skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if you assume that current customers require little marketing effort (which is a huge assumption), what about the businesses?

Let's apply the same logic to GroupOn's business customers: once they acquire a customer through a GroupOn, that customer will remain loyal and they don't need to market to them again. In other words, that business doesn't have to offer sharp discounts for quite a long time, and therefore ceases to become a GroupOn customer. So, GroupOn needs to spend more on marketing to get new businesses to offer deals.

Sure, it's plausible that if they stop marketing, they still have a business. That's certainly the story they are trying to tell. But accounting is not about plausible-sounding stories. It's about cold, hard numbers in black and white.
I posted this video of that event yesterday, but it's funny enough to post again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwU9m4oCtRE
I don't think we have any strict non-drinkers but there's definitely some lightweights (cough Holman cough) so I think he'd be fine. ;)
Excellent work! This is the first interactive coding tutorial that I actually like.

Small bug: On http://www.codecademy.com/programming-intro/4#!/exercise/3, it says "We've given you an example for the first one", but there is no example.
Is this affiliated to (or a domain change) of hackercs.com?

Or a new competitor?
I reiterate my example of baidu.

Just because size isn't a problem for your application, doesn't mean there aren't others out there dealing with petabytes of text.
Really glad to see that people are interested in this!

We're actually planning to write up a little blog post about our learning experience with NodeJS etc, maybe open-source the code, and then post that to HN/reddit/etc.

We've actually been waiting for a good opportunity to 'launch' it properly. Just as a fun side-project, no real business in 300lines as it stands, though we'd like to spin off a simple collaborative whiteboard app at some point.

Thanks for the feedback :)
Makes sense when you consider how little consumers pay for new computers (and quasi-computer things like tablets) compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
It's interesting to see they're pre-rendering the composition of the weather layer on top of their regular map. Where I work we have our own styled map tiles and probably would do a layer of transparent cloud tiles over our (unmodified) regular tiles. It just takes too long to re-render deeper scales.

That said, if I was serving up as many tiles as google does, I'd go for it this way too. You already need a buttload of resources just to handle the request volume, might as well exploit that to save the user on download time and yourself on bandwidth.
Really nice. I just did all of the exercises .

2 bugs I hit were the lessons not saving upon completion & if it hits an error, it froze the window which I had to close (Chrome running on Lion)

Proof of completion: http://www.codecademy.com/users/4e4da1c233a5480001000221
Can I take advantage of this thread to ask the HN crowd a technical question? Some time ago, I implemented an automatic differentiation tool. Using operator overloading on a special "autodouble" type the tool would trace the execution of a block of numerical code. Then, some calculus would automatically happen, and it would output and compile fast c-code that would compute the original function and derivatives in pure c. This was great, except the c-code that was output was freaking gigantic (like hundreds or thousands of megabytes) albeit very simple, and so the c compiler would take forever to run. Sigh.

My question is: could I leverage pypy somehow to avoid this? Can I output RPython? Can I output whatever RPython is compiled down to instead? Can I do this with no more than, say, a 3x penalty compared to c?

(I apologize for asking a question only marginally related to the particular article here...)
thanks! let us know if there's any course you're interested in seeing.
Ask HN: best ways to charge people online for small, punctual purchases?
Kind of like "in-app purchases" in iOS. Not recurring and in the $1-2 range.

Facebook credits? Paypal? Selling a bigger package of credits in the $10-20 range to be used over time (similar to Skype for example)?

Regular payment systems would work of course but they tend to have a lot of friction and include multiple steps, where two clicks would be nice. And, though I'm not familiar with the exact prices, I'm not sure the commissions are interesting for multiple $1-$2 purchases.

How have you done it? Thanks!
1. Yes i should have mentioned that about the universe; the pdfs are deterministic. I dont agree about "effectively random"; chaos != randomness. But, crucially, at the level of biological molecules that mediate most brain processes, quantum effects have little significance.

3. I disagree strongly with theidea that free will can arise from quantum uncertainty or randomness. That's not free will, that's random will. Unfortunately, great scientists have like R. Penrose advocate such things, but i believe most neuroscientists believe it to be hokum nowadays.
I think a lot of the problem with circle's being too complex and overlapping is a symptom of people posting public only (the blogging aspect).

For example, I follow Leo Laporte, who has recently been publicly posting a lot of HAM radio related updates. Amateur radio is interesting to myself, but its not a subject I'm all that interested in constantly be seeing. I don't have a way to really block that subject out as a whole without blocking/unfollowing him as a whole, even though I find most everything else he posts to be interesting.

