skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am currently participating in Startup Chile and I am very happy to be here.

It is important to note, however, that there are some things that have surprised many participants that I think should be made clearer.

This is not an accelerator program like Y Combinator or TechStars. There is less structure and support, for example no "Demo Day" to work towards. You also don't get a check made payable to your startup to relieve your short term cashflow concerns and allow you to focus completely on your product.

Startup Chile is more like what I imagine taking a government job as an "Entrepreneur in Residence" might be like. We earn points by actively working to give back to the community, each team is expected to earn a minimum number over the 6 months. In return we get fast tracked through the admin of moving to a new country (getting visas and social security numbers) and are given access to a $40K budget to reimburse most, but not all, of our expenses.

You should expect to spend a couple of days a month working through the (bureaucratic) government reimbursement process and organizing / participating in community activities.

A few notes on the reimbursement process:

1) You have to spend money on things before you can get it back, and have to pay off any payments made by credit card before you get reimbursed.

2) You will probably need to put in around $10K so you have cashflow allowing you to spend the $40K within the 6 months allowed.

3) There are lots of rules restricting what can and can't be reimbursed. You need to make sure you understand all the terms and conditions before you spend any cash.

4) There are limitations on some forms of spending, for example:
a) You will need to get 3 competing quotes before spending more than $5K.
b) You will need to ask permission in advance of booking travel / events and they won't be reimbursed until after you have taken the trip / attended the event.

5) You will only ever get 90% of what you spend reimbursed. So $44k = $40k.

6) The complexity of the system means that there are inconsistencies between startups on what gets reimbursed and what does not.

It saddens me to say this but you shouldn't expect to have your mind blown by the quality of the startups here. There's lots of talking and not enough shipping. Unless contacts in Latin America are critical to your business, Startup Chile will not accelerate your startup any more than other forms of cash.

tl;dr: Apply to Startup Chile for the experience of living in another country amongst a community of ambitious people from around the world. Bring lots of money with you.
Only because this is HN where we're all picky:
http://begthequestion.info/
One hundred and fifty names (err, anons) should be easy enough to rustle up on 4chan for a petition to... well, whatever the meme of the week on 4chan is.

I googled "white house petitions free republic" to see whether the freepers were planning anything, but so far they haven't got past the "They'll harvest my IP address" paranoia stage.

I'm sure that conservative activists will get wind of this eventually. If there isn't a serious competition for the most-signed petition between "Legalize pot, man" and "Make Ron Paul President" by this time next week then I'll be suspicious that they're deleting things they don't like.
>> Groupon's business-professor cofounder, Eric Lefkofsky, has dumped about $382 million of his shares in the prior private financings.

It's important to know what percentage of his total shares he dumped to form an opinion on this.
The way you typically record this is start time, end time, and IP assigned. It's still not enough to identify what sites or traffic was visited, but when you get a spam email forwarded to you by your upstream provider, it's enough to identify a customer.
Business Insider: Good or Bad?
Indeed. You were among the few skeptics when Goupon rejected Google's buyout offer, and even you predicted it would take 2 years for the irrational exuberance to fade: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967975

On the plus side, the company seems to be creating massive consumer surplus; Mrs. Browl seems to do half her shopping through Groupon. At this stage, the company doesn't look to be doing any worse than Bank of America or the Eurozone, so I guess they'll stagger on for a while yet.

Maybe I'll buy a few shares in the IPO. If I have kids and they ask why I won't buy them a car, I can pull out the share certificates and start waffling about the Dark Days of Great Recession until they get bored and take a bus.
Why not make it available to everybody?

There's a lot of data mining talent in academia, but there's also a lot of us in the "real world" who follow what they do closely and add our own special twists because we've been doing data analysis for decades rather than teaching about it for decades.

Why keep the data under wraps? I can't see the data being all that valuable to Yelp's competitors, unless somebody wants to make a niche out of have stale data about university towns.
No, in 2010 they spent $263M on customer acquisition, and only $233M on everything else (rent, servers, employees, bonuses). [1]

