skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point RE: MMOs, I wasn't thinking about them as a separate category. Why do you think it's easier for them to pull off a freemium/subscription model?

Gifting is interesting, I first noticed it with reddit. If you don't mind me asking, why did you pay for your friends on Tribal Wars?
The same way you measure productivity of a programmer. LoP (Lines of Proof) per day.
Spot on about Ping. It should have been a service where anyone can be an artist, and everyone is a listener. Artists could share their content for free. And there should have been a web based application.
I disagree that the founders somehow have a higher and nobler responsibility to retail investors than VCs. The VCs are the professionals, they sit on the board and direct its activities.

These ideas about the difference between management and bankers made sense when IBM or US Steel went to the public markets to raise money in the old days, but where Tech Startups are concerned I am skeptical that founders are pulling the wool over the VC's eyes.

But I suspect we're quibbling over who gets the lion's share of the tar and feathers :-)

UPDATE: But yes, I agree about the word "value."
Complaining about bitcoin articles on HN is like complaining about Ron Paul articles on Digg.
In case anyone is curious, the design aspect of the site that pissed me off is that it blocks resizing the text. I found it too small to comfortably read, and hitting my browser's "make bigger" button just makes all the other elements on the page bigger, not the text.
I don't know if I agree with this assessment. There's a land rush going on. They need to grab as much of the market's network effects as they can before Google Offers and the like manage to get going. This is definitely one of those extreme first-mover-advantage situations, like online auctions fifteen years ago.

So to answer the author's question: When will Groupon be profitable? When the enormous costs of their explosive growth are no longer counting against their bottom line.
Re: All Word Processors Suck
OK, good, but how much thinking really needs to go into this?

Make it simple: You can link up to 4 devices on a single data account, and you get an aggregate XX GB amongst them per month.
Here's a picture of the rocket and the submarine: http://i2-images2.tv2net.dk/s/49/20942149-29ce372936dd69adf1...

The picture was taken in September last year when the first (failed) attempt to launch the rocket was made.

Here's a picture of the succesful launch today: http://www.bornholmstidende.dk/nonsec/NPIX/2011/6/Launch.jpg

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmGmymAWI4E
Judging from this sentence from the article

> The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant has agreed to pay the labels between $25 million to $50 million each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing.

sounds like what Apple is launching is also a music locker service akin to what Google Music is now, and not streaming arbitrary music. Perhaps the author is referring to when Google may remove the invite-only aspect for their service, or maybe just confused.
I'm flying tonight - are there any decent NodeJS PDFs/ebooks?
I've been dipping my toes into learning Node over the past few weeks and have had alot of trouble finding great documentation. I generally learn best when coding, but will be on a four hour flight tonight with no wifi and would love to take a Node 'book' with me.

Any suggestions?
Here are some business books I've read or am reading
http://www.shelfluv.com/pek.pongpaet/business

I also read books on design - here's a few I like:
http://www.shelfluv.com/pek.pongpaet/design

One of my favorite books of course is Founders at Work. I also find books about entrepreneurs very inspiring - like anything from Richard Branson. Ted Turner's book and Howard Schultz are also good.
National Academies Press Puts 4,000 Books Online at No Charge
That may be their theory, but can you offer concrete evidence that the network effects in this line of business look like Metcalfe's Law rather than the more typical O(n log(n)) network effect that is normally seen?
Cool, thanks for the link! I've noticed that a few sites align their premium with being able to play more. Chess.com is a service that I started paying for because I wanted to get past the rate limit and they had a lot of neat-looking members-only things.
What's the difference between this and jquery.parallax?
ACER HACKED BY PAKISTAN CYBER ARMY
Please share : ☛ 40,000 Users Data, Source Codes & Server of ACER ( Europe ) Compromised http://goo.gl/fb/emW2v via @TheHackersNews
I took a look https://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html and I don't understand why "If you have multiple machines, you almost certainly want to create a separate key file for each machine."? Can you explain why, if I'd like to access the same data from the different machines? Or is the main assumption that every machine has its own, nor shareable, backup? Isn't the main advantage of an online service to have the same data accessible from more machines?
I'm not HTML expert, but I've seen things like Wijmo and controls from Telerik that allow you to drop in jQuery UI elements just like WPF controls. They have things like grids, charts, calendars, etc...

