rjett

All privacy concerns aside, Facebook has had declining utility to me (and my loved ones) over the last few years, which has translated into less and less use by everyone in my network. My news feed from three to five years ago was much more diverse in terms of content and number of people posting. Today, every other post is an ad, and in between are the posts of the remaining power users in my network. I'm not sure if anyone else has had this experience, but I would label the power users as the least common denominators in my network. Thus, my news feed has come to resemble a trashy tabloid magazine more so than a collection of the goings-ons of my network of friends. In my mind's eye, the Facebook ecosystem is like a corrupt, dangerous, almost comic book-like city: A lot of good people may still live there but they only occasionally peak out of the blinds from the protection of their homes and they rarely participate in the community. The streets are filled with trash, and the people running freely on the streets are lunatics and crooked cops. But maybe that's just my wild, childish imagination. I'm a much heavier user of instagram these days, which is probably just like a movie set with sunny skies built within this corrupt ecosystem of Facebook.

A few thoughts: 1. Five star rating systems by themselves contain such little information that they are basically pointless. If there's a critical mass of ratings, then they can be somewhat useful. Yelp is a 5 star system, but without the ability to skim a handful of reviews written by other users, it probably wouldn't be nearly as useful. 2. The system presented in this post might work ok for one's personal ecosystem, but as soon as I strayed into a new city where my contacts were 0 to a few, the utility of this service would rapidly decline. 3. For all their pitfalls, Yelp and Google reviews do a decent enough job at enabling discovery, especially when users take into account the amount of reviews for an establishment, the specific area they're searching in, and the specific search term they've entered. Sure, there are fake reviews, astroturfers, and gaming going on, but it's not too hard for a trained eye to filter these things out.

I have a friend who quit his day job working as a developer for a design agency. He now makes handcrafted leather products for men because he likes the satisfaction of working with his hands on physical products. Incidentally, Horween supplies all his materials. As you would expect from reading the article, it's quality stuff. If you're in the market for some cool products that will last a lifetime, check out starkmade.com.

I'll take a model that iterates often, with higher likelihood of variance in ideology, over one that optimizes for moderation at the expense of gridlock.

For real. Assuming monthly credit charges are evenly distributed from month to month and you max out your allowed credit charges under the flat rate plan, you effective rate is 1.32%. Anything charged in addition to this gets charged at the standard 2.75%. So please tell me how a flat 2.75% is better for the customer? Whoever wrote this press release for Square went about it the wrong way.

Amen! Kopi Luwak has the inherent marketing advantage of describing the production process in a one sentence, narrative hook that everyone understands. Even non coffee drinkers know about "that coffee where the weasel poops it out."

That aside, modern experimental coffee processing techniques, varietal classifications, and terroir's effect on taste and quality is far more interesting and productive with regards to pushing the envelope for specialty coffee.

Actually, we tried to create some buzz on social media even before opening, but I'm unsure how much this actually drove traffic in those first days. I think your friend will figure out pretty quickly that at first, opening a brick and mortar [without any previous brand history] is very much about the location. The early adopters will be folks from the neighborhood. In some respects, predicting early traffic for a coffee shop is what I would imagine it to be like if you were looking at good locations for a gas station. Since there's nothing too novel about the _concept_ of a coffee shop, before people try you out, they're going to judge you by what part of town you're in, how easy it is to park, and other logistical factors. Once you get people in the door, that's where you need to start differentiating yourself. If you can impress your first customers, get them talking, and stay consistent, the draw of the shop will expand outside of the neighborhood. Once you have a reputation, people will overcome logistical hurdles to try you out. From there, it's all about continuing to create positive experiences for your customers and they will keep talking about you.

That's great! Compliments like this are the real payoff when you open a coffee shop.

While this article was noncommittal in offering up the reasons for HB's success, the pleasant sales experience was reiterated throughout the article. THIS IS HUGE IN RETAIL.

As of this coming Saturday, I'll be a year into operating a coffee shop I opened with two friends. Like HB, my shop has exceeded my expectations in the first year. FWIW, here are my observations on success: If you have the best sales experience in town coupled with a great, consistent product, people will talk about you. I monitor every mention of keywords related to our shop on twitter, Facebook, yelp, instagram, tumblr, etc and after a year in operation, it's pretty clear that people value the attitude [or lack thereof] of my employees, our approachability, the quality and consistency of our product, and the beauty of our shop. In combination, these things help create and maintain a lot of positive buzz about the shop. Buzz begets buzz too. We've never once paid for advertising and instead let word of mouth and good product do the talking. First there were just tweets, Facebook mentions, and word of mouth. Then bloggers started writing about us. Then we had local press do a few stories on us. With time, all this turned into positive reputation and people outside of the city began to mention us. Recently we've received national press. We also just climbed atop the #1 ranking in yelp for coffee in Charleston, SC. Over the past year, I've made a concerted effort to keep people talking and it seems to have worked.

