skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RE #2, the price issue is interesting.

I could rewrite your point on #2 from a different perspective:

"$20/year 'dreamhost pricing' is way too little to spend my the blog. I'm sorry, but I rely on my blog for my entire income and so I need to know the support at the level I need is in place, the quality for the service I need is there, I have the kind of traffic that needs performance optimization and CDN, and I need to know that this is a clearly long-term viable business so you guys will be around in years to come as my blog gets even bigger. I really hope this is just the initial price plan, because I honestly believe that as you grow, it will make sense to let people host much bigger comercialized blogs on here."

The point is we're simply looking at the entire blogging space and carving it up into different market segments based on needs and then super-targeting one segment.

Tony Schnieder (Automattic/WordPress.com CEO) said today at TechCrunch disrupt that WordPress blogs power 8.5% of the internet's websites - so we think it's clear that one size does not fit all and there are opportunities for different services to cater for different needs.

Finally don't forget there are much more expensive options out there... we're not WordPress VIP either which is several $1000's/month for service and support (TechCrunch, GigaOm etc run on this).
There are many types of advertising that work on me, none have convinced me to buy a certain product, but i have learned of a companies existance I otherwise would have never learned about. I know that xobni exists and spells inbox backwards, due to massive radio/sky advertising campaigns in seattle.

I think the only internet advertising that has made an impression on me are Hulu/etc video advertisements (basically tv commercials, but generally more relevant to me). I can't think of any standard internet advertising (banner ads, google ads, etc) which has made an impression on me.
Ask HN: Managed Hosting Service Recommendation for Windows environment
We are currently using a .NET / DotNetNuke based product that runs on Windows 2008 / IIS 6 / MS SQL Server 2005. Currently, it is hosted in-house but due to resource issues, we plan to move the web infrastructure to a 3rd party provider.

I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for a Windows/.NET Managed Hosting Service Provider. Also, would it be a good idea to look at Cloud services providers? We need a provider with a solid track record as far as security of data and data availability are concerned as we do store confidential information like SSNs and handle payments.

Thanks.
I think what is important here in the OP is the "at least give me a few options". Amongst my group of friends there has been a "quit facebook" movement in the last 6 months, and I can see why given the privacy issues that have been going on there. I probably would have joined them if I didn't live so far away from family and friends now. But really, it'd be nice to have a few options; lots of social sites allow you to use them to authenticate elsewhere, and things like OpenID which you can get from other places as well as rolling your own if you want to.

The only time you should be really concerned about whether your user really is who they say they are is if you are (or you are interacting with) some sort of official government or similar entity that legally and officially requires proof of identity. Otherwise it should be perfectly acceptable to have multiple, disparate identities on the internet.
perl is dead?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl,+php,+rails,+ruby&...
Someone is going to figure out a really nice framework on top of nodejs for making webpages with javascript.

edit:

Which is to say, I think javascript is a great language, has the benefit of being the de-facto language of UI development on the browser (and on a lot of embedded apps now as well). Nodejs alone is much too low-level and evented for normal humans to use for throwing together a web site without callback mindfucks, but its a great base to build something on.
I like the Swiss system. People can actually move their neighborhood to a different canton or create a new one if the one they don't like how things are run in the canton they are in. And it rarely happens, simply because it can.

And the people must approve many measures and certainly those changing the constitution of the country. They have referendums all the time and also proportional representation, which aligns the legislature with the voters.

Of course, this means Switzerland minds it own business and won't invade other countries, but I guess that's the downside of government not driven by anti-competitive urges.

The downvotes are ok. There seems to be an element here that doesn't like it when you state the obvious, but most are rational though.
Did aliens tamper with nukes?
My theory (I have absolutely no evidence to back this up) is that there's a level where there's no point reducing the price because the psychological cost of digging out a credit card, typing in the number, and wondering if you can really trust this merchant, is actually higher than the cost of the money you're forking out.

For me, if I'm not willing to buy it at $20, I'm probably not going to buy it online at all. Other people seem to have a threshold closer to $15 or $10.

Note that this doesn't apply in app store situations where your carrier already has your billing information. (Hence all the successful 99-cent iPhone games.)

Also, ignore the "feeble excuses" from the "piratey types"--they're just that, excuses.
In case anyone didn't see it down at the bottom, this comment was left on the post:

Ryan (& Everyone Else) –

My name is Mike Vernal, and I manage the engineering team for Facebook
Platform.

I understand and am legitimately sorry for the frustration you guys are
experiencing.

I think there were three themes in this post — frequency of change, bugs,
and documentation. I wanted to give you some more context on all three
points, not as a way of excusing the problems you’ve had but as a way of
adding some additional context.

