skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the only company loyalty they have is to Groupon themselves.

And Living Social, and Crowd Cut, and DealPulp, and ValPak, and Eversave, and Mamapedia, etc. The people who you describe don't have any exclusive loyalty to Groupon; it's just another one of the dozen emails they get every morning with a possible deal.

The main advantage that Groupon has over these competitors is that "Groupon" has come to be genericized as a term for a group-buying deal. My wife never says, "Let's use that DealPulp I got last week." She says "I have a Groupon for 50% off, so let's go to Santorini for supper," even if it was a Living Social or Crowd Cut deal.
His "Opinion 37: Guess What? Programming is Even More Fun Than Proving, and, More Importantly It Gives As Much, If Not More, Insight and Understanding" is also very interesting:
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion37.html

Fun fact: Doron is known for crediting his computer "Shalosh B. Ekhad" as a co-author.
Of those, only the dumbbell presses are even an alternative to the bench press.

Dumbbell presses are fine. But bench presses are better, and if you do them, you don't need to do dumbbell presses (but do, if you like them, I do too, as a complimentary exercise).

Injuries are nothing to scoff at of course, and you should always make sure to not put on more weight than you can safely manage. Regardless of exercise method.
"I've found the people who consistently opposed time tracking were often the people who weren't using time efficiently, and therein lies some of the friction."

This is actually a big part of the frustration. I feel inefficient. But I feel that I'm inefficient because I'm interrupted a lot, my priorities are shifted around on me, etc. None of this is reflected there. Even with scheduled and impromptu meetings dutifully tracked, when I look at the bare numbers, all I see is "took three days to do something which should have been an afternoon."
Making Dreaded Performance Evaluations Less Dreadful
Looks like pressing ESC invokes the puzzle.
would like to try this on my android. could you make it work with a touch interface?
A good friend of mine made the same transition (vegetarian to paleo) and says the same: it changed his life.
Any suggestion for Indians who using Paypal
Paypal had changed user agreement for its Indian users which effects from 1 March 2011, There are too many restriction to use it.
Bedside Cancer Detector
When Programmers Need Marketers
My mom and I used to take turns reading the code listings from magazines like Compute! and RUN to each other and typing them in. It took forever. I definitely find it harder to do that with punctuation heavy languages these days (not that I'm typing much code in from magazines anymore).
I tend to find them a lot safer. The weight used is a lot less and is much more forgiving of improper back posture. With that said, for beginners, I do think that the Power Clean is more dangerous. More places to make a mistake. But for an ahlete with strength training background, deadlift is more dangerous, I think largely due to the weight. I've seen too many people with what looked like perfect form hurt their back.
Miami school's turnaround wins Obama's attention
Hiring other people to do the actual work while you just do sales and negotiation isn't that impressive.
Analyzing CharlieSheen Twitter Followers
This is hilarious! If patent enforcement is an illegal anticompetitive action, then the patent system itself is a contradiction.
This is specific to FOSS project right? So "some Devs are clever; some devs are stupid" is more correct.

Joking aside, the (user) devs should provide as many information as possible per question since back-and-forth communication cause friction which resulted in their problem got resolved slower.

Also the (user) devs should self-reflect, isn't it annoying to receive bug report without adequate information?
Bots can take javascript into account too, if they want to.
Oh, looks like the title should say "ACM ICPC". "For ACM" was very confusing to parse.
As far as I'm aware, the hedonic treadmill is a culture-bound theory. Has anyone actually done serious research about it outside of the 'developed' world? Also, by my understanding, it doesn't state that long-term lifestyle changes won't make you happier, just that our happiness levels stabilize quickly after sudden changes.

Genetics may be one factor, but relative differences in wealth is another huge factor that I know has been observed extensively outside of dominant western culture. In HG societies, there are almost no differences in wealth. Everyone considers themselves pretty well-off because there are very few things (or experiences) in their world that they could want but not have.

And even by the objective standard, a HG is better off than someone in the industrial world who has no job, family, home, or love prospects. An average HG has meaningful work, a large and close family, a mate, and considers their entire territory to be their family's "home". It isn't a miserable or unfulfilling life at all. The only way you could come to the conclusion that you're still better off is if you held really stereotypical and inaccurate views of how HGs live. Which leads like things like groups of us deciding that we have a moral obligation to nose in on what few HG societies still exist and bestow the gifts of technology and capitalism on them, so that they can live in slums for the rest of their lives and the lives of most of their descendants. Which doesn't exactly make them happy, because they go from being the richest people in their society to the very bottom of the ladder in ours.

