skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience has been the opposite. Despite the fact that this blog post from Mason...

http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-organizes-class-a...

...suggests that Groupon's "completely open return policy" can be used, rather than a lawsuit, to get a refund on an expired Groupon, that's not true. They won't give such refunds, and their customer service responses have advised that the Groupon in question may still be usable "if state law applies". So rather than providing "unbelievable" customer service, or even following through on the refund promises of their CEO, they're doing the absolute minimum required by law.

So in the single interaction where I could independently test whether what Mason touts is true, it was not. As a result, I don't put much weight in anything Groupon claims.
I would like to see this compared to their pageviews/impressions
Rumor: Apple offered $800 Million for Dropbox
I've heard proposals for both bandied about. Some suggest that we ought to go year round "like they do in Korea" [sic] to get more learning in. Others just want to space out the breaks more evenly, as you suggest.
The Microsoft .NET developer community tends to believe that people within it are known to the outside. Because this ecosystem is essentially funded, there is more of a marketing slant, and Microsoft employees, as well community members, enjoy a kind of celebrity.
Back in the 1950s, the rich were really good at tax avoidance. All they had to do was to donate more than their total income to charity. (The so-called flying nun tax exemption.) This was doable because when you donated items that appreciated in value, you didn't get taxed on the increase in value, but got to claim the whole value.

So if your parents had bought a lot of art, you could donate the art. Better yet you could donate a million dollars to a charitable foundation you had, have them use it to buy a piece of art from you, and then donate 4 other pieces of art which are now valued at $1 million each.

The result was a huge run-up in the value of things like art, and a simultaneous increase in public art for display. When you visit the Metropolitan Museum, you're basically seeing the benefits of a tax dodge.
Just talk me through why you need access to my contacts (I know there is probably an obvious reason I'm glazing over)
Every time I'm left unconvinced, either by pointy-edged syntax or not fair representations of javascript...

Arrays could use a beard or the varied language syntax is going to cause ingrown pains:

Declaring arrays
In CoffeeScript:
things_that_rule = [
"robot unicorns"
"honey badgers"
"Lord Inglip"
]

Destructuring assignment
Assign variables from inside arrays:
sum_and_difference = (a, b) -> [a + b, a - b]
[sum, difference] = sum_and_difference 5, 2

It's also bizarre from a Python background:

>>> [
... "a"
... "b"
... "c"
... ]
['abc']

=====

if foo.bar? then console.log foo.bar
# if (foo.bar != null) { ... }

versus

if(foo.bar){console.log(foo.bar);}
Love those, probably the only books I've read that deserved the "techno-thriller" label that publishers love. Best extrapolation of the networked society yet.
Does this take into account inflation? It could be that they are actually decreasing with inflation. I don't think it's like that but I'm just curious.
> If a lot of the wealth is concentrated, the people in the middle and bottom are very squeezed in terms of what society actually offers them (generally)

I'm not sure I understand the connection though. I don't see how one party having a large amount of wealth, however defined, necessarily precludes any other party from having any amount of wealth.

> whereas if the wealth is more evenly distributed, society tends to make sure everybody's getting along well, with health care and schools and what-not.

But the underlying underlying in statements like this is that wealth originates in the aggregation, and individuals subsequently claim a portion of it, which seems counter-intuitive and false.

Particular people build things like schools and hospitals in particular places, generating wealth for the specific people involved. 'Society' doesn't ensure that people have these goods; people create these goods for themselves, and generate society in the process.
Ask HN: Who would you say is the most popular tech blogger?
I'm talking about individuals like Robert Scoble or Daring Fireball, not blogs like TC.
Are you pud from Fcked company?

Would be great to have a Fcked company on Solyndra: takes 600MM from .gov to "create jobs", builds then shutters plant, burns through cash, shuts out 1,100 employees with no severence/vacation time payout. Gets raided by FBI.
Relative to the thousands of slides out there with no interactivity, it seemed like worthwhile trade-off to me. Tough crowd.
I can't wait for Yahuffcrunch!
Every time this study or one like it is trotted out, it drives me nuts. What a society should be looking for is freedom of mobility, not arbitrary mobility.

