skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Groupon stock only has to hold its value long enough for his lockout (usually 6 months) to end. It's usually not hard to do that - when things come crashing down, it's usually a few years in the future, not months.
function call overheard. isset is a builtin.
thanks, i'll try it
This is ridiculous to compare Groupon to mortgage derivatives.

This is what Groupon is guilty of so far:

1. Having such a profitable business model that everyone and their mom has launched a copycat or sub-niche clone in a fairly short time span. (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and countless other small players.)

2. Bowing out of a Google acquisition over regulatory concerns that arguably would have derailed their growth.

3. Re-investing what would have been profits right back in to the business instead of sitting on them.

4. Letting early investors cash out early.

The competition in this space is brutal and the top players have seemingly bottomless pockets . Without an IPO Groupon will fail. With it, they have a chance of being around for a while.

The "quality of deals" issue is separate. Just like a novice advertiser can blow a million dollars on display advertising and have nothing to show for it, the novice business can screw up their Groupon/Living Social/any daily deal site offer. That doesn't mean there is something wrong with the model. This is a two sided equation in a marketplace with incredible consumer demand -- its not a pyramid and with or without Groupon it will be around for a long time.
How much skepticism will need to be raised before investors are deterred from funding "a possible bonanza"?

I also wonder how much Groupon is riding high based on the reasoning, "Well, if _Google_ thought highly enough of it..."

(forgetting that Google was willing to bet on it _on_condition_ that Google had control/oversight of the operation)
Tim Ferris talks about cold showers a lot in his 4 hour body book. Lately i've been 1) avoiding masturbation and 2) taking a hot shower followed immediately by full cold. I feel like I have more energy throughout the day, I'm more aggressive, and more confident. I've also started to eat brazil nuts.

Cold showers (cold in general) stimulate fat loss. I always feel amazing after getting out of the cold too... like the wind was just completely knocked out of me. Almost like a high.

Here are some resource, but again, it's a major theme in the 4-hour body book.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/health-fitness/58335-cold...

http://www.lisajohnsonfitness.com/the-4-hour-body-thoughts-o...
Pretty amazing story!
The sad fact about freedom: In the "real world", you don't have freedom. In academia, you do, but the pressure is such that you never use it...
5 Things You Should Know About Starting a Business and Having a Baby
Are Your Sales Reps Missing Important Sales Opportunities?
People tend only do things like this for people they actually know and not for acquaintances on the 5th or 6th degree of separation. Seriously, this isn't a startup. Its not a business. Its a potentially nifty tool that nobody is going to pay for.
How Do You Know When the Price Is Right?

by Robert. J. Dolan

Published Sep 01, 1995

http://hbr.org/product/how-do-you-know-when-the-price-is-rig...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005RZ5D/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

I said it was old...but still relevant!
I think you're making an assumption that Apple and MS don't track your click habits, as you put it, in addition to charging you for it. Is there really a guarantee from Apple/MS that once you stop paying them they won't keep your data?

At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.
What about hair?
ICE invites European countries to start seizing domains as well
50 Ways To Love Your Startup
Might be not completely offtopic if I asked here: is there some reason array, resource and object were never folded into one type (object)? It seems like array and resource are kept separate just because it's done this way internally (with array and resource super classes). Why can't resources or array be native-code-backed objects like some modules in python?

It seems like many special cases were left over from old versions and the inertia prevents any change.
"Salespeople produce income, everyone else cost money. I was very reluctant to hire anyone that cost money, she says. I was always happy to spend money that would produce more money for the firm."

As a programmer, I feel so awesome whenever a real estate agent or equity trader or department director or whoever makes a comment like this.</sarcasm> Comments like this make me want to scream and let them know that we all keep things running smoothly. She's lucky she didn't have any turnover; higher-ups with these kinds of attitudes don't keep worthwhile people for long.

Also, pedantic journalism fail: 9/11 happened on a Tuesday, not a Monday.
Why everyone seems to be wanting to use INFERIOR tools in the tech world baffles me. Why in the world would you ever want to do development on the web? You have no control over your development environment. Its almost as bad as the iPad needing a special case so that it can have the same ergonomics as a laptop.
I was being a bit facetious, yes. But voting electronically would solve this problem, assuming that you could trust the voting software!

Public terminals could be provided for citizens without computers/smart phones/netbooks/tablets/implants/whatever.
Facebook has youngest staff among top tech firms
In some cases it's a performance thing. Instead of deleting the entire table with user X's info, they just flip a value in the deleted/disabled table column. If they really want to delete it they can run a batch job later.

Then again, it might have as much to do with reactivating accounts as it does with server performance.
Rocking your Hustle and Customer Service LaunchRock style
By boat.
The age and gender ratios in the article is interesting information.

It is impressive that Facebook has managed to achieve a 33% female staff ratio. While this is still not 50-50, it is a very healthy step.