If Leo Laporte had a way to know what interests I am into, and then automagically not put me in a "Amateur radio enthusiasts" circle, of which he posts all those updates, then I would be happier for less noise on my stream. The problem though, is that he is doing it publicly, which means I get everything from him, since that is his choice to put it public.

So basically, I guess, we already have a way to filter outgoing messages by posting to specific circles, but I would like a way to "reverse circle" the people I follow so that I only receive public posts either under a whitelist or blacklist of keywords, which seems to be one of the only ways I see to "reduce the noise". We all know that whitelisting and blacklisting isn't the best solution to every problem, and this seems to be a very complex issue, so I doubt this idea would even work outright.
Small investor panic selling creates great opportunities for investors?
thanks! we love tryruby too. thanks for celebrating whyday!
looking into these now. thanks!
awesome. we're adding the option to skip registering but we hope most people do what you do.
So all the filing/lawyer fees would be paid by yourself for the transfer since it is your own company now?
Between that and the prevailing wage req, I still see quite a high bar. :\
I spent many years maintaining a USENET newsreader, first on BeOS, then on Mac OS X. Being that it's so old, USENET users are often very entrenched in their ways. Chinese users were particularly fond of BIG5 and seemed in no hurry to move to Unicode. I supported around 15 different encodings for displaying messages, yet it was still very likely to see an article that my app wasn't displaying properly.

I've never maintained an email client, but I'd bet the situation there is much the same.
Only 14% of the fastest growing 500 US companies were venture backed
looking into and fixing this now. thanks!
It's not the only one. Upside Down adds Viglink to pages (and mentions it in the extension gallery page).

Allow copy-paste action on websites replaces the banner on LyricsFreak with one for the author's website.

The Web Of Trust Firefox extension also adds "safe search" links to Google results.
They OCR it, so with the PDF you get whatever text data they are able to extract from it (don't know about the encoding, but that is easy to convert), plus additional information.
For now, I'll be selfish and only want to learn and seek help when I get stuck while programming.

Are you on twitter?
I think you are under the impression that they're talking about the actual H1B transfer failing, but in reality they're talking about the actual new startup company failing. If the startup does fail and the H1B isn't transferred elsewhere again, they do lose the visa.
I feel like the prevailing sentiment in 2007 was that most everything Apple chose to include in the iPhone, they executed well. It wasn't all that buggy at launch. However, there was a lot of very valid criticism of it--mostly that it had many glaring omissions -- 3G, copy/paste, ability to turn off autocomplete so you can type in other languages, etc.

This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
You are an exception, most people that are curious about programming do not buy every book about a subject just because they know the name of a language. If you are just starting out, it doesn't really matter if you learn how to write an if/else in C, PHP, JavaScript, etc.
OK heres ones example. I have a good friend who is a dance music promoter. He throws shows once or twice a week, and big ones every month. He posts like crazy.

He is one friend, I have at a guess around 30 people involved in doing roughly just this. I have a friend who owns a dance music label, plus for the last year I have been working for a Television news network running there online news. I have lots of journalists and advertising people doing the same thing.

And the problem is I'm a social person, I go to these dance parties. I know lots of musicians, these journos are my friends, and I go to advertising events and talk to people. I'm likeable and I like people, but the way social networks are used in my circle of friends is as much (if not more) for business as it is anything else. Its a promotion platform and they use it as such.

So theres a cross over point where my friends need there posts to be in separate circles, which they can do... but guess what... theres no benefit for them to do so. Infact there is a negative in terms of promotion in doing this behaviour.

Anyway back to point, if I isolate people into circles for say "promoters" then stuff that should be appearing under "friends" is appearing in the wrong circle and I would miss it (as I would only check the promotions tab approaching the weekend). Circles are black holes for crap you don't care about.

Which in itself wasn't a huge problem as only a few people where actually posting personal stuff. My feed was just advertising, "reasons why Google+ was better than Facebook", and gif's I'd already seen on Reddit a day before.

Lastly I also am known under a pseudonym due to years of involvement in the music scene, that was the nail in the coffin to me. And writing that just made me realise the root cause of my issue is just that fact. People are using there personal accounts to push business matters.
you'll see soon enough ;) thanks for the feedback!
we're looking into this now - thanks for the tip.
not affiliated with hackerCS - we love what they do though!
Indeed: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure." (J. Fried of 37signals, from http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2185-a-new-way-of-working-a-t... )
The "we haven't seen them in a while, so we must assume the worst" almost sounds a bit too cavalier or insensitive to me. If someone does set this up and really does die, the email could be hitting grieving relatives / friends, etc. In addition, an email sent by that person is likely to be very disorienting.

