skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
im a chicago entrepreneur and had a crowd funding startup. i sat on a panel with andrew last year before groupon got massive and know as much as anyone about the inner workings of groupon (pun intended).

i write this to give some context to the comment below.

groupon (i dont think maliciously) uses the fact that they are sophisticated and the small business owner isn't to their advantage.

you might think "so what? all is fair"

well, the small business community doesn't live in a vaccum. they talk to each other and talk about groupon (especially here in chicago).yes, they don't know how to create promotions (one of the real values groupon sales people provide) BUT what they do talk about are these horror stories.

so whats the moral here? people aren't idiots and if groupon wants to make sure their two sided platform survives, it can't abuse one side for the benefit of the other.
There is another problem with this type of tools, you can read about it here:

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/226

most of what it's found while still a bug may never lead to erratic behaviour, it's hard to estimate the severity of each bug and it's a lot of work to wade through all of them.
> By taking a high cut

This is what confuses me. Shouldn't the split have been determined before the contract was signed? I don't understand how they could have made a deal with Groupon, but not worked out who would keep what percentage.
I've known many founders who don't have this trait. There's no single trait that all founders share.
I see three immediate problems:

1. The merchant didn't think through the consequences of their promotion. They made a deal that was too appealing to an unnecessarily broad swath of potential customers. A commenter on the blog points out that the better approach is to figure out how to bait the hook for a specific type of desirable customer instead of having a fire sale.

2. Groupon didn't look out for their partner merchant. Groupon's job is to be really smart about the business they're in and to share those smarts with their partners. Sure, they're relatively new at this too, but a part of their sales process should be qualifying the deals they're going to be running for people and saying "hey, you know, this might be giving away the farm."

3. People are dicks; doubly so in a down economy.
It's good to hear that Qt is making app development on Symbian less of a pain.

I made some software for Symbian a few years ago and dealing with the UIKON library and all of it's object-ownership issues were just terrible. It was a monstrous, overwrought, poorly thought-out UI framework where everything that's easy in other toolkits is made hard and everything is a special case.
Die Ass Poor Ugh
Open source projects sometimes need help with branding. Any suggestions for pleasant sounding names that don't need the pronounciation and meaning explained?

Surely they can spend some of that sweet Kickstarter money on a domain...
Maybe something related to Dandelions?
Sorry for the buzzwords. What I meant was: there are whole classes of people who are very used to using Justin.tv (and ustream to a lesser extent) for live video. Maybe some of them would switch to Google if YouTube suddenly offered live streaming, but my feeling is that this is a Twitter vs. Google Buzz situation. Google can offer, but if the digerati are already used to another service, they won't necessarily switch.

Justin.tv is kind of a dark horse -- ustream may be better known, but Justin.tv is actually bigger. The Justin guys can probably explain this better than I can. :-)
Not sure about Groupon but FYI a well-targeted list usually goes for about $60-$80 CPM for a single mailing.

Yeah, they're that valuable.
The issue is of sentience in humans and non-sentience in trees -- not of developed sentience in adults and yet-to-be-developed sentience in babies.
Free Painting Wallpapers, Beautiful Background Wallpapers, Photos, Picture
The painting is like the blood of the Artist.It is magic, inspiration, dedication and above everything is a lot of Love.This painting was done byEdward Hopper painted at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1942. The First Time size of the painting is 30 x 60 inches, and canvas with Oil Paints. Edward Hopper's use of color, shadowing, depth, and the placing of the viewers perception to the painting, give the viewer the feel that if we were there.The painting has only two characters, the painter and his subject. The painter is thought to be a self-portrait of the artist, though the face is not visible. The subject is the Muse of History, Clio. A number of the items shown in the artist's studio, the location of the painting, arthought to be out of place.
Thrillist charges $200+ for it's email ads.
2. It's -$8000 net gain which means that advertising cost them $8000 plus any additional profit it brought.

