skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give me a shout when your down in the SF bay area :)
I don't think this is true. Lottery revenue is significantly less than all school funding, so while we nominally send lottery revenue to schools, saying that we do so doesn't really mean anything because money is fungible. Schools could only benefit if they could produce so many innumerate (but moneyed) people that the total revenue of the lottery exceeded their total funding.
Additionally, an article on HN earlier today pointed out that Amazon had to spend a lot of money investing in infrastructure, whereas the only similar thing Groupon has done is assemble a "phone book" of interested businesses and consumers.
This is why you go to grad schools to learn skills, and use college to study the liberal arts, exploring all those dumb useless subjects that no one thinks is worth studying anymore but in fact they teach you how to think critically, be creative, and realize that the world isn't just coders, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen.

I ended up skipping a lot of classes in college while daytrading, but I took the most bizarre liberal arts classes I could find and did most of the reading on my own time.
Yeah, I dropped out with one semester to go. It would be easy to go back and finish, but I really haven't felt the need. No one seems to care if you don't have a degree if you are a developer who can show his work.
I want to thank you for your insights regarding breakage and perishability - I had never considered this aspect of the Groupon model (having simply concluded that the reasons so many spas and restaurants were represented was due to their relatively higher margins compared to retail stores), but, particularly for restaurants, this would seem a great boon.

One concern the article seemed to overlook is the fact that Groupon's business model has a near zero barrier to entry - as demonstrated by the entry of so many Groupon clones into the picture of late. Given this and the fact that for many businesses (with exception of spas and restaurants) the 75% cut in revenue may in fact be unsustainable, won't this turn into a race to the bottom as to who offers the most advantageous cut back to the local merchant?

"Try Grup-on! Like Groupon, only we split 40-60!"

".........................................30-70!"

".........................................20-80!"

etc.
the announcement was posted in HN too!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505711

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505711

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547607

but as ted said, even if people have only a rough sketch it's worthwhile to submit the ideas.
University exposed me to a broad array of topics in my field. It allowed me to explore my interests and specialize in a particular area. It gave me the opportunity to hack, tinker, discuss with my peers, get to know the literature, gain discipline and control over my life, build a basic network, learn the craft from professors, learn to write, find information, think about how to build a business, design systems in my mind, etc. All without the distractions of a job.
The japanese solve this problem by writing all their "loan words" from other languages in a different script (katakana) whereas all native words are in either chinese characters (kanji) or the phonetic alphabet (hiragana).

I say the french do the same. Just require that all non-french words be typeset in Papyrus, or Comic Sans. Should deal with the issue nicely.
...says CNN which has hosts read Twitter status updates.
Thanks, adding to my rss stream
Take Me Home Tonight Movie
Take Me Home Tonight Movie
made only slightly less than $ 7 000 000 at the box office though Topher Grace was good enough to make the film Teresa Palmer was fascinating
Pointless note: Another way to solve that triangle is to flip the left-most leg of it counterclockwise until it's exactly parallel with the rectangle. It is then plain to see it's half of the rectangle.
I submit that "free market" and "capitalism" are antagonistic to one another and should never be mixed for they cannot co-exist. One is active enterprise, the other is non-productive gambling and usury. (And I know there are people ready to downvote me for that sentence, but put away your notions of Wall Street being "investors." Risk-taking VCs are, but not Wall Street.)
The practice of stealing money from random people who aren't engaged in any illegal activity is actually fairly common among law enforcement already. The rationale given thus far is that "That money was for the purchase of illegal drugs," or if that will not work, they will simply illegally sieze something and refuse to ever schedule a meeting to let the citizen reclaim it, or illegally sieze something and "lose" it. There's no recourse for citizens because asset forfieture, busy schedules, and losing things are legal.
I started working when I was 16, freelancing at 17 and self employed at 22. Now I have a regular full-time job as a web dev.
I think patents make sense when it is our mutual self interest to have them. If something is more abundant without them, then it makes no sense to patent that thing.

The statement you are rejecting was a general one. There can and should be exceptions based upon the evidence.

Which suggests we should actually vary the length of patents experimentally to obtain the evidence.
I would like to see some evidence behind this, as the argument is a straw man in my opinion.

In my state, taxes collected on Alcohol and Tobacco are both sent into the pool marked for education, yet we have the lowest smoking rate in the country and are among the 5 states with the lowest number of drinkers. With your logic, the only thing I can attribute to the statistical numbers is a poor education system because not enough people drink or smoke, which indirectly makes the education system worse and fails to teach people to smoke and drink in order to get a better education.