According to an article on NPR that was linked but then deleted here a minute ago, 80% of Americans think that one can still pull oneself up by their bootstraps. In the article, the subtext was that this mobility study proved that Americans were morons and don't realize how stuck they are.

What hogwash. If we think about what Americans and immigrants are actually seeing that makes them feel so hopeful, it's the opportunity of mobility through one's own efforts.

What opportunity of mobility does not imply is the greatest statistical father-son mobility. That would only be the case if each person born were randomly allotted IQ or EQ or whatever your favored intellectual attribute is for being more likely to succeed. But that's not how genetics work.

Not only that, but each person would have to be born into families with precisely the same quality of upbringing. But neither is that the case. In fact, on average, successful parents have successful habits that they pass on to their children.

The upshot is, the method of this study is absurd. The correlation between your dad's income and your income does not represent freedom of mobility, it's just a lot easier to measure.

One can easily imagine societies arranged with more arbitrary success paths that lead to greater father-son mobility than a meritocratic society organized by families of natural born children.

No money needs to be involved for the preceding to be case.

Now, I actually favor an even greater level of meritocracy. I would be interested in something like a 90% death tax, to be put in a pool and distributed proportionally to children upon a certain birthday. I can see all sorts of problems with the naive version of that idea, but something in that spirit would be fantastic. Let's get rid of family money dynasties.
It doesn't handle the case of not being logged in to Spotify.
Right, but this sort of begs the question: why does it matter whether you're the richest or poorest? Isn't the relevant question the extent to which that $10 worth of wealth satisfies your own needs, irrespective what anyone else may or may not have?
Any other entrepreneurs integrating this into their standard employee training manual?
This proves again that the idea of assembly line was the thing. Oldsmobile lasted for over hundred years and was one of the successors.
What's wrong with social? A game developer opens up on why he quit the industry.
> In a filing in Chicago federal court this week, former salesperson Ranita Dailey confirmed she will be lead plaintiff on behalf of Groupon employees who seek to recoup overtime that the company allegedly failed to pay.

Just because she's the lead plantiff doesn't mean the others aren't involved.
These data relate to "production and non-supervisory workers" (82% of today's private sector work force). The people you refer to would seem to comprise the other 18%.
I think it's meant the 'flood tide', not the lunar tide - the annual flood tide when the rivers and streams are engorged from snow melt over the winter.
Since you're unaware he's also "pg" who created ycombinator.

Edit: I'd like to point out that this wasn't some kind of appeal to authority to support pg's arguments, so kindly explain the down mods.
Grouponzi.com
...and does he really need to make so many basic spelling/grammar mistakes?

"I worked for 1 of 2 other folks" (doubt he meant "1 out of 2")

"I feel think I hit the lottery !!!!" (which is it?)

"I’ll gibe you some hints."

Agreed on the weird caps too. Makes me keen on learning more about the old OSDT ("Open Source Development Technologies")
I think the word "unpopular," in the context of the article, is referring to people's perceptions of the company's business practices and brand. Not so much to the size or engagement of the userbase. I might be wrong, but that was my interpretation.

(It's "unpopular" right now because it's come under a lot of heat in the press; perhaps "embattled" would be a more accurate word).
Ask HN: Which startups have flexible vacations policy?
Meaning that vacations are not tracked but also not guaranteed. I'm not judging whether that is good or bad, but just want to understand how many startups are practicing this new approach.
Someone who never appears on these list but is one of the rising stars in Scif-Fi isis Ted Chiang. He's not written a full length novel yet but his short stories and novellas are mind blowing, best stuff I're read since early Egan. Check out:

Stories of Your Life and Others
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Ted-Chiang/dp/193152...)

