skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others have noted, it's become much more common. Partly because IPOs have become so uncommon, and the majority of large investments are private equity rather than public offerings. If they have no hope of a near-term IPO (because there was no IPO market for a while), founders can get frustrated locking up their time, effort, money, etc. into a company and start looking for acquisitions. If the investors don't want to see an early acquisition, and want the company to keep growing, the founders and investors may agree on an exit, or partial cash-out, for the founders that allows the company to keep growing.

It's not much different from the IPOs during the dotcom bubble: It makes the founders rich, and possibly pays off early investors, and transfers more ownership to the buyer (in the IPO case, the public is the buyer, in the private equity case, it is a VC or investment bank or conglomerate of the former).

In this case, it confirms for me that Groupon was built to flip. If it accidentally becomes a profitable company that lasts, I'll probably be as surprised as the founders (who, as you note, have already mostly cashed out; sure, they'll make more from the IPO, because I'm sure they still have some stock, but they locked in winnings already, and are mostly gambling with other peoples money from now on).
We are using Jobvite for this which is way too expensive and a total pain in the ass.

If you are a rails app please make it so that the job page can be edited with Liquid. Also provide an API so that we could migrate.
Tweetmarks: Service for syncing last read tweet between multiple Twitter clients
It's intended to be a portmanteau of Group + Coupon, pronounced \ˈgrüˌpän

I've had an affinity for portmanteaus ever since I was 10, when I saw "portmanteau" in Through the Looking Glass and thought Lewis Carrol was talking about me. So I tend to be irrationally defensive of them.
Apple actually treads carefully with the jailbreak thing. It's cat and mouse security and patching games, not suing people, and since the government ruling that allows jailbreaking (for now), they haven't even said they are fighting jailbreakers (which they used to, at least for PR purposes to please developers).
Google’s Button is Slow And so is Facebook’s
I'm using it for my sideprojects. Heroku has an addon for mongohq. If it goes down, no biggie, it's just a side project.
I just missed it. Is there a replay posted someplace? The linked page is just to the live stream.

aside: why don't any of the "live" video companies offer complete rewind/replay? Why can't I go to the page linked in the OP and watch the whole thing, even though it is no longer "live"?
The real fix is to change patent law so that it's not broken. The USPTO is now trying to solve the wrong problem.
Decoupling components
Its greater fool investing. The last round probably had a lot of "We're going to IPO in a year" which means that last round is expecting to get their payday on an IPO and, frankly, future company performance be damned.

I'm not as skeptical as some on Groupon's future I think they still have a vast amount of room to grow. But this lack of a focus on fundamentals is how bubbles get made.
That Warren Buffet quote doesn't mean you should buy a company that everyone hates. Buffet meant to go after "un-sexy" businesses (like railroads and insurance) and forgo "hot" fields (like technology or media).

The negativity surrounding Groupon isn't that they're boring; the negativity is that they're over-hyped.
They're trading that temporary debt for hypergrowth, as the article says.

"For the remainder of the year they had $669 million in revenue (simply staggering), but had a net loss attributable to Groupon of $398 million. This year, Q1 results showed revenue growth continuing to soar, with revenues of $644 million, but a net loss attributable to Groupon of $102 million."

So the time periods were different, but the revenues were the same. They went from losing $400mil to only losing $100mil... That sounds to me like they are getting close to being profitable again... And in a very short timeframe.

As for it being like a Ponzi scheme, it's not. Ponzi relied on lying to the investors and telling them the money came from good investments. It wasn't sustainable, and nothing could fix it. Groupon is sustainable and hasn't lied (that I know of) to their investors, new or old. It doesn't even need fixing as it looks like it's already on the fast-track to profit, based on the numbers provided.
From Paul Newman to Paul Graham: part 2 of my TechCrunch interview w CDixon
If you're looking for more options, there's a LOT out there. Think of all the automated voice systems you interact with on a regular basis.