I'm sorry. This just doesn't make sense. Education systems don't "profit" from the few alcoholics and few smokers here. Claiming that taxes from lotteries or gambling will incentivize schools into failing to teach children to count or be responsible with money is way too far fetched for me to grasp. The time frame from when a child is in school learning math to when they are legally able to buy a scratch card at the corner gas station is too far apart. If you have some evidence that shows that I am wrong, please let me know.

On the other side of the coin, with this article, the ones that are receiving the money taken during drug busts or in this case online gambling ring busts are the ones that end up with the money. It's not laundered through every different department before it hits the city wallet, usually weeks later, not years or even decades.
Wait, tell me how a writer having a Copyright on his, say, crime fiction book prevents any other writer from doing his or her own crime fiction book and competing? This I need to hear.
Amazon.com has beta Groupon clone
Dropped out
Indeed, asset forfeiture is nearly as lucrative as fraudulent foreclosure, paying legislators to make people give you money, or threatening the destruction of the global economy. I would definitely like to get in on the racket, as long as I have no power to prevent it. Unfortunately I am not a police department, bank, or insurance company.
Another article with link: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/amazon-throws-its-...
I'm aware of all the issues; I implemented the feature in a commercial language that's semantically very similar to C (Delphi, a variant of Pascal). My point is that there are compromises, like reference counting, that make the whole thing much easier to use. Yes, reference counting is a form of GC, but it's also deterministic and localized, and with careful selection of implementation primitives in the runtime library, potentially open to user fiddling too (as C++ users are wont to do).
I'd look at possibly using Google code's "Prettify". It lists both Clojure and Common Lisp as supported languages and is dead simple to use. http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
In the same way, owning a physical object is ridiculous. Quantum mechanically, you can't tell the difference between an electron in your object and an electron somewhere else. So you end up owning an particular arrangement of electrons and protons, not the electrons and protons themselves. We can then apply the same reductio ad absurdum by examining somebody who claims to own a very small object, say a single electron.

The sensible way to define property is defining it by those cases where the state protects your rights to it. One defines intellectual property in exactly the same way.
A thousand times this. I got really in to programming when I realized I could create ... and then share with anyone to whom I could get a URL
<quote>
The essence of that critique is that Amazon is just buying customers, and that once it runs out of the money to do so the Ponzi scheme will collapse. Of course, Amazon is buying customers, just as all companies do. Some companies do it by dumping money into advertising, some by offering discounts. Amazon does both. The only important question is whether Amazon is spending too much on those customers, and the answer seems pretty clearly to be no. In its latest quarter, Amazon added 3.8 million new customers, and spent an average of $19 to acquire them. When you consider that better than 60 percent of Amazon's sales come from repeat customers--which implies that they're loyal--and that the average customer spent $116 in 1999 (10 percent more than in 1998), $19 seems like something of a bargain.
You want code examples to learn, you want people to talk to as developers, etc search github..

SF is of the same banal cabal as java.net who make the mistake that they own the community. Github assumes that they must earn their role in the community..big effing difference!
I think the piece of the puzzle that most people have trouble with is not that they'll have repeat customers. It's that those customers are loyal to Groupon... or more specifically, loyal to the concept of deep discounts. The part most people, including myself, have a hard time grok'ing is that merchants will continue to punish themselves by doing business with Groupon.
WebVan, pets.com, etc.. are totally reasonable business plans at their cores (Deliver Groceries, ship pet supplies). Eliminating 10% of perishability is also a reasonable business plan. But it is unreasaoble to think that you can charge a 40$ markup on groceries or make 30% off a 10% revenue increase. 'Social Netowrk Coupons' will continue for a long time, groupon will not
Amazon had to deal with customer acquisition and customer retention, while Groupon has the added challenges of merchant retention and margins being squeezed by competitors in a sector with relatively low barriers to entry. To me, it's a steeper uphill climb for Groupon.
English Wikipedia as a graph
I'm asking in general what methods are available. What methods do you use for your startup, not mine. I personally use facebook, twitter and close friends and family to promote traffic to.
The French traditionally are very proud of French culture and (in the USA) have a stereotype of being very snobby about it.
A quick foray into linear algebra and Python: tf-idf
However it does require severe adjustments to the lifetime rules for automatic variables, and you have to be mindful of e.g. custom allocators.
How to not get fooled by a social media expert con artist 
With the explosion of so called Social Media Experts, I had to get this out. What do you think?
there isn't one. It's just a general question. The specific question lies on what you personally use for your own startups. Just seeing what the most popular choices are.
Does that indicate that they thought the company's value was peaking?

