skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Speaking as a customer I don't see any reason to offer a pro-rated refund, it's nice but I have no expectation of it, and so it doesn't bother me. However if your would rather going the refund route you may be better off letting people delay the cancellation until the end of the billing period i.e. I'm paying monthly on the 15th, on the 27th I decide to cancel, I won't get billed again but my subscription stays active until the 15th of the next month.

2) It depends on your service, if it doesn't cost much to keep user's info saved you may want to go the route I believe Netflix takes by separating the user account and their subscription. Canceling the subscription makes it so that I can't use the main feature of their service (i.e. watch/rent movies) but I can still log in and restart my subscription easily. Additionally I can delete my account to remove my data from their servers (at least in theory).

Obviously all of this depends on the specific product your offering but thats my $.02
Paypal lets you specify the name you want to appear on credit card statements. You get to specify an 11 character and a 19 character name for the charge:

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-for-your-business...
Background garbage collection doesn't help so much if your drive doesn't know which logical blocks no longer contain active data - which is what TRIM is all about.

(Filesystems historically never worried about informing floppy disks or hard disks about deleted sectors / blocks, because there was nothing useful those storage mediums could do with the information).
Interesting to see it released under GPL3(+). Looks like they want any distributed modifications going back to the community.
It's an interesting question, one that Twitter is at the center of now but one that's not limited to Twitter: Where do we draw the line between a technology company and the culture its technology has spawned?
Unless they changed it, a referral to Amazon will get the referrer some percentage of anything you buy during the next couple of days, regardless of the original link.
When I first saw the cartoon characters, they were used to display meta information about sites. Overviews, brief tutorials, etc. Now, its just somewhat morphed into the norm. Just imagine if you're a programmer with no design ideals! You look around at other startups and see this antialiased design with bright colors and characters all over the screen and jquery mayhem. You look at the successful sites and the failures and see a theme in both. Its a bandwagon. Shrug. I know I was in this situation. I wanted to design a site and saw minimalism, bright colors and huge cartoons everywhere. I adapted with much restraint.
What's wrong with Buddypress? Never heard a bad word about it myself. Haven't used it either, though.
I think you mean "recuse yourself".
On The Move, Again
I've had the same experience with smalls as the parent poster. No EBS loss though. The larger instances do seem more stable. No quantitative data to back that up though.
The Digital Agencies of the Future
People need to take responsibility for their actions. If you blow off your fingers mixing up some chemicals you read about, that's your own fault. If you're not sure whether or not the activity you're about to perform is going to result in the loss of your fingers, don't do it.

I probably knew at least that much in high school.
I am looking for better support for right to left languages. I use Google's transliterate bookmarklets to enter text, which sort of works OK, but then somehow the text box flips the orientation and the punctuations go to the wrong side. This might be a low on your priority right now, but its something I'd be interested in.
Funny, I think of New Orleans
IBM mistakenly asked Microsoft for an 8088 version of CP/M (the predecessor to DOS). Gates then bought a clone called 86-DOS and slapped the MS label on it.

If MS didn't exist, someone else could have easily replaced them. It was also mainly due to Intel, who created such a cheap processor, that we have cheap computers today. Not Microsoft.
The tug between browsers and apps for your clickstream
His comments on the difference between Twitter and Facebook are particularly interesting:

"Previously, developers took data out of Twitter and into the context of their own applications and services. The new design flips this on its head, bringing rich embedded content into the site from a host of brand-name web properties. (It’s worth noting that Facebook has done much the opposite: they started out with a very centralized build-it-within-our-walls model, then gradually grew their tendrils out into the web with Facebook Connect.)"

I'm curious how this relates to his later observation that "walled gardens" are doomed to fail. In both instances, the walls are being chipped away, but in the former, the content is being brought in, while in the latter, content is being let out.
I've installed and played with both, but I'm still not sure how things will develop if social networks become more "distributed." Ideally, in my opinion, sites sould be able to run any social software, whether Appleseed, Elgg, or Diaspora, and they could all interconnect and push updates to each other, somewhat similar to the many available options for blogging software all syndicating via RSS. I'm glad that there has been so much interest and publicity surrounding Diaspora, since it will benefit this new type of social networking and help it grow, now matter what platform or language each client is built on!
A New Name for High-Fructose Corn Syrup
That sounds really interesting. Are there photos/videos of this somewhere?
You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses, literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views.

