skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said the same thing to friends of mine at the time and was roundly ridiculed when the company went public at that enormous 17B valuation. They hype was just that - hype. I think Groupon will be around for a while but I have a hard time seeing ever be worth more than it is now.
The Daintree Rain Forest
This guy.

Travel back in time with me to October, 2010. Stanford. Startup School.

Andrew Mason has been talking, sharing the origin story of Groupon, the lessons learned about entrepreneurship, the pitfalls, the joys. He is fun and engaging. You wanna like him, you wanna see Groupon succeed.

We get to the part of the talk where questions are asked and answered. He answers some early softballs. Then one brave soul stood up with a real query that only Mason could answer.

Is Groupon a sustainable business, given what we'd been hearing from merchants online?

It was as if a mask had dropped. Where once there was cheer and energy, there was now a sullenness. The man seemed affronted at the notion that his business would be challenged in this way. Despite the fact the opportunity to ask just such a question was one of the great values of a venue of this sort. Despite the fact that Groupon's sustainability had been the elephant in the room the whole time. This was right after some of the first stories from distressed Groupon merchants had been trickling out.

Petulant, absent all of his previous ebullience, Mason asserted the business was sustainable, offered no supporting details, and demanded the next question.

A good leader has the intellectual honesty to recognize their missteps and explain them, along with the remedies explored. The expectation for that is even more acute when you've been elevated to the role of mentor.

It was in that moment, his phoniness laid bare, that I decided Groupon was likely melting puppies in its basement, Mason knew it, and didn't know how to reverse the operation.
Sean B.:

Hi there,

We’ve been looking into these spam reports and take them seriously. Back in July we reported that certain user email addresses had leaked and some users had received spam as a result. At this time, we have not seen anything to suggest this is a new issue, but remain vigilant given the recent wave of security incidents at other tech companies. If you’ve received spam to an email account you only use for Dropbox, please send the message (including full headers) to support-security@dropbox.com to help our ongoing investigation.

Separately, we want to apologize for some of the dismissive responses from our volunteer moderators - since they aren’t employed by Dropbox, they don’t have visibility into issues like this. We want you to know that we've taken these reports seriously and began our investigation immediately.

https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=97303&page=2#pos...
Wealth Redistribution Gains Currency Among Digital Elite
Building Stripe's API
Toxicologists are far more likely to emphasize dosage, eschewing the categorisation of chemicals as toxic or non-toxic . Non-toxicologists “tend to view chemicals as either safe or dangerous and they appear to equate even small exposures to toxic or carcinogenic chemicals with almost certain harm" [1].

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1992.... Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks (2006)
PHP is not Java.
PHP is not Ruby.
PHP is not Python.
PHP is definitely not Perl.

Developers need to stop trying to force it to look and act like the languages they would rather be using. It doesn't have to be as ugly as Flow appears to be, at all, and in some PHP frameworks, it isn't. Because as has been mentioned already, comparing a framework with a framework is only valid when you pick the best framework, and as the Rubyists are fond of pointing out that Ruby Is Not Rails, well, PHP Is Not Flow. Nor is it Symfony or Yii or Laravel or Zend or the framework I'm building in my spare time which is still not quite as ugly as Flow. This article's argument is as arbitrary as it its conclusion is irrelevant.

The reasons PHP is not, and will not soon be, dead have to do with its ubiquity and utility in its one and only purpose -- preprocessing html. It does this perfectly adequately for many many use cases, provided you approach it like a donkey and not a horse. It is the animal that it is. Otherwise, you wind up with a swift kick in the shins. It's ugly, and ornery, and it stinks but it does its job and it's cheap and simple and it's not going away anytime soon.
Can blood pressure be monitored in realtime with this technique ?
It's as if the alphabet runs in order.
Regardless of what he did or didn't do with Groupon, I love this letter; it hit all of the points it should have and didn't say too much or too little. The humor, humility and hope really tie it all together.
We'd like to expand outside of the US as well. We're discussing that topic here. Please let us know what you think: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23
print version

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/we-found-our...
I don't necessarily buy the evolution argument, the extent to which some human adults are lactose tolerant is a very recent evolutionary development which coincides approximately with the development or agriculture, but the conclusion is nevertheless sound. Stop eating bread, or at least so much of it.

