skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of 1 year old Android phones can't receive Froyo. That's a major problem. Why would you buy an Android phone knowing that it will quickly be forgotten by its support teams?

I'm not saying legacy support will make WP7 successful, but its a huge feather in MSFT's cap!
From their support site:

All,

We appreciate the feedback and will make something available to anyone that built their business around this. It will not be free but we will give a large discount for a smaller plan. More information to come shortly.
Tonido iPhone app Review
This I had seen, but it looks like big firms.
Bypass the SAAS model altogether and check out http://www.opengateway.net

One-time fee for the script and you get all the power of chargify on your own host.
If you want to waste a bit more time, it would be great if you would take notes and submit a blog post to HN with what you find.
Same here. I am from Brazil and i liked much more HN in its first days...sigh
HasWifi Tells You If Your Flight, Well, Has Wi-Fi
Why Love the Bullet but Hate the Bosom?
> You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever.

That assumption needs to be questioned. There are times when it's appropriate to raise your prices for certain goods and services. In fact, there are times when you must raise your prices if your business is to survive.
Am not well versed in this, but wouldn't the onus be on you to be PCI compliant then?
Down with URL shorteners
No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).
As mentioned by charliepark I think a reminder e-mail and a very forgiving refund policy seems to be the best way to do things from a customer relations standpoint.

On a business side of things do you have data on what the average retention rate of a customer is? If your average retention rate for monthly customers is >1 year maybe it's not worth it to even have the yearly subscription from a revenue standpoint. That being said if the yearly subscription retention rate is higher you should definitely keep that option available.
6 of the Best Free Linux Fractal Tools
Because the Simpsons is know for subtlety ...
Question, since this is getting a lot of discussion right now and it's relevant for anyone this impacts:

If you run a subscription-based web app and you determine that you need to increase your prices, what's the best way to do it?

Grandfathering existing customers obviously makes sense, but what if that's not an option? What if you need to charge them more to survive?
A breakdown of a week's worth of Techcrunch stories
Actual Print offers printed gift boxes and custom paperboard boxes
Some of them stay on for 30 minutes. They really like that someone is listening to them and trying to solve their problems.
I feel like I'm missing something, because going by these pricing charts -- http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup -- it seems like if you're a Chargify customer, "freemium" is no longer possible.

We (http://mocksup.com) happily use Spreedly and only send customers to them when they're upgrading to a paid account. Can you not do this with Chargify? And if you can, what do they count as a "free" user?
I remember one article of Steve Yegge in which he wrote that for the most part the engineering culture at Google came from an early employee. Is this actually the guy?
Guys, if this upsets you, you are not in the target market. (Much love, but the real world spends real money on revenue drivers.)
Cartoonish, even.

oops, hit reply instead of paste - didn't mean for that to look like snark

Not mentioned in many of the articles - most of which breathlessly informed viewers that animation of The Simpsons is done in South Korea, in case they had never bothered to read the credits - is the fact that animation is one of North Korea's few successful exports (legal ones, anyway). Although The Simpsons isn't prepared under the watchful eye of the Dear Leader, the head of the SK studio that produces it is the prime mover behind NK's animation industry, which I understand was set up during a less frosty period of north-south economic cooperation.

Less well-known again is the fact that North Korea also exports development services, and Fox parent News Corporation recently came under scrutiny for its ownership (following a takeover) of a firm that has developed mobile game spinoffs of a few Fox movies using NK labor.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/IC14Dg03.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-f...
I total agree about the meaningless titles. I ended up using http://www.pastacode.de/extending-gnu-screen-adding-a-taskba... to change the title to the current working directory and the program being executed.

Would be interested to hear your other tricks if you ever remember them ;)
Not till I read this post and the ensuing comments.

Snark aside, it would be helpful (and more interesting) if you at least elaborated on what you found displeasing, and perhaps even some ideas on how to improve it.
No one has seen the RTM version. Not until today at least when WP7 officially launches.

I'm interested in how WP7 will do in real life as well. My prediction may be completely wrong, I know that. Like I said in my article, "There is a huge check with Microsoft's name on it IF they pull this off." It will be pretty embarrassing if their billions invested in WP7 ends up as a failure :/
I'm not sure why the good doctor isn't worried about inflationary spirals. He talks about deflationary spirals, but here's the situation I see:

Economy goes into a depression, so there's stimulus, to give jobs to either government positions or favored private entities. The requisite money printing causes inflation. Inflation causes the cost of living and operating businesses to go up, which either sends jobs overseas (prompting government to inflate more to create a better trade balance) or corporations (esp. small businesses which are more sensitive to price indices and less likely to get stimulus) to close shop. If jobs are lost, government must inflate more to pay for new jobs or create more stimulus.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

