skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "It’s because we cannot afford to lose any more money on this terrible decision I made"

Quote from the end of blog post. Having read through the whole thing I do not believe at any point she blamed Groupon for her predicament - she walked into it eyes wide open and appears to acknowledge this.

It does, however, raise interesting questions about Groupon's relevance to the small businesses they purport to help. Groupon is supposed to be a win-win for consumers and small businesses alike, but it would appear this may not be the case. Seeing as how this is core to their business model, if this is a regular case I would expect this to sink Groupon sooner or later.
‘Batman’ Prepares To Join The Air Force
Did you mean custard? Showing results for custard. Click here to see results for cursebird.

Ah, Google.
Merchants run promotions at losses all the time. What the merchant should have done was set a cap at the dollar value of the loss they were willing to accept. For example, I'm willing to lose $2000 therefore I will sell only 200 groupons.
Think about it this way, if you can segment your traffic into valuable niches (e.g females, 18-30 in NYC, who are searching for shoes), you can sell your traffic at a far higher CPM.

That's where Trafficspaces excels - ad targeting.

All impressions aren't equal so you shouldn't treat them as such. The key is being able to unlock the value.
If someone offers you a bad deal, you reject it. Simple as that.
Definitely overestimate and quote for worst case scenarios. This type of work isn't fun when you know you're going to get stuck doing a lot of extra work for the minimum amount of compensation. And like michaelhart said, sending an invoice for less than what you quoted will no doubt make the client happy.

I quote a range for friends because I want to charge them as little as possible while getting -something- for providing that value.
Other than the academic nerdiness of minimal OSs, what is this good for?

Do modern OSs cause too much overhead for certain operations?
I have a Pre plus, uptime is in weeks (out of updates, I had to reboot it only once in 6 months), and the interface is really far ahead for multitasking, and I multitask a lot with it; mp3 + web + contacts + an app or two all the time, and it rarely hiccup if ever.
So is this like the demoscene stuff or is there a practical use for it?
This is a nice statement to make, but how do you propose they could have done that?

Groupon seems to demand at least a 50% discount on normal prices, and then seems to want to take between 50 and 100% of the actual groupon coupon cost. That leaves the merchant able to collect somewhere between 0 and 25% of their standard pricing. Other than software businesses, there are few few shops that have enough of a markup to be able to sell something at 25% of face value and still make money on the product itself, much less cover all the additional overhead.
Can Experience Be Designed?
Information in social networks are so valuable.The information can be used to generate targeted ads to the user or better search results. Everything in the facebook world can be tracked and mined to generate some relevant information on you. Based on that they can generate a targeted ad platform, identify who the opinion leaders are in your social network, etc.

That is why google wants to create a popular social network or wants facebook's data. Google is in the business of targeted ads, facebook is as well.

Facebook alone with that data and a platform to utillize it is worth billions. Soon they will get it right.

That being said, sometimes walled gardens are good, because if facebook didn't protect this data a competitor will use it and take away the facebook's money making opportunity.
Purge Your Online History Forever
The hacker method for game publishing: band together
Q&A: TechStars Founder David Cohen
We're going through this right now, too, and we've finally found our first paying* customer.

What I found helpful was introductions, and in this case, even introductions made through a cold call.

I'd been pounding away for weeks, signing up free accounts and begging people to actually use the service, or tell us why they weren't when they said it was something they'd like. I was also sending a lot of e-mails and making a lot of calls to hand-researched groups I thought would make good customers (like your product, it's fairly niche).

I'd get blown off, blown off again, and then when I finally made the call, they though the idea was dumb and we were doomed to failure (gulp). But they'd make an introduction to somebody who was on our side of the country, and with their name, good will and bad predictions, we ventured forward. That introduction has proved invaluable, as that connection, which itself took 3 calls, 4 e-mails and showing up at their office, has been a relentless cheerleader for us, going so far as to give us a shout out at an upcoming panel they're moderating in front of our target customers.

So, personal introductions ... by any means necessary. Hope that's helpful.

* We are, indeed, getting paid, but there's an asterisk for another day
105 Companies Join Forces With Obama to "Change The Equation" for Education
The item they're selling for $13 could be a low/zero margin product usually used to bait further purchases or tips. Another issue they noted was people not tipping as if they had paid $13, but tipping as if they had paid $3.
People have been saying flash is dead for the last 5 years. If not 10 years.

Don't get me wrong, I hate flash, think it will die eventually, and wouldn't build anything on it.

But I also hate kneejerk decisions based on a tiny amount of data.

The article is definitely worth considering if your users are the type that buy iPads, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that the iPad will go 'mainstream'. It's still a niche luxury 'extra' device.

