skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google's offer was $6B. The IPO is priced at $30B. I am scratching my head how that is the dumbest thing you have ever seen a company do. Ever. I can see the IPO valuation getting cut to a more reasonable $10B, but that is still more than the Google offer.
Any suggestions for PHP applications whose source code can be presented as an example of what TO do instead of what NOT to do?
Yea, I'm a Hubspot follower, I guarantee they knew what they were doing. They are the kings of buzz. This isn't that innovative of a technology, but they've got us talking about it.
Latakoo Introduces Investor Payback Plan
New Options for Starbucks Wi-Fi Squatters
I thought you were trying to be really clever by responding in hex.
I think Google was willing to pay way more than they should have for Groupon, but I wouldn't call it anywhere near the dumbest thing a company could do.
The dollar hit a record low in 2008, not just against foreign currencies but also against measures of value such as gold, soybeans, corn, etc. It got stronger in the intervening years (as you note), except against gold, and is now back down to the 2008 level, more or less.

You're certainly right about the bond markets.
I'm no longer a customer of Groupon. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but I don't know of any company where customer acquisition isn't a major cost. The traditional business school number touted is that is costs 10 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to maintain an existing customer.

EDIT: I know I may have counteracted my own argument, but my point was that customers are expensive, and the costs don't go away, even if they lessen.
I'm going to repost this here because it actually tells me why I'd want to route all my JS through a third party, and I had to click through the blog link below to find it:

http://blog.proxino.com/post/8388203148/catching-the-worlds-...

"At Proxino, there’s one question I receive with uncommon frequency: why the proxy? After all, we only ever (at the moment) handle exceptions for you, and so there is curiosity. Is it really necessary, my customer will ask. He considers, perhaps, that the proxy is some clever ploy, a small glimpse at our plans for world domination. A lovely thought, if only it were so. Developers in particular have a tendency to believe that what Proxino does can be done dynamically. They are mistaken.

In a general sense, what Proxino does is a form of global exception handling, a way to catch every exception that occurs within your Javascript. To their credit, our customers correctly suspect that some approximation of this can be achieved dynamically. For it certainly can. Here is a naive first pass attempt at such a global handler, no proxy required:

window.onerror = function(e){ console.log(e) }

Unfortunately, window.onerror does not work in every browser, nor on every piece of code. It will fail to catch some exceptions raised by elements of jQuery, and other similarly complex libraries. It’s a simple one-liner, and it sort of works. But quite often, sort of is not enough.

With a bit more care — and a lot more code — a clever programmer can find dynamic work arounds for most browsers and most popular libraries. However in the general case, a global exception handler constructed dynamically is something of an elusive, asymptotic state. You are simply not going to get there. And this brings me to my point. Proxino is not interested in most. We want to catch, and tell you about, everything that goes wrong in your Javascript. Enter the proxy.

When a request reaches proxy.proxino.com, we lookup your existing code, parse it into AST form, and walk down the tree inserting special try/catch blocks within each function definition, as well as around the file itself. We then serve this instrumented file to your users, and handle every exception that occurs. Naturally, we have optimized this process for speed (with caching, etc.) but this guarantees us — and more importantly, you — complete code coverage. You will know about every exception.

Dynamic approaches are incredibly convenient in some ways, but in the general case they simply don’t work. And so there is a Good reason for the proxy. Hope this helps."
Speculating here, but I don't think Google wanted Groupon as an immediate profit center. They wanted their considerable mindshare and ready-made sales and marketing team. I'm guessing that they felt they could merge Googles ability to optimize with that juggernaut and build something to just dominate the local marketing space (particularly the real time stuff).
In regard to #4, this works for very technical people to -- this is an interview strategy that is used by Ken Thompson! See Coders at Work.
:-) My users LOVE it. The new level of engagement I'm seeing is leading me to put some more work into the site and grow it a bit more.

Anyway, envolve is awesome.
I wonder what percentage of people who have enough access to install a plugin into IE6, don't have enough access to install a new browser.

To plenty of corporate machines... this will be an annoying piece of bling.
Applying a Moebius transformation to an image
Short tutorial on how to apply a moebius transformation to an image in python. It has a little introduction to Moebius transform too.
I've seen this often as well as a way to build Page Rank.

The higher the Page Rank your page, the more positive influence it has on the Page Rank of the destination site.. but it's more like "bleeding" because it eventually lowers yours.

It might be that your page has a good Page Rank and therefore is of interest to that company.
NASA rover reaches rim of Martian crater
Advanced tricks with vim registers
They've been feeding me and my colleagues the last couple weeks and I gotta say: pretty awesome. Great variety of food and everything has been delicious. I crow about new food several times a week since they started, and I'm a pretty tough sell.

