skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would assume that Groupon could build something like that tomorrow, if they really wanted to. However, the overhead isn't necessarily in the process of creating a deal - it is in finding local merchants and convincing them to give you a big cut of already-reduced prices on things in return for more customers.

Sales and customer acquisition are usually a lot harder (and more expensive) than throwing up a website and hoping customers find it.
How many cookie monsters until we see diminishing returns?
Hm, Adblock seems to be interfering with Wordpress(.com) blogs -- loading gets stuck on s{0,2}.wp.com (waiting for...). That's the first time it broke anything for me, is this a known issue?
Is a likely possibility; but there its not a sure thing; remember that after the end of the alcohol prohibition in the USA the crime rate did dropped[0]. Also, the jobs opportunities that legalization creates may help this become the case.

[0]http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/alcohol-pro...
> Why jump to something else that's illegal?

It's going to be difficult for many members of criminal gangs to move into mainstream employment. Violent murderers probably don't make great employees.

It's a shame that the less violent low-level offenders will also find it hard to escape the life of crime, and it'd be great if there was some Mexican legal cannabis co-operative that rehabilitated gang members.

The cartels don't have a distribution network that would scale to legal distribution. Catapulting bales of cannabis over the border isn't useful for legal businesses.

While their networks aren't much use for a legal business they are useful for more illegal business. People trafficking is a high profit business. Gun running is high profit business. Other drugs - heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, are all still illegal and unlikely to become legal any time soon.
You Might Literally Be Allergic To BlackBerry Phones
The more you let build up on an uneven foundation, the harder it will come tumbling down.
...a bit offtopic, but I was wondering while reading the example of using C itself as the C preprocessor language: why don't languages provide the ability to do this kind of thing automagically, I mean marking some code to be executed at compile time and act as a code generation feature? (I know, it's easy enough to write a small preprocessor that does it, and it's just primitive string based macros, but having a standard way to do it baked into the building tools or the interpreter for an interpreted language seems ...neat ...even cool if some more "magic sauce" would be added to it to make these "macros" hygienic :) ).
Taking Sass to the Next Level with SMURF and extend
Twitter Apologizes for China Hacking Error
Being a good developer is largely about practice. Who has more time to practice than a 14 year old armed with an entire summer vacation of free time and no worries about having to pay bills? I'm more impressed when a 35 year old with a family is able to learn to be a developer.
They don't necessarily have to have a sales team to convince merchants to put up deals. Maybe advertising can do that. Maybe they can outsource the sales people. Since all they're doing is convincing merchants it's a great idea, it doesn't matter where the call comes from as long as it's representing Groupon.

Also, they can do things like yelp does with stickers at merchants places. A lot of places have the "Find us on Yelp" stickers and I doubt Yelp went out to find & convince them to do that.

I haven't spent too much time thinking how I could make Groupon better but I don't think it's really that far out there to find a better/cheaper way of acquiring customers.
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I'm not sure if this is still true, but the lock that Outlook + Exchange had on some parts of industry was impressive. Many people felt there were serious problems with Exchange, but people continued to use it because they didn't know email servers, they just sub-contracted that out.

I agree with your comments about average employees. But perhaps this is changing? People are used to different messaging systems now, with various social networks and smart phones exposing them to better (or at least different) ways of communicating.
Building a Java GUI - Containers
So I just got back from talking to the Meetup.com people. Doesn't seem like there will be a policy change.
Fanny François by Mitsugu Sakai in ‘Color Me Bad’ for Fashion Gone Rogue
Fanny François by Mitsugu Sakai in ‘Color Me Bad’ for Fashion Gone Rogue Fanny François
Violation is patented. You are being contacted by my attorney.
There are some valid reasons for asking for a discount, such as plans to buy a large quantity of licenses, pay for a year in advance, the company is a charity, non-profit, school, etc. If the request for a discount didn't have some sort of justification like this then I still wouldn't write them off, but I would probably make a mental note.

Regardless of the size of their company, some customers will never be content unless they bend you over backwards so far that you're losing money on their business. They want to get more value than they paid for. Whether that's because they don't appreciate the value of resources they consume, or it's intentional, I can never tell.

On the flip-side, the weird thing is that these difficult customers can also wind up being your hugest fan. It can be a real love/hate relationship!
I'd rather choose death penalty than living six years without Internet
Why HTML5 is Good for Your Web Projects
Some encouragement is a whole lot better than nothing though. For every one of these young app store success stories there's probably 10 who are just as technically gifted, but just enjoy programming for programmings sake.
This is really amazing.

Vimeo video didn't work for me, here's another:

http://video.golem.de/wissenschaft/9642/robot-dragonfly-tech...
Ubuntu also restricts use of ptrace for security reasons although it shouldn't affect gdb https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Roadmap/KernelHardening...
> What would happen if a law was passed banning smoking in a particular area? Would ordinary Chinese be able to object to it, would they be able to petition the legislature that passed the law without fear of reprisal?