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...
OTOH, it worked great for posterous.
Thank you! The 0.5.4 comparison point is what I believe he was presenting at OSCON. That's a major improvement since then!
Here's a prediction:
Since facebook "senior executives" are so fond of central planning, i.e., personally picking winners and losers for kickbacks, instead of creating a level playing field and letting the users pick the best services, its very likely that facebook will suffer the same fate as other centrally planned entities...viz., run into the calculation problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem). They'll make one big miscalculation that will be the end of it. The most obvious miscalculation is mismanaging security, letting in a potent virus that takes down all or enough of facebook's servers.
More details on the "faster than the speed of light" neutrinos
How long will it take for this to be at the top of HN?
No, Google is still only likely interested in Groupon's market, which they're going to get now for much less than $6B.
It is kind of entertaining watching Groupon slowly implode...
Agreed. It's certainly not unheard of, or even necessarily unsavory, for founders and early-stage investors to take some profit off the table in later financing rounds. Since Groupon received HUGE financing prior to IPO, taking $382mm out might not have amounted to a giant percentage. Then again, it may have. But the percentage is indeed the more interesting figure.
Ontology vs. Taxonomy « Brian's Blog
Big-ups to you for knowingly launching a half-baked, half-assed product. Judging by the number of "hackers" you've inspired here, I feel great knowing that the main goal nowadays is to simply set the bar lower. Maybe even stick some ads on it if you're looking for other ways to "improve" it.
Perhaps, but this is easy to say now.

You would likely call them fools for leaving $12 billion on the table had they taken the $8
Counting the amount of money your customers pay you as "revenue" is not a bullshit metric.

Amazon books revenue when someone orders a product, even if that product is "fulfilled by" a different merchant behind the scenes. Some people think they shouldn't be able to count that as revenue. Intelligent accountants disagree with one another.

Accounting is hard. It's rarely black and white. Anyone who was seriously interested in buying Groupon knew what their business model was (collect X from consumer, give X/2 to merchant) and this restatement won't change anyone's informed opinion.
To your second point - it is entirely possible that people are traveling abroad to get medical care that was developed here but not yet approved for the general public. That doesn't contradict their original point. I think they more than just hint that the problem is regulatory. The fact that investing in medtech has a late exit time period speaks to the regulatory hurdles and they point that out in the article.
No, I haven't really tried (because I'm not interested in it). I realize now that this guy probably practiced a lot before the initial posts on that forum thread, but I was just pointing out that his initial attempts are always significantly better than what my initial attempts would be.
Not only does it allow you to do it globally, it doesn't allow a user to log in and disable it on you either. If you have to have them turn it on in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys all it takes is someone to get in once to add in a key that doesn't require that any more.
http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ is a neat tool for staying motivated
I'm fairly confident most people could do most things if they really wanted to, but it seems like most people don't. This is partially a function of time—no one has the time to do everything in the world—but I do wonder about the people who seemingly don't do anything well, or who don't believe they can do anything well. It often seems like they haven't really tried.
Of course, the vast majority of them will be test apps, but it's still an interesting metric of the interest in both platforms. Even if Heroku makes it super easy, creating an app still involves at least creating an account with them, installing their command-line stuff, etc.
Santiago is inland. Valpariso is a 2.5 hour drive away.
Valve wanted to punish him for crimes he commited. HL2 was a big deal.

As for the magnitude of what Valve was seeking? Among other things, they were probably scared; not every hacker is a friendly, innocent curious kid working alone. They should have taken his word for it? Hah, since when is it a good idea to trust criminals?
Not only that, this is a terrible mistake by the SEC. Groupon should count total receipts as revenue, that way shareholders can see the average merchant split across periods. It is deceptive to report net-revenue as gross revenue. The old way is far more transparent.

Not the first stupid thing the SEC has ever done.
A few friends of mine built something similar. Loaded the USDA nutrition database in a dropdown, and scaled 24 vitamins, nutrients, calories, etc by recommended daily intake:

http://exposedata.com/intake/foodpick.html (takes a minute to load)

Many people have told me an added layer of discovering foods with particular nutritional qualities (filtering, sorting) would be very appealing. A recommendation engine for food.

If you're looking to hack on the dataset, check out this JSON version:

http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database
Agreed. Especially because these replies so seldom make an argument: they rarely say, "this shouldn't be on Hacker News for well-considered reasons x, y, and z." They (usually) just make assumptions about what should or shouldn't be on HN.
If the phrase is misused 9 times out of 10, then redefine it. That's the hacker way.
Massive congratulations on launching - and it's a great, interesting idea as well (I'd help test it out for you, but I'm in the UK).

Like a lot of people have said, the pricing should be clear without having to watch the video. Personally, I think the graphic at the top looks great, but I'm not 100% sold on the video - there's something about it that doesn't seem overly professional (sorry). I might be the only one that thinks that, but if not - you could potentially try to get the information you need to say put into a similar graphic as the one you have at the top, rather than have people watch the video at all?

Good luck!
Why not just a separate field for the address?
This is not how it works. Cut ties and try another recruiter or add your name to the HN contractors list and see what shakes out. Here that link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs..., etc.

Also, I've had good experiences with Curtis.Weigel@CyberCoders.com.
> you'll need to be associated with an academic institution to qualify for access
Jake Gold is "staunch". After 4 years, no longer anonymous on Hacker News.
"Where does their money go?"

