skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is standard GAAP accounting. Amazon reports revenue as the sales price of the item sold, even though a portion goes to suppliers. Google reports total revenue from Adsense, even though a portion of the revenue goes to the site hosting the ad. In my opinion as an ex-finance/accounting guy, the SEC is wrong in this case, for a few reasons:

1. The share that the business receives is negotiable and different for different vendors.

2. Groupon is the point of sale for the full amount of the revenue.

3. The merchant receives their share at a different time from when the Groupon receives the revenue.
The fallacy is named because one of the definitions for "beg" is "to evade," which is why "begging the question" can be recast as "evading the question" (although you do lose the subtle part about assuming the conclusion to prove the conclusion).
Is that really what Groupon's site looked like in 2010? That looks more like the site pictured in the Internet Archive is just missing the correct CSS files.
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What I wrote is that we can say the same thing with every source of information, even purely unscientific things like magic thinking, rituals, etc. That's the paradoxical thing about science. And also, there are a lot of things that you can't test and can't probe but they are true.
How is this better than creating a local branch ?
Handtaschen
I think Groupon could have been more conservative in how they described their financial statements. However, it's a huge stretch to call them dishonest.

As a commenter put it here: "They were forced into accounting that Priceline hasn't been forced into in 15 years. Accounting that, I might add, provides no real additional visibility into the business. Now, it's a high-margin business with 1/2 the revenue it had before. Then it was a meh margin business with about 2x the revenues. This is not the SEC doing us any favors. It's rearranging chess pieces."

http://allthingsd.com/20110923/more-groupon-amends-its-s-1-i...

Given the media scrutiny on this, it's clear now that Groupon should have made this adjustment earlier, and referred to their full pass-through revenue as "gross billings" instead of "gross revenue". That would have been the most conservative way to describe their numbers.

Still, it's a big stretch to call this dishonest. It was definitely not conservative labeling. But all the numbers were clearly disclosed, and the labels clearly described. If you read the S-1, it was very clear how their financials worked. The problem is that this is getting so much media attention that people aren't reading the S-1, and are getting their information from the media.
Thank you. We worked so hard to pick a problem interesting enough, and big enough, to keep ourselves interested in the long term. Now we just have to continue to work our asses off.
I agree that there is a sweet spot between "too early" and "waiting too long" to launch.

But I think people naturally tend to wait too long, constantly "perfecting" the design, the features, the code, etc, as if to almost ensure they always have something preventing them from launching. Because launching is scary.
I'm definitely not condoning purposely launching with a boatload of bugs. Instead, I'm just complimenting the OP on launching knowing that it's not 100% perfect yet and welcoming any positive or negative feedback.
Self Destruction Is Generally Counterproductive
Maybe by learning a bit about etymology.
How does this compare with what PostalMethods[1] offers? They have an email interface as well an API, and their prices appear to be slightly better.

[1] http://www.postalmethods.com
Just imagine if Microsoft gives a good boost ($$$) to Firefox to be the first search engine in the box?
Yes, Bing has gained marketshare. But over that time period, Google has lost only 2 tenths of a share point. For Bing to pass Google, they would suddenly have to lose a minimum of a whopping 15 share points after a decade or so of share growth and two years of stable share.

As far as I'm aware, there is nothing to suggest that it is at all likely that Bing is going to start taking large amounts of share from Google after no record of having done so to date. Do you disagree?
Didn't we all see this coming for a long time?
Questions for anyone that has done this:

1) Can you find good local talent on at least software but hopefully hardware as well (I have a consumer electronics idea)? (I speak Spanish at the intermediate level if that changes anything)

2) Are you required to live in Santiago either practically or by rules? Or could you live in Valpariso or Vina del Mar?
Someone should get Aaron Sorkin on that
is this the same dataset:

http://socialcomputing.asu.edu/datasets/Yelp
You're taking one sentence out of context of the entire article. He's talking about being a source of scientific information - it's pretty clear if you read the article as a whole.
Yeah totally, I'd say people would almost welcome a subscription service - invariably this kind of thing is something you "should" do, and SendWrite just makes that easier. A subscription might make people use it more, as it adds a financial incentive to "get your money's worth", like paying for a gym is often the incentive people need to actually make them go.
Seconded. When I heard Geoff speak, I wasn't particularly interested in the domain at first, but by the end of his talk, I felt extremely motivated to help out IK12 startups however possible. The work they're doing is so important, and the quality of the advisor team is going to change the way business is done in the industry.
Preschool Funding for Kids Now Pays Off Billions Later
Yeah, but the cheap consumer routers that do not let SCTP through the NAT do not generally let IPv6 through either.
Thirded. Ralston is one of our investors and he's awesome.
It is very apparent that Einstein was wrong, only because his theory does not account for quantum effects. But it works for human sized stuff and up to galactic supercluster motion.

