skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The founders and early investors have all cashed out, they invent accounting metrics. When you look at the actions of their management team and combine it with weird accounting metrics, it would be more aptly named Grouponzi.

It isn't a lack of business accumen, divesting yourself of a business at the height of it's market cap is the right thing to do. The problem is that in order to do sell at the highest price you need to convince someone else that the business will be worth even more in the future. For being able to do that he is a brilliant business man.

If pouring cash into this business would make it profitable then why did 90% of their Series G go to cashing people out? It seems to me that if Andrew Mason believed what he says then he'd go all in and take a modest profit to secure himself for the rest of his life. Instead he sees what everyone else sees which is a business about to tank.
US House approves SEC-exclusion, allowing Crowdfunding for Equity, up to $2M
Suprising Insights from Facebook Analytics Data
I've come to that conclusion that I can't keep my idea a total secret, otherwise it will never see the light of day. At first I was entirely vaulted. As for the site, it's a social network with a focus on businesses rather than people. I've spent countless hours drawing up the blueprint, so there are literally over fifty other services that I believe the site could incorporate which all have a huge potential upside. It's very frustrating to have all these ideas but not know how to implement them. I've already spent thousands of dollars on developers, but I don't want to go completely broke.
Actually, there is an effect on the reader. Being indirect softens the blow for folks who are offended by it, much like a euphemism does.
Even if you trust a company not to do you harm with the information they store, there exist entities that can compel them to turn this information over. For example, the information can be (sometimes secretly) subpoenaed by the U.S. government.

The choice between being evil and not being evil can be an easier one to make, practically speaking, than the choice between being evil and becoming the target of federal criminal prosecution.
Um remove whitespaces by choosing compact setting. Problem solved.
It depends on what you mean by "sustainable." Is it going to create a sustainable business model that will displace the whole analyst labor/consulting market? No. A significant portion? Probably not. Will it create opportunities for firms needing analysis to get it done cheaply and for non-traditional or inexperienced analyst to show their stuff? For sure.

Might it lead to totally new ways of approaching problems that would never have been discovered otherwise? Most likely.

So it's not going to replace analyst in a niche that is already hot, but it will be a valuable component of that ecosystem.

I wish them the best of luck and I'm already thinking of ways my company could use this.
Groupon Prices its IPO at $12.7B, Has A lot to Prove
All of this may be true, but I'd like to see the public record where legislature took a look at the existing candidates for elected official, didn't like the results, and decided to raise salaries in order to improve the candidates.

My guess is that it didn't happen that way at all. Instead, the legislature voted to increase salaries for itself, and no one bothered to ask questions. Now we have retrospective justifications that it's hard so there were no candidates until salaries were raised, but I just don't see that happening anywhere.
What makes swearing any more offensive than say, not wearing a tie at some conference? Is there anything inherent in the tie and words or is there a cultural attachment to these things that raises emotions?

So then, do we always cater to the current cultural trends, or do we pave our own ways in some way? Some times we're not always looking to please, attempts to be polite can lead to concealment of details that matter. So sometimes it's worth not being polite, and politeness, too, is in the eye of the beholder.

Offensive is largely still a subjective matter, you have to decide how much you value this subjectivity.

Some people get offended and start throwing shit at the wall, and some people don't give a fuck.
I think he's correct in his assumption that it's only really in America that people are offended by swear words on a slide. I'm in Europe and no one I know would blink twice to see that - although I'd defo leave it out in a sales pitch!

I personally thought the unnecessary swearing was quite amusing. It's nice to see someone not taking themselves too seriously (for a change). Also reminded me of Ted Dzuiba - anyone know what happened to him? His articles on theregister were highly amusing.. Almost as funny as the comments where people just bemoaning the swearing. That was hilarious.

Also reminded me of this, which was on HN a while back:
http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-c...
Nope; it's mostly their ethical void. The business boils down to temporarily delaying payments to merchants, in the meantime reporting those payments as revenue. This inflates the value of the company and misleads investors into believing their business model is more viable than it actually is.

On the flipside, their customers (merchants) are reporting that they do not see the conversion rates that Groupon advertises to lure them into a deal. In response, they try things like raise their prices prior to honoring a deal, which further dilutes the value of Groupon's product.
I disagree with the article. Swearing is highly effective but only if rarely used. The article's author hints at innuendo, euphemisms, dysphemisms and doublespeak as alternatives to swearing. I am a firm believer and follower of concise eloquence so avoiding calling a spade a spade is akin to heresy. Come out and say it, don't avoid words when they perfectly describe something.

Think of swearing as an alternative to hitting someone. Sometimes you really want to hit someone and there may be a good reason for it but violence is never appropriate. Swearing in such a contexts is how humans don't continuously tear each other apart. They should be a tool of last resort to express our most powerful emotions.

