skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more I think about this, the more it seems like the old email signature "by reading this, you owe me a million dollars" is actually enforceable.

In the US, nobody has any obligation to pay me a million dollars. Similarly, a copyright holder has no right to regulate what happens to their CD-ROM after they legally sell it to someone.

But the court ruled that a piece of paper included with the CD-ROM that was not required to fully use that CD gave Autodesk some new rights and created the obligation for the original purchaser to ask Autodesk for permission to perform an otherwise-legal activity, selling the disk. So it follows that a little message that you do read at the end of my emails should be equally enforceable.

Actually, I think this decision is on its way to reversal.
Rate my startup: HobsonFiles.com
HobsonFiles is a dead simple and fast CRM/task manager that is integrated with Gmail & Google Apps.

We have have been using it at another startup, TeleEMG, to manage thousands of our own business leads for several months now and have decided to spin it off as its own product.

How has it been useful to our company?

1. Since it integrates with Google Contacts we also get a full sync of contacts to our mobiles which means we get caller ID on incoming for all of our biz leads.

2. The UI is dead simple and intuitive. We spend less time fumbling around with the UI like we did with Salesforce and more time being productive. You can instant search through your contacts and bring up any notes/emails/tasks you have associated with them.

3. We recently added a click-to-call feature which integrates with Gmail's phone, making it super easy to dial out to contacts from your laptop..

We spent a lot of time making it as simple as possible so that our users could instantly figure out how to use it.

Please check it out and let us know if there's anything we can do to improve HobsonFiles.

www.HobsonFiles.com
right, i just meant that the archives here are back a few years, i saw that the dates are up to current news. What I meant was that we'd have heard if he'd started blogging independent from the regular articles he already publishes in Granma.
http://www.HobsonFiles.com
18 ways to stay in power when the entire world is against you!
It's great that Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin works for you, but not everyone wants to take that path (or knows how to). $50/year is worth it for some people not to have to diagnose Roundcube issues.

I think Gmail does hit a sweet spot for most power emailers. It took months for me to switch from my previous custom mutt + .procmail setup to Gmail. Do I still miss procmail sometimes? Sure. But overall, I save a ton of time using Gmail instead of rolling my own email solution.
The author was trying to play on "more on...".
it never is, nor it should be, a binary choice. you forever have to find a balance between the two. if you would quit your startup forever assuming you had full financial backing to spend with your family and friends, then you really see your startup as a means to an end and not a hobby/lifestyle like many others do

you call it work, many others call it their hobby. they just happen to do it full time and get paid for it.
> Heroku should almost certainly have user defined cut off points. They should require every new user to set a maximum monthly bill to something they can afford (or "unlimited").

And then what? They shut you off? That would go over just as well! Here's a thought: understand what you sign up for and take some responsibility for your actions.
Seth's Blog: The myth of preparation
Ask HN: What is your AQ?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html
I'm curious if the overall AQ here is what I'd expect it to be, given that this is Hacker News.

Edit: BTW I got a 42 on this. I'm honestly not that surprised because I have always considered myself severely socially awkward. I don't have many friends and whichever friends I do have aren't particularly close.
The problem space is not reduced to the gender of the unspecified child. The important distinction is that "One of my children is a boy" is a statement about both children, not just one of them. Compare that statement to "My first-born child is a boy," and it may make more sense.
The balance is between offering a cool feature and the danger that all those features accrete into cruft. If you wanted something similar for Google, you can create your own "Subscribed Link" to do this: http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/

I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-googl...
Canceling ahead of time is one thing. "Canceling" later because you didn't use your reservation is another.

The example in question is more like: you make a reservation for September instead of October. In October you realized your mistake. Then you ask for your money back, after all you didn't use either the tickets or the hotel. And because the airplane and hotel weren't fully booked, you claim they didn't have any additional costs because of you. Well, good luck getting your refund.
I doubt anyone would want to say publicly that they've had a bad experience with YC, constructive to the rest of us as it may be. It's just not worth burning that bridge. It's probably a good general rule of thumb to never say anything publicly negative about anyone, unless you're enough of a badass to get away with it (zed, dhh, etc).
Compiz does make usability of Gnome on Ubuntu better. Super-E (which displays workspaces overview) and Super-W (a clone of OSX expose) for starters. The added workspace switcher animation when switching to left and right is nice to show you which workspace you are transferring to.

Sure a lot of the stuff Compiz is silly. Granted that wobbly windows is a wow factor thing, but why not? its the little nice touches that keep peoples interest in things, and makes it an enjoyable experience.
I was watching the documentary series Cold War, which is brilliant in that it is full of first-hand accounts in interviews with people that were at all the important meetings and events.

