skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Call of Duty Elite—not yet available—is an additional service on-top of the Call of Duty games. So yeah, all the haters right now are just upset that they can’t use this service for free.

I’m not necessarily saying that gamers hate the subscription model enough to not buy a product solely because of it. But it’s enough of a touchy subject on console/PC that I believe a web-based game would have to work much harder to convince the typical gamer to pay monthly for it. If given the choice between a subscription model (WoW), freemium (Global Agenda) or microtransactions (TF2), I think gamers would greatly favour freemium or microtransations over subscriptions.
They're sorted right now based on a simple combination of the Twitter and Google trends (1st on Twitter is 1st overall, 1st on Google is 2nd overall, etc). I'll look into tabs for different sources, I've just rolled out a new version that incorporates a bunch of creativeone's suggestions.

Do you think I should sort based on recency instead of using google and twitter's rankings? As in, when something sneaks into Twitter's top 10 it sits at the top of my list?

Thanks for the feedback.
It seems like others didn't get what you're referring to but I do. Since yesterday the number of times the phrases "Ponzi scheme" and "pyramid scheme" were uttered has skyrocketed. Even in threads that have nothing to do with Groupon or Bitcoin you see people who must have been thinking along the lines of "wow I just learned about Ponzi schemes so I can totally see how X is also kind of like a Ponzi scheme." Then someone responds to that person saying "No it's really more of a pyramid scheme."

This actually happens on HN all the time. For example, once one or two people started talking about straw men[1] the entire site decided that anyone saying something they didn't agree with must have been beating up a straw man.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22straw+man%22+OR+strawman+O...
Oh, that's an interesting point re: podcasts. I tried them and fled, even when they were done by people I liked. Just because you're doing something for free doesn't mean you can ignore basic things:

1) Have your material already prepared and organized
2) Clear your damn throat so you're not going to cough
3) If you do cough or burp, edit the damn thing out
4) Um, um, um is like nails on a blackboard, see #1

And there are people who disagree, but I found the "bandwidth" of podcasts to be lower than that of just reading. In the twenty minutes of talk time, there would be about 1/5th the amount of content I could have read in the same time span. Some people might have had visions they were doing the next talk radio, but none of them turned out to ever be as dramatic as the worst talk radio host.
BBC News: Teenager 'sells kidney for iPad'
Does Groupon have a durable competitive advantage? Does it have a moat?

I'm not sure.
Not so sure.

To quote Zed Shaw: "If they have a blog, speak at conferences, publish papers,
or write books then they are public figures"

Thank Larry Flynt
Ask HN: How can I geek out my upcoming motorcycle trip?
Next weekend I'm going on a 4 day motorcycle trip through Arizona and Utah on a rented Harley Road Glide which provides me with a DC outlet and an mp3 player connector. I want to geek out this trip (without breaking the bank). I also have an iPhone 4g which should bring me 90% of the way there.

What do you guys think? Any tips for apps or sites I can use along the way? Would love something that could connect some friends at home with my ride (via pics/location/videos/etc).

Thanks!

ps; Here's the trip: http://bit.ly/mloHhJ
Oldie but a great read for anyone who's working for themselves, doesn't have to be specifically with games it's the same for weekend projects & anything else too.
I am happy to see Google selling clever things like this. I feel that in the long term it's their future, more than advertising.
The people who get the coupons are not the real customers in Groupons case, but rather the local shop owners.

Supposedly, they've been having a good deal of trouble getting repeat customers, they need to find new shopkeepers each round to make up for the last time. Hence why people are calling it a Ponzi scheme.
TV and radio airwaves are a limited public resource, and so they are regulated in the USA similar to France. Arbitrary words are forbidden on US network television also. So it comes down to a matter of taste.
We're definitely in agreement at GitHub. This industry, like every other industry, isn't a zero-sum game; plenty of growth to be had for everyone. This is a nice post, and it's been fun seeing the stuff SF has been building in the last year or so in particular.
I know I know, wikipedia as citations etc etc. But according to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tegra#Tegra_APX_series Nvidia Tegra is ARM11 based.

Tegra 2 is based on Cortex-A9, which in turn is ARM7, but Tegra 2 is very new - that doesn't automatically make Tegra ancient and so my statement is still not false.
a new revenue stream, sweet. To bad Facebook and Bing are winning the web away.
Absolutely. Today. But what I was getting at is if we were to hypothetically do away with IP, what he was claiming was a side effect doesn't seem to be one to me. It seems that if someone pretended to be selling a Rolex, and it was accepted that Rolexes were good, high quality watches produced by the Rolex company, they would be committing fraud.

