skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a pro at reading these, but it seems like you can see for yourself at: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/00010474691100561...

That 713M "costed" 433M (seems to be that what goes to the companies advertising via groupon). Then theres 263M on "marketing", 233M on "selling, general, and administrative", and 203M on "acquisition related". The link has more detail on what each of these means.
Has anybody tried running numpy? If it's got numpy then I think I have found my new hosting solution for my upcoming project at work.
They appear to have cracked the nut on local advertising. Their business could end up bigger than Google's.
In theory libvirt should support Xen as the hypervisor instead of kvm just fine.
There should be a pithy name for this effect, the tendency of small groups of committed supporters to dominate internet conversations. I am reminded of this "100 Best Novels" list (the reader's choice version, on the right):

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

in which the top ten contains four books by Ayn Rand and three by L. Ron Hubbard.
> Did the 2000 bubble come with revenue numbers like these recent IPOs?

Lol.
It's more valuable to start with a huge corporation and then move to a start-up according to my personal experience.

At a large software/Internet company, you can learn best practices, how organizations work, politics, real team work and real challenges in large scale. And can make more connections that will help you for future opportunities and company name might be a great reference.

But 1-2 years later, you have to move on. Because clearly, you'll see that you've started almost nothing, never practiced some fundamental architecture patterns (since your large scale cant scale with them), shipped less code. You are living in a comfort zone that you obviously cant even take a tiny risk.
Now just imagine it being used at political events or to suppress collection of evidence of abuse at demonstrations.

Edit: Probably worth noting that were this to take off it would probably also be embedded in every TV out there.
This business as others have pointed out is not about selling grilled cheese, it's about proving the market and perfecting the system. They'll likely go after big fast food chains which is why they sell a similar product made in a similar way. Oh knows maybe it will be a runaway success but I have a feeling it will be moderately successful return the fund and the cream will be selling the system to everyone else.
It's funny, but as a pyramid scheme it kinda sucks. When the pyramid crumbles, everybody's left with a bunch of worthless bitcoins. At least in a ponzie scheme, the people at the top profit. A lot.
When Webvan when public in 1999, they were predicting by 2001 they'd be at $518.2 million revenue with a $302 million net loss, roughly where Groupon is now. So you're quite right: GroupOn's farther down the path of losing a lot of money.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/THE-DAY-AHEAD-Webvan-revs-IPO-as-questi...

http://news.cnet.com/THE-DAY-AHEAD-Webvan-revs-IPO-as-questi...
Yea, he means acceptable from a performance standpoint since in node the event loop will just stop and wait for that to finish before doing anything else. http://nodejs.org/#about

The `*Sync` methods are really only there for convenience sake, so you don't end up with 'banana code' around your whole app because of your initialization (reading config files, etc).
Ice Case by Fractal
The employee growth is definitely a part of it.
They went from, what was it? 120 in 2009 to 4000 in 2010?

My boggling is more at the challenge of intelligently doing that spending than simply tabulating it.
e.g. how do you intelligently hire 20 people a workday, every workday for an entire year, when you were a 100-person company?
Show HN: our Co-op onboarding project
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.).

So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite and it just creates a toolbar along the bottom of your website with information about the next objective to meet and the current points accumulated.

We've just gone live over at scavsite.com, and although the original four week goal was to make $20, right now we'd be really happy if a few people found this useful. :) It's been a long journey. We built it in django, which neither of us had used before, and it's been an incredible learning experience.
What you are looking for is a knowledge pill!

</sarcasm>
It's also very alluring to the the current investors and founders.
What about, say, car maintenance/repair? Plenty of hackerly types work on their own cars, despite the fact that a mistake could potentially be fatal, and there are professionals who specialize in the field.
Gaming website metrics
Yeah, that's what I meant by simply not wanting the bailout and letting failed corps fail. I'd agree.

Though imho using a tax pool, printing more money, giving banks 0% loans, etc, are all spending public funds one way or another. And it's unfair competition for the companies who didn't abuse the system and have been struggling to make an honest profit.
Cue for dozens of Fortune, Newsweek et al articles proclaiming the new bubble. If everyone's so confident in their assertion, go short that stock.

Groupon will grow like hell until there are finally no new deals to lure with left and the 'extreme couponing' lifestyle has been grinded to death (regular couponing will have a place like it always had).

