dude_abides

> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git.

I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?

In your experience, what metric(s) is(/are) the best indicators of product-market-fit (or lack of it)?

My 2c: "Upvotes" is too noisy a metric, and will give too much importance to HN ranking. I strongly suggest tweaking the HN ranking model for "Apply HN" posts to be as random as possible.

Funny, typing "livingsocial layoffs" in google gives me these suggestions "livingsocial layoffs 2015", "livingsocial layoffs 2014", "livingsocial layoffs 2013"

Or simply use incognito mode and click on Google search result.

Hah missed that. In that case, thanks are due to Chrome+Firefox+Safari!

What I found most heartening about the article was that it spent several paragraphs describing why they initially had to use Flash, and how they managed to get rid of it, but not a single sentence saying _why_ they decided to get rid of Flash. We've come a long way! (Also, thanks Steve Jobs!!!)

"The CEO has hired management consultant McKinsey & Co. to look for areas of the company to cut, said a person familiar with the matter."

Shudder.

Easily the most amazing "How to Get Tenure" article that I've ever read, even though (or maybe because) it hardly talks about how to get tenure! Passion and success are so strongly correlated, and Matt Might is such a great example of this, as are most successful researchers and entrepreneurs.

They got in trouble with lawsuits because of the recent Uber employee vs contractor verdict. In addition, they were bleeding cash in customer acquisition so that didn't help too. The lawsuit was the trigger but the bleeding of cash was the fundamental reason.

It's fascinating to be able to see generational power shifts in such short cycles of time. I still vividly remember the days when M$ could never do anything wrong, and only a few years later, an upstart Google became the next M$, and Facebook the next Google, and so on. Old timers may also remember the IBM to M$ power shift, which played out over multiple decades.