The Lifecycle of Software Objects*
http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Software-Objects-Ted-Chiang/...

*if there's a more HN title for a novella ever I haven't heard of it!
Must Read Essential Linux Books
"This is a winner-take-all market, like with Amazon in the 90s!"

Amazon is often pointed to as a company that was doubted much and then succeeded. What isn't talked about as much, in addition to the fact that there were many more companies that went bust than hit, is the fact that Amazon lost 3 billion before it became profitable. (Source: financials on Amazon investor site). The fact is Amazon should have failed and the critics were right more than they were wrong.

"I'm too young to remember if the same pitch was used for the Dotcoms of the '90s bubble"

Same idea. Making people think they are stupid if they don't "get it". I know otherwise smart people who lost $100,000 on dot com stocks that they had no business in back then.
Rushed endings are a staple of Stephenson books. Anathem probably has the least rushed one.
Using fancy characters to check off some made up list is just as 'fluff'.

Do you disagree with what he is saying? If so, why? Just listing shit like that is worthless. Back your thoughts up - alternate points of view that can be justified should be encouraged.

Just saying 'bah, this is fluff' isn't being justified here, it's just bashing for bashings sake, on the altar of 'whats killing HN'.
Why isn’t Apple in the running to buy Hulu?
Wages may have stagnated, but purchasing power for non-core goods has soared.

And why is this all that relevant, especially considering that purchasing power for core goods (which you don't mention) has probably declined?
Ah, so that's why "you can have any color as long as it's black".

And wikipedia agrees with your conclusion:

> Soon, companies had to have assembly lines, or risk going broke by not being able to compete; by 1930, 250 companies which did not had disappeared.

It also notes iteration in the perfection of the assembly line itself, though going by its older name of trial and error.
Browser Incorrect -- BlackBerry App World
That was cute, except Jeremy Ashkenas doesn't have a beard either. Why replace one beardless man's language with another's?
I think beta testing is shipping. Nobody expects perfection right out of the gate - even Apple and Google and Microsoft still get that wrong. I think the key is getting it out of your hands, and into others, as soon as possible. Maybe your stability won't be an issue, but something else will be? Maybe it'll work great. Who knows until you try?
I like the fact that there's a very low-barrier to entry of trying out the language while you're learning about it. This makes the material "stick" much better than just arrow-keying through a presentation.

I agree that the interaction could be better, though.
This. I've always found the TechCrunch writers to be huge egoists.
Funny, I was just in a discussion with some folks on this very issue, so enjoy the citation bomb. In short: total compensation isn't outstripping productivity by a substantial degree.

First, start with "The relative stickiness of wages and prices" by David E. Spencer. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5814/is_n1_v36/ai_n2... It provides important background to the discussion of whether wages or prices 'stick' more, and provides an overview of the debate through '98.

Next, we turn to Martin Feldstein's paper, "Did wages reflect growth in productivity", 2008. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 He highlights two common errors with studies that find wages rose substantially slower than productivity. First, he explains that such studies focus on wages rather than total compensation. Without comparing productivity to total compensation, such studies are dangerously flawed. Second, such studies tend to poorly select the deflator when comparing productivity & compensation. Basically, the price index that's used to determine compensation is different than the price index used to calculate productivity.

For an even more recent discussion of the same problem, but within the context of Russia's economy, read "Productivity and Cost of Labor: How Statistical Illusions Are Born" by R. Kapeliushnikov, May '10 http://mesharpe.metapress.com/index/BW00W218X2143504.pdf. He explains:

It seems that many of them are unaware of the difference between the
producer real wage and the consumer real wage. The former is estimated
by deflating the nominal wage using the producer price index (PPI) or
the GDP deflator; the latter, by deflating the nominal wage using the
consumer price index (CPI). One reflects the change in the price of
labor from the perspective of firms; the other, the change in the pur-
chasing power of wages from the perspective of employees. Therefore, if
we want to answer the question of how expensive or cheap labor is for
firms, we should use the producer real wage, not the consumer real wage.