Expletives are the most powerful words in every language, but they only retain their power when used infrequently and in contexts that demand them.
The word "shit" is not profane, just coarse. And vulgarity has it's honored place in the lexicon. In fact, I'd say that "shit work" is an excellent term to use when describing unpleasant, meaningless activity.
2012 AD and Beyond: Abracadabra
The linked article "The Nine Parts of Speech and the F-word" is silly. Replacing "John went to the bakery" with "That f* went to the bakery" does not a pronoun make, any more than "That person went to the bakery" makes "person" a pronoun. The reflexive pronoun examples are similarly weak. The third line under "Adverbs" has at least one error that makes it nonsensical. I stopped reading at that point, but I'm sure there is plenty more garbage in that article.
I don't either, and I didn't think about it until, like you, I was shocked.

I think we owe it to ourselves to look into this.
Racingtips
Sports Tips: bet like a pro. Exclusive Profit Guarantee. Sports betting memberships include a proven staking plan and money management system."
The only people that would benefit from an EC2 cluster in Australia are Australians. For everyone else its just more latency. It's not a huge market, I worked in Sydney for the past 3 years and I'm very much familiar with it and its recent growth but its still tiny. I just don't see the demand being high enough to warrant anything more than something like CloudFront.
It's not about presentation, it's about semantics, and making the web more accessible.

Accessibility is an important part of HTML and the Web itself, so in that sense this sort of thing is most certainly contributing to the evolution of the Web.
Ask HN: Someone released my startup before me - now what?
Hi Folks!

Obviously this is a throw away account - but rest assured I am a regular poster / commentor here.

Like I am sure many of you have experienced already someone beat me to it. I started working on a new startup with some friends a month ago and we were hoping to launch around January / mid February. Its in a relatively untouched area of cloud data (I know everyone is doing something with data in th cloud but believe me this isnt something we found any options for out there yet). All I have been aware of is that 2 companies were working on something similar (one of which got funded recently too). Turns out in the last few weeks one of them launched - and has done a great job it seems with the UI and so on. No idea how they're doing so far in terms of acceptance and conversion and so on - but it certainly looks great - and feature overlap beween our products is pretty huge.

I dont know what to do now - on the one hand we have only a months effort behind us - and it wouldn't be too much to loose to go do something different now. But I do believe in our product and since the market is relatively untouched I dont think that it needs to be a monopoly. On the other hand I also believe that coming first isnt always the best way to win - but being better is. However considering we are far behind the competition at the moment - I really wonder if it would be a good idea to get in here or not.

I would really appreciate and advice or experiences that fellow HN'ers have made in such situations - especially success stories.

What would you do in my position?

Thanks!!
That just seems like a dangerous argument, like we implicitly discriminate against poor people but won't say it directly.

I disagree that wealth is an accurate proxy for capability in any field.
EMI Music gives out 12,000 songs - for programmers.
Good point. I was thinking that too. Or was I thinking it? Maybe the aliens were thinking it for me...
I just uploaded a bookmarking Chrome extension that does the tagging for you. I am using myself so far but if you want to try it I can send you the link. I set it up so that I click on the icon and the bookmark is saved. But I am sure I can add a popup that will let you choose a "folder" to save. This is the backend in google app engine: http://ting-1.appspot.com/
How not to respond to vulnerability reports
Cheap N Djamena Flights - Flights to N Djamena from London
We provide cheap airfare for flights to N Djamena from London. Dial 0207 183 0392 to book your flights to N Djamena. We offer cheap tickets for N Djamena flights.
However, you take no chances of offending by not swearing, but you guarantee to offend someone if you do.

Good. Fuck them. Believe me, we aren't going to get along. Best to know now. Also, I believe in evolution, think the earth is more than 4000 years old and I support gay marriage. That offends a ton of people and expressing that opinion has the same effect on those "relationships" as saying "fuck".

You might think you're being polite. You're not. As Bill Hicks would say, you're sucking on Satan's cock, ice ice baby.

And as a matter of economic reality, I've found that the better educated, and economically advantaged a person is, the more likely they are to use words that others have judged to be offensive. "Manners" are what the servants have.

Then there's an anecdotal inverse correlation between the likelihood that a person uses the word "fuck" and the likelihood that they support dropping cluster-bombs on civilian areas. That is people go all weak at the knees if I say "fuck", but those same people are all for shredding small children: just so long as they are "non-christians". (Yeah, I'm sure you don't do that Mr No-Potty-Words HN reader - its just a general observation).

