skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know the license on this?
if you are looking for more detail, definitely read the entire case study (link also in post): http://blog.yipit.com/2011/06/03/groupon-s-1-reveals-busines...

reader beware: the case study is a pain to read
In case anyone didn't notice, this blog post is by DHH.
Why 2011 Is Different Than 1999
Have you considered adding video profiles of applicants? There is a startup that Paul Graham interviewed that does exactly that. But I like your overall presentation more. Good luck!
This article is full of handwaving.

1) Lot's of businesses run in the red for awhile in order to build up their market share. Just pointing to losses in the first few years of major operations isn't particularly compelling.

2) The adjusted CSOI metric isn't as ridiculous as the author makes it seem. The claim is that their marketing expense is a function of how fast they want to grow. Presumably once they reach a size they want, they scale back that expense, and the revenues turn into profit. The Forbes article says: "The bottom line is that considering the profitability of Groupon without online marketing expenses is silly; Groupon without marketing expenses is not Groupon at all." How is Groupon without marketing not Groupon at all? It's an interesting-sounding statement without any meaning.
I did not say that Windows was written in .NET. The parent comment was "essentially .NET for many purposes." Among those purposes would be development of applications and system automation.
I think the bigger issue here is how Microsoft is handling the dissemination of coming changes. Why on earth say nothing except 'please wait until september'. Between now and September I could learn object-c and move to another platform. Just a really unwise approach. At the minimum they should be saying, '...your investment in the Microsoft stack will not be lost, C#, F# and VisualStudio are important technologies that we are committed too...'.

So here we are left to speculate as to what happens next. I can't believe they would simply toss all the technology out - what's the alternative for true native apps, pure C++?

As far as the HTML5/Javascript thing goes - hell yeah, I switched to using html(4/5)/javascript and css(2/3) for my front-end code over a year ago. I think this is actually a pretty shrewd move and likely will be more a focus for the tablet and phone developer side allowing easier porting across all the emerging platforms. The fact that I may be able to use that same tech for Windows desktop apps is nice bonus, but like we all saw on iOS - nothing beats native for the best client experience, at least for now.
Thanks. We would love to get some feedback from you on how it is going.
Usually there is a 6 month waiting period after IPO.
Considering how violent is the repression there, going on the streets would just make the protesters even easier targets.

Things are not looking good...
Wonder how they plan on enforcing that one.
Probably not just you.

I changed it, hopefully now it's less headache inducing. :)
Insanely cool. Reminds me of a much less ambitious forth-in-postscript implementation I wrote a while back: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps

I went with constructing a VM in PostScript and compiling subroutine-threaded code rather than using indirect-threaded code and an inner interpreter like ZmForth.
Flipboard Lands Time Inc. Digital Leader Quittner as Editorial Director
I generally think MG Siegler is one of the better TechCrunch writers but this article is exactly why the site has developed the reputation it has. Pure sensationalism based on a weak understanding of both the facts and the history of the computing industry.

The truth is there is not a Magic Trackpad for the PC. Trackpads on the PC tend to suck. Microsoft is pushing touchscreens and touchscreens on PCs do create ergonomic problems (In tests people's shoulders literally ache after a day of use)

Beyond that while the iPad is fantastic it works because the interface is designed around touch. Meaning everything has to be a lot bigger (since a mouse can click on a single pixel while a finger is far less precise). That leaves less screen space (which is why you have to pinch and zoom a lot when you use the iPad on the web). That's fine for the limited scenarios but not practical if you're doing serious computing work like a balance sheet in Excel.

Finally anyone who has watched the technology industry for any length of time knows inferior solutions win out if all parties don't agree on the way forward. Or in other words if Apple backs the Magic Trackpad and Microsoft backs the touchscreen then the Mouse will likely stick around because it's the common denominator. At least based on how history has unfolded in the past.
The IPO makes investors very, very, very rich. The Groupon executives have built something that is going to make the investors and the bankers very, very, very rich. Why shouldn't they be rewarded for creating all this value?