I think I'd rather receive a more direct message about what exactly is happening. "So and so set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if they do not respond to us for a certain period of time. That period of time has now elapsed. If you need something..."
we'll be adding other languages, so that's why the homepage doesn't explicitly state which language you're writing. we'll update it now. thanks!
Not to mention cigarette taxes and the lottery.
Why is that? .PDF isn't proprietary enough?
yep, i'm @zsims and we're @codecademy.
All software patent lawsuits should be decided through feats of strength.
Binary File Parsing revisited using Javascript
If only this service would have been around in Fermat's time.
New Chip Borrows Brain’s Computing Tricks
- For an interesting take on (1) and (2) i would suggest reading this http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/... ; I think there's ample evidence there, too.

- You need a tool to "discover" right and wrong, just like you need a metric tensor to measure length. That tool is empiricism.

- If it's not the actor's will, whose is it?
> Much like dates and times, correct handling of Unicode is best left to the poor souls stuck dealing with them full time, all the time.

Reminds me that date parsing is fucked up in iOs and you actually need to know your shit to get it right when dealing with users around the globe. But I don't see people dealing with this full time.
Since the submitter is the author, I'll say this to you: this looks interesting but I would preface the script with a short paragraph explaining what you're trying to do.
looking into this now - hope you'll check us out again in a day when we have it fixed!
I am still wondering why we are calling this the 'post-pc era'. We didn't have the 'post-desktop era' when laptops became the most common form-factor for personal computers.

Tablets and 'mobile devices' are different form factors. Different form factors often result in different hardware needs (we didn't have track-pads and batteries before laptops did we?). Those who are able to get these form-factor and hardware built and usable first experience an initially high sales volume.

Compaq led the portable computer world for a few years when it was first introduced, Sony led the walkman market, etc. etc.

Tablets are not the final form-factor, and the market is in it's infancy. Isn't a tablet just the extension of the PC market, rather than a completely new market?

When I think 'post-pc' I think of a time when we'll be interacting with any object we touch, without needing to think it is a device of this sort or that.
"Of the potential situations where it may become an issue that I can think of, pretty much none of them are on end user hardware."

Do what you need to on your companies machines, but keep it out of ecosystems it has no reason to be in.
checking this out. thanks prayag!
yep, planning on adding some more context as soon as possible. thanks!
"... and Google"
This is exceptional! The work of a really clear thinker.
Seems a safe bet that scanning equipment and methods will decline in cost faster than the US dollar.
From my experience replacement value plus some extra fixed fee is common. So you might as well just purchase the book. That's cheaper.
yep, that's what we're trying to help with too. just wait until we have some more advanced topics!

thanks for checking us out.
That book is excellent. In the same vein, you can read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, or if you want to dig deeper, check out the studies cited in those books.
Yep exactly my problem, but the fact is currently there is no incentive for people who make a living off promotion to post to anything but public. Infact would generally be a negative.

It also becomes complex when people are friends and promoters as you can't block them.
And the person writing the software never uses it either. The definitive recipe for shitty enterprise apps the world over.
I suspect that as a result of some out of court settlement with Intellectual Ventures, people are asked to invest. I also suspect that the best lawyers in the world - and apple and google have the best in the world - pick the fights they have a chance of winning. A similar example is http://www.iwf.org.uk/.
you forgot work hard
the other way round, having a wildly variable size depending on the character can be a weakness. In japanese EUC was sometime used despite its shortcomings to force 16bit by character.
thanks, max! hoping you'll come back for more.
Off hand and guessing about the problem:

You might want to look at approaches that use dual numbers. Likewise, in instead of inlining the procedures, generate a differentiated version of each procedure with a new name. If those don't cover your problems, perhaps look at how other autodiff tools for C do it?
Oh please....

An unnamed source claimed something that the article itself says there's a bunch of problems with this idea and we are supposed to believe it? It was more likely a rumour that someone at Palm was putting around to try and push the price up, and the "source" believed it.
I am quite close to a lot of deals and I can definitely say that most people who are considered a-list investors today are both:

a) willing to invest in someone who is waiting for a visa

b) willing to use their contact network to get their investment secured with a visa for the founders. I've seen this happen multiple times - good lawyers pulled into the deal to expedite visa issues.