People binge on bread these days, it is insane. It is no wonder that any amount of fructose in bread can be alarming when you look at how much is consumed.
Andrew Mason's statement, Groupon CEO fired(Jottit's broken)
This is for Groupon employees, but I’m posting it...
Human perception of 3D geometry comes from motion. This is an algorithm to amplify motion. And that's really all that is needed. See "Structure From Motion" and "Optical Flow" for more information about this. Note that this is technology that is used in some video codecs. You may have noticed in some corrupted videos, the corruption artefacts can sometimes move as if they are mapped on a detailed 3d model of the moving objects. But really all it is are 2D motion vectors moving blocks of color around on a predetermined optical flow path.

In this algorithm, exaggerating that same 2D optical flow path has the perceptual effect of somehow "knowing" something about the 3d geometry. you could more accurately say the original motion is constrained by the 3D geometry.

(more)
here is a kanye west video that uses the optical flow/video corruption effect intentionally for artistic purposes.

http://vimeo.com/4578366

see particularly the sequence starting at 1:00 to see unrelated background "texture" getting motion mapped onto kanye's moving face.
> Though I can't quite imagine why anyone would want to do this to some random stranger.

I'm going to guess you've never been Goatse'd.
In hindsight it's easy to say bad things, but rewind a couple of years and Group was exploding, awesome place to work, and felt strong enough to say no to an acquisition by Google.

Though I'll bet now the regret at that turndown has to be killing him, and many others.
"John, I'm just been told that Groupon is announcing my termination tomorrow. If you could put me in touch with a PR person that's familiar with Battletoads, I'd be very appreciative."
They've only turned a profit once since going public and the stock is down over 75% since then.

Should have taken the $6 billion buyout from Google when they had the chance.

Honestly, it all doesn't really matter after their IPO revealed bonuses were more important than investing into their business.
Ugh. This yanked a couple of thug tears outta me.

And for those wondering what place this has on HN, I actually read HN for interesting, often-not-technically-related news.
Instacart Now Offering Whole Foods Delivery
The "respect" line sounds admirable, but it comes off as defensive in light of the RapGenius fiasco.

And I wouldn't call documentation that indicates a core piece of infrastructure works one way but then functions an entirely different way as a "mis-communication". That sort of CEO-speak is simply meant to minimize the situation to make any further discussion around it look petty.

Respect, indeed.
While "better designed" is definitely subjective, I find that HN reads easier and is more visually appealing. Personally, HN feels superior on an aesthetic as well as functional level - many of DN's design techniques feel kind of cliched or tacky.
Apple Required Executives to Hold Triple Their Salary in Stock
Predator Drone on Amazon - Hilarity Ensues in Reviews
Sure! I tried sub-contracting in Massachusetts for a guy who did Computer Repair. A lot of people/businesses used him and after some time started asking whether he could put together websites for them (you know, because all computer work is roughly the same). Well, he looked me up and I joined him as the web team.

I came on looking to expand on my development abilities, but I soon realized that very little of the is spent actually sitting and programming. There was meeting with customers, getting requirements, creating some sort of plan then figuring out how to break it all into a roadmap/schedule where the delivery is satisfactory and on the proper date. I had little to zero experience in any of those tasks.

I struggled to gain comfort during meetings and lacked confidence while I would be setting up the schedule, I assume it stemmed from my beginner status and an overall lack of successfully completed tasks to look back on (whether as a sub-contractor or just even hobby projects).

There were times I'd ask my father for advice (he had started a company that was rather successful), read a book or two, tried some online resources, but really, I was probably just too young and not wired to be a sub-contractor at that point in my life. Sometimes I do look back and see the mistakes I made and what I could have done to correct them, so in a way, it was a great learning experience - but not in the area that I wanted.