I am not being sarcastic. That's how business works: If I can make you a lot of money, you need to share some of that with me, or I'll go make someone else a lot of money.

The Groupon deal is a business built to flip to the public. The structure benefits the insiders, but it benefits the VCs who cashed them out invested in the last round even more, and it will benefit the bankers. And that's why they can get away with getting rich right away: Because they're making a lot of other people rich.
Thanks for your feedback!

The iPhone Meetup is on the list for the next Bay area visit.
The Thank You Economy. I have a few extra ones, let me know if you'd like one for free.
Why do they need to go public? Are they hoping that more ad buying power is going to provide them economies of scale? Graphic designers aren't that expensive to employ are they?
So Groupon is a massive affiliate network scheme built using humans, software and hype.

The lesson for nearly everyone here on HN, is that this market is huge! I'm signing up for Groupon, Living Social, and others, and I plan to just sit back and absorb the marketplace for a couple of months and brainstorm about how to get a piece of the pie!
Weather in your Inbox
Local Search Ranking Factors: Are Up for 2011
Labels do not want a next big thing.

Labels want two things: that their current business model keeps working, and that a new physical format completely incompatible with old ones comes along so users have to buy their whole collection again, as happened with DVDs.

From this, you may think majors are retarded.

They are.
1) Read down to the bit about Amazon.
You Now Can't Say "Facebook" Or "Twitter" On French TV
While their growth has been absolutely staggering, part of me thinks they could have done it in a much more effecient way. Do they really need this many salespeople? Do they really need 925 writers for the site? A reduction in headcount should be coming and is necessary.
Isn't iTunes the largest retail music outlet (more music sales than Walmart)?
Thanks, great find. A lot of really inspiring advice on ignoring conventional wisdom, getting around gatekeepers, and being persistent in one's target.
I'd be interested in hearing Jason Fried's take on this. Isn't he an advisor for Groupon?
> "the argument that ARM support requires a move from .Net really doesn't hold water."

I would draw a thick, dark line between managed .Net and "legacy". When people talk about legacy Windows code, they're talking about those massive enterprise apps running front ends written in VB6/MFC-era code. Those are the ones that Microsoft has to push to the curb in Win8 [1].

That said, any number of .Net tricks to enable legacy behaviors will likely pose roadblocks for particular apps. So some .Net incompatibility will be at issue as well.

> "but based on this exactly what should the authors commit their investment to"

I'd imagine the question Microsoft is grappling with, is which versions and parts of .Net they can reasonably support. Though I'd be surprised if anything they recommended in the last five or so years that wasn't supported.

That said, anyone designing an enterprise replacement in the last five years, who did so as anything other than a web app is likely out of their gourd [2].

[1] i.e. live on in an XP-mode style ghetto only on Win8x86

[2] Sure, some of have some steep client requirements that rule out web apps. But that's a tiny minority amongst enterprise apps. The overwhelming majority are workflow/database interfaces.
And moreover, who is allowing these stupid patents through that are so vague and apply to so many different sites?

The USPTO has fixed resources, and the number of patent applications has been growing exponentially for years. Also, if they grant a patent the person filing goes away, but if they deny it the filer will just come back with amendments or appeals again and again and again.

If we gave the USPTO more money or, heck, even let it keep all the money it collected in fees the problem wouldn't be nearly as bad.
Stumpedia – Search For the People By The People
Take a look at this too http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/heatmapjs/
Having own mailing lists in the past, I can say this is most likely true. Think about it - most deals Groupon sends are not of interest to you. Because of that, you're gonna ignore more and more of their emails, and eventually you're gonna stop opening those emails. The open rate of a Groupon email will just keep decreasing, and as such as the value of a subscriber base is gonna deteriorate.
We are looking into an import function. Currently you can use the Ruby Gem to import data with a small script. This is not perfect but should help in the meantime.

You can also directly use the RESTful API from your server, query content and serve websites in HTML.
Frankly if this doesn't get cleared up soon, for me the answer would be 'anything but Microsoft's stack' - it's just too unpredictable.

Don't get carried away. MS has been very clear that you can run any Windows app here. If you're porting over old VB6 apps it seems clear that porting to VB.NET makes the most sense. .NET development isn't going away as at the very least MS's web server-side story is still all .NET.
This is a market strategy. Microsoft knows desktop apps, WPF, Silverlight are losing the battle against HTML5/CSS/JS based apps, the most obvious movement Microsoft could have done is create a 2 minute video of their next OS and say "hey Web Developers, you can use your web skills here too".

Also, this video says nothing about the architecture behind this "Launcher"(because that what it looks like), there are a lot of possibilities. May be IE10 has some kind of <protected-frame> element so you can specify certain permissions like network access, file system access and stuff, maybe it requires a manifest in which you can specify what "DOM manipulation technology" do you want to use, the most obvious options are:

- A Javascript (IE9 code-name "Chakra" engine) based file.
- A JScript.NET file.
- Any DLR based language file.
- Any .NET assembly decorated with some fashion attributes like <Windows8Launcher.TileDomBehindAttribute(typeof(MyTileHandler))> or something which you can easily compile with any .NET compiler like C#, VB.NET, C++ CLI, etc.

May be developing in HTML is completely optional and each Tile can be developed using Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation technologies... we don't know.

We know that Microsoft is a legacy company, they will not abandon .NET anytime soon.
If we take the principles from compressed sensing and use a random-lens approach to subsampling the original image, we can create a fingerprint of the image which also happens to be able to reconstruct the original.

Both techniques are compressions that rely on the sparse properties of images to devine which bits are meaningful and which are redundant. It appears to me that using compressed sensing is just a smarter way of doing it. Maybe a hash that starts with a random subsample is inherently slower for comparing millions of images, but I shouldn't think so.
> Maybe they should...

"they"? The space monsters who run the universe?
If Sequoia is backing grilled cheese, is it time to found a food startup?
It would be kind of messy ... there's a lot of valuable IP like EA's stuff, Angry Birds etc and there's a lot of games that are available in other formats - Android, Flash, downloadable.

Apple's terms would inevitably do more than merely "protect" you.
IPad Newspaper Pricing
I like the current logo much more.
Qt pretty printers for GDB
I suppose they also consider it a breach of human rights to disconnect users for harassing other users, spamming, DoSing, breaking into the ISP's own network, wire fraud, and so on. All is as much "free speech" and as equally illegal as warezing.
17-year old Chinese student sells kidney to get an iPad 2. Sounds reasonable.
Unfortunately, the lack of posted license means nobody is permitted to use it without getting explicit permission. I really doubt that was the intent of the author, though.
Nope.. $100k (US).
it seems that his point with CSOI is that despite all the money they've spent, they don't have much customer or user loyalty and at least on some level, their revenue is linked to their marketing expenses. scaling back marketing expense = scaling back revenues.
Great work. There's so much space available helping companies managing their incoming data. This is a great start.

Though I haven't been through a hiring process in awhile, I'm surprised though that this doesn't have some kind of referral bonus/source tracking feature built into it. Seems like it'd be novel and useful.
I'm confused at why the summary of a detailed case study gets upvoted. I think pg needs to adjust voting again.
Video profiles are a fast way to discrimination lawsuits.
Windows developers have a bad reputation for being fixated on one or two programming languages and tools at the expense of learning other platforms. Can't say I would feel sorry for them if any of this were to be true.

This is an unfortunate, and valid criticism. I've worked with senior C# and VB developers who hadn't encountered the concept of an (OO) interface, but they got along just fine with their day-to-day jobs, copy-pasting. However, I do feel sympathy for them - they were so insulated from the wider programming and CS communities, that they didn't even realize there were other things happening in the wider dev world. Their fault was one of ignorance, not arrogance (and of believing everything Microsoft told them at the developer events they attended).
Why am I not suprised. I know you're not supposed to judge patents just by their title but this one is about as broad as it gets. There should be a penalty for making broad claims like that. And anyone should be able to challenge a patent by providing the prior art to the USPTO and have it review within a short (6 months max) period of time. For a fee of about 10 bucks ;p No courts needed here.
That's interesting given that Jason Fried (his partner at 37signals) was a board member of Groupon and is now an advisor to the company.
Since it is down, this is probably useful:

https://github.com/plivo/plivo
A fixed number of people with a limit on what they can demand? Where do you get this from? Either way, it is still different in the sense that in Russia you'll get threatened with guns and not lawsuits.
I'll email him and see if he'll add a license.

EDIT: Waiting on a response.
Does UML still exist?
Groupon is eventually going to have to end up creating a self serve product for business' and send out a daily digest to subscribers of the relevant deals in the area
That's a great idea and a lot of people are going to do exactly that. However, think about this: It's a bubble, it will pop, but we don't know when it will pop.

Imagine you want to invest a million dollars and sell when you have doubled your investment. The sooner and cheaper you can buy the stock, the greater your chance to double your million dollars. The longer you wait, the higher the chance that you will be one of the suckers whose investment makes other people rich.

The safest strategy is to buy at the offering price and sell as soon as the stock reaches your target for selling (double in our example). You pay the least and get out the soonest, before the collapse. With every passing minute, the price of the stock rises but the probability of the bubble popping before it reaches your target also rises.

So how do you buy at the offering price? By having a cosy relationship with the investment bank leading the issue, that's how. Do you have a cosy relationship with the investment bank leading the issue? If not, you are playing a game rigged to make other people rich at your expense.

Of course, if you like the fundamentals and plan to buy and hold, that's a different matter. But if you're playing the speculation game, you ought to know that the casino is rigged and that you are not in the business, you are the business.
They need money. And the investors would like to cash out before the company runs out of money.
Video of the lift-off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmGmymAWI4E
Windows Media Center is written in .NET.
Does anybody have a capture of the liftoff for those of us that missed it? :(
The problem, like with all bad code examples, is that people copy and paste it without thinking and don't look back if it runs, so here we are in 2011 with SQLi holes in literally every other website.

Either write a complete, secure example or don't write an example at all. Like a colleague of mine said, putting incomplete code samples on the Internet is like handing out loaded Glocks to children; expect feet and heads to be blown off. I wouldn't even write a toy example with mysql_query anymore because the number of footnotes required (that people would ignore) would fill a page.
You're partially right. But I'd draw your attention to this part of the article...

"Underlying the discussion is that developers have clients, and clients want applications that run on a platform with a future. Currently, Microsoft is promoting HTML and JavaScript as the future for Windows applications, putting every client-side .NET developer at a disadvantage in those pitches."

Remember most MS developers work in corporate environments. Either in companies or as consultants. No one wants to spend money to build a "legacy" app. So when Microsoft says HTML5 apps are the future but doesn't lay out how their APIs are going to work it freezes many .NET developers in their tracks. Because now Silverlight and WPF are legacy but you don't know how to pitch these new Windows 8 apps to a client because Microsoft hasn't specified how they'll work.
What communication tools work well for Startup Weekend?
>Do anything to get rid of thousands of cold calling sales people.

