skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the best and most damning analyses of Groupon I've seen yet, which is kinda surprising coming from TC but I guess it is a guest post.

The biggest parts of this are the account risk, the needing to grow revenue to pay existing liabilities (which is and should be a huge warning flag for any enterprise) and just how much room there is for someone to do this better.

My only fear is that a collapse of Groupon--which I actually see as a non unrealistic possibility--will taint other Internet/tech IPOs and, even worse, prompt the Federal government into more kneejerk regulation even stupider and more onerous than Sarbanes-Oxley.
I don't think the 30% has ever been an issue. The exclusivity is. Doubly so as Apple keeps changing the rules which if you're caught on the wrong side of can destroy your business.
I think you need better marketing, then.
I glanced over the page and didn't see anything that “wowed” me.
I think that's needed to justify the effort.
Intel's EFI: Hidden Threat to Computing Freedom? (2009)
The main question, if you really were to judge something like quality, is why older devs answer more questions.

Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions.

As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it, because it sure could be interesting
Ask HN:  How to make $100 today?
I decided to build a top ten list after reading James Altucher's How to be the Luckiest Person Alive ebook. I thought this would be a fun exercise, but I've only gotten to 9. So HN, how would you make $100 today?
New John Carmack Interview
OpenPhoto, a photo service for your S3 or Dropbox account
Ask HN: Why does mobile browsers have sucky support for mobile websites?
Have you noticed that mobile browsers have poor support for mobile formatted websites? I'm currently using Android and I notice that on mobile websites you can't adjust the font size and apply text reflow. Although mobile sites look better, it is often easier to read normal sites.
Ask HN: Burned Out. Is a sabbatical a good idea and will I ever work again?
Hi, I'm in my early 20s and based in the US. I started working at a big company in IT last year, and lately, I've become disillusioned with the work I'm doing and the people I'm working with. Since starting, I've slowly stopped working on personal projects, and can't seem do any real work on any of my ideas.

Getting up to go to work is starting to be a pain and I feel like I'm spending a quarter of my time worrying about office politics rather than getting any real work done. My productivity is approaching zero, and I can't even get myself to apply for other jobs when I get back home. I read the description of burnout from jacquesm and it hit me hard - almost all of it seemed true for me. A combination of burnout and depression and not enjoying what I'm working on is killing my passion and motivation. I don't even know if I'm mentally ready for another job.

I have around $10k saved up and instead of getting another job, I'm thinking of taking a 3 or 6 month sabbatical to reboot my career, explore East Asia and develop my skills. I imagine with expenses, I can get by with spending about $5000 if I live cheaply which I plan to do. I've had this idea brewing in my head for a while, but everyone I talk to thinks its crazy so I wanted to get some advice from HN.Note: I have no dependents or girlfriend and besides student loans, no real commitments.

What I fear is that once I return, I will not be able to get another job because employers will care about the resume gap. Who here has done something similar? If so: What were things you took into account before making the decision? What would you do to make the most of a sabbatical? What can I do to prepare the best for when I get back in terms of looking for a job / starting my own thing?

Thanks, really appreciate your recommendations and insights!
Is Freshbooks being a dick, or do we not care any more, since Apple decided to screw thousands of developers last WWDC.
May 13 Special: What Are You Afraid Of? – A Typographic Set
This typographic set is an illustration of all those things I am afraid of- bugs, snakes, malaria, you name it. Mostly, I let the shape of the letter determine what the subject would be, rather than the other way around. Although this started out simply as an experiment, I am very happy with how it all came together. They are all available on my site as desktop, mobile, and tablet wallpapers.
My guess is that the older developers have more time to comment and follow up. Plenty of times I have looked for solutions on stackoverflow, but have been too busy to post responses because of looming deadlines. This is like saying my grandparents would make for better farmers because they spend their whole day on Farmville.
Mashable as a citation... whatever next.

Define "competitor" and "popularity". It's all damn lies and statistics.

My old Windows tablet could be a competitor. Dell do a tablet Windows machine. Motorola do a hybrid device. Is an ebook reader a tablet? Is an iPod touch a tablet?

Perhaps people with iPads hammer web sites? Perhaps people without iPads don't? Perhaps some mobile browsers identify themselves as desktop ones?

There is no defined taxonomy to classify things in either.

It's all pirates vs global warming.
Also note the significant 34 y.o. bump from the legendary Jon Skeet [1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
The big Groupon question
Ask HN: Feedback on our landing page?
http://getgush.com/ In particular I'd love to hear feedback on the wording. Are you seeing some kind of value you'd like to sign up for? What do you think the product could be?

Much appreciated!
Tutorial on how to implement a new language (Brainf*ck) with Racket
I have my math book on my iPad (through Kindle), and this is the single biggest problem with it. It's hard to find your place in it.

