skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they squandered not only the raised capital, the money that is supposed to be paid to merchants is partially gone too:

"...

Specifically, as of June 30, Groupon owed $392 million to merchants for old Groupons--way more than the $225 million of cash the company had on hand.

And merchant bills aren't the only bills Groupon has to pay.

As of June 30, Groupon had $680 million in current liabilities--bills the company has to pay. Meanwhile, Groupon only had $376 million of current assets with which to pay them (composed mainly of cash and receivables).

Another way of looking at this is that, if Groupon had been liquidated as of June 30, the company would have had a net of $304 million of bills that it would have been unable to pay.

..."
TIL: There is such a thing as a take-away steak ... and that eating hour-old steak out of a plastic box can be "amazing".
A lot of the speculation re: Lodsys was that the license Apple et al had from IV for these patents prevented them from contesting the validity of the patents (standard language apparently).

So what's great here is Google either confirms that this is not the case or that they found a way around it or are ignoring it.
Thanks for all the comments and feedback on the bookmarklet. Glad it was entertaining. As mentioned by other commenters, the popularity of something like this does raise many interesting security issues.
I'm sure this cut people off in the zone when 6pm hit from time to time. As others have said here I think that the best is a happy medium, no enforced long hours but no enforced breaks either.
The top voted, open question on that particular SE site is "What should a developer know before building a public web site?"

I'm a huge fan of SE, I just find the random prickyness of shutting stuff down without editing annoying.
I do use the circles, but unfortunately even when i stick people in the "talk to much circle" Google defaults to showing the full stream. And I can't pick "Show me everyone but this circle", so then I'm manually clicking the other 10 circles only to see that no one else is posting.
So, are these high-growth companies seeking VC funding and not getting it?

Or were the entrepreneurs not aware of VC as an option? Did they avoid it altogether?

If you're in such a high-growth and bootstrapped company, I'd love to hear why.
Hm, that's not what I meant, but I can see why you read it that way. I'm sorry for being unclear. Hopefully I can clarify what I meant a little.

I don't think your claims about Israel are helpful for two reasons.

One is because neither of your claims are statements of fact. Your first claim was:

With regards to the occupation, its is related human rights issues, Israel is very unlike modern Europe.

First, it's a matter of opinion--and rather heated debate--that Israel is responsible for any human rights issues related to the Palestinians. Some would say that Israel is only doing what they need to in order to defend themselves. Secondly, modern Europe has faced several human rights issues of its own. There was considerable violence against civilians during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, as well as human rights issues in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Granting for the sake of argument that Israel has human rights issues, they're not unlike Europe in that respect.

Your second claim was:

Israel viewed very negatively by the majority of its neighbors in the Arab world primarily because of its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories

This is speculative, and again there is another side to the story. Israel's Arab neighbors invaded or planned to invade Israel on two separate occasions before Israel even occupied the Palestinian territories. One of the reasons Israel even occupies those territories--which used to belong to Jordan and Egypt--is because Jordan and Egypt have refused to take the territories back.

So, the first reason your claims aren't helpful is because both of your claims are highly controversial claims, far from the "true observations" you claim them to be. The second reason your claims aren't helpful is because a lot of people (yourself included, by all appearances) have very strong emotions about the situation in Israel and the occupied territories, and bringing up these controversies only conjures up all kinds of strong emotions and threatens to start irrelevant, tangential arguments. It's bad form to start arguments about Israel in unrelated threads for the same reason it's bad form to compare people to the Nazis. Or, as the guidelines say,

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
Kickstarter funds pet jellyfish company
I hope you can add Android/Java programming later on. But until then you should probably focus on web languages. Very nice site. When I'll decide to learn Javascript, yours will be the first I'll try. Great name, too. I hope you can expand it quickly. Good luck.
This is Oliver Roup, CEO of VigLink. Merchants generally offer affiliate programs to encourage the creation of content discussing their products or the development of services where such content tends to develop.

Extensions like this one have neither of these characteristics and instead are seen as a "tax" by the merchants - they drive up costs without any benefit. This is of course not welcomed by the merchants and as a result, VigLink does not permit this type of use of our service.

The account this extension references was terminated quote some time ago, not long after we discovered it. Although the extension continues to insert our code (we cannot prevent it) we do not affiliate any clicks on the account and the extension owner is making no money through VigLink.

Oliver Roup
Founder / CEO, VigLink
oroup@viglink.com
That's a good thought experiment.
I imagine we would very suddenly see an explosion of automation solutions for making engineers accomplish more with less time. We would also see an almost perfect eradication of most time-sinks in software development.
Are there production users of PyPy?