WPF does have lookless controls and triggers, but I'm not sure I'd make a dev platform choice based on that.
How do you move a 401k to a self-directed account? Can you do it without quiting your job?

My single biggest gripe with my 401k--a very poor selection of high cost managed funds.
Although I'm not investing directly, my concern is what the fund manager in charge of my 401k thinks of this.
Google Viewer (docs) available as a stand alone service
MI6 Sends Cupcake Love To Al-Qaeda
That's interesting. In the CoD:Elite example, do you know if the "haters" were folks who paid and were disappointed, or were generally upset about not being able to play for free? Do you think that deterred others from paying?
Here is the counterpoint: India is awesome if you're not struggling.

A lot of people complain about traffic. You know the salary of a driver on a monthly basis? About $100-250 (depending on the car you drive).

Bureaucracy is killing. Takes 3 months to incorporate. But do you know how much accountants charge in India to take care of all your business details? A startup probably won't have to pay more than $150 a month on an accountants fees.

Things are so cheap in India that you can live an extremely shiny life on the same budget at which an entrepreneur struggles to feed his family in USA.

But yes - a lot of the things are broken in India if you don't have the little bit of money required to throw at it to fix it. On the bright side: the pace of improvement is staggering (I mean - Indian literacy rate went from 65% to 75% in 10 years. Thats 650 million literates in 2001 to 900 literates in 2011! Still not awesome. And college education is still lacking in many places. But the speed of improvement is staggering.)

Disclosure: I'm a glass-half-full kind of an Indian who studied in USA but is now living in Bombay working on a startup.
Thanks. No plans to monetize, as of now.

We loved going through the process of it, and will try to fix out any possible bugs.

The .co.cc or the sein-cal part?
The Ultimate Groupon IPO Linkfest
It's mostly calls to some kind of assembler macro built into MASM, which means it's not really x86 assembly language:

INVOKE SetFilePointer,hFile,FOffset,0,FILE_BEGIN
INVOKE ReadFile,hFile,pMem,FSize,offset NotUsed,0
INVOKE send,wParam,pMem,FSize,0
INVOKE GlobalUnlock,hMem
INVOKE GlobalFree,hMem
INVOKE closesocket,wParam
INVOKE CloseHandle,hFile ;Done with file and socket too.

The guy wrote it in 2001, when he was in high school, and he's done a lot more cool and interesting stuff since then, and it looks like he's graduated to Linux: http://lingcog.iit.edu/~scubed/projects.xml

Too bad he stopped adding new projects to the page in 2007. His "portfolio" page has a few more things since then.
it blocks resizing the text

Bad, very bad. Don't do this, ever. You don't know what my monitor's resolution is. You don't know if I have left my glasses in the car and need to make the text huge to read what you have to say. You don't know if I have my glasses but I'm reading your words on my television across the room. You don't know if I'm using a tablet or phone and I need to pinch and zoom to navigate.

Set a default design and let me decide what to do with the page and its elements. Thank you.
Awesome! Many congratulations man. It is very impressive and very much appreciate you sharing the details.
Blueprint I/O: easy, centralized configuration management
you should be able to get all of the .net specific stuff you want via jscript what is the big deal here?
Rumor: Apple Hires Famous Jailbreak Developer To Work On iPhone Notifications
Personally I find the booking of the face value of their coupons kind of questionable or at least unsustainable. Yes it is revenue, but a typical "coupon" business would probably only count the fees received from merchants as top-line revenue (because the merchants would collect the money directly). So it makes the business look more viable than it really is. I can't see merchants continuing to accept that, and I bet larger deals (i.e. with Expedia) don't work that way.
Yeah tried that. Didn't make much difference. I think the main issue with the Quadro's was the poor quality of drivers more than anything else. Even the WHQL ones are junk.