The problem with extreme valuations/bubbles is not so much to recognize them, it's to pinpoint when they will burst.
there is only one l in alot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
If this did go to court, what could they get out of it? It seems like it would be incredibly difficult to show even a vague possibility of intent or damage, so the lawsuits would be an unsustainable money drain.
Losing a lot of money by emailing half-off coupons isn't going to end up bigger than Google.
Your self-effacing "PHP programmer" comment surprised me and made me chuckle. Thank you for that!
Expatriate Tax Returns
He said "revenue number" at one point, so I think it's the gross.
Raising money near to revenue doesn't sound bubble.
IRS: Top things every taxpayer should know about identity theft
How to put a VC in the hot seat
Wouldn't it be typical of a growing company like Groupon to run negative because they keep investing all the profit into people and technology? Paying over 7000 people and their benefits probably takes a majority (e.g. 51% or more) of the revenue.
'This looks shopped to me. I can tell from some of the pixels, and from having seen quite a few shops in my time.' ;-)

On the one hand, Ceglia has looked like a highly questionable plaintiff from the outset, and when his first suit sank without trace I wasn't terribly surprised. On the other hand, he's now represented by DLA Piper, one of the largest law firms in the US, and the senior partner who is the lead counsel on his case has a long and distinguished reputation.

It seems unlikely that the firm would risk its time or reputation on such a questionable case without doing some due diligence of their own. There's a big enough market in document authentication/forensic analysis for the legal industry to sustain several companies; they advertise regularly in legal magazines and newspapers. It's not like a new or high-tech concept that would be unfamiliar to Ceglia's lawyers. Sure, it's possible that Ceglia is hiring Kip Hall [1] and his team by the hour, but much more probable that they're working on contingency because they think he has a credible case.

1. http://www.dlapiper.com/kip_hall/
Andrew Mason's desire is for Groupon to be where you go when you think "I'm hungry or I'm bored"

If you're calling bubble and confused about how they're running at a loss don't miss this line:

"Participating Merchants: 56,781 in the first quarter of 2011, up from 212 in the second quarter of 2009"

That database of 56,781 merchants is GOLD.

The way their sale staff works is to create direct relationships, phone contact etc - that is not a cheap proposition.

In terms of growth potential there are 10x as many restaurants in the USA as Groupon's entire universe of merchants today.

If they continue to capture the consumer mind that they're the best in the world to answer those two questions, their valuation and growth potential is insane.

Refs:

http://answers.ask.com/Food_and_Drinks/Restaurants/how_many_...

http://www.geekosystem.com/groupon-im-hungry-im-bored/
It better be something good.

The best easter egg I've seen was on the Power Macs circa System 7.5 (if only I'd bought shares of AAPL instead of that Power Mac...) where you could type "secret about box", drag and drop it to the desktop, and get a full-screen animation (very impressive for the time) of an animated flag flying in front of One Infinite Loop. The mouse controlled the direction of the wind. The flag showed (for reasons which were no doubt hilarious to the folks who coded it in) an iguana with a power plug for its tail, and a banner below "Iguana Iguana Powersurgius".
Google drives billions in revenue to online businesses.

Groupon drives billions in revenue to local businesses.

There are important differences, and Groupon may fail, but their fundamental market opportunity is easily as big as Google's.
The Xbox wasn't in a market with zero brand loyalty, low barrier to entry, etc. It's an apples to aircraft carriers comparison, IMO. Groupon could be very profitable in the future, but so could the other 1000 companies in the space. It's a race to the bottom with little retaining their business.
No, but have you corrected for the size of the audience? The web is a lot bigger than it was eleven years ago.

Meanwhile, from Groupon's prospectus:

Our revenue is the purchase price paid by the customer for the Groupon. Our gross profit is the amount of revenue we retain after paying an agreed upon percentage of the purchase price to the featured merchant.

So they have huge revenue numbers because they move a lot of coupons. But they're operating at a loss. It's promising that they have a big audience, and a database of merchants, but what does that really mean when they're not profitable?

If I build a scalable website that sells ten-dollar bills for $9, I will probably attract as much traffic as I can afford. If I have a billion dollars to lose I can probably arrange to do roughly $10B in "revenue". But what does that number prove? Not so much in itself. It's other details that matter.
Ideally, you can predicate your search on metadata. It would greatly simplify my searches for volcanoes with a 4 star or better rating.
No, it actually sounds like their business model is so profitable in a single locale that they've been rapidly spending outside funding to accelerate their growth and stay ahead of the competition.
you ruined your whole argument with this "* Crisis of legitimacy of the US Federal Reserve Bank. Which is neither federal, or a reserve, or really even a bank. It's actually a cartel of private bankers; many would say a criminal cartel. *"

This ruins everything else you said. You're not telling us
anything new, or necessarily true (depending on how you twist the definition of cartel)
"On the other hand I regained the weight as soon as I came off the [insert name here] diet ..."

There are two kinds of diets, lose weight now diets and lifestyle/habit diets. Both diets are subject to the "but I regained the weight" issue, the lose weight now type probably more so.