I feel like PyPy has always been the most academically interesting Python implementation. But has it taken away mindshare from CPython?
There are more buyers than just those who aspire to compete with the big dogs. WebOS has application far beyond just mobile OSes. Even PalmSource was sold and Garnet OS was in development until just a couple of years ago. There are thousands of potential buyers that have nothing to do with the smartphone wars.
the number of purchases per customer will likely continue to decline over time.

That's not correct. While the list is growing the number of purchases per customer will probably decrease, and when it is shrinking I would imagine it would increase (because the people who get no value from it will remove themselves, while those who get value will stay on the list)

If GroupOn can continue to provide value to customers they will keep using it. Much of their business is currently in the "door buster" special type offers, but it is easy to see them offering smaller, 10%-off-type offers from retailers they have a relationship with in addition to the "door buster" offers. Places like supermarkets would pay for that, and consumers would get benefit too.

the costs associated with building that network are analogous to building product in more traditional companies.

Yes, exactly. It's not abnormal for companies that have huge up-front investments to report their operational financial situation differently to the operational expenses. Think of sports stadium operating companies, or companies that build toll-roads, railways of other infrastructure: they have huge upfront costs, but report that cost by amortising it over the operating life of the infrastructure. At the same time, they also report their finances without taking this cost into account, because that cost is more relevant to their business. I guess GroupOn could have tried to amortise the customer acquisition costs, but that would be hugely speculative. In this case the raw operating numbers were more useful.

GroupOn may or may not have problems with their business model. That is orthogonal to the fact that reporting that ACSOI number made sense and was useful for any investor to know.
Standing predictions:

(1) Wii U will be a huge bust for holiday 2012 leading to...

(2) a huge bidding war a couple quarters later for Nintendo as an exclusive 3rd party.

(3) Microsoft will win, overpaying heavily.

(4) Shigeru Miyamoto's swan songs of Mario and Zelda with Kinect will be Co-Games of the Year 2013 but...

(5) less than a year later Nintendo will opt out of the Microsoft deal and produce for everyone.
The iOS VPP is for purchasing apps that are most likely not made by Apple. How could they provide support or negotiate pricing for something made by someone else?
I don't think the answer is so binary. I think non-rounded corners convey a feeling of simplicity. And because of that, I believe using rounded corners in a simple design can actually be harder on the eyes. Take HN for instance. If the corners were rounded, would it really be easier on the eyes? Well, I guess we would need new users to verify that.

Or take Microsoft's or anyone's tile UI for instance. I think the tile UI gives a feel of simplicity. If the tiles were rounded, would it really be easier on the eye?
Perhaps a bigger problem than maintainability using external tools (since one could continue to use Muse to edit the page) is performance. The page is slow to render from the cache in Chrome on my not-slow laptop, uses 153M (compared to 35M for the alternate code elsewhere in the comments) and requires the transfer of quite a bit of data (still significant on mobile connections).
Nice to see that there is a market for this because I've had an idea for about a year now around an .it domain that I bought last year. Good work
If yo want to work 9 to 5 that is fine. Is your choice. But I think is unfair to claim that working 9 to 5 will increase your chances of success. Now, whether you don't care for that is another matter. Fine with me if you are happy. Working long hours in a sweat shop is bad obviously. Working long hours practicing in athletics, music, academics is necessary. If you don't do it somebody else will. Assuming you want to reach the top else why even discuss it.
Starting a business involves a lot more than just coding. Responding to employee emails, getting quotes for various bits of infrastructure, setting up the legal side of things, the banking side of things, all takes up a huge amount of time. It's not difficult however.

I find swombat's generalization incredibly insulting and naive. I've heard from many successful business founders that they often have no choice but to work long hours at the start. I know swombat is talking about regular long hours, but what is his definition of regular? There are always exceptions to the rule.

I don't have a lot of respect for people who make overly-general statements in absolutes. I have even less respect for those who feel the need to back up their statement by characterizing anyone who disagrees as incompetent, greedy, or otherwise.

I agree that in an established business, you shouldn't need to work 10 hours a day everyday. I'm very much for people having a balanced life, and for treating employees fairly. However, depending on the situation, there may be periods where you do need to work long hours. There are no golden rules in life that you can follow and be guaranteed success, no matter how smart you are. Everyone makes mistakes, and a failure doesn't mean you are incompetent.
"As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world."

Also you live in San Francisco, I'm sitting in a cafe in Florida, and we got 2 macs (me (developer) and another guy that is a designer apparently) and 10 PC, welcome back to the PC era.
With one click on YouTube you can now watch videos with your friends on Google+
I'm saying it's a complicated issue and no simplistic approach is going to work all of the time. I'm sorry I can't give you a grand unified theory about how governments should handle protestors.
I think they miss out on an opportunity there, just tag them differently or put them in a different section or something. The question and answer stuff is great for searching but when you have put together such a knowledgeable community it seems like a waste not to allow them to engage on topics like this.
Which direction do you think technology choices flow?
Protect IP Act would cost taxpayers $47 million, private sector much more
So, why wasn't it as appealing to the broader base of consumers?

