skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Groupon has simply gotten big enough they don't have to advertise as aggressively, especially in search advertising. Their partnership with AdParlor via Facebook is also running very strong.

Groupon all along has been bringing in substantial cash but also spending a huge amount towards marketing. They've saturated their markets in the US. They can now drop that marketing budget and see massive profits in their US business.
4) It's a common "click of the eye" gesture to design-savvy public, like their basing their podcast app to classic 60's design, etc.

Or it is just another case of Skeuomorphism gone wild. Not everybody who pays attention to design likes that kind of thing and appreciating it isn't making someone "design-savvy" either.
College as We've Known it Will Soon Die (And Should)
It's getting harder to "game" the search engines, especially with updates like Google's Penguin. So a lot of the old methods that might have been effective a few years back (article marketing, reciprocal linking) won't work, or will event be detrimental moving forward.

A colleague of mine said it best a few days ago: "You can't fake it anymore when it comes to SEO. If you want to rank well, you're going to have to put out / do awesome stuff." I totally agree.
That's actually possible, 400 is just the default code:
cancel("You're not allowed to do that", 403);
I'm not sure why we didn't show that in the video.

Edit: Unless you're saying that 403 should be the default code?
But they aren't "distributing" data, they are creating an "integrated experience". At least that's how I read it.
Life online after death
Funny how "mensa" is the feminine of dumb in Spanish. One would think these "smart" people would have done more research before picking that name.
I agree with your argument until your last point, "seeking alpha is a sucker's bet". There is ample academic evidence supporting "cheap stock" strategies as improving performance relative to the broader market. Do you disagree with much of what is said in this article?

http://www.tweedy.com/resources/library_docs/papers/WhatHasW...
Ask HN: If you had 3 month to program for fun, what would you learn?
Ask HN: My first time developing a rails app. What do you think?
I came from a PHP background, and I've decided to jump ship to rails.

https://www.bucketlistly.com is the result of 2 months of learning by doing.

What do you think of the app? Would love to hear all of your feedback.

Feel free to sign up for beta, I'll send an invite to all of you.
IQ isn't a big deal, but neither is degree pedigree. He's making up for a deficiency in one signal by providing another, in effect saying "don't think I'm stupid because I didn't attend college."

If you have an elite degree and a technical major, you probably shouldn't include Mensa.
A Visual History of Mac OS
Try Google cache for now: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
He means it's hard to make money by being a good judge of a company. In the old days you could look at new product introductions and predict better than the majority stockholders (pension funds and insurance companies) how they would affect revenue. They would buy after the next quarterly report showed higher earnings, and you could sell to them at a decent profit. Smart individuals who knew an industry could make decent money. That's no longer true, because HFTs are jumping in front of your transactions.
If this was in the US, you could well be correct. In Switzerland, the law is quite likely to be different. It's not uncommon for Governments to have specific copyright rules in non-US jurisdictions (See e.g. Crown copyright[1] used in the UK, Canada, etc.)

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright
We cannot pull an App from the App Store and would never do that if we could. We are drafting a response. Please give us a few minutes to get something up on the Q&A thread on our dev site.

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/142516/warning-li...

Jeff (CEO of Appcelerator).
Users of The Well buy The Well from Salon
The title statement is meaningless. "Imaginary numbers" are not "multiply" by "90°". What does it even mean to "multiply" by an angle?

Correct statement: "*i is equivalent to a 90° rotation in some contexts." Which is kind of obvious to anybody who has done some maths or physics at some point?
Nagoya Corp Stock Exchange - Wikipedia Corporation.
"It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in."

So, let's say that Mark's right and the combination of HFT and emphasis on macro trends has caused some securities to be mis-priced compared to his analysis of their long-term prognoses. As a long-term investor, shouldn't he be delighted for the opportunity to bargain shop? If anyone can stay solvent longer than markets stay irrational, it's him.
Here in London you're only guaranteed to find where you're going if you search by postal code. And the directions are quite bad too… through parks and etc.
Sure it is, they're just different manifestations with different side effects. The root is the same misunderstanding, the combination of underestimating the market and overestimating your shitty product. They did the same thing with an entrenched product with Final Cut Pro.

People want to say this kind of thing never would have happened with Steve in charge. Nonsense. This kind of thing did happen with him in charge.
I strongly disagree. People use the same password on multiple sites all the time. If someone shares a password between Pandora and Gmail or PayPal, for example, you now have access to their email or their money.
I'm going to just say that I was never a fan of the way that Appcelerator handled their framework from a tooling standpoint. To create an app, you have to register it with them. It felt a bit creepy and unneeded if I wasn't going to use any of their other services.

I'm much happier using Phonegap, Knockout, and Kendo Mobile to build apps.
> Apple does it with their App Store, and without their curation, probably the store would have turned into a bigger garbage pile than it is now, to the point of being unusable.

Ummm, I know its not your primary point, but I'm not entirely sure about this statement. Look at the android app store (Google play) in comparison. It doesn't have that same curation as the Apple version, and certainly there are a lot of useless apps on it, but it is by no standard "unusable". In fact, in my experience, I prefer looking for apps on the Google version than the Apple because for almost any purpose its easy to find an amateur low cost or free app. This generally isn't the case in the apple version
Apple still had access to that data while using Google as a provider. That wouldn't justify the switch at all.
What Has Worked in Investing
I recommend that anyone interested in capital markets read this. I am of the opinion that you can in fact, generate alpha with simple mechanical value strategies. This classic Tweedy,Brown pdf outlines a few startegies that appear to work.
Here is an even better discussion on the same topic, and the HN thread from last year:
http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712575

One great conclusion from this approach is how intuitive it becomes to understand the square root of i. I always thought you'd need another dimension to describe that, and another dimension for the square root of that unit, and so on.

But think of i as a 90° rotation, so applying it twice (squaring it) results in 180° which is -1. Then √i is a 45° rotation so applying it twice results in 90° which is i. Sure enough, this works out. The unit vector at 45° is 0.5√2 + 0.5√2 * i. Follow the rules of complex arithmetic to square that and you do indeed get i.

A rotation of -135° applied twice gives the same result. Square the unit vector of -0.5√2 + -0.5√2 * i and you also get i. We've arrived back at the axiom that all numbers have two square roots of opposite signs.

Last question: What's the cube root of i? Easy: a 30° rotation. The 30° unit vector is 0.5√3 + 0.5i, and cubing that does indeed get you i.
Oh, I wasn't aware of this distinction.
Turim em Itália - Bela do dia e da noite
Not where I live in Arizona—many roads missing or incorrect.
Everyone should learn some of the tools of Geometric Algebra sometime in high school, and it would save a whole lot of confusion.

http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf
Chrome has never worked on PPC Macs.
Not really. The second hand takes 58.5 second to move the entire circle at constant speed if I recall correctly. Then it stops for 1.5 seconds before it starts moving again. During that 1.5 second pause you close the doors of the trains. So it is more a method of synching the closing of the doors with the clock rather than actually gaining any time.
And yet their JS error handing is still terrible.
Voteskee.com
A review/Social media hybrid site to allow people to connect and find out what events, places, and people are popular in their specific area of the world. Also great for traveling to a new place to look up events in that area.
Cuban is just griping about something he doesn't even understand here. There was a great article about it here a couple months back. There is value to HFT. It creates liquidity in the market. It doesn't make long-term investing any different at all. It's just an automated version of the same market making that's been done manually for decades.

Wall Street has a lot of problems. Computers making markets instead of humans isn't one of them.
> "1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded?"

Facebook + Spotify. I actually see people sharing the music they listen to. Not to mention, it is indeed very possible to fail without someone else succeeding - i.e., launching a product nobody ever wanted (say, Ping).

> "You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right?"

And now the competition is much better than they are. Your point?

> "Where's the problem, exactly?"

iCloud. Have you written an iCloud-enabled app recently? I was in the iCloud session at this year's WWDC, and damn that was a tense session - developers approached this session with "hopefully this shit finally works", because iCloud up until that point was broken, and still largely is.

If you look behind Apple's hyperbolic claims and actually look at the API and work with it, you will realize iCloud is pretty much loosely held together by string. It breaks often, the API is obtuse and more or less undocumented, and there are very few ways to look under the hood when it does break, even while in dev, much less production.

Apple really, really sucks at data synchronization. Here's an interesting test: take an iCloud-enabled app, go into your settings and delete the app's cloud data. You would expect this to delete your data and let you start fresh right? But nope, none of your devices associated with this Apple account can ever use iCloud with this app again.
"In addition, you’ll be unable to install Chrome on any Mac still running 10.5"

This kind of stuff needs to stop. Chrome in particular has the whole fancy installer thing. What if I have an old machine sitting around that I simply need chrome on (even an older version)? Don't support it, that is fine, but don't prevent me from doing something that used to be possible.
Kind of like building a world class encyclopedia.
It's from the latin for table. One would think you'd have done your research before criticising others for not doing their research.
Founder Failure Insurance
News
Cubadebate contra el terrorismo mediatico
Dyslexia-optimized typeface for Instapaper
The Atlantic recently wrote up a nice piece on Google Maps. It explores just how complex the whole operation is, how many humans and machines are involved in making Google's maps...

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
Looks really hot. Seems like you've done a lot of work on it.

I can't use it though, since I need an invitation for it. A big turnoff for me.

You should also make your title into a link, otherwise nobody is gonna upvote your post.
As a Django dev (currently, anyhow - formerly was largely Windows software dev), I think I would investigate Go, if we're talking purely from a 'fun' perspective.

From a professional perspective, I've been dabbling in Objective-C/Cocoa and the Android SDK (trying to dredge up old Java knowledge) - but for something 'new' I think I'd take a closer look at Ruby on Rails.
Can HN show the subdomain for Apple, like it does for Google/Google+? I guess it should be obvious this link is to the App Store, but it would still be helpful.
Twitter NLP and Part-of-Speech Tagging
If you do not know of what you speak, do not speak. Yes I am "dead" for expressing this reason.
Add "SweetExpressions" and I wonder how far from coffeescript it would get.

"SweetExpressions" is probably the best method so far to get rid of excessive parentheses in lisp. See http://readable.sourceforge.net/
What I find amazing is how many just plain stupid resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (And it's not hard to unwind a lie, which you should do as time passes and the benefit of the lie approaches zero while the cost remains constant.)

I think what happens is that we hear about the sensational and embarrassing lies. This stuff gets dug up when the decision to fire an executive is already made, in order to reduce severance. If the lie is small and reasonable (slight title inflation) it doesn't much matter because that's so common, but if it's something immensely embarrassing like faking a college degree when he actually flunked out, it gets broadcast. Most of those public humiliation stories are cases of failed severance negotiations in which the company decides to be a dick and play the nuclear option against his reputation to get out of a contractual severance agreement (e.g. extortion against the fired employee.)

This is not to condone lying on a resume. I don't, but I think the public shaming that accompanies these digging expeditions is a bit much. When someone is shamed over an irrelevant resume lie, he's usually being shamed because someone (often the ex-employer) wants it that way.
Thanks for the advice. I come from a RoR background and I want to go into something a bit more "new age" or low level. Also digging a bit into iOS development now, just for fun.
In the extreme, repeal of Glass-Steagall and resulting shenanigans put the entire market at risk, which in turn put the macro economy at risk, which in turn changed the long term outlook of stocks.

That said, I do question the overall premise that HFT affects stock values over the long term.
Goes hand-in-hand with Apple’s own lack of support for Safari updates in Snow Leopard (~ 3 year old OS, I think):

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/safari-6/
Kurzweil's new book: How to Create a Mind
Thoughts about "buy now, pay later"
Unfortunately, you'll be waiting for a long time. Almost every scientific issue with a lot of money at stake will have a well funded opposition keen on clouding the debate as much as possible. They've gotten much better at it over the years. Instead of denying things, they instead attempt to create an impression of greater dissent than there actually is.

This is very effective. Even intelligent, well-informed people have a limit to the amount of time they can devote to simply understanding an issue. Mainstream media also leans toward presenting "the other side", which is admirable enough, but tends to give the impression of greater uncertainty than there often is on scientific issues.

And lastly, there is political scare mongering. Scientists tend to be conservative about their projections and use language that often appears to be equivocation ("we found no evidence of X", "early studies show some support X"...") This opens the door for people who don't equivocate, including people who want to undermine science because they don't like the conclusions and people who want to reach conclusions that go far beyond the evidence. This causes rifts which become fertile ground for people who seek to create the impression of dissent on issues that aren not controversial among scientists.

I recognize that it is exceptionally difficult to educate yourself on complex issues in science, especially when faced with people who are determined to confuse. If a physicist tried to explain to me how my microwave works, and another physicist was determined to convince me that the first explanation was bunk, I would ultimately not be able to tell truth from fiction. In the end, I would have to either go back to school and study for years, or decide who seems most credible.

This is why I am more likely to put much greater emphasis on opinions from respected research institutions (such as the mayo clinic). Not blind faith - they can be wrong. Just a greater inclination to listen and stronger emphasis as I shape my opinions.

In the end, I'd emphasize that this is a scientific issue, and that you are capable of ignoring pop media and going to the source to read up on the science on this issue if you are inclined to do so. Or, you could go on smoking a pack a day for the next 20 years as you wait for all the dust to settle on the highly controversial question of whether smoking correlates with lung cancer.
If only they didn't frequently lose our exception data, this would be great news!

Honestly, their only job is to store stack traces. In about 20% of occurrences over the last 6 months, we've been told that our data "has been lost and is not recoverable." Thus we know that an exception has occurred, but we're lost as to why.

It's such a simple app that we've considered rolling our own. We believe we can achieve better than 80% uptime.
It's not just IQ, but one of 200 different tests [1]. For example, if you score an 800 on the math portion of the SAT, you're in.

