skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
eh, I've been 'in business' most of my life now, and, I guess that isn't all that long (I think I was 12 when I started my first venture, selling pumpkins, and I'm 30 now.) I haven't seen great success, or really great failure. The thing is, every time I tried to be less than honest to gain an advantage? I got slapped down. Sometimes hard. (though most of my forays were probing and weak, and so were the consequences.)

My suspicion is that lying and dishonesty is a skill like any other, and one that is not trivial to learn. You can't just lie and expect to be rewarded, you need to know when and how to lie. People spend their lives studying that sort of thing, as well as how to detect liars. Personally, I think the average businessperson is better off being as honest and transparent as he or she is able while focusing on some other competitive advantage. Competing with the professional liars in this arena is difficult.
I will not argue against the case that the US will print more dollars, because I think that will happen, but will they print enough to refloat California's obligations without specific funds being allocated by Congress for a bailout. The Republicans control enough votes to determine whether this happens or not, and it would appear that the political benefits to them could outweigh the damage in the near term.
I also see it as following the motion picture marketing model. Build interest months before the release, develop buzz, and then increase that to a countdown ramp-up.

Seems to work quite well, and indeed you are correct it does keep individual issues from getting lost in the release process quite well.
What of the presidents who were excellent orators?
One point from the comments I did find interesting, it says as much about what areas oreilly is still the top tech publisher in (case of python).

However from any perspective I found the fact a data analysis book was #1 very telling. I find big data interesting and see it discussed here a fair bit, but I never assume the hot topics here hold interest in the wider developer community. Guess I was wrong this time.
Why not expand on the concept that people could use a place to store an annotation of any sort. That way, if I want to leave people text, photos, a presentation, an embedded video, etc, I can do that without the need to create a blog or let that person see a full history of other things I've written. Another idea would be to generate a QR code for the page.

That being said, I can't think of very many times I've needed something like this. If I had more to say on a topic than I wanted to leave in a comment, I'd blog about it. If I knew the person, I'd email them.
What worries me is that while the government may inefficiently try to haul Assange into court and call him a terrorist, the banking & finance elite may just decide he should have an "accident." I wouldn't put it past them.
I'd classify it as a spelling error, similar to to/too/two and their/they're. They know the word, but not the right letters to make it.
Before wikileaks there was Gazette De Leyde
The argument that California's policies produced the strongest private sector in the country is equally fallacious.
One of Spain's big impediments to getting themselves out of their economic mess is that they're on the Euro. In ways similar to the varying economic situations in US states. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/opinion/29krugman.html
Google Explains The ‘Hotpot’ Name: “It’s About Community”
Why didn't Google move quickly to make a competitor to Groupon? I feel like this would have given them much more leverage to offer a lower price.

With google's reach and talent, I feel like they could have made groupon sweat. And then bought groupon for a more reasonable amount of money.

5 billion seems like a lot for a company that has such a low barrier to entry for competitors.
Ask HN: What are the top HN posts of all time?
The Google Beatbox has 436 points, & is still at #1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952356

That's a lot of points. Which makes me wonder: what is the most points a post has gotten?
As someone who is building a startup that deals with slightly-more-than-usual data and who has been involved with various startups that similarly pushed the data-boundaries in later phases: Yes.

Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast. In that order.

Restructuring data is, in most cases, a smaller issue than it may seem. Running systems don't normally crash and burn over night. More often you'll see it coming and have plenty time to apply bandaids while transitioning to a new system.

Doing so is much easier when you can actually see and measure the bottlenecks, rather than trying to predict them beforehand.

In other words: Embrace the limbo. ;-)
+1 for QR code gen
Can some lawyer please just kill comcast instead?
I agree with having both the post date (optional?) and the markdown option, I like the idea of being able to toggle markdown, you could still default to plain-text and so preserve perfect backwards compatibility. Also I can't help but wonder about expiration dates and the ability to edit or delete, maybe have an optional password?
Two interesting links in here on the history of unix pipes that I wasn't aware of, http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/ and http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html#pipes

The second link shows this as a formerly valid command:

pr <"sort input"< >opr>

Ouch!
Just checked the source -- farting around with it a bit to try and raise the timeout period among other things.

Nope it's a lot simpler than that as said above. Basically the x axis is generation, y axis is distance. The black line is the max and the green line is the average.
+2 I think that would make a nice, easy, useful way to tie a digital comment to the physical world, QR graffiti tied to a manifesto anyone?
Watch Live NDTV Imagine Online Free
Watch Live NDTV Imagine Online Free
you forgot .pv

like .pv pv zk bschkpv zk ds
To get rid of the cutoff gray background after pressing the feedback tab in Chrome, you can add "html {height: 100%}" to your CSS. This adds a vertical scrollbar though, but again just in Chrome. I had to deal with this on my Get Satisfaction widget too.