VMware - forget it - unusable. All our infrastructure is VMware based and we have to do remote debugging on VM's via RDP. Yuck. I think when RDP is used it falls back to a GDI+ backend as HW accelerated primitives cannot be thrown down an RDP link and then uses tiles (as you state).

This is all down to the fact that RDP came before DWM. If it was the other way around we'd be throwing surfaces down the wire which would be nice.
A decent Vim statusline primer
"Ponzi relied on lying to the investors and telling them the money came from good investments."

It seems like a more crucial aspect of a Ponzi scheme is that you tell new investors that their money will go into the business, when in reality it's just paying old investors.

So, did the investors who put in a billion dollars realize that most of it was going to old investors?
The College Application Essay
The writing of the college application essay is the student’s chance to show off his or her writing abilities as well as personality to the Admission Panel. The Admission Panel will make their decisions based on a well written college application essay.
Mixpanel is looking for engineers who want to scale big data
Battle In The Boardroom: Why Groupon Probably Paid Off Its Early Employees
I'm glad you said this. I gave up on a reply yesterday to the initial story for lack of time, but basically it said "anyone that thinks that Groupon is like a Ponzi scheme doesn't understand how a Ponzi scheme works".

You can say all you want about their lack of differentiation from competitors, there huge debt levels, their dicey use of the series G funding, and what appears to be a poorly scaling business model.

You can intend to short them, sell puts.... whatever. But stop calling them a Ponzi scheme. It's an insult to them, it's hyperbolic, and it's ignorant.
Honestly, I think you're both right. My feeling is that Apple has not successfully been able to from that successful web platforms have are professional, but "open-ended with a purpose". Your examples of Facebook and Stack Overflow are perfect representations of this: both are professionally implemented, but the content itself is basically open, but purposed.

Ping doesn't let you generate anything new, or provide information that is broadly useful.
woot can't wait to play with this

Edit: err I should probably add more substance than that.. one less thing to keep track of and have to set up when getting into config management = win
> True, but you invariably depend on somebody else to write the software you want.

Not really. When Zope Corporation ceased to develop Zope 2 in favor of Zope 3, the Plone community and others continued development of the 2 series. It currently has a lot of features migrated from the 3 series, a lot of new features of its own, but remains compatible with the Plone CMS that runs on its top.

If, for whatever implausible reason, Oracle decides to ditch MySQL, its users already have a bunch of forks in place, perfectly functional. If, however, Oracle decides to discontinue their RDBMS, its users are royally screwed.

> and a unified platform for the web, client and mobile (the promise of .NET), which is insane as there can be no such thing.

Despite my dislike for Java (the language), I have to recognize it spans a very vast space, from dumbphones (J2ME) to fairly clever ones (CLDC, CDC) to very smart ones (Android) to desktops (Eclipse, NetBeans, several standalone development tools I use) to large distributed server solutions (Cassandra, Mule, Hadoop). And the JVM is sweet. I'd love to find a decent excuse to do something in Clojure on it.
how does this hook into a phone system to actually function/process messages? This is why I use Twilio.

Website was pretty confusing
You can AFAIK in WPF (not SL which is a smaller lib subset). You can render it to a GDI Image and then convert that using CreateBitmapSourceFromHBitmap. It sucks though.
Definitely. One can only stand so many spa and skin treatment discounts per week. Then again, I wouldn't imagine hackers to be the main target group for the majority of groupons.
I have an Android phone and I have never had any problems with Flash. And I am far from a Flash cheerleader. It seems that most of the Flash hatred comes from Linux and Mac users. If it sucks on their platforms then I can truly understand that. Even on Windows it could be a lot better. But it is not an evil technology. Just poorly implemented at times.

