skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lesson learned here isn't that FeeFighters fucked up their acquisition. It's that you should be especially wary building businesses that depend almost entirely on another startup.

Put another way, you should only use services that are pretty obviously going to stay around and aren't just a few years old with no solid track record.

A service may be perfect for your business to hook into, but is it really realistic to expect something like Samurai to stick around for 5-10 years?

EDIT: I would also say that yes, FeeFighters _did_ royally eff up the acquisition process in that they threw their customers under the bus. It lends credence to the idea that they probably had no customers to begin with.

Also, GroupOn is not the enemy here. They acquired technology, talent, whatever. It's in their best interest to negotiate terms that are favorable to GroupOn. If FeeFighters didn't go to bat for their current customers, why would GroupOn volunteer to take on that burden?
"How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog? They are not the exclusive owner of it, as they are with the name Google. However they claim the right to become that owner, by paying $185K to ICANN. Nowhere in their proposal is an offer to pay money to the people who created the idea that they would take over. And what if the creators aren't willing to sell it to them? permalink"

Dave - you own scripting.com. What gives you the right to control that? How is that any different? I can't use me.scripting.com without your approval. You didn't agree to letting anyone do that when you bought the domain for $x per year in fees. You didn't invent the word "scripting" you were just the one to get the domain back in 1995, right?

What gives anyone the right to own any domain name "news.com" or "boat.com" etc?

That said I am not a fan of the new TLD's but that's a separate issue.
He is talking about schools for childeren, not universities.
Funny, though - Were I in his position, I'd just sell the stock, pay the taxes and own whatever it was I wanted to own. Perhaps that says something about why I am not in his position.
I love posting speaker notes too. I did it for this one a bit ago; I think the notes helped people who were reading it. http://brenocon.com/IE%20lecture.pdf
To the algorithm they use in this study, it counts as a failure unless the company is public, which is my point here.

To investors, whether an investment is a success or a failure is indeterminate till the company either goes out of business or returns the capital invested.
Internet raises $150K for bullied bus monitor in one day
I would guess that the author is trying to show when they've deliberately overruled the cameras exposures settings.

So in the section on under exposure the exposure compensation gives an idea by how much the image was under exposed.

Which IMHO is useful to know.
You forgot 7.8 that has a significant set of features.
I hear lots of advice to founders about not wasting time with email. This may be good advice, but to be honest I'm not sure why somebody at an early stage startup that hasn't launched a product yet would get so much email?

Sure you may be negotiating with VCs/Suppliers etc (in which case you probably want to see those emails) but I don't get why you would have hundreds of people spamming your inbox every day?
FeeFighters didn't build Samurai. As I understand it, they acquired the team/project who did.
http://www.openvim.com is also a good web-based tutorial that I used when learning vim.
To be fair, KMS does stand for "Kernel mode switching" and is useful for things unrelated to X, such as Wayland.
OK, sorry. But it greatly increases the surface area, no?

Would you say it really isn't an issue?
Google Spreadsheet with Retina MacBook Pro order status
Does stuff like this make any one else think of "I cannot by played on record player X" from Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach?
This is very interesting. I mentor at both 500 Startups and i/o Ventures who have accelerator programs. I know a high percentage have gone on to funding, and a number of happy exits. (Not Instagram exits, but great first experiences for the founders). I can't speak if these are still the exception and not the norm though.
Half-baked.
Neither, really. We don't consider the information valuable in any way, but trying to anonymize and release it would be about 1000th on our list of priorities, and we are pretty busy.
Acta set to fail after Europe's trade committee votes against it
I hate the Metro UI. I hate the live tiles,I hate the way text seems to drift off the edge of the screen; I hate the way it looks, and navigating through it annoyed me. I've only ever seen it on a phone, though, so maybe a tablet would improve things.

I'm not a UI expert, so maybe I'm missing something awesome. I am, however, a user of consumer electronics, and as far as that qualifies me to comment, I think it looks like crap and would never buy a Metro UI based product.
Why use Click-Through Rate to calculate return? Cost Per Impression would make a lot more sense to me, since it is closer to how traditional advertising is measured.
Square open sources fdoc
Tour the Tomb of NASA’s First and Last Nuclear Reactor
Middle schoolers bully bus monitor, 68, with stream of profanity, jeers
A lot of people here complain of RSI and comment how the pedal helps solve that. I tried solving this by creating a keyboard layout especially for vim:

https://bitbucket.org/cheater/us_split.

