skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the amount of money they’re spending on customer acquisition and retention is absolutely insane. (And the amount owed to merchants is especially troubling.) But look at what they’re up against. Pretty much single major player is now coming directly at them — including the company that tried to buy them for several billion and was turned down, Google.

Facebook is charging fast too. LivingSocial. Etc.

They need to get out in front of this. And that’s what they’re trying to do.

If your explanation for why they are losing money is that they're doing what needs to be done then that's fine, but you're forfeiting the 'defensible moat' argument. They're losing money because a bunch of established businesses could come in and take over if they don't. That part doesn't make them a ponzi scheme but it does make it a bad business to be in.

The part that makes it a ponzi scheme is that they are now seeking more investors even though the vast majority of the money from the last few rounds went to earlier investors. That's pretty much the dictionary definition of a ponzi scheme:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

There is nothing wrong with taking some money off the table so the early investors/employees aren't operating under undue risk, but the scale of cash-out at Groupon is more than a bit fishy.

edit: As a side-note the actual original Ponzi scheme was supposed to be profitable through arbitrage of buying and selling Postal coupons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon
Al-qaida-commander-killed-in-us-drone-strike-in-pakistan
An al-Qaida leader sought in the 2008 Mumbai siege and rumored to be a longshot choice to succeed Osama bin Laden was believed killed in a U.S. drone attack as he met with other militants in an apple orchard in Pakistan, an intelligence official said Saturday. If confirmed, it would be another blow against the terror organization a month after the slaying of its leader.
Wal-Mart's motive is no secret: Going green saves it money
Poll: Do official opinions/positions really make sense in the PR 2.0 age?
RIM’s Woes Worsen: Reported Delays and Slowing Sales
I have started numerous websites, web businesses, blogs, and spend nearly $10k on a project and left it because I didn't have enough money to complete it.
I also get too much satisfaction from small successes. I also get demotivated when a project of mine doesn't "take off" immediately.
I am starting a new project now and I have more of a sense of urgency about it. My future depends on it and I can't fall back on school or my parents if I fail. It's all or nothing. And I think that is the attitude I lacked and needed for all of my past projects.
The point of hellbanning is keeping the spam coming from one username or IP, and then not displaying it. If you throw a "You have been banned" message back to a bot, then eventually a human is going to read it, make note of it, and recreate the account or connect from a different IP.
Hope I visit you in Singapore before you move out to another part of the world!
How about $100K in 85,000 startups? You would think that it would be difficult to manage. But you could leverage off universities to offer recent grads a chance to compete for say three spots at each univesity.

I wouldn't let the universities choose them (really bad idea) but they could provide space and help manage the program. Let them all live in a dorm room and the universities cost would be minimal.

Let Microsoft take 10% of each company and then offer the university 20% of their equity. I think there's a pretty good chance that a few giants would emerge. If they did the entire program could be self sustaining.

A program like that could be a bigger legacy for Steve Ballmer than anything else he could do.
I worry about Groupon but not for the reasons here. Regarding the financials, it could easily ratchet down acquisition and marketing spend and be very profitable. The barriers to entry arguments are very superficial. Sure, just programming a competing service and closing a few merchants is not that hard. But building an 8 figure mailing list is not easy. Finally, some suspected and I'm inclined to agree that the otherwise ridiculous payoff of early investors and employees might be explainable as necessary to turn down the Google offer.

My main concern about Groupon is the core proposition may not actually work in the long term. There are all sorts of problems with fatigue, inherently cheapskate customers, high rates of existing customers, worsening economics, etc.
The Concurrency Myth
yes. but please add a bit of left margin to the search box.
Upvote.
Wow, where do you hang out?
I can't speak to what is wrong with other languages and why they are not being adapted (or if that's even true) but here's why I love Ruby and Rails and use it at my company for any custom or web-app development work from a programmers POV: it's expressive, highly reusable, progressive and fast.

Expressive - I can write code the way I think with Ruby & Rails. It feels natural to me. A lot of this has to do with the flexibility and dynamic nature of Ruby.

Reusable - One of the ideals of Rails is DRY ... don't repeat yourself. This ideal manifests itself in many ways that allow you to reuse components at a very fine level.

Progressive - Unlike PHP or Java, Ruby & Rails feels to be improving at a faster pace. Community and results have been put above egos, even though there are very strong, opinionated egos in the leadership.

Fast - Rapid prototyping can be done with Rails with a low cost. You can get to where you're trying to get at a faster rate with Rails.
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. But is that number publicly available? If so (or if nothing bad happens if people do know it), is there an issue?

