skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mother owns a coffeeshop - Her loyal visitors come in about once a day, spend on average $6, of which 50% is margin - That is, they bring in around $1000 gross profit/year. She has about 30-40 of those customers, upon which her entire business depends upon for it's "cover the nut" revenue.

She goes out of her _way_ to make those customers feel loved, and would never, ever, do something so insane as to jeopardize that $1K in annual profit over something as stupid as a $13 comp.
> easy to explain on the phone

So many people forget about that one, it's really important. Of course all the rest is also important, but one of the major drivers of viral traffic is still people telling other people about your product, in person or on the telephone.
Over at WPEngine we're finding a lot of people are using us to host their Saas/Web App landing/sales/info site in WordPress and then run their app at app.domain.com via AWS, Heroku, etc.

Wordpress allows you to decouple the "info site" stack from the web app stack, which are not necessarily the same technologies - and so this can go way beyond just MVP.
Mixpanel is hiring - DBAs / Pythonistas / Designers please apply.
So you think it's a good idea for Microsoft to continually break crappy internal web applications that misuse outdated Microsoft technologies? Crappy internal applications that misuse outdated Microsoft technologies are the life-blood of business, and that's the biggest factor keeping businesses from moving away from Windows. Do you think it's time for Microsoft to give that up?
To be fair, other companies are less, well... stupid. Today on SF Groupon, I see a climbing gym trying to get new people to come for their first lesson by offering 2/3 off. That makes a lot more sense along the lines of the gillette / dealer model (the first one is free).

I think a coffee shop, or really anything selling a commodity, is particularly ill suited to groupon type sales whereas a climbing gym, or really any business with probably a monopoly in a geographic area, is particularly well suited.
Yeah I think this point has a parallel in #6 referring to placing important content on the left of a web page...

"...for sites that are traditionally read from left to right, placing important design components at the left is a good idea; vice versa for sites whose language is read from right to left."
> fghjhgbvf

I rest my case ;)

Good advice otherwise though, another one is make sure that the people in the major markets can pronounce the word in an unambiguous way.
a good place to start is putting the url in your hacker news post. :-)
I use groupon and similar services (LivingSocial, some more local sites) constantly. It is a GREAT way to both save money and to discover new things. I feel like the author is being a little overly harsh on Groupon when:
A) He admit's he should have done the back-of-envelope math to determine it could be difficult to get the dentist appointment.
B) He had no issue getting a refund.

I know we are a society of convenience, but are we really at the point of boycotting and writing rants to influence other's to follow simply for being slightly inconvenienced with no direct financial loss?
Apple disabled mucking around with the acceleration curves if I recall correctly. The only thing that they do that is different than the normal mouse prefs is allow you to change the speed of the mouse to a super fast rate which minimizes the effect of the acceleration curve. Try slowing the mouse pointer speed down and see if it is normal.
What I learned in food service is that a general formula is 30% food cost, 30% labor, 30% overhead, 10% profit. If things are running well, you take home some money at the end of the day. The margin for error isn't huge.
Groupon has recently started serving different coupons to different people (in the same location) based on variables and preferences- so, in theory, this should cut down on future issues like this.
Automating your firewall with Django and Fabric
I don't think this wearable computers in the chest plate are very new, I read about them a few years ago.

I'd be surprised if any of this kit was current gen as the military are unlikely to divulge the current technologies being used by special forces on the ground right now.
i have a startup that can send emails back in time to any year of your choice (well, SMTP/POP has to exist in that particular era, but otherwise...)

patrick, check your inbox back in 2006, you have a message waiting
Why node.js?

If you care that much about implementation, you should consider it an opportunity to write some code.
Information Architects – Can Experience be Designed?
Go tech meetups, bone up on your foosball.

If you've been coding on your own time you should've already known a few people from the SF BayArea by now via collabs/side-projects.

Unless by tech nerd you mean someone who can't/doesn't code.
While there is a straightforward way to implement Back and History, the point is that traditional web dev technologies give it to you for free, so it's one more thing to think about.

Compile time definitely gets better if you reduce the number of targets, but it still totally dominates most people's build times.

Not needing to recompile in dev mode is definitely a big win.
The distribution zip actually just contains binary pure64.sys file and sources for their example kernels. The sources for Pure64 are not included. Also, no information on licensing is included.
"Money doesn’t motivates us to help each other with R"

This might be the case. However, If you aren't paying someone for development, they will most likely only be able to work on your project after the bills are paid (and if they are married/have kids, this means they will have even less time to work on it).
Actually Diaspora hasn't spent any of their money with us, (us = Pivotal,) we're just giving them space to work in, and occasional advice when they ask for it. It's been fun to have them around, and we're glad they're open-sourcing and getting feedback like this.
You might need luck if you assume that the industry is standing still and chips and batteries aren't getting cheaper and more powerful...

