skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some companies really are hoarding [0] cash. By which I mean, they're stashing it in very liquid investments, rather than investing it in long-term ways back into their own company, and rather than hiring new employees. (And many banks are choosing not to lend those cash stockpiles out as capital.)

Corporations have good reason to do this. For many companies, they want to have the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities created by this economy, but they don't want to move just yet since there's so much political uncertainty. Nobody wants make a big investment only to have Congress levy a punitive tax on that investment. Nobody wants to hire a bunch of new people and then be forced to spend a bunch of money due to an unforeseen change in labor or health care law. So companies are sitting on cash, simply waiting for the political situation to settle down enough that it's safe to start using their cash productively.

[0] horde - a large group of people or warriors. hoard - a stockpile of resources.
Deploying a Rails3 app to AppFog in under 2 minutes
I don't know what your view/message ratio is but I can't imagine any guy has any decent ratio. The thing I have noticed with online dating is this: girls get a gang of messages + views and guys get some views. This is true with all the guys I know who are on okcupid. The 60-100 views/week for you is what girls I have dated on there say they get in messages, which I'm sure you know is much harder thing to accomplish.

The art of online dating, IMO, is not in the questions answered but the messages sent and secondly how non-offensive your profile description is. Include keywords "Hiking, Laughing, Friends/Family, Good Beer" and you're in like gin.

My 2cents :)
cash yield = cash flow from operating activities / fully diluted equity value
Happen to know when that is?
dwm in particular mentions that it's elitist in order to prevent stupid questions from novices:

Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though.

Also anyone who has ever subscribed to the suckless mailing list can testify to the elitist sentiment among many of its users.
I was surprised to find out that the cost to borrow shares (to short) was still so high. Doesn't that pretty much guarantee that the share price is somewhat above the "fair price"? The cost to borrow is like a tax. The price consumers pay is always above the equilibrium price, which is above the price the sellers get (30% below the buyer price).

What about derivatives? Are there calls and puts on Groupon?
The insiders are 144 days into their lockup period of 180 days according to the S1 filing. Morgan Stanley and their preferred clients have made their money and are moving on. So there's not much motivation among heavyweights to keep marketing the stock and there is some paranoia about the looming lock-up expiration.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...
Simplicity and features are related, but they aren't opposite ends of a spectrum. I tell my design and product team that as the core feature set grows, more development time and design effort must be invested in keeping the software simple to use. Similar to the way your test suite must grow more powerful to cope with increasing code complexity. There's probably a cool metaphor like technical debt lurking around here somewhere.

As an example, think of Facebook - one of their ideas was to simplify the standard classes & permissions system down to concept everyone would understand and use: Friends. Friends is basically permissions without the classes, wrapped around a familiar mental model. This was very successful, but over time users demanded the ability to grant different permissions to different users. For example, family vs. applications or close friends vs. co-workers.

So Facebook re-introduced the concept of classes to their permissions systems. They called them lists. And they ran into the same problem that has bedeviled permissions systems from the dawn of Unix. It's a PITA to understand and manage the additional complexity.

So Facebook invested a lot of time in simplifying class management. Namely, they used social signals, some basic heuristics (everyone has a class called "applications" and another called "family") and probably some other information to auto-assign friends to classes for you.

While the new, class-aware permissions system is more complex than what Facebook started with, it's simple enough that users seem to be adopting it just fine.

This is just one example, but this sequence is repeated everywhere good software is made. And it's pretty easy to understand: stop adding features when they add too much UI complexity for your target audience to successfully use. Assuming you're not doing monolithic releases and are capturing lost of user feedback, you'll know when you're about to cross the line.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd be careful to ensure that the advice this application gives does not construe financial advice that would require being registered with a regulator as you could get into serious trouble for that (if you are not registered that is).
There's a startup in Palo Alto that uses phone signals to track consumers and generate analytics. Perhaps their technology is being used. http://euclidelements.com/
This is a pretty bold move. It would be fun to have a basket of say 500 pre-paid phones scattered around so that folks could pick up a phone and drop it off to poision the data with a bunch of bogus stats. Except you could probably defeat that with ESID or IMEI filtering.

I am surprised that this is legal in California, there is legislation that forbids this sort of thing.
Anti-noob is perhaps a bit harsh, but dwm is definitely elitist. It is designed to keep its user base small (see my reply to qjz).
Dragonsong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonsong - and the rest of the trilogy) was my favorite as a kid. I'd recommend it today.