Some of my favorite moments were the bits from Castro's interviews. "Thoughtful man" is a great description. It was fascinating to see him describing events from his view, and he was captivating to listen to even in a language I had to read subtitles to understand.
In my opinion, your point is totally orthogonal to the point I was responding to. I agree with your reasoning about Heroku's self-preservation completely.
Would you feel the same if the bill was three orders of magnitude larger?

If you don't, we're haggling over the price, not over the principle.
The score shows as "0" initially until we've collected data from different geographic locations, which may take a little while Sometimes users mistake this "0" as the final score and didn't know they should wait until the score gets updated. We are aware of this issue and will fix this in future releases.
Funny, but the answer is that part of the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the United States wouldn't invade Cuba, and anyone else with the force to do so was a NATO member/American ally.

This is speculation, but looking at how the Cold War played out, then without that agreement the U.S. likely would've invaded Cuba at some point or other. It was still a good agreement overall because of the Moscow-Washington Hotline getting installed, though one can look at history and wonder if the Cuban people would've been better off living in an American territory similar to Puerto Rico instead of a backwards impoverished dictatorship. Hotline Agreement was good though -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Agreement
He already wrote about his positive experience, right here in this thread.
Every file in S3 can become a torrent just by appending ?torrent:

http://carltonbale.com/how-to-create-and-seed-a-torrent-down...
Quotes means something different, and I'm not sure if quoting a single word actually does anything. "+" is the operator you are looking for. If I add + to the +beginning +of +words +in +my +query, it will ensure that those words are on the page and aren't coming from any other source of data.
Hmmm.. I am not sure if any file needs a torrent. For eg, my /etc/passwd file.
I wonder how well the McDonalds over there are doing...
I have only written a small amount of assembly code, but I cannot imagine how someone who has written even a tiny bit of either could make such a mistake.
>backwards impoverished dictatorship.

You mean the one under the Batista regime?
If it's not Heroku's fault in some partial way, then look at it from another perspective. It's an opportunity for Heroku's competitors in a market that is quickly becoming commoditized. At the very least it's a feature that I always look for when using pay on demand services, and will rank very highly on my list of important to have features.

Akamai comes to mind as an example of a company that has always had similar issues. If I ever were to use them in the future, I would have to factor into their monthly costs the partial FTE required to manage their usage and costs. More importantly, if there are other CDNs that offer better cost management features, I would almost certainly use them before ever using Akamai again, unless there was no other technical option.
threaded emails is a major reason to choose gmail over yahoo (in 2010)
It reminds me of that Albert Brooks movie where he goes to Vegas with his wife and she gambles away all of their life savings. He tries to convince the casinos to give him a refund because of the good publicity it would create. The casino replies with something like "If we give you a refund, everyone will come in asking for a refund and then where would they be?"

It's an interesting line to walk. If they give the poster a refund and he posts goodwill posts about it on Hacker News, Twitter, etc. Then, next thing you know, every customer who isn't using all of their capacity is asking for refunds and if they don't give them, then the PR backlash will be even worse (think AT&T and the free micro cells they're giving to some of their best customers but not others).

I'm guessing the majority of their profits come from people who don't use their full metered capacity -- in the same way giftcard profits come from people who never redeem them. Of course a google-like model that provides traffic-based metering would be best.
32. I have trouble with social situations, especially discerning nonverbal reactions or ironic speech, but enjoy fiction and stories about people. I love proofs, argument, and reasoning about systems, but suck at numbers and dates. Overall I'd say I'm "normal"--just analytical and sometimes awkward.
Heroku runs on top of EC2, and they get charged the same amount of money by Amazon whether your instances are idle or on fire.

Is the latter part of that true? (I'm not playing Devil's Advocate, honest!)

I'd assumed the lion share of Heroku's profits were coming from clever arbitrage of EC2 instances rather than markup alone.

For example, if they have 1000 users paying $108 per month for 4 dynos, they don't keep 4000 "dynos worth" of EC2 instances running constantly. Instead they can see the overall load and maintain that lower level of EC2 instances plus some "slack." When traffic increases among apps, the slack can be rapidly configured to pick it up. Heroku would then make not only a markup on EC2 but also profit from the difference between the maximum load and actual load. (Isn't this how cloud scaling systems work anyway, right? Heroku could/might be doing that over thousands of apps for collective benefit.)

Perhaps I'm over-thinking how I'd be trying to squeeze profits out of a Heroku-type system though ;-)
BitlBee: IRC vs. Instant Messengers
>a bakery in a street where there are none but a bakery is needed

Then you find that people go to "bakery street" instead as there's a choice. The 3 stores share the whole market and you get none.
Car Charging Station-Maker Coulomb Raises $15 Million to Expand Network
Some license agreements state that a change of control of the corporate owner is deemed an assignment requiring the licensor's consent.

[EDIT: Autodesk's EULA is one such - see section 9.1 in http://images.autodesk.com/apac_sapac_main/files/autocad_200...]
> I'm guessing the majority of their profits come from people who don't use their full metered capacity

For Herokus sake I hope that that is not the case.

