I believe that getting the ice to melt more slowly is the purpose. Regular ice cubes will melt at a faster rate and in turn dilute whichever drink you have them in. In something like water or soda it is less noticeable but with something like whisky, you will end up noticing it more.
I don't get why there seems to be hostility towards Outpost. On both occasion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010 and the current) the articles have been relevant to the YC community and to my knowledge hadn't been up voted by sock puppets that we created or operated. This article mentioned Outpost once and wasn't even centred around it. I could have replaced Outpost with any other company and it still would have same purpose.
My account had posted it from Medium earlier but I realized how SLOOW it was loading so I loaded up a Ghost Blog droplet for Digital Ocean and reposted it there. I needed a new account to post it on behalf of so a smashed my keyboard. Voial!
We do. For most for most of the providers we have arrangements that give us commission but they're all providing us with an API or data dump of some sort.
It was what I originally was planning on doing but felt that a personal response would be better than a bot. During the hours of 3am - 9am I do set it up to be auto replies but there's not much traffic anyways. There are similar Twitter bots that do this and I've spoken to someone from Twitter about a grey of the ToS area I might be able to work in.
A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.
It's something I've thought about and both our current investors and potential future investors have mentioned that this could be a product on its own. If I were to scale it up and turn it into its own startup I'd want to make sure not to saturate the tweetosphere with it or there's no benefit over the competition. I'd also probably license it out to early stage startups instead of bigger companies because no one wants to be spammed to by the next HP, Apple or Dell computer when you ask for suggestions from friends.
Quite a bit but that might be because of our market. We're a P2P travel / sharing economy metasearch engine and the demographic we aim to target seems to enjoy traveling without burning a hole in their wallets. I'd like it to be a higher but its passive growth hacking with almost a $0 customer acquisition cost.
I put the blog post on Ghost droplet with Digital Ocean in a hurry as my first attempt with using Medium never ended up on the front page. I'll add one as quick as I can. For now follow me on twitter @trevorstarick. :)
Originally the post was going to be a bit more technical but I decided to keep is simple and see what the reaction was to it. I'll make sure to put that in the technical post. For now I've included an image that I hope gives readers a bit more of an understanding on how we're using this application.
I'm planning on doing a more in-depth write up on how NER/NLP in the tweetosphere is different that general NER/NLP which will by me technical explanation of what I did here. That should be up sometime later this week.