skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've seen first hand on my own websites' ad inventory along with what my $$ ad intelligence tools tell me, Groupon's US ad impressions have dropped off a cliff in the past few months. As of halfway through this month they basically stopped buying display ad inventory -- this is from the US side of things. I think they are buying more display internationally (which I am no expert on.)

Hitwise, Quantcast, Comscore, by themselves don't mean too much. When you combine them all together and you look at traffic numbers for really giant web sites they are pretty close to being accurate.

I was pretty optimistic about the daily deal sites, but Groupon (and LivingSocial to a degree as well) pulling back on their ad campaign coverage so dramatically is not a good signal. The other competitors that were spending early on (late last year) did not last very long, and it was a good signal of things to come.

Groupon has a great business model, but as with any business model that relies on buying tons of ad inventory it raises your profile too big too fast. That in exchange explodes your ad costs and eliminates your margins. At the end of the day Google and website publishers end up the winner. That's one of the reason I've split my business across lots of different websites. Had I not, I don't think I would have been able to keep it running profitably.

Update -- here is something to take a look at. Earlier this year InAdCo was running display campaigns on behalf of Groupon on a massive scale, chances are if you were using the internet you saw these ads more than once(they had some fancy in-ad signup form) If you take a look at their traffic on quantcast it had a huge spike April-May and then went to nothing http://www.quantcast.com/inadcoads.com The traffic returns in May, but as I recall it was pushing LivingSocial at that point. Their traffic has dropped off again, with neither Groupon or LivingSocial to be seen.
James Gosling leaves Google for a very cool startup job
Curiously, even Apple wasn't able to make headway in fighting counterfeit products. [1]

"China's government declined to investigate a facility ... that was manufacturing imitation Apple laptops because it threatened local jobs ... A different arm of China's government scrapped plans for a raid on an electronics mall in the Guangdong province because it could have driven away shoppers, the cable says."

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/30/apples-anti-counterfeiti...
I feel like a lot of problems in software come from lack of understanding of things that were figured out by previous generations of developers. That's not to say there aren't improvements to be found in modern software projects; just that sometimes there's a lot of reinventing the wheel, badly, because folks don't understand the beautiful simplicity and power of the UNIX system.

I suspect the fact that git exhibits a deep comprehension of that history is one reason git pretty much took over the mindshare for DVCS in record time. Where it took years for Subversion to oust CVS, and numerous DVCS systems had been plodding along for years, git was the obvious leader seemingly overnight.

So many projects have vastly over-engineered interfaces and component architecture and such, with a huge variety of interdependencies, often proudly, as though it is a benefit.
There's a lot of potential applications for mass manipulation, if it's possible. You'll be hard pressed to find specific examples, because a lot of them depend on how mass manipulation would be possible.

Potential applications could be in energy generation or the creation of ultra light materials, which could open the doors for affordable space travel (or just better more fuel efficient travel here on earth). Understanding how mass works is one of the final puzzle pieces in physics, and could lead to countless breakthroughs in a number of areas. It's not a trivial theoretical pursuit.
The foursquare venue comes in from the firehose, so we have information on venues that have seen recent checkins. Thus the coverage (though imperfect) is best for venues that are most popular.

If that doesn't meet your needs please get in touch, as we'd like to evolve something that does -- flip@infochimps.com
SingPath is the most FUN way to practice software languages
The alternative of ignoring race gives you two identical candidates. If choosing a particular race consistently gives you worse results than choosing randomly would have, that's still evidence supporting racism as a general rule - you're just being racist in the wrong direction.
At the time, reports were that Google was offering $5.3 billion with $700 million in earnouts based on performance. Google was obviously front-loading the deal so performance wasn't as big of an issue. Google just wanted to get their paws on Groupon's network of relationships with local merchants. I imagined Google pushing local deals through adwords, or complementing the inbox deals with Gmail ads, or targeted deal commercial prerolls on YouTube videos. I bet Google didn't really care about how they performed, because they wouldn't need to be profitable on their own inside Google, they'd just need to drive more ad traffic across all properties.
Rent in San Bruno or San Mateo, affordable, boring and close to public transport and the 101. Good enough until you find a good place in the city (It's been months and I'm still looking though...).
Here's my walk-through "Read This Before Installing Rails 3.1" which helps in dodging pitfalls and potholes:

http://railsapps.github.com/installing-rails-3-1.html
The basic underlying assumption is that more knowledge is inherently more valuable than less knowledge, even if you don't have a specific application in mind for that knowledge.

How many people could have forseen GPS recievers as a consequence of General Relativity?
How does Rubygems modify the behavior of the Ruby interpreter?
Budgets tend to be somewhat compartmentalized. If a project in compartment X goes over its budget, that tends to come at the expense of other things in compartment X.