It's just like us qwerty, just more ergonomic.
Encrypting and decrypting content with Java
Note: this post assumes Vim, not other implementations of VI

If you type fast, you don't want to have to spend time correcting for line estimations that are slightly off as a result of thinks like 20h. For navigation, just use forward slash to search and you'll land right where you want. It's also almost always faster to use f/F/t/T in conjunction with semicolon or comma for jumping to specific letters than using h or l. The # and * keys are also useful for jumping to words in a specific line. Failing all of /?fFtT#*, it's still going to be faster to use ^0$wWbBeE than hl unless you're one or two characters away from where you want to be. But you shouldn't even need to navigate much within lines, since text objects let you edit entire units of text, regardless of where the cursor is within those units. People who come from an emacs background (and use the default editing environment instead of evil) can't even imagine how powerful Vim is as a raw editor until they try it. I can only edit in emacs for long periods of time if I'm using evil to emulate vim's text objects.

See http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html if you're new to Vim
when I started using linux, I went through two phases. the first one was marked by knowing, generally, which commands to invoke from the command line to make the computer do what I want. I had very little idea of what was going on in the operating system and the userspace runtime, and it didn't matter because the creators of the OS and runtime were smart and the system behaved sensibly.

I thought I knew what was going on, I had this feeling that I was in control of the computer, but really I wasn't, I was just as much at the mercy of the operating system maintainers as I was when I ran Windows. If a command line program reported an error or crashed, the procedure to fix it was identical to the one on Windows: ask your friends, or search the Internet.

It was only after many years of doing system level programming that I was actually able to fix problems that the original tool creators did not anticipate.

I think many people park themselves in front of a command line for five minutes, "learn bash", and think "hooray I am in charge of the computer". You're not.
How do you DoS chrome?
Yeah, no kidding. I ended up with a merchant account with fusty old FirstData out of the ordeal. I look at FirstData and their portal, www.mymerchantoffice.com, in a whole new light now. It may suck, but I can expect it to suck consistently for years to come.

It also feels now like I should be vaulting cards with multiple vendors to avoid a single point of failure. As mentioned I went with Stripe, who are similarly green. I'm in the process of moving my merchant account over to Braintree. Also looking at WePay and Dwolla. Who else?
Nice post Ryan, and especially, nice use of Trello. Do you also have a Trello board for your Treehouse team or do you use just TeamGantt? It would be interesting to read a post about your tools at Treehouse.
> Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/09/10/its_bofh_disaster_re...
Replying to User Reviews on Google Play
Sadly, this happened in my town (Rochester, NY), but it's garnering national attention. If you feel so inclined, consider donating to give Karen a nice vacation / retirement: http://www.indiegogo.com/loveforkarenhklein

Surely none of our jobs are as shitty as that.
Helping you build beautiful, powerful, successful apps
While the idea sounds appealing, look what it's done to the medical industry. I'd hate for gaming to get into such a slog of expensive/long/only big company's can play industry.
I think this is a cool calculation, and the numbers seem pretty reasonable. One benefit from tshirts that isn't taken into account here is simple exposure -- even if someone who sees the shirt doesn't follow up on the company themselves, let alone become a user, they are at least more likely to remember and recall the name. (Coming from MIT, it seems like Palantir and Dropbox had a lot of success getting good word-of-mouth campaigns going because of their stylish shirts).

Also, quality does matter. An extra couple of dollars per shirt can make a disproportionately large increase in the number of times the shirt is worn.
http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1 (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.

I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?
So, who is the intended audience?
No, it's an article that lacks some (not that) advanced stuff.

A joke is more like "Knock, knock. Who's there?" etc.
Excellent point. We aren't traditional marketers and some of the terms are still newish to us. I will revisit the terminology of the article and update it.
How Will Microsoft's New Not-Yet-Priced Surface Tablet Compare to the iPad?
The Microsoft Guide to Error Messages
Winzip has Finally Gone Mobile
The people that will find this most useful are probably the same people who won't want to give you read/write access to their repos.
Quality is important. We thought about the "branding" aspect of the shirt and didn't have any idea on how to calculate it. Do you know of any resources to determine how to calculate brand value?
And the author was somehow able to conclude that YC and the two accelerators his firm invests in are all at the top.
It's an interesting methodology. Some thoughts:

(1) 12 times is way too low for number of wears. I'm probably extreme, but I've got tech shirts that could apply for a drivers license; I've easily worn some of them hundreds of times -- let's say every other week for the last 500+ weeks. (The older shirts are too worn thin/ragged to wear in public any more though.)

(2) I'm not sure CTR is going to be as high as an explicit ad. Clicking a link is a fairly low barrier, and still only gets a 0.14% conversion. CPC is probably the wrong model to apply; you might want to look at it as traditional advertising and apply a CPM. For what it's worth, I'd bet that your conversion rate would be higher than average since the visitor has already qualified themselves somewhat more than just a casual clickthrough.