In the open source world, you could install Asterisk yourself and use something like Adhearsion to develop your apps. Adhearsion is an open source framework for building Asterisk applications in Ruby. http://adhearsion.com/

Whistle from the 2600hz project could be of interest, too. http://www.2600hz.org/whistle/

To build telephony applications in Java, you can use SIP servlets, a Java standard (look up JSR 289 and JSR 309). Because the Java standard is extremely low-level, we open sourced the framework we use for building Java speech applications. See Moho at http://labs.voxeo.com/moho/ or https://github.com/voxeo/moho

You can also take a look at at VoiceXML, a W3C standard for building telephony apps. VoiceXML is how the big boys build telephony applications. There are a number of commercial and open source VoiceXML products, and tons of hosting companies. A search for "VoiceXML Hosting" will turn up several thousand options. Many of which will work internationally.

And of course Tropo, as already mentioned, has an open source core as well as a ton of other fun open source stuff. See http://tropo.com/ and https://github.com/tropo/
Let's see, give 50% off and then pay 35% of what is left to Groupon. Merchant nets 32.5% of the original purchase price. I don't believe there is 67.5% margin in an automobile.
I doubt Groupon will bankrupt any of hacker news readers' portfolio; I bet most of them are licking their chops to short this thing (just like they are shorting LinkedIn).

Effectively, all these IPO/overvaluation bubbles are meant to steal from (mostly public) pensions of older investors. So the next time you see your uncle or grandpa, buy them a nice bottle of wine! They're paying for your startup (while losing their retirement money), don't you know.
WordPress disable theme changing by removing submenu
There's nothing wrong with low margin, look at Wal-Mart. The problem is getting the customers through the door (or in this case through the website).
Looks pretty awesome, would love to see more screenshots though.
That hasn't stopped blatantly obvious patents to be filed. You are being extremely optimistic. USPTO will issue a patent nearly for any software related invention even with prior art.
You shouldn't just have one idea: You should have dozens. The trick then is to pick the one idea that's the best direction to go in. You can make a matrix chart for this which can address everything from the investment required to the potential revenue, and of course have a column for your passion.

I'll also add to that that a business isn't just an idea: It's the team. So you may start with one idea and it may evolve or pivot over time. For example Twitter was a side project and the iPod was a peripheral device (which wasn't even as cool as the Newton first was if you were a geek).
Have you tried disabling the use of hardware acceleration? WPF seems to have some issues with some graphics cards, or more accurately some graphics cards have some buggy hardware acceleration. Another thing I have noticed is that use over remote desktop and on VMs (specifically VMWare) can have quirks, then again I thought I read somewhere that WPF has to use bitmap remoting instead of primimtive remoting because Windows doesn't offer them any way to take advantage of primitive remoting because they aren't Win32 based (except their root visual which is an HWND, but everything else uses DirectX surfaces), which is a great example of Microsoft teams having pissing contests that just hurts users.
I don't think Apple has an IR filter; IR blasters show up as bluish-white - handy for testing remote controls.
What the article says is very true.. Sometimes I feel like a time traveler trapped in dark ages, waiting for the things around me to catch up to what I know is already a reality else where.. like last weekend when there was a 9am-5pm power-cut in bangalore, wondering how life without such basic problems can be.. :(
How to troll for fun and profit
1. find internet giant
2. have them write a KW fodder post
3. point out how stupid they look
4. submit to imgur

http://imgur.com/nou6K
Other Warrent Buffet quotes:

"Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1"
rRack/Rook (R) - https://github.com/jeffreyhorner/rRack
That's a bit disingenuous. The API clients are open source. The actual service is not. If a developer builds on top of Tropo, they are locked into Tropo's pricing and servers. Same with Twilio.

If you want to be on the eye-bleeding edge of scalable VoIP, check out Whistle (http://www.2600hz.org/about-whistle/). Host your APIs (REST and AMQP), choose your carriers, and build your whapps on a completely open-source project. We will gladly host and/or manage your servers as well.

Whereas Twilio/Tropo/Plivio give you ways to manage just call handling, Whistle aims to expose phone provisioning, call handling, server and cluster management, and more. We are open sourcing the PBX tools, a trunking platform (see it live at http://store.2600hz.com), among others that are in development.