In various places I've seen pieces of what may be a solution. Both Kindle and iBooks let you scoot through books using a slider. The Youtube app lets vary how fast you slide through a video by moving your finger away from the bar thingy. If we combine these, and show the current page on screen as you slide, you could get fairly intuitive skimming. Maybe.

I would also like a better bookmark interface.
{tl;dr} Define your assumptions. Capture data in an effort to verify those assumptions. Modify experiment or assumptions appropriately. Repeat. {/tl;dr}

There's a great answer I recent read on Quora which may help answer how to approach the design of your site. The thing that made the most impact here is being aware of the market your are entering. (http://www.quora.com/Internet-Startups/Should-I-focus-on-get...)

It's easy to argue which stage/market your product falls into, but I think you agree that the experience of your site is going to be the primary differentiator. (Experience Focus Stage)

Aside from the few tips in that thread, the next thing I would focus on is capturing data to verify your assumptions. Your assumption here are that the blog layout and distribution model is better than what's available elsewhere. (Right? If not, what ARE your assumptions/goals?) Custom analytic tools which let you capture custom events are helpful in verifying these things. You might setup a tool like MixPanel to capture key events your users are experiencing.

For example: Maybe you have a specific flow or funnel you're expecting users to take. Are they completing this flow? Where are they stopping? Are you staying on a specific page for very long?

I would also ask people who have never seen your site before to try using it. Watch what they do and ask them to share their thoughts out loud as they browse the site. Do they get the point of the site? Does your vocabulary used on the site confuse users?

Above all else, make sure you're investing your effort in the right things. You might not need to improve your UI. Your UX (user experience) may be hurting you more than the site's looks. The fact that you have a whole FAQ explaining your site's basic terminology is a bit concerning. (I know many of these things didn't make sense until I read your FAQ. How many users do you think will invest that sort of time?)

Follow up questions are welcome. Let me know if I should elaborate further.
Very interested to see how this plays out, because there's a faltering consensus around Groupon, and it's getting closer to their IPO.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/10/only-fool-inv...

It reminds me a little of when there were a few dissenting voices claiming the US housing market was due a correction and yet prices kept going up.
Almost every application ends up with the kind of bugs where you have two properties set on an object that are mutually exclusive, and you can do nothing but scratch your head and try to reproduce the steps that got you there.

I agree that managing state is important in any large application. I've studied formal machine but they have certain limitations - often a single module will have several different kind of states and some ad-hoc dependencies with the outside world.

Personally, really simple solutions have worked best for me.
A) Name your states and state-variables really well - appropriately naming or renaming a state can clarify a huge amount of code. Editors that allow automated renaming of variables are fabulous.
B) Add "choke-point" functions which guarantee a consistent state through each program "cycle" (each cycle of user interaction or whatever "main loop" a program has).
C) ASSERT, ASSERT, ASSERT. Even if you assert too much, it forces you to think about your code. It frustrates me that Ruby doesn't has a costless ASSERT even though a minimal-cost equivalent can be Jury-rigged in a line.
Right, we pay our waitstaff next to nothing in terms of hourly rate (it's well below minimum wage) and they make all of their money on tips. If a bill is $50 worth of food, you should tip the waiter on that, even if you got it with a Groupon that cost $25.

Waiters at higher-priced restaurants do make considerably more. Thus those restaurants are far more selective (a lot of waiters at, say, Fridays are new to the trade, not so at Mortons) and the waiters are better. Their jobs are more time-consuming too since there are more courses, wines, they're expected to be more knowledgeable about the ever changing menu, etc.
Right, but a "$2 off your next $20 order" coupon is much much different than a "$19 off your next $20 order" Groupon.
My favourite experiment with the CAN bus - these guys:

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf

"Even at speeds of up to 40 MPH on the runway, the attack packets had their intended effect, whether it was honking the horn, killing the engine, preventing the car from restarting, or blasting the heat. ... In particular, we were able to release the brakes and actually prevent our driver from braking; no amount of pressure on the brake pedal was able to activate the brakes. Even though we expected this effect, reversed it quickly, and had a safety mechanism in place, it was still a frightening experience for our driver."
Clickable http://getgush.com/
Leaflet printing
if you need cheap, quality leaflet printing, then you should give this company a go, I placed the order for leaflet printing yesterday and received them the very next day. Plus the quality is fantastic - Bonus!
There is a strong correlation between being a good developer and your ability to effectively educate other developers.
Hybrid (Native + Web) Mobile App Development • Part 1: The Motivation
First part in a series of articles that will talk about the hybrid approach to iOS app development. Suggestions/comments are welcome!
Best of Stack Exchange, every month
The average case isn't google, though, it's... well, some company which winds up going under or if really lucky maybe getting acquired and either way vanishes off the radar.

