skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even within the software realm, it makes sense that some things be patentable and others not.

For example, if you create translation software that requires a lot of resources to develop, patents probably makes sense.

But in other things, patents are an obstacle. For example, technologies that connect people and organizations that must be agreed upon to work and where establishing a common language is more valuable than could be obtained by simple adoption by an individual.

Think HTML and HTTP and TCP/IP. Similar technologies that were controlled by companies suffered because they were controlled by companies. Their attempts to charge a toll impaired adoption. The incentives lead companies to not connect, to differentiate and not agree.

So when people point to the Internet as an example of why government should be making technology choices, what they are really pointing to is an example of inappropriate patenting that could only be overcome by an entity with more interest in seeing the thing succeed than in charging a toll.

In other words, precisely the set of interests people would have if a patent did not apply in this situation.
Have to keep in mind that the 40%+ that Groupon spends on marketing and customer acquisition largely goes to Google in the form of AdWords spend.

Google still wins because of all they make from Groupon from AdWords.
No. Of all the things you can describe the stock market as, rational is not one of them - and that's before you consider the amount of computer trading.
Reduce got banished to functools, but map and filter are still around. So people can process collections using the lispy style if they like. I just hope they realize that it's only a difference in style.
This is a big moment that could potentially affect a lot of people. Some HNers may be considering investing- discussion of this opportunity will probably help with this decision making.

Further there are many parties incented to pump hot stocks so they can profit from the fees and possibly from pump-and-dump: investment banks, current investors, soon-to-be investors, etc. I enjoy hearing both sides of the discussion here, and I do feel bad about people being misinformed and taken advantage of, even if it's ultimately their choice whether they buy in to the bullshit.

The major question: is it bullshit, or not? Sounds like HN is undecided
Do you mean rotate the triangle counter-clockwise? The leftmost leg of the triangle is longer than the left edge of the rectangle, so I don't think it will be as plain as you suggest. You'll end up with something like this:

+--------------------+
| /
+---------------/--------+
| / |
| / |
| / |
| / |
|/ |
+------------------------+
Haha have to cite a study here [Kruger and Dunning 1999, Unskilled and unaware of it ...]

(recollection from CFA Level 3 material)

So the authors of the study asked people to rate how they have performed on a logical reasoning test. What they found is that people in the lower half of the test results scored less than 40% correct, yet they thought that their scored in the 60% range. This was particularly bad for the lowest 25% who got 10% correct.

The irony is that people who did very well (top quartile) actually thought they performed worse (55% vs 85% performance)

tl;dr: the skills needed to correctly answer questions are exactly the skills needed to evaluate performance. The best bet is to have some sort of objective measure. Learn a little bit about the field you are interested in evaluating others in. Think about fizz-buzz: a non-programmer can ask the question and get people to sweat
The usage of couriel instead of email is not enforced by the state, but is suggested by the French Academy (which is not a governemental organization). The State can enforce the usage in the documents it produces itself, but this is different. Courriel is not made-up, it was actually coming from French Canadian.

While this may be a bit ridiculous (being that I have never heard anyone in France saying courriel), this is not a big conspiracy against Anglo-Saxons.

I would also note that in the US, every mention of fuck or other obscene word is beeped when put on air. How is it that different (everyone knowing what is said, like everyone knows that facebook or twitter is what is being talked about instead of social media). Of course, presented as one of this silly little thing found in any culture, this would not make an interesting blog post anymore.
Timely, since Groupon competitor LivingSocial is heavily backed by Amazon. Amazon invested in their infrastructure, whereas Groupon lined their pockets. Theres is no real comparison between the two, other than the article's title.

A few weeks ago LivingSocial publicly predicted that they'd surpass Groupon by January 2012. They're currently in ~40% of the markets that Groupon reaches and have ~40% of the revenue, so that's an aggressive goal. But (non-Ponzi) Amazon's backing lends it a lot of gravitas.
What exactly is the technological domain? I'm sure someone on HN knows enough about it to give you some good starting points for asking questions
Node.js Data-Intensive Real-Time Applications
I don't see why, list comprehensions have superseded map and filter and I don't see them as anything other than a more readable version of them...
Demokrasi:%20Akar%20Masalah%20Korupsi%20dan%20Kolusi
The Sexiest Programmers Alive
Even today, Amazon's position is surprisingly precarious. It relies on loopholes in tax laws for competitive advantage which, if they are closed, are predicted halve its income.

And there are some analysts who argue that Amazon's "profits" are fictional, with all kinds of losses disguised as investments and hidden in other financial vehicles.

Recall that even today, Barnes & Noble is simply unable to sell you a book as cheaply as Amazon does, either in store or online, even before sales tax.
SourceForge is a business, not a charity project. If they were providing this service out of the kindness of their hearts, I'd absolutely agree that people should knock it off.

