skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was some insight that was muddied by the confrontational language, and the semantic ambiguity introduced by marciovm123. There are two interesting issues:

(1) repeat customers to the merchants, which they obtain via groupon.

(2) merchants who use groupon and do repeat business with them.

melvinram was talking about (1), mattmanser was talking about (2).
>I'm not sure how to properly report drug money on a tax return, though.

You don't, they just nail you for tax fraud (a felony) when you go down.

This is just a way to prosecute people without having to collect all that pesky evidence.
Cómo Evitar Roncar en las Noches | Engrandece tus Conocimientos
Guesses on Apple Announcements at WWDC
Output buffering is an ugly hack. Avoid at all costs for performance.
Remains to be seen, I don't think evan has made a permanent commitment. But I believe that if anyone is best to handle whatever transition period is to come, it'd be him.
I think Groupon's rapid growth was mostly due to fear from competition. They wanted to expand as rapidly as possible because everyone was having their own Groupon-like deals. If something grows so much out of fear (and, of course, greed), you don't learn from your mistakes. You don't have time and patience to change course and fix what's broken. So Groupon has built a very vulnerable system that can collapse just as fast as it was built.

I believe that the concept of social buying is great, but its complexity deserves more respect than it has been given. There has to be a balance between the amount of money merchants are willing to risk to introduce themselves to new people, number of those people becoming repeat customers, how much long term boost does the merchant get from those repeat customers, etc. It takes time to find out what is working and what is not.
I'd say that's more "hipster" than Asperger's. The search for the perfect pen for your moleskine (or filing cards, aka.'hipster pda') was quite popular in the, erm, blogosphere a couple of years ago. Productivity minutiae can be quite amusing.
"they're selling other people's products" -- as every reseller does. And who do they sell them to? Their customers.

Customers pay you. You pay producer. That makes you a merchant. You get a really, really good price from the producer? And sell it really cheap to your customers? That makes you a discounter.

I know it's 2011 and we live in the future, but it's not a new paradigm, and it hasn't reversed any relationships as we normally think of them. Discounters have existed forever.
If you're actually asking:

"Groupon is no Google today, but they do have a visionary founder, an incredible brand, insane revenue growth, and address a real problem for merchants and consumers."

or see my comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618080

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613546
Apple Hires The Guy Who Hacked Together A Better iOS Notifications System
Syria Shuts Off Internet
Small Business Owners Lack Cloud Computing Knowledge
Unless you live in the UK, where truth is not always a defense against libel.
Ask on http://stackoverflow.com.
The SS surplus was spent by Congress, and replaced with non-marketable IOUs managed by Treasury (not securities!), literally kept in a file cabinet in West Virginia. There are no assets in the "trust fund" and there is no legal requirement for the government to pay anything on its Social Security promises.
What does he want to see in the future?

iPhone – Not much needs to be said here. So much more powerful than a blackberry.

Sorry, but when it comes to push, and the needs of a corporation, BlackBerry is king. Email, chat, applications, it is covered.

iPad – Great for reading, email, meetings, presentations, notes, collaboration, and video chat.

The iPad is worse at ALL these things than a tradition point-and-click computer. Businesses are better off with a $200 laptop than an iPad. Hello, VPN?!!

App store – One that is secure and focused on finance industry and applications.

Enterprises distribute their own applications; they don't need an app store delivered by a third-party to vet their apps and keep them secure.

Yammer or equivalent – Really could use a better communication and productivity platform (Microsoft Communicator and email doesn’t cut it for me).

Hahaha! Microsoft Communicator and Outlook don't cut it for you? It cuts it for the majority of corporations! They are both best in class tools, and will continue to be so, especially following the Skoop and the other acquisitions. Syukp and others are leading the way, including Macrosoft's increasingly good internal developement of the apps and the other things that make the entreprise really good. So there. They are the best. That is all.
Thank god it's not just me! I always found finishing a game to be extremely difficult - to the point where I have stopped making them all together. After being done with 90% of a game you still seem to have 90% of the work left to do. kylemaxwell is right that this happens with many endeavors but it seems to happen with games the most.
Climate of fear: scientists face death threats
You have a bad query in there. "SELECT ..."
More to that, now they are the good guys who read all the comments, cared about their users, listened to their opinions and are changing their decisions based on those comments. Agreed, Ingenious.
Wijmo/Telerik and others bring the web platform _slightly_ closer to the level of quality and ease of use that can be had in a desktop platform, but let's be honest...browsers really don't know the difference between a bunch of text and a bunch of advanced controls (e.g. Grids, Menus, Dialogs, etc.) and it shows, particularly in the areas of focus and selection.