Whatever.
I wondered the same thing. Doesn't really add up. Maybe he was as blind as a seeing bat.
Hotmail on 2 million iOS 5 devices, growing 100K per day
Twitter Bootstrap v1.4.0 Released
Steve Jobs had a technical partner (Woz). If he didn't, he probably wouldn't have gotten funding (he wouldn't have had anything to necessitate funding).

What this article should have said is that there needs to be a better way to connect creative non-technical visionaries (whose primary skillsets are having an empathic understanding of the customer, product design, and an ability to build passionate followings/movements behind those products) with engineers from the start, rather than having startups/accelerators treat them like an afterthought (ie, post Series A, let's hire a marketing intern to do some A/B testing).

What Jobs proves is not that people like him should always run things, it's that they need to have a better seat at the startup/accelerator table than they currently do. Identifying them and plugging them in earlier in the process would help the startup scene as a whole.
> Swearing almost goes with the territory of being a programmer.

I respectfully disagree.

As a counterexample to your codebase, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single swear word in the 50k lines of one of my projects - even in the commit messages.
Sometimes shit sucks.

Or, to be more verbose, sometimes somebody creates, publishes, and endorses a crafted good or work which is incredibly inferior not just to current state of the art, but also prior art and future ideals, but without any indication that the creator has encountered any reason to believe that their invention will not stand the tests of time, merchantability, reliability, insight into the human condition, etc.

In those cases, it's incredibly useful to identify and call out these things as bad. If we can't use the full width and breadth of language, then it gets harder to do so; invariably, all attempts at censorship start with the negative parts of language in an attempt to whitewash thought and opinion. (As recent examples, consider Facebook's omission of a "Dislike" button, or American Idol's refusal to allow voters to indicate unfavorable opinions of all contestants. The historical ideal is Newspeak.) When we can't say that something is bad, then we lose some of our freedom, not to mention some of the expressiveness required to attack everyday problems.

So, yeah, fuck that. Sometimes shit sucks.
Oh, the retirement benefits are insane. Presidents have a guaranteed pension of $160k for the rest of their lives, funded outside of the social security system. Many local officials have even higher pensions.

No matter how you do as President, you'll be comfortable for life (not counting speaker fees, which are at least market-driven). Seems like such a sweet deal, I'd do it just for the money...and that thought is what scares me.
Speaking of trusting google... there was a situation at a company I worked at where the management strongly was against transferring the company mail system to google apps/mail because of the concern of google may read their email. They wanted to keep their internal mail infrastructure for privacy reasons of the company.

The cto at the time convinced them that there is really no point of keeping things inhouse since the majority of the management, for convenience, forwarded all their company email to their personal gmail account anyways.
Funny how security is not about what you think but what you do.
Imagine you're a startup and use gmail or Google Apps for your team communications, even customer service. One day Google decides it wants to acquire you. During negotiations, it has access to all email exchanges between you and your customers and, more importantly, you and your investors / team members. So there's definitely something "in it" for them to do so.
Probably about 50 altogether. Each of us promises to never ever look at personal data, before being granted privileges. And I'm pretty sure all those promises are serious.

I don't know how enforcement works, though a single offense would be firing-worthy.
People are always offended for "other" people, I would be curious to hear the thoughts of a person who is truly offended by the word fuck. Does it have some magic powers that cause it to fire off a pain circuit in mutant brains?
15 Great Design Resources From October 2011 | BOCO Creative Blog
Hardware improvements necessarily move slower than software, especially when carrying the complex historical baggage of out-of-order execution of x86.

To be fair, things are improving. eg. The latest Intel CPUs no longer need aligned memory to avoid slowing down.
It's cool, but utterly pointless. Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days in orbit in one mission, in which he was routinely tested.

> Polyakov's mood stabilized to pre-flight levels between the second and fourteenth month of his mission.

So I really don't see a point of a test of this length, if mood stabilizes to pre-flight levels during the second month then there's no point of a test beyond two-months in duration if this holds true for multiple people. Given the number of astronauts and cosmonauts that have been on prolonged missions the data should be readily available to crunch.

Why bother isolating people for 520 days when you can crunch the data of hundreds of people isolated for months to gather the same data. It's a complete waste of money that could have been spent on real research.

33 men survived 69 days trapped in a mine after a collapse. Big groups have bigger risks of social cohesion failing. I think it speaks when 33 men not trained for the situation got through it fine.

Top that in risk, stress, quantity of participants and isolation. It was 16 days before they knew anybody was even looking to rescue them. Top that one for stress.
WARN - if you sign up w/ FB and say "you've been there" on an experience, it will automatically comment on your wall without permission saying "I just did this, check it out"
overall tho I like, ravn - congrats on the pivot folks
I did 5 years in the Navy, so I have to try really hard NOT to swear occasionally. I generally don't have a problem around children or my great grandma, but when I'm giving a talk it's pretty hard not to.

