skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's insane not to see that marketing expenses will drop and that they can be comfortably profitable.

Look, projections based on assumptions are part of the investing game. And while I appreciate your enthusiasm, the likelihood that you are correct is not the point.

The point is, there is already an existing method of disclosing assumptions and projections for the future, it's called a pro-forma financial statement. Groupon can simply state their assumptions for when their customer acquisition expenses will go away and give us their projection for what they think their financials will look like at that point in time. In the time-honored format that has served many companies before them.

Giving us a new number for what their business looks like now is ridiculous, because there already is a standard way to share their hopes and dreams of what their company will look like in the future. And that has nothing to do with what you or I might think of their assumptions about what might happen in the future.
I used to perl but now I python :)
Both of these are designed terribly. It's hard to believe this came out of Apple.
Body hacking refers to the use of programs and gadgets to aid in your diet and exercise. Some people call it the quantified self - http://quantifiedself.com/
% git push
fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got '

Yes, this is an actual "helpful" error message.
The articles linked to in the OP (both of which have been discussed on HN before) provide a lot more detail.

To answer your specific question, Srivastava called the provincial lottery agency (iirc - it was Canadian) and asked 1) Would they send him a large number of tickets to use for a promotion / fundraiser, and 2) Would they "buy back" at face value any unused tickets. They said they would gladly do both - meaning he could examine before scratching, return unscratched, and also avoid lining up at the drug store to buy 10,000 tic-tac-toe tickets at once!

Edit: Previous discussions

Srivastava - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166555
Cash WinFall - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828122
Astro Teller (Director of New Projects at Google) on Innovation
What I am missing is why Sony and Ericsson, who jointly develop android based phones, would not partner up with Google and rather partner up with their competition (apple et al).

My suspicion is that SE actually need the patents in order to continue produce devices. Whereas Google can take the money/time they were prepared to invest and clean up the code removing infringing components for the Icecream sandwich release.

Thats ignoring the "lets play patent monopoly" and just focusing on the core products being produced. Code and Handsets.
Macs in the age of advanced persistent threats
This presentation from Black Hat compares Window7 against OSX and reveals where Macs are more vulnerable than Windows7 PCs. The good news is that Lion has addressed some of the problems. The authors encourage Apple to add additional measures. Consider the exposure to network exploits discussed here, especially those resulting from leaving certain service configuration set to their defaults.
I thought this was an excellent read and thought I'd pass it on.
Indeed, the patents used for defense have to be different from the patents you are attacked with. Sharing patents means they can't attack you with those, but if they have a lot more other patents, you still aren't protected.
Oracle: Java's worst enemy
Coffee is for closers - And other nonsensical sales management BS
American conservatism is a machine for driving a wedge between the people who are trying to save this society ("liberal intellectuals", although neither word should be pejorative) and the common people of the country they are trying to save.

Who are you including under the term "liberal intellectual"? Are you including folks like Martin Feldstein (Harvard), Larry Summers (ex Harvard), Robert Rubin (Harvard BoD) and Robert Schiller (Yale)? If so, I'd argue those academia-associated liberals are every bit part of the problem. Even further-to-the-left intellectuals like Krugman have their salaries mainly funded by donations from wealthy bankers, and they offered very little criticism of the financial sector before 2008.
How do you have one of these at home? I was under the impression that they haven't even started production yet.
Nokia is way too big compared to the Finnish state to be bailed out by the government anyway. Nevertheless, Nokia gets Finland's biggest subsidies anyway for R&D and such.
You're highlighting the difference between "in principle" and "in practice". Probably all these companies think that in principle the patent system is screwed up; they spend BILLIONS of dollars buying and litigating patents, and most likely every single one of these companies would rather spend the cash on R&D or something more useful. However, in practice a company that does this is going to suffer, and suffer badly.

The complaint against Google is their whining. Yes, they don't like the patent system. Yes, they also aggressively bid pi billion to increase their patent portfolio. However, complaining afterwards that the problem is with the "other guys" is just stupid. Complain about the system, OK; it's a messed up system, we all know that. Complain about the other guy, when you were just doing the exact same thing a minute ago, now you're just a whiner, and you should grow up.
Wave was like that. :-)
You can definitely find smaller CFLs. My house is old and has a lot of places where there used to be gas lamps and instead tiny electric lamps have been put in, so I have several 8, 10, and 13 watt CFLs in my house. I think I got almost all of them at either Lowes or Costco.

Here is a GE one:
http://www.amazon.com/Lighting-Compfluo-85382-Compact-Fluore...