It is also apparent that Quantun Chromodynamics is also wrong because it does not account for gravity. But it works for super small stuff including CPUs and subatomic theory.

But they both work tremendously well for their scope. Hence the seeking for a Theory of Everything, because each is incompatible with the other without that mystery glue. But they both are "Wrong" - because they themselves say their theories are incomplete.
Sorry this is just sexist. And people like you who harbor and propagate sexist ideas like this are holding back our field.

Princeton's President Shirley Tilghman once said the following and I think it's a fitting quote that speaks directly to people like you.

"There are 25 years of good social science that demonstrate the many cultural practices that act collectively to discourage women from entering and continuing careers in science and engineering. The research is overwhelming, and it is there for anybody to see. On the other hand, the data that would suggest there are innate differences in the abilities of men and women to succeed in the natural sciences are nonexistent."
A More Detailed Look at Facebook Music
Pscan 2.0 - multi threaded TCP Syn port scanner
Oddly enough I am considering using Facebook because of this feature and I never use FB now. What I like about it is that it makes sharing more convenient, almost mindless (if it actually works the way its been hyped).
I went to your site and signed in with Twitter. Now it is asking me for my email address and to choose a password. If I wanted that, I would have chosen the "sign up with e-mail" option. Could you fulfill the promise of single sign-on?
Im interested to know the story of how you acquired your domain name (and at what price).
Multiple Wrongs - Business Insider vs Reuters/Marco
You're definitely right, and I don't agree with the author regarding the idea that Eric was outright lying. I just don't think the search engine market has been very volatile lately. As others noted, Bing's increasing market share comes largely from cannibalizing its partner's market share (Yahoo).

I just don't see Google in position to lose much more share to Bing is all.
If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things

I don't think that's strictly true. Governments exert themselves in a number of ways that amount to 'soft censorship', and it is often neither illegal nor very difficult to circumvent these measures. They just want to make it inconvenient, and create an appearance of distance/disapproval. Politics rewards such hypocrisy.

For example, content filters on government-workplace or government-accomodation internet access. They may not really care if you tunnel around them – it's rarely illegal – they just want to make sure there's no appearance they condone the activity.

Even things like the national internet blacklists can fall into this category. They might require ISPs to block certain direct routes to disfavored sites, making access inconvenient. But the legal mandate is not to block all access via all means, and if you figure out how to access the target sites, you may not have broken any law (depending on what content you then copy/disseminate yourself).
Mac trojan poses as PDF to open botnet backdoor
Has Jason Fried added anything to this discussion after announcing he left the board? I'd be interested in his take as a past insider.
But that's what I was suggesting, if a person really wants to try doing it I'm confident they could draw that first mug with no initial practice.

Obtaining the rest is just time and passion.
I've read, anecdotally, that wealthy Arabs have started going to Switzerland rather than the US. If you're not of an unfashionable nationality or ethnicity, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the US is the best option.
The problem is Twitter doesn't provide first name, last name, and email like Facebook does. I'm going to try splitting on space for name and people change it if it's wrong. Won't work for many names, but should make it a little better.
Hi jxcole,

Hm, we tried to make it as clear as we could up there at the top, in big ol' 32px font:

"Who we're looking for: An awesome web developer."
Samsung Seeks Dutch iPad, iPhone Injunction Using FRAND Patents
congrats! submit a 3 month update, would love to read about your experience with the program.
It's Official At HP: Apotheker Is Out, Meg Whitman Named President And CEO
There was a program on one of the PBS channels recently, it might have been Frontline, where they explored the statistics, and showed that wealth and lifespan were correlated, and as the "wealth gap" has widened in recent decades, so has the "lifespan gap."

I was only half-watching, but as I recall the study attributed this not just to wealthy people's ability to pay for better health care, but also to a tendency for wealthy people to feel more "in control" of their lives. A poor person is likely to be more fatalistic. If he gets sick he will not feel that he has any control over the situation. He will have a lower tendency to seek treatment. A wealthy person is used to being in control of everything in his life. He will be more proactive about his health care, and seek treatment sooner if there's something wrong.
UBS Finds 31% of Android Users Likely to Switch to iPhone
We spent the first couple months (while we were raising money, getting the company incorporated, working on prototypes, etc) emailing dozens of domain owners.

