skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gilt and its clones don't sell regular merchandise, but almost always out of season, overstock, and seconds merchandise that the firm would have to dispose of regardless. Businesses that use Groupon deep discount their normal stuff.
Cross-reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1728987
Another interpretation of the wave function collapse.
A bit of background: I wrote this because a lot of my students say things like, "You teach AND take classes?" and call me "Dr." or "Professor" when I'm technically not, although many of their other instructors are PhDs and professors. As noted in the essay, such experiences made me realize that I didn't know a lot about universities when I started in one either.

So now I direct people who ask me what this grad student business is to the essay, which has been on my private course sites for a long time but which I've finally decided to make public.

Note: if you have feedback, I'd love to hear it, especially if you're an undergrad (two of my former students read "How Universities Work" and said it made sense; the changes that resulted were relatively minor). If you want to send msgs privately, try seligerj [[at]] gmail --dot-- com.
To be fair, they do point out that many of the situations are simulated to demonstrate a survival technique.

In much the same way that you generally never want to, for example, be in a situation that causes you to have to use your buddy's secondary breather on a dive, you still want to simulate that while training so that you know what to do if it does happen.

That all said, I totally agree with you in general.
Of course there is a stigma. If you are out of high school and aimless then the most sensible thing is to go to more school and at least be directed to learn some valuable stuff. If you're just farting around with computers all the time, of course most older people will not understand that, and they'll assume you don't know what it takes to be "successful" (because they probably don't), and they will be disapproving. And given their experience and wisdom that is totally logical.

However if you are one of the people who has the courage to follow your dreams, then you shouldn't care what the stern majority thinks. Society will never nurture unique personalities, if you want to do something great in life you need to look beyond your family (and local community, especially if you live in a small town) to find your own mentors and your own way.
It would take a pretty strange view of academic economics to believe that the Chicago school has been generally "marginalized", while the neo-Keynesian school has been "dominant". At least in U.S. economics departments of the past few decades, they've traded dominance on and off, and I'm not sure either has enjoyed a measurably greater period of dominance. Chicago-school economics was dominant in the 1980s and 1990s, and especially in the late 1980s neo-Keynesianism was almost completely marginalized in academia. It's now made a comeback post-financial-crisis, and currently has the upper hand, but Chicago-school economists haven't exactly disappeared, and are still prominent at many of the top schools.
I admire Ron Conway for his business acumen and regard for entrepreneurs. But he's taking on a lot of needless baggage for continuing to talk about a meeting he himself did not attend, and for continuing to speak on behalf of his partner in an ambiguously denial-oriented style. "thou doth protest too much" comes to mind. The whole thing seems fishier than it probably really is because of it.
Subsidies like these are inefficient for businesses because they don't discriminate between customers who are new to the business and regular patrons. It doesn't really increase demand so much as pull it forward a la "Cash for Clunkers" meaning you are subsidizing customers who would have bought anyways.
One thing I would add is that if you have any interest in graduate school, it's important to become involved in research ASAP. Research experience is an important differentiator on grad school applications and scholarships, but it's a rare school that will warn you about that before senior year, when it's already too late.
Me too...but we are unusual in having such fast metabolisms, and are lucky to live in age of plenty.

Also, being skinny doesn't mean your arteries won't harden.
I'll be the voice of dissent here: I think it's ok. Her whole style of clothing and even choices in hair color are norm violating, attention grabbing devices. If she would have left well-enough alone, her picture would have faded into obscurity with millions of other pictures.

Instead, she brought more publicity to the event. She actually allowed a news outlet to cover the incident.

While the owner of the website is not being a super-friendly-pushover, and I know his behavior falls into what society considers asshole behavior, I feel things will be really fucked up if he is legally forced to remove the pictures, or if Google cuts his page revenue. That'll be censorship in my opinion.
While strictly speaking impotence wouldn't prevent this (trivially speaking you could only allow a single tweet with a given content), in practice idempotence is a sufficient to avoid this.
I'm glad it's not slashdot because this would be an impossible choice between +1 informative and +1 funny
If you are looking for something you want to use right away, check out JRebel. Mechanisms for hot swapping classes is still very premature in the JEE and I'd recommend WAR/EAR deployments in any environment other than development. I find hot swapping more useful for development as it gives me a faster dev/deploy cycle similar to PHP.
In Praise of Laziness
>it would be impossible for the average sedentary person not to gain weight eating the Michael Phelps diet.