All things being equal, I'd rather have a deflationary spiral, which can have a levelling effect - as inflation erodes saving power - hitting the poor far far harder than the rich.
This is not a good thing. While I understand why companies would rather not have their shares trade, imposing a $6,000 fee is anti- startup employees.
Deja vu. This is exactly what Recurly did to its users a few months ago. It was a bad move, with negative effects for their company that were serious and lasting enough that they had to backpedal with new pricing a few months later.
oDesk - easy to screen and pay people.
I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

I wholeheartedly agree, and from everything that I've seen of WP7, I'm impressed. MS has rethought the entire UI, and frankly, rebuilding from scratch was the only thing they could do to become relevant again in the consumer mobile space. They've done away with the desktop metaphor, menu bars and contextual menus, and yet they managed not to make it a carbon copy of iOS or WebOS. I can't wait to test it.

However, just a side note about your comparison between OS9>OSX and WM6>WP7: whenever there was a radical change in architecture, Apple provided a transition period where the two coexisted. When Apple switched from 68k processors to PowerPC, developers could build FAT Binaries that would run on both platforms. When Apple switched from MacOS 9 to OS X, MacOS 9 apps could still run within the Classic environment. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, PowerPC applications could still be run within a layer called Rosetta.
That may not be a safe assumption.
I hate url shorteners too, for all the reasons the author lists and more. But the article is wrong in stating "They serve no purpose other than to create a short link..."

Actually, while that is their primary purpose, they are very attractive to the people who use them because they give you a click tracking on your instance of the URL post, regardless of who owns the target website.

For me, this is actually another negative of the whole concept of URL shorteners. But it's a huge draw for the people using them.
It must have been weird for the workers in Korea to produce this opening.
I hate to say this, especially as an avid .NET fanboy, but I feel they missed a huge opportunity here. If they would have layered a pure-managed userspace on top of the CE kernel, they could've achieved extremely high performance (shared GC and seriously diminished task switching/IPC overhead) while guaranteeing a huge degree of security at compile-time. In addition, they could've much more easily moved the whole system to be orthogonally persistent, which I believe will play a big roll in the mobile space as tablets get more advanced, particularly.

The benefits of the OS being able to introspect completely on the applications running on it simply can't be overstated. From a security, stability, speed, memory use, and flexibility point of view, they missed the mark. It'd also open up a lot of new avenues in terms of parallelism, which will be a big deal in a few years as we get dual- and quad-core mobile chips. They're coming, and yet again we're not ready for them.

I sincerely hope they go the pure-managed-userspace angle for WP8. If they do, they'll have a tech stack that simply can't be beaten.

(Note: I'm a bit biased here, being the author of a pure-managed OS. But seriously -- these guys really started the trend, why are they not taking full advantage of it? They're already going mostly-managed...)
it depends on your sales volume. If you're a small starup you can do self-certification. Once your volume picks up you can go to the next step.
Happy to use Rackspace or another dedicated server provider... the trick is that we don't want to be responsible for, say, security patches to the kernel.

So really the question is: is there a company that'll manage the damn server(s) for us so that we get to deal with a nice, clean abstraction similar to shared hosting?

Basically I want a HIPAA-compliant Heroku (though in this case not for Ruby).
It seems that the device actually lights up to help you wake up. Does it also mimic the sun's early-morning wavelengths? From what I understand, the color changes from early morning to noon to afternoon, etc. and the body is adapted to react differently during each phase.
We use http://timetrex.com/. I think they may have a hosted solution.
But this is not one of those times. What you do is you adjust your businessmodel so your new model takes in to account grandfathering in the old customers. Who over time will fade away so the problem will take care of itself.

We're not talking about a price hike that is caused by an increase in cost of raw materials or such. And even those usually don't radically cause your business model to shift, they will just cause an adjustment of a few percent or pennies to accommodate the underlying shift.

For instance, I have a very good deal with moniker for my domains, if they underlying price changes I pay for that. This is logical because moniker has to pay it too, so they pass the cost on 1:1. It's not like they told me 'first 50 domains are free' and then suddenly turned around and started charging me $100 / month.
I don't really see from that article what the issue is. It just tries to SSH into your phone, and if you left the default root password, ta-da, it's in; then it tries to use your phone to SSH into other people's phones.

Is there some part of the story missing here? The only vulnerability I see is that foolish people are allowed to run SSH servers on their phone.
In head to head comparison, the WP7 browser, in preproduction HW, performed about on par with Android (Nexus One) and iPhone 4 browsers.