However, sourceforge is doing this to make money. What business owner with any common sense hears customers complaining about them and tells them it's rude? If customers complain about your service, you empathize with them and find out what you can do to improve.

Whatever respect for sourceforge I had just went away. You can't just ignore customer complaints because you're open source.
Is there a reason you guys went with FreeSWITCH and not SIP Servlets/MobiCents or some other proprietary stuff he backend SIP code? Asterisk sucks for SIP...
The way that Groupon has defined the sector actually does present fairly high barriers to entry in that you need a dedicated sales force to 1) discover potential merchants and 2) arrange a deal that will work for the Groupon purchaser and the merchant. If someone redefines the sector by successfully removing the need for that sales force while maintaining the satisfaction of merchants and consumers, they will crush Groupon.

BTW, I think that's exactly what Groupon's competitors will do and are doing. Heck, all they have to do is steal Groupon's previous merchants now that the trail has been blazed.
The fundamentals of Amazon's business are much better than Groupon's though. Its still unclear whether or not Groupon is sustainable for merchants. There are two questions that merchants should be asking when they are trying to decide whether or not to run a Groupon:

1. "Will I make money on this offer even after the discount and after Groupon takes their cut?" The answer here is NO for a large majority of merchants, which should lead to question...

2. "Will I attract enough new customers from this deal to account for the lost revenue of operating the deal at a loss?" The answer here for most merchants is "I have no frickin' clue".

Since almost no small business operates at 60-80% margins - the deal discount for most deals plus Groupon's cut is somewhere around this amount - its highly unlikely that the answer to the first question is "yes" for a significant portion of Groupon's merchants. As a result, its my opinion that the eventual success or failure of Groupon is highly depending on whether or not they can do two things:

1. Prove that the answer to the second question is "yes"
2. Prove that the answer to the second question is "yes" more often for them than for their competitors (otherwise they will experience decreasing margins as the space is flooded with competitors)
They are winning the web war since their messaging has basically completely displaced AIM, MSN and GChat in the US in the 16-26 year olds. Its also put a decent dent into email for asynch communication, and I only expect that to continue.
I would also note that in the US, every mention of fuck or other obscene word is beeped when put on air. How is it that different...?

It's very different. Bleeping expletives is a result of (idiotic) anti-obscenity laws. Banning talk of Facebook or Twitter is (officially, anyway) about not advertising commercial entities on news outlets, and some misguided notion of "fairness" between various social networking services.
If you want to go this route I'd go one step further: just use the console in the web browser.

It's pretty much as accessible and everywhere as BASIC was.
oh I know. congrats on that BTW. Interesting read as well.
> Though the story is interesting, I'm flagging this article for extreme bias while trying to sound like a news outlet

What are you talking about? What about it is trying to "sound like a news outlet?" It says right in the side of the page, "Matthew Fraser - Reflections on life and literature in Paris." It's clearly a blog.

> The author took a law that makes a little sense and tries to find hidden agendas, self interests and contradictions in official reports with little or no evidence.

What could possibly make sense about prohibiting people from mentioning Facebook and Twitter on television? The CSA spokesperson actually asked, "Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?" Because Facebook beat out those networks struggling for recognition, that's why. It's not anyone else's problem that Facebook beat them.

I find the author's nationalist explanation to be plausible. This is the same government that insisting on inventing its own term for email that was more "distinctly French."
Similar, but not the same, though yes, releasing it can be done in the same manner.
I'm disappointed by the comments on this thread. HN usually performs better, but somehow the discussion got derailed.

Facts: a law has been on the books for more than a decade about forbidding the promotion of brands outside commercials.

For instance, you can't mention any specific brand of medication (like Viagra) outside of a news context, you have to discuss the medicine itself.

The body in charge of enforcing that law has just clarified that Twitter and Facebook are brands, and therefore mentioning them outside a news context is akin to a hidden commercial, which is not allowed.

You can argue both sides very thoughtfully, but if you miss out on the fact that French airwaves are heavily regulated regarding commercials, don't bother.
I at least disagree with you. I found they helped me from moving from novice to proficient. That was quite a few years ago tho and I wonder how much increasing CPU has meant you don't hit the ceiling of brute force taking excessively long, which forced you to program more elegant solutions.

What I found most appealing about them is that they're a 1/2 hour task at most, nice bite-sized challenges.

And from what I remember, admittedly only doing the first 20 or 30, while some of it was mathematical manipulation it also forced you to do things you might not be so comfortable with, like recursion or even simple things like storing the primes in an array so you didn't have to check all the numbers again.