Typically a service like this is 'oversubscribed' to about 10 to 15%, it's like pre-paying for your parking meter, you want to pay a little bit too much because of the uncertainty in when you'll get back to the meter but not so much that you'd be cheaper off parking somewhere for a flat rate fee.

If they really do make the majority of their money on unused instances then they're setting themselves up for trouble in the longer term.

I highly doubt they did not think that one through.
I'd be interested in the "considerable time and money" you are talking about. Reading daeken's analysis makes it look like they did not try at all.
I considered using a different title for the submission, but I figured he was using "moron" as a modifier.
Do you realize that rvirding is Robert Virding, one of the creators of Erlang?
Before, I hate doing it after!
Why would you say most businesses wouldn't? I'd think most business would do something to help a loyal customer stay loyal. I agree with you that it's absolutely good business practice to help customers recover from their own mistakes.

On many many occasions, businesses have literally given me money even when it was my stupid mistake. Some examples just over the past few years:

- Sprint credited me $100 when I racked up a $250 bill by not watching my usage

- Bank of America credited me $100 when I left my card in the ATM and someone withdrew $100 from my account

- Hyatt Place gave me a free room when I made a reservation on the wrong date (and never showed, or called)

- Southwest Airlines gives you full credit if you cancel your flight any time

- ATT gave me all my rollover minutes when I changed plans (by rule, you lose them - i had over 2700)

Those are just some examples that I can remember...I'm not sure it's a healthy mentality to expect this, but it certainly leaves a very positive impression. Leaving your customers in a state of feeling ripped off when you can obviously help is not the right business decision.
If they're not doing it that way already then they should definitely hire you at 10% of what you would save them every year ;)
The HTML5 video element and the future of Online Video
And you prove them in the right simply by recounting those instances here.
Can tell you spend a lot of time on it, and it shows- the UI is simple but slick.

That said, here are some thoughts:

The main page of the site isn't really getting at what it is. It isn't a personal assistant. It is a somewhat easier to use web-based Outlook Web Access-like saas. Maybe something like "Makes online email and task management easy."

About the bullets:

* Auto-dial any contact in your addressbook in a single click

could be rewritten as "Auto-dial your contacts with a click"

* Auto-scan & organize your important email sent from real people

becomes: "" (nothing) If it is a web-based email client, right? I don't understand this auto-scan thing at first glance and neither will your customers.

* Auto-sync your contacts to your iPhone, Blackberry & Android devices

Sounds neat, but without context it doesn't sound revolutionary. My first thought was, "Can't anyone just do <a href="tel:111-222-3333">111-222-3333</a> to do that?" and the second was "Does that work with Skype, etc.?" I think you'll need to specify the GMail phone thing.

* Auto-delegate tasks to friends & coworkers

This sounds like it's a bit out of focus with the goal of a simple web-based dashboard for email and personal/business tasks. Is it a personal task management and email/contacts app, or is it a task management system like Jira? I'd focus on the former and axe this.

Nothing mentioned about low-cost on front page like "Cheaper than Outlook and connects to your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.".

All in all though, I personally wouldn't have interest in it, and I can't really think of anyone I know that would. I think that basically it's main purpose seems to be a wrapper around Gmail to provide an even simpler UI and task assignment/management.

I think it seriously needs something it does that nothing else can do, that is of serious value to the small business owner (which it seems to be targeted at).

I don't see it as a real CRM, and with Sugar CRM, Salesforce, etc. you'd have to make that the primary focus.

I understand it was in use at another startup, but I really think you need to seriously pick something for it to be really good at, and beef that up.

Good work though! Looks nice!
Mildly clever, but this isn't an either-or issue. Cuba was a backwards dictatorship then, and it's a backwards dictatorship now.
> This kind of attitude makes me keep looking for ways to move away from Python-land. The new "we're better than everyone else" attitude is seriously grating.

Wow. That sounds exactly like you're talking about Ruby/Rails.
Jump should be up-arrow!
Psychotic Websites
For what is worth, Cuba is in good terms with the leftist governments in Latin America. At least with Brazil and Venezuela.

Also note that the Cuba embargo is specific to the US. I'm not pro-Fidel at all, but it's not like Cuba is North Korea.
I'd say apart from (1) he has it down for the basics; see http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors for some confirmations.

Why not (1). Well yes (1) too really but: Google use a "game" to get people to describe images and if there's text it can be OCR'ed. Google are quite good at OCR. I doubt they pass all headline images through OCR but I can imagine they might do subject comparison between text and replacement images (eg in pages using Fahrner Image Replacement) to sample whether the text Google is reading matches the images the user sees.

With (2) avoid stuffing.