Her work had become merely formulaic to me as I grew, with a few exceptions. But before I knew what those formulas were - wow. Some poignant and dramatic stuff. I felt for her characters.
Amazon usually has really good customer service all the times I've called. It seems like this really is a fell through the cracks thing. I'm glad venues like Consumerist exist to publicize this kind of thing.
The local market is the reason why I switched to ODesk.com
Probably other freelancer site would also work well, just got a first contract, then profile becomes better, finally I've got enough proof so I can just write 'check my profile and see my rating' in my proposal on interesting job positions.

The most important hint is - unless you are Indian developer with $7 per hour - dont sell yourself too low. Two years ago I looked at 15$ per hour and thought - wow, thats cool, how can I ask more? Now I have about 50$ per hour and think - not so bad, but should I try $100?

Advantagaes of ODesk(or competitors, dont know)
-you have your profile. Work good and it is better than any CV / recommendation. 4k hours, 4.9 average rating, ...
-your market is now a % of global market (Who trust to freelancers), instead of 100% of local market
- you work from home. forget loosing 2 hours every day
- no HR. really, no stupid human resources guys (girls)

So just start and good luck! One more advice - the rule of premature optimization is still applicable even here. Something goes wrong - return some amount of money back, make a good deal to your employer and close the contract. There are better projects to you.
HP Tablet Number 2 with a Bullet (to the head)
From what I've heard from people who work at Google, the environment there is one where there are tons of projects ongoing but seemingly little long-term dedication/passion in making these products successful.

Employees do what's in their job description but don't go above and beyond because they don't know if the project is going to be continued to be supported by upper management. Its a self-fulfillng feeling of inevitable failure. My impression is that management needs to have better vision and commitment other than "let's throw everything half-hearted at the wall and see what may miraculously stick".

However, Google is still the king of search and making gobs of money - at least they're still doing the biggest and most important part of their products right.
I suspect if the only issue was translating architecture to logic, we'd be doing it already
Groupon Stock: -30% in 3 days
Dart compiles to JavaScript, and the language is pretty standard stuff, if you know any C style language you can pick it up quickly.
"Simple" means different things to different people.

Apple aims their products at individual people. "Think Different" means "Don't think about your computer". So write your book, keep your spreadsheets, whatever. The user doesn't care about the computer.

Microsoft, in contrast, wants to keep the CIO happy. So you have robust single sign on, reliable and modular patching capability and backwards compatibility. IT cares about the computer.

Open source projects are all over the map. In general, current Linux users are enthusiasts. They WANT to customize Emacs macros and tweak their operating environment. The user cares deeply about the computer, and gets some amount of joy out of futzing with it.
Angie's List: Doomed?
While I certainly acknowledge everything that America has done for the Internet from its beginning up through now, it's long since established itself as a global institution. As such, shouldn't the faculties in charge of running it be global institutions as well?

The premise of the article seems to be that America needs to be careful lest it lose its current Internet dominance. I'm an American myself and I'm very proud of the fact that we initiated something as amazing as the Internet. However, is it fair for us to hold that dominant position in perpetuum? The Internet is a global community.

(edit: spelling, structure)
Nokia Siemens to Cut 17,000 Jobs
Fast Real Estate Service In USA : Universal Timeshare SA
Patio11's new SEO tip: image blending
Pitney Bowes partners with start up company EmailDirect
Doing a Job by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
Hyperbole is best answered with hyperbole.

Note that I have nothing against Git. I use it. The main difference between Apache and GitHub is one is a non-profit whose main goal to shepherd OS projects while the other one is a for-profit company out to make money. I don't think it's a fair comparison to use one to substitute another.
FYI - if you can make do with smaller images (50x50 or lower), you can use the param 'type=square' to pull Facebook's standard square photos. For example, graph.facebook.com/ID/picture?type=square
Why would you need fewer sales people to sell this model than to sell Groupon? Restaurant and retail shop owners are not the easiest group to get ahold of, and they are suffering from pitch fatigue as everyone and their brother tries to sell them their daily deal service (that does have some theoretical differentiator).
To see how sopa hurts us, you have to open the third eye and see what was destroyed when a government has the ability to crush anything on the worldwide internet. A theoretical Web site, say in Africa, which allows citizens across the world to be part of a new nation which has no central authority. No president, czar, Congress or representatives. A radical new nation. One where the hive dictates the course, not the elite.

If USA can crush this idea from growing in Africa because they can block it in the USA on account everyone in California wants to join it... A threat to national security. A new system that is pulling away us citizens.

We are harmed when this 10x better system dies quietly in the night, having been choked of support by the elite protecting the powers that be.
Not a huge deal, but I think you should add the "Try it now" button on your learn more page (http://www.bullbear.ca/more). Clicking on the back button or on the logo to go back to the home page and sign up seems a bit redundant to me.