TLDR: If people see integrity in the ownership, quality in the product, and a pleasant sales environment, they will tell someone and they will be loyal to the brand. If you've done your job so well that you can inspire your customers to talk about you, you will grow, even if you aren't in a prime location.

There's too much dissonance between the two brands and their models for sourcing, roasting, and preparing coffee are entirely different. It's hard to see the synergy from such an acquisition. The only thing Starbucks could possibly offer Blue Bottle would be distribution channels for bottled iced coffee (New Orleans or Kyoto style), and I suppose that's nothing to sneeze at.

As an aside, the fact that you're making such a claim speaks volumes to how well Blue Bottle markets itself. They seem much bigger than they actually are, due to high profile locations and a loyal fan base. In actuality, they have less than 12 cafe locations in 2 major cities. Those, combined with all their wholesale accounts probably still doesn't come close to the number of Starbucks in Manhattan alone.

I find it ironic that the OP, who hacked the experiment to divert funds onto his own card (which are now going to a just cause), is the brother of the person in the original comments thread who was posturing about whether or not the card had been hacked.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2858120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2858226

Perhaps Sam made this script well after there was a question as to whether or not the card had been hacked, but if not, this is just funny.

Filling out the survey was a breeze but it took at least 3 minutes to calculate quotes and then when it was finished, it listed quotes for each insurer as N/A... buggy and anticlimactic. I'll check back later when they've worked kinks out.

I also don't understand the need for charging stations to generate their own electricity. I do, however, think the way which electric cars are filled/charged will be fundamentally different than how our current automobiles are filled with gasoline. I think every time an electric car is parked, it will be plugged in, either to charge or to send power back to the grid. Perhaps the net metering part is what they meant by the ability of stations to generate their own power. I think "stations" will be ubiquitous, with outlets in most major parking lots. This scenario still doesn't help people who want to take long road trips on their electric vehicle but it does cover most use cases.

I'm not talking patent theory 101; I'm talking about the business of what amounts to the securitization of patents for the purpose of extorting money (either from businesses who pay IV as an insurance policy so they won't get sued or from businesses who have to pay settlements for violating a patent).

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a naive suggestion but I'd like to hear some informed discussion on the issue:

Couldn't a company like Intellectual Ventures be prosecuted under some form of antitrust law? There seems to be evidence of predatory behavior and the nature of how they do business seems to violate a few main goals of antitrust law, namely to prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business and to ban abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.

Since this _is_ hacker news, can someone in the know explain the considerations that have to be heeded when developing LED technology for lighting environments? I'm much more interested in hearing about the science behind these bulbs and how it compares to fluorescents and incandescents than hearing 50 different anecdotes about peoples' LED experiences.

FWIW: This appears to be his startup: http://www.myliferesponse.com/ and from his resume, it appears he's the business/marketing partner in this relationship.

Yes that brew temp is correct. Any hotter and you'll scald the coffee. That's the temperature that the water hits the ground beans, not the temperature it should hit your lips.

In a french press, the brew then sits for 3-4 minutes before being served at a hot, yet palatable temperature. Same goes with a pour-over drip or a chimex.

The problem people have with coffee that's too hot is usually related to subpar brew methods, either scalding the coffee grind with water that's too hot (during extraction) or using a cheap drip machine that has a burner that's overactive and basically scorches any coffee that's left out too long.

Interesting hack, but if your coffee is scalding when it's being prepared, something is wrong and it's going to taste bad anyways.

I also hope there's a disclaimer attached to the packaging that warns of the dangers of gulping down your coffee joulies.

Low hanging fruit?

I wouldn't go so far as to say unreadable, more like annoying. Hopefully he takes this into consideration for the book he's writing.

Agreed. The only time I've seen value in twitter is during times of emergency: my hosting provider goes down and has no other way to communicate than through twitter; people being rappelled from the ski lifts where I ski but there are no news outlets reporting on it so I go to twitter to find out; stuff like that. I remember a Charlie Rose interview with Mark Andreeson a few years back where Andreeson talked about the future of tech and the instant dissemination of news. From what I can see, twitter is the news outlet where the story breaks first.

How are people grouped together? Are people able to screen the other people that they'll be eating with? Maybe that would take some of the serendipity out of it, but it could also help curb some of the superficial conversation that occurs upon meeting someone for the first time.

Congrats! I've always been curious how the conversation goes when one company reaches out to another in hopes of being acquired. Do deals like this usually happen as stock swaps?

From what I can see, it's people affiliated with YC.

Yeah, that was glaringly lacking in the post. I doubt the idea is one that no one's ever thought of before and keeping it a secret is only going to prevent him from getting potentially valuable feedback.

How does a stunt like this affect your credit rating?

Not really... I just finished writing a couple days ago and this seemed like a good opportunity to mention it. I don't have a site yet, and I'm not much of an SEO buff, so I really just wanted to get some ideas from those in the community more versed in the matter.