Seems like it would be pretty impossible for the average sedentary person to eat the Michael Phelps diet in the first place.
I'm in a similar situation. I've started businesses before and I LOVE doing it myself. I'll learn everything I can, put together a simple website and then run everything alone. I recently put a business plan together for an internet startup that I feel has amazing potential, but it's also a huge undertaking and involves a lot of web programming that I can't do. I want to find a dedicated tech co-founder but money and time are huge issues. If the person is a co-founder then you would be in the same boat where nobody is getting paid, but then why would someone even agree to be a co-founder if the only promise of money was the hope of outside funding. Can a great idea be enough to attract talent?
This is not specifically an argument against Groupon, but with occasional discounting in general, such as seasonal sales. Economists, marketers, and business strategists have studied and argued about this for decades.

So, some businesses avoid discounts, and others embrace them. It probably depends a lot on the type of business whether they're a net positive or net negative; otherwise either the "sales are bad" or "sales are good" argument would have definitively won out by now as accepted wisdom.

Small businesses are often unsophisticated in their marketing, so Groupon probably benefits from some businesses not realizing discounts hurt their exact business, or overpaying for Groupon promotions. (Similarly, Google benefits from small businesses that sometimes overbid on AdWords/AdSense without rigorous ROI calculations, or fail to adjust their campaigns to eliminate negative-ROI outlets.)

But other businesses -- those that get a large benefit from awareness, and some number of new recurring full-price customers -- surely benefit. There will be some optimal frequency of promotions, to minimize their cannibalization of normal demand at full price. (Ideally, you'd want to offer the promotion only to new customers, but that would require some information-discrimination that's hard on the net, with promotions that are meant to spread like gossip.)

Groupon will be in a very interesting position, as they collect data on what works for different businesses and what customers respond to. They could tempt more businesses to overpromote, or help unsophisticated small businesses schedule optimal promotions. They could possibly deemphasize certain promotions to repeat customers, or emphasize them to proven customers of competitors.
Stuxnet malware, nuclear cyberweapon
They fixed the bug blazing fast. It must have been the referrer stuff! LOL
Like the meat producers don't do the same thing?
Separately from my on-topic reply: you should consider choosing a login name different than a famous person -- even if 'Steve Jobs' is your real name.
If you want to make revenue from ads, then do so. If you want me to buy your app, don't also make me pay with ads. This seems perfectly reasonable.
You know, I find most skinny people who say they can't gain weight grossly overestimate the amount that they eat. (myself included)
More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729601
Launch48: Encouraging people to throw unrefined shit against the wall and see if it sticks.
dupe: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723421
I would tend to agree. Even at this point if no one said anything it will fade into nothing and we'll all move on.

Generally, I took away from this entire thing is you never really know the whole truth, so more information is your only best friend.
Okay, someone answer me this:

Is this comic so standards compliant that it only runs well on IE9? Because, if so, this is a special breed of irony.
I'm just happy he's using his spell checker now. No more "entrepeneur"
At least this was fixed much faster than the last one.

It is interesting that when they release a new version a bunch of exploits start popping up almost like when twitter first went big, kind of seems like it would be worth paying someone to work on security. (Though they may do that already.)
The fact that they're using a GET is not the problem (though it is slightly bad). The malicious javascript would have to be only slightly more complex if it was a POST. The issue is that there is no security token required when making the request to do the status update.
Learn by doing, not reading
xD

Good point. Was getting terminology mixed up with PUT.
Mozilla & P2PU's School of Webcraft
Groupon is laughing at this and similar posts all the way to the bank.

Businesses bend over backwards to be on Groupon and there are few faster and cheaper ways to get a flood of new customers to try your service. It may be great for some and not so for others, but if you can't do the back of the envelope math (Posie's cafe) and ignorant to the risk (or success) of potentially 3,000+ people buying your groupon, then you have bigger troubles ahead.
i agree, negotiations are critical. i read secrets of power negotiators.
This seems to have worked almost perfectly in the current Webkit nightly for me, and I think it's really a stellar example of what can be done with browsers. Now we just need one of the comic book giants like Marvel or DC (or even a smaller publishing house) to "publish" a few pages of issues in this format. I'm sure sales would go up dramatically.

I would really love to know just how long it took to make this, though, regardless of the actual artwork (the html-ification of it), because the time it takes probably isn't viable for my webcomic utopia.
It's very interesting that Ron Conway appears to have known about - and endorsed! - David Lee's attendance at these meetings.

Did it really need to take 2 meetings (oh, and Arrington's input) to voice disapproval?
"We're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play. For the most part, the industry has been rinse-and-repeat. There's been lots of product that looked like last year's product, that looked a lot like the year before."

- EA CEO John Ritticello, 2009
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=26508
Yes, dropping out of college to start a company is risky. However, if you can't handle that risk are you sure you can handle the risk of starting a startup?