I still don't get it why you would vouch for such a thing like groupon. For me, it's quite obvious that you'll get a line of people wanting to buy coffee and a cake for this coupon and nothing more. With zero conversion AND negative profits.
We'll assume for the purposes of this thought experiment that the shark just wants a nibble - he'll be satisfied for sure with either one.

Meh. Then cut off your arm and give it to him. The problem with these philosophical experiments is controlling external variables. It just can't be done.
Pure64 also is proprietary :(

Is BareMetal bootable via GRUB?
This approach isn't perfect, as people have pointed out, but I think its better than the alternative. A lot of freelance coding sites are practically unusable from the employer's side because every yokel can give a low rate and not even read the project description. I think forcing those people to try to prove their worth and getting rid of some riff-raff employers that underpay is a net gain.
It shows the test (as seen on the left side of the screen at sodajs.com) running in a real browser.
It looks like Nokia is the next to die after Microsoft's demise three years ago.
Add ports and a keyboard and it will be perfect! Make it a clamshell style so fingerprints wont get on the screen, and protect it when your not using it.
It must be a tough call whether to battle on with a four/five letter miss-spell, or change to something longer. Obviously locately is much better though.
Microsoft Exec Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent'
In the video linked from the article, they mention that they are going to pump the outgoing water around the complex back to the sea and it will be nearly the same temperate as the sea water when it reaches back. I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.
The video is an automated recording via Saucelabs. Selenium RC / Soda allow you to automate acceptance testing, paired up with Saucelabs allows you to do so across a matrix of operating systems, browsers, and browser versions completely automated using the Soda client (along with the selenium IDE if you choose) to write your tests.
Great point. Restaurants operate on low margins to begin with, usually 12% or lower, and coffee shops can be worse (I found this out during due diligence for a shop I almost bought). To offer over %50 off already puts them in the red, then to let Groupon have %50 of the little revenue it generates is worse.

This is probably a case of the business owner not understanding the types of customers they would get and at what volume they could expect them to come. Some business owners think advertising=good, in any form. Knowing your business model and which advertising models support you best is very important.
A spouse capable of financially supporting the founder while things are starting out seems common as well.
Rate my Startup: Search Craigslist visually
I have created a site that allows to run searches against Craigslist and other online stores and displays the results as images.

http://spotli.com
damn i didn't know people hated larry ellison so much. He did have a rough upbringing and didn't have the advatages Bill Gates had and founded one of the most successful technology companies in the world.

How can anyone deny that he is a Silicon Valley hero and success story. He is going to save Sun.
1. That's groupons business model. The average profit margin in the service industry is less than 10%. If you give people a 50% discount, you are definitely going to be losing money. The idea is that you let them try your place, then they keep coming back. In practice, most of the places I've talked to haven't seen it this way.

2. It's really expensive for what it is, and could easily tank a small businesses cash flow. I know of two different places that did $30 gift certificates for $15. Of the $15, $7.50 went to Groupon, so the businesses got $7.50 per transaction. Both sold over 1000 coupons. If half of those coupons are redeemed in the first month, and it costs $27 to service each $30 transaction, you would see a negative cash flow impact of $9,750, and a total cash flow impact of $19,500. The average restaurant spends about $850/month on advertising, so a single groupon would soak up their entire budget for two full years.

Everybody that I've talked to that has used groupon (~10 restaurants) has said that they would never use it again. It's too expensive, and the people that buy it aren't the people they want to attract.

Ultimately, I'd be surprised if somebody else didn't come in and offer the exact same service for free. It doesn't take a genius to sell stuff to people for less than it costs. Incidentally, I did a survey of some of my customers (http://barsannapolis.com) about offering the service for free, and they largely weren't interested because it doesn't produce the results they want.
I don't think a private high school education is necessarily universal, but in my experience a lot of founders in the valley are from wealthy (or at least, extremely upper-middle-class) backgrounds. You rarely see founders who put themselves through college by working at pizza joints -- those dudes are working for the guys who went to Harvard via trust fund.

