin.
From the article:

I – and many other researchers – did not believe they [bacteriocins] could be useful clinically because injecting a “foreign” bacterial protein into a patient is likely to induce a severe immune response that would make the antibiotic inactive. There were therefore gasps of amazement in Beijing at data presented from several animal studies showing this was not the case.

So, is this a case where the theory these experts embraced misled them for a long time so that none of them (until recently) even bothered to try bacteriocins on animals?

I mean, what was the breakthrough here, exactly -- actually trying it on animals, or something else?
This Amazon product is not new and many cellphones have basically the same functionality that brings the same privacy issues.
After you've sent a passport scan, you'd think they'd keep the scan on file (though that might be problematic) or at least keep a "legal ID verified" flag.

Facebook really don't care, do they?
There are only two fundamental positions in philosophy from which all else derives; the primacy of existence versus the primacy of consciousness. In ancient times the former was staked out by Aristotle and the latter by Plato. On this basis Aristotle created deductive logic and taught man how to think and by the same token Plato invented praying and taught men to wish. In modern times the primacy of consciousness view was picked up by Kant and the primacy of existence position was defended by Ayn Rand. Everyone else is mere footnotes in the history of Western thought.
New Fn() vs. Object.create(P)
They tried to reflect the actual letters used in the original script, and differentiation between them. Same reason the Thai place Phuket had a silent h after the P - romanisation of ภ to differentiate from พ, ผ, ป, and บ, albeit the last two are pb.
It might be regional. I recall reading some hypothesis that certain sounds were more popular in regions with more humid climates. I can't remember if there was any backing to the suggestion, though.
I don't know if every child is a potential genius but I do know that not every child reaches their full potential. Its interesting that Polgar felt Chess was the ultimate expression of intelligence, why not mathematics? Or language?

As a parent when your children are young, I encourage you to encourage their curiosity in a healthy way, which leads to a life of wondering just why things are the way they are, and investing those questions in a productive way. Later in life its hard to rekindle the spark of curiosity, and early in life its easy to extinguish it.
You might want to read this:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/89813/managing-k...

Anyways, if you decide you want to learn more about secure hash functions and cryptography in general, you can't go wrong with Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography".

Good luck!
I agree that Microsoft would have push well beyond the established best of AR technology in order to darken things in the hololens, but I can't tell what's likelier: that they're totally lying in their demonstrations, or that they have kept some bit of truly state-of-the-art-advancing innovation a secret.

It would be very easy to lie, but it is also difficult to believe that Microsoft would bet so hard on selling this product as revolutionary when it provides a fundamentally weak experience.

So Animats, is there something concrete that you're basing this claim off of, or just a general knowledge of AR technology and its limitations? I genuinely want to know--I've spent a lot of time wondering about this, and I've seen good points on both sides.

For anyone curious, Abrash does a great job of explaining why darkening is so hard here[1] and this reddit-speculator[2] does a great job of highlighting some incidents where hands-on hololens reviewers specifically noted "dark projection" during their user tests.

I've heard that the field of view is smaller than videos make it appear, and also that the image it displays is not fully opaque, but nothing that suggests that they can't darken. If it turns out they can, it would be a pretty big deal, and if it turns out they can't, hololens may be a dud.

[1] - http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-... (3.5 years old)

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/30koy9/hololens_a... (7 months ago)
Teens can't tell the difference between Google ads and search results
No romanisation system quite lines up with a specific European language. After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're romanising.

You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation.

Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.
do you use a sweetener with your coffee?
You just brought back old memories for me. I wrote the heap manager for Borland C. I chose the next-fit algorithm for its balance of speed and reasonable fragmentation under common use cases. Best-fit performs exactly as you described.
There's an odd, big complaint about numeric casts that culminates in this line of code:

fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%"+strconv.FormatInt(int64(paddingWidth), 10)+"s %s\r", "", legend)

Which could be improved greatly, and made a lot more readable with:

fmt.Fprint(os.Stderr, strings.Repeat(" ", paddingWidth), legend+"\r")

In my experience with Go over the last few years, any time I have this "ugh" moments it pays to take a step back. It's usually a code smell that there's a better way.
Never. Sometimes I drink it with milk though. If I drink it on a full stomach I can manage it better but it still jacks me up too much.
> htmlPy is a wrapper around PySide's QtWebKit library...

