skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aside from missing the opportunity to bow a time or six, I think this was close to perfect for execution of an apology (both by Japanese standards and for companies generally). Heartfelt apology, total acceptance of responsibility, comes straight from the top, makes full amends to customers, identifies specific changes made to address problem in the future, closes with thanks to customers.

Edited to add: For extra credit, it might have been worthwhile to apologize to the merchant for failing to prevent a situation which caused their wares to be presented in an unflattering manner.

This probably stands reality on it's head, but what actually happened on one particular day in Tokyo is not maximally relevant to Groupon's Japanese business, and having a reputation for being magnanimous and savvy to how the game is played can only help them in the future. Again, though, I think they did really well.
That's one hell of a way to remember when to ask rather than tell though :)

What I thought was the most interesting bit about your comment is the 'unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning', as a rule I've found that the real experts in a field are usually humble to a fault and approachable (with some exceptions), it's the people with a little bit of knowledge that will do whatever the can to make it seem like they're the experts, as though they've just read one of those 'how to bluff your way in to computers' books.
Agreed, I'm just saying that between noise, safety and simple powering concerns, I think the window for this being superior to current methods is very, very small.
I never said anything about the accuracy of w3schools. And as the person below has commented, the issue is more or less about out dated information.
Am I a bad person for using nohup and stderr/stdout redirect?

Anyway this is a really nice creative alternative.
The top-rated answer (by the submitter I think?) is excellent:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/37316/what-do...
> I've turned down jobs before where I considered the environment hostile (for example, centerfolds on the wall, servers named after playmates - seriously!).

And so they continue to have centerfolds on the wall and have their servers named after playmates.

That would have been a golden opportunity to change the system from the inside.
My favorite line from the exchange:

I also was not able to find Matt Cutts in the Google employee directory.

Clearly the words of a true expert in Search...
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This always annoys me:

Dupx is currently implemented as a simple shell script

So why can't I just download this "simple shell script"?
As far as I can tell, isogenicengine is not published. There's a beta signup, that's about it.
Wonder if this will change now...
The 'early life' segment from the wikipedia article about Benjamin Graham:

"Benjamin Graham was born Benjamin Grossbaum in London, England[1] to Jewish parents.[2] He moved to New York City with his family when he was one year old. After the death of his father and experiencing poverty, he became a good student, graduating from Columbia, as salutatorian of his class, at the age of 20. He received an invitation for employment as an instructor in English, Mathematics, and Philosophy, but took a job on Wall Street eventually starting the Graham-Newman Partnership."
I looked at that original thread, and oh boy is that a lot of text. Obviously someone really wanted to defend their position and thought a lot of text would help make their point.
I would guess that in such a case the largest portion of cost would be bandwidth.
Sorry I missed the discussion!

Just wanted to add a pointer to what I ended up using: https://github.com/sam-mccall/ship

It's lets you create pseudo-threads, you pretend you're calling a sync function, and get a promise back, which you can call methods on (giving more promises) etc.

It needs a rewrite to allow objects in different pseudo-threads to interact - i.e. the threads to cross. Currently it's just a queue of actions to perform which doesn't allow this.
It is not possible to design something that is both optimized to be an in memory DB or on disk DB, there are tradeoffs. So Redis stresses the right tradeoffs to be good in memory. The VM evolution, called diskstore, will provide us a way to work on bigger datasets as well. But probably Redis will continue to be much better in memory compared to an on disk DB with dataset that happens to fit in memory, and on disk DBs will try to be better than Redis+diskstore.

A few operations that Redis supports are specifically designed to work well in memory and can't be made efficient on disk. See for instance sorted sets and all the commands that this data type supports.
[he] took a job as a chalker on Wall Street with Newburger, Henderson and Loeb. Before long, his natural intelligence won out when he began doing financial research for the firm and he became a partner in the firm. He was soon earning over $500,000 a year, a huge sum; not bad for a 25 year old

Fyi, Jews have been prominent in finance since Joseph, at least.
Looking at the other replies, this topic just begs for a reference to the work of Terence McKenna.

Especially to a speech like "The World & It's Double"

Terence McKenna: The World & It's Double - 1/11 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkUkGUY7hsY

It goes into subjects like boundary dissolution, how this is not something that some parties (governments, many religions, etc.) really like.

It also mentions how particular drugs (the ones that make you productive, e.g. caffeine) are the ones that are allowed. Not those which make you snap out of the standard Western materialistic view of the world:

"All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them."