I don't put swear words in my slides, though.
To sharpen the analogy, maybe each type of business is like a certain type of car or sport. You should learn the relevant skills before diving in. Driving a Geo is different than driving a Ferrari, but they're still both cars.
Moncler Men Jacket Montclar (black) on Sale
I'm pretty sure when a company does additional "public offerings" they typically issue new shares and dilute their existing shares rather than sell them. It's just easier, and more smoke-and-mirrors, just the way Wall Street likes it.
Every such request gets individually checked over by the lawyers. Many get pushed back on.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/...
If you're writing people off as "too far outside your value system to be worth bothering with" because they happen to find swearing offensive, you're missing out on knowing a lot of really awesome people for a pretty stupid reason. Then again, your policy does save them hassle, so maybe it's for the best. Penalties offset...repeat first down.
I like its look, but I wish newsblur didn't require a username or would just let me use my e-mail address. I failed the "new character" test. Once three or four don't work, I really want you to just offer me one. Or not require one in the first place.
Try college students. Seriously, I knew so many CS/SE majors who needed projects to work on that would mean something on their resumes.

Many colleges have an undergrad "capstone" program where entrepreneurs can pitch their ideas to teams of students, who may spend 1 or 2 quarters building a product in lieu of a thesis. This might be a good place to start.
"stuff outside the domain of the package manager". Almost entirely redundant with /usr/local, except that /usr/local works for relatively well-behaved software that uses the standard directories like bin and lib, while /opt mostly contains software so broken that it wants to install in one big directory named after the software package.
There's actually a checkbox that says "Share this on my Facebook wall". You can also just not give RAVN permission to post on your wall when you first sign up (in the Facebook authorization dialog).
This is a little prissy. I'm far more offended by a poorly-edited tl;dr blog post than the occasional f-bomb. Both can show disrespect for the reader; there's an art to it.
Re: struggling, issues of being bought off exist independent of salary. If someone can be bought off, making an extra $180k a year isn't going to stop them from taking more. So that's not really a valid concern, since it exists in both cases.

The point about making the salary average is that it is by definition neutral, doesn't discriminate against anyone. I don't argue that we shouldn't pay politicians at all (what Benjamin Franklin wanted) because that does discriminate against the poor, who could never afford to be politicians irrespective of ability. Sounds like that wouldn't bother you anyway, but I wanted to clarify.
COPPA isn't designed to forbid freedom of expression; it was intended to protect children from advertisers and data miners. Google not being allowed to register accounts for kids without a big wall of legal documents from their parents is exactly what this was intended to do.

This is a rare case of the system working.
The real question is, do we have an alternative?
Haha, I noticed the location was Troy, NY.

RPI, huh?
I noticed exactly the same thing. I've become increasingly alarmed at the decline of the lay/lie distinction in English, even in educated speech. In this case, though, I consoled myself that at least it created a rhyme. Contrast this to the chorus of "Truly Madly Deeply" by Australian pop-rock group Savage Garden:

I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lay like this forever,
Until the sky falls down on me...

They missed an opportunity. Here the grammatically correct lie gives a lovely rhyme between the middles of lines 3 and 4:

I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lie like this forever,
Until the sky falls down on me...
That argument is sort of like a chess strategy that starts with "If I get four moves in a row, I can checkmate my opponent."

Nobody is denying the basic facts you've cited, so it'll be very hard for you to find someone whose ignorance of those facts you can use to your advantage. Groupon won't be as liquid as, e.g., AMZN. But buyers and sellers both know that.

And selling pressure is intrinsically short-term; Groupon's underlying value is completely independent of the number and motivation of selling shareholders. In a Bayesian sense, you could respond to insider selling--except that insiders are almost always selling, and the more successful the company is, the more they ought to sell. The biggest insider sellers are, by necessity, the founders of the biggest and most successful companies.
Sure, some of the guys on our team wouldn't commit so much as damn or hell, but they are in the minority

We have something akin to a swear jar going on at work, where instead of a coin donation, you must slap yourself in the face for swearing, it's a bad day if it's not even gone 9am and you're slapping yourself

And after Embarcadero finally released a 64-bit Delphi compiler complete with memory leaks and 8000% slower compile times, there was a lot face slapping going on =\
Hey bomatson.There actually is a checkbox right under the done button to not post on FB. I think a lot of times, people just click out without looking at the modal. The whole doning and wanting experience is definitely something we're looking at. Of course we want people to share on FB but at the same time, we don't want to give anyone an unpleasant surprise.

I'll let you know what we come up with for that one. Thanks for the feedback.
It's a lot like Binary Land, a game from the mid 80s: http://youtu.be/NLI415emLzQ?t=42s
Wholesale Nike Air Max 2012 on prices on line