Based on my experience using Qt (via PyQt) this is kind of puzzling, and the very limited doc doesn't do much to unpuzzle me.

QtWebKit is basically a rendering engine wrapped as a Qt widget[0]. Where an entire app is based on a Qt main window, it can display HTML-encoded or Javascript-encoded content in a QWebView widget.

QtWebKit also offers the "WebKit bridge"[1] which "extends WebKit's JavaScript environment to access native objects represented as QObjects" and this permits creation of a "thin client" in which "the entire UI is driven by HTML, JavaScript and CSS." This sounds like what HtmlPy may be doing: using QtWebKit to make a "thin client", basically a minimal web browser window, in which the client code can use Javascript and HTML to display stuff.

If that's the case, a couple of points follow.

First, in that design, the only UI elements that will have the native OS's look and feel will be the outermost bits of the window. All widgets inside will have the look'n'feel designed by the app using CSS. Which may or may not be an issue.

More important, QtWebKit is deprecated and support for it ended with Qt5.4 [2]. Maintenance on QtWebKit has been slow to nonexistent since 2014 and my personal experience with it was that it had many bugs and frequently crashed my app displaying very ordinary web pages.

The replacement for QtWebKit is QtWebEngine [3][4] which is based on the Chromium web engine. Although QtWebEngine has several annoying omissions of QtWebKit features, it is in my experience much more reliable, and has on-going support.

However, I do not think there is as yet any equivalent in QtWebEngine to the "WebKit Bridge" mentioned above. The WebKit-to-WebEngine porting page[5] doesn't mention it, but does mention restrictions on Javascript execution compared to WebKit. So if indeed HtmlPy is depending on QtWebKit's "bridge", it is on a dead-end track for Qt support.

[0] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebkit-index.html

[1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebkit-bridge.html

[2] http://www.qt.io/qt5-4/

[3] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-index.html

[4] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebenginewidgets-index.html

[5] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebenginewidgets-qtwebkitportingguid...
I've heard that the L-Theanine [1] in green tea is responsible for a calmer caffeine effect. Although I haven't tried it, I've heard that you can get the same results by taking a supplement before your morning coffee.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine
I think it was Steve Sailer that first said preferences are important. In climbing it's commonly thought most people could climb 5.12 with intense training. But not many actually do because few enjoy training that hard.

I saw this first hand, I was naturally a much better climber than my friend but I didn't enjoy training or climbing as much. After a couple years he's putting up first ascents.

To give a shout out he's http://vividrea1ity.blogspot.com/
That's not a rebuttal, it's a strawman combined with a personal attack.

I said nothing about disallowing anyone to reproduce. I just said if only rich people reproduced we could eliminate most human suffering. Learn to read.
The geofencing is a good thing. They can drop grenades or anything else.
Yes, many drones can be programmed, and therefore can fly autonomously. China has banned export of their drones.

RC planes are remote controlled at least. This is the first time we have autonomous robots among humans.
Because the Vietnamese didn't romanise their language. The French did.

There have been suggestions to evolve the way vietnamese is written. For example, "Y" and "I" are the same sound, and could be changed to just "I" to simplify. However "Thuy" is a common girl's name whereas "thui" is "smelly". There is resistance to change everything to "I" because it would change the name to something embarrassing.
Perfectly described. Thank you.
I'd rather have shorter weeks and zero days off, but that just might be my personality. I hate the idea that once in a while I'll get a vacation that I'll enjoy half of and spend the last half dreading going back.
>Why would promotional discounts be different?