In general, the central government tries to maintain a good popular opinion so complaining does work in some ways. It's also fairly straightforward to join the party if you are really into politics. I believe you are relatively safe from reprisal as long as you complain about a specific policy, not the actual party.

When people are unhappy about something, the party's modus operandi is to blame local government or corruption and fix whatever is making them unhappy. The nice thing about the party is that it is highly decentralized making it easier to back off without losing face or perceived authority.

In the case of Internet censorship, it doesn't affect 99.9% of Chinese so there isn't much people complaining about it. Most Chinese don't have a clue what Google Maps or Gmail is. The prevalent websites here are Baidu for search, Baidu maps for maps and Yahoo for email. Would the average Joe in the US complain about Baidu or Youku being blocked by the government?

> What if your kid's school adopted something in the curriculum that you found objectionable - could you complain without fear?

I'm not sure who sets the curriculum and whether you could successfully get it changed. I believe it would be easier in that case to send your kids to a private school.

Personally, I feel China is freer than the US or Canada in ways that have a more noticeable impact on my life. Then again, I would probably be more concerned about freedom of speech and political freedom if I couldn't leave China as easily I can right now.
Using HTML5 Features Tips and Benefits
Google Drive desktop client is an unmitigated disaster
Google Drive desktop client, 2 weeks usage report (it's not good)
probably projecting my own problems onto that one, hehe.
Stripe isn't an option if you are not incorporated in US or Canada - as of now. And unless you make substantial revenue (couple of million dollars+), none of the other processors in US would underwrite for the business that exists elsewhere.

PayPal offers only PayPal standard in APAC and the recurring billing checkout page is too long that drop offs are high.

Not necessarily an ideal option, but you can go with 2Checkout.com - one of the recurring options available. If you need a better API and simpler way to integrate with 2Checkout.com along with multiple payment gateway options down the line, you can use ChargeBee.

When you start scaling, you can incorporate outside India and can start using multiple payment gateway options via our solution.

Disclosure: I am one of the founders of ChargeBee.
Thanks for your and jdoliner's detail answers! Hope I didn't ask too many questions. :) I'll respond to both here.

For 2 and 3, I think I didn't make it clear. Let me clarify. A common db problem with multiple clients is dealing with concurrent update on the same piece of data. E.g both client1 and client2 read D as D=15 at the same time. Client1 adds 1 to D as 16 and saves it. Then client2 adds 1 to D as 16 and save it as 16, which is wrong. It should be 17.

Conditional update is one feature db usually provides to let clients deal with this problem, i.e. the update would only go through if certain condition is met otherwise abort. Update D=16 if D==15. Client1 would succeed while client2 would fail, where it can retry the whole read-increment-update cycle again with the new read value.

The litmus test to see if a db system can handle this problem is to try to implement a sequential Id generation feature run by multiple clients at the same time.

For 8, if the query is parsed into a query execution plan, you can ship the plan to all equivalent replicas to ask them to estimate the execution cost based on their current load. After they reply, pick the lowest cost one and send the execute command. Even a simple approach of asking for machine load of all replicas and picking the lowest one could have adaptive utilization of all the servers.

For 9, Bloomer Filter is a relative simple technique that can dramatically reduce the amount of data to ship across peers to do join. You basically filter out the vast majority of the non-matching data before shipping.

It's a good start. Good luck going forward!
I fail to see the credibility in your law suit, you couldn't possibly have patented it without using my method of patenting patents, I would however be willing to settle for $0.50 plus lawyers fees of $500,000. (I had to hire an entire team as I fully intend to sue the holders of every patent ever patented which used my method (involving the accurate account of the targeted methods transcription upon any form of data storage device))
The website owner is also talking about it on reddit : http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12ydou/for_three...
Previous threads on Groupon have suggested that the $6 billion dollar Google deal would have never gone through.
Torvalds’ rant against Nvidia works, new Linux drivers double..
Ask HN: How would a high schooler find CS mentor?
How would a high school/college student go about finding a CS mentor?
json definitely has certain advantages. e.g. arbitrarily nested data structures. However. json is not extensible by design. There is NO standard way to define new custom data types in json.
Consider this my vote of support for simple input and "baking" to yield something which suits your fancy. There are no surprises about content or server load.

It also seems like one of those things that (some) people eventually do: writing their own engine which makes their posts work. For something deeply personal that you might wind up using several times a day, sometimes it takes that kind of commitment to get a tool which is just right.