It's a little-discussed phenomena amongst the yammering classes, but a lot of startup founders have nothing to lose but pride.
I've been wondering for a while why Google and others don't put data centers in Iceland. Electricity there is almost free of charge and has zero carbon footprint - in fact zero emissions of any sort. (It's geothermal.) The location is remote so you would have some extra latency but for lots of stuff that'd be fine.
Good luck getting Android to run fast on a low-powered 100$ device.
Djangy Is Not Good
Got invited to Djangy beta, sign-up link raised 500.

Worse:

They're running debug=True on a production deployment, and the error was a painfully simple import error (basically, urls file wasn't found).

How am I supposed to trust these people with managing my apps?

I keep feeling like my industry (web dev) is some kind of 24/7 Amateur Hour when things like this happen.
Opt-out vs. Opt-in is arguable. Given the severity of alerts, I think opt-out provides the most utility to the population. These alerts are coming directly from government organizations, "deals from Costco" should have no bearing on the decision.
I think peoples gut reactions is somewhat based on “Number of lost potential decedents in 50-200 years based on primitive life expectancy.” At which point a 15 year old has greater value than both a 50 year old and a baby. This also explains why you get women and children then men then elderly.
Will you or BoS be posting the video and slides? I'm not able to make the talk, but am working on a product whose users would be almost exclusively female.
How to Balance Between Loving Your Startup Idea and Taking Feedback
That doesn't mean that smartphones can't get better & cheaper, displacing some of the feature phones. Smartphones are ~26% of the entire market, I'll give you the source for that tomorrow.
Ooooh....
Our web app is exclusively embedded and hosted from an activex control within a desktop windows application. GWT really fits nicely with this admittedly awkward model.
I love the conflict. I guarantee you that my answer has changed since becoming a father, too.

A bit of indulgent nit-pickery: My first inclination would just be to move the younger tree. It wouldn't add significant costs to the investment of building a new road.
Tech companies target EU cloud computing profit
I saw Rob Pike talk about Go, and he gave the impression its being used on a rather wide variety of systems related programming inside of google. I don't know of any particular projects though.
From a couple of months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546135
Tell Heroku?
That's not hard to find out.

Glenn Kelman is the CEO of redfin, which has a very cool Google Maps-like real estate search. I haven't done business with them, but have used them as another tool during my house-buying searches.

I wager that Glenn (or someone on the redfin team) is using HackerNews as yet another place to market.

Personally, I don't mind. It's interesting reading.
Groupon in Retrospect
It is tough acquiring a short (under 8 letter) meaningful domain name now. I am curious to know how much it cost just to buy that domain. Sometimes you can make a nonsensical name stick with enough effort/branding: see zillow.com, it is all in the sub title.
I think that vast majority of people would kill under some circumstances. EX: Conscripted army’s have worked fairly well throughout history.
Here's an old report on how 3 letter domains got snapped up at the height of the .com bubble...

http://www.honeylocust.com/trigraphs/
Additionally, they can use sacrificial anodes to reduce corrosion and apply an electric current to reduce growth of living things.
Seven ways social nets like Facebook and LinkedIn are 'truly evil'
Why your family doesn't respect your job
Apple's trackpad is vastly different from a traditional trackpad. It is a multi-touch device similar to the iphone but without the display. There are no buttons the whole thing is a button. You swipe two fingers to scroll up/down click the pad to click. 2 finger click to right click, the list goes on. The point being, it is nothing like a traditional trackpad experience and for me personally it is superior to a mouse. If I used a desktop, I would use the peripheral trackpad no doubt, I could no go back to a mouse now.

Another poster mentioned above that they slowly realized that they stopped using their mouse, that is what happened to me as well. One day I realized that I just never pulled my mouse out of my bag anymore.