Hopefully this helps in evaluating the claims made by the EPI (the source of the data used by the NYT). I'm not familiar with any direct responses to their latest data, but Feldstein reaches a different conclusion over much of the same time period: While there's some lag in total compensation, it's not dramatically different than the rise in productivity.
It's a site issue, obviously. But I do have a bookmark which I use to undo the damage.

The style in question can have its places and uses, but not for body text.

I have written Posterous and they just don't want to hear it.
I posted this to the other thread on this topic:

---

I said the following here on Yahoo almost a year ago:

"Yahoo is dead.

I don't know how they can do a meaningful recovery. Sure - they probably have enough cash to stay alive for a while - but if I were yahoo, I would be focusing on investing in every single startup in the valley in an effort to own some % of future innovation, which they have lost.

I cant see anything revolutionary occurring with their web property - their IP is mostly uninteresting and I cant imagine a large % of their staff being of too much interest to FB or Goog. I am sure there are some top devs there that would do well to migrate out - but for the majority of their staff, they must have few options.

Seriously - Yahoo could do well just becoming a very prolific investor in everything happening around them, rather than thinking a new haircut and convertable will alleviate their mid-life crisis."
awesome slides and presentation Garrett!
Realistic attack scenario:

Create a web site with user-friendly instructions on configuring your router for popular games. (Port forwarding, etc..) Hustle for good Google rankings.

For each game, have an instruction sheet. Each instruction sheet is two pages long.

The first page tells you how to log into your router.

The second page contains the malicious <img> tag as described by JoachimSchipper, as well as genuine instructions to complete your router config. (If you want to hit multiple router firmwares, just include multiple <img> tags, each with its own parameters.)

From there, you can gain remote admin access to the router. Presumably, you'd want to automate whatever you're doing to people. So, after people visit the second instruction page, run a script that reconfigures the router however you please.

At this point, the sky's the limit, but might I suggest uploading your own firmware such as DD-WRT. From there, you could do all kinds of things, from the silly (replacing all downloaded images with kittens) to the nefarious (stealing passwords on all non-SSL sites).

Standard disclaimer: I'm not writing this to help the bad guys. They already know what to do. This is food for thought for the good guys.
The disappearance of blue collar jobs is most probably due to the fact that it is cheaper to put them in faraway countries where minimum wages either don't exist, or are ridiculously lower.
Order Food Directly from your Phone, Even on the Back 9 | launchDFW
That is a bit offhand. Google has added an offline feature to Gmail, and are rolling out access to Calendar and Docs, as they outlined when they announced the Chromebooks at I/O earlier this year.[0]

All this replaces the previous work they did for online/offline through Google Gears -- which they're continuing to support until they've migrated data into HTML5 features.

[0] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-a...
August browser stats: Safari dominates mobile browsing
Particle Debris (wk. ending 9/9) You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Image
pg's thoughts on inequality: http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
I don't automatically assume it's a problem, as so many people seem to. I don't assume that all economic inequality is the medieval type, where the rich are the winners of a zero sum game.

At the high end of the scale it doesn't seem to be a problem. I've seen a lot of people go from middle class to rich when their startups succeeded. Most live pretty quietly.

I would guess most of the damage done by economic inequality is at the low end. I don't think there is much debate that societies should try to mitigate that.
"I now spend my waking hours thinking about what am I shipping today and my sleep about dreaming stuff I want to ship as soon as I wake up, if I don’t ship, I might as well be dead"

That is just so sad. I agreed until that one, living for shipping makes you live for others. What about doing things for just the casue of doing it? I don't consider my random hacks shipping, it's just a journey on the sea (to use the same methaphors).
Don't miss his short stories, like luminous and dark integers. Egan rekindled my excitement for SF recently, great stuff!
HTML, CSS and Javascript so they can at least translate an idea into a prototype/mockup that expresses the idea. That is, assuming a web app idea.
The more interesting question for me is: why are the dividends of increasing productivity no longer being shared with employees?
They'd lose credibility. :)
I read a random sampling paper recently which took a simple problem and approached it in ways that were much more elegant than I did.

