skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting Schooled in User Experience
Great article. In a startup environment, you should always see people taking responsibility whenever there is a crisis. They inspire the people around them to come up with solutions for the pressing issues.

If you see someone who doesn't take responsibility and is always trying to run from it, or is always whining and never a part of the solution. Fire Them. Those who take responsibilities and are atleast willing to be part of the solution have the DNA to be in the startup culture.
KDE have several desktop apps for language training - http://edu.kde.org/applications/language - including a couple of flash-card based memorisation apps.

KDE can now be installed on MS Windows in addition to the usual 'nix installs.
UBS Whistleblower Finds Himself in Federal Prison
Groupon may be the strongest brand, best venture backing, and most revenue compared to all the clones, but it certainly could become worthless practically overnight. Easily replicable as seen by many others, staying power is questionable as mentioned.

I'd have trouble sleeping at night if I were Andrew Mason. Especially hearing the company that I turned down 6 bil from was joining the market. Post ipo his wealth will pretty much always be tied to groupons success.
They "won" EUR50,000 investment for an 8-10% steak in their company, and will participate in the Seedcamp US trip, and Seedcamp week.

Those that "lost" are the 17 other startups that participated in the Seedcamp event, but didn't get investment.
Sorry, but this is inaccurate. The IFPI report says Spotify is the second largest source of DIGITAL revenue. (Itunes is number 1.) Big difference. Digital revenue is about 20% of total revenue for European labels.
> What about committing code the first day you're on the job?

Wow, talk about another test that would be super successful. I'm not sure I want to work at any place where any first-dayer is made to break the build in the name of shared ownership by checking in code to a codebase he couldn't have possibly had enough time to understand to a necessary level. I suppose he will be fixing it later that evening, in the name of shared upkeep.

Responsibility and desire to belong will naturally drive the new guy (it's not like it'd be a woman, is it?) to commit something small, simple, and in the big picture totally irrelevant. As with all of these tests, what you actually get is a token activity that will tell you nothing useful and that will fail to screen out anyone who doesn't want to be screened out, company fit or otherwise.

The military is the only setting in which these tests will be useful, because there being masculine and doing whatever the boss says the company needs doing with no questions asked is the entirety of the job description.
> I’m not convinced Groupon has staying power. Sure, it’s uber-popular but how much longer will consumers be captivated by the flurry of deep-discount offers hitting their inboxes?

Ah yes, because everyone knows consumers hate saving money, this is why coupons have never taken off in the past. Wait a minute. In 2009 hundreds of billions of actual coupons were used.

Of all the companies people cite for a bubble, you choose the one making money hand over fist? Seriously?

I think the most ridiculous statement people say is that Groupon isn't defensible, guys, Groupon has thousands of people calling companies every day - guys in a garage eating pizza can't exactly do this. (also, if you're saving people money, people have a tendency to remember your brand)
ChromeDeck is pretty great. It's an HTML5 TweetDeck app in the Chrome Web Store that feels almost native. Multicolumn layout for your lists, inline video / photos, and desktop notifications with sound.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbdpomandigafcibbm...
XSS Awareness: How a Yfrog vulnerability could be used to post to Twitter
To me, that doesn't sound like something consumers are going to abandon very quickly.

No, but it requires retailers to participate. When the prevailing trend seems to be that retailers lose their ass on the deal, and then don't win over enough new long-term customers to justify the cost, the model is going to need some refinement over time.
I think no one can predict that but the market. No company is going to give you 50% discount if they were selling with good numbers.

I have few domains that I'm planning to transfer to namecheap. Surprisingly, yesterday I found out that they have an around 50% coupon for domain transfer. I quickly went and transfered the domains, I was planning to transfer them two months later.

So it's a deal. The company needs money now. The buyer wants to benefit. Whenever you have these two parties the transaction happen be it groupon or not.
Lizzy Bennett: We still make stuff in San Francisco
"Pretty please, buy my book".
SEC to wean markets off credit ratings
I reread my comment after it had been downvoted and realized I was probably not clear at all. I don't care about the downvoting, but I wanted to clear it up so no one reading it felt persecuted or unappreciated.

When I said .1 cents I actually meant a small amount but not a trivial amount per paycheck multiplied by the tax paying population. So around 7 million per year. Not sure if that's significant enough, but it was just a figure off the top of my head meant to demonstrate that by paying a small amount individually we could help the issue.

Anyways, I've over-explained it now... but I felt like a douche when I checked my threads this morning.
Joe Medved: Reviewing competitive VC deals
weak analysis.

Here's why Groupon works: data compression. A groupon is a signal compressing all of the economic data in an entire city into a single very best offer, at a rate of one per day. Consumers are overloaded with information and seek simplification, the value derived is a function of the ratio of compression.