Sub-$100 Android devices that "run fast" are inevitable. The only question is how soon.
You know I'm getting sick of the downvoting to the depths of hell any post that crosses the group-think party line of this place. I don't think that it is okay that a CEO of a commercial site is cross-posting here to boost traffic to his website. So what if you've used their services in your personal life and found them useful? How does change anything? My expectation of a site like HackeNews and SlashDot or anywhere like this is that the posts are posted by ordinary users because they find them interesting. If you get upvoted for liking posts that are a) crud and b) probably only used to drive traffic to a commerical website and I get downvoted because of the same then this is a place I don't want to be. Personally I do mind.
Yes, you need to negotiate opportunities. But an opportunity is where you see value that is not visible to others. If that value is large, then it will pay off in spades even when other people think you're being crazy.
While what is covered is very well presented, post doesn't mention `shopt -s histappend`, which is one of the most important things to note when dealing with history in bash.

Also useful: you can append :s/foo/bar to bang commands to substitute once, :gs/foo/bar to substitute globally. `man bash` History Expansion section has the other options under subheading 'Modifiers'.

I highly recommend the following resource -- it's what really got me saving keystrokes:

http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/
I'm not. I didn't.
I tried to be fair in pointing out that Groupon issued a no-hassle refund. It was one of the easier refunds I've ever received.

With respect to my own calculations, it's asking a lot (or at least asking something new) of the user to vet the likelihood of actually receiving the service. Again, I tried to be fair in saying that it will take time for both vendors and consumers to flesh out the best way to interact with Groupon.
I made all these mistakes as well, but continue to soldier on with my original name. Google has grudgingly accepted it and the mis-directed traffic is quite minimal now.

One thing the author didn't mention was that when you're getting a lot of mispell traffic, it plays havoc with your traffic stats, and it gets very hard to move the needle testing different content because you might have 60-70% of your traffic in the early days boucing immediately.
I think the point here is being minimalism, and being a starting point to build on those features you mention.
In my opinion no they haven't.
Why so slow?
What Patrick is suggesting is the proactive diversion of the PHB's attention to such issues.
I wonder how much the sites they used biased the results. Google's search results are very F-shaped, for example, and so is any left-to-right language text that is divided into paragraphs with headings. Does the "use an F-shaped pattern" recomendation actually boil down to "display text the way ypu normally would in your language"? If so, that's not nearly as interesting.
More up to date information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
I used Linux for years without knowing about the bash history file (though I knew about hitting the up arrow). As soon as I discovered this file, I looked up how to set it to save all my history forever without rollover - what a good resource it would be to have all the commands I've ever used!

Anyone know of a utility for saving annotations about the bash history lines? (Date, comments, current directory, etc.?)
Nokia's product line up in 1936:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/puijo/4997269178/
That may be, but that does not address my complaint.
Don't know if you'll read this but we will be setting the lower limit to three characters and we may raise the upper limit as well.
Interesting. It jumps out at me as low-KATE-lee, growing up speaking California English. (If by caps you're indicating putting the emphasis on that syllable.)
We are indeed all about being pragmatic. I think a lot of our pragmatism has rubbed off on the Diaspora folks, but do keep in mind that we're not really advising them in any formal capacity. (Other than the occasional conversation over breakfast, or when they ask about ideas.) I'm sure if you asked them about their choices, they'd be very happy to take in new ideas. Not to speak for them, but I think they're just trying to get a concept out and iterate on it. I think Ship it Squirrel would approve.
Everytime I see such pictures, it reminds me of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" video which reminds me of how tiny we really are.
Minor nitpick - how is Groupon at all similar to Woot?
IE9 - evolving the blue 'e' logo
Inspired Rookies: The Most Popular and Ever Useful Web Designing Tools
This is the fist post in a new Inspired Mag series dedicated to design newbies / beginners / rookies etc – designers with less than 20 different pieces in their portfolio and (almost) no followers on Dribble.
that could help a lot. that was my own personal beef with them as a potential user. i don't want to get a totally random "deal" each day, solely based on my location, that has nothing to do with what I'm actually interested in in buying/using. hair salons? no. tires? no. now something related to games or books or a restaurant, sure.
Yes but if 1/10 of the people come and stay, and you get 10 people coming, you retain one.

If you get 30,000, you retain 3000, which could potentially be the 3000 that you need to gain traction and start gaining new users organically.
I am tired of answering questions you can't be bothered answering yourself. It wouldn't bother me so much if you hadn't already formed such strong opinions already. If you're not interested in learning the language, then just be quiet. It's not useful to spread misinformation about something you don't understand.
An American government attempt to help Iranian dissidents backfires
Why not have an IE6 compatibility mode? Central IT could maintain a list of domains that require the mode to be switched on.
Analysis of Stuxnet malware (and implication of Cyber Warfare)
Surely it would be easier to hack around the forced updates than to turn Webkit into Trident.
>Today one of our most loyal customers, Lucinda, came in and asked if she could use her Groupon that had expired the day before. I felt terrible, but I had to say no...this experience made her never want to come back.