It is in the investor's best interest.
It depends what you mean by successful. The Android tablets are selling reasonably well - ASUS is claiming ~1 million sales (to consumers) and forecasting 1m more by the end of the year. It ain't iPad level but it's a strong showing and it's just one tablet out of half a dozen.
Notch can easily afford to pay top Quake 3 players too though.
indeed it is, thanks so much!
Reminds me of another company with a (misspelled) number in its name. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Googol
thanks! looking forward to getting it.
If ever a company lost its way it's HP
unfortunately the iPad is unsupported at this time. we're working on getting it out the door as fast as possible!
Easy. Instead of sending a username and password, generate a long key of some kind that would be unique to each user and use that instead.
we'd love that! if you have something you'd like to teach, drop us an email - zach (at) codecademy (dot) com.
Yes. But you might as well get your book of some torrent site, then.
Money is a weight on the side of the big guy whether the competition is Quake or Court.

Money can always buy you an advantage in a duel, just like it buys you better lawyers.
How about you just let the customer indicate whether he has a clean book or not? Just charge more for `dirty' books.
Companies pay money for patents. Granting less patents means less money. Pure and simple.
LLVM? I don't have much experience with runtime code generation but you might find it useful.
we're using javascript to teach

it's a rails project.
Yep, that's what I meant by API key above. I could also home my Android skills by making a simple app for it.
thanks! at the moment fighting fires and working on getting more curriculum up.
This is really similar to the "getting started" feature in our product, Handcraft.com. It's a HTML prototyping tool so you have to write code, but we're aiming it at interaction designers so we've taken care to address the fact that some designers aren't too familiar with writing HTML to do prototyping.

We ended up initially putting you into an introductory prototype when you first start an account where we bring you up to speed on what our tool can do in terms of writing HTML before we go further and show you more about how our tool is special.

Strangely, after launching in the Chrome Web Store, we started getting a lot of feedback from people who had stumbled into it and were discovering HTML for the first time through our getting started guide. They don't have a clue what "HTML prototyping" or "interaction design" is, but they love learning about "how to make websites" with Handcraft.

Just thought I'd share. Great work with Codecademy! I'll be keeping my eye on it and might start forwarding people over if they get stuck with what we have on offer.
"site:bartpoa.com inurl:.asp?": BART Police was French girl's first hack.
Exactly. If they can consistently predict the results over a year, I will be impressed.
Main reason being they can't even compete on price without those fat carrier subsidies that it took to get Android for phones off the ground. They're pretty much at price parity with the market leader with a fraction of the useful apps, and surprised why they're not selling that well.

Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.

Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
Very interesting presentation, I think! But it bums me out that I should be doing more!
Ashton Kutcher Could Face Questions About Disclosure
thanks tom! would love if you sent it to them.
The Manichean World of Tim Wu
If it's really a first principle then there should be only one of them. This is very important if you want to understand the world completely.
I think these stories about Domino's drivers saving lives beat Morton's delivering a free steak to a lucrative customer. (Which I agree every company should do occasionally for their own best interests.):

Old lady doesn't place her regular order, driver takes the initiative to drive over and check on her. Sure enough, she's fallen and she can't get up:
http://consumerist.com/2011/02/dominos-delivery-driver-saves...

Psycho ex threatens to stab customer with the door open as the driver arrives, he sneaks away and calls the cops:
http://www.uhpinions.com/dominos-pizza/
I'm sure this would go down awesomely with the board.

Board: So why don't we have that trademark anymore?
Bethesda: Oh we gambled and lost it in a game of Quake 3 deathmatch
...

Seriously? :)
Quake champions, get ready to send your resumes to Bethesda. ;-)
> Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it?

Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.
Scurries off to his keyboard to start hacking...
Once again, HP proves that the collective vision of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is so long-dead that the tombstone has crumbled to dust.

I'm gutted. Genuinely.

When I was younger, before Fiorina stepped up to be the first to rape the corpses of the founders, I was a massive fan of HP. My first graphing calculator was an HP48G, which taught me the joys of Lisp... well, Psil, because it came with Reverse Polish Lisp.

WebOS could have been the resurrection of that culture -- fully JavaScript development environment, app development across multiple mobile and tablet platforms with a single environment... just genius. It's sad to see that vision evaporate, along with some of the novel telephony and interactive features that made WebOS a joy to work with.
Americans are Innumerate and Broke - Credit Slips
I would like to see where that number is coming from. I've seen a lot of number's based on units shipped, but none on "actual" units sold. Curious what the 20% is actually based on.

Edit: Someone posted the link below.