The key thing, obviously, is to eat well and live healthy. Leaving that regimen, however it happens, is going to be bad.
Groupon files for $750M IPO
Chinese teenager sold his kidney for an iPad 2
True show of brand loyalty, a 17-year-old Chinese teenager sold his kidney in order to buy an iPad 2. Shanghai Daily reports that Anhui Province Zheng was able to net 20,000 ($3,084.45) for the organ but now as his health is worsening, he is regretting the decision. “I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it. A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”
Wow. Google revolutionized the way we entertain ourselves, learn information, and interact with each other. Groupon has revolutionized paying $5 less for a pedicure on Sundays before 1pm.
Am I on reddit? y u no read previous comments?
SHOW HN: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Javascript))
Here is a LISP interpreter in Javascript based on Peter Norvig's interpreter in Python. All constructive criticism is welcome.
You are correct, but he earned this poor discussion by using a link-bait title.
Building 500 restaurants sure is an expensive way to get a cool press release, if it's just a PR play.
The IRC channel just provides an initial set of peers. There's a hard-coded list of peers it falls back on if the IRC channel fails. I believe there's been some discussion about diversifying the initial peer discovery further.
Thanks. I believe Vb uses kernel modules also, and mentions in the manual having ring 1 support for OS/2.
I'd support the ban on bitcoins just to stop hearing about it on HN every 5 seconds.
Salary, to convince businesses to work with them on their extreme terms.
Well, that's one solution to the problem. Nice work!

(I don't use Safari myself, but...)
Articles like this make me wonder how git would be without the rebase command. Would it look any worse than mercurial? It (rebase) is kind of a stepping stone from non-dvcs, where an input is just a file, not data with history.
You're painting this as a "Obama eats a ham sandwich" story, but I think there's a big-picture trend that you're missing.

The news is of interest to HN because it's a sign of how the Internet and social media continues to have an ever-rising impact on major world politics. To put it another way, are Twitter and Facebook and Reddit just procrastination engines, or might they be important, world-changing tools? Stories like this help answer that question.
Why is the post by "superasn" dead? It's topical, relevant, has useful information and is not rude or insulting.
Taking DNA Sequencing to the Masses
Just trying to add some context for the topic.
Update: We disabled the payment system so that you can create free accounts.
Why would you have to correct for audience size? The web is the web is the web. If you're a web business today, you have a much larger potential market than companies did in 1999.
Technically the "tainted" attack could even come from programming books that offer code snippets. Unless you have a signed release from the copyright holder of the book, you are also tainted.

Abstrd, but true according to what you're saying, if you can prove that I copied it. Now, assuming you did download and peruse the source code for Free_skype: fine. Now prove it.
Eh, those are all hopeful predictions. Actual revenue numbers for the year in which Webvan filed for IPO (1999):

"projecting revenue of $11.9 million and a $73.8 million loss"
This is really scary. I'm a total apple fanboi. But no way I'd buy a phone with this baked in.

I don't like to think apple would bow this deeply to the recording industry. Maybe the government. Either way it turns my stomach.

"At block 950, a record function can be disabled. For example, if the encoded data includes a disable command, the device can temporarily disable its record function for a period of time after receiving the command (e.g., 30 seconds or 30 minutes). After the device's record function is disabled, the device may not be able to store images detected by the device. In some embodiments, after the device's record function is disabled, the device may not be able to even display images detected by the device (see, e.g., system 500 shown in FIG. 5). In some embodiments, a device may even delete one or more of the most recently stored images (e.g., the first image detected at block 910) when disabling the device's record function."
Good points, but as a business, I would consider GroupOn before those other 1000 companies because of their reach.
1) You can report stolen content here:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&t...

2) You can report the policy violation here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contac...

(including copyrighted content)

3) You can report copyright infringement here:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr...
but I've relied on basic human decency all my life and it has turned out fine for me.

This may work if you're starting out by yourself, but as soon as you involve another person you have to have contracts. Too many people I know have lost their best friends over relying on decency. When money is involved spell it out multiple times in a contract and have it reviewed. Removing any confusion early on will prevent huge headaches later.
Yeah, the 500 restaurants in the next couple of years is believe-it-when-I-see-it territory. I can't see where the money's going to come from.
Yeah, when it bursts short it all the way to the bottom, hopefully panic selling ensues and you can pick it up a firesales prices at the bottom. Just saw citigroup at $40 today and am kicking myself for not having the cajones to pick it up at $2. Hindsight is 20/20 though and I know I liked it at $18 as well.