Though of all the ones I tested the Sylvania seem to have the most pleasant color temperature, and online I can only find their 13W ones.
I just checked to make sure, it does. I think it's had it for years, too.
I would tend to agree, and that's why we're in the middle of a site-wide redesign. Check back in a few weeks. Thanks for the feedback.
The cost is what is prohibitive for many developers, which is why web apps are easier. I don't have to buy a Mac to make them, and any body can use them no matter what platform. I used to write Mac applications back in the day, but all my friends and relatives who didn't use Mac OS couldn't use them, I switched to web apps and yes I lost a lot of features, but I am reaching a wider audience. Have any IOS developers tried to port their app to Android? just for the challenge.
Previously (with discussion): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824780
This post does not belong here. Please remove the post.
You can (could?) do it with ICQ, it had an option.
IPhone App that Scans Skin for Cancer (Skin Scan)
How Microsoft makes money from Android
IRC is listed as a supported protocol on the front page of http://www.pidgin.im/
Why do they run javascript on the UI thread?!
are you going to tell us how much you make on affiliate sales?
If they're in the US they probably have access to a HE feed. That's $1/mbit. You'll probably get higher quality transit for < $20/mbit. That's stupidly cheap compared to ec2 prices.
OS X Lion: Organizing Messages in Apple Mail | TMO Quick Tip | The Mac Observer
You can do it in Lisp... even in a long-polling application you can change a class definition and all instances are immediately updated without restarting the image or anything.
The only part of Twitter's native apps for iOS that use a UIWebview are when rendering a single tweet since in that specific use case, it's simpler and faster to render links that way rather than deal with rendering it via Core Text. Every other screen in the app is natively drawn. I don't think Twitter's app is a particularly good example.

> "elite-ios-wiling-to-pay" customers are indifference about it

They are? Are you just throwing that out there or is there some research you can back that up with? In my experience, from watching users use hybrid applications (that is, native app shells around web content) they're perplexed about why things look "a little wrong" and the scrolling is "not as fast" as other apps.

Note: I design/develop Mac & iOS apps.
I think that may be the first time I've heard Science and Engineering referred to as special interests. Given the key role they play in pretty much everything we take for granted in a modern technological society, I would describe funding Science and Engineering to be more in the general interest, no?
It wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.
As someone who experimented pretty freely with science at home as a teenager, I'm perturbed by the over-reacting and jumping to conclusions associated with "science-based hacking" shown here. Just because you do things that has the potential to do damage doesn't mean that you have the intent to or that you will. Pretty much anything can do damage if you want it to; just because I have a baseball bat doesn't mean that I will hit someone with it. There are things that really kill people in our society, chiefly cars and guns. Having those are mostly legal, but doing experiments on your stove: dangerous, must be stopped. Some attention to proportion is called for.
No City Has A Lock On Innovation
Having access to a large patent pool provides zero protection against NPEs ("patent trolls").
Thanks for putting the exact timeframe on it. Super useful to understand it in weekend for modifying something existing vs what do you think 4 weeks for fixing GNOME or KDE? :p

Today's Dilbert is made for exactly this situation :-) http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-08-04/
In these cases, yes. Of course there's also the more direct saying that lotteries are a tax on stupid people. But I don't see it that way. It's supposed to be a contract between a lot of poor people allowing one or more of them a chance at a "rich" life. If anything, it's a tax on desperate people.
I stopped someone driving by my house just now, luckily before he got very far. With that mass and sufficient speed, he could have done some amazing damage...
Modern version control with Git (Part 2)
Exactly. Sounds like a flaw in IE 9 that they're trying to pass off as an error on the webpage. If the API / functionality exists it should work and not give you a chance of killing the browser.
After more than a year's use I've only had one failure of cheap CFL I bought in a package of 6 or so (for only about $60US at Wallys/Sams or some such). I wouldn't have paid $4/ea, but at <$2/ea they were hardly more expensive than tungsten.
I think you can go from one to the other. Start by leaving work at 5 after 8 hrs work each day, no matter what. Don't bring work home. Don't think about work while at home. Don't carry a notebook around to work outside the office.
This article is silly. I've never seen a sales org that doesn't do what he says (track leads, calls, presentations, etc, etc.) Managing the sales funnel is fundamental to both inside and outside sales, nothing of value in the article.
Yeah, MeeGo is going everywhere. Snark aside I wasn't saying use Android as is on Desktops if you read what I wrote. It is already somewhat desktop-ish and would need to be made more so but I don't see why that would be hard to do.
It is the first time that I have seen it though -- and I check HN far too frequently.
Wait, really? "Anger"?

I mean, "disappointment" maybe. Or "annoyance". Or "wistful regret" -- all reasonable reactions to the real loss you suffer when someone else decides not to pay for your education.

"Sadness", perhaps, if you believe society is worse off for not having more PhDs int he world, I'd buy, too.