"The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural projects, in the corporate office, whatever it is."

I've once listened to this when I was in a skyscraper, looking at the world below.. seeing all those tiny people and vehicles move and pondering about this is really something that puts things in perspective.

Finally, although I don't use drugs/alcohol/caffeine myself.. I too cannot help wondering why one should not be allowed to experiment with ones own consciousness. Why not allow this in a legal, safe, special environment which watches over things?

Perhaps not all drugs are suitable for this, but let's not forget that drugs like DMT, which as McKenna describes give one 'the ride of a lifetime', are naturally occuring in our own bodies... yet they are one of the most illegal things out there.

Isn't that odd?

#daretoask, #questioneverything ;)
>It's bullshit because the biggest part in the price of a paper book is for printing and distribution.

Irrelevant. Pricing is based on value provided, not cost to create.

>and it doesn't even benefit the authors.

This is indeed an issue, but it is then up to authors to find better representation the way that athletes have so they can get a larger share in the value they create.
Plenty of industries feel overpaid.

They have protective associations that get them lots of pay for a smaller chunk of work.

All the professionals are well paid just for having a protected market: Doctors, Lawyers, Psychologists, Nurses, Actuaries, Accountants, etc. None of the work is particularly challenging - they are paid lots for their professional status and because they have associations that lobby and market the profession as a whole. They have standards bodies and certification boards and so on.

The reason for these things is to increase their pay. Pure and simple.

Then you have the blue collar workers who have banded together to fight for higher wages - this goes for both union and non-union. They are manly men who are unwilling to be shat upon and for that simple reason get paid more. They also get bonus money for doing jobs that are not prestigious.

Being a plumber is hardly challenging by MIT standards but a first year plumber rakes in cash hand over fist and has zero competition with India. Likewise for all construction related fields that are booming - especially in Canada. A first year construction apprentice working in the Canadian oil fields can make $100k in a year if they choose to. This requires no high school diploma.

Meanwhile the effeminate computer science dweebs get manhandled by MBAs into working unpaid overtime - reducing the pay of everyone in IT - not just themselves.
"It depends" or "that's not entirely true"

It various, I know people who do little html and consider it programming. And obviously there are those in charge of huge software developments.
For a second there I thought that google decided to sink Demand Media before the IPO.
Another big difference is that lots of civil engineers are employed in the public sector, which (for various reasons) tends to employ more women than the private sector. The same correlation is seen in EE's, where there's a lot more women in power engineering than in other fields. Unless you can create tons of public sector software engineering jobs (which sounds worse than dreadful to be honest) you're not likely to replicate that.
Anniversaries & Ideologies
Google translation link (somewhat intelligible) for the benefit of people who can't read Japanese: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.gr...
Somehow I hope this will not succeed. Although exciting we may be getting careless about animal extinction because we can 'resurrect' them later.
I think you seriously overestimate the competence of the “professionals” doing the typesetting on ebooks. Most of the ones I've paid for are shockingly awful. This includes ebooks like the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Ender's Game, or more modern titles such as Freakonomics/Superfreakonomics, or even classics like the Count of Monte Cristo or the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, from a variety of sources, including the Kindle store, B&N's Nook store, and random independent ebook vendors like Books On Board and Fictionwise.

I've seen every error you can imagine, from the wrong table graphic being used to pathetic OCR errors or just plain typos. And the cover art, at least on most of the ebooks I've purchased, is nonexistent or extremely unimpressive. As a consumer, I certainly don't feel like ebooks are worth the prices being charged.
It's that "func programming is rocket science"-stigma people nowadays spread. I don't know why they hype functional programming that much (maybe because they could show off the C "hotshots" in their CS 101 course?) but FP is such a basic and simple paradigm that it's not really something to brag about.
>Why aren't we seeing the same pricing evolution with eBooks?

Because no "pricing evolution" ever took place. Pricing works as it always has. We, the buyers have decided we're not willing to pay over $8 for Plants vs. Zombies on the iPad. I still costs $30 or more for the computer. Most things on the iPad will cost less than their computer equivalent because the apps are simply not as powerful (unless it's a really simple app).

You seem to be arguing that it costs less to distribute and that's why it costs less on the iPad. How can that be the case for companies like EA sports who've had to rewrite their sports apps for a completely new platform? It has actually cost them more and they've charged less.