Here's how Groupon can fail: they start offering more than one coupon per day. Anything that increases the perceived noise/signal ratio in crowded inboxes.
Because there isn't really anyone to defect to in Finland?

Just to get a sense for the dominance of Nokia in the Finish economy – Nokia is a full quarter of Finland's GDP.
I googled a bit, but can't find any numbers any more. I thought I remembered a few 'studies' (I'm using this very lightly, this included self-reported sales numbers from manufacturers and blog posts from industry watchers with estimates) mentioned last fall. All I can find now is how many more average purchases iPhone users make (compared to Android), but that doesn't say anything about the shape of the curve of course - if iPhone users are overall equally likely to buy apps, and only 10% of the most hardcore Android users buy the same amount, the average for Android is down, but with a lot of users not buying (this is my assertion, like I said I can't back this up with credible numbers).

Anyway, my main point is that 'twitter' is something most users have only heard from on TV and don't even know what it is. For a regular user, a phone works when you can make phone calls with it, send text messages and set reminders/use it as an (alarm) clock. Then there are fancy features like using it for navigation (which is something they're already familiar with from standalone devices), contact/full agenda sync, and password management; and reading news sites; and post on facebook when they're so bored out of their mind that they really don't know what else to do.

And then there's the uber-advanced, only-nerds-do-this, full phone-centered lifestyle, where as much as possible is automated through phone apps. This is where twitter-client downloading people fall into - web nerds, turtle-neck wearing marketing people and art students. Of course in absolute numbers this is still a sizeable market, but it's only a fraction of the overall 'mobile phone' customer base. It will become more main stream in time, but not now...

How many OS projects are really used? A couple of hundred users, a couple of thousands for popular custom android roms? That's still marginal.
50% of the people I know that I know like their Windows phones do work at Microsoft. Even if it was 100%, this still invalidates your original claim.
> No one has patents on C or C++ AFAIK...

Oracle is not complaining Google is implementing Java in Dalvik. Oracle is complaining they are implementing things too similar to stuff Oracle has acquired patents about.

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/oraclegoogle-the-patents-and-...
I'm surprised no one commented on the fact that a Groupon is not a tech company.

Sure, they USE technology, but not nearly as much as they use people. They have massive sales and customer facing teams that make all of the deals for the coupons. Its not like a social network of business owners who create and swap coupons or something.

Groupon is in the deal business, the coupon business. Their name and brand isn't riding off any one large technology push. Calling Groupon a tech company is a stretch (even if thats how they began), and saying its going to "burst Tech" is even more knee-jerk.
> In Belgium, tied sales are illegal (or were mostly illegal until very recently), and subsidized phones linked to contracts are considered tied. Which makes them illegal in Belgium.

Tied sales ('koppelverkoop') have been declared legal by minister Q since about end of 2009 (1), due to Belgian law conflicting with European law. I'm not sure if the revised Belgian law has gone through parliament already, but Euro law takes precedence anyway.

(1) http://www.quickonomie.be/nl/persberichten/29oktober2009-kop...
This hardly a "danger" though. I realize it's fashionable around here to create brilliant new ideas for startups, but the overwhelming majority of successful companies are selling "products that people know they want to buy."

One of the most useful pieces of knowledge I got from a longtime entrepreneur was "don't build anything until you have an order for at least one." A lot of important details emerge from that statement once you analyze it.
On a related note: it took 8 weeks of struggle coding daily to convert to C++. I would go home each day sweating and exhausted. At the end, a switch turned and the code would come out with much less effort.

Yeah, yeah, your favorite language is much easier than C++, I'm sure. But maybe it took something similar to get 'fluent'?
You can get away with following oral(blog)-history scaling lore at that low end, but before you scale much further the most important thing by far is to be more metrics and measurement oriented. The most basic one to start with is average http response time and http requests per second.

For instance, say your slicehost returned a page at an average of 200ms, but only below 10 req/second, over that it started to bottleneck somewhere and responses would shoot up to 500+ms. Then your question is "how to I handle 100 http requests per second while keeping the average at or below 200ms".

Eventually you'll need to step up to full-browser-render (gomez, keynote, browsermob, homegrown-selenium) time, appdex or 95th% based numbers instead of simple averages, and backend components like mysql req/s and service time.

The point is, this is engineering, use numbers.
And the nice thing is it picks up your local files (and even syncs them to your mobile just like the other songs!)

It solves the organisation problem very neatly. Piracy will find it hard to compete.
While readability is impressive, the zoom slider could use a slight tweak. It's far too easy to zoom out to the maximum setting when you meant to go one level up.
I like to read Harry Potter in various languages - works great for learning to read well.