People aren't replacing their laptops with an iPad. That would be insane. They're just buying an iPad as well.
Show HN (One year of work!): Fast Society - instant, short term group messaging
About a year ago, a few friends and I went to a Bloc Party show in Manhattan. Leading up to the show, we were all trying to coordinate via email, phone and text message, but a few of us were completely out of the loop and it lead to a lot of frustration. My business partner and I were discussing how frustrating it was to stay in touch with groups of friends when we're out doing stuff together, and it suddenly dawned on us that we could create an awesome tool that would solve this problem. Between acts, we sketched out the concept and by the end of the show, Fast Society was born.

Fast Society lets anyone create short-term, private mobile groups via their phone. Just pick a length of time and invite some friends. We spent a year working on it and hope you will check it out and give us some feedback. PS. we are self-funded and bootstrapping.
I for one welcome our new anarcho-capitalist overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a anonymous internet personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Really, I'm not sure what to say to this, other than wonder why CNN is giving space to objectivists.
As a side note on the conversation, I'm impressed by how well Best Buy is adapting to the changing demands of the consumers. Rather than desperately promoting the same stuff that has worked for them for decades, they see the writing on the wall and are changing their focus.
Supposedly the 'internet generation' are now savy enough to know this.

If you launch a site called "sport.com" or "music.com" young people know that however hip and trendy your graphics you must be a bank/$Bn corp to own that name. So to appeal to 'yoof' you have to have a "the only address we could get" type meaningless name ( even if you are a $Bn corp!)
Autism's First Child
I can't write code on an iPad (not efficiently at least), so my recent need for a replacement laptop ate up my budget for an iPad.

I'm guessing I'm in the minority, however.
Are you familar with the restaurant/food industry? For most places, profit margins are pretty awful. I'll admit ~14% is low for the type of venue this is, but believe me this is common
Chip Ellsworth III sounds distinctly aristocratic. Another "white-sounding" name could be chosen that doesn't have that quality.
RIM Is Still Top Smartphone Platform In US
Interesting you bring up the gardening techniques. Actually many of the old school algorithms related to hypothesis testing in six sigma were indeed derived from farming techniques. Or rather small trial farms were different theories were tested by dividing the farm into sections.
#3 is just brilliant.
absolutely. the whole digital promotion space is still ripe.

i used to work for the the 3rd largest broadline retailer in the US(SHLD) and we were constantly struggling with this.

Think about it, right now if you're Target, how do you push promotions to those who dont already shop at Target? TV is primarily branding, search is primarily for...well specific product search. Nothing out there for true, replacing the old sunday circular, promotions.
It's amazing how Apple disrupts a whole market with new categories of products again and again. They might not be the first to enter a nascent market but they are the one to make it big.
I agree with your footnote. It's very easy for drivers to slow down and share the road, but they don't want to. They are Very Important and are late to their next appointment. (Of course, so am I, and I have to pedal there! They should be making way for me!)

I ride my bike to work (almost) every day and do about 100 miles of road riding a week in addition to that. Rarely do I have problems on the streets of Chicago, because I choose wide roads that are "off the beaten path" and there is plenty of room for cars to use the other 3 lanes (giving me one to myself). People interact safely because it doesn't inconvenience them.

The other day, though, I had an interesting encounter with the driver of (you guessed it) an SUV. I was waiting to go straight through an intersection where there is only one lane for left turns, going straight, and turning right. I'm stopped at the red light. The car comes up behind me, and the driver gets out of the car and asks if I can "get off the road" so she can "make a right on red". I told her the lane is not marked for that, and I tried to choose the safest position for myself while waiting for the light to change. This annoys her, so she drives over the curb, onto the sidewalk... and has to wait for pedestrians crossing the street. The light turns green and there are pedestrians crossing the other way, so there she waits... stuck on the sidewalk.

The reason I don't feel bad about making her wait is that if there was a car there waiting to turn left or go through, then she'd be stuck, too. But the mentality of drivers is "us vs. them"; a car is a normal, a red light is normal... but a bike in my way! That's some selfish bastard (her words) stealing 15 seconds of my life!

Now I know why most people drive to work -- they don't want to get yelled at (or be endangered by) other drivers. You have to have a thick skin if you want to cycle and survive. And thus the cycle continues; "those damn cyclists need to get off my God-given roads, because someone told me that the one time I wanted to ride my bike to the store."
Yeah, your #2 really burns me up. Groupon should be the ones to call out point #1 to the business owner. Work with the merchant to design a deal that benefits them.
one other useful thing to point out. It can often be harder to implement robustness at the bottom of your call chain. You may need to step up a layer.

user_method()
call_to_get_info_from_remote_system()

Just because call_to_get_info_from_remote_system fails doesn't mean you have to be done.

user_method(tries)
while i < tries
if call_to_get_info_from_remote_system() == FAIL
# log error
if check_remote_system_reachable()
# fatal error be done
i++

granted this makes all kinds of assumptions like you can afford to retry this operation up to N times. It also may break the rule of "Stupidity"
With educational institutions, you might want to consider giving away your application for free to a few clients first. These sales cycle can be so bureaucratic it is often of more (unrealized) value to be able to say "we have 5 other very similar clients using this already" than trying to charge right off the bat. Taking the factor of "I don't want to be first" out of the equation could be a viable way to ultimately find paying customers.

