Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964685

This isn't reverse-engineering at all. Frankly, I think this is a reasonably cool project, but it's brazenly dishonest of the author to claim he "reverse-engineered a company" when all he did was conduct elementary statistics on an open dataset. You can reasonably expect that there's much more to OPower's data analytics suite, and furthermore, a company is of course much more than its flagship product.

There are lots of smart metering companies: why is OPower among the most successful? Maybe the interesting thing to really think about is not their analytics but their sales and marketing strategies.

The author of this story clearly does not know what "reverse engineer" means.

This is reverse engineering AI companies: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02943

That's nothing. I reverse-engineered Twitter in one hour using Wordpress.

Sorry. I try not to be to mean, but this title was just crying out for it.

i suggest removing the unnecessary $500M and one week from the title. those things are total clickbait.

Yeah, it's very clickbaity but I figured it was the original title, and the content was interesting enough to be submitted. Hopefully it won't prevent people from reading it because of an anti-clickbait reaction.

I suggest leaving them in for the same reason.

Baity title for maximum effect, but the article itself is not so bad. Content marketing, but ok.