Also, once you get to the main page, it would be great if by changing your settings you only saw the relevant pieces of news (for example, if I uncheck "Crude Oil" in my settings, I shouldn't have to set a filter on the news as well to remove the elements from the list).

Love the simple interface, very slick. The features I tried worked exactly like I expected them to. Well done!
Just to play devil's advocate, how is this any different from running analytics on your websites? They are keeping track of where people go, just like most people on HN do with their own users. And to be honest, I think it's a clever hack that could give them information about how to improve the layout and offerings at the mall.

So why are people having a negative reaction to this? Because they can track your purchases? Websites could easily be doing that too, if they were willing to cooperate (the same way the stores would have to cooperate with the malls by giving records of all purchases, which seems unlikely). Or is it creepier just because it's your physical location?
Nice tool... great UI. I don't like being automatically signed up for your newsletter, though.
Intellectual Property Strategy: a book, a panel, and a movement
The Berlin startup community is amazing, I lived there for 6 months this year. Check out http://maneeshsethi.com/blog/7-reasons-you-should-move-to-be...
It may be popular to hate VB, but it was certainly much simpler to develop with than the C++ Windows SDK was at that time. Surprisingly powerful too. I remember building both a point/click adventure game , a poker game and an organizer app from scratch without any formal CS education.

From what I remember Joel was responsible for VBA, which brought programming to people who had no idea what a pointer was. Of course this spawned some of the most badly written business apps out there, but that's hardly his fault.

Are they still using their own compiler? Never really understood the reasoning behind that , I believe it was to make it compatible with Windows and Unix, but surely they could have simply written the app in php and bundled it with apache all statically linked together?

Pherhaps CityDesk was not the best thing ever, but nobody gets it right every time.
Another sense in which it's not over is the question of what the weakest system is which will prove FLT. Various people have suggested that it should be provable in PA. Colin McLarty has been working on this and has managed to reduce the requirements substantially. There's a preprint available of a paper to be published in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, although he may have progressed further since writing that.

http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/phil/Proving_FLT.pdf
Buying DRM-ed content is a contradiction in terms. Period.

It should be made illegal for sellers to pretend this constitutes the purchase of the content itself. Call it a lease, call it a service, but stop scamming consumers.
Yes, but there's an awful lot of stuff that needs to run once at the start (premade geometric figures and the like). Once compressed of course it is much smaller.
Yeah - if only Carmack had read the Gang of Four on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns - imagine how much more he would have accomplished! He could have used the Flyweight pattern for texels, since the same color is used many times - and that's just one example! :)
I guess I should have read the FAAAQ. I had no idea "mandatory" was being applied to the matching algorithm in such a naive manner. That sucks.

Of course, it doesn't really matter for me, anyway. I don't use OkCupid as a dating site. I use it as a way to find things like local libertarians, programmers, and other essentially platonic things. In fact, for a few years, I haven't even used it for that -- but that's how I did use it, so dating criteria are kinda irrelevant, which means answering questions is kinda irrelevant too. (I've answered quite a few just for shits and giggles, though.)
Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well
This is quite funny, unfortunately this shouldn't have been published on any other day than April 1st.

In case of doubt see this quote:
With this in mind, smoking should be commenced at as young an age as is reasonably possible. Children who have not yet developed a pincer grasp might require modified cigarette holders, safety lighters or both.
Depends what you're looking for. But sure, adapted to your, um, target market.
Hmm, this does make me wonder about some people that I'm "almost perfectly" matched with. We potentially had too many mandatory questions matches, but a lot of the more subtle things got lost?
Writing a compiler is hard. One day, you're sure it'll be the fastest thing in the world, the next day there's sheer terror because no object code will run.

I'll grant you there could be 30% fluctuations from one given day to the next, but the months of work determining an accurate valuation should smooth out a lot of that noise.

I'd guess a hundred man years of effort went into the deal. Furthermore, this isn't grad-student eating ramen effort. This is high finance. Smartest guys on the planet and all that. Sure, you can't think of everything, but there must have been some underlying value that everyone believed in.

Any other process - highway throughput, software memory usage, year over year daily sales, cancer survival rates, just about anything getting 30% worse in two days would be a pretty pathetic failure.

Perhaps it is just noise, and it'll bounce right back to IPO valuation. I'm skeptical that that price was reasonable.
Much better! Eloquently explains what it's for and what I would need to do were I to use it.
Keurig My K-Cup Reusable Espresso Filter
i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.
I'd like to be wrong on this one. My position was that Groupon should not have gone public in its current state.

Because I'm not a Wall Street expert, but just a regular guy, I still hold the slight hope that someone knows better than me, and Groupon did go public for good reasons.

If I end up being right, it's not a victory, it's further proof that our startup world is dominated by speculators who will eventually destroy it to squeeze more money. Nothing to rejoice about.
>I don't really see the problem.