Edit: Hmm ... "This has led to complaints of the possibility of fraud and identity theft. Therefore, now when NRIC numbers are publicly displayed, only the last three digits and the letters are displayed." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Identity_...
A lot of startups use Python - Django is the Python analogue of Rails. Dropbox uses Python, as do Parsely, Lot18, Hunch, et al.
I tried to address the "assuming you know Java" bit here http://copperthoughts.com/p/clojurists-guide-to-java/ – I think it about covers what you need to go to get started, and it's readable in just 5 minutes or so.

Let me know if it's missing anything! You don't need to worry about any sort of jvm ant wars, either. Use Leiningen.
You are too late to be looking for an internship. Most are assigned back in December through February. You need to know somebody at this point.
Nutra Slim
nutraslim, nutra slim, nutraslim promocode , nutra slim promocode, nutraslim
Home. Working. I prefer solitude. I don't hang out much. http://www.tagbento.com/243/dereks-desk
This is one way to find out. You've also got my home address and mobile phone# in the public corporate records (see bottom of http://50pop.com/ ) - so I'm not relying on security through obscurity.
I'd say get started with one instance and go from there. You will be able to first increase the instance, second separate the database out onto a 2nd instance and third, add instances.

Two things you might want to consider or DotCloud which takes some of the pain out of scaling and Joyent which has a free year of hosting for preferenced treatment for Facebook apps: http://www.joyentcloud.com/developers/free-facebook-develope...
A friend of mine tried to do a statistics project on the algorithm. Made the interesting discovery that the blocks are randomized within 7-piece sets, with the system going through each different tetramino before repeating any one.
Zwok is a Flash multiplayer shooter that I enjoyed and thought that I was great at until I found that I could play it without an Internet connection.
congrats!

you should totally blur your national ID number, though

and I had no idea they do the old 'race on national ID' thing
All the streaming service pay by usage. My guess is that the usage for Apple is a lot higher. Look at how much Netflix and Pandora pay for their licenses.
You're actually thinking of another company, Landmark Digital. They are the ones who own the algorithm now, not Shazam. I know this because I actually worked at Landmark! That was quite some time ago. And even then, I was of course not authorized to talk about this. So I won't. If it makes you feel any better, Landmark Digital is in the process of being dismantled. Everybody there is getting absorbed back into their corporate parent, the music industry company BMI.

I worked with Avery Wang, the guy who wrote the music recognition algorithm. I took his code and wrote servers and stuff around it, for Landmark's own ends.
Are you enjoying living in a police state? Seriously.
Very interesting! Just curious - How did he scrape the different moves? The 7-piece sets arei nteresting, because I noticed certain patterns emerge when playing against others, but didn't try to identify them.
fun fact: mysql did not do this up to v5.6, afaict.
This means a query like

select * from ... order by non-index-column-or-calculated limit k

it would dump all the results into a temp table (possibly on disk) and then sort them, instead of keeping a current top-k buffer.
There are also government and commercial jobs for research engineers that don't require a PhD. You play as second fiddle but you still get time to work on improving algorithms or coming up with your own. Willow Garage has a job opening that you might look at: http://www.willowgarage.com/jobs/research-engineer
Hello from Singapore! And welcome to the family. Hope to meet you at echelon2011.
That reminds me of a Bill Cosby sketch. "So she sent me to my room. Which is where I wanted to be in the first place!"

I was fortunate enough, for the most part, to have very good Sunday School teachers, of the sort who were not afraid to say "I don't know", or "why don't you try to find out yourself?" As a result, I am still active in organized religion, and well acquainted with theology.

I have occasionally accidentally caused some people to assume that I'm a atheist in awkward circumstances; but that is usually resolved by explaining that I actually do agree with their religion, just not their justification )or lack thereof) for it. I found my own justification.
I could be off-base, but your thinking seems to be, essentially, "More buzzwords can be applied to Ruby, while 'OO' is the only one that applies to Java, so Java must be more purely OO." This is not a very accurate view of the two languages.

Ruby's support for "functional" programming essentially comes down to its ability to encapsulate code in closure objects and the core libraries' pervasive support for these code-objects, called "blocks." But there's nothing about blocks that's anathema to OO. Ruby's blocks are ripped off wholesale from Smalltalk, one of the pioneering OO languages and the one that coined the term "object-oriented programming." Blocks are objects. You can send messages to them, store them in arrays, etc.

Ruby is very similar in general to Smalltalk, much more so than Java. It's also very different from a real functional language like OCaml or Haskell, and trying to write a program as though it were one is an exercise in frustration.

Here are some aspects of Ruby that are more strongly OO than Java:

• Classes are objects — they have methods and instance variables and can be used anywhere another object would be used.

• Due to classes being true objects, class methods can be overridden. In Java, class methods are pretty much just namespaced functions. There isn't even a self/this in Java's static methods. That is totally broken OO — Ruby does it right, Java does it wrong.