Nice service by the way. I love the low barrier to posting. Like pastie.org, but for publishing.
ASK HN: What are the most costly bugs you have fixed?
Coding is a lot of fun + debugging. So as encouragement to starters what are the most costly and maybe the toughest bugs you have had to fix?
The value of an acquisition is (simplifying) a product of how easy it would be to replicate the target without buying it, that is itself a combination of (again simplifying) how big a first/early mover advantage they have, and the technical lead they have, in terms of software, data, infrastructure, etc.

Groupon obviously has an early-mover advantage, although it doesn't seem insurmountable, but their technical advantage doesn't seem enormous. I don't mean to undersell what they've done and fall into the "I could build X in a weekend" trap, but what they've accomplished technically seems easily repeatable in a year by a company of Google's talent, if not less.

Their early-mover advantage has established them as the definite leader in the area, but again, it does not seems insurmountable. There isn't significant vendor lockin (the vendors are constantly changing), nor customer lockin, (other than having to sign up for a new site). There is a clear avenue for competitors to break in, by offering better terms.

Basically, they are printing money by being a middleman. Funny, i thought the internet was supposed to eliminate that kind of business. They are certainly worth billions, as they are enormously profitable, but 6 billion seems excessive. What this says to me is that Google sees locally-based commerce that occurs online (bad phrasing by me) as a critical space in the coming years, and they would rather significantly overpay and jump ahead rather than risk being lapped.
For the same price they should be buying Twitter.
Thanks for feedback! All credits of the arrow keys working go to JQuery. :)

The <<< and >>> are my poorman's UI implementation of left and right arrows. It seems the prefetching has some problem when going left and right too fast. I'm turning prefetching off and re-deploying the app. It'll be up in a moment.
Is Groupon really that big?
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Real estate management is a complicated work. As the new economic policy is taking India to a new rise, it will get more complicated.
Purchasing real estate properties entails huge amounts of money which makes real estates substantial assets. Although it may be easy to manage just one or two real estate properties, managing more than that may seem too tedious for most people.

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Would this mean their army of Ruby on Rails developers being laid off and replaced with a team of many fewer Google engineers?

edit: sure it is a bit offensive, but it is a serious question
And if they buy in the next 17 hours, 23 minutes, and 15 seconds, they can have $6 billion worth of Groupon for only $3 billion.
Real Estate Company In India
Now a days container housing is being a popular concept in western countries. Container houses are also easy to build, also easy to maintain and cheaper than contemporary concrete houses. These kind of houses can serve niche segment the people who likes to experiment with variety housing types, and people who wants to own their studios either for work or stay.

For more information visit :
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Thanks for explaining this. I don't have Flash and was very confused why nonsense words being translated to the same nonsense words was of interest to anyone...
Thanks for the feedback. No, the logo text doesn't link was an oversight. The logo image links back to home; I thought that was enough. I'll add the link to the logo text as well.
I'd be very interested in seing the raw numbers, I'm guessing there is probably some wide differences between 1 and 25.

It's cool to see Land of Lisp on the there. Good book, get it while it's cheap.

I also got, Algorithm in a nutshell and Real World Haskell. I had a lot of the other books on the list already.

Anyone care to share their list of purchases?
Precisely. It doesn't take very many A/B tests on lead-gen forms to realize you can get much better conversion rates if you're willing to trick your users into clicking on stuff. "Learn More" isn't a better title for that button, it's a deliberately misleading title for that button. You can have a button labelled "Get a free puppy" and a button labelled "Spam me every 24 hours and sell my e-mail address to the highest bidder". Guess which one will convert better; Guess which one is honest.
How can Comcast argue they incur so much costs? when other providers are able to offer triple-play (isp/cable/phone) offerings for a third of the price or less. Example: in France Proxad (http://www.free.fr) offers 179 cable channels, on demand movies and shows, 18 Mbits DSL, free unlimited VOIP calls to the whole country + 40 foreign countries - all for $40 flat (no catch - I have used them happily for 5 years and I am still a customer in France where I own a home).
I can't help but remember Geocities, which sold for $3.5 billion way back when. Sometimes you buy a company on the cusp of rapid exponential growth, other times it's merely on the cusp of rapid obsolescence by a flurry of superior competitors.

I have a hard time buying the idea that groupon is actually worth $5 billion.
Not really a useful counterpoint. No one would argue that Obama's a poor speaker, just that more exposed dialogue these days can make even the most eloquent of speakers seem clumsy. Fortunately TR and Honest Abe didn't have to worry about Politico & co.
Sharp to launch tablet computer on Dec. 10
Not sure if this was said, but add a little text editor like in gmail so one could add links, etc. The main point of what your trying to do is so people can add this text to twitter, facebook, etc. Like a mini published text based website. Great Job!
Derek Sivers - Coming Back to Rails (2010 Railsconf keynote) (audio)
Does Google have the technical skills? Of course- after all, Groupon started out as a mere blog.