And heck, even if you had, would it be that life-changing? It'd be a moderately interesting cocktail party anecdote at best. And I say that as someone who is interested in this kind of stuff. For everyone else it'd probably be a fairly boring cocktail party anecdote.

Visiting a couple of guys in a small office really isn't that intrinsically exciting.
For any .Net people here, this is a great piece of kit:

http://code.google.com/p/stateless/
I think its one of those things where the real issue is if you have an answer at all. Of those ppl that have answers the quality of answers, I'd expect to be similar (across a population).
An Open Letter To Anyone Planning To Buy Into Groupon’s IPO
> So who was that on TV constantly boosting the idea and bringing it into the State of the Union address, etc?

Huh? The claim was that congress didn't approve the Iraq war. It did, several times. The above has nothing to do with that fact.

> Are you making the case that the Bush admin doesn't 1,000,000% own the Iraq war? Really?

Do you really think that Congress bears no responsibility for the votes that it takes?

> Just cause Congress got bullied into approving these things doesn't mean they weren't Bush initiatives.

Poor little congresscritters, can't stand up to that mean old moron Bush.

Obama hasn't varied from Bush's Iraq timetable at all. Is he also "bullied"? (As candidate Obama pointed out, President Obama could start withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan with 10 minutes after taking office. PO didn't.)
http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/
DadaDodo is a fairly old implementation that may be of interest.
Do it. I took 7 months off after working for 5 years at megacorp and getting burned out. Take the time off to revitalize yourself. Don't do any coding or programming for a month at least. I went to China and studied martial arts for a month, then came back and spent time in the SF night life and Burning Man crowd.

Then I started working at a startup, which was much much better then working at megacorp. Much less politics, much more freedom to do what you want, and you have much more impact. Less soul sucking :)
How to use Jpa Hibernate Lifecycle Events Feature
Having dealt with the local advertising model myself (restaurant virtual tours) I can testify how god damn hard it is to get money out of small business owners so the success of Groupon is a surprise to me.

From a consumer perspective I unsubscribed a few months ago as I really didnt want to hear about a Botox or Massage deal each and every morning. It was good for xmas presents I will admit but in my local area the variety of the offers was somewhat limited (and Its by no means a small town), I shouldnt imagine I will check the site until around mid December again.
These sorts of additions to the YC team provide a great example of how YC will scale its model. There's so much shared knowledge and know-how among the alumni and that's what will enable YC to create hundreds of companies a year without sacrificing quality.
or even if it is only one protein. gene also probably has role other than just encoding proteins.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=81+b-41+w%2B64+x%2B34+z...

β = 68, Δ = 553, φ = 158, μ = 231
What this really shows is that developers get better at answering technical questions with age. There is probably _some_ correlation to development skill, but the data doesn't demonstrate that. I'd expect developers to know more things as they get older, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better at answering questions. Not sure that makes them better at the development part.
I'd say LinkedIn is more social than Facebook. It certainly provides a useful service to it's users (both hiring and looking-to-be-hired).

It can do this because people care about where/what their friends and colleagues are working.
This move seems to indicate that the startups are having issues getting access/undivided attention from the 'senior' partners. It is great that ycombinator has become so successful but the value prop of it seems to be diminishing as it grows. If I wanted to collaborate with other founders there are plenty of meetup groups I could attend without giving up a large share of my company.
Does anyone believe that the promotion that Apple offers on average is worth two cents?

And what good is a marketplace with some of the worst discovery ever? I mean, there are now hundreds of thousands of apps. Finding high quality apps on the app store is like finding a needle in a Utah sized haystack.

I much rather do my own marketing, have a user download the app off my website or heck, Amazon (which actually has a decent recommendation engine).

And keeping junk out? Have you seen most of the apps? I mean the number of them that haven't been updated in years is staggering. The number that are essentially clones churned out by some make-an-app framework is ridiculous. The signal-to-noise ratio on the app store is awful.

Credit card processing? Not having to do anything is worth 4-5%.
Yes! If you need to refresh your mind, get a new perspective on what you are doing and what's important to you, and seek internal satisfaction, I think it's a great idea to take a sabbatical, or a long vacation of some sort.

Ignore the people who think it's crazy - they aren't walking in your shoes and feeling your malaise. Don't fear your return back to the workplace - in fact, I think spending time figuring out what's important to you and broadening your experiences and perspective should make you more interesting to prospective employers than if you trudged forward in a job that you have little zest for.