Fell in love with a bunch of different ones and even met in person with some people to negotiate. They all fell through over price/terms.

We ended up working out a deal with the owner for Get.com. We're not 100% clear on whether it's wise to disclose all the details yet, but we definitely will as some point.

Aaron Patzers idea's behind acquiring Mint.com were a big inspiration for us. I even grabbed him at a conference so I could get his opinion.

We knew we wanted to build a real consumer brand and believe that a great domain makes that a lot more likely.
Good point. Also, aren't the vendors effectively under 'accounts payable' because Groupon doesnt have to pay them immediately? They can float that money for some 30-60 days right? I know several business that do this (including mine) and no one has objected to how are revenue is stated. not that we're IPOing anytime soon :)
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This has nothing to do with branching. Here is the idea I tried to replicate http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-...
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This doesn't seem so shady when you realize that there are also these things called "liabilities" that you need to account for. It should be fine to count the whole cost as revenue as long as you are also accounting for the expense on the other side.
Yes, calling all $10 revenue is disingenuous

No, it isn't. That's the definition of revenue. What's disingenuous is obscuring the costs that correspond to, and apparently exceed, that revenue.

If I buy an iPod from Apple for $150 and sell it to you for $199, my revenue is $199. That's the definition of revenue. Along with that revenue, I have $150 COGS (cost of goods sold), plus my own expenses. So my net income (revenue) might be anything less than $49.
Hi Harkins,

Thanks for the feedback! This is the first time we've ever created a job listing, so I'm sure we've done some things poorly.

When it comes to the salary, we honestly don't know what the right number would be. I know it will be different depending on experience, but we don't know what's fair to offer since we haven't really done this before.

I've always tried to offer as much as we could afford. I have often actually offered more than the person asked for.
How to Make Him Fall in Love With You
"How to Make Him Fall in Love With You" Each woman has a way to make a man fall for her. However, there must be some kind of chemistry there for the trick to work. When chemistry isn't involved, broken hearts tend to prevail.
There are literally hundreds of ESPs (Email Service Providers).

Many of them offers APIs that can be programmed. You just need to define clearly what exact automation functionality you need and then select the right ESP based on API features and other factors, that surely would include pricing.

YC recently funded an ESP as well: http://www.mailgun.com

Take a look
From an affiliate perspective, this potentially means that Amazon and other merchants will reinstate California affiliates. Some smaller merchants have already sent out reinstatement notices.
Advanced Rails Tips: Managing generated files with Paperclip
Have you looked into display ad exchanges and how they store and manipulate ads? That could be an easier place to get traction.
His wife here, painted in a similar style (2 hours):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP_ACdivFQ
Nice book review. I will definitely read the book once it is out of beta.
Startups Built to Fund
Hello, why do you think most of those sites are geo-restricted? Because of copyright laws. Circumventing those blocks in most cases means you're breaking those laws -- at the very minimum, you're breaking contractual obligations that you and the service are supposed to obey under penalty, and at worst you're committing fraud by claiming you come from a different country.

Using a different IP address is, in absolutely no way, a mechanism for claiming that you come from a different country.

If I live on the Canadian border, and get my internet access via long-range wireless from the US, am I committing "fraud" by presenting a "US" IP address?
Ask HN: Any non-saas profitable side projects?
It seems most webapps these days are SAAS projects.

I'm curious, if you can share any small side-project you've worked on that has turned profitable (eg. makes at least 50$/month or so) and is not a SAAS app.
As someone involved with products that sell a lot of in-app purchases, I can state that it happens with Android all the time.
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They say US has the best (most advanced) health care technology but not the most affordable or even effective (in that Americans don't have the longest life expectancy).

You are making the implicit assumption that health care is a major driver of life expectancy. In reality, it isn't.

Consider a (virtual) country with the exact same [1] health care system as the US: Asian America, a land comprised entirely of Asian Americans. In this imaginary land, women have a life expectancy of 85.8, making Asian America #2 in the world for life expectancy (between Japan and Hong Kong), in spite of having the same health care system as the US.

That shouldn't be possible if health care is the primary driver of life expectancy.

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...

(I couldn't find the stats for men in 2 minutes of googling.)

[1] Actually, it's not exactly the same. Asian Americans are less likely to have health insurance.
TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington Launches A New Blog, Uncrunched
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This is generally the reason in the esoteric studies one does not question a master.

In scientific studies, a question is made and an answer is given. That answer then leads to newer questions further probing the ultimate. One can approach, but never completely know.