Multiple Superbowl commercials starring famous people don't come cheap, I would imagine.. and that is one of the ways Groupon has been trying to "party like it's 1999", so to speak.
IMHO, the Nutrition Information box is actually a shining example of good design already. It is very, very legible and has a clear information hierarchy.
So you are saying that even if no money goes to amazon, they book revenue?
"Previously, when it sold a restaurant gift certificate for $10, for instance, it would book the full amount, even though a portion went to the business owner."

I keep trying to think of something to say about this. I'm speechless.

What else do you need to know to accept that these guys are dishonest?
I guess Groupons collapse would actually make a pretty neat movie
Russia believes U.S., Israel behind Iran worm attack: official
Also, I can't help but wonder if the fallacy was named based on some colloquialism to begin with.
Any idea if this app will handle stripe in the near future?

After a lot of initial enthusiasm I don't hear any mention of stripe in payment threads any longer. I was thinking of using it but haven't yet had the time to dig in. If not, perhaps this app would be helpful to look at for implementation strategy?
Here's a post that encapsulates his progress
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1789531&...
Very impressive stuff. His work is reminiscent of some of the best stuff I see in my charcoal classes at RISD.

A very important thing worth noting is he switched from mostly digital art to completely traditional; there is just no matching with a tablet/mouse what one can do with real materials.
Definitely passes the geeky test :-)
Shadenfreude at its best
Flooring in Singapore
I had a strong hunch back in February and I'm glad I blogged it for once because it might well be coming true(!): http://peterc.org/blog/2011/381-michael-arringtons-dreams-of...
It's amazing to me how far Groupon has fallen recently. I'm curious to see if investors file lawsuits against the founders for misappropriation of funds given that the founders took so much money off the table.
If we redefine everything based on what 9 out of 10 people do, what will the 1 out of 10 do that are trying to communicate effectively using precise terminology that wait... no longer exists for the concept they're trying to convey.
Due to ClojureScript I have been going about learning Clojure the past few weeks. For anyone in a similar boat found a fun little site http://4clojure.com/ that teaches you Clojure by coding on the website which is pretty cool.
Don't make me pick a unique username ever again
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I think the email signup actually works really well in this case, since it's not actually presented as 'email to signup,' the whole product is just 'send an email and have it turned into a physical card.'

As a user, you don't actually have to think about the drudgery of entering your password twice and pulling out your credit card until after you've already kinda committed to sending a card by actually writing it.

And it works pretty nicely as a really simple asynchronous interface. Instead of watching an animated gif spin while the proof of your card is generated, you just get something to aprove in your email.
The new food labelling in the UK is based on a traffic light principle and, imho seems to be clearer: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44434000/jpg/_44434134...

The problem with this exaple is that it's hard to see quickly what the key points are, since prominence is automatically given to higher scores, whether they're good or bad.
Perhaps my one-word comment was an insufficient indicator of my sarcasm. 't'was a joke, good sir.
El Uso de las Redes Sociales para Ganar Dinero en Internet
> the top 20 most upvoted articles of all time

I don't think that's an accurate list, as it excludes [dead]ed articles. Zed Shaw's "Programming, Motherfucker" received 870 upvotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355427
This IPO is looking more and more like a scam.
Wasn't there a post a few months back claiming the current tch market wasn't a bubble because during the last bubble firms bent over backwards to claim revenue and now they don't?
Haven't read the preso yet but I just wanted to chime in and say that I love ZeroMQ - it's one of those simple libs that are so cool you want to run out and build something with it the moment you see a four line example.

I've used it to build some cool stuff, and can't wait to use it more often.
> existing drug companies have no real incentive to do serious innovation

This is just massively ignorant. Who do you think funds drug research now? Not just the initial 'this substance looks kind of interesting', but 'we have to get this specific drug from the concept stage through FDA approval'.
On the contrary, nuance matters.
You are right in that contacting people was easier via the postal service that via the Internet.

BTW, my intent was not to discourage sendwrite.com, but to see if any lesson can be learned from the earlier attempts and avoid those issues. One of the issues I can see is charging small amounts (micro-transactions) for occasional use...it seems like it would be hard to make money that way. But I can see them doing well if they provide choices of stationery, providing a hard-written service, etc for a monthly subscription for people who do have a constant need for such services.
NPR Marketplace report may have figured out why Netflix split in two
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Fair enough. Per AllthingsD [1], Andrew Mason has sold about 4 million shares, for $27 million. Per the latest S-1 [2], it appears Mason retains about 23.5 million shares, so he's sold about 15% of his earlier stake.

Eric Lefkofksy has sold (through related entities jointly owned with his wife) about 32 million shares, for $382 million. From the latest S-1, it appears he and his LLCs retain about 129 million shares, so he's sold about 20% of his earlier holdings.