If I remember correctly, it sees its sales force as a competitive advantage.
Well, you know, I do not live in Russia, so perhaps you can correct me. But here in North America, the kind of people who threaten people with guns for protection have territories and do not take kindly to random people threatening their "customers." So there is a limit of sorts on how many people with guns you have to deal with.
I enhanced Sunng's googlemap page by adding google map event and event listener.
Here you can see the live demo.
http://nihuajie.com/heatmap/googlemap.html
I agree. I'd like to know what can't be done in HTML that can be done in WPF. WPF is a lot nicer, but HTML is usable. JS, feels like a huge departure from C#. I think ppl use the .NET stack because they like things like static typing, generics, the BCL, etc... Even something like a halfway decent editor for JS seems to be missing.
I continue to not understand how people imagine these services working (de-dupe, block level updates, etc) without access to the unsecured version of the data. As for the claims about what Amazon could do to your data... there's even less sinister options. S3 is not 100% safe storage. There's a chance for bit rot and that may occur. If you don't check the file yourself, you won't know. Again, that seems a bit inevitable, no?

edit: left out a 'not'
Do you really have Levi in India signed up? If so that's awesome and congrats, and you should make that more prominent.
I believe Ericsson can be used internationally for everything Twilio does in the states. They're a bit more corporate than Twilio, and their website is hard to navigate, but once you get in contact with them they're more helpful.

They are not able to provide long codes (10 digit phone numbers) for messaging in the States, but they can use long codes for messaging internationally.

In the states you're limited to Short Codes, but they do offer MMS support, which one-ups Twilio. I believe they also have a higher send rate, but I don't remember the specifics. Ericsson also has mobile payment support (charged to the carrier), where Twilio does not.

My research was specifically for messaging, but there is voice functionality as well.

Overall, Twilio is a lot more developer friendly. I think I waited something like two weeks for a callback from Ericsson, which would never happen with Twilio. But if you really need international phone numbers and advanced features, take a look into Ericsson.

I use Twilio now, but I don't use Ericsson yet. Chances are my product will end up using a combination of both, but the nature of every product is different so do what's best for you. Twilio can text/call internationally, but not with local numbers, which I believe makes the cost quite high on yourself and your users. Apparently there are also other solutions I haven't looked into yet (see other comments).

http://www.ericsson.com
There's a sucker born every minute. Jungle Disk claims to be secure, and most people believe them -- most people have no way to assess whether they're doing things right or not.
From Managing $96 Million Budget To Improving Social Travel
Exactly. All the media hogwash about 'brain drain' flowing back to India....nobody smart enough is going to go live India to start a startup. It's like trying to fight your schizophrenia while living in a bomb shelter in a war zone. At best these entrepreneurs are going back briefly to setup offshore office in India before hightailing out of there. And from personal experience, offshore teams aren't that great...the smart ones left India already.
Show HN: Seinfeld Calendar webapp.
http://sein-cal.co.cc/

This is our first web application. It is a no-frills implementation of the Seinfeld Calendar, and aids in improving productivity by helping form habits.

We (two of us) started with it 5 days ago. With a bit of Python background, we decided to go at it with Django. The process was in itself a learning experience with remote collaboration, learning and using git to manage the code, and using App Engine with Django. All for the first time.

Feedback welcome.
Went from Quadro 2 to ATI FireGL and the UI performance doubled. That is about it.
p.s. Conjecture: if the VCs had to wait for years to cash out, Groupon would be a very different company with much stronger fundamentals and less emphasis on flashy growth.
>> "how often do insiders get their stakes cashed out"

While this used to be the exception, it is starting to become the norm. The technical term is "secondary".

Fred Wilson has been doing a great job chronicling the rise of these transactions for almost 2 years. (He calls them "DST-style" investments.)

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/some-thoughts-on-public-and-...

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/a-second-market-is-emerging....

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/angel-liquidity.html

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/founder-liquidity.html
But, this is just a letter.

And in that sense, Kooltol has trolled TC. who in turn has trolled us.
Link - http://sein-cal.co.cc/
It's not a comparison so much as it is a frame of reference.
Hopefully Sunny
Oprah Who-Memphis’ Elvis Gave Away A Car Or Two - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmGmymAWI4E