I really think Apple has done a poor job of marketing this one, as I think most that have used it would agree, it is a mouse killer.

I do 3D work as a hobby from my old simulation days, and now days I use Blender, the pan, room, rotate is so natural with a trackpad it is unbelievable. And for Photoshop it is a huge productivity booster.

It is also nice in an IDE where I spend most of my time because you can navigate select and modify all in single hand stroke. If they ever add gestures for copy / paste I won't know what to do with myself.
Nice site. I like it. From a sales to the customer standpoint, if it were my site, I would put a button on the index page that says;

"Looking for a CHEAP Mattress and not a Luxury Mattress Click Here".

And offer maybe 5 very cheap mattresses for the traffic that can't afford or doesn’t want to pay for the luxury model. I would get some real cheapies and mark them up to make the same dollar amount as the luxury model.

I doubt the cheap ones would steal sales from the luxury models because they are not a direct competitor.
Ask HN: How did you get your first paying customer?
We are building a web application targeted towards educational institutions. We have recently started the sales process and have begun with making cold calls/visits to potential customers. Will appreciate it if you can share your experience and learnings as you went out to get the first paying customer
LOL @ the pic.
iPhone in the night? hahaha
The distortion would make my ears bleed too.
A letter to Kevin Rose about how to save digg.com
Notwithstanding that the code is a maze to find your way through.
Agreed. Chrome OS table will be awesome. It'll be like upgrading from iPhone to Android. Escaping from the walled garden of "Sorry, you can't do that", to a feature rich device without stupid design decisions - iPad has to sync to a computer running iTunes????? WTF
This is a ridiculous claim!!!

Wold class talent should not settle down for "acceptable monthly income" and "decent living standards", that's what we reasonably competent talent do. And even the reasonably competent freelancers should be charging twice as much, just to compensate for the lack of benefits, the depreciation of their infrastructure, and the fact that they will not likely be able to book 4 x 40hr-solid weeks month after month.

The whole point of your little startup is to cut off the people who leaves in countries with lower cost of living. You should rename it as WeCantCompete.us
I spoke with a business owner recently that had used Groupon and he shared a similar experience with me.

He said that with Groupon you must discount your offering by at least 50%, and that you must share 50% the sales with Groupon. That means the most you can sell your goods is 25% of there normal price. Where they made the mistake, he said, was in not thinking it would be very successful. You are able to put a max on the number of sells, but they only thought they would sell ~40 so they left it open. They ended up selling over 800.

He said you have to think of Groupon as a marketing cost. Multiply the max you are going to sell times the discount and make sure you are okay spending that much on a marketing campaign.
do you support Europe as well?
Google Ventures Hires an Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Yeah because there's only a bajillion existing flash capable browsers out there. But apparently the 'hip' crowd are buying iPads! ;)

FWIW though, I'd choose HTML5 over Flash, but not on the basis of this datapoint - for all the other more important (IMHO) reasons.
Dumping your smartphone is a major step in the right direction.

No one ever takes the time to be truly present and witness the world around them with a smartphone in their hand. Immediately we default to checking Twitter, Facebook, texting, emailing, surfing, etc. instead of making small talk with the person standing next to us in line.

This was my primary reason for reverting back to a Blackberry from an iPhone. I needed a messaging device and nothing more. (Yes messaging is still a vice, but it's infinitely times better than playing a Angry Birds on your iPhone.)
Ideas, Execution, Teamwork, Success
Skyhook sues Google amid greater federal antitrust scrutiny
Have you cleared your use of "Zappos" and "Amazon" with the trademark holders?

I bought my last mattress from http://www.us-mattress.com and was very pleased with the whole process. One of the most important things to me was their durability chart at http://www.us-mattress.com/durability.html. I don't see any information on your site about how durable your mattresses are, or whether there is any sort of warranty beyond the 30-day return policy. That alone is enough to keep me from buying from you.
Also a very good point. Being surrounded by supportive people improves focus for sure.
Good initiative, the website is easy to understand. Makes the process more convenient for those who, for any reason, aren't able to take the time to visit a store to make the purchase. The 30-day refund period and clearly stating there are no additional fees for this is a good idea.