Don't get me wrong, you're making a good argument for staying in college. However, I think it's hardly a prima facie case for staying in school.
Another possibility: David Lee is the leak. It may have been Ron Conway suggesting he attend to see what was going on. Even if he isn't the leak I tend to think David Lee was there simply to find out what was happening for SV Angel, not having intent to form agreements.
As the docs say, that's a property of internal phone storage (which is very limited). External storage doesn't have permissions. How could it? It's all FAT32!
DMA Design -> Rockstar North
Google's results are usually fine.

If I had to chose one single thing at which Google results suck, it would have to be Javascript documentation.
If he was legally forced to remove the pictures, I suppose that would be censorship, although not automatically bad. IP rights rely on censorship to stop other people from publishing what's covered by the IP. The problem with censorship isn't that it exists, it's that it's used inappropriately.

Google deciding not to do business with a dick and/or someone who violates their terms of service is not censorship. As far as I'm aware, Google isn't the government.
I'm amazed Twitter doesn't use nonce values on their status updates: they've been around long enough that this shouldn't be an issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce
Meat Art - Sick or Cool??
Not nearly cynical enough. A lot of the things written here are sort of the 'ideal'. The fact of the matter is, if you want to be a chemist, you probably shouldn't be anything but a chemistry major (or something related enough, or effectively complete the chemistry reqs). I don't know that colleges are 'places where knowledge is created'. In retrospect, I feel like colleges are places where people get that A (i.e. a college diploma) to prove they've been there - and to gain qualifiaction in the eyes of the outside world.

Whether or not that should be the case, that seems to be the way that it is.

The Paul Krugman quote is shudder-worthy, but that is a personal bias.
It's drama, but it's also of life-changing importance to some people on HN. It's also Sunday, so it's a slow news day anyways.
Even if this were a POST request, once could simply issue an AJAX request of any type to Twitter and it would have the same effect.

Alternatively build a form in the iframe and use JS to submit it to Twitter.
What's wrong with sex with goats?
Ask HN: How much does the Internet weigh?
A fun discussion topic that persists in my office: how much do you think 1GB of data weighs? By extension, how much does the Internet weigh?
you could, but this is not good enough. A malicious app can collect data to send, store it, and wait until you slip up and accidentally give it internet access. Again, this is trivial stuff, no elite hacking required.
Literally no one uses "literally" literally anymore.
Idempotent means that the side effects of n > 0 requests are the same as for a single request. The "update status" method is not idempotent, as calling it multiple times would post multiple statuses. I think the parent's statement is sound.

A request that is side effect free is idempotent by definition.
Any tips on landing a decent internship position in researches headed by different universities? I am currently attending an institution where the highest level of education offered is a masters... so there's no research going on here. But I do live nearby a univ. where there is. Do I just e-mail one of the professors there, speak a little about myself, and just sort of say "I'm interested in becoming involved in the research you head"?

And actually, furthermore deciding what sort of research I should get myself involved in. Does it even matter? -- in line of what jseliger and pg said about choosing majors -- that it doesn't matter, because the more important skills are easily translatable into different fields.
apps without permission to access it could be run in a chroot, for example.
It also raises some interesting thoughts about the antrophic principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle)
> anyone remember what the non-github compojure website looks like?

It sucked ;)

However, Lift is several years older than Compojure, and is now in its second stable release, whilst Compojure has yet to reach 1.0.
Fair enough, but I only know about Android and Maemo! As for apple, I have different reasons for disliking Apple: http://sam.ai.ki/apple.html
Its very hard to find examples of good survival behaviour in Grylls' work.

Essentially, if you are on your own, with no rescue coming, you must be super conservative in everything you do. A simple and common broken ankle is now a fatal wound.

With this in mind, you don't charge around everywhere like Grylls does. You don't climb anything you could fall off, you don't make any big jumps. You move slowly and carefully, conserving energy and minimising risk.

Pretty much everything he does, from start to finish, as he runs around for the camera, while entertaining television, is a terrible survival template. You find very few experienced mountain guides that run around like Bear does.
I did mention that Maemo's practical security is much weaker than Android's, but it's actual security may be better - like Debian's - because most apps are open source.
Ask HN: Role of a Law partner
I'm a college student with programming experience and I'm interested in making start up with another dedicated friend as a co-founder. The thing is that this person has a law background and we had heard from a law adviser that real lawyers never actually become a part of a start up. Instead what people mean by a law partner is someone who deals with the lawyers. This adviser said that instead the better choice for a co-founder is to be a business oriented person. Honestly neither of us were too certain about this advice and we are still both going ahead with our plans to start a company, since we are both very enthusiastic about start ups. However we did want to know what the real role of a Law partner is in a start up and if there was any truth in the advice we got?