$8 billion was a huge amount in the science compartment. It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
Unix and Perl for Biologists
They were wasting a stack of money promoting their Australian site stardeals though the google display network before they even had any deals on the site for people take up. Sure I get the strategy of trying to build up a mailing list so the initial deals will sell really well but as with most things they do it's throwing a boatload of cash down now hoping they can build up some sort of defensible mailing list.
> “We’re eager to bring this case to the jury,” says [an attorney for the plaintiff]. “It’s a fascinating case and I’m eager to see what a jury will think.”

This is pure B.S. right? "I'm eager to see what a jury will think."

A jury is composed of randomly selected individuals. So he's saying "I'm eager to see what a group of random people will think." Clearly doesn't make sense.

Basically what he's saying is, "A group of random people are clearly going to side with us."
The arxiv is not refereed. I usually read those pre-prints with (extra) extra caution, especially if they are outside my area of competence.
I'd use tarsnap.
5 Grooviest Twitter Apps for Android Phones
Twittering is quite addictive, can’t deny that, right? But this fascinating addiction gets a bit muddled up when you try accessing it from your mobile phone, but this can be sorted out well when you have some cool mobile apps for Twittering around you.
Select all, then deselect (ctrl-click) the one item you want to exclude. That's the exact same amount of work, just with the inversion step at the beginning instead of the end.
Does anyone know why the class is only something like 8 weeks long? Stanford is on a semester system, and even in the quarter system classes are 10 weeks.
Don't forget the thousands of jobs created and billions injected into the economy. It's not like the money was dumped into a volcano.
Is it unwise to do the research/vetting before I actually need the services?

I am hoping to launch by the end of the year, so I have some time, but I want to have some idea of what I should be thinking about so that I have one less thing to distract me from my users (assuming I can get them).

My real concern is CRM, but I am having trouble wrapping my mind around where various CRM solutions end and Email marketing/social marketing/helpdesk/feedback solutions begin. All I know is that I will need a database of my users and the ability to keep them informed via email once I launch, but I don't know what I don't know.
It's on the first or second page of icons in a Google image search for "copy icon" with size set to icon.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=copy+icon#um=1&hl=en&t...
I'm a real fan of PostGIS and like ltree and hstore a lot. Heroku isn't quite right for my needs at this time, but I would definitely consider it if I had a use case that needed an extremely fast public facing postgres installation.

I am curious as to whether you do pro-rated pricing?
An interesting assessment that I've heard from someone who would have reason to know is that Groupon is moving towards pivoting away from the "Daily Deal" business and monetizing their network of small business relationships using a different business model.

That would explain the reduction in ad-spend on end-user acquisition. If my sources are correct, we'll see something new popping up in the next 120-180 days from our friends over at Groupon somewhat unrelated to the coupon business.
That's handled by not merging changes into the master branch of the master repo unless you mean to. Anyone gets to see the files as changed, you get to choose who to listen to.

And, if you forget to pay attention and listen to the wrong set of changes, you can trivially revert any piece of it.

> this must be a terminology issue? "locking" refers to [...]

I hadn't understood exactly what locking entailed, but I don't think it changes the issue much.
I don't think you can learn to program anything related to "web-businesses" in University. I've done a MS in CS at OSU, and I always pitied the poor schlubs doing their undergrad. It's just a bunch of hoops.

My recommendation would be that you pick up a beginner PHP book and learn to build basic websites. Beginner level 0. There was a link on HN about how browsers and html5 work, see that, or see diveintohtml5.org

Then, if you see holes in your knowledge, look up something like stackoverflow.com -- SO also has a list of free CS books, look that up.

To actually program, start with HTDP or similar, mentioned in the SO bookslist. That will get you approx 7.53 times further than sitting in some braindead Java class, struggling to get above a 3.0...

Use your hard-earned money to spend on MIS courses. They'll get you a job out of school while a undergrad level java class won't. Don't do any of the courses you mentioned above either: DS, CO + asm (you're kidding!), SE. PS some of MIS is similar, you sound smart and motivated, so read the CS coursework books for fun if you want, buy them used.

Kudos on the Stanford MIT stuff btw. I would recommend starting with something like the iPhone programming course on iTunes U -- fill in the gaps as you come across them (which is the big advantage of self-study.)

Finally, CS has only one theory that you need to know; you'll like the title too. Google "shtetl optimized complexity". SO has some articles on it too, and codinghorror tried explaining it once at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/11/your-favorite-np-co...

PS Feel free to ping me offline if you wish.
gender could give them all sorts of interesting statistics about what happens to gender ratios in CS when you take the course outside of a traditional classroom.
If you're good enough nobody will take as much care in creating a copy as the you did the original.
There is a mixup here of "libertarian" and anarchist.
They are pretty similar.
This is irrelevant. LoJack (by Absolute) is in the BIOS. If you reformat, it reinstalls itself.