Interestingly, Groupon also paid out about $27 million in dividends in 2009.

Mason diversifying away from Groupon makes good sense, without sending much of a negative signal, as his net worth was probably 99%+ in Groupon before the 2009 dividend and then later stock sales. Lefkofsky was already very wealthy (and thus presumably diversified) from other ventures, so his sales are a stronger signal that he thinks other investments are more promising.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20110602/where-did-groupons-billion-do...

[2] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...
I understood it as, money goes to Amazon but then it immediately moves to the merchant. Showing the money as a revenue then eventually an expense. They probably hold that revenue for a certain financial period and write the expense in another. IANAA.
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Learn from our mistakes what not to do when you hire a contractor on Elance.
There is no real need to use app engine anymore.

Just use Heroku with MongoDB for Ruby On Rails deployment. :)
+ Portugal: 2
Who is in charge? A business professor who lectures sometimes at the U of Chicago Booth business school.
LeafLabs puts Python on their Arduino-compatible ARM board
I've designed my IAP such that form the moment transaction is paid till the moment it is confirmed it is "tentatively accepted", and the app works as if it was truly accepted. Should the verification later fail, the "tentatively accepted" will turn into "failed" and the related functionality will cease to work later on.

Payment systems outages like this are inevitable, and design a billing system without handling outages gracefully is just inviting trouble.

On a related note, I am open to licensing the tech (both iOS code and the backend server) to anyone who is interested.
The Tail that Wags the Dog - The Trouble with Focus Groups
Simple CGI hack instantly improves classic movies
For those of you who are thinking about applying to IK12's next batch, I strongly encourage you to do so. Geoff, Tim and Alan are great guys who really care about education and bring a wealth of experience to advise you with.
Honest question: Why are you speechless? Did you read the S-1? They always documented how much they paid out to businesses.

Yes, calling all $10 revenue is disingenuous, but this accounting change doesn't effect their profitability (or lack thereof)
It won't matter that they can't communicate, since they will have been marginalized as pedants.
A past discussion that seems to be playing out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2980323
Trust Issues - The Case of the Thousand-year Trust
I wonder if it's almost as if in some cases Americans subsidize medical innovation for the rest of the world. We pay the price for the new tech and while our system for whatever reasons keeps prices high, when it's time to sell the tech to other countries the price ends up being lower and so ironically people are going to other countries to get American-made treatments.
The site seems to be under a lot of load. In case anyone (like me) is having trouble viewing the images, I wrote a quick script to scrape the images:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/paintings.tar

The naming format is "page_X_image_X.jpg".

EDIT:

Here's a video slideshow of the images:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/Paintings.mov
http://vimeo.com/29510470
If Bing:

(1) gets another 4% from Google over the next year due to IE defaults and advertising;

(2) gets another 2-4% from the FB deal;

(3) signs a deal with Apple to become default on iOS (2/3 of mobile = 5%+) and desktop Safari (4%+).

That could potentially put them around the same market share as Google. None of those propositions are crazy either.
A simple but seductive business model, and one whose utility is seen on here regularly...not to mention an impressive domain acquisition. Lots of luck!
Also provide attractiveness as a 3rd axis... That would give a much better picture
Gov. Jerry Brown signs Amazon sales-tax bill
Starhawk - In Space (Combat Trailer)
Bing launches daily deals aggregator (Yipit competitor)
They went for the two in the bush when they had one in the hand. It's one thing to reject $60K when you could go for $200K. It's another to reject $6B to hope for $20B. Even though the ratios are the same, the maximum downside of each is considerably different.

Or, as others have speculated, Google got a look at their books and wouldn't touch it with a ten-and-a-half foot pole; to save face, Groupon claims to not be interested in the offer.
Additional security blogs regarding this vulnerability:

http://hackersmag.blogspot.com/2011/09/beast-beating-ssl-tls...

http://www.phonefactor.com/blog/slaying-beast-mitigating-the...

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/man-in-the-mid...

Some comments: Appears RC4 is not FIPS approved if you need to do government work. Also, not all sites are RC4 compatible.
If they take in the full amount and then pay some percentage of it to the supplier, isn't that just treating it as "cost of goods sold" the way you would account for a normal reselling arrangement like retail, wholesaling, etc.?

I can see why the SEC might want them to change it, but it's not obvious to me that the only way you could come to this type of accounting is dishonesty. Am I missing something?
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Getting The Most Impact From Your Blogging Efforts
Thanks, you just saved me from a chore. although I've bought three mails, I have one I had to send, I am happy to pay $5 to send one. Make it so that I can upload PDF's or choose paper stock, I, and probably many other designers will be waiting in line for your service.
What laptop can you buy for half the price of MacBook Pro that has the same feature set? Especially the giant multitouch pad?