Every time the argument comes up I feel as if there is a section of people trying to convince others that Adobe is the devil. Flash has its place on the web until something comes along that can properly replace it. HTML5/CSS3 is just not there yet but it soon will be.
I'm actually looking on a good "starter" on NodeJS. Most of what I've read seems to dive right in at a level above my head. (I'm reasonably familiar with Javascript, although 90% of what I write is utilizing jQuery nowadays, so I'm hazier about the core than I used to be.
Completely agree with OP on this comment!
I really doubt Groupon's business model, hardly believe that coupon style business could be a main stream of profit.

Would like to short this IPO when it comes to the stock market.
...oh, I think I see what you're saying. If you have hardware that can predict jump-to-pointer and not just jump-to-literal, that can make quite a difference in how well more dynamic languages / paradigms perform compared to more static ones. I was thinking more along the lines of languages giving programmers (the appearance of) the ability to tweak their code to take advantage of these things, and "don't bother, the compiler is smarter than you are".
Tarsnap isn't Dropbox. It's a backup system. Its cost structure and security model is optimized for backup, which is why you can't e.g. read your Tarsnap files from a web interface at Tarsnap.
If you consider that Apple's core business is to sell a belief about themselves and their users, there isn't a conflict.

People don't buy Apple stuff because of what it is -- the identical hardware can be bought for sometimes 50% cheaper from other stores/manufacturers. People buy because of the perception that Apple has values which are aligned with their own.

The most visible value is that Apple challenges the state of normalcy in whatever industry they enter, that they oppose the status quo. This is a perception, it doesn't necessarily align with the reality of their actions (for example, how is it opposing the status quo to pay the labels' extortion fees?)

You don't have to agree with it -- that is, you don't have to believe that Apple actually challenges anything -- but you should at least understand how they sell themselves and how that drives their business. If you simply examine Apple on the basis of the products they sell, you can't develop a consistent theory that explains their success (IMHO).

Look at the commercial for the Playbook, it focuses on what the actual hardware/OS can do: run multiple apps at the same time, browse with Flash, etc. At the same time, the iPad commercial focuses on how amazed you'll be, and how much potential it has to change the future. It's audacious -- could you imagine how ridiculous it would sound if RIM billed the Playbook as "just getting started"? That's not RIM, they're not visionaries and they've never sold themselves as such. They sell themselves as people who sell enterprise solutions -- i.e., they identify themselves with what they make.

You have to consider that Apple primarily sells a belief, and secondarily sells products which demonstrate that they implement those beliefs.

I would modify your initial statement -- companies fail when they are reduced to selling commodities, instead of following their values. Dell and HP sell commodities, but Apple takes that same hardware (laptops, desktops, MP3 players, tablets) and turns it into gold, because they sell users the perception of following their values.

(If you liked the foregoing analysis, it's largely influenced by the writings of Simon Sinek in Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/...)
Yeah, that's what is confusing to me about any .NET developer employment angst. ASP.NET and other business infrastructure technology seem unaffected by desktop software innovation. I have to believe that desktop software is a small piece of all .NET development and innovation in this area shouldn't threaten the platform.
My point wasn't that less professional looking websites succeed over more professional looking sites. It's Apple's focus on professional content (the select few) vs amateur content (all of us).

I didn't mean to use amateur in a derogative sense. Amateurs are just people who don't get paid for their work.

Re: Facebook/MySpace, I think this was a different dynamic. The thing facebook did right was tone down the design significantly so that everyone's content became the only important thing on the page. It's still amateur content though.

If Apple had done Stack Overflow, I bet they would have had a team of certified experts to answer the questions and I don't think it would have worked very well. In Stack Overflow, there's no separation between who can ask and answer questions (besides a few karma points). That kind of chaos Apple doesn't excel at.
The "making it do something useful" part is the hack. Breaking the security to do that thing is a crack.
Open Source powering the next gen cloud stack prt-1
Its common knowledge that Apple doesn't understand the web?
That's one of the funniest things I've ever read on HN
Yes, 'rotten core' was a bit strong. :P I don't know anything about Groupon's specific case, and it's certainly true that in many cases the VC's will be the more experienced and better informed, and therefore more culpable party. Comity!
Oldmansearch
Groupon isn't going to make the S&P 500. If you're invested in a wide index fund, you'll be safe.
I don't know of any, let alone decent.