[1] http://www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/qualifyingscorefaq/
Because it isn't indicative of anything. If all else was equal it might be relevant, but if you had to pick between someone in Mensa and someone who has shipped a product the decision seems rather clear.

Rather, intelligence doesn't correlate with getting anything done, nor does it correlate with being a pleasant person.

I got into Mensa in high school (sophomore circa 2003), but quit as soon as I had gotten what I wanted. The people in Mensa are extremely varied.

After high school I went to an engineering university, hoping to find a lot of bright happy smart people, and was amazed to find the sheer number of people who were intelligent but incapable of interacting with society or being productive. Great minds and personalities who were self-sequestered from the world. It felt tragic sometimes.
The time it takes for case law to build up depends on the speed of the courts (usually involving multiple appeals). If we had 4-hour justice, we could probably have solid precedents in 4-days.
please also explain how/why the final customer was contacted. knowing nothing about this, it seems like the licencing issue could be a misunderstanding with the developer. but contacting the people that developer was selling to seems very odd.

[edit: and... you avoided the issue completely. pity.]
The kickstarter rules only limit the content on the kickstarter website. I don't see anything that precludes them from showing design concepts on a different website.

So if you want to impress people with your project on the kickstarter website, you'll have to stick to actual content.
Kickstarter may not be a store, but http://outgrow.me/ is.
It is why I wish Gore never would have presented on it. Someone like Bill Gates or someone else otherwise removed would have made the discussions and decisions much easier.
Not at all, we can choose! It's just that we choose between different lies, that's all.

I think we use different definitions of a 'lie'. I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately? I'm quite sure it's just impossible.

EDIT: it seems I can't reply to jd and davidhollander just yet; I'll do it later, when I get home. I just wanted to say that I upvoted you guys, because your criticism of my posts is very good :)
It amazes me how many people continue to misunderstand App Store rules and quote bullshit on a daily basis.

In-App Purchasing rules apply to purchasing books in an e-reader, levels in a video game, or music in a player, etc.

It doesn't apply at all to real-world items. (This includes something like train tickets via Passbook because they are not consumed in the app, they are consumed by the train conductor scanning your phone.)
I think you are interpreting the term 'invest' incorrectly. He has previously [1] alluded to a difference in the definition of trading and investing.

[1] http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/04/facebook-handled-their-ip...
This is a great observation and something I haven't really seen put this way. It immediate reminded me of this graph

http://broadstuff.com/uploads/HypeCurve2008.JPG

I suspect it has something to do with the tremendous technological advances made post WWII. With "techology" being the curve. Or perhaps some more abstract thing on the curve.
I find this idea that all the investment managers in the world exist simply by skimming off peoples retirement savings mind boggling.

There are two main kinds of retirement savings, those where the retiree is in control of where their money goes - in which case they can choose to invest it as they wish. In an index, a company or anything else, and those where a company is investing on their behalf but with a legal obligation to pay out.

Now, if the company goes bust then that is not the fault of HFTs or managers skimming. Either they failed to make adequate contributions or they simply went bust because the business failed.

If you invest your money in ACTIVE MANAGERS then you'd best know who they are, what they do, and why they think they can win in a negative sum game. By definition very few actually can.

HFT is not the cause of pensioners going without - that is a combination of lack of contributions (based on unrealistic expectations) and poor investment decisions. They don't prevent you from spending all your money on Apple shares and making a killing, and nor are they to blame if you invested in Northern Rock and lost everything.

It is a fact that more money is spent on portfolio transaction costs for large pension schemes than any other cost. It is also true that much of it is unnecessary. But these are functions of investment choices based on active management, along with poor implementation and usually high management turnover.
I think everyone supports market making. And market makers should take a reward for holding onto a stock (even for a short period of time)

But the benefits of market making tail off with frequency - would you mind waiting another hour for a deal at 518 or even a whole day? To a trader its unacceptable, to an investor, its a coffee break.

But what drives HF trading is trading - as markets become more efficient trading opportunities, as you point out, vanish. So smaller amounts of arbitrage need to be leveraged with larger amounts of cash to get the same return.

We want nice safe retail banks who make a tiny fraction on the movement of wages from company to employee to shops each year, and bundle it all up into mortgages and ATMs. They keep society oiled

By the same token we (society) wants nice safe boring market makers. Who efficiently take a tiny fraction of each trade and keep liquidity in the markets for investors.

I cannot prove it but the amount of margin gained for investors who hold for >1 year through the existence of HF trading is probably small - you can now get 515 offered quickly. 5 Years ago? 520? If that would have prevented you investing, maybe it was the wrong company.