That said, we're really excited with plivio's release and hope to either work with them to integrate their app as a whapp on our platform, or fork the project and do it ourselves (if we ever have time)!
There is no "platform" lesson here. The lesson is not to adopt risky business "models" based on wishful thinking. In one case, don't compete directly with the platform provider -- in the other case, it was never really a "platform" to begin with.

If I make a mobile app for wide distribution, I will probably confine myself to iPhone, because it will make me more money for less hassle than Android. I don't expect Apple to pull the rug out for under me in most cases, because I don't expect to compete with them directly.

If I'm selling a mobile app which acts as a book store, I would be dumb. Why? Well, the most prominent is that you're directly competing with Apple's own application released from Day One of it's book format device. Unless you're a large company with bargaining power (e.g. Netflix, Amazon), it will not go well...

Similarly with all the drama about the Twitter API. Twitter is not a platform. 99% of the complainers, well they're making Twitter clients. That's it. They are taking twitter's data and displaying it slightly differently(?[1]). They aren't creating anything new, or particularly original, sorry. Once a couple good clients came out, the game was over, and Twitter purchased one as the canonical version. In this case, you're in early or you don't go in.

[1] Most of them, tellingly, I have a hard time seeing the difference between.
I think "freemium" is the most common option. For instance, landgrab.net (a Risk clone) offers a premium option that lets you play more than four games simultaneously, and gives you other features.

I paid.
One of the comments says that it's on youtube. There are a few there, but I'm not sure if one is official - none of them really look like it.

That does seem like a feature that would make a lot of sense for live videos to have. Could be that there are patents preventing them, or something like that, because it would make live videos far more valuable.
AT&T Has Shared Data Plans in the Works
From the Java Tunings section of the paper:

Note that Jeremy deliberately refused
to optimize the code further, many of the C++ optimizations
would apply to the Java version as well

It sounds like Jermey didn't spend much time tuning the Java version either.
I was just thinking about how Google must be rolling in all that cash Groupon spent on Youtube ads etc. And LivingSocial's. And the other me-too's. Talk about selling pickaxes.
I like the idea, but I want have a lot more than 20GB available. I think it would be more inclined to buy this as traditional software (instead of SaaS).
You have a fair point — maybe I'd say more "IT Dude" than CS. In the corporate world I see many folks to doing IT who are doing it out of a default mode. Also sometimes said people will start with out with a passion, but pretty quickly it just becomes a job to them.
Apple is professional, the web is amateur
Inspiring, they've actually done something, on a shoestring, basically hobbyists, that most national governments haven't been able to achieve.
Please don't put words in my mouth, that is not what I said. I think it's silly that people want to hide the stories instead of just not reading them.

I understand that they have no interest in them, however I don't think it's such a burden to just skip over stories you don't want to read.
Hey Groupon: Why the rush?
It also seems that Groupon's business provides diminishing returns the more popular it becomes in a certain city - http://bit.ly/iDslVV

At this point in the tech boom, an underwhelming IPO wouldn't be a bad thing.
Cool idea and a clean implementation. Just out of curiosity, are there any plans to monetize in the future?

Also, this may just be me, but I'm not a fan of the domain.
>> Thinking that WPF/C# can be replaced by HTML/JS is foolish at best.

Take a look at the latest JS development tools, jQuery/ExtJS/backbone. It is the future of the UI development
Gmail calling uses Google's own plugin, not Flash. And they just open sourced it and intend for browser makers to integrate it into their browsers. Hopefully it will be possible to do video calling in HTML soon.
Wikipedia says $500.
I found this link (http://allthingsd.com/20110602/where-did-groupons-billion-do...) to be a scathing indictment of Groupon, to the level where it could attract the label "Ponzi Scheme" or the less harsh "Very bad Investment choice".

Seeing that the lion share of the two recent funding rounds were used to pay back investors, leaving very little on the table to fund their growh (this is when they are bleeding over 100 million per quarter) sounds unbelievably stupid or criminally insane.