I think the best you can do is find some tutorials but even in that department there's nothing to be crazy about.

So far it looks like the prime way to learn about it is to experiment (well I guess that's the best way anyways).

It would be a good idea to look into some general JavaScript specific stuff if you're not very familiar with it.

Or just download some sample projects from github and look at that during your flight, haha.

4 hours is not that much anyways, so you might just as well give up on it.
Apple is driven by a philosophy of design, like industrial design and graphic design, but not necessarily craftsmanship, although craftsmanship often goes into design.

As long as Steve Jobs is alive, Apple won't give up on design. Design is what sets Apple apart, not craftsmanship. It's why you see the Macintosh in the MoMA but not a Compaq.
Hack (Haskell) - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/h...

Paste (Python) - http://pythonpaste.org/ *

* WSGI is a spec, Paste was the original (AFAIK) implementation. Interestingly, WSGI was itself inspired by the Servlet API.
Is 'portmanteau' a portmanteau?
Buying all of Vivendi would be a way to use up their big pile of cash. This is just putting change in the parking meters.
I'm in the process of getting an app review done by a security expert. Then I can answer that question (hopefully) definitively. (I'm the author of Arq)
You make a very interesting point w1, there is a documentary film I'm making right now called #killswitch that addresses this point.

Check out the 5 min 27 sec. trailer on kickstarter and let me know what you think:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-docum...
That's similar to other problems I have with sites recently: their super-special javascript on textareas screws up my own resizing of them, and even worse, ruins ctrl/cmd Z! I don't know how they do it, but screwing up Undo is pretty serious.
Porsche’s Take on EV Range Estimation
Arq says they don't think so: https://twitter.com/#!/arqbackup/status/76693981286768641
Groupon to accept Bitcoins as a payment method
Objectify for Mac. Give JSON. Receive Code.
I've heard that their main target group is young professional women, which makes the spa/skin stuff a lot more sensible.
Use a browser that lets you resize text? Before you say anything, I already know. I just think this is a problem with the browser, not with a site. The browser should be able to resize the text. If it can't, it's a browser failure.
I included code samples from several of these in a presentation I did a little while ago: http://www.slideshare.net/bscofield/great-developers-steal/2...
More trolling on HN I see! The Web is professional, it's the developer who blogged about this story that is an amateur.

Just because he doesn't know what he's doing, now the web is amateurish? These nerd-rage blog posts are just noobs venting that 'they don't get it'.
So, after they stop investing in expansion and reach a stable level, what is the realistic value of Groupon? Or does nobody really know enough to speculate?
Cheap isn't everything. China is cheap. Thailand is cheap. Malaysia is cheap. They don't have the massive infrastructure problems that India has.

Personally I (or any sane person) wouldn't want to just live in a nice house, then sit in a chauffered car, stuck in traffic for hours, while avoiding looking out to see bum/garbage/slum/dirt/smog/chaos, then arrive in a nice office, then eat lunch and hope it doesn't make me sick, then go back home again.
Limitations in inventory (limited by sales force reach, geography and the number of their business clients) will make effective filtering very difficult.

If you think of deals as SKUs, there's a huge granularity mismatch between filtering 50 deals in my geographical area vs. filtering millions of products at Amazon. (Not to mention that it would seem to be very difficult for them to capture much useful data about user preferences to make recommendations or perform proactive filtering.)
How is Groupon without marketing not Groupon at all?

Because Groupon is getting all of their visitors/subscribers through massive amounts of marketing. Without that marketing, it is not proven that they would still have so many visitors/subscribers.