(And they've stopped asking for that goofy video audition requirement in all their job postings, so props to them for seeing the light.)
The differences are that 1) Amazon was selling a tangible commodity and 2) they weren't doing it at the expense of the other side of the transaction (i.e. the companies Groupon is selling coupons for).

That isn't to say that they won't find a happy medium where they can balance the need for their customers to get massive discounts without pissing off the businesses, but I'm having trouble seeing it.
Good point. This is the reason I never listened to my math teacher, his material was too basic and too abstract for me to get motivated, I couldn't see myself using that knowledge in the short term. I went to art school, and only later I realized I was actually clever enough to program and enjoy it; all it took was a high level language like ActionScript 1 (and to put credit where it's due, Flash allowed a nice smooth transition from manual design to code). After that I worked my way down to Java, Objective-C, and more basic C concepts (although Ruby/Python are the owners of my heart).

Ironically, this book looks interesting to me because it would now fill the basic gaps. I've never actually needed to understand binary numbers or endianness - it's bitten me in the ass a couple times but nothing looking for help online couldn't handle - but today those higher layers of knowledge have solidified enough in my brain that I'm ready to actually enjoy learning these basic concepts.
At first take this seems like it would be easy to circumvent, (given a dictionary of homonyms) but...

google "look over there." == 1.5M hits

google "look over their." == 16.2M hits

google "look over they're." == 1.0M hits

Google doesn't support periods, apparently. But, other examples from the article are a little more easy to game:

google "do you know were we are going?" = 8 hits

google "do you know we're we are going?" = 0 hits

google "do you know where we are going?" = 6.1M hits
I think its key to bring the social aspect of the net in from rather a passive thing to an engaged thing. I certainly would sponsor a good friend to stay on track. It would likely motivate me to do the same so in would be reciprocal.
I'm not sure about that claim. I've been working with SF for years and tried SF2 during early beta and I don't think it's that clear cut. Then again, I don't care that much so - carry on
My favorite trick is using capital-letters to append to registers:

"kyy - copy a line to register k

"Kyy - append a line to register k
Apple Closes as the Most Valuable Company in the World
How people in science see each other
1 - You don't need any medical knowledge to just pick the row with the highest value in the last column

2 - Aren't those outcomes exactly what we see empirically?
The Earth can certainly heal itself; the question is whether the healing involves getting rid of us lot.
My problem is worse (I think). When I think of what might be a cool idea for a project, I always manage to convince myself that it's not as cool or glamorous or useful as I thought before I begin actual work on it (or very shortly after).
--dur
What is the process for employees like? Does food just show up or is there some kind of website / email that everyone gets before lunch?
I concur with your counter-argument. I'll add that one of the reasons we've seen such a huge increase in startup activity and entrepreneurship in the last 4-5 years is the fact that getting a startup from an idea to an Internet scale web service costs practically nothing now.

4-5 years ago a startup (like iLike) had to spend millions up front on server and infrastructure costs. Then the ongoing opex costs for serving millions of users were huge.

This has shifted radically. $150k is TOO much money for many ideas and the opex costs have continued to plummet.

The recent announcements by both Amazon & MS on lowering (almost eliminating for many scenarios) ingress and CDN costs (http://www.talkincloud.com/amazon-web-services-cuts-cloud-tr...) are just harbingers of this.

In fact, it could be argued that any sort of economic contraction could increase the rate at which these costs decline, further enabling great ideas to get traction via startups.
One interesting number for last quarter, from total sales of $878 million, $341 million or 39% was actually Groupon's. Which definitely seems to be proof that the days of 50/50 splits are over, if any merchant prospects about to talk deal terms hadn't already gotten that memo.
Thanks. Due to your comment, I tried vimperator for the first time.
There is a strong correlation between things whose primary design criterion include "any idiot can install", and "complete crap design".

As examples I hold up PHP, most PHP applications, MySQL, Matt Wright's script archives (a series of security holes masquerading as useful Perl scripts that were popular a decade ago), and so on.

The correlation is hardly absolute. For instance SQLite is both excellently well designed and also designed for easy install. However it holds often enough to strain coincidence.

My suspicion is that part of it is that something that is designed to be trivial to use tends to have a low barrier to entry to get involved with. This leads to getting contributers with more enthusiasm than skill.
>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

Did you mean 'black hat'?
Get a copy of Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structure".

Alas, as far as I remember, deleting an element out of a purely functional red-black tree is more messy.
No idea. I'm personally curious to know how many of these javascript/json based solution use eval for parsing.
P.S. There's also Bellman-Ford.
I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor.