Part of the drive of open source is bootstrapping better ways of doing things. We could all likely do our jobs to some degree running Windows 95, but who wants to? Git improvements over SVN include increased performance, cheap branching, more detailed tracking of changes, the ability to code offline (not a huge deal, but it certainly has made traveling more fun for me), and DVCS collaboration capabilities.
Ultimately, economic growth comes from growth in productivity, i.e. making stuff people want. We seem to be riding an ever-increasing complexity of arbitrary systems, including tax laws, financial regulations, healthcare regulations, etc. that is drawing an ever greater share of the time and talents of the well-educated workforce into the world's largest game of Dungeons & Dragons against each other, and not making anything that anyone wants.
There was a recent incident where a dark pool provider was frontrunning their own customers. I believe it was Pipeline/Milstream. It happens all the time, and then they get a slap on the wrist.
Apropos of some of the recent HN discussion of automated story writing, following one of the links on that page led me to http://www.tickrwatch.com/2011/11/abnormal-price-movement-de... , which is a "story" about abnormal price movement in the GRPN stock. It is fun because it does things like discuss the performance of the stock "in the past year" and I particularly enjoy the line "The stock may bounce back to test the 200-day moving average." I find myself wondering what code lies behind that line. Also the last line is a real gem in the field of using lots of words to ultimately say nothing concrete. Automated story writing gone bad.
Louis Gerard Saliot’s Blog
Louis Gerard Saliot with his extraordinary reputation and efforts towards the tourism industry has a well resonating presence that is globally acknowledged. His success stories are too many and eventhough he is French by origin yet every country he takes on linked to his projects turns into his motherland.
>thinking the earth is larger than the sun are [is] an indicator of stupidity

The question is "which is bigger: the Earth or the Sun?". It doesn't specify how to measure big, so when answering the question I decided to consider angular size and answered that the Earth is the larger of the two.
I just received a Barnes & Noble "Nook SimpleTouch" (the basic, e-ink screen one), and while I like it, this sort of thing has me very worried about using most of its (limited set of) features. That is, while the Nook has something like 1 gb of internal storage for books, about 75% is reserved for content you have to purchase through Barnes & Noble. That leaves about 230 mb for your own files. (The Nook does feature expandable storage via microSD, but these don't get placed into your "Library" on the device in the same way files on the internal storage do). I'm sure many of these same concerns apply to the Kindle. (And more, since Nook books are EPUB format, while Kindle seems to use a variety of formats, including some proprietary formats & DRM).

I really like the convenience of an e-reader, and the e-ink screen really is fantastic, but so far I've only loaded files from Project Gutenberg and some e-books from Manning (who provides free pdf and sometimes EPUB format e-books when you buy the hardcopy). I'm already bumping up against the (artificial) 230 mb-or-so limit for books not purchased directly from B&N.

I'd be more open to buying e-books from B&N if I wasn't afraid of a scenario similar to what's described in the article. As far as I can tell, B&N ships their Nook books with DRM, what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under, or my account gets screwed up in some mix-up?

Edit:
I must have phrased something in a confusing way. The Nook allows you to load 3rd party, non-DRM'd EPUB and PDF's (although as I mentioned, you only get about a quarter of the device's internal storage to use for 3rd-party content). My concern re: DRM was the books you buy directly from Barnes & Noble.
The had me until that sentence.

Actually increased hemoglobin levels in smokers wouldn't be surprising. The problem is that all of the increase (and then some, most likely) is bound to carbon monoxide and effectively inert.
I'm inclined to agree.

My own anecdotal experiences with Amazon customer service aside, something feels amiss about this whole situation. Why did they not call/email Amazon after a full 24 hours had gone by? Why are they disputing Amazon charges to their credit cards?

I just feel like something is wrong here.
This, of course, is the difference between ownership and permission-to-use.
> JavaScript has the classic benefits of an incumbent technology. Programmers are familiar with it...

This is only from my own experience but I'm consistently blown away by how little people actually know of JavaScript. Between interviews and looking at samples attached to jQuery Mobile issues all day I get the impression that most people don't know how to use the prototype system at all and generally organize their code as a series of jQuery event bindings.

While this isn't necessarily and endorsement of Dart, I welcome anything that can provide/encourage well-known and sane code reuse patterns.
For that matter, how is it any different than just having people with clipboards walking around taking notes?
Different Great Uses of Bumper Stickers
Inconsistent APIs Are Costly
Saying Dart needs Microsoft adoption is like saying CoffeeScript or GWT needs Microsoft adoption. They all allow JS compilation and the ability to use JS and be called from JS. Google will likely make an IE extension to run Dart natively anyways.