Keep a blog. Track your experiences. (In the old days, this would be a diary). Figure out what's meaningful to you. Expand your experiences - push your boundaries. This is your chance to rediscover what makes you tick and perhaps why you're doing what you're doing now. Or maybe that you actually want to do something else.
Apache votes to accept OpenOffice.org for incubation
Obama Cybersecurity Chief: Other Nations Key To Securing Cyberspace
EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite going open source with support available
Thanks for the response. Does it seem strange that they're being bullish about letting me review these policies prior to accepting? They've sent me all the benefit information: vacation, medical and dental, stock, etc. I feel like this last piece of information is equally as important when evaluating the offer.

As an analogy, the company I previously worked for did application development. It was their policy to release all source as part of the project, but that did not imply that we would never engage on a similar project in the future. After we priced, scoped, built and deployed a project, a client came back to us and requested we sign a non-compete and decline to work on any projects related to it. We replied that we would have been happy to, but would have significantly impacted the cost of the original project (eg, what is the cost of future revenues that we'd have to miss). The conversation stopped there.

To rephrase my additional question, is it unusual to ask to review policies related to confidentiality, non compete, non disclosure, non solicitation and other employee covenants?
Tips for getting the most out of startup conferences
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

--Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, 1982
Insightful article, but notice that the business model being criticized is in many ways well known (and successful): namely, that of book publishers.

When an author deals with a book publisher, he/she gives up some of their future revenues in exchange for cash in advance and publicity.

Likewise, when a local business deals with Groupon, they are giving up part of their revenue in exchange for upfront cash and publicity.

The main difference might be in the actual numbers (cash upfront, revenue share %, etc).

The risks pointed out remain, and are very real though.
I can testify how god damn hard it is to get money out of small business owners so the success of Groupon is a surprise to me.

Well, now we know how to get $62,500 out of a small business: Offer them $7,000 within about 5 days. This is the salient point of the article: Groupon is more than just a marketing vehicle, it has a financing angle to it that should be evaluated in terms of risk.
No, this is in addition to office hours with the regular partners. And we can tell if there's any shortage there, from the length of the office hour request queue, which at this moment has only 2 requests in it.
The only tedious part is typing it out into a linear solver like this one:

http://wims.unice.fr/wims/en_tool~linear~linsolver.en.html

Solution:
http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi?session=QW1E82D03B.1&...

Getting the numbers appears to be the easy part in figuring out the new company name.
As a counter example, twittermachine (or was it tweetingmachine) creator posted a little while ago that a simple theme from theme forest increased his conversions dramatically.

edit: http://tweetingmachine.com
First Chromebook Is Expensive To Make
Sure, but to a lesser degree than for Microsoft, it's not in Google's best interest to have ChromeOS apps ported to other platforms.
Apple Sued Over Use of iCloud Name
I was referring to not using the review section as a bug report area, something that happens, beta or not. Sorry for the confusion.
Based upon the mounting evidence about the condition of Groupon, cletus' fear "that a collapse of Groupon--which I actually see as a non unrealistic possibility--will taint other Internet/tech IPOs and, even worse, prompt the Federal government into more kneejerk regulation even stupider and more onerous than Sarbanes-Oxley." makes absolutely no sense.

Suggesting that a poorly performing companies weak IPO, or otherwise, will taint other IPOs and prompt regulations makes no sense whatsoever. For the health and vigor of the tech markets, Groupon's IPO should be a spectacular failure based upon the poor business model and weaker financial position.
The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow.

If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism". For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued off, is what I mean, if you are found to have used that in a hiring decision, for example.
In the US Groupon guarantees you'll be satisfied with your experience. If you didn't like the restaurant then tell Groupon and get your £18 back. This restaurant sounds like they did a very bad job of designing and executing their Groupon and it hopefully will end up costing them money and reputation.

Unless that policy isn't in place for Groupon in the UK?

http://www.groupon.com/groupon-promise
The part about how groupon will refund the price of the groupon if the business goes of out of business is interesting because Living Social specifically does not do that.
Interesting article and a well developed topic. As a latest survey says that Entrepreneurs Are Made, Not Born.
If you can put twenty quid in her hand, then you wouldn't be bothering using Groupon, would you?
I click on the X, and it gives me the option to block all stories coming form an App (as well as other options).

That being said, I remember the first time I discovered that. For the longest time, I just assumed it would remove only the post.

Odd.
After years of countless web apps and services hopping on the bandwagon of the perpetual beta, the potency of the term has become diluted. Users don't think of betas as experimental builds of software for testing purposes; they think of Gmail, which only shed its beta status as a formality two years ago with 150 million users.

Give them any path, even a tricky or expensive one, to obtain a beta of a sexy new mobile operating system and they will, expecting it to work as well as the other "betas" they've used online.
Union Square Ventures Leads $3 Million Round in Moot's Startup, Canvas