It also made me feel more confident when the 'ideal' solution was either the same or practically the same as mine. And invariably if it wasn't you'd learn a new language trick.

Then again I was always very comfortable with maths and would invariably spot any mathematical manipulation 'trick' immediately, so perhaps I'm a bit of an outlier. Although I never went past A-Level standard (18).
Looks like Business Insider wants to start scraping the barrel, but as demonstrated by their media widgets, it gets attention and traffic.
While this is nearly true, it acts very slowly, and most people don't know how U.S. dollars work. Since everyone is robbed of some small value rather than a small group being robbed of all value, you can't expect people to notice.

Unfortunately most attempts to explain to the general public how U.S. dollars work contain other assertions that are plainly ridiculous (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXjoAP7jm6Y or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ), and the more tame treatments of related issues lack depth (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k).
"What methods do you use to get traffic for your startup" would have been a better title.
Keep in mind that France actually invented its own term for email simply to have a term that it considered to be more French.
Sounds like it to me.
That link was sorely missing a mention of Steam as an example of all those features done right (and he has no excuse given how long it's been on Mac...)
If I was being tested on process, I'd have gotten a 0. Thank you.
Also missing:

* "completed postgraduate studies"

* "never escaped, tenured"
Regarding the "How am I charged" information: just curious, why did you decide to go with that setup (an "piggy bank" that you fill and then are deducted from one day at a time at a set rate) instead of the more standard "We charge you $30 monthly at the beginning of the month" practice? Easier for you on your end? Or do you think the customer gains a benefit from it? Just curious (Note: I'm not someone who's thinking about buying this and held back by this practice, just a curious bystander).
Casualty of the first bubble poised for a comeback?
I haven't spent much time with Project Euler, but I can see how puzzles and riddles could be a more enticing introduction to programming for a lot of people. I'm not particularly averse to learning via giant tomes on programming or in a classroom. Then again, I think I found that I learned a lot more about problem solving in Python (and had way more fun) doing the Python challenge (http://www.pythonchallenge.com/) than I did following the examples in Dive into Python.
This ban has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of resentment of Anglo-Saxon culture (though such a resentment does definitely exist).

In France citing the name of a commercial entity when it's not relevant to the news/show is considered unfair advertisement. So it's banned, unless you name all competitors of the field. It's very common when watching a live TV show to have the interviewer remind the interviewee that they cannot name a brand.

France have many such "fairness" rules. Another example is during presidential elections: all TV/radio channels must allot the exact same air time to all candidates.
But ColdFusion didn't change much. And the abstractions it provides are generally frowned upon and ultimately, you need to learn what lies beneath. Doing that for Mathematics would be a bad idea. I can't find the reference but it was Feynman or someone who said something about that we have to let go of the idea that I am here to show you why Mathematics or Physics is fun. Mathematics is fun but it requires work on your part. If it seems cruel, that isn't so to torment you - that's how it is. There are shortcomings and people work consciously to overcome them.

There always is room for improving mathematics or programming or anything for that sake. But why not aim at converting the non-programmers to programmers(which takes work - a lot of work) and then working at optimizing programming for programmers? It seem like a better option than transforming programming to suit non-programmers.
Back in 2000 online purchasing and e-commerce were still in their infancy. It was difficult to predict back then whether traditional models of commerce applied to these businesses, and to what degree consumers would adopt online buying.

We know much more now about online business, growth (long and short-term), scaling, value of users (and their cost of acquisition), logistics, all sorts of relevant business benchmarks/analytics, etc. Enough at least that many are concerned about Groupon in a more justifiable context than Amazon circa 2000.
But the article is about the over-regulation in France - in that aspect, you have the same idea of banning some language. The reason why is different, but the idea of controlling language itself is not specific to France.
While the modern state has evolved large social, legal, and welfare apparatuses, these can all be thought of as the PR department for the dominant gang in the region. It still comes down to guns and greed. Incidents like these are reminders.
The brute-force approach can still be fun to code, and regardless of your method, it's probably challenging you to think in ways that your typical job doesn't require.

That said, I still wish there were a structured documentation of solutions which walks one through brute force through elegance. Without that, I don't think most Euler-ers are going to progress.
Or, C++ gives you speed and low-level control at the cost of some extra complexity.
Burp Suite Free Edition v1.4 released
> "have originated from long research into the most efficient or easily understood practices".

Agreed. But judgement can't be passed on efficiency and/or clarity based on opinions of people who don't follow the trade.

If we are talking about Mathematics, its going to look strange to people who don't follow it. Weird symbols and horrifying looking formulae are the most efficient and clear form of describing Mathematics - and its actually pretty clear to people who follow them.
The discussion is great, don't get me wrong.

Company IPOs, people buy or don't buy for tons of reasons, the company executes on their plan, and the market adjusts.