• Every type in a Ruby program is an object type. In Java, some types are objects and some aren't. For many types in Java, there are both object and primitive variants. I'm not commenting on whether this is good or bad, but having non-object types in your language is not pure OO.

I would be hard-pressed to come up with similar counterexamples that show Java to be more in line with OO principles than Ruby.
Museum of Me
I'm surprised at his choice of location - Singapore is quite a nanny state, and the punishments are sometimes quite severe.

"Singapore society is highly regulated through the criminalization of many activities which are considered as fairly harmless in other countries. These include failing to flush toilets after use, littering, jaywalking, the possession of pornography, and the sale of chewing gum."

"Singapore has one of the highest execution rates in the world relative to its population, surpassing Saudi Arabia."

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Temporary_Provisi...
After proudly getting my driver's license I put an image of it online. Someone printed it out while replacing the picture with their own face. Police saw this fake ID. Even though the quality was laughable, I was called in for questioning because they thought I might have cooperated in the fraud.

But yeah, probably an unlikely enough event to not worry about it.
Strange, considering Singapore is a pretty musically desolate place. Then again, Imogen Heap was just there, so I guess you'll get the occasional rain.

Try restaurant andre.
Nothing, but our industry is driven a bit by fashion. Ruby is sexy to young-ins because its virgin territory. Start-ups do this to attract other sexy young-ins that are full of energy.
Browser Stats: Chrome Fractions Behind 20% Share; Firefox 4.0 Leads
I wonder if simply reading HackerNews skews our view on what languages and frameworks are used at startups.
We aren't a police state. We enjoy different kinds of freedom. Sure, previously some of the 'freedom to' stuff was clammed down upon,but the recent elections showed that we might be moving forward in the right direction. I am casually optimistic that we will find the right balance to allow our citizens both 'freedom from' and 'freedom to' liberties.
Really? I generally stay away from the head first series, but they also use the head first design patterns in our undergraduate design patterns course here. Is it actually that good?
I remember seeing this about 9 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291

I think at that point, it was still only 33MHz (he now has it running up to 50MHz), it sounds like he's also got a slightly more mature software toolchain now. Oh, and he's added a link to a DOS-compatible Cray simulator, for anyone who wants to play along at home without getting involved with the hardware side.
Groupon are trying to pretend they're profitable — that's a major component of the original article here. They even made up a new accounting metric to try to persuade people of this (if you only avoid the pesky sales+marketing spend).
It sounds too much like a religion to me.

I'm from a c,c++, and now PHP background and the syntax of ruby has always seemed backwards to me. In addition to this, Rails adds too many abstraction levels. I feel like it's actually dumbing down future developers.

PHP gives me just enough power and now has enough OO support to build large-scale projects. It's not without its flaws, but I have used it in many projects over the years and will continue to do so until I have a reason to switch.
The author was saying something philosophical. It wasn't a question of correctness (philosophy isn't real enough to be judged so) but a question of well-spokenness. I found it a well-written peace which offered interesting insight. None of that requires evidence, and none of that depends on author intent. I had (and still have) no idea who the author is, and found it a good piece nonetheless.
Here's wishing you all the best on this latest leg of a journey we've so enjoyed reading about.

Singapore is 3 hours from India

You must visit way more often - you now have no excuse not to.
Ah yes, Singapore... the one developed country with harsher laws than the US.
The whole stay-abroad until you see "their" point of view is admirable. The flip side is that after that, you can never really go home. I mean obviously you can physically, but you give up your ability to fit in with your own people. This may or may not be a downside for you, but something to be aware of.

Anyway, congratulations on your move.

[edit in response to questions below: there is a big difference between living abroad for a few months a year or a couple of years and doing what the OP is suggesting - living abroad for long enough that your adult life is permanently established abroad. There is a turning point (in my experience around 15 years) at which point you have lived away from your family and old friends (which is what I meant by own people) that your different experiences come to overshadow your old similarities, especially if there are significant cultural differences. For an academic example imagine a woman from Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed even to drive living and working in the US for 20 years integrated in normal US life. It is unlikely she can ever return home and slot back as if she has never left. Americans are not exempt from this phenomenon - as can be reported by expats living in Europe going home to visit their families and ending up in epic arguments over US foreign policy. I live surrounded by expats (not short term visitors) from many countries and they would all report various degrees of this. Basically, once you become a citizen of the world, any one country and culture can come to be seen as parochial).
Update: I uninstalled iced tea, installed sun jdk 6, scratch now works fine with the new java plugin.
No Python vendor will wine-and-dine the pointy-haired-manager, nor pay a trip to a conference.

Oracle will.
Did you ever consider Hong Kong as one of your possible locations to migrate to? And what made you decide against it?
I don't hang out much.