Although, if you are solving a true, acknowledged pain point they will likely offer to pay right then and there (these situations are very difficult to come by!) so be mindful if / when you make an offer to let them use it gratis.
Diaspora is a real word. There will not be confusion like you think there will be.
Not really. You can use JNI but it's awkward, discouraged, and every JNI call has overhead -- so much overhead that in the Hadoop project, for example, it was faster to implement their own CRC32 than to use the built in one calling zlib.
What's the harm in having tools written in Javascript? Now that it's getting used on the server more often, it's nice to be able to use the same language everywhere.
Good point, but it's cannibalizing in term of revenue not product unit sales.
I am doing SEO consulting for a company called South-Pak that makes custom travel and road cases. Obviously, the business owners don't want to change the name and obviously Google thinks it's a misspelling of South Park (if you query South-Pak, you must then click on the link to confirm that you are looking for results for South-Pak.

Combatting the fact that many are searching for the name of the company and getting frustrated, I'm working hard to associate South-Pak with the word cases. As a result of the anchor text, et al, when one types in South-Pak you should, South-Pak Cases should be one of the options generated by Google Instant.

As long as you have the .com domain though, Google can't hurt you much. Fundamentally, you want to have the .com domain, have a name that is difficult to misspell and easy to explain on the phone.

If people that don't know about your name and they are looking for you, they should be able to find you on Google. That's what Google is for. If that's not the case, it's probably you, not Google.
Out of curiosity, is there another way to pronounce "cadio" other than cad-e-o?
I like the site. Here's an issue: If I choose "cars and trucks" in craigslist, and want to put in a max price, it won't let me click "search" unless I type something in the search box. I might want to look for everything under a certain price.
That would explain it - however, what items fit that profile in a coffee shop? Certainly I can't think of anything from my local.

The tipping is a legitimate issue, however, I bet there are people that spent less than the full value of the coupon, tipping the scales back in the other direction, so I believe my back of the napkin analysis stands.
Why do these articles never mention the aftermarket? It's like businesses refuse to acknowledge that good domains are available to purchase. Sedo? Afternic? BuyDomains? Auctions? Personal portfolios? Wake up! This is where the real gems are.

Domain finder tools are dead. They don't work.
Honestly,

From just thinking about such "experiments", I'd say that such an event is so outside the experience of most people that they simply would not have a mechanism for making such a decision. The somewhat less painful issues around "the right to die" are still very distressing when you are actually confronted with them. For example, consider the unwillingness of soldiers to fire in combat: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers...

Certainly, some people do make such decisions in times of war or times of disaster. I doubt, however, that those folks have dealt with such brutal dilemas would find an evening of exchanging philosophical hypotheticals on the subject terribly enlightening.
I've done this in Seattle. There was one of those speed traps monitoring the speeds of cars; they were going over 35mph, and I was passing them.

The ride back home was not as fast, though.
Flag yourself, I emailed them and they sorted it out.

I think people would like to know if they're going to show this much lack of care.

debug=True should never ever ever happen in a production environment. Very sloppy.
I disagree. I could create a steep discount coupon. 50% off, bam! The trouble is selling several thousand of them in a day, and my website has a lot more visitors than the typical mom and pop shop.

Distribution is worth paying for. Perhaps not paying a multiple of LTV for. But worth paying for.
Beta usually mean it works, and debug=True should never ever go anywhere production.

I don't think you're a Django dev, because that's a srsface problem.
Your summary is more self-explanatory, No doubt about it.

But I think (keep in mind that I'm fairly new on HN) that the idea behind the "avoid duplication policy" is simply to keep the comments all in the same basket.

Said that "duplication happens!"
What about Google Maps/Google Earth? They are arguably even more ubiquitous than Gmail and have thousands of different applications and purposes.

People use Google Maps to make new apps
- ranging from practical [http://www.padmapper.com/]
to artistic [http://thewildernessdowntown.com/] - on a daily basis while Gmail and Google Docs remain relatively stagnant.
I've switched to DDG as my default in Chrome again. My main problem is that I'm always afraid that I'm missing good results, so when it's an important search I have a tendency to also use Google. And then after a while I tend to switch back to Google to remove that anxiety.

Not sure how to fix that :-/
Plain and simple: She should have driven a harder bargain or not gone for it.