That's what I like to tell myself, at least. I described my own program earlier this year: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/12/publog/
Tickets bought, hope to see you there!
IWave Storage Automation Update Includes File System
I think the Linux hacker, MetalX1000 on youtube did this a while back using various [ speech to text -> google translation api -> text to speech ] tools.
Here's a ZNGA funny

https://twitter.com/maxticket/status/260825571712458752
Variation of second point: Kill political leaders who are against legalization, and make it clear it's because of their position on this issue. This would imply that pro-legalization people are willing to murder to get their way, and so in sympathy the public would vote against legalization. [Call this the 'anti-legalization martyr' play.]
Darpa wants to equip soldiers with Android phones for 'Predator vision'
Why would companies want you to service your laptop when you should either buy another one ($$) or take it to their own blessed service company to fix ($)?

Oh, well, there was a slim chance of buying Toshiba, but now I'll just have a small mental note to purposefully avoid them.
I don't have any sources to cite, obviously, but from what I know of it, quite a lot is grown locally (i.e., in Washington state). It's maybe less risky than moving it over the Canada-US border, and Washington has been fairly soft on marijuana users for a while (medical marijuana for two decades[0], lowest priority for the Seattle police department since 2003[1]).

There have been ~illegal medical marijuana coops in Seattle for a long time now[2]. (IIRC, Washington's medical marijuana laws allowed patients to grow a few plants, but didn't allow for dispensaries[3]. Obviously federal law is different, which is what the DEA is acting on.) Those coops are largely stocked from locally grown plants. It wouldn't surprise me if some medical marijuana patients also sold into the grey/black market for some extra cash.

[0]: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=69.51a&full...

[1]: http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?d=CODE...

[2]: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/11/15/feds-ra...

[3]: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/125532903.html
Off Canvas Menu with CSS :target
there's a logical flaw in your argument, though, because where you say "we are trading for something that would be worthless anyway" it assumes the choice is between "trade secret" and "disclosed." But there is really also a choice between "trade secret, people know it exists and what it does but must guess at how" and "trade secret, no one knows it exists or what it does".

In other words, for some kinds of trade secrets, perhaps inventors might not even let you know of the existence of their invention, since without legal protection this knowledge would render the competitive advantage it confers worthless - even though before disclosure, skilled practitioners did not think to use it, as it is quite novel and those skilled in the art have not come up with it despite its obvious utility once disclosed.

Thus inventors might secretly enjoy its benefits or fruits. (This is easy enough to imagine; there could be a closely guarded manufacturing process in use right now that the public and other manufactuers do not even knows exists, and is not in the final product. The manufacturer simply makes an end product more cheaply, say. But telling us what the process is would give it away.)

Imagine, for example, that Google uses some kind of trade secret as part of ranking web pages. We don't even know what the process is, let alone how it is done. Naming the process would render it public and unprotected. So, it remains the only search engine that uses it, secretly.
How does it feel as a ball? Can you give a short review?
Can Windows 8 Give Developers What iOS and Android Lack?
The ulterior goal of infrastructure is consumption. The goal of everything you suggest is consumption. Infrastructure supports businesses and employees. All these crazy R&D projects are only a success when consumption has been increased. There's not much difference between consuming reality series or some high pretentious art, a lot of people will prefer the former.

All these cheap lunches together, one for the plantage worker, the transporter, the designer, the real estate holder, the taxman, etc. etc. is the clockwork of the (global) economy.
Podio sees surprisingly high Ubuntu numbers, delivers One integration
Why should the US marijuana have a higher THC content than the Mexican one? Can't Mexican plantations grow the stronger type? Or is there a difference in the agricultural process that influences the THC content?

I don't understand this part of the article.
Facebook makes you spend more, research suggests
No, they get broken down, but do not enter the bloodstream. The sugar molecules bind to receptors to give you the sweet taste.
Microsoft warns of first critical Windows 8, RT security flaws
Then again, it means that he can't work in most professions until he is 21.
Marijuana is sold by weight; this might have something to do with it.

Producing high-quality consumable marijuana is a bunch of work. You have to be careful to separate the female plants, prune low THC content leaves and stems from the flowering buds, etc; the cartels don't seem to put this much work into the cannabis they grow.

Cartel marijuana often has tons of leaves, stems, and seeds in it. It's earned the name "Mexican ditch weed."
You certainly have a point here. When I was in high school I could spend exorbitant amounts of time debugging stupid errors caused by inexperience. I could read programming books, play around with code, build completely useless stuff just to learn, etc. for entire months. Now that I work for a startup and am a full time student, I only dream for that type of time.