Its almost a toy problem but I found the paper really interesting:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.138.7...
I've been happily using Moniker.com for five or six years now. They have really solid bulk domain management.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Wayne Gretzky
> Or do you believe economic inequality is a negative externality (like pollution) that needs to be remedied?

I'm pretty sure that you're not measuring inequality in a reasonable fashion.

Larry Ellison has a lot more resources than I do, but the net worth ratio is far greater than the opportunities ratio.

Yes, he could afford his own space program, but we both can afford to go diving. He can't drive his (much more expensive) car on 101 any faster than I can. And so on.

I'm actually running into this problem. I'm trying to get someone to help with a project. One of the sticking points is that the potential reward, while "huge" by some measures, won't significantly change what he can do. Since your model predicts otherwise, it's clearly wrong.

How about you figure out how to measure the actual "problem" before proposing solutions?
name.com, as recommended to me by many on here.
Five interesting things about Mersenne primes
F-16 pilot was ready to give her life on September 11
"...purchasing power for non-core goods has soared."

I've heard this argument quite a bit. I'm not convinced it's true. Is it the case that purchasing power for "non-core goods" has gone up, or that the cost of producing such goods has gone down? More likely the latter, IMO.

Look at the cost of home computers, for example. Most PCs cost a mere fraction of what they did back in the '80s and '90s. That has nothing to do with purchasing power increases, and everything to do with the decreasing cost of manufacturing PCs. Same thing with plasma TVs. Or with any new technology as it moves along the curve from state-of-the-art toward commoditization.
Suggestions from Last Year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Winner
True, but in addition to not being especially influential in the US, catholicism and hinduism aren't exactly socially liberal either. E.g. hinduism may not be isolationist, but what you can do in terms of your social life and your career and family is still very firmly prescribed. Plus if all the Hollywood financiers were catholic do you really think we'd be getting movies like Superbad? I feel like even the most liberal catholics like Steven Colbert wouldn't have been responsible for creating that sort of culture had they been in charge.
At the end, you said it works bi-directionally.. but you didn't demo it. Why not?
This brings up an interesting point. Perhaps hyper-locality (ie, zipcode or even neighborhood granualar offers) is the full-paradigm shift that will revolutionize this Groupon concept.

Social sizzle like what LivingSocial adds I think is nice, but forgettable (no one I know has gotten/used the "free deal" group buy).
This is a great collection of papers, and I don't mean to downplay how happy I am to find it, but you might want to use a linking method that's more obvious, like having relevant text be blue and underlined. The principle of least surprise is important, usually more important than cleverness in design.

(Now I'm going to go off and read that Lamport paper.)
No, Moore's law suggests 4x increase in transistor count over 3 years.
It is impossible not to notice that this trend started when Reagan took power and neo-liberalism was adopted as the reference in economic policy. The theory: More wealth produced, better for everybody. The practice: More wealth produced, better only for the top earners.
Screw the gimmicks and just love your customers
As a European I find that really scary. Its not as if you will be on your deathbed regretting that you had never spent more time working.
> Please, point to me one example of this blue collar utopia.

Much of the "oil states" are like that.

> What about CPAs, lawyers, and their must be some sort of corporate hierarchy wherever these people are employed right?

(1) In other words, you don't actually know anything about these biz,so you're hoping that what you picked up watching "The Office" is reasonably close. It isn't.

(2) Not really. How many lawyers do you think an oil drilling company needs? They need more CPAs than lawyers, but a decent "roughneck" costs more and a decent foreman is gold, and gets it. The lawyers? Not so much.

It's hard and dangerous work, but it's very good money.

You folks really ought to look at what decent tradesmen get.
The attached graph clearly shows the difference between wages and total compensation.
At least they won't die alone.