Also #3, #3, #3, and #3. People don't read the little bit on Groupon where it says "tip like you're not getting a discount," or just ignore it, and also #3.
These guys are killing it. A variety of quality game content, bundled, cheap, and well marketed on the web, via platforms like steam and email (I open their newsletter every time it shows up, which says something about how they connected with me as a customer). Just when I was feeling that pc gaming was dead, this kind of distribution (steam especially) is reinvigorating the platform in a way that makes a lot of business sense.

Another great example: steam shows me a game that's 18 months old for 10% of the original retail price, I buy it on their platform and instantly download/install it on a whim and in one step, and I'm a happy customer. I never would have purchased it if they hadn't dumped it in my lap... but when I can get at least a few hours of (perhaps questionably good?) entertainment and new gaming experiences for the price of a pint or two of micro, that B-game I wouldn't otherwise have purchased starts to look more attractive.
Best 'Other' Schools To Recruit Computer Science Majors/Developers From
This is not a surprise to anyone in the industry.

There are many small companies out there that market software products that meet the definition of "Medical Device" but are not approved by the FDA or its equivalent in other countries. They escape because they're running under the radar and the agency doesn't have enough people to police everyone. Now put those apps in one or a few places and it becomes much easier to monitor.

The solution isn't a simple one. Getting 510(k) submissions (FDA pre-market approval process) approved can be very expensive but at the same time, it's possible that many of the products the FDA regulates really don't need to be or at least could be served by a simpler submission process.
hint hint: there's a startup in there somewhere :)
I agree with you there. Digg's traffic was higher before the change to v4.

I think what may have happened was that they looked at Reddit's plea for money as an excuse to commercialize, and took it too far.
Buy a used mobile phone (from eBay) that just allows you to make calls and at most text without additional charges.

You don't have to go to the risk and trouble of getting a used phone. Any one of the prepaid plans will sell you a classic-style phone for not much money, eg here's a perfectly nice Samsung for fifteen bucks:

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-de...

Eat on the cheap

No way, I'm spending the money I save by not having a smartphone on eating expensively.
Some years ago a friend of mine and I built a "self-propagating" system to speed up server deployment. Every server inside the datacenter would periodically look for hardware it wasn't previously aware of in its subnet, and then it would try a few known exploits to root the box, and run our shim. The shim would install all the software we wanted on the box, apply patches, reboot the machine, bring it online and register it so that all the other machines knew about it.

It was kind of a fun experiment, but in the end didn't save us enough time to maintain it for very long - the real time sink was getting the hardware bootable and into the datacenter to begin with. (This was pre-"cloud" days, I guess if we were doing it again now we might have used it for a little longer.)
To me, Cadio is much better than Locately (I brake my tongue trying to pronounce it). Easier to remember, spell and pronounce. English is not my native language so that might be the reason why I think that.
If it can [be made to] run in real time, it could be useful in avionics software. We often use a minimalized Linux-based system.
I wrote this page http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm and Google started sending me people looking for [dolch sight words bingo]. It was, at the time, the most obvious hole in the Internet which my product filled, and was my single best source of sales for probably a year or so.

I eventually got savvier about the strategy than "target one SERP at a time using pages handwritten in notepad."
Both of your statements are based on equivalency between marginal cost and average cost.

The marginal profit in the service industry is not less than 10%. It would be nearly impossible to pay for all the fixed costs of running a service company (rent, labor, depreciation of PP&E) if that were true. Yes, the net profit margin is less than 10% (typically 5-7% for restaurants). The two are not the same.

Many gross margins in the service industry are 30-50%, or often higher. Think of the actual cost of a cup of coffee, or of the ingredients in a sandwich. It's not high relative to the price charged. But quite a few must be sold in order to cover the fixed costs of keeping the store open.

This is why location matters so much in retail. It is not because it allows you to charge significantly higher prices, usually. It is because it gets you much higher volume, which is principally what determines the net profit of a retail outlet.

That's why Groupon actually works quite well for many such service businesses. It drives volume, which is what matters for net profit. But it would be loss generating for a low gross margin business to use it, such as a high volume mass retailer.
> But this is exactly what a small business is buying from Groupon.

But this is not what Groupon is billing themselves as providing though...
Stating from experience. The IDEs tend to be inaccurate. They can provide a good skeleton for a test suite. But they have a hard time recording interatction with modals, animations, or facebook connect elements. Using an IDE you will find yourself returning to the generated code and hand coding other interactions.
What's really interesting is that we are all here rationalizing whether to throw the doctor or the baby, when the hardest but perfectly politically correct choice is to throw yourself to the sharks.
Actually, I don't think that's true. Studies after world war 2 showed that only 15-25% of soldiers were "effective" and actually fired at the enemy. Modern training mechanisms have increased this ratio substantially, which is also blamed for the increase in PTSD...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall