skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An old but descriptive article about them in Financial Post :
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1554656
"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..."

Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work.

College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless.

The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
I agree. It's just fundamentals. There's no such thing as a free lunch. No company can offer 50% coupons again and again, and be profitable, so the number of repeat merchants will go down, and Groupon will have to continue spending more to get more dumb merchants.

The customers are all looking for deals, they're not loyal. Plus more and more will get sick of the deals being targeted towards them.

In the end, Groupon is like a Ponzi scheme in that it will need to trick more new merchants to join in as old merchants drop out, and it will need to continue paying a premium to attract more consumers as the existing ones drop out. Compare that to companies like Amazon, and Google where ppl will never get tired of shopping online, or searching online.
College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)

Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.

Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing.

And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.

19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
At first glance, this looks about 100x better than jobvite.
Doesn't a CRM sort of satisfy that need? Lot of people use them for lead management.
When I invest, I have some expectations as to how that money should be invested

More than that, you have a prospectus (or term sheet) that will specify those kinds of things. In this case, the Series G investors knew exactly where the money was going, and they were ok with that.

As for the public getting scammed, the SEC has a metric buttload of regulations aimed at seeing that that doesn't happen.
Thanks. The WordPress install is just an example. It can be configured to install any application fairly quickly.
Maybe he should check himself into Northeastern University. It was almost every course that started off teaming oneself up and heading right into the project work as a team. Loners were discouraged from venturing off.
But this isn't a time when "no one else is" investing in Groupon --- it's a time when a whole lot of major players have, evidently betting on the willingness of a deal-happy general public to buy even more when they can. If they don't, the wolf will be at the door in a hurry.

Which, by the way, is in marked contrast to the kind of negative buzz Google had at the time of their IPO. There were legitimate doubts about the sustainability of their business model, in part because they were deliberately concealing the size of their profits as long as they could to avoid attracting competition. (See Levy, "In the Plex".) But at the time they went public, they were making money, in much larger amounts than anybody outside the company had realized.

As to Groupon: if dhh is reading the balance sheet right, they need the proceeds of the IPO just to keep the company going, unless something very dramatic happens soon. They have only two quarters' worth of cash on hand at the current burn rate. The $750 million from the IPO will extend that by about two years (if the burn rate doesn't go up!). But if you invest, then you're counting on management to pull a not-yet-evident rabbit out of a hat within that time. And you're expecting that from a management team that put most of the roughly $1 billion that they raised off private markets in the last two rounds in their own private pockets (they sold founder shares to the VCs), leaving only $150 million available to the business itself as working capital.

Good luck!
You won't see me saying that I think Groupon is a great value or anything, but I think that you have to acknowledge the difference between the people Groupon is reaching and the people FB or Google is reaching: Groupon's audience is people who are actively looking to spend money, whereas most of the people who see Google or FBs ads are doing something else entirely (and would probably not notice if they just went away).
Javascript objects/components repository
What are you talking about!?

Firstly, ARM11 is an instruction set and not a processor in itself. Secondly, Mvidia Tegra[1] is an ARM11 processor and the Qualcomm MSM7201A which LuaJIT targets seems to be Qualcomm's current generation of mobile chipsets[2].

Doesn't sound ancient to me at all. Sounds pretty current actually. Sure, I'd like an ARM7 version of LuaJIT (specifically, for Cortex-A9 MPCore), but this is still an interesting start. Also, now that theres an ARM11 port, its not too far of a stretch to think that ARM7 might follow sometime in the nearish future.

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

[2] http://www.qualcomm.com/products_services/chipsets/mobile_pr...
They are also spending a lot on acquiring other daily deal sites around the globe.

Everything they have done so far indicates great competence in what they are doing. There are numerous companies that have blown hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and ended up with a tiny user base (I can think of a particular MVNO a few years back.) Then you have failed acquisitions such as Cisco buying Flip, where the buyer ends up shutting the company down.

Neither Groupon's customer or business acquisition strategy is a coin flip. They know very well what these users and business's are worth and they have all of the tools in place to monetize them.

Without an extremely aggressive and hyper growth strategy, Groupon stands little chance against Google or Facebook. If they wanted a path on easy street, the original investors could have sat around pocketing millions of dollars a month for years. Once Groupon decided to go big or go bust their profile was raised to the point that ceased to be an option.

The real wild cards here are not so much what Google and Facebook do but rather what the business clients do. There is a very fine balance between delivering great value to both sides of the equation. Tipping too far in one direction destroys their brand. I've heard plenty of complaints from users about the quality of Groupon's deal offerings.

If Groupon can continue to demonstrate an ability to successfully overcome these challenges while staying a step ahead of Google and Facebook, they might be around for a while.

Will they deliver fantastic returns for shareholders at a mature $20 billion valuation over the long term? That is a completely different question, but if you think that an answer of no equates Groupon with a ponzi scheme, all financial markets are ponzi schemes.
This is wonderful, but I wish I knew about it long before June 3rd. When was it announced?

I will try to make a commitment to enter regardless, time permitting.
"You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization."

Particularly math classes. Memorization was almost meaningless and tests could be open book for all the prof cared.
Dreamhost and other providers DO have simple installers for things like WordPress. Most good providers do. If people are using these hosts, they won't need your tool.

Honestly I'd be worried if I saw somebody using a tool like this to install WordPress. Too much potential for abuse.

It's not that I don't trust you, but I don't trust the other nefarious guy who will build SEO and setup a site to install corrupted versions of WordPress for people.
>But the value of a stock is not based purely upon the speculative market that might exist around it - at its root, it has an underlying fundamental value that is not driven by market demand.

Market demand for the instrument, that is, right? :)

I don't know -- I see a difference here, but it looks only nominal.

If I purchase shares in a privately-held small business that hits tough times, my claim on the output of that company can essentially evaporate -- they won't be paying dividends as no profit exists, I might not be able to sell the stock because no market exists for it, and once the company goes belly-up they pay the bank and lenders before shareholders get anything.

I'm sure a difference exists; I'm no serious investor, so it's easy for me to not see it.
Jason, since you are here - may be its a good idea to tell the crowd why you decided to sell some of your shares of Groupon,

as some papers seem to indicate
Safari [reader] button (or readability bookmarklet) fixes this (as well as many other reader-unfriendly pages).
Yeah, but being able to disable syncing was enough. I left my job on Wednesday and needed to be able to kill the dropbox directory on my desktop without it affecting my home machine. The unlink feature worked perfectly. Thanks!
Not much really, especially if you limit the XAML to basic layouts. If you do everything in C#, it's not too much different from something like, say, WinForms. Which is why people like it.
LG Revolution
While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself.

Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.

Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.

Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
Yeah, but he is part of the Thiel Fellowship, which I tend to see as a pretty damn smart group of young people. And I know Dale and know that he talks to these "moving forward" type of teens.

On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.
Toshiba Thrive
This comment makes no sense to me. "I know you're not supposed to do this, BUT I'M GOING TO DO IT ANYWAY BECAUSE FUCK PATENTS." The title of a patent is irrelevant to what it covers. Read the claims.
Has there been any research done on programming language readability for non-programmers? I think that that would be extremely interesting.
An Owner's Title Insurance Policy Offers You More Protection
Because it is just one of trillions of spinning rocks, subject to the same concerns than any particular grain of sand on any given beach would be.

If we want our species to survive, we need to be more than occupiers of a single grain of sand.

As to the first point, I think the poster was meaning that the stars' movement is not the main cause of the nightly patterns across the sky, the earth's movement is.
as some papers seem to indicate - the guy sold some part of his Groupon shares during or before IPO,

so it fits his filosphy well - seems like he wants to get out of it slowly and profitably ..
LuaJIT/ARM runs fine on an Cortex-A8 or Cortex-A9. The instruction scheduling for the simpler in-order architectures is beneficial for the newer architectures or for out-of-order architectures, too.

And even though it needs at minimum ARMv5, it does take advantage of some ARMv6 and ARMv7 instructions, if available. But this has a rather small impact on the performance.

The only real issue is that this is a soft-float port for now. So it doesn't take advantage of VFP, even if the CPU has it. I'll add hardware floating-point support, when/if I get a follow-up sponsorship for this.
Why is everybody using Facebook, is it good marketing or good usability?
You've never taken apart a PowerMac G5. It was simply elegant for it's time... the innards are more beautiful than the exterior.

Apple is famous for lots of serious attention to detail that involve not just visual/glitz but usability.

Design is definitely the correct word.
Agreed that it could be messy. Another alternative: Apple could buy it and license it back to you: $1 for 100 year license...buy/leaseback is a reasonably common thing for all kinds of assets. I don't see that it would be necessary to give up any functional rights that you aren't already giving up by agreeing to Apple's current app terms.
You need an invitation to get in.
The difference though is if the intent is for the markup to be styled, it will be written differently.

For example, take a look at the WPF built-in controls. Those are written in very clean XAML. Easy to read, style, and modify. I'm sure they could have made it difficult, but their intent was that you'd modify the built-in controls.

If they want to do this with the UI, they could do it. The theming you could do with this could be incredible.

I doubt this is something they're going to do for V1 (if ever), but I can dream.
The python parts seemed OK. But the data flow diagram in the OP at:

http://jimmyg.org/blog/2009/working-with-python-subprocess.h...

(I.e., the first blue box in the article, "what happens when you execute a command")

is wrong. It implies that the command (ls -l) is read by the terminal emulator, which gives it to bash, which gives it to the kernel.

This is wrong in several ways. The terminal emulator starts bash (or whatever shell) and it is bash that directly reads the string "ls -l", figures out what it means, finds the ls program in PATH, and runs the ls binary. It is ls that calls kernel functions when it's doing its job.

And of course, the kernel is not really of importance here. The selected command does whatever it does, which might not even access the kernel ("Hello, world").

And bash can and sometimes does directly call kernel functions without an intermediate binary (e.g., unlink(2) to overwrite a file for output redirection).
Dropbox: The consequences of forever
Oh... oh my. I never realized that higher arity blocks worked with that syntax. Thanks for that one.
No actual response from Jobs. Rather, an article speculating about one.
As kenjackson notes below, college-age students typically have everything figured out. As a sort of hangover from the teenage years, the world is astonishingly simple (the story of Asteroid Boy comes to mind) and traditional institutions are worthless. As a "smart" kid, I suffered from this myself.

The problem with the UnCollege movement is that it might disqualify a lot of smart students from graduate study, which IMO is where the teenage hubris starts melting away. Spend a few years in a PhD program, and even if you don't finish, you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you imagined, and there is a lot of advanced knowledge out there that requires a period of dedicated study with a mentor. You might not need graduate school for it, but it's a structured environment for those who aren't fortunate enough to be adopted by a VC.
Why do you think that anything "local" in general is a money/energy drain?
The Characters of Silicon Valley (Startup)
You've missed the point here, think framework-agnostic web server interface (like WSGI or Rack) rather than web framework (like Django or Rails).

The Weblocks developers could use Clack to interface to web servers like Nginx or Apache rather than maintain their own web server interfaces.
It may be shameless promotion, but the fact is, he managed to get a platform (CNN) on which to do it. One could argue that he's off to a good start.
"I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class."

Not to be mean, but that might be a problem with your college rather than colleges in general.
Beware Groupthink on Groupon
At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the internal drive to make the most of your opportunity.

It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
The sad thing is that with Google's backing, they would have had immense resources to eat FourSquare, LivingSocial, and Facebook's lunch for these kind of local advertisements.

To me, Groupon's leadership were idiots for passing up the Google $6B buyout... and it will be readily apparent to everyone in a few months.
I believe that's normally implemented as middleware on top of Rack et al.

I assume it's expected that the same strategy would be used here.
This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even the first in the last 24 hours.