Over the past year or so, we’ve been pushing to simplify and standardize
our development platform as much as possible, to address some of the root
causes of the issues you point out here. For instance, we’ve been trying
to move from FBML to IFrames over the past year because we think that
IFrames are both a lot simpler to develop for and a lot simpler to
maintain because they’re based on standard web technologies. We’ve also
been moving towards simpler ways of integrating Facebook context
(e.g., iframe-based social plugins) because they’re easier to use, debug,
and maintain.

Our end goal is to have a technology stack that is simple and
standards-based, because we believe that’s actually the best way to
address many of the issues you raise here.

In terms of bugs, you’re right — we haven’t been doing a good enough job
here. We’re working on this. We’re triaging bugs on a daily basis and
working through the bug backlog. We’re continually adding more automated
unit + functional tests to help prevent regressions and issues in the
first place. And we’re working on our communication processes — the way
the system works today, we actually copy verified bugs from Bugzilla into
an internal bug tracking system, and we then use that internal bug
tracking system to drive bugs to resolution. We don’t do a good enough
job of communicating back to the Bugzilla bug the internal status and when
we actually push a fix, which we’re working on.

In terms of documentation, again, you’re right. We’re building up a team
and focusing on this as well.

That said, actions speak louder than words. If you don’t see meaningful
improvement by the end of October, please let me know. My email is
mvernal@facebook.com.

Thanks,

-mike
The common use of tragic is more general than the literary term, and any premature death of an admired or innocent person is reasonably tragic.

This situation is arguably ironic, with a few reasonable assumptions: the Heselden believed and promoted the Segway as safe, that one motivation for his fatal final excursion was to be ready with personal experience and stories about its safe and exciting use, and so forth. "I have so much confidence in this product, I bought the company!" And now, he's also bought the farm.
There's some confusion between PHP and Perl, the languages, and PHP and Perl+various things as solutions for creating web sites.
You are mixing your requirements really badly here: a language that's "dead simple to run" vs a language that works stupidly simple with the web.

Ruby is very easy to run: puts "Hello World"

As is perl: print "Hello World";

Php? <?php echo "Hello World"; ?> (wtf is all that crap, says the new programmer)

The point the OP is trying to make is the "stupid simple with the web" side of the equation. Of course the PHP side isn't as simple as "the language runs on the web". PHP runs on Apache because of the tons of work put into mod_php to integrated it and make it work as easy as possible.

You can't "just run" php on nginx, lighty, etc. Then you need to setup FastCGI instances, and now you're no different from Rails land with mongrels or thins.
I agree, users should have options to login. I'm giving the option to login with Facebook or Twitter, but users can also register for a completely new account on the site. Hoping that this method creates the least barrier for users that don’t' want additional accounts, but also provides a login option for users that don't have one of these accounts.
He built on an open source project and built a very successful community and SaaS consumer business around it, starting at a time when no one was using that kind of model.
The article refers to the max flow problem. About all this article does is imply that the new method involves the adjacency matrix of the graph and provides little else in the way of details. A better article is needed, not this oversimplified press release.
Review: Amazon Kindle 3 Wi-Fi (pics/vid)
The language that newbies love is never going to be the language that experts love. Andy Hunt writes about this somewhat in his book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - newbies need a level of structure and support that experts would feel to be braces restricting their movement.

Whatever eventually replaces PHP will have to be easy for beginners to get going with. I assume it will not be a compiled language. I think that rules out most of the languages on the JVM, even the really easy ones, because it is on the JVM, and dealing with compiling is one more hoop that beginners won't necessarily want to jump through. CLASSPATH is not friendly. Likewise, I'd rule out .NET languages.

New languages tend to gain a foothold when people change contexts, so I assume cell phones offer a starting point. A light weight script language that works on cell phones? I am not sure what that will be.
Supermarkets are cheaper than eating out.
You're only thinking two dimensionally.
Keep in mind that everyone is a Dilbert at something....
To me it just seems retarded to assume that everybody have a facebook account - especially when OpenId was invented to solve this exact problem.

And guess what, a facebook account is also an open id.
Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To "Stop Out Of School"
Blacked Out: Where the Economist is Censored
What's stopping you from setting your password to jeff_sucks? It's pretty memorable too.
It looks like their "DRM" is more nagware than DRM.

You can pirate it easily enough, but it forces you to admit to yourself that you are doing something ethically dubious in the process.
Yes, let's kill PHP. Now we just have to figure out who's gonna rewrite Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, flickr, digg, all drupal sites, all Wordpress blogs...
Mark Zuckerberg, comic book action hero?
Here you go, works on heroku. http://github.com/capotej/joke
PHP established itself when there was no real contender for a HTML preprocessor that could mix server-side code in with web pages. There are a staggering number of choices for this now, but none of them come anywhere close to being widely supported on every Linux shared host in the world like PHP is.
I had a t-shirt for that.