So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a valid thing to do.

At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to curse people, and a curse causes misfortune.

So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever. This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again.

So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were repugnant.

So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get a more generic algorithm, we see these key components:

1. A label that classifies someone as bad

2. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must be non-specific.

3. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!".

4. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain.

If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt" (keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after anyone labeled as the bad thing.

There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist of it.
Personally, I'd avoid node.js. It is most definitely cool, interesting and has been proving itself useful, but (!) there are a lot of details that won't come up until you really need them. If you're focusing on business logic and you already have a rather large set of applications that are relatively "bleeding edge", then I'd stick to a language that has a bit more history on the basics.

It is the really simple things like form parsing and cookies/sessions that may not be fully fleshed out in Node.js. Not that it won't be soon, but it is a nightmare to spend time on low level issues when you don't have to. This has always been the issue trying new languages and frameworks for projects. I get part of the way there and realize that some basic aspect of web development hasn't been done. Sometimes I start to handle the issues, but if the project is something I want to finish, it usually ends up with me turning back to Python. This might be a bad reflection on myself, but when you want to get something done that doesn't need the latest/greatest tech, it is nothing but frustrating to hit your head against a wall doing basics.

Just my two cents!
Angel Investing: Skill 3 – Relationships with VCs
Put it in a sentence.
Agreed. The UI isn't even that good. They paid a company to tell them to copy Facebook, but ghettoed it. The funding definitely went to people who were not ready for this. They had 4 developers on this, you'd expect more polish. Just feels like a regular crud app with flash sockets, won't work iPhone/iPad without a lot of tinkering. Am I being too harsh?
Diaspora source code
This is a nice piece, and makes some very good points.

Completely unrelated: I enjoy reading Alex's writing in the same way I enjoy reading John Gruber and Paul Graham. He's eloquent, thoughtful, and passionate.
Sure, we're all human - but I noticed through my career that those who abused their privilegs didn't tend to last long, and those who had a strong ethic as to what was appropriate and not appropriate (ie: myself) tended to be trusted with quite a bit - often quite outside the scope of my job title itself.

yes, there are systems that should enforce this properly - you can't build an empire on raw trust - but for the small-time systems administrator out their working throug your career - this principle should always stick with you.
Respect users data. Don't ever BRAG about the access you have. People, both suits and workers, don't like to be reminded that actually you can see record and mess with their mail - everyone is happier if you don't tell them, and don't do it (and, yes, at some point set up controls to make this harder to do)

I've turned away enough managers and directors, even when I agreed with them in one case on a deep personal level, and would have faced no consequnces for looking it up - I still did the right thing and insisted that if they wanted to snoop through employee's email, that I'd only do it through the OK of HR or specific others. I was firm and polite, and pointed out that I'd do the same if someone other than (let's say the owner) walked in and asked for his email. He walked away pissed.

He came by an hour or so later and said, "you know, I really admire your ethics on this - that was the right thing to do, and not many people would stick to it like that - so no worries about hard feelings or anthing like that."
You also need to change the Carrierwave config to use S3 instead of local storage.
You frequently see reference to "an algebra" or "a calculus" of something or the other :)
Because it's a reasonable default assumption, when you're looking at an unfamiliar discussion website?
I guess things are going to have to get worse before they get better.
Today's Most Useful Resource: Word of Mouth Marketing to Create Buzz is Sexy
The evidence as summarized by the court in the preliminary injunction ruling suggested that the only real basis of potential liability had to do with potential breaches of fiduciary duty relating to a possible joint venture of the parties to develop the underlying product. Generally, an aggrieved party can elect to pursue recovery either of the benefits received by the wrongdoing party (i.e., FG's profits from sales of the product) or of the losses it sustained in connection with its investment of time and effort into the product. In either case, where the product is essentially dead, the dollars recoverable would be quite small.

A lost profits measure sounds appealing but would not apply. When a business or venture has no track record upon which to measure such profits with some degree of reliability, courts reject such a measure as speculative.

Thus, the damage recovery here is likely to be trivial in comparison to the costs of pursuing the case. Moreover, under U.S. law (in contrast to U.K.), a prevailing party cannot force the other party to pay its attorneys' fees unless, among other possible but unusual bases, there is a contract specifying that a prevailing party gets such an award. Here, there was no written contract and hence no attorneys' fees provision. Thus, after a trial, each party would likely have to bear its own own attorneys' fees in the case.