What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless.

This isn't good logic, much less good advice.
I am not worried about the Investors who led the G round being scammed out of anything. They knew what they were getting in to. I was pointing out how irresponsible this move was, on the part of the Groupon team to allow this to happen. One one side, you have a company bleeding money aching for growth and spending over 200 million just in Ads and over 320 million in salaries to their 8000 sales staff. And you choose to cash out instead of plowing it in to maybe eking out a better profit margin than last year? They are not even trying, for Christ's sake!

And I dont have to look that far back to see how effective the SEC has been, with their metric ton buttload of regulations. You dont live in the US, do you?
Sony hacked yet again, plaintext passwords, e-mails, DOB posted
I don't know Dale, but reading that article leads me to different conclusions about him than you probably already have. :-)

I will say this for starters. I thought that college was actually one of the most open environments I've ever been in. Moreso than pre-college education. Moreso than working at a VC-backed startups. Moreso than working in corporate America. Probably the only time I had significantly more freedom was taking some time off between jobs.

When I see statements like, "Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity" -- I see immaturity. He punishes himself for failure. I've seen it as a learning opportunity since junior high at least (I think this something athletics really instils in children, although certainly not exclusive to athletics).

In any case, he sounds like a friend, and I don't want to rant on a friend, especially if he's not here to defend himself. I look forward to what he can do over the years. Maybe he'll prove me wrong.
> most of them complaining have used HTML/JS

Using HTML/JS in Internet Explorer is very different from developing on a platform where HTML/JS application development is fully supported. I have been playing for some time with WebOS development and I am quite happy with it.

Anyway, I seriously doubt .NET will be deprecated anytime soon.
I wish I could find a link but,US military spec for secure passwords is 14 characters with capitals and special chars. And they have to be changed every 30 days.
His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to school for:

Computer Sciences, absolutely.
Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure.
Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it.
Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study

None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting.

Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
VoiceXML and CCXML are suited for most telephony apps. We've seen conference calling, dating, virtual Number services, notifications, and lots more on XML telephony platforms. Twilio and Tropo Apis are each subsets of what Vxml & CCXML are.

Vxml and CCXML are more complex, sure. And for that reason they may not be suited for the same developers targeted by cloud Apis.

Prism, the app server platform Tropo.com runs on, is not open source. But because Tropo core is written to the JSR call control and media server standards, Tropo will run in any server that implements those. Mobicents and Sailfin are two open source options.
The instruction sets have a v in them, like ARMv5, ARMv6, etc. The latest version is ARMv7. ARM11 is a core, and has since been obsoleted by the Cortex A8 which has been obsoleted by the Cortex A9 (e.g. Tegra 2 uses Cortex A9).

The MSM7201A is anything but current; it was used in the T-Mobile G1 from 2008.
In my case, my business partner was my college roommate. We also have made a lot of contacts through school that continue to benefit us. Your classes are not the only thing about school that will help you in the future. Like I said in a previous post, college is what you make of it.
Yes, the 34-character is English text.
why is it illegal to gamble online and legal in physical world ?
in 30 years, we'll be "remember the UnCollege movement? yeah, we really wanted to change the world at that time".

definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.
There's a gpl implementation of an audio information retrieval approach here: http://code.google.comp/audioscout/
I would agree, but I think we are all on the same page on this subject (with Dale, that is). At least, he touches on the fact that students on the med track shouldn't really take the UnCollege route since there is intrinsic knowledge you pretty much need to be an active participant in the medical community in whatever capacity. (Around the end of the article.)

But yes, if you're saying that doing more education opens you up to more than just knowledge, but a realization that stuff is really a lot harder than you thought, definitely ++ on that.

Of course, there are things which are better suited for jumping right in—I'm thinking areas of work where experience can teach more than learning, like startups. But I'm biased.

In any case, I think with every article that's sensationalized like this, we can all agree that the headline sucks.
Node.js PaaS Nodejitsu Open-Sources Several Tools