If it's done on the job, I call it competency modulation.
Flash Crash Summary Report & Time-Line Graph
I'm tired of this ZFS hype. ZFS for linux is absolutely not mature. First, you can't distribute binaries. Second, the version is currently 0.5.x, which is alpha; and I can tell you after trying to compile it proved largely enough that it is, indeed, alpha quality. Third, it misses a quite useful feature, the posix interface, i. e. the ability to mount the filesystem. Slight limitation isn't it?

Then I can mention a couple of other small problems. ZFS isn't at all cluster-aware. In fact, it radically sucks as a cluster filesystem. I know quite an important storage platform who sent back 2PB of Sun storage because you know, aggregating 2PB by stacking iSCSI volumes and using RAID-Z simply cannot work and doesn't scale, though that's precisely what Sun tried to sell them. That pretty much assures that ZFS isn't really a perfect fit for the cloud, you know. At least not for the people actually running it.
Yeah, it's bad enough developing your own applications on someone else's unstable API - I'd definitely hate to do it as client work.
"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

A couple of things:

1) The key word is obvious. There are oftentimes less obvious ways to do things that may be better for whatever reason.

2) It's not really reasonable to expect that there can only be one way to do everything.

What it really means is that (for instance) Python only allows one way to denote where a code block begins and ends (via indentation) while Ruby allows you to use curly brackets and begin/end. Nor does it have an unless statement that is equivalent to "if not"
There are two points you need to remember, one, a huge percentage of users have facebook accounts and use them regularly, the hacker news audience is a small minority of people who don't want to use facebook; and two, facebook's new graph api can easily give you very simple and quick access to viral marketing by spamming your your users' feeds while also providing you with a fairly substantial amount of data about your users. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but its definitely a strong motivation for a lot of companies using facebook logins and facebook widgets.
from http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15...

WordPress.com….

1. Doesn’t allow Javascript. (So no dynamic elements and no Google Analytics)

2. Doesn’t allow arbitrary plugins. (Because they severely restrict what they can do — many of the plugins I use on this blog are illegal there.)

3. Doesn’t do the speed optimizations we do (some of our WordPress.com refugee customers report 3x speed improvements)

4. Doesn’t put your media on a CDN for free (not yet announced but we’re starting to roll that out!)

5. Doesn’t have quality, email tech support (you have to troll around on forums)

6. Doesn’t recommend plugins (we know which ones are still supported and work well)

7. Doesn’t have the “staging” feature

To name a few.
Ruby is very easy to run: puts "Hello World"

You are confusing Ruby for Ruby on Rails.

Ruby is easy to run. Ruby on Rails, not as much(relatively).
I think the real test of whether anarchy is preferable to stable government ('anti-competitive' or not), is whether Somalia is doing better than the United States. A perfectly fair comparison would require Somalia to be under anarchy for the same number of years as the U.S. has been a democracy, but presumably you could pick younger democracies for an easier comparison.

I think you will find that:

1) Anarchies, almost by definition, spill into neighboring countries in the form of violence and/or refugess. This is the reason the U.N. intervenes in the first place.

2) A system of governance imposed by outsiders may be worse than anarchy, but self-governance, given a decade or more, will result in conditions better than anarchy. Indeed, I believe that left alone, an anarchy over time will develop into some form of stable government. Usually it's a dictatorship but there is a small chance it may be some form of self governance.

These are both as yet unproven claims based on my intuition of course. If someone has data to back these up or refute them, that would be really interesting.
i was expecting this article to be about glenn beck
"If you give a founder (or early employee) more than they're going to be worth in the long term, you'll feel increasingly motivated to fire them and recover their un-vested stock."

I'm surprised that I don't hear more horror stories about co-founders and early employees being kicked out just to get their un-vested stock. That's the one thing about 4 year vesting that always seemed risky to me.
How about embedding positive tweets about your business? Pretty hard to fake that kind of testimonial, and they always appear more genuine than solicited praise.
It is a good thing, but it isn't the highest good. It doesn't make sense to avoid useful basic features simply because they aren't immediately obvious to a novice in the language.
This is all good advice except that (as you can see in these comments) I spell like a retarded gold fish and my ideas aren't really that interesting.

I very much doubt I am alone in this.
It's been years since I last cracked a statistics book. Would a t-test be more accurate than a z-test or chi-squared for small samples? I've love to see a write-up on the statistics equations for A/B testing and guidelines on when to use which.
The DSM may soon classify anti-authoritarianism as a mental illness
TIP 2: Take what you need. Nothing like ripping all my details because you need my e-mail address. I think twice about using your site when you want to take a view of everything on my profile.
Ask HN: Web app hosting...fast, reliable, affordable vendors?
We're currently using Bluehost for our start-up, Page99Test.com. It's got a decent control panel for file management and links to phpMyAdmin, server-side plugins, etc. but our site performance (i.e., response times) seems pretty crappy to me.