Somehow that's almost how I prefer to work too, but it's sort of impossible to have this setup in a professional environment.
Cooking Classes, Live on Google+
It's always nice to cushion your IPO with fraud...
It would be interesting to find out how other coupon sites with similar business models are fairing--as much as the land grab theory makes sense, I actually wonder about the current system of offering stuff I normally wouldn't want for cheap being a viable business.

A little off topic but I've been noticing a lot of "TeamBuy" ads on TV (I live in Canada)--one can't help but think that until competition like that is settled there will continue to be tremendous growing pains for Groupon and company.
RIM Suspends BlackBerry Certification Program
There will always be people who scour coupon sites for deals, even taking into account natural customer churn. It's conceivable that Groupon could be the Google on coupon hunting.

However the number of coupons available isn't going to increase forever, and may well already be in decline (for some measure of businesses using Groupon compared with deals offered).

This is because those businesses see Groupon as a way to infrequently attract a large number of people to try their products at a price that they would not be able to sustain for other marketing models such as advertising.

The only way Groupon can "grow" is to continually reach new businesses to ensure that the number of coupons available is high. However, eventually the well will run dry.
Wow, that's pretty nifty. Somehow I missed it when I looked at the home page. Did you change it? If not, I think I might have missed it because local was only in the finer print. If the header said "Worry Free Local Fallbacks" I think more visitors will notice it.

BTW please see my other comment about changing the API; "secret" in client-side JavaScript is confusing.

Edit: never mind, didn't realize my other comment was replying to you. You've already noticed that secret is a misnomer. :)
...or just don't show it if it's not available. It is sort of interesting to know that information, but it's not like I have time or interest to contact the rights holder in some other territory and promote the potential economic gains of cross-border availability.

Also, I wish the same were true for mobile devices. I am heartily sick of being told 'x is not available on mobile' or spoofing the user agent string in my tablet to watch something. It's really none of a publisher's business where I choose to watch something and this attempt at artificial market segmentation is not worth the administrative overhead it imposes.
In this kind of analysis, you can't ignore the role of government stimulus spending in juicing the economy. Yes, 2009/10 were better, but largely as a result of stupendous stimulus packages. The current problems are a predictable consequence of that stimulus money running out. So, that stimulus spending brought the financial world some breathing room. Now, the question you have to ask is, was that breathing room put to good use? Have the fundamental imbalances which triggered the 2008 liquidity crisis been corrected? I think if you look at the financial/legal problems BAC is facing and the economic instability in the European PIIGS countries, the answer is no. So then you have to ask whether there's going to be another liquidity crisis, and how much capacity and political will there will be for further government stimulus, if there is another crisis. I think another liquidity crisis is all but certain. If that's so, and government stimulus is limited, the downturn will be hard and protracted, and you are going to need a hell of a good business plan just to survive. If the stimulus is vigorous, there will be another acceleration to the economy, and that will be the ideal time to be taking money to grow a nascent business.

So I don't think it's as simple as you make it out to be. Starting a business now is basically a bet that either the problems which caused the 2008 crisis have been corrected (doubtful) or there will be another massive stimulus when another crisis arises (highly uncertain, but certainly possible.)
Nothing terrible happened after 2008 because the Fed and US Govt completely propped up the US economy with $700B TARP + $800B stimulus + two rounds of Quantitative Easing + many more billions of alphabet soup supports and bailouts.

The result was deficit spending making up for a precipitous dropoff in GDP:

http://imgur.com/1aJbj

The idea was to prevent a shock and/or collapse and buy time to work out the underlying problems, and they succeeded at the former but may have run out of time on the latter.

But much of that ammo is now used up. It's doubtful the GOP in Congress would allow another massive stimulus, leaving only the Fed's ability to keep rates low and possibly try another QE3.

So, my point is, don't take for granted that nothing much happened after 2008. It only played out that way because of massive intervention, but much of the underlying problems still haven't been solved, and a shock or collapse are unfortunately still possible.
Hmm— I wonder how that works with exception-handling code. It'd be a pain in the ass to get notifications for normal behavior.

They must have thought of this, and it'd easy enough to ignore functions that are already inside `try` blocks, but it's strange that it's not mentioned.
Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. DLR != invokedynamic contrary to my impression of how the DLR operated. I will be interested in see how JRuby performance improves as a result.
Now I know which whores are following my tweets!
I didn't suggest an outright fabrication. No need to restate here all of the cliches about how statistics can be manipulated. My only suggestion was that the Heritage Foundation are an absolutely worthless source. If you've provided a better one, that's great.