In the Occult, one accepts a maxim or answer as an answer. Questioning hinders or derails to what is desired. I am speaking of the ultimate goal of the study of the esoteric: understanding of self.

(You mentioned an occult icon, thereby opening this line of commentary)
Show HN: Why the US got downgraded
U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000

Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Total budget cuts: $385

Puts it into perspective a bit, huh?

(Source: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115560790731793704368/posts/5TRu4CdDW3R)
Just a small thing, but this site completely fails at the back button.
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It's not "as if" this were the case, this is the case. Most especially with drug discovery. In many cases the only people who pay to recoup the R&D costs of a new drug are Americans, while the rest of the world only pays the marginal costs of production.

P.S. For the drug companies this isn't a big problem because they still make back their development costs and there isn't much they can do when dealing with big state run health care systems. It's not fair but from a practical standpoint it still works. However, it does put the world's healthcare system at risk because people in the US are starting to think that drug companies are screwing them and they want the same deal the rest of the world has, they want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Since there's nowhere else for significant profits the obvious result would be a diminishing in drug discovery.
They've actually set aside $100M to fund 1,000 startups over the next 4 years. It's one of the best economic hacks I've ever heard a government doing.
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Thats the app I am working on http://www.picsicle.com . Should be out the first week in October for iOS
Not to mention what seemed to be 1/3 of Google's entire advertising inventory. For a while I couldn't go to most sites without seeing a Groupon ad.
Spent a lot of time building this out but don't have time to work on it anymore. Not sure if I should try to partner with someone or try to sell it or what. It generates some modest income but not enough to hire a full time developer.
Thanks for this - a video was the first idea that came to my mind.
This line of argument is basically BS. Families lack the power to tax, the power to issue currency, and the power [currently] to borrow for 10 years at less than 2% interest.
Please help me understand this. Is it only valid for Amazon or CA based E-Commerce Sites or all sites selling to CA based customers.
Wow, 154 at once. That's impressive. I'm very interested to see how this turns out. With these kind of numbers you really might end up generating a startup hub. It's a comparatively cheap experiment, considering the upside if it works.
Indeed. By the way, I am indeed German, but living in Britain now. I just wish they would introduce approval voting here.
All this finger shaking is misplaced.

Groupon's accounting was legitimate as a management accounting approach, and any savvy investor should have realized this.

Do you think that Google's acquisition offer was naive to the basic accounting approach used by the firm? Of course it wasn't.

The knee-jerk criticisms of Groupon's accounting are coming from the same naive viewpoint as those who demanded mark-to-market accounting practices (which helped trigger the housing crash).

The use of accounting to measure business valuation is more an art than a science, and no savvy person should be fooled either by a firm's decision not to mark the price of an asset to market or to consider ramp-up costs temporary.

If you're thinking of investing, be sure you understand how the accounting works and that you are comfortable with why management is doing it that way.

There is no reasonable way to compare two companies in different industries using a standardized accounting method. Even GAAP is not designed to do that. It's a nuance of business valuation and ultimately in the case of a company like GroupOn the valuation is mostly due to what investors are willing to pay.

And yes, it's reasonable for a firm to choose one accounting approach over another b/c it makes the company easier to manage, or b/c it makes it easier to show the company's true strengths to the market (aka investors).
If you believe this idea is false, why do you need to label it as a taboo thought-crime ("sexist")? (I didn't think that it was expressed in an aggressive or especially irrational way, in which cases some criticism might have been warranted).
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How do you plan to handle the quality of answers over time as products change? For example someone asks for recommendations on the best android phone. Today there may be a couple best answer but in the near future those best answers would likely be different.
As of this writing, 5029 of the required 5000 signatures have been collected! Now hopefully this actually goes somewhere...
I've talked extensively to a number of people that run Startup Chile. They are very interested in getting early startups that are too early to even go into an incubator. That was a conscious choice. So, it stands to reason that you're not going to be astounded by the quality of the startups.

Catalina, their director of HR/Culture is coming to Silicon Valley in two weeks to learn more about what Silicon Valley is, and does. I'm going to try and communicate what we think works at Hackers & Founders to help get startups ready for incubation / launch. We're trying to get her talking to a number of people that we think can be really helpful.

Anything that you think would really help down there? Ping me: jonathan@hackersandfounders.com
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True; however, it seems to have at least some validity. (Please expound if I'm wrong.)

Obviously because the US borrows in Dollar-denominated bonds they can control the value of those bonds, but the difference is still staggering.
This one is from Eric Rescorla, a coauthor of many of the recent TLS RFCs:
http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2011/09/security_impact_of_...