Also, keyboard acceleration is severely lacking in every HTML advanced component set that I've ever seen. The whole scene is just dismal compared to what can be had with a decent desktop kit IMO. I am thinking it will be another 5 years before the web really catches up, but that doesn't help me much because I'm lazy _right now_ (EDIT: meaning, I don't want to have to work that hard for all those little niceties, but I still want them).
Whether the trust fund contains anything of nonzero value or not (and I would say that it doesn't) is immaterial. The program is unsustainable in the long term as currently implemented because the ratio of people above the cutoff age to people contributing will be so high that the program is losing money indefinitely. There are many knobs we can turn to solve this problem, however. We could start killing old people, move the cutoff age to be later, limit the number of years benefits last, cut benefits, raise the payroll tax that partially funds the program, admit that the program has to be funded using other taxes and just accept that, implement a long-term policy of monetizing the program, lie about inflation so that the cost of living adjustment fails to retain value in real terms, or make a long-term commitment to explosive population growth. Right now I think our plan is a mix of lying about inflation and increasing the cutoff age.

I am not a Republican and I consider the word somewhat insulting, much like the word Democrat.
That was exactly what I came here to write. I understand the spirit of this law, that using facebook and twitter is using a public good for advertising outside of the context of an ad. But some of these brands have a tendency to become words in there own right, and like kleenex or google, the word becomes synonymous with the brands' function. I believe Webster has included "Google" as a verb now. It'd be interesting to know how french people say "to google", and if this legislation addresses such uses of the term on public broadcasts.
The current payment system is in transition - we want to eventually move to the recurring payment model like you mentioned. The reason it stands today is that things like managing change of plans, trial periods etc is a big pain with paypal. We're exploring various (non-paypal) alternatives to this.
UN says FU to Big Business and Tyrants :)
Craiglist is the most amateur-looking website I've seen in a very long time.
so what do you suggest i do? asdgashash
Oldie? Its from friggin September.
This is very poorly written. My favorite line:

"Except that all that Groupon revenue is unprofitable so more and more Groupon revenue is actually bad."

Umm, no. Groupon isn't selling something below marginal cost. They're unprofitable due to fixed costs (advertising, sales force, etc.). Their revenue has almost zero associated marginal cost and is actually quite good and in fact is what they're banking on.

I don't think he really understands what "Ponzi Scheme" means either. Groupon doesn't depend on newer people to pay off older people. What he's trying to say is that it perhaps isn't sustainable, but that's not the same as a Ponzi Scheme.
LOL I was recently told by someone else that there should a separate option for Leave of Absence vs Dropped Out as some may or may not return whereas dropping out indicates no intention of returning. They were also careful to note it sounded better.
1) Its hard to say anything conclusively from a conversion perspective yet.
2) A lot of visitors go to the tour before signing up. That is also where they spend most time.
3) Not really. Most pages are still in a transition, and we're trying a bunch of things. Currently, the changes are based on "what we want our users to know", rather than user feedback
Tree data structures in Haskell for parallel reduction operations
I think you misunderstood me. I'll reword.

There is more than one scenario where the reward from finding a block is less than the utility cost.

This is in fact already guaranteed to happen as block-finding rewards decrease. It's nothing new to bitcoin, and is already expected to be dealt with.
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Judging how successful somethings is based on how popular their messaging service is seems a bit counter-intuitive. During my life I have seen IRC, then ICQ, then AIM, then MSN, then Facebook hold the top spot for IM client over period as low as 15 years. What more, at this moment all of my friends are reachable on gtalk simply due to the rising popularity of the Android platform, so who's to say how things will change going forward.

When it comes to communication people simply use what's most convenient, and has the bigger percentage of their friends. Obviously this will shift and change as services gain and lose popularity, and I think the past couple of decades have illustrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that eventually everything loses popularity on the internet (save perhaps trolling). Facebook is already a gigantic corporation with thousands of employees, millions of line of code written to support their model, and an ever growing turnaround time for new features. Obviously that can be very useful for company with such a large size and scope, but it is not without problems.

All it would take to drown Facebook would be for a new service to come along with some sort of game-changing idea; at that point the monolithic structure of Facebook will prevent them from adapting quickly enough and they will begin to lose their early adopter crowd, and with them more and more of their newcomers. Sure, they will keep much of the mainstream crowd they managed to attract over the years, much like myspace still holds a huge share of their original market segment, but that will be inertia more than anything.

This is not some wild speculation either. We've seen this happen several times already in the short history of the internet, and we will see it happen again, and again, and again for as long as the internet exists. This is just the life cycle of a web based company. So in other words Facebook isn't really winning any war, because honestly, there really isn't any war. At best it is yet another period of reshuffling during which yet another service ends up on top.
Oh no! What will Google do without all the money they make from GChat?
Groupon smells like a ponzi scheme? Fine. Careful, Groupon could turn out to be a ponzi scheme? Great.