So not only did she kindof make one of her customers unhappy, she actually made her unhappy to the point of never wanting to come back again?

This is terrible, terrible business practice.
Its never happened to me before, but I've seen it happen.

It isn't about loyalty, its about trust. Once you've quit and then flip-flopped once, the boss can't really trust you not to do it again and again. The boss wants stability.
If you're doing something enterprise-y (which it sounds like you are) then you should take a look at the article, "Sean Murphy on the first dozen enterprise customers" that was recently posted to HN here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671852

It goes through the process of getting your first customers in detail. It jives with my personnel experience and some others I see on this thread.

Key point: Go through your network and find a way to get introductions to folks in your target market. Be creative on this. Once you've got an introduction leverage it to get more e.g. "Do know other folks that you think would be interested in a solution like this? Could you provide their contact info?" etc. Repeat.
There's a bug in the interface code for non-Chrome browsers. In Chrome, the tab key works, and the text area auto-indents. It's a small comfort but it makes a world of difference for me.

There have been language changes as recently as this week. Go moves fast (although it's unusual for existing code to break).
Why We Shut Newstilt Down
For many businesses, betting that people will spend a percentage above their discount is a reasonably safe bet. For a coffee shop though, I can't remember the last time I spent more than 20 dollars for a couple cups of coffee and a sandwich over an evening hacking in the corner. For this shop to bet that most people would spend 20+ dollars with 13 of that being the 6 they spent on groupon is insane. If your average sales are $50 or more, than this particular deal might have been viable, but it seemed that many were walking out the door having spent only 6 to groupon for their entire purchase.

I feel for the business, however. I've had to turn down customers that I know aren't going to be repeats, and it is difficult. But at the same time, I would never ever agree to a 75% reduction to my sales. My repetition period for returning customers about 4 years due to the nature of my business, so maybe I don't have the market for that kind of thing though.
The business model is to offer one deal per day, getting eyeballs on the deal via a massive opt-in mailing list.

They're only really different in that Woot is for tangible goods and Groupon is for local services.
This is a pretty common misconception among geeks. Let's say we have two sides to a business: a blog and something which isn't a blog. If there is a competent SEO in the room, links to the blog (or other linkbait) benefit the non-blog part of the business, too.

Starbucks loves getting in the New York Times for being socially conscious latte liberals who are in favor of small furry creatures, artisan coffee farmers, and other South American mammals. Is there anywhere on the page to buy coffee? No. Does it sell coffee? Yes. SEO is like that, except many orders of magnitude more efficient.
You can't upgrade frequently if you don't have any tests. Disclosure: I wrote a web testing tool.
The Great Internet Freedom Fraud
It's interesting how difficult "location" is as well. Most groupon offers here are spread out all over metro Denver. I live in Central Denver, and rarely visit the rest of the metro. That disqualifies a lot of offers for me.
Minor nit-pick. Groupon doesn't make money on the float. They give the money to the retailer pretty quick.

My understanding is the the retailer gets paid even when the groupon isn't redeemed. One would think the retailer would make up some money on the non-redeemed groupons, but groupon claims a higher than 90% redemption rate.

Other than that I completely agree about service businesses. I saw a local bike shop sell over 1000 tuneups for $7 each. Meaning the bike shop received $3.50 for a tuneup, and their techs would be booked solid for a long time preventing them from being able to perform as many higher profit services.
AMD64 also included a lot more registers, and has some extensions to the instruction set. It also makes a baseline for other features like SSE, as all CPU:s supporting AMD64 are relatively modern. Also having larger address space to work with may affect some design decisions.

So while you can write 64-bit code just like 32-bit code, it's bit like saying that writing c++ is no different than writing c.
Uh, is there some kind of calculated Groupon smear campaign going on right now? This is the third Groupon negative story to hit the frontpage of HN in the last 4 hours...
Actually, since they are US-based iPhone developers, they did, but that's not even the issue. Users of the app would be breaking the TOS.

I don't know about you, but as a consumer I don't like it when companies insert BS clauses they have no intention of enforcing (or worse, selectively enforcing) in their TOS. Not that anyone here needs more convincing that AT&T sucks...
I know nothing about their ability to intro startups to investors, but Orrick as a firm is first-rate.
For the sake of the millions (billions?) of annual man-hours spent supporting every crappy browser in nearly every crappy external web application? Probably. I'd be willing to bet (a lot) that the hours spent working around the not-recent versions of IE are many many many times larger than the amount of time needed to fix every site that relies on a not-recent version of IE.