That being said, imagine a Google-made version of Groupon. It would be horrible. Google may not get it when it comes to making products similar to this- but at least it seems to know it doesn't. Google isn't in it for the technology. They'd be buying it for the community and the atmosphere- something they can't reproduce.

After all, nobody will care about "Google Coupons", the minimalistic Groupon knockoff with that big blue "Buy now!" Google Checkout button.
How I came to embrace JavaScript, part I
AVS (Address Verification Service) only looks for matching street and zip in the first place. Since you're allowed to send only a street or zip, I assume that just verifying the zip as they're doing avoids paying a higher transaction fee for not doing AVS at all.

Collecting a billing address or not doesn't do much to stem fraud when you're not shipping anything physical. Unless you're going to have your customers sign and mail/fax written authorization, you're going to have a hard time disputing chargebacks regardless.
This is one feature of http://stk8.co

http://stk8.co/Wpbbbc

But stk8.co supports links as well, like:

http://stk8.co/gkbbbc

:)
Ben even posted the comment as a separate blog post. (Also, the Disqus anchor link often doesn't work.)

The 30 Steps to Mastery

http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/11/the-30-steps-to-mastery.html
There are apparently 5.7 million good piano tuners.
Extra Vitamin D and Calcium Aren’t Needed, Report Says
tor just doesn't cut it. I have tried to use or similar services like yourfreedom.net with VPN (german tor) but there is no way to stream even half-way decent video through these... They usually top around 350 kb and you need at least twice that to start to stream well.
Following re google's new china policy got >1k

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800
neat idea, nice spike at it. i could see this filling a certain use case for some folks.
my favorite sr71 anecdote is how it leaks fuel when on the runway because all the joints were all designed to fit loosely until it reached pressure at altitude.
Groupon: great name, great consumer awareness, an existing salesforce hitting on all cycles, a growing database of what works and what doesn't -- but fairly easy to copy the basic formula.

Also notable: some of Google's profits come from unsophisticated operators often overbidding for Google ad placement, the "winner's curse" of auctions. Some of Groupon's profits similarly come from unsophisticated small businesses overpaying for a new kind of promotion, in order to be a featured daily deal. Neither company wants this tendency for overpaying to go too crazy, burning out their customer base. But each likes the way these market dynamics drive even savvy operators towards paying more than half of the 'gains from trade' to the promotion-provider.
I suspect it NASA's press conference will be related to this:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini...

Oxygen and CO2 on Rhea; suggesting an easy route to complex chemistry near gas giants (which are so much easier to find outside our solar system).
What Groupon deal tips after only one acquirer?
Lawsuits in the mobile circle
Scientists find way to reverse aging in mice
Sorry google but you should pass.
This is great. MathJax support would kick ass too.
Interesting idea for the time. God aweful business plan though. I hope that they had a thorough document with much more market reaserch before courting investors.
I wish there was a way to enter MY site and have it regularly take a snapshot weekly, monthly, yearly. That way, a year from now I could have a record of what things looked like and what happened over that year, without having to think about it. I would pay a few bucks for a system that did that. Sort of like a personal internet archive.
Well that's fine, but don't tout that your state is an engine of economic growth when the companies you mention decide to "offshore" major chunks of their operations. Figure out a way to keep them in state, or generate some kind of equivalent growth, maybe even outside silicon valley.
Guidance On New Canadian Law C-28
Recently the Canadian government introduced a new bill titled FISA, the Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act or Bill C-28. While this bill is not a law yet, it is expected to be soon and as marketers we should all
another one? didnt they just released one last week?
'X is dead' is dead.
How would you like to volunteer your time, specifically?
> I would be interested to hear which of California's policies you believe play a significant role in the success of its resident businesses.

Its large subsidies for higher education played a significant role imo, especially during the era (up through the early 1990s or so) when they were larger. The state used to fund the UC and Cal State systems with a larger subsidy than today's (much larger if you account for population growth), and also indirectly supported the state's private universities, by providing very generous scholarships to CA high-school students with good grades, if they chose to attend any in-state university, public or private (the old CalGrants program, which still exists in name, but with much reduced scope).