EBooks cost more precisely because they are easier to distribute. For customers. If I buy a book on amazon I suddenly have it everywhere. And I have all my books where ever I go.

Pricing is only confusing when you mistakenly assume price = production cost + distribution cost + 10% markup.
If an ebook deliver more perceived value than a paperback to its target audience, why is it bullshit to charge more for it? As has been pointed out time and time again, charge based on value, not cost.
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Starting those kinds of fights is not the best way for someone to find themselves in a welcoming work environment, and it's not the obligation of every woman to sacrifice her own career and happiness in order to fix unwelcoming companies.
>If I could buy ebooks at 1/10 the price, in an open DRM-free format, I would buy ten times as many books.

So if they would drop their prices to 1/10th you wouldn't spend a penny more but you'd have more books? It's obvious how this is good for you, but how is that an advantage to them? They're trying to make money, not populate the world with books.

Further, you have a finite list of books you want. Even though it's growing it's not growing at the speed of light. If they let you get everything on your list for the 1/10th the price then they soon won't have anything else to sell you. Where are they going to recoup the money they lost buy letting you have 10 times the assets for the same cost?
I fire up Terminal, then stand up, offer my chair to them, say I'll be back later.
Then what you have is a fork of the library. There is no reason you can't distribute forks of the library (to either your own paths or with your own modified names) using the system package manager.

If you are expecting the person taking your patches to install them to the system, however, that's a whole 'nother ball game, and gets back to the original point: as a system administrator, I have no reason to believe your "better" versions of those libraries are going to interoperate with everything else on the system, and I am then going to have to do a bunch of work doing that isolation myself.
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My bad. The video is in English -- watch that and you'll get most of the benefit.

The other Japanese text reads (my rough translation, you get what you pay for):

To our customers who ordered Bird Cafe [n.b. name of advertiser]'s "Kinsei Osechi" [n.b. name of product -- osechi is a a food box delivered at New Years], related parties, and Groupon's fans: we are sorry for having caused you trouble with the Kinsei Osechi Groupon offer. Our CEO Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, explains how Groupon will take the utmost measures to stop similar incidents worldwide in his apology message:

Video goes here.

Not only Groupon Japan but all worldwide Groupon companies will take corrective steps to prevent this sort of occurrence from happening again. The measures include:

+ Strengthening pre-deal investigation of merchants

+ Improving the setting of deal size limits [to prevent overwhelming merchants' ability to deliver]

+ Establishing a dedicated customer support office for purchasers of Groupons

+ Improving training of employees and our internal management systems so that our customers and merchants can trust us sufficiently to do business.

Thank you for using Groupon. We hope to continue earning your trust in the future.

[Transcript of video begins here. You can listen to English.]
Thanks for your suggestion, that should really help. About the second spoken language, it is not that impressive in India. besides the fact that I lost my hearing later, and that too on one side. In India a grasp over three languages is usually the norm, proficiency of course varies. My native language is Bengali, though I picked up its written form fairly late. Mainly because my schooling was spread over a number of states and each has its own language.

Another round of thanks for initiating this nice thread, hope it helps you as much as it helped me.
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Ask HN: Please review my startup: TheSunnyTrail
Hello guys & girls, we are looking for a helping hand from the HN community (especially from people that run web apps that use the SaaS model)

We enable founders / CEOs to easily to track the financial performance of their web apps in order to make better business & product decisions.

Here's how it works: Companies can use our API to send us transactions (signups, payments, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations) occurring in their webapp. Our web interface then allows them to keep track of metrics such as churn, customer lifetime value and others.

We'd love to explore whether this is something that might be helpful to you and hear your feedback.

You can check out the product over here: http://www.thesunnytrail.com
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Thanks. Might have something to do with the project I'm currently working on...
I don't know of any specific ones. I just use Demoinoid mostly.
I don't think that Mr. Kerninghan runs around shouting "I made C! Bow to me, worms!". It's rather that other people make him the icon he is.
Ideological cries for "freedom" aside, the main two things you can't do with an ebook that you can with a physical one are reselling it and loaning it to people. But since you can do a lot of things with an ebook that you can't with a physical book I'd call it at least a wash (for me it's advantage ebook).
Well, to be fair, Al-Jazeera played a somewhat important role (but lesser than mobile phones and self-organization) on Tunisia's movement.