The payscale seems comically non-sensical to me. They don't consider options. But even disregarding options, I have a hard time believing that a developer at Apple gets paid under 60K. Perhaps, it is other staff that is bringing down the median. But I still am having a hard time figuring this out.
If the pencil tip broke while writing in space, it could easily mess up astronauts nostrils, instrument panels etc.
The pen approach takes care of corner cases.
Golden Marketing Rule: He Who Can, Teaches
I think that non-wage labour costs can be an important factor. I think they are quite high across Europe. Could anyone tell the numbers for Italy? (for example: in Poland a net wage of 2700 PLN (~ $1000) is a gross wage of 4500 PLN (~ $1650)).
You completely missed my point, which was that the ability to make money is not, in and of itself, the only measure of success as an entrepreneur.
NY Times & LA Times warn Protect IP could break the Internet
I think life is very much like a prisoner's dilemma. Yes, it would suck if everyone did it, but since not everyone does.. you might as well do it for your own personal gain.
Upvoted, if only for mentiong Terence McKenna.

That man was such a great thinker and ponderer (not to mention his huge vocabulary!)

Even though I don't agree with him on every idea, boy, do I wish there were more extremely out of the box thinkers like him around. :)
Bre on The Colbert Report
this book is the yin to neuromancers yang. instead of predicting the net it predicts how networks change our thoughts. i can't recommend this enough.
Except for the physical scarring and potential for infection.
These two books will be pure candy for anyone who reads this site:

Daemon
Freedom T.M.

Daniel Suarez
I agree completely. People forget about Apple's failures very quickly and continuously bring up Google's for some reason. Apple makes a lot of great products but they have as many duds as everyone. In the last year and half they've had at least 3 off the top of my head: Ping, GameCenter, and iBookstore. iBookstore isn't a total failure but it's not most users first, second, and sometimes even third choice. It was widely speculated to be a Kindle killer, but that hasn't been the case at all.

I'd also point out that Apple is entering a market that it has traditionally not done well in and is pushing an unnatural definition of cloud that consumers will be forced to either accept or reject.
A quick search reveals this post:

http://jan.kneschke.de/2008/9/9/async-mysql-queries-with-c-a...

with a little more in-depth exploration of the MySQL async API. The problem seems to be that that (undocumented) API does not handle EAGAIN and that there's no way to connect asynchronously (mysql_connnect always blocks).

Compare with PostgreSQL, which has had an async API for a long time:

http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/libpq-async....

and for which I wrote a Twisted library that does fully asynchronous connection building and query execution: https://github.com/wulczer/txpostgres.

Since the asynchronous API is exposed in psycopg2, the Python connector library, it should be trivial to hook it up to Tornado as well.
Apple files motion to intervene in Lodsys patent lawsuit
Just so you know, in SF that money will buy you a dingy room in an average area with roommates.
recursive fib, memoized fib, or O(1) fib?

Also, given that apache should run indefinitely, I would think the preferred result would be that fib is infinitely faster.
Archive of Palin emails is rolling out now (1,732 pages now on line)
Seriously awesome name.
I understand the æsthetic decision, but there is no reason why Apple couldn't have made the wire that runs from the brick to your laptop detachable. That way I could actually replace it for a reasonable amount.
You're doing a reverse of the James Bond shower, which has you start warm and then turn to cold at the end.
It's become more and more important for me personally to be google free over the last couple years, and I largely am, but DuckDuckGo only gets me about 80% on getting free of relying on their search, which is my main paranoiac worry.

The problem with getting off of Google search is that it is such an excellent product. When I want to dig hard, I can't help but go back.
Correct me if I'm wrong, at that distance isn't it possible to get some unreliable data.

The discovery is huge, but I'm just wondering
I feel the explanation could fit in the headline.
See the simplest QR-code with landing page maker: http://qr.linkstore.ru Just a plain copy-paste
Journey begins with Android via Hello Android App
I was thinking the physical token would have had a USB connector that you actually had to plugin to use it.
I used rapportive for a while months ago, but in my experience it slowed down gmail. I like the idea, but it needs to be lightening fast, or just load leisurely once gmail is up and running.
If you have read Steve Blank's(?) book regarding customer development, he has a portion on dividing up equity.

It may piss you off even more to hear that he says (roughly): give the technical guy as little as possible.
Improving performance is our number one priority at the moment. We aim not to slow down Gmail at all. Hope you'll give us a try again soon!
Contact Us - Sagar Cricket Club
I take lukewarm to cold showers often, half personal preference and half dermatologist-recommended. Hot water dries out skin pretty quickly and I end up with red, raised itchy skin over large parts of my body before I'm even done with my ~10 minute shower.

But I doubt that's why a lot of people are taking cold showers :)
Keep in mind what year it was.
Of course, Sharepoint was released a decade before Dropbox.