We're on a shoestring budget... looking to keep hosting fees well below $100 per month.

Hoping the community here can share its recommendations and experiences.

Many thanks,
Lance Jones
"30 minute nap between classes" -- heh, that's not how I remember it :) I had one class right after lunch, on Special Relativity. I was interested in the subject (it was an elective), but the lecturer's voice was quite monotonous and I rarely stayed awake through the whole class...
As I understand it, the point of this is to manipulate how MDC ranks in google searches. A lot of people try to do this, and google works to prevent it. What I'm saying is that google's algorithms might see this sudden rise in links coming from sites with potentially widely different content, consider it unnatural, and classify it as spam. They also might not, I certainly don't know the details of their spam prevention algorithm.

I'm not saying that I personally am offended by this widget, I don't give a damn. But google might.
A lot of misinformation in this post. Perl pointers? The Perl hash is the same as the PHP assoc. array (thats where they got it from). PHP has both lambda's and method chaining (method chaining isn't a lang feature).

confusing language and platform/framework - "the language now requires modification by a framework to do what you need." and "I want a language that assumes everything I will be building is an MVC web app, and builds that right into the core language, not just a library.". yikes.

Not sure what else to believe in this article after spotting basic errors (not to mention terrible cliches, assumptions, no background or references etc. and statements like this - "nowadays it doesn't feel like you're doing it properly these days")
I might be (very) slightly more sympathetic to that argument if the FBI were not currently raiding the homes of antiwar activists:
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/09/24/fbi-launching-mass-raids-...
But it doesn't always lengthen a URI if this is the case.
Another jQuery plugin I've been using quite a bit
He is referring to an under-appreciated virtue of good software: installability.

apt-get install php5

Usually you don't even need that.
Level 3 VPS at Hostgator is great for a startup and only around $40/month.

I've been using Hostgator for ~2 years and I can only imagine leaving if I plan to run my own servers.
I am starting a new site and want to avoid authentication.

In our system, two users are linked together for the purpose of our service. We do that via unique URLs. Do you think it is safe to match up emails for authentication.

i.e. when user 1 wants to get his profile, he has to input his email and his partner's email. If he fails to do that then we do not pull up the profile. Does this make sense and do you think it is secure enough?
I've been using PHP professionally since it was called PHP/FI, and while it's a terribly designed language, I've longed stopped hating it. I know all of it's quirks, and I know all of it's work arounds, and the density of support it has can't be beat.

I wouldn't complain if a better server-side language came around (not a big fan of Ruby's syntax, but Google's Go looks enticing), but until then, I've built incredibly complex apps in PHP, and rarely do I run into a limitation of the language. My biggest issue in the past was the lack of namespaces, and 5.3 has those.

I think the best thing you could do to get a new language as popular as PHP isn't to evangelize, or even to make the language dead simple, but make it dead simple for administrators to add support to a typical shared hosting environment.
Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.

That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't understand what was wrong with the question.
After my surf-and-turf, three-martini lunches, I do tend to get drowsy
No I don't do any templating server side, it is a waste of server resources. So all of our templating Header, footer, static articles are in a CMS all dynamic elements are done via JavaScript. We use a headless web browser to serve pages to crawlers from a dedicated server. It acts as a parser for the crawlers and when it sees a crawler agent and the hash mark it acts as the client Javascript engine and composites the page. This way, we don't have a hand coded solution for a platform problem that is infrastructure related.
When I ran WP on a Windows host, the biggest frustration I had was that so many WP hacks required .htaccess. I don't know for sure if there's a market out there for a Windows .htaccess emulator, but I'd bet there's a lot of Windows shared hosting users that would love to see their hosts provide one.
Given that you are running your servers in house, your best bet is probably not to use a managed hosting solution, but rather something like Amazon EC2 (for windows) or Linode (for linux). Back in the spring I was looking for a managed hosting solution for a small .NET project and the best I could find was GoDaddy which ended up being a terrible experience as you might expect. If you get an EC2 server, it should be fairly easy to port your current setup to Amazon's cloud since you will have root access. I'm running my linux servers on a Linode right now and I love it.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
One major point of contention: the quality of PHP's documentation is a critical part of it's overall value to developers.

A language isn't done until it's documented. Parts of the language available that aren't documented simply don't count.

A competitor has to beat PHP on both the lingual and documentation fronts to win.
Linode is popular. Heroku or Google's thing seem like popular choices as well, depending on what platform/language you're using.