Numerous sources can attest to this, but here's a generic reference: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LoJack#LoJack...

As you mentioned, not everyone would know, nor have the capability to reformat. This is doubly so for steps I take with administrative passwords, firmware passwords, hard drive passwords, etc. to make it further difficult for the thief to reformat the machine.

Pro-Tip: Leave a guest account, and have everything else encrypted.

(Looking forward to OSX Lion's upcoming support for a browse-only guest account on the unencrypted boot partition when using filevault2)
Why did you take that down? I've wondered that for years..
Sure. You'd likely have as many sentimental books as you'd have sentimental tie-clips, rings, photos, favorite songs, etc. But why do some people romanticize nearly all books?
You better make sure to get your money's worth by picking Norvig and Thrun's brains at office hours :P. And if you get an A in the course, you can probably do undergraduate research with them through CURIS, something that online attendees won't be able to do.

http://curis.stanford.edu/
If the Apple TV wasn't stuck at 720p I would probably consider it. I have a friend currently doing a similar setup to what I have with the PS3 via a Logitech Revue and if that ends up working out well I will probably pick one up. The addition of Android 3.0 on the Revue also makes it a bit more of an appealing idea. While I won't save as much energy over the PS3, just the reduction in fan noise will likely be worth the $99.
This is rather beside the point, but why must they call it the "God Particle"? According to Wikipedia, it was coined in a popsci book when the writer's editor wouldn't let him call them "goddamn particles". So now we're stuck with this hollow, cliché, uninformative phrase for eternity.
I am not affiliated but this service is clever in that you don't have to reveal to the waiter that you are using a coupon. You send in a picture of your receipt and they give you a refund. They can also steer diners towards off-peak hours. http://www.dailygobble.com
I think I was three paragraphs in and wondering when they would shift from how the iPad was changing the game of baseball to how it was also impacting the game of go...
Daily31aug11
The data was hardly made public. It was shared with law enforcement in order to track down a person who was believed to be a criminal. Until law enforcement discovered that the holder purchased the stolen property rather than stole it herself, she would be assumed to be a criminal.

Additionally, because a user puts their own personal data on their laptop it should be assumed that they are entitled to do things to protect that that personal data just as it is reasonable for you to use lethal force on anyone in your home you believe believe is an intruder. If it turns out after the fact that the masked guy with a crowbar isn't an intruder, they fucked up, not you.

I'm sure this argument could be translated to legalese and win the case.

The plaintiff's lawyers are just trying to get easy settlement money because the cops were rude.
Show HN: iGeek.at, Our Yahoo HackDay India App
This is the app we made for 2011 Yahoo hack day India. Its basically a usesthis.com for everyone. The idea is to showoff apps that you use and discover more apps.

You can basically build and browse profiles like these - http://igeek.at/deryldoucette

We have a bunch of apps right now but we wanted to put it out on HN and see what people think about this. If you want to see some app added, please let us know. Also, we would appreciate any feedback. This is a side project right now but if there is a lot of interest, we are certainly keep on working more on this.
You don't need a plugin to open a program. Just set the mime type and file extension, and let the OS pick the program.

Or at the very minimum you download a small file (not an exe, a data file), and let the user double click it to open the program associated with it.
In a country with a billion people, even if you're one in a million, there's still 1000 people just like you.
18 minutes to download and install? Evernote takes like what, 2 minutes? I imagine there's an eloquent reason for that as well. Not to be snarky, but i would just love to see some of the discussions that take place these days at Microsoft.
Are you crazy? iTunes has one of the best user experiences of any app on the market today. Period.
Quite. I always wonder at the history behind left-over bookmarks, marginal notes, etc.

I'd be happy seeing a scan though. Happier actually because I could flip through other scans of other marginal notes in other copies of the same book, comparing handwriting by decade, seeing if the same things confuse or inspire multiple people, or whatever. Stuck on a dead tree it's going to get lost, scanned in and indexed it's data.
Membership software
Membership Software to provide free and paid membership using simple registration form and web based admin section to manage members.
Okay, well let's do the math:

US pop in 2000: 280,000,000 —
US births in 2000: 4,000,000 —
US births per day: 10,958 —
Fraction of US pop that 40,000 represents: 0.0001428 —
Number of births per day for the 40,000: 1.56

That seems inline with the conclusion of the paper. See any mistakes?
I’m always disgusted when people share those photos with the public or third parties even though doing so is clearly not necessary for recovering the stolen property. It just seems immoral to me, no matter whether you know that the thief or someone else took the photos.