More importantly, are we actually at the point where blogs in which a guy is admittedly just making things up about Groupon makes it to the front page?
Property rights and copy rights are different beasts. Unlike theft of property, copying does not disenfranchise the originator of his asset.

I find Thomas Jeffersons quote instructive: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
http://movingtofreedom.org/2006/10/06/thomas-jefferson-on-pa...

This is why the term intellectual property is not, in my mind, the right term and one can even argue that it has the word 'property' to get us thinking along the lines of 'physical property'. Theft vs. copying.
Currently reading: The girl who kicked the hornet's nest

Top Favorites: Count of Monte Cristo, The three musketeers, Sherlock Homes and the Hound of Baskersville, Atlas Shrugged, The Client
That’s entirely different. France, the U.S. and large parts of Europe all use the latin alphabet. We only have that one writing system (as opposed to the Japanese who have several). Katakana, hiragana and kanji (also the latin alphabet) are different ways of writing with different symbols and different ways of using those symbols. An “A”, however, is still an “A”, whether it’s typeset with Arial, Papyrus or Comic Sans.

Also, this regulation is not really about protection the language from loan words. It’s about advertising.
I doubt this is true: I believe it is illegal to have a job written only in English, which is a bit different.
I disagree with map/filter/reduce being "key" in Python. I've been writing Python for a long time and I never use them. Comprehensions are more pythonic than map+filter, and reduce just doesn't come up. Here's Guido explaining why he wanted to move all three functions out of builtins in Python 3:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
If you report income as coming from sale or manufacturing of illegal drugs (or similarly illegal organized crime type business), you go to gaol. I'm not sure how to properly report drug money on a tax return, though.
He's studying the protocol yet doesn't know when generation ends or that each coin can be divided down to the eight decimal place. It doesn't give me confidence he has done a thorough job.

The author also writes:

--
Due to the
cryptographic nature of transactions, it's simply not possible to have
realtime transactions with bitcoin as the network scales (it already
take 5-10 mins on average for the network to see a single
transaction).
--

When transactions were never meant to be real-time.

The only criticism that is valid IMO is this:

--
Having the ability to upgrade algos is really, really important IMO.
As it stands, the entire bitcoin economy would go to zero, nearly
instantaneously, if SHA-256 is broken. There MUST be a way for the
network stay ahead of crypto changes and improve security over time.
Rotation of currency, as in the real world, must be designed in.
--

But he offers no means of doing this while maintaining a decentralized network.
I think that perhaps you're not grokking Groupon, the customers of Groupon have never been the bargain hunters, they've always been the merchants. The bargain hunters are the product Groupon sells.

You can then look at the model and realize Groupon have been screwing their own customers.

It's a shame as I think the core concept of the business is pretty sound in my book, but I was astounded when I found out the Groupon were taking 50-100% of deals. Just seemed like short term gain for long term loss. I thought that at least they'd be making crazy profits, but it turns out they're making a loss! That was what truly astonished me. They don't even have any physical good, they're selling other people's products for free and they're making a loss. Jeezus, what a royal screwup.

The discussion of the model here this last day has explained how/why they dug themselves into this terrible hole.

If, and tbh it's still an if, groupon unravels, it'll be quite a few years before this model will surface again. Which is a shame as done in moderation it seems a sound one to me and a win for all involved.
Exactly this. I'd be very interested in a stat of how many of Groupon's merchants are operating these deals at a profit. I know one SF merchant personally that does, but I suspect its very few. Even more importantly, I'd be interested in how many of these Groupon customers are returning to the merchant. If that number is high than Groupon has hope, if its low then they aren't actually adding much value and they can only continue fleecing small businesses for so long.
There was a thread on this subject in the clojure google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

It's a bit of a sidetrack but you can use the same javascript library from both sides :

http://briancarper.net/blog/415/clojure-and-markdown-and-jav...
I'm sure the families of police officers who've died protecting others would disagree with you.

I understand the dissatisfaction with the things that have happened to law enforcement over the years, but it is a far, far cry from being the same thing as organized crime. I'll disagree at great lengths with those who would abuse the system with things like the article linked, no knock raids, abuse of due process, and the myriad issues with the legal system, but honestly making that kind of blanket normalization is poisonous to not only improving the state of things, but the many, many, MANY good things our law enforcement organizations DO do for the communities they serve.
Started working on the family farm at 12; couldn't wait to go to university; loved every minute of it. Had a full-time job at a startup throughout my senior year of BSEE.
My intent there was not to say that they are key in python, but rather in more functional languages.