Enforcing updates would also likely improve IE's market share, as all those not-recent versions are part of the cause of developers migrating towards Firefox / WebKit browsers. How much has this hurt Microsoft? Enough to make it worth losing the stragglers who aren't paying to update anyway?

edit: of course, there's a solution to all this: the ability to specify the particular version of a browser you're targeting, if it matters. Then at least a warning can be thrown, and if multiple renderers are included, they can be used selectively.
Register for do-not-call list. Cell phone numbers go public this month
Do you use any web service like Gmail or Google.com? They "force" changes on users all the time. That's the beauty of web development.
I think it is best to pay for ads and figure out the conversion rate before using free traffic sources. That way you get a worst case cost of acquisition and you know how much it costs to buy a new customer. Then use free traffic sources to get cheaper traffic without influencing your conversion rates stats.

Paying some money is still boostrapping. I just spent $60 this week trying to validate two new ideas that are not funded.
The words-read-per-page graph is presented as a curve; looks to me more like folks read up to 200 words, then start dropping out. The initial plunge is linear in other words, equal to the number of words on the page (when there are less than 200).
Thanks - I put in an edit on the blog post.
I think the obvious answer to this is a pre-built, deployable VM, something that you can fire up with an EC2 instance. Thus you don't need traditional hosting, and can get going straight away.
One of the biggest mobile phone retailers in the UK is called "Carphone Warehouse" - people don't think twice about the name. People treat the name as a brand rather than a literal interpretation of the words that make up the brand.
I guess I misunderstood your original post. It sounded like you didn't know who the poster was, and I looked it up for you and shared some context of my experiences with them.

Personally, I do think it's ok that a CEO is posting here, even if it is for financial gain. I feel like this site is like a tech-news link aggregator with a business spin. Having a CEO of any company is (I think) of value to the community since they can share their experiences in starting a company (it looks like Glenn Kelman was a co-founder of Plumtree as well).

In any case, if you disagree with the article (i.e., you think it's crud), then say why. Let's have the discussion. Complaining about it isn't going to get you upvotes, if that's your thing.

Take it easy. No harm, no foul.
Samsung Announces Android-powered Tablet
The link would be there regardless of whether or not you (as an advertiser) ran an affiliate program.
My post was from February. I saw the other two posts at the top of HN and figured today had a receptive crowd for groupon-unfriendly posts :)
I use semantici.st for my email and blog, and it's a real chore. The ccTLDs used in domain hacks are frequently expensive at renewal time and reading your domain out to people verbally is a huge pain.

If I was starting over, I'd pick something else.
Appropriate for exported APIs; maybe not for internal objects used once by your own code.
I had the same thought actually. I think what might be more interesting, or at least as interesting, is the flow of how the user looked at the page. What did they look at first, second, etc.

The fact that the bottom right corner is barely ever looked at directly is hardly surprising, but seeing how the user processes the page could be interesting, especially with some layouts that are more visual than than search results.
So... the cafe was stupid, and nearly destroyed themselves because of it.

Capitalism / evolution says they had it coming. Yes, Groupon certainly took the assholish route, but taking advantage of stupidity is within their rights, and even within expected behavior in a marketplace.

FYI for future sales through any intermediary: know your terms. If they charge $X, and you want to sell something for $X, don't do it because you'll be left with $0 (unless that's what you want). If you might not be able to handle above a certain volume of takers, restrict the number of sales.
I think the coffee owner let her business down by not running some projections through excel. "What is the financial state of the business if 100, 200, 500, 1000 groupons sell"

But I'm surprised that Groupon wants to take 100% of the payment if less than $10, with no way for the local business to set an upper-cap.

A good parasite doesn't destroy it's host, a bad parasite does. To expect a small business to sell $13 worth of retail-priced product for $0 seems like a bad parasite to me.

Also this from the blog posts comments is quite a gem:

"what could I expect from the only establishment in Portland without a drive through window that is using crisco and kraft “mayonnaise” while claiming to be kid friendly."

OOH SNAP!
Dan Rosen dishes dirt on Delve: Founder disputes angel's take
We got our first paying customer by giving a presentation (using mockups) of the product and how it would fit their needs, and why it was better than the solution they were planning on implementing. We convinced them to try our product by offering a discounted rate, compared to what we planned on charging companies later. This first sale basically funded development and we used them as a 'beta' client. Now they are our biggest cheerleader!
Yahoo unveils three-year plan to become cool again
Concur about Orrick's being first rate - also, its Silicon Valley lineage was much strengthened when it merged with Venture Law Group in 2003, VLG having itself been a Craig Johnson-led spin-off from WSGR a decade before that.