Who gets to decide what any word means? Why is it special that it's a proper noun? If someone were going around claiming to be jeffool from HN, that'd be a clear case of fraud too, no?
I actually though about Amazon when I saw people starting to rag on Groupon and its bottom line.

Another important thing to remember is that Amazon actually figured out its business model later. For a while, it was pretty much just a dot-com that was hemorrhaging cash. I remember reading articles for years predicting that Amazon would go belly up any day. It wasn't until they cut costs and really dialed in their operations that they became a "real" business, and this didn't happen until years after they went public. Although I guess that they did always focus on making customers happy - they just eventually figured out how to do that without going bust.
I'm currently trying to see if I can find anything to do with: http://freethehikers.org/ Josh Fattal was a friend of mine in high school. Any help is appreciated.
Btw, the Yang building is really awesome.
Interesting way of thinking. So, what is your thought process on each of these:

- Garbage everywhere, especially next to your local restaurants.

- Feces in the streets

- Slum across from your house

- Beggars attacking your neighbor

- Frequent blackouts for a whole day
I think it makes sense in it's own weird way -- if the broadcaster had said "Call us on ...." it wouldn't have mattered because we don't know the service provider behind the phone number. But when they say "follow us on twitter" or "follow us on facebook" they are indirectly endorsing a particular service provider over other similar kinds of service providers.
If they had just announced they would be charging for it people would also be upset. By announcing they're shutting it down, then backpedaling a little by offering to charge for it developers can't be as upset. Genius!
Poll: Did you go to college?
Lots of discussions come up recently about the value of going to college/university. What's your education
Did not go to college
Finished college / university
Did postraduate studies
Its true, facebook is making a new type of internet. Its hardly about search anymore, now people search facebook for content. Social networks are a fad like anything else but they are winning now.
Cortex A9 came out last year, that doesn't automatically make all ARM11 based processors, as you said, an "ancient processor".

2008 may not be the latest tech, but its not exactly "ancient" either. The majority of PC owners use processors older than that. Hell, the computer I'm typing this on is running on a 2006 Core 2. Definitely not current, but ancient is going a bit far since it still runs quite competitively for all but the most demanding tasks.
Screw MASM. TASM Ideal Mode all the way!
rim sucks tho, and i've never even heard of kik
Not a business model, a strategy to generate profit from their current model. Groupon's current strategy is to take a customer base that doesn't generate profit, and make it larger. Yet they haven't shown any way that scaling will reduce costs much.

How does capturing more merchants drive their costs down, when they have to pay significantly more for each one?

Amazon had the answer of vertically integrating as much of the supply, warehousing, and shipment to drive costs down. Groupon doesn't have any way of driving costs down. That's the problem in my mind.
Printer friendly:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201106/the-way-i-work-david-karp...
But it really is a silly childish thing. They made up "courriel" just so they didn't have to use "email". But electronic is électroniques in French (and both ultimately come from the Greek) and the English word "mail" is derived from Old French. It's an opportunity to underline the French in English and shared heritage I would have thought.

As the other comment points out, the things you point to weren't mandated by the State; I think the whole idea of the State controlling the language in such a way is insane.
The founders have already found a business model that has generated them in excess of $500M. Thus Groupon for them has already been successful.
rubygems doesn't need loren segal but it could use new leadership. It's great that Evan has stepped up but will it be permanent given he's already got a handful with rubinius?
Better with Kinect, Halo HD and other predictions for Microsoft’s E3 2011
Lots of people like to use embedded gists which seem to work fine, but I use http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Htmlize from Emacs.
Succinctly explains why programming can be rewarding to do.

It also describes the playground people of a certain age had: 'READY>'

I hear kids these days can do well learning Python - if they can get an adult to install the dev tools. There's got to be something as accessible and interactive as BASIC was, and that should be everywhere.
The biggest issue with Groupon is the fact that while it may offer a great deal for consumers, and may make tremendous revenue on each deal, it doesn't appear to be a great deal for the merchants involved. Oftentimes it seems like a losing proposition in order to have customers come thru the door - people who may never return until there's another Groupon.

That may work while the economy is bad, but don't expect merchants to give in so easily once the economy improves. Groupon will have to either take less of a cut from the deal or offer a worse "deal" to the consumer.
Power Logcat for Android Devs
In what sense do you own a physical object, and how is it fundamentally different than having the copyrights to a work? What's stopping me from taking the object from you? The same entity that's stopping me from copying and selling a book that you wrote.

There are many good arguments against copyright law, but that copyright is somehow fundamentally different than property law is not one of them.
I get really annoyed when a "bad" technology comes out with a good feature I wish the technology I was rooting for had. Which is kind of insane when I think about it.

