skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You clearly misunderstand the entire business models of the industry.

Those 'accidental' visitors are actually quite 'regular.' A certain stream of people type in domain names to find what they want every day. Just because you don't behave a certain way to navigate to things doesn't mean others don't. It's called Direct Navigation in the industry. That's what has fueled the growth of domain investing since about 2003ish when PPC parking systems actually created an easy to monetize method for domain holders that scaled incredibly well across virtually all niches. Google pumped it even higher until about 2007.

Those people who directly navigate to a website are amazingly consistent. I have held names for many many years and the type in numbers have remained almost constant for most of them. What is the value of X potential customers coming to you without any work every day? What is the value of a more memorable brand name? What is the value of a domain that is an exact match to a super high value keyword term that defines an industry and google puts a giant bonus on in SERPs?

Very few domain sales ever reach the million dollar mark and especially not new registrations (http://ohashi.info/article/there-money-fresh-domain-name-reg...). You're confusing a billboard in the middle of nowhere and a billboard in times square. The value of the billboard is the distance from times square. There are a lot of unreasonable people, but that's life, there are just as many professionals who know what their domains are worth. Just because you have one value doesn't mean others don't see the value differently.
Awesome. Did you consult on what eventually became IPAWS / CMAS? Thanks for the offer for more insight. I grabbed your email from your profile. If it looks like the project will get undertaken, will definitely hit you up.
Avoiding website project disasters
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/10/autism-821...

he missed the colon in the http:// and it the site added a new one for him
I didn't fail to understand it. I worked for years in corporate IT and have maintained and upgraded enterprise systems (PeopleSoft/Oracle) on slow (1 year+) upgrade cycles. Those days should die. And I came to that opinion from direct in the trenches experience in that kind of environment.
Fraudulent Groupon Photography Deal Calls Attention To Service Drawbacks
A Groupon salesperson called us awhile back to see if we were interested. We crunched the numbers, wondered how anyone made money using Groupon, and told them "no thanks".

In retrospect, I can see it working in a few cases:

1. You are not well known and will attract new customers (marketing expense).

2. The Groupon is worth much less than your typical sale.

3. Your overhead is fixed and you are not at capacity.
I would think the most important thing to do first is to stop and think about the logic of the code. Plan a small and simple roadmap in your mind, or on paper if your mental memory is low.

This will save you a lot of the try-and-fail attempts, and even better, before you write a single line of code, you have a general idea of what it is that you're doing and how it is that you're going to be doing it.
Not only this, but this seems like it might be against the Groupon terms of service to deny the coupon outright.

According to the fine print on one of the Groupons I have, after the expiration date the coupon is still good as a voucher worth what the customer originally paid.

You're not entitled to the advertised deal, but that coupon is worth money toward goods and services. For example, your $25 coupon is no longer good for a $75 spa treatment, but you still have $25 credit at the spa.
Thoughtbot: Team Rotations
Details of Google Social Layer emerge, to be centered around Buzz
Faster to just scan the zonefiles. You run into a black swan problem with this technique. However, that said, all of them WERE registered, TWICE throughout history. Once way back and again more recently (someone wrote 2007, sounds about right). People have realized the cost of holding them is higher than the potential sales in many cases, especially at the bottom of the quality barrel. They weren't kept because they sucked but domain investors like all people like patterns and herding and get sucked into poor investments.
And the hits keep coming for Groupon today: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/groupon-photography/

A photography deal offered on Groupon in Atlanta yesterday turned messy when it was revealed that the photographer had promoted her work with stolen images and was far from equipped to carry out the terms of the Groupon.
"When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it."

I think this is the best takeaway from the article generally (not focusing on the Groupon aspect).
While I distrust the author's claims to be able to reliably distinguish devices created by data thinking and design thining irrespective of final quality (I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation more rife with the potential for hindsight bias) he does make a number of good points.

Perhaps the best was that if you're trying to grow a market then being like your competitors is probably the wrong was to go about. A common expression of mockery with a group of friends is that a company is "trying to differentiate by embracing the dominant paradigm." These seems related.
Only at the margins would the registered stuff change. Tasting is a different problem from people actually buying. Tasting was a free loophole where you could buy a domain and 'return' it within 5 days and not get charged. It now costs 25 cents per domain over X domains (some reasonable numbers, i think few hundred for legitimate client mistakes), per registrar.
Exactly. Is anyone standing up and demanding that Google release more slowly?
Looking for a laugh? Checkout this
The deal is... let's disregard our COGS, halve the pricing, then send half of the revenue to Groupon. This sounds so inanely stupid for a SMB owner that every time I load up Groupon.com I'm just amazed. Amazed that there are so many desperate businesses out there.