(4) & (5) <- this is all it takes!
I love Reflexiones del Comandante en Jefe. I had the opportunity to study at the University of Havana in 2009. I read Fidel's "blog", which appears on the front page of Granma, the country's biggest newspaper, every time he publishes a new article.

Want to improve your Spanish? Read Fidel.

You can also follow Fidel Castro on Twitter - http://twitter.com/reflexionfidel
Ha, From the page source for:

<div id="noCanvas">

<p>

Hey there, it looks like you're using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Microsoft hates the Web and doesn't support HTML5 :(

</p>

Edit: formatting.
Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate
Me too! I wager you would fall in the INTJ spectrum too like me. I like this kind of stuff as it gives me clues on what I should probably be looking for when dealing with people.

It also gives clues into other other people and what their motives may be.
I wouldn't call it a trap. #1 is largely the reason our field is so great. It's love. It's passion.
They do for their background workers, but not the dynos. http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling
In my experience a smaller host would have likely been sunk by your lack of attention requiring them to allocate more services (used or not), not be able to provide more personal care. You're lucky you're on a big host.
If you want to do scientific computing in a modern general purpose language, NumPy/SciPy are pretty popular. Haven't used them much myself, but they look pretty decent.
Google "search engine"
My bank emails me when I withdraw over a certain amount, they send me a text message and sometimes will give me a call. Those are not annoyances, those are safety guards I want in place.
They could give you the option to turn off the notification if enough people complained about it, though I doubt they would. I don't usually find it annoying when a company goes out of their way to look out for my best interests, especially if it could cost them money short-term.
How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted
I think the point is that it depends on what prompt the man is implicitly answering.

If you ask parents of two children if they have a boy 3/4 of them will say they do, but if you ask the same parents to randomly name the gender of one of their children 1/2 of them will say they have a boy. Those two different scenarios lead to the 1/3 and 1/2 odds respectively.
The statement "C is portable assembler" makes sense in exactly one case: writing a UNIX kernel in the 1970s. Both the assembler and C versions of the kernel would be single-threaded, both would have a standard stack-usage convention (where cdecl is just a codification of the particular assembler stack convention K&R agreed upon), and neither would be run through an optimizer (as an optimizing C compiler didn't exist until quite a while later.)
The meeting problem is not so hard to solve. Start at the appointed time. Close the door. If the person who organized the meeting is not there, adjourn. People will catch on soon enough. Organizations which have a chronic problem with people straggling into meetings 10 or 20 minutes late are likely enabling the behavior.
That would only work for sales by Autodesk directly to the customer, where Autodesk actually cashed the check.

Most companies' accounts-receivables clerks, however, are trained to look for that kind of endorsement language on payment checks.

Chances are that Autodesk, upon receiving a check like that, would return the check and take whatever action it deemed appropriate for a past-due invoice.
Technology exists to invalidate the old license so this scenario wouldn't be possible. Autodesk would simply null the old key when an upgrade is purchased based on it.
Puma Co-Edition Mens Shoes, puma co edition mens sneakers
... and yet you still won't tell me what it means?
At the end of the of the day everybody has their own style and a framework to go with it. Some people leave Rails to do Django and vice versa. One of them just feels natural as compared to the other. Enjoy your preference!

<for-everybody-commenting-here>
Internals of Rails 3 are much much more simpler and well organized compared to Rails 2.x -- I would seriously recommend getting rid of your fears of "black magic" by diving into the source. :)
</for-everybody-commenting-here>
Agree: 2,4,5,6,12,13,16,21,23,46: 1 point
Disagree: 1,8,10,14,15,29,30,34,37,40: 1 point
Score: 20
I appreciate your reply. But I'm still not clear on it. Because of this: "At least one of them is a boy." As I see it, this statement contains the following pieces of information:
1. There are two children.
2. One of them is a boy.
The question is... what's the probability of there being two boys? Considering the information we've got, there are two possible scenarios remaining 1. [B, B] 2. [B, G]. So we have P = 0.5. No?
17. Very close to control group. I work in an organization with someone who is a sys/server admin that seems very autistic but is fully functional. I think he's married and has kids. I think slight Autistic tendencies and IT seem to mesh well.
for-profit businesses do not have a generalized right to make their mistakes into others' obligations.

The OP never argued that he has the right to force the cost of his mistake onto Heroku. He's polling a community of business owners to see how they feel it should've been handled.

If I were Heroku management, I would've written the OP something like this:

(Valued Customer)-

I'm so sorry your accident created a nasty end of the month surprise. We understand, but we cannot forgive the whole amount because while they were not servicing requests, we incurred real costs keeping the dynos ready, willing, and able for you.

Since it's your first mistake of this sort, and you've been such a great customer, we're willing to reduce your total amount owed to $x.

We hope this helps,
Heroku

----

so yes, I think it's his own damned fault. But I also think it's a missed opportunity to create a happier customer.