I'm not going to live my life maximizing my standard of living because money and wealth aren't the same thing. Call it fulfillment instead of happiness if it makes you feel better, but having the biggest pile of money isn't the way to get there.
Awesome work!! Great set of libraries for competitions...
Uh, no. Don't even think about getting into a "you don't do this" argument with me, because I have a list of exactly where most my spending goes, and I spent a year living in the desert on sustainable goods, don't own a smart phone, have bought everything I own at Goodwill, don't own a car, and work at Kiva.

I know that might blow away your preconceptions, but think twice before harping on people that you don't know anything about. You are not a special piece of sunshine. The difference is I'm not going around like you trying to pretend like I am better than someone else, rather explaining the objective facts of the situation.
A work of genius. Final proof that Apple is doomed. The drunken flamingo is wild!
Groupon is primarily good for discovery, but it's up to merchants to capitalize on referrals from their Groupon customers. It works particularly well for small operators who need to put a quirky business on a map.

For example, a friend who lives in San Francisco bought a Segway tour of the city, which she would never on earth do had she not seen it on Groupon. She then asked 50 people to join her tour, and then plastered the photos all over Facebook. A lot of people now know these tours exist, and next time we have friends visiting from out of town, we'll be asking her about it. If the Segway tour operator had offered her a promo for referrals, all the more reason for us to remember the tours and book, preferably via her referral link.

I suspect the effect is similar to getting your startup covered in Techcrunch. Suddenly you get tons of pageviews and signups, but it's up to the startup to keep people coming back.
This Man Is Putting Millions In Startups' Pockets -- And Scaring VCs To Death
It makes some great points. Do you see Facebook Comments as changing the equation?
It's a shame their banner looks like the sort of thing you click and have malware installed.
Chocolate Diamond Rings
Founder Conference and LetsLunch bring the best entrepreneurs on-stage
Independent invention is definitely not a defense in a patent infringement suit: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=903521

That's certainly consistent with the current, US Constitution basis for patents, to encourage general progress by giving a limited monopoly to an inventor.

It's not consistent with any kind of "ownership basis" for patents, which gives someone a monopoly on an idea because of the exceptional, very special nature of the invention. If we grant ownership of an idea to someone based on the incredibleness of their invention, then surely an independent inventor deserves the same, or maybe even more, privilege on the idea.

Patent cases don't consider whether the alleged infringer "stole"/copied the idea, or thought of it independently. The one study that has been done on this appears to support independent invention in almost all cases: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1270160
I was thinking the same thing. So far this tactic has not worked well in the cases where it has been tried, the last gasp of a desperate autocrat.

On the other hand, banning the media has worked well in the past, such as when China ordered the media out of Tiananmen before getting serious at the end. The problem is that nowadays with cellphones and twitter, banning the media accomplishes nothing because that merely deputizes the entire populace to become journalists. At Tiananmen no one could post to the internet from their cell phone. Things have changed since then. Now the only way to stop the media is to shut down the internet, cell phones, and land lines that might contact fax machines. But this leaves the autocrat with no reliable feedback about what is going on on the ground, while people manage to communicate news reports via satellite phone, ham radio, pigeons, across the border local wifi, and who knows what else.

A big question is what will governments do in response to this loss of control, something they can not stand? Something like the great firewall of china is one solution - leave the internet running but have the ability to monitor 100% of net traffic in real time and block prohibited communication instantly. In the US there is an approach of monitoring traffic for keywords (but no blocking) combined with psyops such as persona management and media control in order to get the sheep to go in the direction the herder wants them to go.
Nice concept - not only as a bit of fun, but as visual feedback as to what types of photos your followers prefer to see from you.
185 million tablets sold by end of 2014, Android to dominate long-term
At least to me, it seems that a US agency putting Baidu but not Google on the list for linking to sites with pirated material smacks of protectionism -- or good lobbying by Google.
MPEG LA exists to extract patent royalties. By patent terms they are a 'legitimate' monopoly as the patent system was created to allow an inventor a temporary monopoly over their technology (20 yrs) on the condition that it passes to the public domain after that.

Given the early MPEG patents are in the mid - 90s they will begin to start expiring in 2015. Once we reach 2021 there will be a dozen free codecs with source code on the market.

In the meantime, MPEG LA does what it can to maximize its revenues.
I suspect it's not quite as easy as that, but you still have a very good point. I wonder why they haven't pursued this path actually - It would be a very Microsoft-ish solution.
Nice You rock Erin Catto.
Well, that claim is completely disingenuous. In reality MPEG-LA oversees licensing for a set of known codecs, the most prominent being H.264. When a somewhat-viable competitor comes to town they just claim they own the competitor and therefore don't even need to compete. Behind the "we're impartial" facade what they're really saying is, "you're going to have to pay us anyway, so why not just use H.264 instead?"

(By the way, I voted you up, I think you summarize their position better than I did.)
IE market share in general is higher in East Asia, for a few reasons:

1) In the case of S. Korea, until recently ActiveX was
required to do any internet banking (required by law,
iirc).
2) Trident is the only major rendering engine that
supports vertical text. This is not a big deal for
Western users, but might be for East Asia.