Groupon is to coupons as Digg is to traffic. One gives you bad customers the other gives you bad traffic. Critical mass that few owners with sophistication and expertise in managing.

I would like to know more experiences in dealing with account managers at Groupon. They should hand-hold some clients more, explain to them the concept after deals are posted online, teach them how to harness customer information to prepare for all this. You know, being a good marketing partner, establishing a working relationship to repeat business, and thrive.

But that's not aligning with Groupon's interests, Groupon's model only works when SMBs don't think this through. That's why you hear hyperbole--you'll never have to advertise again!--it's snake oil sales tactics. They want to come off as being neutral good but end up lawful evil.

Groupon has said they have 35,000 businesses waiting to participate so I guess the real lesson to making money isn't so much about satisfaction but capitalizing on naivete. Last week I learned making money isn't about making something good but copy what's out there until the numbers work.
The problem I have with this article is that it describes Google's designs as "bland" but gives no examples. What exactly is bland about which products?

The problem with too much "design thinking" is that you end up trying to "innovate" without taking user needs into perspective. To a designer aching to flex his design muscles, a clean and usable design probably comes off as "bland."

I'd argue that Google is much more usable than its competitors. They don't overdo their design, and that's a good thing.
I watched the video and was still in the dark.
Sounds like a lot of work/overkill, but I've always given out a detailed statement of work (based on a boilerplate from my own experience) that:

* outlines my current understanding of the project with enough detail to not trivialize potential areas of difficulty

* bullet points of what's in scope and out of scope

* list of expectations from the customer to ensure timeliness and adherence to the budget

* change control procedure

* clearly state that it's a time and materials budget

* clearly state that there's a margin of error and that you will diligently manage the project to budget

* outline any potential risks and showstoppers that will add $/scope

You also have to make sure they sign off on this SOW as proof they read it. This habit is just a carryover from my experience working in consulting agencies.
Groupons terms are not really negotiable.

They offered me the same terms when I called them about my retail stores. (want min 50% off for consumer, they take 50% of revenue). I told them it was too rich. They wouldn't budge. I walked away.

They have a 6 month waiting list in some areas, why would they negotiate.

I am amazed that so many businesses accept these terms. There is just no way it makes sense.
Startup by Numbers: An Experiment in Extreme Openness Begins
What H.264 encoding is used (profile, level)?

Would definitely have to check my notes for this. I'll follow up.

Baseline profile, 1.3.
Hopefully, when we do move away from the internal combustion engine we will move to something lighter. Currently the batteries are the source of massive weight for electric cars but we're all hoping that improves. We will (hopefully) have cars that are much lighter, more efficient, and based on some energy source than oil derivatives.

It just seems that that path is more likely than everyone in the suburbs giving up their homes and communities and moving within biking distance of home and work. I support initiatives that allow people to safely ride bikes. What I don't particularly like is expecting multi-ton vehicles driving at high speeds to negotiate 1/10th ton people going much slower speeds. There has to be a better/safer solution.
This also assumes that expensive == good. In my experience, that's not always true, or even often true. Then you feel really bad.
Ah. I was wondering why it said Galileo was still in the solar system...
Slightly misleading title. I expected a tale of ancient hackers, writing code and making decisions, some of which were good, and others that today we regret.
SBA: U.S. Slipping in Entrepreneurship
Musopen will free classical music from copyright
Yeah - my point with that was that sometimes your solution can be to a problem they do not realize they have or do not understand the value of what you are providing, so adding additional barriers to adoption in the form of payments should be avoided early on. If you think they need to get behind the wheel to take it for a test drive in order to realize what you are selling, make it easy for them to do just that.

At CollegeJobConnect, we help companies connect with undergraduates for internships / full time jobs. When speaking with some HR departments that "just didn't get it", we'd say: "ok, but why don't you try it for free for the time being then" - after they jumped on and saw how they could tap into job-seeking undegrads, it clicked.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but there are other considerations. What about the costs of implementing a major upgrade cycle as opposed to letting the software update itself? What about the increased likelihood of delayed upgrades, leading to potentially insecure, outdated software? What about the happiness of your employees?
While much of this is good advice, the "name that says what you do" is tricky. Product names should say what they do, but companies sometimes find it more useful to remain vague.

Consider: Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon. None of these words had, when invented, any associations in the public mind. This allows those companies to grow and change their brands and their focus.

Imagine if Amazon had been called "Bookery". Or if Google were called "Searchio". Great names for what those companies started doing, completely misleading now -- especially in Amazon's case.
Open source and money - should FOSS developers be paid?
This post delves into the issue after being raised in the context of problems discussed with R, a free open source software for statistical analysis.
I learned a lot from this article. It is very useful for novices such as myself.
My uparrow key thanks you for writing this.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.