Its one for the history books boys!
Wrong about Human Rights
Python doesn't even use quicksort. It uses timsort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort), which is a hybrid merge/insertion sort. It's also used to sort arrays in two different versions of Java. In other words, it's one of the fastest-known sorting algorithms.
8 Years Later, Intel Arrives At 4 GHz
Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers
It is never too late to rediscover your calling | Mini Saga
> Do gamers hate subscriptions?

Pretty much. You still get gamers that riff on the subscription costs of MMOs, services like Xbox LIVE or PlayStation Plus, etc. and most-recently Call of Duty Elite—where I’m betting it’s subscription model and the general distaste for it is talked about more than the actual benefits and features of the service.

With the kind of hate console/PC games and services get, where you arguably get a richer experience compared to web-based games, I’m not really surprised that web-based games tend to err on the side of caution for generating revenue.
Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary of Doom
مشاهدة مباراة المغرب والجزائر بث مباشر اون لاين 4/6/2011 تصفيات امم افريقيا
I wonder how much of a ding this will make in his credibility among bootstrapped entrepreneurs in general. It's hard to talk down something and have your thumb in the pie at the same time.
How to launch your product
When I click the link all I get is "Error establishing database connection", so thanks for copy/pasting.
Groupon is sustainable

I'm curious what you base this assertion on?
De-dupe: Wuala encrypts the file with a key derived from the file itself. This key is then encrypted with the user's key and both (the file and the encrypted key) are uploaded to the cloud. Disadvantage: If the file is known to an attacker (i.e., a copyright holder) the attacker can possibly find out which users have access to this file. Advantage: Allows for de-duplication, but is more secure than Dropbox.

Block-level updates: I don't see a problem with this. Partition the file into blocks on the client (before the encryption). The server doesn't need access to the data for this.
Photo: http://www.bornholmstidende.dk/?Id=27155
Depends.

On my server I use Tarsnap.

On my client I use Wuala's "backup folder" feature.
I Hope You Don't Mind But I'll Write About Nothing | Joanna Ciolek
I went ahead and bought a subscription. I have too many users on my site to follow the feed without a search or a grouping of all the different user ids so I can click on them, and view particular ones.

I also need to search for things like the signup form, so I can follow them since I have no idea who is a new user or not.

So far it's an over priced service that still needs a lot of functionality. I hope you can add a search, and a button I can click to see all the separate ids.

If not, it was a waste of 15 dollars as I cannot get a proper use out of it. It's just a scrolling mess of interaction. Clearly I can click on a single user, but I run a game, and each user has a lot of interactions.

Please assist. I like it, it just needs to be more usable.

Edit: I see user search is a feature you intend to add for a 50 dollar a month fee instead of the normal 15 a month. I disagree very strongly with this, it is simply a core feature for without, 15 dollars is extremely excessive.

Edit2: It should also be trivial to name the ids the username of the person when they login, by looking at a username field, and assigning it. This would be a huge help.
Aren't kids an asset at some level?
Some spam blogfarms play the arbitrage game with Adsense, but it's more profitable for them to use GoogleAds to pull traffic in and push visitors towards their affiliate links.

Content tends to be scraped content, sometimes Markov chained or other spinning methods. The content to display is based on keywords.

Depending on the spam website solution, the automation is done on a number of levels (depending on the blogfarm technique):

* WordpressMU with wildcard subdomains based on a spreadsheet of keywords
* Automated set up of Blogger blogs (either using Captcha breakers, Mechanical turk, or just asking the user to solve captchas 10 at a time)
* Automated publishing of content via XMLRPC (for wordpress and/or blogger), or other interfaces. Then almost always ping-servers are pinged.
* Automated creation of websites given a template and a heap of content - sometimes Markoved sometimes spun. Grabbing content either through screen scraping, RSS, text files, anything they can get their hands on. (They tried wikipedia for a while, last time I looked, they were dabbling with Yahoo answers for both content and inbound links)
* automated link building. Basically finding fingerprints of known no-rel-follow tools - like Pligg, Wordpress on edu/gov domains etc. Includes automated comment spam to build inbound links.