And Hotmail a decade before Gmail. (nearly.)

And the web versions of Office are certainly more functional (tho arguably less usable) than Gdocs -- especially when Office Live launched and you still, at the time, couldn't do Find and Replace in a Google Document without seeing several "EXPERIMENTAL!" warnings all over it.

And something the GP didn't mention, but that can be added to his list, is that Microsoft invented ajax when it released the XHR object feature to enable web-based outlook.

Though, sure, Ajax-like behavior was possible (tho not popular and very clunky -- i know first hand) using iFrames. But come to think of it, I think Microsoft invented iFrames, too...
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree completely; history is both what actually happened in the past, and the narrative that we construct for ourselves from those events.

What scares me about postmodernism is that many of its adherents seem to reject the idea of objective truth completely. That way madness lies.
How can I learn how to test like Apple does? I feel like I don't know where to look for good resources on thorough website testing.
Looks like a good introduction so far. Very clear examples. I have studied quantum computing a little and I need to refresh .
I think the term "leaders" is used very loosely here since last I checked they weren't an organisation with "leaders"

I think they're trying to put the blame on anonymous. They found this and thought, we'll blame it on them:

"police found a large quantity of software programs specifically designed to infect third-party computers. The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."
Bigger Genome Projects Undertaken
Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates
The problem is that a "flat screen running windows with a pen" was the pinacle of what could be brought to market at that time by anyone. Microsoft tried.
https://bitoption.org/
The Breakfast Food Cooker
Damn... If I need to replace another power brick from Apple...
The WSJ's paywall can be broken because they don't want to engage in cloaking and risk the wrath of Google, et al.

So, if this extension is ethically wrong, is it also ethically wrong to Google the title of the article and click on the Google result, thus subverting the paywall?

If the WSJ wants to really charge, that's their prerogative -- but that means no Google News or no search hits bringing people in. If they want to get more eyes on their articles, that means some people are going to get in without paying.

This is just a case of a company trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Just curious: am I being voted down for suggesting that a society use electronic voting? If so, oh, the irony!
But how much will forcing those infrastructure and cultural and societal changes cost NOW, versus letting them happen naturally and gradually the same way we switched from wood to coal to petroleum and from muscle to steam to electricity?

Extremely simple illustration: Do you think people in Florida will be living 10 feet under water in 100 years? No, they will move before then. But they don't have to move now, so why force them?

Similarly, do you think we'll all be driving gas-guzzling SUVs in 100 years? Hell no. Oil just won't last that long, and our car culture will have died or switched to electric (or nuclear, or secret ooze) long before then anyway.

So why force the issue? I guess I'm just not seeing the urgency here. And whatever urgency there is, doesn't seem to be fixable in the short term. Ocean levels will rise. They already have. So let's focus on mitigation rather than the already failed task of prevention.
Its often called a staging environment. Everything is the same as production, except those things that simply cannot be the same, as you pointed out.
He's not writing it for technical people.
It appears that you are strongly implying that I am part of a conspiracy. Can you outline in more detail this conspiracy that you believe I am involved in?
Two other places where aesthetic form trumps function in Apple keyboards and Macbooks: (1) arrow keys are much narrower (especially on the 11-inch Macbook Air) than on most notebooks (probably because unlike most notebook makers, Apple decided against breaking the "clean line" along the edge of the keyboard closest to the typist). (2) the axis on which the two halves of the "clamshell" (the bottom half and the screen half) turn is in a different place than on most notebooks. In particular, on a Macbook, the axis is between the top and bottom surfaces of the bottom half of the clamshell whereas on most notebooks it is about .3 inches (whatever is just enough to allow the two halves to fold all the way together) above the top surface of the bottom half (and more or less in line with the plane of the screen whereas on Macbooks it is about .3 inches from this plane). The probable reason for this choice is that it gives Macbooks a distinctive look even though the way the other makers do it seems more practical to me (because the notebook is more secure when it is not resting on a flat horizontal surface and because the probability of disaster is lower if the notebook is open on the floor and someone catches the screen half with their foot). Since I do not have the patience to create diagrams, I will stop here even though I realize many readers probably did not get what I mean from just this textual description.
Posterous, From SaaS to PaaS Using an API
Why isn't the iPod/iPhone/iPad connector using the magsafe design?
> I can't see a case where I'd be recompiling C code every time I want to run something.

How about when you're writing a program in C?
But the Italians say Si non è vero, è ben trovato.