I can't speak to the relative market share of IE6 inside the IE slice of the usage pie, though....
I completely agree about the Oly lifts. There isn't a bad exercise, just bad form.
It's interesting to hear you say that, but slightly depressing that it's four oblongs of leather coated sponge in a right-angle wireframe holder, designed in 1928 and selling for a thousand dollars.

It should be comfortable, and it should be more like $200 and out of copyright by now.

Where's the innovation in furniture that would make that chair look like technology from 1928?
Cool stuff. Are you doing any face detection or do you just pick two random Instagram pics?
That's quite a misapplication of micro theory. The supply-demand diagram doesn't apply (very well) in cases without complete information, for instance. For example, there are many customers who aren't even aware of the businesses being advertised. That's the premise of Groupon--not to get existing customers to come back more, but to get new customers who didn't even know about the businesses.

I'm not saying that this is effective--the only way to know for sure is through testing, which I'm sure Groupon can do, but I'm bothered by the author's manipulation of micro theory.
Eight Things Stand-Up Comedy Teaches Us About Innovation
But probably they aren't really 100% sure their patents will hold up against the scale of legal challenge that could be brought down by Google. Of course, they have 1700 of them so they could keep the legal trouble going indefinitely.

It would certainly be easier for them if the Google and the world continued to just cut them checks for ancient technology. But it will never be to their advantage to admit the extent to which they are bluffing and they probably don't even know themselves.

Video has been digitized and compressed for how many decades now?

Weren't patents supposed to expire at some point?
Hiring for DevOps and Biz Dev at Cloudant (YC S08)
I've been working on a time tracking application for small businesses (think more blue collar than white collar). Would enjoy connecting... vladik dot rikhter at gmail
The MPEG-LA doesn't charge royalties to it's members. The members also all hold patents - it's just an agreement not to sue each other.

They do charge royalties to anyone not in the association - those royalties can of course be >100%.

In the old days we used to call this a cartel - but that's illegal.
Android Market Malware Has Users Begging Google To Remotely Disable Bad Apps
Anybody care to explain the odd comment ring happening here?
It sounds to me like they're reallocating engineering resources: "For Bing, this means we can focus our development resources on delivering even more unique and valuable features for customers. In essence, this lets us do more for our customers as we continue to invest in next-generation travel experiences."
I'm not happy about that "in a printed publication" bit, though.
The author did the Google Go implementation for GCC, so yes he did, and you can see why he'd be concerned with running lots and lots of threads.
x = File.read('puzle.txt')
y = x.split(/ \w /)
module Enumerable
def dups
inject({}) {|h,v| h[v]=h[v].to_i+1; h}.reject{|k,v| v==1}.keys
end
end
d = y.dups
require 'mathn'
dp = []
d.each {|z| z = z.to_i; dp << z if z.prime?}
dp
Show HN: FaceMash for Dribbble Shots (my first Sinatra app)
I'm working on a project, having taught myself programming over the years, in PHP and Javascript/HTML5. I'm finding my biggest problem isn't the actual coding, but program architecture. How do I build something that isn't just functional for my own needs, but that others can use and understand.

I've started fresh 5 or 6 times now, and I'm definitely getting closer to "right" but it's still a battle. I think part of my struggle lies in trying to get used to the asynchronous aspect of AJAX. It definitely requires a different approach to handling data and presenting it to the user.

I'm thinking I may need to find someone else to take my prototype code and turn it into something more structured and friendly, while I focus on the business side of it. Any suggestions from you or others about basic application structures would be much obliged.
Just added that. Thanks Jeff
And I've never spoken with a Libyan, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan or Belorussian. I'm also not chastising someone else for dealing with any of those countries. In fact, I'm saying the opposite.

Even if I view another country in a negative light I don't see a way I can rationalize telling bit.ly they've made a bad decision, or Boeing they made a mistake with the Dreamliner, or my neighbor he's wrong for buying fuel from a Citgo station.

Throwaway comments about taking a moral high ground are just that. And as bit.ly has not gone down, I don't see how there is a practical issue either.
Sense of urgency - Rank them by expiry date. Maybe even make deals that are expiring in <12 hours "pop"
Currently US patents give priority to the first to invent. So, if you invented a widget and spent six months perfecting that when your next door neighbor filed a patent one day after he "invented" it, your ability to prove you were first to invent (through evidence like your research notebooks, etc.), the USPTO could refuse or invalidate your neighbor's patent and award you the patent.
That goes away with first to file, which means that the people with the deepest pockets who can afford to file patent applications quickly will wind up winning the race. Most of the rest of the world uses first-to-file.
It has a keypress event tied to it, but it didn't trigger for me. I had to manually invoke $('the_puzzle').show().
Yeah really.