Really annoying.
I don't see how it's either reasoned or important. All I see is rubbish.

Giving Objectivists the benefit of the strongest argument, what the author is saying is that Men Of Industry move humanity forward by virtue of their rapacity. Greed as a motivator causes them to bring together knowledge and production. By combining knowledge and production, humanity can in some wise advance to a "better" existence, and so this greed, while unseemly to parochial minds, is really a good thing.

At what expense, though?

Industrial greed was responsible for the Cuyahoga River repeatedly catching fire (!). It was responsible for GE dumping PCBs into the Hudson River, for Union Carbide in Bhopal, for the fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico, for Mercury poisoning of hatters, for locking seamstresses in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory while it burned, for Phossy jaw, for countless industrial deaths and disfigurements forcing the creation of OSHA, for the CIA overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Guatemala in 1952 at the behest of United Fruit, the dot-com and housing bubbles, and a litany of other industrial fiascos and most of the wars of the 20th Century.

This is what greed gets you. This is all in the pursuit of the production of stuff.

What it doesn't get you is the discovery or invention of stuff. Yes, industrialists have in the past provided large sums of money to fund R&D -- which goes to support people whose motivation is discovery and reputation, not money. Presumably most of us here have either been to or are currently enrolled at a legitimate college or university. How many professors or PhD students are motivated mostly or entirely by money? By the rapacious need to have more cash than someone else in the department?

Galileo and Darwin were in it for truth (and possibly fame).

So was Tesla.

Edison? He screwed Tesla out of promised money for improving Edison's (crappy) products.

The people who get the money aren't the people who discover the knowledge, or invent the device. So we shouldn't pretend like they are.
I'm very excited to get my Kindle. Has anyone gotten accepted to the Kindle Developer Program? I'm curious to hear your experiences.
Google Me will produce an activity stream generated by all Google products.

There's something both fascinating and scary about that thought. Imagine I search for an event on Google, look up the venue on Google Maps, add it to Google Calendar, email it to a friend using Gmail, Buzz it using Google Maps on my Android phone when I get there (based on GPS) and leave a voicemail to a friend who uses Google Voice, all the while uploading geotagged photos to Picasa and videos to YouTube.

What would my activity stream look like? And who would have access to it?
Mentioned in the comments, but another extremely useful feature is if you type ctrl+r and start typing a command, it will give you the last command you ran that contains that substring.
And at the same time, they're clearly willing to negotiate, since Posie got 50%.
You mentioned raik/Cassandra etc do the clustering better, and this may be true, but a big part of the attraction of couchdb is couchApps and the built in map reduce which does the data crunching we need to do in a way well suited to our problem. Will have to investigate raik more, just haven't quite gotten my head around walking links. Or how vwebmachine fits in.... Whether it is comparable to couch apps.

If you want a context in which to think of our product, think of it as a recommendation engine or search engine. A large amount of data comes in, some of it realtime, and it needs to be processed and queries of various types need to be handled, some using customer specific information. Eg: someone who likes shoes will see more shoes in their results.

If we're at amazon, well use amazons load balancer. But it looks like we'll be at linode or somewhere like that initially... And since we need to host a dns server anyway, figured round robin dns is the way to go.

I suspect it would take more coding effort to get powerDNS pulling records out of the couch an it would to adapt a pre-written authoritative server for node to our needs. But since node seems like it wont be ready in time...

I'm not planning any wheel reinventing, and a big part of the reason for posting here was for someone to say "hey, here's a wheel you can buy off the shelf!" not "hur hur, you're stupid because you're assembling a web stack, fail!".

Already had decided, if you'll notice the followups below, to replace redis with memcached, though I don't see how it would be a single point of failure if was just using it as a cache, which is all i was using it for. I just saw it had support for some nice data structures and figured it would be better... But changed my mind when i realized it didn't have an LRU.

As for cluster management, turn key Linux provides some of that, and otherwise it was just going to be keeping queues and load readings in the distributed cache so that large jobs could be distributed to less busy machines. This doesn't seem like a big deal to me, because it wasn't even something we needed in a big way, though I didn't mention that. But if someone has already done it feel free to let me know.

I also figured I'd need to write some scripts to have nodes join and leave the clusters, mostly calling the Apis built into the components of the stack.... Figure everyone has to do this.