Also, I created a website where you can practice vocabulary and verb conjugations: http://inglua.com
Actually, you don't even need to switch users to listen to your girlfriends music. The social layer they've integrated via Facebook makes it possible for you to listen to her playlists as well, from your account ;) #win
I could go out and raise $10M and do a better job at doing what Nokia wants to become, than Nokia itself. True story.

That's quite a claim.
So THAT's why they have 'Buy' buttons on the songs.
25 Almost Identical Logos + Bonus
I really don't know if it's copying or inspiration but he talk about a huge company logo and this really must be unique. Let's talk about Google and Goojje for example. I think who's behind Goojee it's a very brave person.
I love my Thinkpad. Can't do without its trackpoint (I hear more laptops have them now). It is extremely strong. I dropped my laptop from 6-7 ft and nothing happened. It has a protection layer behind the screen.
There is always the rest of EU.
> with JS navigation, I could scan headlines in the sidebar while the article was loading, something I would not be able to do while a 'traditional' page was rendering.

...Wha? You can make traditional pages that display progressively just fine. In fact that's the default mode of operation for HTML and was supported as far back as Netscape 1.0. What's it with people, why do they keep forgetting about sensible architectural decisions just because they were made long ago? Or am I just getting old?
Log/linear quantizations in DTrace
However, this is the basic rationale between "loss leaders" and "sale prices" that have been common in consumer-targeted sales for decades (or longer). I see no reason to expect this will change.

Rather, I see Groupon's primary risk is the simple fact that there will be more and more competition, and this will allow both consumers and retailers more choice, cutting into Groupon's phenomenal margins.
FlushTracker: Ever Wonder Where Yours Goes?
>If the copyright owner doesn't allow anyone else to retain a copy, and they delete all their copies, then how will the work ever pass in to the public domain?

Copyright is a contract between the state (the people) and you. You get protection from unlicensed copying of your works in exchange for release to the PD - if you don't disseminate your works then the public have no right to force them to be released into the PD.

There is possibly a loose end here but generally one can retain a copy for your own personal use (like keeping newspaper clippings) but you can't put this (or any substantial part of it) in a publicly accessible place.
I'm a CompE and I interview countless CS and CompE's for entry-level programming jobs and they consistently fail horribly at business-logic decisions. More than 50% of the time, people with 3.5+/4 undergrad and 3.5+/4 masters can barely write a function and discuss the design decisions (e.g., recursive vs. iterative, caching) behind problems as simple as returning the Nth number from the fibonacci sequence.

I've seen over and over again that knowing the physics (well enough to get A's in class) behind a computer and how it stores integers is NOT enough information to deduce good patterns and practices.
Two fluently (Spanish & English)
Two broken (Mandarin & Brazilian Portuguese)

Question: What are you called if you speak 3 languages?
A: Trilingual
Two ? A: Bilingual
One ? A: American ! :)

Sorry.. could not help my self..
4) Do Not turn your computer to a foreign language.

I don't agree entirely. I recommend changing one of your computers to the foreign language.
They were in similar situation in 90s when they decided to sell their PC, TV, and cable divisions etc. and bet everything on mobile.
I got worked up because your comments are just like any of the other millions of Computer-Scientists-don't-know-anything-about-anything-and-are-only-in-it-for-the-money comments you see everywhere. You could have spent two minutes googling looking at curriculums.

As a Swede, I could have included more EE courses in my CS masters degree than you have in your engineering degree, had I wanted to.
Low Cost Video Chat Robot
no one can deny what groupon has accomplished to date. you have to give them props.

as is, they have first-mover advantage (at least in terms of the group discount space taking off). i know i completely abandoned groupon in favor of scoutmob, which requires no money down.

i wrote a post similar to mark's why i believe groupon can't keep this up: http://adamwexler.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/groupon-is-about-...

interesting thing to note....although the general consensus is groupon passed on google, i've heard from a reputable source that it was the other way around, and google backed out of the deal.
The problem is that Groupon's customers aren't actually the people buying coupons, it's the businesses selling coupons, and we've heard plenty of horror stories from that side of the coin. Whether that aspect is enough to dig Groupon's grave is an open question, but let's at least make sure we're approaching the question from the appropriate angle.
Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo
I get the impression that he didn't believe this to be the case, and as he actually knows a lot more about the organization and position from having been shown the opportunity, I guess I just trust his judgment that the approach is broken from the get-go.
It's odd to use the word "baseline" when the power output hits zero two times a day.
While this seems a strange way to encourage whistleblowers to come forward, for perspective -

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20tax.html

Mr. Birkenfeld pleaded guilty to helping Mr. Olenicoff evade $7.2 million in taxes on $200 million in hidden offshore assets. Mr. Birkenfeld will be sentenced in August. Mr. Olenicoff pleaded guilty last year to filing a false 2002 tax return.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Birkenfeld

"With regard to whistleblowers: those who seek to be treated as true whistleblowers need to know they must come in early and give complete and truthful disclosures.... Mr. Birkenfeld did not come in and give complete and truthful disclosures. Therefore, he is not entitled to whistleblower status."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

Zloch, who didn’t explain his reasoning, could have given Birkenfeld a maximum five-year term. Prosecutors had noted that Birkenfeld didn’t initially reveal his role in the scheme when he first came forward as a whistleblower.
At least I didn't say I could do it in a weekend.
You offend anyone with a brain when you write blatantly wrong assumptions about how only the EE master race learn about how integers are represented.