Though, I think there is a pretty fair trade-off between time and understanding. I can pick up new skills (non-technical included) in less than half the time it would have taken me at 14. I've learned how to learn. Shipping an app at 14 is impressive not because they were able to do something difficult, but because they were able to do something difficult with much, much less life experience than is expected. This is to say that, although they have more time, it is, in general, more difficult for a young person to learn how to program. That is why I'm impressed when I see a 14 year old ship.
Apple’s Falling Stock Has Analysts Questioning the Company’s Dominance
Twitter Hacked? Password Resets Required, Company Admits Mistake
Thanks for the tip. That's true, of course. She might become highly motivated, but at this point there's nothing burning to motivate her. She's not hoping to get a job as a developer, she's not particularly passionate about building a new app or a website. She's curious enough about it to try to explore. The same way she enjoys knitting occasionally. Does one have to be highly motivated to enjoy it?
I think there is a connection between the sort of hand-waving, know nothing-ism of Republican political messaging and this tech fiasco.

That kind of thing might work in the soft field of persuasion, but is pretty useless in creating a complex technical system. (By know nothing-ism of the Republicans, I'm referring to the birtherism, beligerent rhetoric about complicated diplomatic issues, anti-science views about global warming, trying to paint Obama as a socialist, in general the whole "Guns, God, & Gays" type of messaging).
Supplementing real-world objects with 3D printing
Heidi Never Slept In An Alpine Cottage Like This
List of great activities for ice breaking or energizing a team
They did, years ago. No one used it.

I think there's a few reasons:

1. Groupons have to be sold over the phone to merchants in order for Groupon to get the margins and volume it wants.

2. Local merchants just don't have a lot of time to spend learning software and monitoring stats. They can talk to a sales rep over the phone more easily than set up a deal themselves.
Precisely the point - we have a choice. Thank you for that reminder. I am looking to buy a laptop and will do likewise.
What your Web Design says about You
I need to say anymore in terms of explaining the importance of good web design – but I’ll elaborate further just in case. Say your website design.
> why don't languages provide the ability to do this kind of thing automagically, I mean marking some code to be executed at compile time and act as a code generation feature?

There's certainly already languages that do this type of thing. Haskell has Template Haskell which lets you execute Haskell code at compile time to generate code. I'm pretty sure multiple ML's also have similar meta-programming features.

It works rather nice, actually.
The article links to IMCO. IMCO have a PDF. The claim appears to come from that PDF. They are saying that Mexico grows a different strain. I don't know why Mexico couldn't grow different cannabis.

(http://imco.org.mx/images/pdf/reporte-tecnico-legalizacion-m...)

They're using THC content as a weak metric to compare pricing. They admit the weaknesses of this approach.

And "less THC" isn't necessarily a bad thing. People still buy plenty of lager even though vodka and gin have a lot more alcohol.
Three Somewhat Similar Maps
Do Toshiba stil make laptops?
Stuxnet Infected Chevron’s IT Network
FounderFuel's 2012 graduating class
This might not be the solution, but I doubt 20 years from now people will be using email. Arguments like yours can be made about anything that's new.

That said, my personal take is that you should start with kids. In contrast to the "dumb" people in the office, my younger sister's friends don't know how to use email. It's what their parents use (gross!). FWIW they use Facebook and a random collection of mobile apps for all online communication.
Can you detail, or point to background info? There've been type system debates between proponents of Haskell, ocaml, SML, scala, and F#, i've never seen a D to Haskell comparison, and I've never seen D mentioned as a "free theorems" language. Maybe in this vid:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Alexandrescu-Bright-M...

Here's a scala to haskell

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/scalagp.p...
Debian Switches Back To GNOME From Xfce
With new HTML5 player, is video finally comming to Wikipedia?
Funnily enough, "we didn't find complete laws of physics" is a reason why I'm pretty sure Many Worlds as is is false to some extent. I'm pretty sure however that the Copenhagen interpretation is much farther from the truth.

As for how this is metaphysics… Sure, but no more that wondering if a photon (or a colonization ship) you just send into deep space, outside the observable universe, still exists. I mean, I don't care if it's meta or not. I just trust Occam's razor (to the extent it gives prior probabilities, not prior certainties), and leave it at that.
An important factor may be that in other industries generally all companies provide competing services, but in the tech(startup) industry most companies don't compete, and even provide complementary goods/services.

If other local tech startups succeed, it generally helps your tech startup succeed; but if other local ad agencies or pizza shops succeed, then it hurts your ad agency/pizza shop.
Is HTML5 adoption the real deal for developers?
Serves them well. Stupidity (if not malice) has to have its price.
Yes, XML reminds the terrible XSL experience; YAML would be pythonesque.

1. To the beginners, we need to explain; why code/data unity opens up broad possibilities and separation is simplistic. Otherwise some people claim that the best LISP DSL you ll write, will end up separating your data from your code, and tell you the virtues of von Neumann architecture.

2. Also the macro expansion time, and run time separation for non-interpreted LISP seems to be a restriction; mainly if all macros are to be defined at design time and expanded at macro expansion time, the advantages of macros seem to be limited against languages without macros. Namely, macros seem to be a way to modularize code by generalizing, and simpler languages may do it with text editing and module/source code organization features.