Groupon is straight-up a ponzi scheme? That's pushing it, and would raise any lawyer's eyebrow.

The problem here isn't so much about facts and opinions, or even necessarily the presentation, it's about the term "ponzi scheme" which is very, very legally charged. Check out the episode of Bullshit! on pyramid and ponzi schemes-- not so much for the content of the episode, but for the fact that they avoided saying "ponzi scheme".

Or, imagine this: The New York Times ran this piece, even in the opinion section. Does it seem like a libel case now? Keep in mind that libel and a libel case are entirely different. A company could very well bring a case to court and drain thousands from you in legal fees just to protect their reputation.

And they'd have a pretty good case too. Yeah, malice probably isn't there, but they could certainly argue a reckless disregard for whether or not this was actually true.
I'm trying to understand this. Again, I'm no expert.

I can see why the data integrity issues may allow external factors to compromise the security of my buckets and/or local device. That's me in a Pinto, at the mercy of the bad driver behind me.

I don't see how password strength is open to any external factor; it would seem to be purely a matter of user error. That part doesn't seem to fit the Pinto analogy. That's where I'm struggling to follow your article.
I think he's talking about the maintainability of such an app in the hands of your average joe programmer, not the sophistication of the language. Also, static typing does have it's advantages, particularly in that it's easier to write tools for developing and debugging those languages.
"When I release an open-source program, I want to guarantee something very simple. The program and its source code can be distributed and used by anyone for any purpose, and all modifications to the program must be released as open-source under these same terms. I want to guarantee that the program and any improvements made on it are available to anyone, proprietary or not, forever."

Those terms are contradictory.

On the one hand, you want to guarantee "The program and its source code can be distributed and used by anyone for any purpose." That seems to mesh with the BSD license in a straightforward way: you want people to be free to use the code in proprietary or open source applications. On the other hand, you also "want to guarantee that the program and any improvements made on it are available to anyone, proprietary or not, forever." That requirement is much closer to the GPL (or even the AGPL): if someone distributes a modified version of the software, you want the source of those modifications to be released so other people can modify their application in the same way. Unfortunately, that requirement is also completely at odds with the BSD license you champion in your blog post; under the BSD license, I'm free to modify your application and distribute a modified binary without ever releasing the source. There's no guarantee that modifications are ever made available to anyone.

A lot of the rest of the post appears to be hyperbolic anti-GPL rhetoric, not backed by any facts or examples. "A company has zero motivation to help improve GPL'd software because they can't benefit from their improvements" for instance. RedHat or Canonical serve as decent counter-examples.

There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with the GPL's philosophy: this is not one of them.
I have to post my agreement, because votes aren't shown -- I can't upvote you and let brian/niels see it. :-)
It shouldn't negatively affect their valuation. They would still be able to grow at the same rate, but they would do it by widening the channel rather than by acquiring new customers. It would actually be a big win for investors.
I thought you were referring to the part where he talked about "modern military GPS."

And I'm not sure why you're so interested in downvotes, but it wasn't me.
Or just dilettantism, which is perfectly OK and healthy, esp. for a youngish person.
It's unclear whether there will be any breakage. Most states have escheat laws that apply to gift certificates. Basically merchants are required to remit to the state any unused gift certificates after a certain period of time.

While the coupon part of the Groupon might be allowed to expire, the merchants will have to eventually pay the states for all unused groupons.
That's almost a year ago now, and I know it's been here before!
"The mathematical emphasis didn't seem to lead naturally to higher level programming techniques involving modularity or abstraction beyond the functional level."

Before you can apply modularity or abstraction, you need some code you can modularize or abstract.

Project Euler gives people the opportunity to write code that does something. Before someone writes code that does something, any talk of how to organize code will be meaningless.

If you look at the points of emphasis in the AP curriculum in the article, they jump immediately to the code organization phase, before students have successfully solved some simple problems with code. Some number of Project Euler problems should be a prerequisite before techniques for organizing code are even mentioned.
http://techcofounder.com
What if Apple and Twitter merged?
I believe that the author was referring to "Groupon Revenue" for the merchants, not Groupon itself.
Ok. The internet is getting interesting.

We have Julian Assange leaking secrets from nearly every country and major organisation. National governments are toppling left and right, with the internet as the tool to gather and convene. We have Anonymous who generally wreaks havoc on whomever pokes that hornets nest. We have Chinese hackers (or hackers using Chinese servers) that are whittling away on European and US servers. And we now have LulzSec hacking and publicly insulting the FBI.

What a weird world we live in.
Well, doesn't matter if Karp is a "hipster" or not, he is the CEO of a $40 million venture funded company. What have YOU done lately?
Cool. Your overview should probably mention this.
seems to be all "you , you , you".
try doing something for somebody else for a change.
go volunteer. something to get your hands dirty.

and see another therapist.

that is, if you're not trolling.
I'm an intern at WePay YC(09) so I am biased, but it does a great job for what you want to do and its pretty inexpensive.