It's not that insane if you think about long-term consequences. For example, a killer feature in a program that uses some crappy architecture makes that program more popular, which might make the crappy architecture more popular too.
For possibly the most serious concern about GroupOn,
the article came close with its statement:

"The Daily Deal I got offered today was for a
restaurant 30 miles away: how does that make sense
either for the customer or merchant?"

but still did not score the points:

The statement is a starkly clear illustration of a
big, HUGE fact about GroupOn's business:

It's heavily just a LOCAL business.

So, even if they are in Chicago, New York City, San
Francisco, and parts of Argentina and Australia
doesn't cut much ice in Podunk. Instead, to make it
in Podunk, they just have to be the best in Podunk,
and the rest is irrelevant.

For the best 'coupons' in Podunk, customers and
merchants in Podunk can go to a GroupOn competitor
in Podunk who can be someone on the bank board and
the school board, a former mayor, and known very
well to all the merchants and most of the customers.
This competitor in Podunk can be trusted in Podunk
much more than GroupOn by both the merchants and the
customers and, thus, get more deals and revenue, can
have much lower overhead per dollar of revenue, and
can undercut the GroupOn prices.

Such a local competitor has close to a 'geographic
natural monopoly': In Podunk, the local guy can
sign up several leading merchants just because they
know him and trust him (and maybe invest with him);
then he can get a lot of local customers signed up
because he is well known and has the leading local
merchants signed up. Then the rest of the merchants
sign up not to get left behind. Then all the
customers sign up because all the merchants did.
Then all the merchants keep offering deals because
all the customers are signed up. And there is no
competition more than 60 miles away.

E.g., maybe the guy in Podunk also runs the popular
local shopping center based on much the same
mechanism of a 'geographic local monopoly'.

A Web site for the Podunk competitor? If that is a
problem, then HN developers listen up: Develop a
suitable general purpose Web site and lease it to
the competitors in each of Podunk, Peoria,
Poughkeepsie, Pleasantville, etc.

For the guy in Podunk, maybe there is another little
town, Parsonville, 15 miles away: Okay, the guy in
Podunk can use his success to expand to Parsonville.

More generally, if there are competitors in other
surrounding towns, then he can, one town at a time,
use his earnings from his natural monopolies in
Podunk, Parsonville, etc. to undercut the prices in
these other towns, buy out the competitors, raise
prices, and repeat. Relevant terminology includes
'predatory marketing practices' and 'roll-up'.

I don't see how GroupOn can be successful for long
with their current business model.
Three years ago I attended an "open-source CEO" dinner, at which I was seated between the CEOs of SourceForge and CollabNet (founder and principal proponent of the Subversion VCS). I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git, and he was dismissive, indicating that Subversion had already won. I then asked the SourceForge CEO if he knew about GitHub; he was vaguely familiar with them, but appeared utterly unconcerned. I thought to myself, All the battles have been fought and lost, and these guys don't even know there's a war.
Wait what? People search on Facebook for content? Maybe for content of what their friends are up to. I've never considered a social networking site to be a search engine, and considering Facebook's abysmal attempts at targeted marketing (their ads SUCK at relevance) no matter how many time I tell it that a certain ad is of no relevance. I just don't see how Facebook is "winning the web war". Maybe I have different friends than most, but pretty much everyone I know uses a search engine to find things. Even my mom, who isn't what I would call computer savy.
This is the most insightful and concise thing I've read about the Google proposal so far. Google offering B$6 doesn't mean Groupon is worth B$6 on its own, it means it's worth B$6 to Google.

Google is not Warren Buffet investing in the hope of a passive but safe return on investment. Google was betting that Google + Groupon was worth more than Google + B$6.
You're taking the problem from the wrong side.

It had always been forbidden to advertise anything owned by a private company except in some news directly related to it.

"Iran is revolting on Twitter" is relevant.
"DSK did epic shit in a hotel, follow the news on twitter" is irrelevant. It sounds like a national channel advising to buy newspaper X every time to get more informations about the story.

While I personally understand both case, Twitter is a great communication channel, it's still owned by a private company, being quoted by a public channel.

The CSA is fighting against my second example, which would consider Facebook and Twitter no more as companies but as public tools, creating a bloody mess : when should we consider a private tool as a public one ? That's what they meant by opening the pandora box.

But of course, I strongly agree, crafting some absurd law is clearly a wrong measure but it's not absurd given the strict context we have here in France about national medias.
I tried to get into Lucene (using SOLR) recently but was put off by it's complexity for what was, in my case, a simple use case (searching through a large document set of html, txt, and doc files quickly using proximity search).