I can’t comment on the law but I really don’t understand people who are ok with this kind of behavior. Thieves don’t suddenly become fair game for any treatment just because they are thieves.
If the company is pivoting then it is probably not worth enough to warrant an IPO.
Cool, thanks! I can't wait to try that out.
You can always use lethal force in the US against intruders? That seems wrong.
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Presumably by modifying `require_paths` and therefore changing how `require` behaves.
The Post-it wars
If you design your app's UI properly, it will disabuse the user of the notion that files that are not stored on the computer should be accessible through the local file browser. When using the Amazon MP3 downloader, I doubt people expect to have to re-open the .amz file every time they want to listen to that album. They learn to find their music in iTunes or Windows Media Player. This model should work just as well for OneNote, which already handles most file management internally.
If work doesn't produce anything of value (which isn't the case here, just hypothetically), then the "created" jobs are bad for the economy because they divert resources from productive areas. It's another form of the broken window fallacy.
Changes in the fine structure of stochastic distributions
Probably because it was the whole office set of programs that was being downloaded. No idea of there was an option to just download Onenote but should have been there.
Wasted Time in the Workplace Infographic
Cool info graphic about wasted time in the workplace
offtopic, i wish HN would show the full domain (espn.go.com instead of go.com).

on topic. this was a good post, I'm surprised michael lewis' moneyball isn't more popular amongst HN readers + baseball fans.
Show HN: This site really thinks they can compete with eBay - that's some balls
Stanford is on the quarter system. You can check out their academic calendar online.

http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/registrar/academic-calend...
I think the point was that the laptop wasn't working when she bought it. She had to have it fixed.
China's Citizen ID:

Area_ID + DOB + Order Number + Checksum

For order number: Men are assigned to odd numbers, women assigned to even numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Identity_Card#Identity...
Sorry, but non of the analysis in regard to sport statistics is relying on the IPad. The trend towards excessive sport statistics and individual player analysis is not now. Look for example at proffessional soccer teams.

I expect that all major baseball teams have been doing this for years, the only change happening now is that with the Ipad bringing a good user experience to non tech affine persons, this information is also actively getting used by players.

All in all, I strongly dislike the head line of this article, as it is in my opinion, missleading.
Bit-squatting – DNS hijacking by cosmic rays/memory errors
Interesting. I feel like there are more high end offers now, with a nice range of prices. But I only subscribe to Groupon and a couple of tiny tech ones.
I just don't buy that it does. We're not picking two random people off the street here. These are people who have passed all the filters needed to have their resumes sitting in front of you. From education, to experience, to HR, to phone screen, etc. If, at this point, the two candidates still look identical, I don't think race gives you any meaningful signal. The black candidate has already proven that he has risen above any disadvantages he might have statistically faced. In fact, this should even be a plus in his column because he had the determination (or raw intelligence) to overcome his disadvantaged lot in life and be sitting in front of you, on equal footing with a white candidate who (statistically) had many advantages given to him.
Often, we do have a fairly good idea what the ramifications will be if an experiment goes a certain way. But we almost never also have a good idea what the ramifications would be if things go the other way. Without knowledge of what the benefit might be if the outcome surprises you, how can you say that the experiment doesn't have enough potential benefit to be worth the time and money?

There's no way to place an easy upper bound on the payoff of the less-expected outcome, so your cost-benefit analysis can't simply ignore the possibilities that you consider unlikely.
Reading the section on ruby reminds me of the things that I take for granted in node.js right now owing to the long history of package management and module systems that it builds upon.

It's super nice having the dependencies specified by semvers in a package.json and installed locally in a project node_modules directory so that libraries can't step on each others toes.

The "Don’t use Bundler version X with RVM version Y" can be specified directly in the package.json and concurrent versions of module dependencies even work without incident in the same project.
Pretty much any time I try to download anything from Microsoft's websites they are a mess and make almost no sense. Everyone who is a web designer and responsible for web design at Microsoft should be fired immediately.

One example of Microsoft's ridiculousness is their hosted Exchange services -- http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.aspx I signed up for it some time last year. I couldn't get it to work with Outlook 2010. Their answer, call tech support. I don't sit on the phone to talk to just anyone, and I damn well don't sit on the phone to make hosted web services work with a companies desktop platform.

Another example is Microsoft Adcenter. Adwords was more advanced in 2005. A 6 year time gap for technology is unheard of. Virtually impossible for them to play catch up at this point. Their desktop software, Adcenter Desktop, running on their own operating system, Windows, crashes all the time. Ooops. The usability of the Adcenter web interface compared to Google's is like receiving a massage verse walking on glass. Its painful.

The sad thing is, Microsoft sits on a pile of very very valuable assets. Even with slightly above average management their business could stand to benefit enormously from Google's antitrust problems. The adcenter platform should be free money raining from the sky for them. But it won't be. And that is too bad because we need real Google alternatives.