The "ton of taxpayer money spent on higher education" policy doesn't fully account for the highly qualified employee base and large number of university-research spinoffs and collaborations, but I think it probably accounts for some of it. Interestingly, Texas is another example, despite otherwise being more small-government than California: it imposed an oil-and-gas extraction tax in the early 20th century, with a significant portion of the revenues legally required to go to the state-university trust fund, which in part accounts for the strength of the UT and Texas A&M systems, and the high-tech concentration in Austin.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, adding content is a high priority. So far it's a proof of concept with couple sites. A big part of the app was the backend crawling infrastructure. I want to make it easy to crawl new site. Now new site crawling can be defined in couple hours. Similar pages within a site can be done in minutes, like the subreddits or the digg categories. There's plan to open up the backend to allow anyone to define crawling for any site.

Storage is so far under control since I'm not as ambitious as Way Back Machine to archive the whole internet. It might be a problem once I open up to allow anyone to define crawling.

Good idea for applying the UI to Way Back Machine's data. I'll look into that. Thanks.
> He confirmed that WikiLeaks has damaging, unpublished material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms (aside from the upcoming bank release), and energy companies, just to name a few industries.

It's almost as if Forbes is sending out a big heads up to various Republican power interests to say, "Ok, he's coming after you guys next." Could serve as a call to action for some.
I've seen this blog on HN a few times, and every time my first thought is 'I wish I could think of such a clever name for my blog/business/domain/etc.'. But so far, nada :(.
Hard to believe the company is so young.

Founded only two years ago by Andrew Mason. Built on collective buying technology that he built for a site, The Point, that he started only a year before in 2007.

http://www.groupon.com/about
I love the way the 150 second trial behaves... It makes the task seem effortless. Swinging the arm slowly and deliberately until the double pendulum is above the plane of motion, then quick small motions keep the system straight while longer slower motions swing the now straight system up to equilibrium...

I think it might be possible to do by hand now that I have seen it done like that.
Big journalism today is mostly nestled within the belly of big fat corporations, beholden to maintaining their viewership numbers and worse yet to a bevy of advertising interests. It's no wonder that their fire has largely left. They are the mainstream, they are the establishment. They fear change. It's no wonder that scrappy internet based newcomers (blogs, wikileaks, etc.) are rising up to take on the role they have long since abdicated.
Apple's Free Engraving and Occam's Razor
Sunlight VS Pixel Power
Sunglasses, the coolest thing since sliced bread, are about to get a wild revamp.
The interesting thing seems to be that he is achieving framework-like productivity by using mere libraries. That shows some power.
"Thus, programming advice of the DTSSTCPW variety (i.e. 99% of programming advice) always makes me a bit uneasy. Instead of thinking - shouldn't I just be crankin' out code, putting it online, and blogging about it on LJ?"

Trying to think what LJ is, but drawing a blank. LiveJournal? (even though his blog is on blogspot?) Anyone know?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952077
yay. trees.
navigating google earth reminds me of second life
Photosynthesis using arsenic? Anybody know the biology behind this?
In another 10 years people ought to be wondering what FB stands for.
The coalition's broadband policy?

Tell me how to run home Internet TV in the lounge, computer gaming in the bedroom, web browsing elsewhere in the house, all over a wireless broadband connection shared with every other house in range of the local telephone tower.

The idea that wireless has what it takes for the next 20 years of broadband innovation for every home in Australia is silly.

I am genuinely excited about the idea 1 one gigabit broadband to the home over fibre. The applications of this sort of power arent yet dreamed of, and the person who does the dreaming and executing stands to do very well for themselves.

What sort of person is it that reads Hacker News but is not excited by 1 gigabit fibre to the home?
This is not about the technical aspect at all or about being an early mover. Great companies solve the technical problem and the distribution problem. Groupon's value is in its distribution and its ability to scale that to the moon. Don't think just any company could replicate that.
Jason Kottke looked at the speaker list and thinks it's photosynthesis using arsenic. See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953228
Most of the pain of California's bad policies have not yet been felt. Things are easy when you're spending but they get harder when you have to pay people back. Also rich people and corporations are leaving the state and poor people, mainly Mexican immigrants, are moving in. So along with a completely unsustainable budget, the largest tax contributers are decreasing and the largest tax recipients are increasing.

California cannot survive without some combination of:

-Huge Spending cuts

-Huge Tax increases (which, if overdone, may result in less tax revenue.)

-Federal Gov't bailout.

You can play cause and effect all you want, but basic arithmetic is really all that matters.
Difference between Google and Apple: Steve Jobs would commit seppuku before spending $5 billion on something he could remake, better, in a couple of months with a handful of dedicated engineers and a barn full of even more dedicated marketeers.
Allowing anyone to define the crawling policy and snapshot any site is in the plan. I need to build up the UI for the backend process to crawl and transform the webpages. I'm building the backend tools as I go along. So far it's just a proof of concept with couple sites defined. Once the tools are ready, I'll open the backend up.