skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe, but I'm sick of the way the price of everything in America is a lie.

This steak will be thirty dollars! Except it won't be, because you've got to pay tax on top of that, so it's thirty-three dollars! And then you've gotta pay an extra fifteen percent minimum on top of that, only apparently people think you're cheap if you only tip fifteen percent nowadays, and you just know you're going to be too lazy to do the maths properly so you're just gonna wind up rounding it up to forty dollars, aren't you?

On a recent trip back to Australia I did discover everything was very expensive, but at least you pay the price it says and not a penny (errr, cent) more. No mental arithmetic, no stress.
All these attacks rest on the assumption that Groupon aren't going to change their business model at all. It's seems a near certainty that they're going to move into the dynamic yield management business which is likely to be highly profitable.

For a lot of businesses their excess capacity is a lost cost anyway. They have to pay their staff regardless or not they do work. A customer might cost $X to service, but that completely ignores the fact that the company would have to pay $X even if that customer wasn't there.

Sure Groupon might not be matching that spare inventory to it's deals with great precision at the moment, but it's only going to be a matter of time.

Look for example at GrouponLive, their partnership with Livenation who are the largest entertainment ticketing company in the world. Does anyone seriously think Livenation are having wool pulled over their eyes ? - they know that yield management is important and Groupon are probably going to become the leaders in that space.
Authors don't really have ongoing costs once they get the money though like a restaurant as one example would. Publishers also handle promotion and distribution as well. You can self publish of course but then you don't normally get the same legitimacy, distribution, and other intangible benefits.
Maybe with coding, it's either up or out. Older developers who have better skills most likely enjoy what they are doing and are somewhat good at it. If they weren't, they would have left the profession, maybe to become project managers or some related position. It's not like you're always forced out of your position, it's just that when you look down the road, you can see that if you're not a great coder, it may be best to find something you're better at. A 25 year old coder may still be figuring out if that line of work is sustainable over the course of a career.
Not sure if I entirely agree with this analysis.
There's an element of inventory management which Groupon allows for, which has previously been unheard of for most small businesses.
Maybe if you realize you are definitely getting x number of customers or x number of dollars), you can better manage your cash flow. Take the photo of the receipt provided in the article. A coke costs $2.00, and presumably it's a fountain drink, cause it mentions the refill is free.
We've all been exposed to this, and let's face it, it's a blatant ripoff, but on some level its understandable - it's a way for the restaurant to make some additional cash, perhaps because the traffic is sporadic or perhaps to save up for a rainy day.
But does coke really need to cost $2.00, if you have a better expectation of how much product you are definitely going to sell?

My guess is, probably not.
Since programming is a skill based on the technical information, and since practice/experience is even more important for skill development than for other types of learning, I would expect their abilities to be even better than predicted by a test of their knowledge.
Wake me up when digital displays can match the graphical resolution of the printed page. And when the display is attached to a reader device that will never, ever need to be recharged. And is incredibly lightweight. And gives off the satisfaction of physically flipping through pages.
Introducing Chloe, a realtime web server
Most Internet users afraid privacy won’t exist in 2020
Seems compelling except that I'm wondering how easy it is going to be for the customer.
I don't think a 45-year-old developer has inherently more free time than a 25-year-old. Given that a 45-year-old is more likely to have a family than a 25-year-old, I'd expect them to have less free time.
This analysis is completely wrong because the bell shaped curve is not measuring number of developers. It is measuring number of SO users. There are SO users that are not developers, and a lot of developers that are not SO users, so there is no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers about the general population of developers.
My Trip to WWDC 2011 — Shawn Blanc
Number of developers by age is likely inversely proportional to the growth in the industry. I'd also say people get into development at a later date in their lives - late 20s - because they started doing something else before making the jump - marketers, engineers, painters, physicists.
What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it.

My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes now, but they are still used to thinking that they did it quickly if they finish it in 2 days, so that's how long it takes them to do it.

Also my personal experience is that older developers can't handle the asynchronous nature of modern communications very well. They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things, whereas younger developers will happily be able to switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish compiling/running without problems.
If there are some nice public failures with people complaining I'm sure states will fix that with some legislation.
Also, if you ask me for help, please let me know if I was helpful. While this may seem selfless, I'm actually improving myself by forcing my thoughts on these topics into prose. If they don't make sense or sound like complete bullshit (and I don't know it), this ultimately helps no one.

So. Feedback please. :D
Don't upvote this article. It hasn't addressed LulzSec's claim that they were selling off. It is back up to around $25 again.
Ask HN: How can one study industrial design without attending school?
I am. Refer to twitter.com/ioerror
Survey shows 37 percent of companies using the cloud
Yes I agree completely. The Rabbinate should not have as much power as it does.
Having the right answers counts for a lot. I see a lot of less knowledgeable developers spend a day or two figuring something out that I know off the top of my head. These days, people tend to come by my cube and ask questions before they struggle too long with something, which makes me feel pretty darn good about myself. I've also learned that before I go too far down a rabbit hole in some area I'm shallow in (OS resources, PL/SQL, database performance, webby stuff, the list goes on and on) I should have a conversation with someone who knows what they're talking about.

Age doesn't necessarily have anything to do with knowing the right answers. (My first experience being a greybeard actually came within a few weeks of starting my first job.) Part of it is investing the effort to gain expertise, part of it is being smart and/or lucky about investing your effort in the right areas, and part of it is having the background and aptitude to absorb knowledge. Wherever it comes from, being able to answer questions that stump other developers provides a big gain in productivity, because you spend more time doing work and less time struggling with trivialities. If the ability to answer questions increases with age and quality of work doesn't decline otherwise, then the average value of developers increases with age.

So anyway, my first experience being the greybeard, even though you don't care. I was walking around in the office when someone flagged me down. There were three senior developers standing behind a junior developer, all huddled over staring at his screen. They were trying to figure out a snippet of Java code that looked something like this: set?foo:0

"It must be a valid identifier of some sort or it wouldn't compile." "If it is, where is it defined?" "Question marks and colons aren't allowed in variable names. We checked that three times in the book." "Maybe it invokes an implementation-specific feature in the compiler we're using. Whatever it is, it's some kind of deep magic." "Maybe there's a bug in the compiler and it's treating the question mark as a combination semicolon and comment character." Apparently they had been at this for quite a while and were repeating the same ideas they had had an hour ago. They were scared to just "fix" the code because it had been written by a "really smart guy" who had left the company, so it must be right.

"Sheesh, haven't any of you guys written any C?" I said. Two minutes later I had restored a junior developer and three senior developers back to productive work, saving them God knows how much more wasted time.

That's the value of knowing random things off the top of your head.
Ouch! ;) I'm probably biased but a big part of the value we've received from YC has been from access to alumni -- for example, when going out for our series A Sam was actually the most helpful out of anyone we spoke to, having just gone through the process himself (and done a killer job!). I think the view we can bring as alumni going through later stage startups is that we have immediate relevant operational experience to earlier stage startups.
Outside of, say, medical software, or embedded automotive stuff, can you give me an example of a coding 'habit' which is dangerous?
Also of note, according to the article they spend $2.5 B on developers (ops likely included in that stat).

Another data point to illustrate that to effect total cost of ownership on a given system, focusing on developer productivity can have a greater impact than operational efficiencies.
This sounds like something we already have. I don't want this to sound confrontational, since I know the F-word is viewed as kind of "dirty" around here, but how is what you're proposing substantially different from Flash?
You're correct that the policies are an important piece of information, but where you're mistaken is thinking there's a chance in hell they will be favorable to you. You'll find this to be universally true among companies of this size.

If you have pre-existing IP, there will be a method to document it laid out in the policies. If you develop unrelated IP completely in your spare time and using your own resources while employed there, there may be language in their policies that describe an avenue to lay claim to this IP.
The problem is that many apps are looking at the wrong states when they design their machine.