I know there are some open source projects for managing cloud clusters, but not very familiar and would appreciate recommendations if there are some that would be a good fit.
The only thing that might be able to touch that
is some alcohol sales

Or coffee. Drip coffee margins can be greater than 70%. Espresso drinks can be greater than 80%.
If cost is too high, then IT departments should have the option to opt-out of automated updates. But I argue that the default browser release behavior should be opt-out -- like Google Chrome. MS' opt-in style is setting them up for failure in the non-IT world.
Two factors that mitigate the 75%:

1. They are betting people will spend above their groupon value. So if you have a $30 that give you a $60, they are hoping you will buy $90 worth of food.

2. They are trying to get loyal customers that will come back every month and have a greater life time value than that first sale.
IE8 has actually never worked for me since it came out. It takes forever to start up and gets stuck loading any page so I never get beyond a white screen.

IE9 can only be a step forward.
PET: English Translation Issue 1 is Here
This magazine is a community effort. It's done by Python guys in Argentina. It has been translated to English.
It is quite the handful to lug around, but the HD screen is so sweet. I only really take it two or three places, so a desktop / iPad combo might not be bad.

on a tangent: I was considering getting an iPad and a Mac mini and switching out the HD with a SSD. The places I need to do heavier stuff all have monitors - so.... Not practical, but the Mac mini fits nicely in a camera bag.
Could be useful if it did something new - support virtual apps, manage restartable/persistent state processes, something. Just another thread/memory/interrupt kernel? Why?
What Groupon wants doesn't particularly matter to the situation. Unless Groupon has somehow convinced you to sign a contract promising that you'll never give anyone a better discount than the Groupon, you can handle regular customers however you want - including customers who aren't doing business under Groupon terms, because their Groupon is expired and doesn't apply. So: "Sure, Lucy. Here you go."

Now, there is a real barrier to just giving Lucy the deal. The entire point of the blog post is that the discount was ruinously unaffordable and didn't attract customers. When you can't make payroll, maybe you genuinely can't afford to comp six dollars of flavored water! Or maybe you don't want to set the public precedent of honoring expired coupons when the coupons were bad business even during their active dates and an entire line of customers is listening to this exchange while waiting behind Lucy. Maybe you get a flood of people digging out their expired coupons, or just demanding to be treated as well as Lucy - exactly what you can't afford. If something is unsustainable then you need to stop sustaining it, and that means there has to be a first person you tell "No."

I suspect that was the sense in which the original poster said she "can't" give Lucy the deal: The deal can't be continued - it's been a disaster - it can't go on. Strictly speaking, you have the power to treat customers however you want, but at the end of a bad business decision related to customer discounts, it's only human to frame everything in terms of "we need to get out of this bad deal."

But taking the Groupon deal at a bad price, such that she painted herself into a corner with her best customer, was still the original poster's own mistake.

I feel it would be unambiguously better, in a social and moral sense, if Groupon provided more advice and guidance to discount providers so that they don't risk going out of business. The mistakes may have been the responsibility of Posie's Cafe, but problems are problems, and Groupon wasn't exactly an uninterested bystander in the issue. I think it would probably be better for Groupon's long-term economic interests as well; if you burn your business partners, you earn a bad reputation, and eventually you run out of people who haven't heard the nasty rumors.
Business Networking Events and Resources for Entrepreneurs in New York
Yeah. Unfortunately spellcheckers can't check everything :)
Groupon reminds me of a real-life "Slashdot/Digg" effect.

What benefits were there to being Dugg? Sure, you got exposure- but it was exposure from Digg users, unlikely to actually care much about your site or subscribe to it. And Digg users don't click ads, so there was no money to be made- in fact, it could even hurt your rates in Adsense.

All the site was left with was a large bandwidth bill and an Everest-like (yet meaningless) Google Analytics spike.
A passive, cross-browser user tracking that works even in private mode
Switching to a Chrome-style update process for IE wouldn't do anything to solve the problem, though. Either enterprises would never upgrade to IE9 because they want control over update deployment, or they'd upgrade to a special crippled version of IE9 that updates at their discretion like how Windows Update works in enterprise deployments. Either way, web developers would still have to deal with tons of machines on old, broken IE.

Enterprise environments are the problem here, MS's deployment model is just a symptom.

Edit: To clarify, my point is not that automatic updates wouldn't work, but that enterprise environments are such a large part of the current internet that web developers cannot ignore them. I'd rather have enterprise users on 'Outdated IE9' that I have to deal with than have 'Oh, are these customers on IE9.0.1.2, IE9.0.1.3, or IE9.0.1.4?'.
I don't understand how the owner was not able to see this coming, you are offering $12 of product for a gross of $3 to you. Groupon lets you set maximum amounts of coupons sold... did she assume many people would not use these?

Recently a supermarket offered a Groupon for $40 for $20 and it sold out at $1,000. This promotion essentially cost them $20k... surely there is a better way to get customers for $20k?