Even if we grant that protein deficiency itself is not a huge problem for America's poor, it nevertheless remains that the protein (and food generally) available to our poor is of the lowest quality.
GRE General Test Distribution of Scores by Intended Graduate Major Field (.PDF)
So, both MongoDB and Redis are DB's optimized for keeping stuff heavily in memory. I wouldn't use either for heavy logging.

RRDTool is nice, but only for data where you don't mind losing records.

For straight logging, SQL is actually a better solution than a lot of those options. If you need weird queries, something like Elastic Search or Solr on top of your SQL DB can buy you quite a bit of freedom. As can denormalizing your SQL.

One other thing to consider of course, is something like syslog.
WebSQLDB isn't really a "standard". The standard is "whatever version of sqlite safari happened to ship with" which is really not a tenable long-term solution.
Why would Google go along with a story that made it look like they were powerless to get what they wanted?
Early on, PHP had the advantage of mod_php, which made deploying PHP applications simple and performed well. Because other languages required more complex setup (e.g. fastcgi, servlet containers) shared hosting providers gravitated towards supporting PHP applications. This caused open source projects that used PHP to gain more traction than projects written in, say, Perl. Eventually, hosting providers realized mod_php was not such a good idea. See the following link for an expansion on that http://www.majordojo.com/2007/11/is-mod-php-falling-out-of-f.... I think the shift of shared hosting providers to FastCGI (which makes supporting additional languages less work) as well as the decreased cost of private servers due to virtualization is playing a role in PHP's apparent decline in popularity.
At the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. They were rebuilt into gleaming cities because they were inhabited by the Japanese.

Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night.

No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.
Ask HN: Review my startup
My startup is http://curenote.com. It's a social health site that allows people to ask and answer different health questions.

People can share what they did to cure them of an illness, share what their doctor told them or share certain symptoms they may experience. It's a great way of getting information form others before and after seeing the doctor.
The WSJ is behind a paywall for me, but a Google search for "Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge" works.
I'm sure they think they are geniuses if this was intentional. However, they may lose business from potential customers whose corporate firewall doesn't allow access to the site.
Who's to say the IPO will be successful? The suits will have to keep their shares for a bit, plenty of time for the whole mess to unfold. Plus, Groupon raised a ton of VC ($950M) after turning down Google's offer. Factoring in dilution, it won't take a drastically bad IPO to make $6B in-hand look like a steal.
I very nearly agree with you, but I'd argue that policing has little to do with it as well.

Detroit's crime rate has plummeted since the 1970s along with the rest of the US, despite no widely-celebrated crackdown. [1] Indeed crime rates have continued their drop from even the early 2000s despite a police department that was rapidly shrinking and increasingly mired in corruption/abuse investigations over that same time frame.

What's holding Detroit back, imo, are uncompetitive services caused by too few funds to cover too much sprawl. Even as the downtown enjoys a modest revival, the neighborhoods are non-options for anyone who wants to own a home. Particularly when functional suburbs with lower taxes and great schools are less than thirty minutes down the highway.

The city needs consolidation.

[1] The only anti-crime campaign I can even recall, was the mid-90s community effort to combat Devil's Night.
Noted. We will change it soon. Thanks!
Astroturf much?
If you are interested in Groupon's actual performance rather than a reporter's linkbait, see the filing. I find the table on page 57 rather informative about the current state of the business.

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/00010474691100717...
Equivocation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

"Time I'm willing to dedicate to your interview problems" and "time I'm willing to dedicate to reading and writing on HN" are not freely interchangeable; you can (and presumably do) have radically different expectations of the costs and benefits that make them incomparable.
Employees get to see a webpage on zerocater.com that has all of their upcoming menus for the next couple of weeks. On the day the food is delivered, they can use that page to rank the food and comment on it. That feedback is critical to us because we use it to figure out what to order in the future (I tell people we're "Pandora for food").
Why Earth may not have needed a moon for life to exist | Mail Online
It is not always healthy.

For instance it is suspected that the prevalence of peanut allergies is connected to the fact that stored peanuts usually have cockroach infestations. The FDA limit on acceptable levels are 30 insect parts per 100 grams. (See http://www.fda.gov/food/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformat... for verification.)
It is not great way to gather information about illnesses because when those people googling for information about illness go actually to meet the doctors they tend to know their illness better than the doctor when the doctor in reality knows it better than non-trained sick person. This is already happening in here and it's making the job of real doctors harder because they have to prove the patients information wrong.

Though yes this might create cheaper option for basic health care in the US where it is not already paid by taxes.