But "anger"? How entitled do you have to feel to be "angry" at not getting a free ride?

Just askin'...
I went from a games programming (C++) career, to Android, to enterprise Java. I admit that enterprise Java can be pretty hideous, but I think in most cases the bloat/slowness isn't caused by the language there. As far as Android is concerned, I co-wrote and optimised a skinning animation system in Java. The bottleneck ended up being things like fill-rates and GPU calculations, not Java.
The "terrible consequences" you speak of are what, exactly?
"You will in all likelihood be a glue programmer: you'll rely on APIs and libraries, most of which have been written by someone else, and you will simply string them together by applying the functions that most obviously address whatever problem you're trying to solve."

If you come out of a curriculum where all you learn is how to string together APIs and libraries, it's pretty much guaranteed you will end up with a job doing that, because that's all you will be qualified for.

If you want a job where you are pushing the envelope of what's possible with computers, you're going to be much having taken SICP.
SEEKING FREELANCER - DRUPAL

NYC: Developing complete website from scratch in Drupal, including multimedia content, user registration and management, in education space. Opportunity for many more projects.
Building apps in the cloud: A tour of the tools
What's more interesting is why they're charging per gig not per mb/second.

Also interesting is that this is a routed service as far as I can see....
And with good reason! A typical graduate is saddled with far too much debt to consider the risk of starting a business.
"...I guess voting in favour of such things is inevitable when not all voters are taxpayers."

I get the premise of this logic, i.e., that poor people don't pay taxes and therefore don't care about spending taxpayer dollars. I've seen it presented hundreds of times. But I think, in all honesty, that such a theory is giving the poor too much credit. It assumes that the poor are making conscious decisions based on rational evaluations of their economic incentives. I'm not convinced they think that way. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that they're even informed enough to know what they're doing when they vote on such things.

Some of the blame lies on the voters for voting without understanding, sure. But the politicians -- many of whom are paid for by lobbies -- bear greater responsibility for selling bullshit to underinformed voters, and for coucing the bullshit in emotionally manipulative ways.
interesting that you're searching Twitter & not a regular search engine (Google, etc). i have searched Twitter over search engines to figure out what's going on nearby (ex: what's causing the fireworks)
SEEKING WORK

Currently in Denmark, I prefer remote work, but I would consider relocating for a great opportunity.

Mostly a Ruby coder working with Ruby on Rails. I'm also very efficient with javascript and jQuery.

Some of my recent projects:

http://www.gipote.dk # Helped them migrating to Rails 3
http://flightlogger.net # My own startup, an intranet for aviation schools

Some of the stuff I can do:

- Integrate with payment provider.
- Scrape websites.
- Help you make a prototype for your idea.

You can contact me on benjamin@bnjamin.com
At a previous employer we used Hipchat ( https://www.hipchat.com/ ) for this. Hosted service, had logging (which was exceedingly useful, it turns out), and a bunch of other features.
If the others think the system is broken "in practice" then they should also push for abolishing software patents, whether they do it together with Google or separately.
This is part of the reason I developed KEYBOX for iPhone ( http://www.jayfuerstenberg.com/keybox/ ).

It gives iPhone users the tools to be more secure and to protect their own privacy. Sadly, most people won't try it until they become victims of security breaks and it's more of a preventative tool than a corrective one.
Racket 5.1.2 released
Could this easily be adapted for chats between the webpage visitor and a single other, predetermined user rather than many-user chatrooms? I've been looking for a web-embeddable open source chat client that could be used to power a support feature of a website.
Design - Designation or Prostitution?
VPC Everywhere, Direct Connect, Identity Federation
Nautilus Live Feed - Expedition to the E/V Nautilus
Why I don't like mocks
Your hacking practice involves potentially unleashing viruses and breaking into other systems. Hence, it should be regulated.

Just wait. They just come for the physical sciences first, but things are definitely going in the direction of making programming a restricted activity.
Yep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).
The two are not mutually exclusive. We do need more PhDs, and it is, in fact, not a wise economic choice for a person to pursue one.
GCC Front End Internals
But in a way this rings true - after an exit event if the former CEO/founder gets mostly stocks/paper his financial well-being is deeply connected with the general well-being of Wall Street, as a system.

The more bullish is the market - the better for him, and for the whole ecosystem of financial institutions that serve him. In this sense he is a part of the financial industry and shares the general systemic risk (though, of course, this varies in individual cases and portfolios)

His position is no different than hers - the enriched with stocks ex-wife of an investment banker after the divorce (also a kind of exit strategy, btw).
How to Choose the Right Startup to Work For
This is my take. Microsoft is known to be evil, led by incompetent leaders, etc. I get it. They intent to use patents to screw Google to the fullest extent possible, and like anyone would/should be surprised.