I've since done some "internships" (one where I was paid less than minimum wage and worked full days - but I really wanted a job experience) and realized that I came away with way more than I could have ever discerned from my experiences as a sub-contractor. However, I strongly believe this was due to the fact that I wasn't all that great development back then. Nowadays, I find that the business aspects come a lot easier now that my programming/development understanding are eons beyond what they were even 4-5 years ago.

I should also make certain to mention that my experiences are my own - I wouldn't be surprised if someone younger than I were thrust into that situation and would came out successful. However, given my past personal experience (and not even running my own business) I have to hesitate at the article's implication.

Anyway, I hope that was some good info - feel free to ask any questions if you'd like, I'll do my absolute best to answer.
Inevitable in hindsight...
Full memo from Andrew Mason (his jottit.com link isn't working):

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company - it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be - I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness - don’t waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew
I'm interested in counterpoints to the evolution argument. Not to prove myself right; just the opposite. I enjoy proving myself wrong, since it means I've probably learned something.

The logic is this: evolution is supreme. It's why our eyes see brightness logarithmically rather than linearly. In fact, every sensory input (sound, etc) except pain is logarithmic. Pain is linear. We see green more intensely than other colors because we've spent a long time hunting for prey that hides in green grass and green tree leaves. Evolution determines the very nature of our thinking patterns. It's why some people count "out loud" to themselves in their heads, whereas others count by "seeing" the numbers in their heads. Etc. There are at least thousands of examples of how evolution has forged our state of being.

Evolution determines so much of our nature that in comparison we have very little control over aspects of ourselves. One thing we do control is input to our bodies. We can control whether we watch TV, and we can control which foods we eat. The question here is, which foods should we eat?

One view is that if we eat foods we've been eating for the past million years, then we probably don't have to worry about which foods we eat. The answer is simply, "Eat any which haven't been designed by humans in the past 10,000 years."

In the USA, foods are required by law to list every ingredient. This is a huge advantage if one were to read them. If I see corn starch, soy, sugar (if it's added as an ingredient, then that means the food is artificial), etc, then I don't buy it.

It's incredible how many foods are excluded by this method. You almost can't find ham that hasn't had sugar added. I pretty much have to buy summer sausage, pork steaks, and chicken. No more bologna.
The "Done" button is a toggle? Is that a side effect of this being a proof of concept, or was there some extra functionality in mind?

Edit:
Answering my own question, since it looks like this was designed for touch/pen based input, it would probably hide the keyboard: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/keyboard.html
.pyc files also seem to be showing up.

I've opened a python file, typed 1 + 1 and hit Ctrl+Enter and it doesn't seem to do anything.
A very related, and VERY WELL PRESENTED and scientific video explanation of why sugar is poison, presented to residents at the University of California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

If you like TED talks, this will just blow your mind. It gets highly medical at one point of the talk, but HN should be able to follow along. I recommend watching this when you have an hour of absolute free time and want to learn.
Despite studies showing that people have a limited amount of willpower, after which they revert to habit?
You're covered by at least some of PCI DSS the moment any card data hits your network, so I fail to see how a business can be passing card data to Balanced at all without incurring some level of PCI DSS involvement.

If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems even transiently, that's a more interesting case. Even then, a lot of payment gateways that offer "hosted" facilities do still expect their clients to file a basic PCI DSS SAQ in our experience.

(Just to be clear, I'm not expressing any views on how worthwhile or otherwise the entire PCI DSS scheme may be.)
Oh, backprop isn't so bad...

After all, a deep belief network starts with an RBM for unsupervised pre-training, but the finetuning stage that follows just treats the network as a standard MLP using backprop.

Also, you can use an autoencoder instead of an RBM, which I think are getting better results these days? And there are better regularization techniques for backprop now--weight decay, momentum, L1/L2 regularization, dropout, probably more that I'm leaving out.