(3) For all of the times I've worn those tech shirts, I can only recall a couple of times when someone has actually talked to me about one of the shirts. Once (a nice polo shirt with embroidered logo) I was asked if I worked for the company (which was somewhat well known) -- the answer was no. The other time was when a fan of the by-then defunct company mentioned on the shirt remarked that it was too bad the company had imploded.

(4) I've gotten free t-shirts that required very little engagement on my part with the company. E.g. rackspace sent me a shirt several years ago I think just for answering a survey; I've never been a customer. Definitely consider giving shirts to people who can actually talk about you if someone does ask about your company. IOW, the CPM on a "talking billboard" is worth more than on a static billboard.
> The section on metering is just plain wrong, true only for spot metering, which most of the people who read this beginners guide are not going to be using. For the people it actually targets its misleading to talk about which spot the camera is metering on.

That section was for people who were using camera phones with on screen touch focusing (the iPhone camera app also adjusts the exposure for the area where focus was selected). The section on dSLR spot focusing was to explain how to do that with dSLR's if you wanted to.

The next chapter on frame exposure settings goes over using exposure compensation.

Your only valid criticism is that the Aperture chapter's photo is poorly exposed.
It's a really interesting post - I think one market segment you gloss over is college students.

Some products will obviously be better suited to others than this, but a great example I saw recently was Dropbox. Dropbox were sponsoring a CS project fair at my alma matter which I stopped by at. They handed out t-shirts (quite nice ones) to everyone there.

For dropbox, college students represent both their potential customers and their potential talent pool. It can be a bit of a bun-fight to recruit the most talented graduates, and the more you can do to get your brand across the better. And of course, students are going to wear those t-shirts across campus, getting hundreds of eyeballs every day.

Not to stereotype college students, but they if they're anything like I was they like free stuff, hate doing laundry (so an extra t-shirt is appreciated), and spend lectures frequently googling random crap (like the name on the person's t-shirt next to you).

(PS: If anyone from Dropbox is reading this, I am very sad that my less than a year-old Dropbox t-shirt developed a hole in it. Subtle hint!)
I'm guessing you're talking about Dotcom and not Woz here? :)
Why do you need write access?
Aside from it not being ROI, I thought it was as good as any guess. What I was hoping for was a clever way of measuring some of the things you assumed.

I think what you calculated is called customer acquisition cost. ROI is how much you made from your investment in a given time, usually as a multiple of the investment -- sometimes it's quoted in time to breakeven.
As an excellent example of this: Consider "Monster". Both Monster Worldwide (e.g, Monster Jobs) and Monster Inc (e.g, Monster Cable) applied for the .monster TLD, and there's at least one other significant claimant to that brand who didn't apply for the TLD (Hansen Natural / Monster Beverage Company, makers of Monster Energy).

Hilariously, both Monster Worldwide and Monster Inc claimed in their applications that granting them the TLD would reduce user confusion:

Monster Worldwide (application #477):

> The proposed .monster gTLD has the following user experience goals: [...] Reduce the risk of Internet users being misled, believing and⁄or acting on erroneous, information about Monster Worldwide, its business partners and⁄or its products and services presented online by unauthorized 3rd parties

Monster Inc (application #271):

> Therefore, .monster gTLD will: [...] represent authenticity and assurance that the domain names are directly associated with Monster thus promoting user confidence...
I'll be the one voicing a contrarian opinion here.

vi and vim are holdbacks from the days of 300 to 9600 BAUD modems. A time when more sophisticated interfaces were prohibitive. Back in those days it wasn't too uncommon for people to actually write their own text editors. I wrote a few, mainly in Forth, as I would bring-up self-designed systems.

While I use VIM today when I have to I continue to think that in today's context these things are, well, ridiculous. There is no reason that the terminal can't switch modes on you and allow text editing with the same (or very similar) UI that traditional simple GUI editors provide.

The damn text box I am using in this browser to enter this comment is far more user-friendly than VIM. There is no reason for a modern terminal to continue to support something like VIM.

Put another way, I had editors running on 6502-based 2MHz clock (yes, 2 MEGA Hertz, not Giga) Forth machines that were far more user friendly than VIM or VI. We ought to have better tools today. In my opinion, there is no compelling reason to continue to promote something like VIM. Put a bullet in it already.

As for the hack. Lots of fun. But, geez, how fucked-up is an text editor that you have to come-up with a foot-switch to make it more usable?
That's kind of funny.