The major remedy - where the underlying product is a viable one - is an in-kind remedy by which TC could get a permanent injunction against FG barring it from selling or distributing the product itself. Again, this is meaningless where the product has no intrinsic worth.

Finally, even if damages were meaningful, an entity such as FG would very likely be judgment proof, meaning that it would have no assets upon which to execute any judgment.

Thus, TC's goals in this lawsuit, especially as framed by sophisticated counsel, really have nothing to do with the specific legal remedies it might get, as these have no real worth against this defendant or for this product.
It seems the setup I was looking at earlier is essentially a VM with the Python and Java SDK's preinstalled and running, which is not the same thing, as you point out.

If you are going to have to do so much re-coding, though, wouldn't it make sense to start with Appscale and just add in couchdb or whatever else you like, to get the data storage you want? After all, you are already familiar with the rest of the way GAE works.
Interestingly, when I type 'kindle' I don't see any kindles...
My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors...

... any of which you can buy for $5,000.00.

It seems that anti-Microsoft arguments always ignore the benefits of network effects and economies of scale brought about by DOS and Windows. They are usually posted by Linux nerds running sub-$1000 3 GHz PCs that they couldn't possibly have afforded in a world where Apple, Commodore, Atari, and ten more companies like them kept building mutually- incompatible proprietary hardware.
Simplicity in pricing structure is a feature. Spare your users the burden and charge them a consistent amount. Prorate this, discount that, and you'll quickly confuse not just your users, but your billing code (if you're handling it in-house) as well as your legal documents.

For example, with our app, the TOS specifies you're paying for a monthly interval with no refunds for unused time. Feel free to take a look at the TOS for our app. IANAL, but I'm willing to help.

That said, I'm not so sure what I've said can be classified as "best practice", but I think it's a fairly common way to run SaaS billing for a small shop.
I'll look at appscale again. I'm more fond of the way CouchApp/CouchDB works than the way GAE works, though, so I'm going to try and do this with very little coding. I really think that I'll only have to write a couple hundred lines of code to bring this stack together, but I may be missing something.
Documents produced through discovery in a typical litigation are produced directly to the other side and are not routinely filed with the court. Thus, such documents are "public" in the sense that they wind up in the hands of the adverse party and are not normally confidential - thus empowering such adverse party to disclose them if it wishes - but they do not normally wind up in the public record unless a party takes affirmative steps to publish them in some manner.

In other words, Mr. Arrington's legal team had possession of these documents but the world would not have known about them from the court record or any other public source unless Mr. Arrington took steps to publish them as he did here.
Does going agile mean following processes/practices mentioned in a book/blog?

I thought it was about not following any set practices and about following the simple guidelines mentioned in the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/). No matter what process you follow to achieve it.
It's the Huffington Post. Do they suggest you dilute your unemployment check with water 100,000 times as a cure for unemployment?
What is Dalvik?
>I once suffered a mental illness that made it difficult for me to feel certain emotions. One of the most fascinating results of the experience was the degree to which my ability to reason degraded.

This helps reinforce a thought I've been playing around with since my 20's. It seems quite ridiculous to me that reason is set in conflict with emotion (a remnant, I believe, of the historical conflict of science contra religion in the west). It is much more likely that the ability to reason is a subset of emotion, i.e., reasoning is nothing more than the development of particular emotions working in concert. This conception is more aligned with how evolution actually operates (building upon the processes of before) rather than having to explain a "magical" reason which just appears out of nowhere in the human mind and dominates the animal nature.

Just a thought...I hope you were able to deal with your illness well.
Ask HN: Question about forming a company for side projects.
What I'm thinking about doing is forming a LLC to run some of my side projects under. I'd like to look into seeing if I can make money both with advertising and selling services with at least one of my projects.

I'm self funding right now, and working by myself. I'd rather do a simple LLC with a simple operating agreement and then if one my projects turns into something I'd want get investors for, or investors want to invest in, I'd form a new company and transfer the assets to it.