It does surprise me the lengths the successful spammers go to in blogspam and spam websites. They figure out this is still more profitable than building real long-term value and writing interesting content. Sometimes I think it's one of those "beat Google at it's own game", and the rush of earning quick money.
I'm not sure there's an official video. The Danish TV station TV 2 filmed the whole thing from their news helicopter, and that is the footage you see on the YouTube link I posted and on http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article.php/id-40453154:dansk-rumrak... (there's a short commercial before the video that can be closed).
Syria shuts down Internet
Any idea how high it went?
Many good developers have a side project that they can show off.

And if they don't, it's probably not a great sign.
Good luck, but man was I hoping for a way to somehow help us manage recruiters, mark spammers, etc.
>Who said that...
The conference. From http://days2011.scala-lang.org/node/91 :

Submissions must be in English and at most 12 pages total length in the standard ACM SIGPLAN two-column conference format (10pt).

Nearly all academic papers in computer science and engineering look like this. Not to say they've converged on an optimal format, but it wasn't exactly a creative decision on the part of these authors.
I love the notion of "I'd rather work with a guy who says 'I don't know anything about it, but let's figure it out'".

That message is amazing, and I've found that has been a huge differentiator between people who are stellar performers vs. people who are mediocre or poor.
I'm confused; looking at the OpenVBX page, under requirements:
Web Server
MySQL 5+
PHP 5.2+ recommended
Twilio Account (link to twilio)
>the smart ones left India already

Actually thats the other problem :) There is so much focus on "brain drain" that people have almost come to believe that the rest of us in India have no brain. There is so much hoopla about getting people back to India and very little about people who just stay back and never move out.
The Hackathons Organizer's Checklist
Any Ham Radio enthusiasts know if anything is coming out of Syria on that channel?

Unlike Egypt, this has turned into a torrid brew of sectarian violence superimposed over the political strife. The minority Alawites (of whom the Assad family are members) are scared that if they don't help the violent oppression and quell the uprising there will be reprisals afterwards, while mostly dormant anti-Alawite sentiments have now been stoked to a fiery blaze in the rest of the population.

Looks like we're about to get another Libya on our hands.
I disagree.

This reminds me of the pre-Google IPO arguments.

It became popular in the press to pot-shot Google in the days leading up to their IPO.

Their revenue model was too tied to search.

Their IPO structure wasn't sound.

Their biggest growth was behind them.

Groupon is no Google today, but they do have a visionary founder, an incredible brand, insane revenue growth, and address a real problem for merchants and consumers.
I'm sure the Data Angels are thanking Commissioner Lal for this.
I'm not so sure if this is true. I think the vocal minority dislikes subscriptions but there are millions and millions of WoW or XBOX Live players who don't seem to mind. And I'm sure, in the end, there will be plenty of people paying for CoD Elite as well.
As long as DHH was not part of the GroupOn advisory panel, he is free to air his opinion. Also based on his tweets, he was expecting them to show a profit but was shocked to find that they were losing money. It's fine to change your opinion based on the hard numbers.
Yep, I can second that.
Looks like most browser games get most of their revenue from premium features/items whatever.

At least I guess we're talking about browser games?
Because if web-based includes MMOs then of course it's different. (well a lot of those are freemiums too, but many aren't).

Oh and I myself have once paid for premium features on tribal wars and paid for my friends too, so make sure it's easy to buy stuff for other people, they like doing that :-)
I tell you whut...a lot of the non-technical stuff suxxor! Why am I reading HN right now? Because I'm in the middle of reviewing some contracts and it's awful, so I got my ADD on and am now surfing here. I would much rather be working on our product. That's why you need business people...because there is more to a company than a product. Company = product + business. Developers work on products. Business people work on business.

Back to the coal mines.
> The government always falls amid the outrage of the people over losing their internet access.

Nothing quite gets the movers and shakers of high society riled up like losing access to an (almost) infinite supply of free porn.