Still can't beat the original! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA
Idea: Form an accelerator for accelerators. SeedJerk.com is available.
So that you can embed it in all of your pages secretly and get users to switch from IE to pretty much any other browser that actually follows web standards for implementation.
This is the ideal solution. All the better if the presenter makes the online version more concise than the in-person presentation.
Given we both just posted within two minutes of each other about how great the Dropbox t-shirts are I think we can conclude it was quite the investment for them!
Isn't measuring by average valuation a little dissonant with how the valuations play out? If startup valuations follow a power law, and most of the money is made from a few successful exits, wouldn't it make more sense to judge incubators by say, their top 10%, while also showing the total number of startups for comparison?
I just discovered that FeeFighters got acquired due to this post. I'm so disappointed. This product does not belong at Groupon.

We've been emailing Sean recently to ask him about Samurai and I guess this explains the no response. I really loved what he was doing and sung the FeeFighters praises from the mountaintops whenever I could. I really wish that product had stuck around. All the info that they were producing on their blog was really just gold for businesses. The education they were giving on interchange plus pricing, etc, was really important (but I guess becoming less important now that places like Stripe are hiding all those complications behind their simple pricing).
Hmm. But isn't that getting at the point they're making here?
For normal domains, there's at least a well-defined process for registering, transferring, and disputing ownership. There's no equivalent for top-level domains, and changing the ownership of a TLD would be likely to cause disruption on a much wider scale than for a normally registered domain.
Its probably people trolling the internet users in those countries using an iframe because they couldn't replicate the crash or couldn't be bothered hosting it. Internet Explorer is still the main browser in China and Japan

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-CN-monthly-201105-201205
if my TV shut down every time i tried to watch one specific show and never any other time, i might blame that show, yes.

people should know the difference, but they don't.
Do Apple’s first iPhone ads ring a bell?
From Google's application for the .blog TLD (application #527):

> The purpose of the proposed gTLD, .blog, is to provide a dedicated Internet space where Google can continue to innovate on its Blogger offerings. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service.

So, yes -- it's just for Blogger.
This is only so we can read your private events. There is a public version (no write access) if you don’t want to give write access. If you don’t even have private repos, don’t bother ;)

Do note that the app doesn’t use it’s write privilege. (see https://github.com/EtienneLem/octofeed).
Eh?

.com is for companies. amazon.org or amazon.info might work.
The NTP Pool needs more servers
I experienced great customer service from FeeFighters prior to the acquisition, so in my experience it's not true that "FeeFighters didn't go to bat for their current customers."

The "enemy" to my mind is the chaos that results from not being transparent and kind.
Amazon DynamoDB - From the Super Bowl to WeatherBug
"I view many startup accelerators as startups themselves"

That is why they started the http://incubatorincubator.com/
Incubate your incubator...
That seems pretty myopic.

Let's say I run a coffee shop. I sell $3 cups of coffee, which is the market rate, but can't get any customers. I have no signage, don't advertise, and I'm rude to customers.

That's what a lot of companies are like - they don't treat recruitment as a core business, but as an annoying distraction (like doing taxes).

The best way to get a job is to cold call companies, or network. It's like if coffee shops with a customer acquisition strategy of "wait for people to find the shop by accident, then hope they invite their friends".
How we use PiCloud for computational science
There is 2 login buttons: One with write access and one without.
The damn text box I am using in this browser to enter this comment is far more user-friendly than VIM.

To the average user, sure; the text box is more friendly.

But that's not the point with vim. At all. Vim's design goals are speed and efficiency. To date, non-modal editors haven't come anywhere near vim in that regard.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-commercially-successf...
Those are some excellent points.

1. I totally agree. It is a variable and one that is in the spreadsheet.

2. I need to look into traditional CPM to understand how to calculate. I may revisit this post in the future using CPM as the calculation.
Wow. I guess Microsoft is still the pinata.

I write web-based software. Every day.

I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them.

Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do something stupid by manipulating the DOM the wrong way or some other funny thing. I fix it and keep going. Because breaking the browser is bad.

Want to report it to the vendor? Great. Fine. Making a website dedicated to the crash? Waaaay too much time on your hands.
This video was clearly taken by some of the kids involved. I'll bet they really regret posting it on the internet now. I guess they're young, but I'm often shocked with how little people think about the negative consequences to allowing a video you post to become publicly available on youtube.
"There's no equivalent for top-level domains"

There is. It's the process that's happening right now. Applying for a tld doesn't guarantee getting the tld. Now is the time to object. Paying $185,000+ doesn't guarantee getting the tld. Lastly the intellectual property constituency had a big role in all the rules and discussions of this which has been going on for many years now.