The LLC would be to protect personal liability, I'd even be looking into what the costs are for liability insurance. However, drafting up corporate documents and forming a class c in preparation for what the future may hold is something I'm not comfortable doing right now as I've never done it, and I don't think I can afford a lawyer right now to do it.

Is that a logical plan, or is there something I'm not thinking about that I should be?
I barely got out of highschool and I know enough to write a contract. It can be on a napkin, but for goodness sake write down the basic agreement.
We have run a recurring billing for 8 years.

We also do monthly prepay with no refunds -- it keeps things really simple. I cannot even recall a time when someone wanted a pro-rata refund.

The only thing you'll have to deal with is the "receipt" often reminds people they want to unsubscribe, so you have to decide how strict you'll be with the no-refunds policy in that case. We typically refund them since we don't email ahead of time about the renewal.

We also allow people to "deactivate" accounts to resurrect later. We have had people come back alive many times, and I doubt if we deleted everything that they would have bothered to start up again.
Sure, the goal might be to have everyone on own installation of it but it would be a reasonable expectation that a lot of people would want their own installation (as demonstrated by WordPress.org's bazillion downloads per micro-second) since part of the promise is owning your own data.
My url shortener with mirror fallback, looking for feedback
I paid $9/yr. for my WordPress shared hosting. Unfortunately that plan is going away this year. VPSes seem to start at $20/mo.

I'll probably move my blog to wordpress.com hosting and then try a combination of Heroku and Amazon EC2 micros for my app prototyping.
Thanks for the warning. Any efficient front end could replace node.js in this design. I'm not wedded to it and it is the most recent component added.

I was trying to get out a huge concept in my head, and probably wasn't very clear. The real "web development" will be happening in CouchApp. I'm just putting node.js in front to provide a couple services, each of which I expect to be very small.

I'm expecting to write well less than 100 lines of node.js code to interface in front of CouchApp. Basically, it will just provide a quick lookup into the routes, and switch between two CouchApp handlers for certain pages depending on if the user is authenticated (Eg: if you look at profile of user Y, it woudl be good to know if you're logged in as user Y and thus can edit the profile, or are some other user, and thus see only the public info for user Y.) Also, to pull results from a couple lists or shows and compose them into a single page, which has to be done outside of CouchApp... but really isn't very complicated.

The caching bit will simply be checking to see if the etag for a page in couchapp is in redis, if it is, update its TTL to keep it fresh and send it to the user, if it isn't then get the full/new page from CouchApp, push it into redis and send it along. This will be problematic if the APIs for redis and couchapp are sychronous in their node.js drivers. Will have to check on that.

Anyway, like I said, I'd be interested in hearing of a good replacement for node.js.

Just need something I can write a simple caching, routing code in... have looked at webmachine a bit, and it might be better... not sure I can pull erlang out of the couch an run it, though.

Twisted may also be a possibility.
It would be quite nice if there were a service half-way between Ask Jeeves and Mechanical Turk, where any query you entered would be passed to a librarian, who would reply with an optimized search string (with the option of starting a chat with you to "tease the relevant details out.")
Ask HN:  Dvorak?
Hello to HN! I am currently typing on a Dvorak keyboard, so as of right now my typing speed is crap (as if you guys can tell while reading this.) My question is such: Does anyone know of a good Dvorak typing tutor I can find online or perhaps does anyone have any recommendations as to any way to aid my struggle, as it were?

Thank you ahead of time for any advice given!
By ignoring the fact that this was built for a practical purpose, and only mentioning ways that it could be abused implied that the author had bad intentions when writing it

No it didn't imply anything of the sort. And whether something is built for a practical purpose or not is, in fact, not relevant to whether it's stupid or not. My point was that I think having this is a public web service is stupid and I explained why. The practical purposes you speak of could have been achieved just as easily by releasing the code so people interested in such functionality can use it as a library or host the service themselves.
They supply new ones every 90 days or so.
I'm guessing this is caused by their API rather than this app... but it's actually faster to search Amazon the regular way than it is to use this "instant" version.
No, people are anti-tax because they believe government is an inefficient way to Get Stuff Done.

To use your example, recent figures have shown that there are 4M adults in the UK who have never worked and spent their entire lives on the dole. Paying them to do nothing while there is stuff in the public good that needs doing, is simply not a good use of taxpayer's money.
Woe, that is ridiculous. Surprised nobody spotted that including me. Will get this fixed.