This looks to me like the patent system operating as designed.

I guess if you're Google you can get the government to make an exception for you in the interest of fairness.

But it's cold legalistic capitalism for the rest of us.
Printing from browsers in general is a mess. Is there a printable version of the page? Is there a CSS stylesheet that changes the appearance for print? Do you use Ctrl-P, or is there some little "click here to print" button you have to find on the page to not have everything be messed up?

I didn't realize how complicated this was until I tried to explain it to my grandparents.
It would be great if they start the initiatives to take IE7 IE8 and IE9 off the world and scrap any plans to have IE10.

Hopefully Google Chrome and Firefox will kill IE10 in the womb itself.
I have a back injury from weightlifting in high school, so I view deads (and the entire "olympic lifts for desk jockeys" meme) with suspicion. However, I think people mainly get in trouble because they try to do too much weight, too soon.
I understand the tradeoffs between Windows and Linux and choosing one or the other for a particular task, buy why run Ubuntu Server on one machine and CentOS on others? Are the tools that Linux specific that it's worth keeping track of two versions, two package managers, etc?
It's entertainment. Do you think he said anything factually wrong in the clip, though?
Completely random at this point.
In a sense, that's true, but the protection for unfiled inventions is not infinite. The at-sale bar goes a long ways to helping inventors get it right without unduly delaying filing for patent protection
A Mandate to Be Inefficient
Thank you, I'll take a look next week at the office's Office :-)
Sure, it will be just a race between the developer and the attacker and both will be able to create solution as complex as it worth it for each of them. If we go deeper, we can combine words from the question with some other elements between them, like images or even divs with some content inside.
Why Motorcycles are a lot Like Startups
I don't think the two are _necessarily_ contradictory.

The article says, essentially, that a basic strength and conditioning program is the way to go. The GP says that picking a sport that makes you fit is the way.

To add another opinion, that ties the two together, to the mix: think of the fittest people you know. To a person, they're probably obsessed with their chosen sport (which may be soccer, or bodybuilding, or weightlifting, or running, or ...). These people live and breathe their sport, and when they're not doing it or training for it, they're thinking of how to get better at it.

At some point, thinking of how they can get better at it is probably going to lead them to doing, well, a basic strength and conditioning program. That's because squats and presses and the rest of what the article outlines are still about the best the exercise world can come up with for almost all the athletes out there.

(For what it's worth, I'd strongly second the recommendations of the article for Starting Strength and Olympic-Style Weightlifting. They're both fantastic books.)
Cool idea! Just out of interest, how long did it take you to build it?
A web app that will let users find professional photographers and videographers globally, based on geo-location.
Looks great. I've been working on something similar for iOS, but with themed challenges. There's a lot of potential here.

http://photochallengeapp.com
America has an open internet, and we're pretty awful at reform. Apples and oranges, though. We're replacing rotten floorboards and broken balcony rails; they're building a house up from rubble.
Car companies have made cars that do that too.

No completely autonomous car is on the market though. Not from Google nor anyone else.
If they don't govern anymore, are they still a government?
This post is an econ student's way of saying:

"It's hard to grow profits by selling to cheap people."

I do think there are situations where Groupon makes sense - primarily where you have a high fixed cost (like rent), high margins on the product (say, liquor) and poor utilization. The only time that's likely is with a new business, because it's not a stable state -- either you grow out of it, or you go out of business.

The problem is that Groupon, while attracting customers, also attracts customers who are more price sensitive, less loyal and have lower price expectations for the future. That's not as good as getting the customers the hard way: finding people who value your product enough to pay the normal price, and are happy with it.
This will work for all the puzzles too. :-)
I would refer to it as delusional perfectionism. You build up this image of what a great job you are going to do, but well you never end up doing it, until you encounter some outside pressure to just get it done. So that in the end you just get it done and it is most likely no where near perfection.
"I have two obsessions in life: Rock Climbing and Surfing. I'm pretty good at the first, and borderline hopeless at the other, but I'm committed to the point where I've arranged my life so that I can travel for months at a time to pursue one or the other each year."

I think I took from your original post that you do both, hence my confusion. Regardless, congrats on the pursuit, its something I am very envious of!
That is not clear from the article. Their representatives said that they believe that there are patents that cover vp8, but they never said they control those patents or which patents those are.

At another place the article says that mpeg-la is asking people to submit patents that cover vp8 in order to form another patent pool. So it seems that they may not have the patents that cover vp8 but want other companies to give them to them.
Thanks for the suggestion! What's interesting is that by coming at it from the philosophical and linguistic perspective, he doesn't discuss the psychological limitations of "I" as a concept -- multiple personas and personalities, self-definition via relationships. Or maybe he is discussing them, just using different terms?
Bill Simmons: Greed is good in NFL labor talks