I could be wrong, but here are few problems I can think of:

- A mattress is one of those important purchases which happen only once every 10 years (for most people). How will you make sure they remember you when its time to buy?

- After a quick look at the price range from a few major brick-and-mortar mattress stores, I found price differences to be minimal.

- Just like you wouldn't buy a used car without testing it first, most people would want to try out the mattress before purchasing.

Best of luck!
The numbers do not add up. Assuming 1,000 customers;

$8,000 in losses is an $8 loss per customer. With $3 of revenue. So they're claiming $11 in variable costs to service each customer, for $13 worth of product. No way that is correct - if it is, Groupon is merely the straw that broke the camel's back. Their markup on product should be way higher.

Also, that's assuming no increase in follow on transactions, and that all coupons were cashed.

I don't buy it. Although it definitely could have been a net loss, it wasn't of that magnitude.
This disconnect between what someone says and does when polled on questions involving race is called the 'Bradley Effect': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect
No, not yet. But we just added Canada support. Here is the link:

http://spotli.com/index.cfm?activity=0&dept_id=1&sto...
> look at IBM: they pursued SCO to an extent

The lawsuit is entitled "SCO v. IBM", not "IBM v. SCO".
Agreed. She should have constrained what it could be applied to so she could manage her losses. If I was going to embark on a Groupon campaign, I'd want to look at how much money I would lose per Groupon and then figure out how many Groupons I could afford to sell.

If you just open the floodgates without calculating how much you can afford to lose, it's not Groupons fault, it's your own. Even a layman should be able to understand that you're going to take a loss in the short term, so don't allow yourself to take a bigger loss than you can afford.

She even makes it clear in her facebook post that this is entirely her fault:

"...I hung up and thought it over. I called him back and said we would have to get at least 50% to cover our costs of product… to this day I don’t know why I thought even 50% would be a good deal for us. Maybe because I thought since we were covering our food costs. What I didn’t think clearly enough about was that that margin we mark up is what covers all of our other costs… like staff, rent, utilities, etc. Our overhead is roughly $25,000/month, and this decision was about to make it so that we didn’t cover any of those other costs."
Palm's on Verizon and AT&T now, as well as a bunch of other carriers outside the US.
This reminds me of MenuetOS (http://www.menuetos.net), although a bit larger BareMetal OS, still manages to cram in a unholy amount of functionality in to a couple of megs.
Hearts Seem to Heal Slowest for Grouchy Pessimists
I like this idea. One issue that looks like a bug. In IE 7.0.5730.11 there is no search box for Craigs list. The search box is present for eBay only.
Mmmh... Yes, probably. Your PC must be infected.
Sounds like the author had some human-centric reasons for changing the name of the business. It's worth noting that Google can be taught to like invented names in a pretty short amount of time, though.

Three of my four iPhone projects shipped with invented words for names (Oddage, Tallymander, Globejot). Even after the sites were live and indexed, Google would do its "did you mean..." or worse, showing results for the word it thought I meant by default.

So, searching for Tallymander, for example, would give you "Showing results for Sallymander" for the first two results.

With any amount of press or other web conversation that generates inbound links, though, this problem ends up taking care of itself. About a week after launch, Google recognized each word as legitimate and I enjoyed top ranking.
anyone from JTV on here? I would love to see/help make this happen. steve at stevederico dot com
I think people might find some of the statements on the page offensive. Such as the implication that 'real experts' are only found in the west. Or that people from the east work for 'peanuts'. Sure they work for less because they need less to support a decent lifestyle, but that doesn't mean they're working for peanuts.

I realize the intention is good, but there must be another way to get the message out.