For instance I worked on an app someone had build in which states were based on a multi-page html form. When I added an android app allowing offline data collection, I then had to hack around the state machine. We couldn't just create a instance of the object with the final data, we had to write code that replicated the submissions of the html form.
Looking to hire? Reddit offers free job ads during June
True and there is also (and I can't think of the name) a psychological principle for this which is how someone will pay money to insure against an event with a negative outcome but not to wager on something. Umm. I think it might be called "Prospect Theory" or some variation like that.
Mashable/Bryan did a nice job on this article, but I wanted to share a few notes on the process:

1) Phone screens: If you aren't referred or we don't really get a good feel from your resume what kind of developer you are, there are preliminary phones screens which can seem...insulting to experienced programmers. Then you get a phone screen with an engineer.

2) On-sites: These are often with people who are -not- on the team you may be joining. We try to avoid team interviews for a number of reasons. But you are likely to talk with 1 or 2 people from a future team .

3) In engineering interviews, you shouldn't see stupid manhole questions. You should see 'how would you do' questions, preferably ones that allow you to talk about how it should be solved, write on the whiteboard code that would solve it, and then what kind of optimizations you would apply to the problem, etc... Through this discussion we can see what kind of developer you are. This should ideally be a discussion among peers about how to approach a programming/Google relevant/computer science problem.

4) Get a reference. Want the best kind? Write open source code that gets used and point it out in your cv/res. That'll lead to Googlers who you can use to put your resume in the system (the best way to go, trust me) A reference that has familiarity with your code and a subsequent link to that code in your cv is gold if you are a decent programmer. I've see people who interview really poorly be saved by their code submissions.

Happy to answer other questions.
This is opposed to the alternative of traditional advertising, where you're losing money on the people who aren't even in your restaurant.

These deals are reasonable to offer if your overhead is more than your incremental costs, for instance. Or if the look of a full restaurant (and thus the vibe) is more important than making money off of those initial customers.

The joke is groupon taking so much for brokering this. Groupon doesn't do anything to warrant $1 per coupon, let alone 1/4 the face value. If it takes off it'll be on ad-driven sites taking no or very little cut, and/or via the restaurants' websites and facebook pages directly.
Monads explained in clear text
Books have been around for far longer than LPs as a format, though.
Imagine a worst case scenario where Groupon files for Chapter 11 and defaults on all outstanding debts to merchants, which by that stage could amount to over a billion dollars (IIRC it's currently $280 million). Imagine that because of that lost revenue many small businesses end up collapsing.

At the same time it becomes more public knowledge that 2010 funding rounds were to buy out early investors, who made out like bandits, and retail investors, pension funds and so on lose a huge stack of money.

Now look at that (admittedly pessimistic) picture and try and tell me there won't at least be calls for "reform".
If you look at original linked doc, you'll see that there are three 68-yr olds, that have on average 19.000+ points. That's why I only used in graphs age groups that have at least 100 developers.
Immeasurable factors fuel measurable results
"A gay girl in Damascus" comes clean; blog turns out to be hoax
With mounting evidence of Groupon's weak financials and long term business sustainability, we should all advocate against investing in Groupon. The better our market segment wisdom, the better for all of us. If we let crap float to the top, then top performing companies will always have their market stigma to overcome. See biotech 2000-2005. Besides Mason has already told us that Groupon is a joke when he told Charlie Rose that Groupon is to tech what Nsync was to pop. High-flying, fast - crashing products poised for brief nostalgia, and obscurity. http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/groupon-mason-charlie-rose/ O

ps. my favorite quote of this emerging IPO debacle has been thus far..

"Groupon's IPO prospectus should raise several red flags in a sensible investor's mind. Factor in Lefkofsky's checkered past, and this IPO is waving more red flags than a May Day parade."

Now that's a great visual.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/10/groupon-eric-lefkofsk...
Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?