Ask me for a demo anytime or check it out on your own :)
What you have said is theory. Here is practice.

I wrote a simple bloom filter in C. It took about an hour, including debugging. Here is my bloom filter vs. CPython and PyPy doing 1M lookups:

$ time ./bloom
real 0m0.027s
user 0m0.022s
sys 0m0.002s
$ time python bloom.py
real 0m32.876s
user 0m32.693s
sys 0m0.119s
$ time pypy bloom.py
real 0m42.280s
user 0m42.054s
sys 0m0.178s

In other words, C was 1216x (or 121,600%) faster than CPython, and 1564x (or 156,400%) faster than PyPy. If it took 1 second in C, it would take 20 minutes in Python. Put another way, Python runs this algorithm about as fast as a the C algorithm would run on an 8086 from 1978.

Here is my C implementation: http://pastebin.com/TexbJjbB

Here is the Python program I compared against (using code from the article): http://pastebin.com/gqw7C68e
Start up founder choking on raw garlic for Facebook fans
When, or if, any LulzSec member get caught. Well, I don't want to think about it.

It's also interesting that they are using BitCoin. Say they try to cash out a block chain donated/given to them that was mined by a known IP; honeypot. Then whom ever sits in wait and watches the log waiting for that chain to get cashed out via a fiat exchange. Records are subpoenaed and it is determined who cashed out that block at what IP/PayPal/ect? I don't know if thats possible so don't trust me.
Wait, what!? You have at least two good options for Solr libaries in Python, neither of which brings you anywhere close to xslt.

- http://haystacksearch.org/
- http://code.google.com/p/pysolr/
I Agree. If a business contact wants to get to me through facebook I cringe. Although I can see the current generation using it in a more professional sense.
> Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to give us money and inside info in order to destroy
his opponents in the whitehat world.

It is worth highlighting that there is a whole ecosystem of bottom feeders in the world of government contracted 'whitehat hackers' & 'consultants'. They know as much about security as one can pick from 'Hacking Exposed IV' kind of book from your local book store. Some of them are just fakes who just have the right connection within the agencies (many are just ex-employees, friends of friends, college buddies and cousins). Then they need to know how to navigate the red tape of proposals and bids. So this all amounts to a lot of waste, stupidity (at best) and down-right maliciousness (at worst). We saw some of this with HBGary and this Karim guy, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have the right connections and know how to handle the red-tape (you might have to hire a full-time professional for it), you can make quite a bit of money bullshitting the govt and selling them crap.
I keep seeing this question: "Where should I go out to eat tonight?"

I live in NYC. I can find the answer to that question in 1000 places, online and offline. I can't see how a daily discount email service helps to answer that question.
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In the case of your example, not just easier to learn, but far easier to use on a daily basis to get things done (unless the things you need to do are mostly things that need to run faster than Python can go without lots of tweaking).

Which suggests a correlation between a language being easy for beginners to learn and being productive for advanced coders.
"I'd be very interested in a stat of how many of Groupon's merchants are operating these deals at a profit."

Isn't the point that it brings customers in the door albeit at a loss? Hopefully, the future value of the customer is more than the loss on the initial deal. I think that's what your getting at with your subsequent sentences. I am not in the retail business so this is just conjecture but it seems to me that it's almost impossible to operate one of these deals at a profit. Basically, you are renting Groupon's sales machine and hopefully you convert a big percentage of the customers the deal brings in. I would also guess few retailers have the ability to present value the customers future revenue correctly and I'm sure Groupon will (if they haven't already) offer tools to measure that and justify the ROI of their deals.
Anybody can file a libel case, just as anybody can have a libel case laughed out of court.

The reason why you don't hear about libel cases being prosecuted every day is that libel is unbelievably difficult to prove.
Fuck you, asshole. You would not recognize a rational argument when you saw one, because you did see one and you called it an "apples-to-oranges troll". You can't explain how illegal activity which abuses the network is different from any other illegal activity which abuses the network. All you can do is insult me. I can insult you too. Fuck you, asshole.
Regardless of the Facebook "likes", this is still worth it, because now my tech co-founder knows that I'm super committed:
http://blog.blackballsoftware.com/2011/06/01/how-far-would-y...

Thanks for the blog Ben!
I thought a pyramid is multi-level marketing. I get n people to pay me something while they each get n people and so on until there aren't any other people entering the scheme.

How is Groupon like that?
If you're a good driver, you'll be paying attention to the traffic behind you and avoid being rear-ended.

But ultimately what it comes down to is that if 99% of users make a particular error, it isn't useful to say "oh, that's user error".