Thanks for the help in advance.
Offering coupons of any kind (Groupon or not) is just another form of marketing. Whether or not it makes sense for a particular business is much more complex: different structures, margins, repeat customers, etc.

So a business "loses" a $1000 with their Groupon deal, they got people into their shop and at least it's a more measurable outcome than most print or radio ads.
AddThis - Labs - Sharebar
No, unless i am mistaken they are not sandboxed with respect to the SD card, and apps with write permission (comes for free with API 1.4) can also modify or delete any SD card content - to install a windows virus for example.
Slightly off topic, but is anyone else a bit surprised at the grammatical errors in Ron's letters?
Squeryl: A concise, type-safe Scala ORM and DSL
Zip Files on iPad?
Don't you agree that zip files are pre-iPad? What alternatives can people come up with for zip files on the iPad? Should content live on the web? But then how do you package it?
Some discussion from a few days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717023

And an article about it from the engineering department at UofT:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720854
Review my sunday project
No, it's entirely the fault of GET. They're opening an iframe on their page with a source your post URL. If it were POST-only, they'd be blocked by Javascript being unable to communicate across domains.
The same PHP code has followed me round since 1999. From FreeBSD 4 to Linux to OpenBSD to FreeBSD 6 (but in a VM running on Linux).

Early on in my career I was given a codebase that adhered to every lesson in How To Write Unmaintainable Code. I can't thank fate enough.
Sure, the key will stop CSRF attacks that rely on just an iframe, but if my attack is more sophisticated then I can scrape the token from a legit form and re-post with whatever data I want.
Joyent Smartmachine Private Beta
Exactly!

Knowing that somebody actually read/watched/listened to... something is very valuable, and I havent seen anybody create a reading list that leverages that data.

I dont consider an rss reader as a reading list, i consider a reading list as a hand picked list.

We need a digg/instapaper and i think donefeed can be it.

Discalimer: I coded donefeed.
I just ran it through usual menagerie of browsers (Win7 - CH, FF, SF, OP, IE) and Chrome was the only one with really bad performance (surprisingly even on HW accelerated canary build).

It's quite refreshing to see MS guys pointing out performance bottlenecks in Google's code :).

Competition is good.

With IE9 MS managed to find one area where virtually all other browsers sucked (large / many / transparent image sprites), made a good implementation and created some clever demos that benefit from this implementation.

This may have hastened coming of HW acceleration to upcoming public releases of Chrome and Firefox.

Kudos for IE team for stepping up the game.
The key absent of measurement is the effect on the business, there is no point to a more measurable loss, in comparison to a less measurable profit.

I don't care to chime in to the debate on whether radio/print/groupon is effective as I think that like most tools it can be used properly or improperly.
Bug: the highest the "I can commit at most" selector on the search goes is 6 days per week.
IE9 has GPU acceleration features that haven't shipped in the other browsers yet. I know Chrome is most of the way to shipping something competitive, but I'm not sure about the others.
Thanks. There goes my Sunday...
I think this is demonstrably false. The horror stories of businesses not being able to handle the huge flow of customers pretty much prove that many people would not "have bought anyways".
I think it's better to have the option, enabled by default, so that people see a warning pop-up the first time an app attempts internet access: "Freecell wants to access the internet. This could compromise your privacy or security. Press 'block' or 'allow' to continue." or whatever. Perhaps for the first time the message appears, the system could explain the risks in more detail, with a biohazard symbol or something. People could also choose 'block all' and allow an app only if it otherwise breaks. If you don't want a firewall, turn it off: simple. Otherwise, you are likely to be saddled with a large variety of malware. I'd rather have the firewall.
So, whats the easiest, tested way for a Django programmer, outsider to the Java world to write a site running on the JVM?
DIY Hard Drive Clock
I actually saw staying in my current position as the riskier option. Sometimes staying put is the riskiest thing you can do. I am about 3 months into my studies. I started with the MIT Intro to Programming with Python course, Stanford's Intro to CS with Java course, and Harvard's CS75/CS50 Course. These are all online and free. I am also enrolled in a discrete math class and an advanced programming fundamentals course a local university. Additionally, I am learning Django and working on a web app. I find this makes me much more engaged along the way. To answer your question, I haven't 'learned CS', but I am much more comfortable than I was three months ago. I expect it to be like that forever.
No, it's not entirely the fault of GET. The browser does not prevent script from triggering POSTs to third party sites.
As I recall I run into this when searching for Linux kernel internals or library documentation. I find lots of error messages and forum posts, but no documentation targeted at programmers. For common library calls a manual page will often be in the top results, which is helpful, but it seems that documentation from the official project site (if it exists), the git commit that introduced a function, or source code containing the function would be more useful.

Next time I run into a search that would have a more appropriate best answer I'll try to post it here.