I played with one for a bit at Best Buy, but it felt clunky and didn't look as good as the ipad. OTOH I didn't buy an iPad either, as tablets just don't work for me.
No scientific data here, but it sounds to me that 82% is pretty damn good. You'll never reach 100% because there'll always be folks who sign up and then simply don't follow thru. I know I'm guilty of that. It's like handing out Broadway show flyers... just because I take one doesn't mean I'm going to actually buy tickets to see the show.
>>So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I could show you many more but why?

>>But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy

Yes, do what makes you happy and yes I am an average person but that doesn't mean that I cannot tell you that the sky is blue even if I were blind (I think you know what I mean). What I disliked is the blanket statement. In very competitive fields if you want to be top dog you have to work long hours and even that may not be enough. Of course, if you work on a sweatshop working long hours really makes no difference. Top dog against who? Lets just not make blanket statements.

Some people are happy working 40 hours others are happy working 80 hours. And if you are in a competitive field 40 hours will not do the job. Happiness is besides the point. If that doesn't make you happy don't do it. I'm not telling anybody to work 80 hours to be happy. I'm telling you not to try to convince other people that they should not work 80 hours a week because you don't like to work 80 hours a week.

I'm saying that if you want to stay ahead of your peers, say, athletics, academics, you better train more, study harder than the other guy. Is almost a self evident truth so I don't understand what we are arguing about. If I'm wrong please enlighten me.
Should the federal gas tax die, or should it be increased?
That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I honestly can't remember your name!).

trunk.ly? They certainly weren't the only ones but were in the right place at the right time to attract a heap of users and as a consequence did some crazy weeks to bring forward a heap of planned features to keep the newly attracted users.
Turning Chocolate Bars into Games - Augmented Reality
My educated guess is years from now if ever. There's no worldwide severe weather dataset, so any foray into that market would look half-baked or worse, biased towards first-world countries (ie nations with good metereological data).
Just FYI, since I assume it doesn't come up in the lessons, your REPL doesn't like objects that self-reference, even though it isn't trying to print them out.

> o = {}
> o.o = o
==> [object Object]
ERROR: Maximum call stack size exceeded

This isn't totally unusual; `window` has several self-references, for example, and hangs for several seconds.
CoffeeScript Koans
I don't like the diagram example because it looks like B is being given some form of precedence over C. The lack of symmetry throws me off.

I would suggest having it round in both directions and removing the bottom edge of the 'triangle', so that it looks more like a curly brace. I'm not sure though, that might look weird or too cute.
I still get it. Maybe is due to bad webgl support for chrome on linux (I have to start it with --ignore-gpu-blacklist).

However I haven't had any problem with any of the other three.js demos, or any other work of its creator, Mr Doob (like Google's Rome).
Huh? The True Distance Heuristic stuff to which I refer can speed up search quite dramatically. The trick is to find a nice tradeoff between improved heuristic accuracy and memory overhead.
According to the linked paper, the have 60 people managing the machines around the world, arranged for 24x7x365 coverage.

I'm not sure what kind of work they do, but they make a point of saying they don't need much human intervention. So, that might be all.
A fork of the well-known (and quite good) JavaScript Koans. As a fork, it currently suffers from a lack of CoffeeScript-specific content; see this pull request: https://github.com/blindsey/coffee_script_koans/pull/4

There's also another project calling itself CoffeeScript Koans, also based on JavaScript Koans: https://github.com/sleepyfox/coffeescript-koans
Thanks everyone for the feedback! I made this tool for myself and other entrepreneurs, not just lawyers. Last year when I was negotiating with investors I often wanted to diff their changes against my original forms. A tool like this would have helped me.

I recognize that there are many challenges involved in selling to lawyers, and I'm talking to lawyers about that. Here on HN I was hoping I would hear about how DocCompare is or isn't helpful to entrepreneurs, investors and hackers.
I'm in Minneapolis. Same story as San Francisco.
Did you reply to it?
Mac might be slowly gaining on Windows but it's a very slow growth.