I've read a book from a former astronaut though, that tend to prove there's some truth to the legend; it was about the vacuum cleaner used in Mir. The NASA devised a sophisticated way to clean up the Space Shuttle; the Russians simply used an ordinary vacuum cleaner from the nearest supermarket.
June 2011 Philly Tech Meetup
I just want to nit pick you for one minute:

"Sharepoint <-> DropBox / Google {Docs|Groups}"

There is no comparison: Sharepoint is not a me too product. SharePoint was Microsoft's fastest Billion, yes Billion, dollar product. For you to throw that in is not logical.
Golang: It's Not Just For Google
Italy's economy is a hard economy to judge because of an out-sized black market (to the tune of 30% - 40% gdp), any article of Italian economic statistics needs to a least mention this.

http://italianthro.blogspot.com/2010/09/southern-italys-econ...
The patent in question[1] is far from a clear case of infringement. The closest thing is Apple's app-rating system. And even in that case, there are clear cases where the patent's claims do not hold water (Claims #5, #6, etc)

That said, I'm glad Apple is moving in. There's no way a small indie developer can even begin to mount a defense.

[1] (http://www.google.com/patents/about/7222078_Methods_and_syst...)
Design isn't just about aesthetics, its about balancing aesthetics AND functionality. Apple's designers certainly knows this.

This was a poor design choice on their part, not just the design department taking precedent over engineering and customer service. The designers are personally responsible, not just the structure
>I understand the aesthetic decision, but there is no reason why Apple couldn't have made the wire that runs from the brick to your laptop detachable.

A detachable wire would violate Apple's aesthetic; thus, you can't detach it. You answer your own question.

Does Apple not replace that for free like they do the iPhone/iPod chargers?
It is interesting to those of us who have been using computers for over a decade. There was a time when a great many things required Windows.
Show HN: A CakePHP component to send through PostageApp
Hey HN,

This was an off-hours work project for me. I am not a developer by any means necessary but I made it a mission to learn at least enough code to be able to read and understand the work my developers create.

We're mostly a Ruby on Rails shop, but I come from a very light PHP background and wanted to pick it up again just as a starting point. After a few weeks of looking at CakePHP (and learning MVC!) I ended up with this: a CakePHP component that allows you to send emails through PostageApp. (http://postageapp.com)

https://github.com/postageapp/postageapp-cakephp

The process was pretty simple: take a look at EmailComponent, the built-in email sender for CakePHP and strip out everything that was unnecessary, create a hash that gets encoded into JSON and passed off into the PostageApp API, and test the crap out of it.

It was a great learning experience, and I am now looking to other platforms (Right now, Node.JS and Backbone.JS) to build more plugins for and learn a lot more.

Would love some feedback and/or code critique! Thanks HN!

(Full Disclosure: I'm the Product Manager for PostageApp!)
All of your Lightsaber problems solved
Red Hat's Oracle shot: The Unbreakable Database?
Clickable:

https://github.com/postageapp/postageapp-cakephp

http://postageapp.com

Blog Post:

http://blog.postageapp.com/2011/06/have-our-cake-and-eat-it-...
"tl;dr: Apple is run by idiots." - Reddit comment

This is why I much prefer HN for any technical discussion.
Agreed. Once a civilization has acquired enough resources that interstellar travel is feasible, the reasons for doing so become less compelling.
Also "From the makers of Internet Explorer" doesn't exactly have a nice ring to it. Microsoft has a bad track record in exactly the areas that "the cloud" is supposed to fix (security, stability, backups, crash-free, virus-free, maintenance-free, "it just works"). Their PR team has a big job ahead of them.
So Engineering should come up with a solution that isn't ugly. Problem solved.
As someone who has taken many, many, many cold showers in Iraq and other unpleasant locales, if your character is so underdeveloped that taking a cold shower builds it up, you should be taking bigger strides.

Edit: point being, cold showers are such an unbelievably mild form of suffering that suggesting they're "character builders" is painfully pretentious. Surprised this blogger of all people wrote this. He knows suffering.
On Students Who Are Full of It
Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to me.

I can understand why some people might not think that way but don't be surprised that there are some people who do.
This. Over the past five years I have had to replace four Apple power adapters. Two caught on fire, one just stopped working, and one only worked when I duct taped it to death. They replaced all but one under warranty. But when I asked the Apple Genius in SoHo if this "whole catching on fire thing" happened often, he didn't say no. He just told me he wasn't allowed to answer that.
Or considering how Facebook could basically annihilate Groupon in the blink of an eye if it ever decided to get into that business model. Not only are Groupon's financials highly questionable, but its position is practically indefensible and does not contain any real "switching costs" to keep users locked in or loyal.
Whatever happened to 'No politics' here?
Fair enough, though I'm rarely obsessed with the absolute speed of code while developing. Tools like clang have brought this experience a long way as well.
Surely the mag-safe cables shouldn't get so damaged, because the cable detaches from the laptop under significant strain?

In terms of mag-safe on iOS devices, I guess it's not feasible due to it transmitting data.
That raises a really interesting point: what constitutes a "startup"? Does it have to be product based?
What is the value of Compass for Rails 3.1?