On the other hand, Google took the high road and built on their feel-good "Do No Evil" mantra. So I hold them to their words, and whenever a screw-up like this happens, where Googlers were exposed to be liars no different than others, shouldn't they be "punished" at least by their own pie in the face a bit more?
Self (language) handbook updated, now available in PDF
"but Python supports proper closures"

Is this a recent development? Without proper lexical scoping, don't you have to do weird stuff like creating an array if you want to update a value inside a "closure"?
How great leaders inspire
Yeah, I started CS in '01.

Most of the guys were there to make a fast buck.
Possibly the most confusing headline I've ever read on Hacker News.
Matthew Epstein: ‘I’m Shocked Google Hasn’t Issued a Cease and Desist Letter'
ok that makes sense, thanks
Practical Tips for Unit Testing
Microsoft offers $200,000 Blue Hat Prize for security researchers
"Nobody likes seeing their money go to waste, especially to causes they dont agree with (ie union pensions for government employees that retire after 20 years of service)."

So the ultra rich obstruct attempts at making the system more efficient (i.e. getting rid of the for-profit healthcare industry in America which costs the average American more and delivers worse outcomes than other industrialized countries) and then use that as an excuse to not pay more taxes? That's a pretty good racket they got going there. The world's smallest violin must be playing for all those poor downtrodden multi-millionaire bankers...
Uhm. Some clarifications.

http://www.adium.im/about/ ->

"Based on the _libpurple_ protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services." (Emphasis mine)

http://trac.adium.im/wiki/LibPurple ->

"Libpurple is the library which provides network-level connectivity for most services in Adium. Like Adium itself, it is licensed under the GPL. In addition to Adium, libpurple is the core of the Linux and Windows IM clients Pidgin and Finch. (...)

Libpurple was previously named Libgaim. "

So yeah, Pidgin is an option, because neither Adium nor Pidgin speak IRC, libpurple does. The support should be ~the same~, of course depending on the version of the library used.

More info: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple
Ah, right. That's probably a nicer way of doing it since you don't have to mess with gconf-editor.

Personally, I cleared /apps/mutter/general/overlay_key (which prevents the overlay from being triggered by any modifier, which got my mod4 bindings working again. I set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu to "<Mod4>Escape", which on GNOME 2.x activates the Applications menu, but on GNOME 3.x activates the overlay.
I remember an anecdote about a record store with a similar tactic for selling CDs. They'd put out 5 copies of a CD; 4 copies would be marked at $13 and 1 copy would be marked at $11. People browsing would notice the cheaper copy and immediately snatch it up, thinking they had found a good deal (possibly due to a mistake on the part of the store), at which point the store would just go and "mark down" one of the other copies.
Study: Healthy eating is privilege of the rich
I did not down-vote you (as a matter of fact, I up-voted you because I am not a fan of ninja down-voters and I think that you ask interesting questions). However, it is evident that you are not a formally trained economist.

Economics is not closely tied to politics. If you ever want to have a look at what real economics is, please go to http://ssrn.com/ and read some economic articles on subjects that interest you. One thing that you will rapidly notice is that politics has almost nothing to do with formal, academic Economics (and this consitutes the great bulk of the activity that goes on in the field of Economics).

It is worthwhile to distinguish between normative economics and positive economics. Positive economics, which constitutes the majority of the discipline, seeks to describe, explain, and record economic phenomena. Normative economics, which is the louder minority, seeks to prescribe solutions to problems by using economic theory.

The problem with modern Economics is that the loudest voices within the field are listened to because of their political viewpoints and not their economic expertise. Dr. Krugman in particular has the habit of mixing normative and positive economics without providing a careful distinction between the two. This is a huge problem, and it makes the entire field look bad. However, what can economists that are not popular do about this? The mass media has very little interest in impact studies of obscure policy changes done in third world countries, so we just keep churning away in the background.

While I would not say that George Box is wrong outright, I would say that this quote from him is not entirely accurate as it could be when applied to Economic modelling. You see, by definition an Economic model is merely a simplification of a real world phenomena. Of course, all simplifications are "wrong" because they are not intended to be "right" they are merely intended to be approximations.

Economic models are more prone to error than Mathematical models and models in the Natural sciences because they are, in essence, brutally simple models of Human behaviour. Their usefulness is not subject to their ability to be implemented, but is is subject to the context of the problem at hand and what the expectations are for the model.

For example, one thing that I did recently was to analyze some time series data to analyze a market for seasonality. The predictions of my model for the next two quarters were not even close to being exact, but the seasonality estimates were spot on. A model's usefulness must be determined within the context of its overall purpose.
Hipmunk Further Reduces Agony For Users With Flexible Travel Dates