brendino's comments

It's related to the Dell - VMWare reverse merger. They have to raise cash to fund the merger.

A flash game I built in high school (about 7 years ago) went from an average of $30 per month on AdSense to $500 the next month, to $3,600 the month after that due to an unexpected surge in traffic for a keyword for which it ranked #1 on Google. The $3,600 month happened in May, and it has since dropped steadily to about $1,500 a month now. Regardless, it was a nice surprise since the game was just sitting there from when I spent a weekend building it a long time ago.

While the implementation of this would be pretty straightforward, the method signature you're asking for seems convoluted, in my opinion. Here's why:

- "add1" is not very descriptive of what the method actually does, since it adds one, but only sometimes. This title makes it sound like the method simply increments each value by one.

- When you say "if it is zero, do this, but if it is positive, do this...", this thinking creates a "secret handshake" in your code, so a new developer would have to read the method in depth to understand what it does in each case.

- If this method will have widespread use in your code for arrays, consider extending the array class with the method, so that you can call it directly on an instance of an array.

I propose you change the method signature to:

  increment_where_value_equals(value, options = {})

So you could call it like:

  increment_where_value_equals 1, { :direction => :forward, :limit => 2 }

or even like:

  increment_where_value_equals 1

While the implementation may get a little more complicated this way, you're making the method signature much more clear and descriptive, which will lead to better code overall.

The greenshoe increases the demand. MS placed a 38.00 bid with an enormous size, so if you were to look at the live feed, you would have seen something like: Bid: 38.00 x 9999999 Ask: 38.01 x 1234

Update: we ended up second place in the Ann Arbor Hacka2thon. GooseCast (ccgoose.com) took the top honors. Thanks for everyone's feedback so far!

For now we're pretty much only targeting the US (hence the zip code thing). We originally had browser geo-location, but disabled that for a few reasons. We will re-enable it soon.

Actually, that's already a feature! In the bottom left you can specify a date range.

FYI - Please click 'allow' when your browser prompts for geo-location. If you don't see many events around you, log in with Facebook and the system will fetch publicly-available events that are connected to your and your friends.

This has huge implications - imagine every "thing" having a freely-available API. Combine that with predictive analytics and we can come really close to predicting the future.

What an incredible idea! This can become even more valuable if ifttt can open its platform to enable outside developers to create and distribute custom action blocks and triggers for end users (like an app store of ifttt triggers and action blocks).

Furthermore, I can see this transitioning into "phsyical" applications (think "The Internet of Things"). For example, OnStar can connect car sensors to send a text message when your car leaves your garage.

Complex pricing schemes tend to be a sign of a monopoly or oligopoly. The sellers of the market use these complex pricing schemes to skim off as much consumer surplus as possible.

In my opinion, the best way to disrupt an oligopoly or monopoly is to create a product that makes the original offering irrelevant. Square is doing just that - making the credit card processing industry irrelevant with simple technology and pricing.

This concept can even be taken further - rather than testing just a name, use AdWords to test your entire product before even building it.

For example, if you are thinking of opening an online business selling widgets, you can build a test website and advertise it using AdWords. Provide a fake checkout process, but rather than processing credit cards, just inform your users that your product is not yet available (at a point in the workflow where it's clear they intend to pay already). Then, with a quick calculation on the data, you have a rough idea of how profitable your business will be upon launch.

Obviously, it's not a perfect model, but still a very nice way to gather market data for cheap before you invest the time and money to build anything.

It appears Web Intents has taken the time-tested concept of an enterprise service bus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus) and used it in a non-enterprise application - namely social networking / bookmarking.

Here's a few ways that makes this promising:

- Using a common set of standard services makes communication application-agnostic

- It reduces dependencies across applications - applications can change, but the services remain the same

- Innovation will be driven by features, not by adoption of one application's API vs. another application's API - this plays into Google's philosophy that innovation should ultimately prevail

Interesting stuff.

Here's some validation of the "boring" concept:

http://techcrunch.com/enterprise/

It's amazing to see how these M&A transactions pale in comparison to what's going on in the consumer-oriented space.