Looks like I'm being downvoted, I guess the CEO of overture reads HN.
For one thing, when you buy an Xbox, and Microsoft has revenue for years. Customer retention is fairly easy. It's easy (and fun) to unsubscribe from Groupon.
Nature backs gold, there is a limit and we love it. If you find a brick of gold in your great-grandfather's chest, he will have stored away something worth 5-20% of his yearly salary, but you could sell it for twice yours. If you stored your bitcoin wallet somewhere, left bitcoin, and came back when they had changed the algorithim to add more money, your money might be worth less (because there's more supply, not less demand which is all that can happen with gold).
They have reach now, but others are gaining ground. I see LivingSocial as the biggest potential competitor right now, since they're an Amazon subsidiary -- that gives them a lot of leverage that Groupon doesn't have, e.g. giving away $20 Amazon gift cards for $10.
Indeed -- and stuck with it for quite some time. They were trialling Xen for some time, but I don't think they ever deployed it on a terribly large scale. Certainly, my VM went straight from UML to KVM.
Ask HN: How would you publish a novel?
HN'ers are always poo-pooing the traditional publishing houses, and for good reason. A close family member is publishing a novel this summer, wants to go non-traditional (i.e. website self-publish) and has asked for my help.

I have confidence in the material: she has published before. Mostly grad-level text books and children's books.
AES-hash proposal [pdf]
I would say that only supports the argument.

I knocked the passenger side mirror off of my car on a pole. $30 and some time later, I had a new mirror installed.

Conversely, I had a power window motor burn out and seize up while the window was going down. I was able to get the door panel off, but all the bolts to remove the motor/window assembly were on the inside of the door. I had the directions and the knowledge to continue to remove the door and remove the motor, but I did not feel capable and I didn't really have the tools to properly proceed. Failure meant a bunch of broken glass in my drive way, or worse my car would only have three doors. So I took it to a mechanic and he fixed it in an afternoon.

To reapply all of this to the topic: some legal stuff you can handle if you have the knowledge and feel equipped to move forward. Privacy policies are a good example, as would be government regulations like CAN-SPAM, which are pretty well documented and explained. But as matters of legality grow in scope: articles of incorporation, anything tax related, or something like the DMCA, I personally would not continue without legal council.
Voting you up, up, up. Zipcar turns great profits in various locales, but they do not turn profit as a whole because they're investing heavily in their fleet.

s/fleet/'sales team' and s/Zipcar/Groupon and you should see why Groupon isn't profitable yet.
Assuming that authoritative sites, at least, don't abuse these schemas, this will help all search engines and data mining/nlp researchers build better models. The biggest gain isn't quick view of search results, it's that now search results will be better in general because Google et al will now understand if a page is really about a person and in many cases, who specifically it is about to point out a specific example.

Information extraction, just got that much easier. Hello, baby semantic web.
Yet another reason why replacing general purpose computers with locked down appliances would be extremely bad for freedom and innovation.
Can we have a Chrome version, pretty please?
Why is the growth of that database over 2 years so flat? What exactly will they do to actually make money from that database that they haven't done yet?
I'm sorry; but that's a completely ridiculous conclusion to draw from reading that they have been losing tremendous amounts of money.

Staying ahead of competition means nothing if you don't have a strong plan to become a profitable business.
That's a strange thing to say, because Krugman thinks they aren't 'printing' enough money. He says this repeatedly. (He also thinks there are additional, more radical changes that would be more effective, so he can come off as critical of QE because it's not enough.)
I'm sure this is fine, but in general I'd want to be sure that anything touching the wallet.dat is safe. Keeping a liquid store of value on one's pc opens it up to new malicious apps knowing exactly what to target. A major client-side security breach would look really bad for bitcoin.
SEEKING FREELANCER

Las Vegas, Nevada USA

Remote work is fine

Need someone that care about my broken FaceBook game and is not just doing the work for the money i pay them.

The work requires a RoR programmer with FaceBook experience.

We can negotiate a pay rate based on your experience and performance.

If you're interested, you can take a look at the patient here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=107717989269...

Thank you.
Web font hosting services - An Overview
PowerPoint and other presentation apps are naturals for touch. A lot of the stuff our engineers present in SolidWorks would be much easier done with a touchscreen.

The actual document/drawing creation lends itself to a tradional keyboard/mouse UI, but presentation is more intuitive when you can touch the screen and drag or rotate/enlarge an object with your fingers.
This is a purely defensive act to keep some company from producing a device that blocks Apple devices, but they can still make one for WebOS/Blackberry/Android/WP7.They're doing it to prevent someone else from producing/selling a similar device.
Start-up Offers New Hires $10,000, and All the Accoutrements of Hipsterdom
You have stated the point sarcastically but thereby revealed the truth of the point you're responding to.
Just mind-boggling. In Canada at least the advertising budget is just monstrous. Their ads are everywhere!