There are several differences between Groupon's model and standard discounting/advertising. The spirit of these can primarily be summed up as "most advertising services don't compete directly on price with the clients for whom they are supposedly advertising."

Groupon's product was its discounts, which it sourced from local merchants, then sold to its own customers. The businesses were not so much customers, but suppliers. However, the businesses paid Groupon for the benefit of supplying the product (the discount), and yet competed directly with Groupon when Groupon sold discounts for the restaurant across the street the following week.

Now, here I have discounted deeply and taken a loss, however, I cannot compete with Groupon in my efforts to retain any new customers and recoup those losses. This is because Groupon encourages a certain customer mindset, based on demand for deep discounts. This is a demand which Groupon alone can endlessly satisfy because no individual competitor could sustain such losses. However, the aggregate loss of those businesses is the very source of Groupon's profit.

In short, Groupon was actually a hyper-competitor to the businesses it was supposedly serving.
Measure the mass of an eyelash with a DIY microbalance (2014)
Except historically some humans have found it useful to coordinate certain events to, say, recur at the same time of winter every year so suddenly a deeper relationship to the cosmos becomes necessary.
> In NodeOS Node.js runs directly on top of the Linux kernel, no more

It's still not really clear to me what this statement means. Do you mean only node.js and nothing else runs? Surely the "runs directly on top of the Linux kernel" is just hyperbole, right? Unless you are literally compiling Node.js with hooks into the kernel instead of separately but I'm not convinced that would be helpful and would just end up a security risk (though if that's the case I'd love to see benchmarks).

So it sounds like none of the helpers from Linux are present just node.js. I can see the use case just seems incredibly niche.
Well said, I stumbled across virtualization in the early 2000s and rediscovered what had been invented in the 60s. In the 80si created a compression algorithm only to find out it had been invented in the 60s. When I was under 30 I assumed everyone over 30 was brilliant and the often were. People under 30 today assume everyone over 30 is an idiot.
Sounds exactly like what TCP_NODELAY does on linux.

Note the final sentence from tcp(7):

TCP_NODELAY
If set, disable the Nagle algorithm. This means that segments are always sent as soon as possible, even if there is
only a small amount of data. When not set, data is buffered until there is a sufficient amount to send out, thereby
avoiding the frequent sending of small packets, which results in poor utilization of the network. This option is
overridden by TCP_CORK; however, setting this option forces an explicit flush of pending output, even if TCP_CORK is
currently set.
Reminds me of customer service:

1. gets through

2. spends a few minutes explaining the issue

3. “I’ll connect you to <other department>”

4. spends a few minutes explaining the issue

5. “Wait 24h. Call again if issue persists.”

6. go to step 1

Y U NO WRITE DOWN MY ISSUE FOR FUTURE USE?
> For generations, Marshallese called their home Aelõñ Kein Ad

Nope: "Aelõñ" is the pidgin version of the English word "island". It's a bizarrely common import in many Polynesian languages, eg. the Cook Islands are the Kūki 'Āirani.
I'll give one, both as consumer, merchant and partner. I have never owned stock in the company and don't know anybody there.

As a consumer, I've discovered tons of new restaurants and services through Groupon.

As a merchant, I ran several groupons and they kicked butt. Of course you need reasonable expectations about margin and repeat customers.

As a partner, I've referred dozens of brands to Groupon Goods, who are easy to working with, pay their bills on time and pay MORE than traditional retail channels, because there zero loss/spoilage.

I can't speak to sales tactics but my experience was virtually 100% positive.
As long as you're claiming that your POV is an opinion, or informed speculation at best, I have absolutely no issues with what you're saying, and do not wish to engage in further argument. We probably agree on most things.
It is ironic isn't it. They pride themselves in fancy, fast, optimized graph storage and querying. Best minds at works, yadda, yadda. But they don't seem to manage to implement a flag like that.