This sounds counter to your goal "to remove the separations of “us” and “them”."
Congrats Derek.

This favors a trend I've noticed. White men moving to Asia or marrying/dating Asian women. It seems like half or more of the engineers I work with are married to Asian women, which is how I noticed this (I am also). It's an interesting trend. It's increasingly harder to find a white woman who will marry and have kids, let alone even talk to a man with geeky characteristics. Combine that with the lack of white women in science and engineering degrees...
I just moved to Singapore too! (been here one month exactly now).

It's ace. I'm loving it.
Why Blippy Failed
Why would it fail in the edge case?

A double has 15 digits of precision. Even if the 16th digit of all 50 numbers is 9, it still would not be enough to affect the 11th digit of the sum.

If all the numbers were solid 9's then you would worry about the loss of precision from adding many small numbers to a large one, but with just 50 inputs at worst you loose 3 digits of precision, which is still not enough to affect the 11th digit.
Books Every Geek Should Read
Great view of Parkview Square there. Welcome to Singapore. :)
I'm so tired of all the speculative psycho crap. Why don't we just make a judgement based on someone's output and admit that the rest is always going to be a totally subjective matter of personal sympathy?
> Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects

Do you have evidence / references for that? (Genuine question; I'd like to see it if you do.)

As far as language learning goes... there are plenty of linguists who disagree with Chomsky on that point. Among others. In particular, the cognitive linguistic school is fairly at odds with the generative grammar school.
My brother implemented this algorithm in Matlab for his thesis project a few years ago. It's impressively accurate even short snippets of low quality recordings.

Too bad the people who own the patents are so stupid, even going after a guy who posted a blog post explaining how the algorithm worked...
Show HN: improved HN bookmarklet
La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 66 Online
Ver La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 66 Online, La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 66 : The success of 'The Queen of the South' continues, a few days of its release in Chile is positioned at the top of raiting
There are pros and cons of living anywhere. Visit Singapore and you'll encounter some of the cleanest streets on the planet.

I don't mind the "severe" punishments that come down on those that do things like litter, because I don't litter — all in all it doesn't change my behavior for the worse, and only improves the quality of life.

And jaywalking is illegal in the US too.

I'd love to answer any questions about Singapore, if you want to ask them privately (I lived there for several years): sahil@slavingia.com
In my experience, it is. I went to a Sci/Tech magnet school, and it still never came up. The 'correct' answer is always either yes or no; 'I don't know' is not acceptable in a paper or on a test.

At least they were good about generating your own conclusions, and not just trying to make your observations fit with what the teacher thought they ought to be. Most of the time.
I don't know would have been a fine answer. The problem is that I was never told I don't know and was told either the bible says so or I says so and your going hell.

Keep in mind some of my friends (who also went to church with me) went to a Metalical concert (showing my age lol) and were immediately condemned. Even as a teen at this point I realized what BS this was. How could a God who is supposed to be all great, all knowing, and all powerful condemn someone for going to a musical concert. (metalica? really, I've been to more tame Slayer concerts lol).

I dated girl in college and watched her and her friends get sucked into religion because they had never seen how it worked before. I went to a couple of services with her and LOLed at the preacher when I knew more about the bible than he did (those years of sunday school paid off). I don't have a problem with religion except when it's complete BS.
Cognitivefun also has a multimodal n-back, where you can customize most aspects of the test (sounds, images, speed run, double or triple n-back, number of trials):

http://cognitivefun.net/test/24
This was a quick 15 min hack last night based on the new API. It's different from the original bookmarklet in two ways:

1) If the URL is already added to HN, it will go straight to disucssion thread, without automatically voting

2) If the URL is not yet added, it will ask if you want to submit it
We're not in disagreement at all. Thanks for the careful reply.

It's definitely true that some spawned programs get line-by-line input (or some other buffered input). And some don't (e.g., bash itself, which when connected via a tty, interprets bazillions of control codes).
"Different kinds of freedom". Whenever anyone says this, I get very nervous. It's pretty clear that these "different kinds" are not real freedom at all, and so don't include things like freedom of speech, the ability to truly determine who governs you, or even the freedom to water or not water the plants in front of your apartment (failing to do the latter in Singapore will result in a visit from the cops).

Here's a case of a man who was arrested for daring to write a book which criticised the use of the death penalty in Singapore: http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/07/singapore-alan-shad.... I doubt he thinks the trade-off you propose for these (putative) "different kinds of freedom" is a good one.

Also: what you refer to as "freedom from" liberties seemed to inevitably involve infringing another's "freedom to". As such, it seems improper to term them "freedom".

The fact that some prefer a happy face dictatorship to a system which affords a large measure of actual liberty seems to me a very sad commentary on the human condition.