The pre-training (RBM or autoencoder) helps to not get stuck in local minimas, but there's also interesting research that suggests you're not even getting stuck in local minima so much as you're getting stuck in these low slope, high curvature corridors that gradient descent is blind to, so people are looking into second order methods that can take curvature into account so you can take big steps through these canyons and smaller steps when things are a bit steeper. Or something like that :-)

All that being said, anyone care to weigh in on the pros/cons of RBMs vs something like a contractive autoencoder? No such thing as a free lunch, so what are the key selling points of RBMs at this point? I keep seeing them pop up, but afaik, they don't provide a particular advantage over autoencoder variants.

Great article though, I'm really glad to see more and more people getting interested in neural networks, they've come a long way and people are just starting to wake up to that.
I guess that I enjoy cleanliness over pizazz. I would argue that it should really only be used in juicy environments. Put it in Peggle, but not in any email client, my tax forms, anything where I'm trying to do something that isn't purely fun.
Make something useful instead
"But when you have a $6B offer on the table"

From my many years of experience in business I can say that anytime you have a serious offer on the table you have to decide if you are willing to risk going for door number two.

You can always point to cases where people didn't sell out and ended up better but with business you have to look at the downside not just the upside. Over the years that is the biggest mistake that I have seen people make in negotiation.

I'll give you an example with domains. I'm in the process of buying a domain for a startup and the startup will pay $50,000 maybe even $100,000 for the domain. But the owner won't even engage preferring to shoot for the stars and thinks he will get a million. He won't even state a price. At this point we will cut bait and find another name. I know fully well this business (I also own names) and I know that this domain has about a 2% chance of selling for anywhere near that amount in coming years. I have domains that I've held for 15 years and have never gotten a single offer on. I've had domains that I've held for 15 years that I've sold for big money. Anytime someone comes along with a serious offer I focus on how long it will take until the next offer will come in - if ever. Business and gambling are two different things.
semi-colon is pretty hard to find..
Where's this data coming from? Bitcoin Charts has different data: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zigHourlyzczsg20...
I'm just relieved that they realized the moderator[s] were being dismissive. I'm not sure that it's a new breach, but it does look like something is going on...
"thug tears" <--- hilarious
It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda...

People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.
No insider knowledge, but I've seen co-leads when someone departs for three reasons:

1) Make it clear to employees, shareholders, and the public that there will be another change coming. Everyone should know that a company run by co-CEOs is unlikely to be permanent. This also helps with recruiting since outside candidates know they have a legitimate shot.

2) Set up explicit competition between the two biggest contenders to win the slot. I personally believe this is dirty and guarantees the loser to leave (which I think is net bad -- the loser was a contender for CEO for a reason).

3) Reduce the need to fill someone's shoes. By giving what was one person's job to two people, those two people can focus on their areas and excel individually without unfair comparisons to their predecessor. This is especially important when the predecessor was a public figure. Think Tim Cook comparisons to Jobs. Microsoft did this with the E&D division when Robbie Bach left (Phones and Xbox went to different people).
With Mason, I'm assuming phoniness at every turn:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5301302
He's being replaced by Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonisis. They will serve as co-CEOs until they find a permanent replacement.

Here is Lefkofsky's statment: On behalf of the entire Groupon Board, I want to thank Andrew for his leadership, his creativity and his deep loyalty to Groupon. As a founder, Andrew helped invent the daily deals space, leading Groupon to become one of the fastest growing companies in history. Groupon will continue to invest in growth, and we are confident that with our deep management team and market-leading position, the company is well positioned for the future.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/ceo-andrew-mason-replaced-b...
How to make your API better than the REST
I felt it was dishonest when I got to "good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40." It seems he tried really hard to inject humor and trivialities into the letter.
Apt supports this. However, no distribution officially supports that scheme.

http://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences

http://serverfault.com/questions/22414/how-can-i-run-debian-...

http://blog.drewwithers.com/2011/06/mixing-debian-stable-and...

Debian stable + backports is probably closest. Unfortunatelly, there are few backports. Partially, because few people use it and partially because upstream rarely cares for Debian stable.
Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.
Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.
Where can I find the algorithms to implement ? would you mind sharing it. Thanks