That San Franciscans use more Macs should be a surprise to no one. Their salaries are a lot higher than people on the east coast (a few choice cities excluded). Of course their living expenses are a lot higher too; but computers cost the same no matter where you live. $1200 to a San Franciscan is a different type of purchasing decision than to someone from, say Ohio. In San Francisco $1200 is a month's rent on a studio apartment. In many parts of the east coast that's a pretty luxurious 3 bedroom condo.
I love Apple products, but the lack of a monopoly is what's keeping Apple innovating. Lets hope no other competitors decide to drop out.
A pretty good example of what you are talking about is AirBnB, sure they may have had some of the security features in the pipeline but the pressure was really on them to at least get something out the represented a step in the right direction shortly after what happened. I'm pretty sure they must have had people pull some big hours to put together such a comprehensive security features overhaul so quickly.
This has been around for a while. It's still not 100% reliable (for instance, it simply converts the JavaScript `a == b` to the CoffeeScript `a == b`, which is equivalent to JavaScript's `a === b`), but it's astonishingly good in many cases. Very useful as a tool for learning CoffeeScript.
It's an implementation detail to a beginner.
12 ways to make your web start-up investable
Perhaps we have different expectations of what we think should appear on Hacker News.

I come here to find out about cool new stuff that hackers elsewhere in the world are working on. To me, an individual learning a fundamental AI algorithm isn't all that interesting. Particularly as the OP in this case has nothing to add to the discussion; he's just crowing to the world: "Look! I implemented someone else's idea!"
Basho's Contact Form - I hope these guys are serious
I still think MS has the potential to be the biggest cellphone maker and tablet maker. But boy they have BBBBAAAADDDD marketing and advertising campaigns.

They have the largest social networks under there belts Live (messenger+hotmail+xbox), Skype, and in a way Facebook. The biggest gaming platforms with Xbox + PCs.

I've used the windows phone for a bit and its nicer than either Android and iOS IMO. I would consider one if I wasn't running a complete Apple suite now.

Google may have just truly opened up the market for competition buying Motorola and annoying its Android partners. Plus there is the whole patent payout weighting they are adding to Android (I assume to make it more costly than manufacturing with win7).

They have Nokia, they have all the ARM work ready to go.

They have the enterprise, and if they can make phones work like a dream in the enterprise I'm sure companies would like at using there existing MS skill set to look after them as well. Taking note that lots of people I know have smart phones issued by company rather than buying them personally.

Windows 8 demo's look really good from a touch interface perspective. The demo'd Win 8 UI looks like it would be nice on a tablet, weird on a desktop without something like the apple track pad, but still nice.

But they need a new marketing company sooooooo bad. One that knows consumers and not the enterprise.
I've actually worried before about not drinking being a social handicap at today's hip tech startups. It certainly makes bonding with the rest of your team more difficult if their primary social venue is the bar.
Very nicely articulated article from MG on this. Although I may be biased since it pretty much echoes every point I believe as well. Anyone think otherwise?
Mais oui! It is an embarrassment not to be French, n'est ce pas?
Using Gephi to visualize keywords and landing pages from Google Analytics
Damn. AI 3rd ed on amazon is $115. Assume the authors get $50 so Norvig gets $25. He may have just banked $2.5MM.

No disrespect meant -- it's awesome to see Stanford experimenting with education like this. But still... wow.

Edit: reminds me of the $24MM house Stewart -- of Stewart's calculus -- built with earnings from his calc texts [1]. I'm not hating on educators being paid well, but particularly stewart seems a little... unseemly, particularly in light of the constant churn of new editions. Has calculus or calculus pedagogy seriously changed in the last 10 years in a way that requires a stream of new calc book editions?

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123872378357585295.html#proj...
Sorry, should have included it myself.
So between Apple's ritzy kickass mobile PCs and the boatloads of sub-$100 chinese Androids that will flood the market soon, is there any room for a third platform? I really don't see anything stopping RIM and Microsoft from ending up at the same dead end.
Activision: Social Game Company Valuations "Out Of Whack"
There is no way Android represents 20% of the tablets sold this year. Seriously, I doubt it's 5%.

It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.
If you are looking for confirmations... perhaps a percentage just didn't use valid emails? Possibly accidentally?
American Girl in Italy Photo Subject Speaks Out
That's my point: it's not a traditional "enterprise" market. Neither price (what you pay to Apple) nor terms are negotiable. There is a certain amount of "support" involved, via the App Store approval/appeal process and transaction dispute handling, etc.
Yes, a true Scotsman would not say such a thing.
Are you tracking emails that bounce? Or people that have whitelists of who can email them? Then there's the people who always send signups to a special yahoo signup address they rarely check. You can probably do a little better than 82%, but I doubt you'll ever beat 95%.
For many years now, the majority of Microsoft's revenue has come from enterprise sales, and Apple and Google has a very long way to go to dominate that market.
>welcome back to the PC era

I wonder how long this lasts. When the biggest PC maker decides to exit, it should be a cause for concern for competitors who aren't Apple.