This article seems to make a lot of sweeping negative generalizations about MBA students. I agree with the author's obvious argument that people who lack domain experience and who focus on short-term outcomes should not be in-charge of the mentioned businesses. But what about MBAs who do have domain experience? Or MBAs with backgrounds in engineering? I'm sorry, but a handful of anecdotes is not enough to support the author's argument here.

This article fails to bring several factors into its economic model. It should be about incentives and demand elasticity here - the "steepness" of the demand curve.

According to the article, he recieves $0.35 from a Kindle sale, and ~$2 from a traditional book sale. In this case, he would need to sell (2/0.35) = 5.7 times as many Kindle books as traditional books to be neutral between the options. To get the equivalent incentive from traditional books, he would need to sell ~175,000 traditional books.

Since he offers both physical and Kindle editions for his books, the question becomes, did ~175,000 customers purchase the Kindle book who normally would have purchased the physical book? Probably not, IMO.

So basically, it sounds like Locke actually knows what he's doing - he's driven by monetary incentives and his arrangement has more-or-less maximized his proceeds.

That's a good point - enterprise software is meant to be customized to a business, so maintaining a strong repository of documentation is difficult, if not impossible.

However, I've noticed that even some of the core functionality is pretty light on documentation as well (and it is typically written in German-English).

SAP's lack of openness is a huge problem, and will continue to hinder its development. Not only does the license cost millions of dollars, but then the enterprise that purchases it has to hire dozens to hundreds of expensive consultants to actually implement the behemoth. And if the company wants to actually understand how to use the system, they need to invest in expensive training sessions because any sort of public documentation (or documentation shipped with the system) is far too vague to actually provide usefulness.

I tend to think that the lack of openness is done on purpose - that is, SAP depends on its consulting partners to help sell its software, so they need an incentive to sell it (not to mention, SAP has a consultancy itself).

SAP has tried to evolve recently with new developments like HANA (mentioned in the article) and MII (tool used to connect manufacturing systems and provide real-time KPI dashboards), but without a more-open ecosystem that enables learning and innovation, it will continue to stagnate as modern technology overtakes it.

The biggest hindrance preventing companies from ditching SAP for a modern system is the fact that SAP is so complex and can handle so many business scenarios. Although it stands behind the curve in terms of technological innovation, it has decades of business specific functionality built into the system. That's the main reason, in my opinion, for why enterprises haven't jumped ship.

It's funny you say that - there's a lot of Kool-Aid drinking that goes on at Accenture (or any other corporate consulting brand for that matter). Re-reading my post, it does look a bit sales-ish.

Regardless, from my experience, there are quite a few people in the company with cult-like loyalty. The majority, however, (myself included) maintain a pretty healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism.

As a current Analyst (1 year out of college now) at Accenture, I have a few points to add:

Positives:

- Accenture greatly helps develop one's people skills and networking skills which can help prepare you for a startup. Building these skills in college is difficult, so jumping into a professional setting right after college helps.

- The work enables you to understand real-world problems that clients are facing, so you have a better base of ideas upon which you can launch a startup (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634665)

- In working with enterprise software, you gain an appreciation of how complex (and how messed-up) some of this software can be. Enterprise software is incredibly different from typical software created for the masses in some cases. It is also rarely user-friendly. Compared to consumer software, enterprise software has much less documentation and support available, so you learn to figure things out with missing information.

Negatives (or "Deltas" in Accenture terminology):

- The work is not always interesting and engaging. Since it's consulting, you sometimes have to work on the boring, but necessary things, and to deal with several levels of managers. Furthermore, working for someone else (vs. your own startup) makes inspiration or dedication hard to summon at times.

- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.

- Working hours are inflexible and excessive. Management sets the expectation that you must be in the office and working before the client arrives and long after the client leaves. This leaves little room for work-life balance, which gets very frustrating. On a positive note, however, everyone at Accenture in the consulting workforce (in the US at least) gets five weeks of paid time off per year (on an accrual basis).

Overall, Accenture is helping my professional growth and positioning me to later start my own startup company. It's certainly a worthwhile experience and a useful precursor to entreprenurialism.