And we can all agree that Al Jazeera is 'media'
Hey, you can't have emergent properties before you have foundation properties. Can't build a building with magical emergent properties if you don't first figure out how to make a bot that can lift the beams.
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God, if I'd had to work in marketing/management I'd stab my eyes out.
Theft generically pushes prices up. Not down.
I doubt this is OK by Japanese standards. Did anyone commit suicide?
Which "SEO companies" aren't sketchy?
Yes, The Kindle can read PDFs. (I recently got a Kindle 3). However it's a second class reading experience. You can't change the font size (you can zoom in/out) etc. It's easy to convert a normal 'text pdf' to an ebook format suitable for Kindle (cf. http://www.technomancy.org/kindle/convert-books-to-kindle-fo...). If it's a PDF of scanned images from a book, then you'll need some OCR stuff.
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Phone interviews bother me too. I am pretty sure I come through a little dimmer because I often ask the question to be repeated. It never occurred to me to prevent a potential misconception by letting the interviewer know that I have difficulty in hearing.
There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example, software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a little bit less about abstract stuff.

Overgeneralize much?

Did you know that women, on average, do BETTER in Calculus than men? I guess it is a good thing for them that there is none of that hard abstract stuff in math!
+1 Impressive site. Clean design sets this site apart as a great example in this nascent niche.

One constructive criticism: I would add some more space around the "Search" functionality. This area is a little cluttered at present (too close to the preview image on the right and the high level process text/images below) and my eye I think you would improve conversions by emphasising this section a little more (since performing a search should be the "call to action" for visitors).
> I tend to include text fields (later visually hidden or obscured with Javascript) with "name" parameters like "email", "url" and "name". Spam bots always fill these in. Your users won't, because the fields are hidden. If the fields are filled in, your submission came from a spambot. Easy!

Fuck every website that does this. It's 2011, we should all be using password managers. If using LastPass makes your site flag me as a robot, I'm not going to use it.

CAPTCHAs are like crypto: Don't roll your own unless you have good reason to and know what you're doing. Just throw in reCaptcha, or Mollom, or (preferably) some crowd-sourced solution that leverages your userbase (the best way that will scale, imo).
Market Segmentation. You can charge a really cheap price for the unedited one. It'll be the bargin basement cheap version. People who wouldn't buy the €10 one will buy a €2 one. People who can afford €10 will buy a fancy edited one and feel superior.
Don't lie about what you earn now, state what you are expecting if you're hired.

I've neve been asked the question about my current salary (expect for that one phone call from a recruiter in the UK).
If you bundle one gem with five different apps (as could easily happen with, say, rack), then any security updates to that gem mean that five distro security updates have to get pushed out. That's a lot more work than it needs to be.

As far as calls to the "gem" method go, I have in mind a distro-specific replacement which would check that the right system package is installed instead of the right gem. That would, I think, be handy for packagers.

Having rubygems the library being part of ruby is not something I can see a problem with. Having the gem command available is a problem because it overlaps so much with functionality which should be provided by the distro. That being said, ~/.gem is useful; maybe it should only be neutered for root/sudo.
Settling for mediocrity - why releasing software is all about compromises
Jurassic Park in 2015... yesss! This is exciting, I'll be one of the first to buy a ticket when these end up in zoos and theme parks.

Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming.
It was indeed big news in europe. but i have to add, that none of the coverage that i've seen, provided what i wanted to see in it: an urge to support the protesters. It didn't mention if these protesters were 'the good ones' at all. and i didn't see any european representative supporting them, at least none in germany. we use this country as our own florida for generations, but don't seem to care that their generations have to live in some sort of soft-lybia.
Interesting article. Did not expect a negative experience for the author in a post-secondary institution.

On her point about being at a disadvantage compared to the other students since she had low experience with computer science (having only taken classes in high school). In my point of view, I think she had sufficient exposure to compsci. I didn't get into computer science, or even know of its existence, until my 2nd year in university.

I definitely do think personality has an effect on the experience. The author of the article, I think, took comments and retorts too seriously or negatively. In addition, I think she uses her gender as a weakness but rather it has no effect on her ability at all. Though at least she recognized the asshole soon after his outburst.

In my experience, I don't see a decline of females in computer science, rather it is a increase. I have passed by the portraits of graduated students in my hallways and definitely there are way more females than in the previous years. Matter of fact, it was almost a 1:5 ratio of females:males (may not be super accurate).
If anyone's still interested my blog-in-reply is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111686
Chill, buddy. If you simplified your original statement to the point where it is no longer true, responses to it that are off base can hardly be surprising. Say what you mean, mean what you say.