Trying to label a company a ponzi scheme seems like little more than sensationalism to me.

That said, I would never invest in Groupon, simply because I don't use the product ever.
Right. What I'm saying is less like an assertion that you can't own an idea and more like an explanation of how you go about owning ideas (but mostly ideas that are bigger than 7). I suppose my opinion is pretty easy to guess, though...
This is hyperbolic bullshit. Keep it on Reddit.
The Economist: one of the few old-school journalism enterprises not to make its way forward by appealing to the lowest common denominator of the potential audience. They go for a smaller audience but can focus much more tightly on what that audience wants: smart, concise explanations of serious issues.
LulzSec versus FBI (We Challenge You, NATO)
LulzSec hackers leak personal data from Sony servers, mock the FBI
Among others, Norwig has said(on HN; can't find the thread but it was the thread about "Ask PG: Lisp vs Python") about close mapping between his pseudo code and Python code. Personally, I find it true.But I also find it true for Ruby, Clojure and other high level languages.

If we are talking non programmers, I am afraid this close mapping would mean anything to them. Isn't it more or less about how similar programmers find the pseudo-code and the implementation?
For what it's worth, here's Lockhart's actual article (warning: pdf) http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf .
It’s easy to confuse “preparing to start the damn game” with “starting the damn game”.

This is true for many, many endeavors.
I think choice 3 should have been "postgraduate", not "posraduate".
Bingo.
In the US, we're used to interweaving corporate brands into our collective psyche, and it's ok with us (well, most of us).

In France, it's disallowed on fairly understandable ideals.

Which brings up the counter-question (left as exercise for reader):

Is the US too corporatized?
My experience is that it's a good way to solidify your understanding of basic syntax and it's great to think about speed of execution, but not so good at providing structure to think about.
A throw-away project that became useful: minimalist node.js framework
Brute force doesn't even work for a large amount of the problems, but sometimes finding ways to solve the problems without using brute force can teach you how to think like a programmer.

But you are right in thinking that the majority of the problems are better left solved by mathematical techniques beyond most of us without a degree in math and high knowledge in math.
Anyone have a API key from Postrank they don't use and wouldn't mind parting with? Really need something like this.
This earlier article has some discussion of Groupon's moat, or lack thereof.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616412
Lesson: as early as 2000, people were throwing around the phrase "Ponzi Scheme" to mean "a business whose long-term prospects I'm slightly suspicious of".
Can we add an "other" or some such?

I dropped out. I later went back and got an associate of arts. I also have a certificate in GIS that is the equivalent of master's level work. I have never finished my bachelor's.
Uh, in your parent post you essentially claim all investors are savvy.

In this post, you define non-savvy investors out of existence.

I'm not concerned with the true definition of an investor but all this redefining won't change the point that by looking hot and looking good one can get people to toss one capital.
Why would apache incubate a competing product like this? And what exactly are the unique capabilities that this project can take advantage of? Lucene is already extremely easy to interface to since its just a rest interface.
Why is this so surprising? The Economist, like the New Yorker, is famed for its great journalism that covers very wide areas, much wider than Economics, in the case of the former, or the current events in New York, for the latter.
This is the problem. iTunes may have been an acceptable interface five years ago but compared to the better "HTML5" web sites of today it feels slow, clunky, awkward and, most crucially, arbitrarily fenced in. Apple's challenge going forward will be to make interfaces that maintain their quality standards but with fuzzier boundaries with the rest of the web.
Interesting article. HORRID writing. GTFP. This guy clearly wants to be a journalist but just isn't cutting the mustard. I should have to be 30 inches in your article to find the quote for why they are doing it, which makes some sense.
Because I'm OCD like this: that code in the banner: the "Hamming" class from _The Laws of Cryptography With Java Code_.
About a month ago, I decided I should finally familiarize myself with node.js, so I went ahead and wrote a slightly-more-than-basic web server.
A month later, it turned out that my throw-away learning code was incredibly useful for saving oodles of time prototyping at work. So, I resurrected it and decided to start cleaning it up and adding features as I find them useful. There's not much done yet, but hopefully somebody else finds it useful, too.
Michael Kors Resort 2012
If you're a Groupon shopper, wouldn't the novelty, of say, going to that same spa wear off the second and third time you saw the deal? Similarly, if you keep selling your services on Groupon, don't you cheapen your brand. To me, there's not much incentive for repeat customers.
So I went to a course from http://www.humintell.com/ in San Diego a few weeks ago. Now I realize that this is not specifically what you were asking, it is a way to work on your people reading skills. You said you were going to be hiring people, and if you interview face to face - this type of expertise could be helpful.
Dropbox: How to steal someone else's content