Just where did you get the idea that an Elecrit Engineer knows more about the types in MySQL than a CS graduate does? You're also the one who brought up the whole education thing, as if the morons who programmed these silly systems that store telephone numbers as integers have any education.
If that is right - and it's totally possible - isn't this a fundamental flaw with the business model for all competitors too?
I'm a software engineer, have nothing to do with Sony or Battleship, and I don't understand it either.

Kevin Butler

P.S. And I'm non-fiction. Really.
4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained
Sure, but if you're asking, "Why wouldn't they leave?" for a lot of folks, "I'd get to work on more interesting projects" doesn't trump, "I'd have to move my family to a different country."
Maybe so. In my comment I noted that retailer issues are a far better criticism of Groupon... The OPs analysis is focused far more on consumer issues, which I think is an inaccurate view of what's going on.
“4) Do Not turn your computer to a foreign language. This will cripple your productivity. I am forced to work in German on a Windows box now and it is really awful and frustrating. Not recommended at all. Not one bit.”

That’s interesting. I never thought about it but it makes a lot of sense. The problem with software is that you often need to know the exact translation, especially when you are looking for something in a menu. You might know a correct translation but it won’t help you if that’s not the particular translation the translator picked. The weird vocabulary software often uses only amplifies the problem.

That’s why switching from English Photoshop to German Photoshop (my native language is German) was so hard for me.
I have scaled many systems in the past and the easy answer is: Know what you're doing or hire someone who does.

There is no blanket answer because applications and workloads differ. E.g. MongoDB has a number of documented issues under high load (esp. high write load), in some scenarios they can be worked around with reasonable trade-offs, in some they can't and Mongo needs to be replaced.

If there's one general thing to say about scaling then that you scale applications, not stacks. The stack will usually change in the process.
I think the purpose of these kinds of litmus tests (to find people who are willing to get the job done, even if it looks stupid, boring, or detestable) is more important than filtering for independent thinkers.

Quite frankly, a good manager would be able to determine whether someone's a brownnoser or an independent thinker through other means. Heck, just talking with people will be sufficient for managers who are experienced and talented. But a litmus test like this reveals a lot about the nature of a person that can't come out in a conversation. You see them talk the talk, now see them walk the walk; not in terms of their professional skills, but in terms of their human nature/personality/potential for leadership.

Because the thing is, this kind of litmus test has one other very positive goal. See how someone responds to stupid orders. It's a huge sign for how well they'd be able to handle conflict and politics, which exist in any organization, even startups. It's the unfortunate nature of the beast, but good conflict management also does much to foster amazing outcomes, productivity, and creativity.

You want that kind of independent thinker over a guy who's a prima donna, even if he is an undisputed talent. To think that litmus tests cause organizations to hire only brownnosers would say more about the quality of the managers than litmus tests themselves.

Don't hate the litmus test, hate the managers who don't have higher purposes. We shouldn't be petty about that kind of stuff, it says a lot about our ability (or lack thereof) to handle human interaction well.
Why can't we make Internet available to everyone in countries with censorship? 
During the cold war there were several western broadcasters that were funded to broadcast on the territory of the Soviet Union (see [1]) . This had a big influence on the country's people's minds. Everyone was able to listen to the point of view of opposition using a simple standard radio receiver.

Nowdays WiMAX-type networks may be deployed to countries like North Korea, Iran or Egypt (and other oppressive countries) with similar technologies. Laptops or simple cellphones that are already widespread in the country may be used to access the network. People can start criticizing their government and coordinate their efforts for change.

Just a general thought that doesn't lead anywhere. But I thought it is worth it to publish it somewhere.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty#Radio_Free_Europe
That's what (very big) capacitors are for. :-)
> There's nothing wrong with me proving my initial theory (and falsifying fabjan's hasty "you're wrong" post) that C.S. majors don't know as much about the inner workings of computers as C.E. majors.

Your initial comment was about the representation of integers, not all the inner workings of a computer. Or course I don't know all the details.

Computer Scientists are Formula One drivers, Electrical Engineers are the guys who change tires and fills the tank up in 4 seconds, which is awesome. I only speak the truth.
That can be used to justify funding for the Laser Broom.