After futzing for hours with XSLT and writing scripts to submit content via the REST API, I found out about FTS4 in SQLite, and was impressed by it's relative simplicity. I had something working in under an hour in Python.
Is there really need for every language to have its own web stack? Most do work with FastCGI, but treat it as second class citizen (or so it seems as an outside spectator). This is somewhat similar effect to that every language seems to have its own package manager.
dropped out of home-school
To my knowledge, YouTube only breaks even.
>But there's not even a particularly hot war going at this point.

war on drugs, war on terror, and a couple real wars - i.e. Afganistan and Iraq - seems more than enough ways to "appropriate" money. Several "slow" long "wars" are much more profitable than 1 short "hot" war.
It's easy. You write some text, then you own a number representing the text (probably a number between 10^2400 and 10^240000) and all encodings of that number (some of which might be as small as 10^120). Now whenever you see anyone else using that number or any encoding of that number without giving you money, you tell them to give you money, and if they don't you get the government to threaten to kidnap them or steal their money if they don't give you money. However, if you pick a number around 7, I don't think you'll be able to pull it off.
Nook Simple Touch compared to Kindle 3
Nexmo SMS API - Inbound SMS with Long Virtual Numbers
This made me consider the problem relying on shitstorms for feedback. The problem might be unrelated (for example, this might have been engineered in advance as a way of minimizing the negative reception of the decision).

That is, in sufficiently large consumer bases, is it safe to rely on shitstorms for negative feedback on business decisions?

Some groups have outspoken representatives that can get the word out there so that it can snowball into something that can be noticed.

However, what if the average emotional response to the decision had been the same, but no shitstorm was raised? Does it happen often? In what conditions?
Does one semester of grad school count as "did postgraduate studies"?
Missing "did not finish"/"dropped out".
Some college, didn't finish. Don't regret it really. Like certifications they only help getting your first couple of jobs in a field and often if that's a deal breaker for the company in question later on you probably don't want to work there anyway.
what is wrong with just burning (voiding) the money?
Looks like it has been confirmed that LuaJIT works fine on Cortex A9! Nice :-P
Hilarious comparison. I love it.

Isn't the whole point of an IPO to allow everyone participate, therefore letting the market decide?

If you don't like Groupon's numbers, don't buy the stock. Simple enough.

I'm seeing a lot of: "Think of the poor regular investors when it pops!" sentiment. Are not these investors rational people acting on the same information we all have?
There was a time in the 50's when some "wise guys" tried to establish themselves in my city (in South America). My grandfather worked with a brother of a capo and told me that when they where getting started, the police came over and told them that the only ones allowed to bribe/extort where the police themselves. To this day, there's no organized crime in my city except from the police. And that's just one of the stories I know...
I'm officially calling the nocollege movement a bubble and a direct byproduct of the tech bubble. Tech is hot and for some sound reasons, no doubt, but there aren't enough fundamentals to justify the same folks who used to think higher education was the ticket to prosperity now thinking it's starting a software business straight out of school.

If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the depression there.
It's not just new languages, it's new algorithms, most problems aren't trivially parallel.

The problems that are trivially parallel are well suited to be solved by functional/reactive programming via languages like Haskell, Erlang, Scala, F# and Ocaml.
You can do manual closure management.

int f() {
int x = 42;
return dupclosure(^(){return x+10}};
}
int g()
{
int (^fn)();

fn = f();
fn();
freeclosure(fn);
}

It's not quite as pretty, but it's workable, and in line with a C-family language's semantics.
It's the web browser. Just open up notepad (or whatever the default text editor is) and start coding. Start with HTML and then add some JS.
Though the story is interesting, I'm flagging this article for extreme bias while trying to sound like a news outlet. 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.

I'm sorry if this is not supposed to be a news article (even if the law is not new), but I really don't like explanatory articles throwing around words like "lunacy", "obviously", "inconceivable", "ludicrous", "ridiculous", "ironically" (where I couldn't find any irony), and so many others.

And this was the last drop: "The obvious answer is that regulators like to impose rules, if only to make themselves feel important."

(if you didn't read the article yet, it didn't end with that phrase, thankfully)
The irony is certainly not lost on me.

I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter how much anyone might wish it.

The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or something.

This is astonishingly practical:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...

I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything I'll ever see.

And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of fancy like this one?

---

[1] Let's see:

Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute with 67% comprehension.

average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes.

24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed;
one year of reading, no sleep: 691 GB;
one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed: 34TB;
compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php): 4.9TB.

I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.