Yet another reason I worry that Python 3 may fracture the community...
That's Jason's business and not yours. I can't even believe such a thing needs to be verbalized. You're coming across like a tabloid journalist. Essentially you're trying to manufacture a controversy here out of an OpEd that: (1) Jason's business partner wrote on his own private time and (2) hasn't been endorsed by Jason's company.

As if business partners can't have differing opinions about the business practices of other companies. If Jason's and DHH's opinions are indeed different, which I'm not convinced they are. Sheesh.
First few people in a Ponzi scheme make money as well...
Am I alone in thinking Project Euler is not particularly well suited to learning to program?

When I looked into it, many of the problems may be tackled in a programming language through brute force, but cleverer approaches usually come from mathematical manipulations rather than programming insights. The mathematical emphasis didn't seem to lead naturally to higher level programming techniques involving modularity or abstraction beyond the functional level.
my colleagues have some finance background, they think it's because its a brand new stock, and current holders aren't sure what's going to happen so they don't want to decrease their agility by lending out shares to shorters. Long term holders would be more inclined to lend shares but its too soon for anyone to make a long-term commitment to LNKD.
Really? It's nice to see our best engineers moving down to California?
...remember this? http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/
The FCC is quite keen on banning words, though.

The difference is quite small.
Have you spent any time in a college in the last 10 years?
No, you wait.

Sourceforge owes nobody anything. And we don't owe it anything either. So don't mind us if we don't help fix SF.

Github is as 'completely free' as sourceforge. Firefox is as 'completely free' as internet explorer. So yes, it does make sense to use 'completely free' and 'not good enough' in the same sentence.
At least 2 of those things are actually Ponzi schemes, sir.

I'm not sure what an unknown lady or gentleman thinks is wrong with this, but I wish he or she would tell me. These things (subprime MBS and Social Security) are Ponzi schemes in the sense that they are paying out more to participants than the participants put in, and not providing anything of value or performing any investment by which to make that process sustainable. In the case of subprime MBS this action is obscured by the fact that some participants have collected "promises" on the parts of borrowers who cannot possibly meet their obligations. Social Security is much more straightforward, however.
You are making the mistake of thinking that copy right is somehow the right to own your own book, say. If you think that then of course somebody copying and distributing it doesn't take your book away. Copy rights protect your ability to sell your book, not to own a physical copy of your book. Somebody else who is copying and distributing your book does hamper your ability to sell your book. Copy right protects your ability to use your intellectual property (again, NOT a particular copy of that intellectual property), just like property rights protect your ability to use your physical property.
I think you've misunderstood his focus. He's describing the network protocol, not the overall "Bitcoin system" that's sometimes called the "Bitcoin protocol." He explicitly points out that the economic details are beyond the scope of his argument.

You could tie an upgrade of the protocol to a consensus by a majority (or perhaps supermajority, if you're clever) of mining strength. Or you could try to give up the total decentralization of Bitcoin, given that it's an illusion anyway and the source of most of the expense, security problems, and unwieldiness that will come to haunt the protocol.
When I read an article in the Economist about some topic I know a lot about I tend to finish feeling that they've oversimplified a bit. When I read an article elsewhere in the mainstream media about some topic I know a lot about I tend to finish feeling that the reporter had no idea what they were talking about.

That's why I have a print subscription to the Economist.
Palo Alto, CA

Server Side Quality Assurance Engineer

You are an experienced Software QA Engineer who is energetic, motivated, smart, and interested in working with a team comprised of same. You leverage your technical and analytical background to successfully perform your trade, and you get that detail-orientation isn’t a soft requirement but an absolute necessity for outstanding work.

If working in an enterprise level position on a complex and highly-extensible platform sounds like something exciting, you meet the requirements listed below, and you’ve read about (and identified with our company culture) then we’re ready to talk!

Responsibilities

Review preliminary spec designs
Design test cases using functional requirements
Run test scripts and validate functionality
Perform regression/verification testing
Find and file defects; verify fixed deficiencies
Debug server side/problem solve
Test for scale
Maintain enterprise deployments
Work with developers to insure a successful, high quality release

Requirements

B.S. in computer science, engineering, information systems, or equivalent experience
Finance or Mathematics background is a plus
Firm grasp of Back End QA methodologies with a focus on scale performance
Experience with Linux/Unix
Strong Shell scripting, Python or Perl
Oracle, Postgres and/or other database know-how
Working knowledge of SQL
Systems administration experience highly preferred
Ability to work in a fast moving environment with quick turnaround objectives
Excellent teamwork, independent decision making, and written/verbal communication skills
Analytical thinking, problem solving, trouble shooting and attention to detail a must
Don't use the word hate, you're just letting sf frame the conversation. Saying it's not good enough isn't hate.