I'm sure that with IE9, they'll rev the phone with an HTML5 focused browser in the future. But for todays web, I think a solid IE7/8 browser is something I'm completely fine with. At least for a year or so.
In a way it is. I'm not a regular Simpsons watcher, but at least in some episode there are multiple layers and meanings going on at the same time. It can be almost Shakespearean sometimes.
I use screen in my production configuration. It is a pretty static setup, though. It is particularly essential to monitor production server where I could suddenly get disconnected.
I fail to see how this could possibly be a good business decision for them.

Seems pretty plain to me that they need to be going for the low end of the market — new startups with 0-100 customers — rather than the high end.
Banksy never really been subtle, but I thought it was pretty clever.
Unsubtle, agreed, but provocative? It's too unsubtle to be provocative.

You would have to be pretty humorless not to see the whole thing as a joke. And presumably the Simpsons writers stopped listening to the humorless people twenty seasons ago.
But it's a correct one. Razzle is used internally for building the kernel and drivers, but the majority (I believe?) of the userspace is done using VS.
Follow this simple flowchart to startup success
Last time I looked, Spreedly's API and functionality wasn't even in the same ballpark as Chargify's. I've worked on integration projects with both, and Chargify is much better and more configurable. Spreedly may have improved, it's been a while.
The main point for me, is that XKCD used to be funny, insightful and reasonably accessible.

These days it rarely achieves all three.

(Shame you're being down-voted, I suppose hell hath no fury like a nerd scorned ...)
Some people (like you, it seems) see HN primarily as a place to discuss things. Others see it primarily as a place to discover things. For the latter group, this belongs on HN because they would not have seen it otherwise.
I use screen very heavily. One of my favourite although somewhat frivolous uses is running irssi on screen from my home box. I have irssi configured to set my status to away when the screen is detached and having the chat session be persistent is a huge help.

Also I've used screen as a poor mans daemon tools to run various apps in the background as a service. I even at one point had a skeleton init script that used screen to run any command as a daemon. I should see if I can find that actually and get it on github so I can find it the next time I need it.
The old episodes are pretty sharp. Lately it's gotten pretty blunt. Yes, Homer is a jackass. Got it.
Grellas' Startup Law 101 is a great starting resource for these sorts of questions. The IP article is here:

http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_015a.html
My favorite is when he painted "FUCK PIGS" on the side of a pig. There's something so completely hilarious about that.
Original here: http://hackfwd.com/
Bump is looking for an Android contractor
Bump is looking for high-end 2-3 month contractor.

-We are writing Bump 2.0 on Android.

-We would be very interested in adding someone to our 4-person team until the end of the year.

-Great pay, team, codebase.

-Need to spend 50-100% time on site (Dana St, Mountain View, CA).

email: dalvik@bu.mp

Feel free to ask questions here or email us.
Will WP7 phones sync out-of-the-box with Macs?
The first company that gets to a certified HIPAA and PCI hosting cloud is going to have to figure out what to do with the buckets of cash they have lying around. I think for the enterprise PCI certification will be the event that gets the big (non-tech) guys out of running their own infrastructure. I would imagine that it would be the same for medical. As for you immediate question, I am sorry I can't help I don't know who if anyone is doing this. I am still looking for a PCI certified cloud as a portion of my customers are Public companies and not having to work on all their different infrastructures and being able to provide them a hosted solution would be great for me, but there is no way I could get into managing a PCI certified hardware infrastructure just to achieve that goal.
None of those. Personal recommendations will always deliver above any automated solutions.

Start with anyone you know who knows Obj-C, if you are posting this you probably don't know anyone that fits though.

So the next step is to talk to anyone else in a similar business to yours and see if they have someone they have used and would recommend.

The last step, post to places like HN asking for recommendations - if someone is willing to publicly endorse someone chances are they really believe in them.
If bootstrapped young startups aren't in Chargify's target market, then I'd argue that "the target market" was poorly chosen.

Why might the low-budget territory (with costs from $0-$30/month) be useful for Chargify to cover? Not because you'll make much money from that territory. In fact, you might, on balance, lose money on the people who remain in that group. However, everyone who starts there won't stay there, because some will ultimately become your multi-thousand-subscription core users a year from now. In other words, it might act as a "loss leader." This pricing structure, given the pricing structure of the competition, risks diminishing the wellspring of new users for Chargify.

Restated, my (testable) hypothesis is that (a) if you have similar competitors, and (b) you make yourself unpalatable to your low-tier users, then you will see reduced growth in your high-tier users. It looks like Chargify is willing to test that hypothesis.
IBM to join OpenJDK
agreed. it raises uncertainty...if they raise the prices now...what's stopping them from raising them again in the future.
You'd think that wouldn't you. I found ways to track this stuff even when remote images are disabled in Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Android Mail, Mail on iOS, Outlook, tonnes of webmail apps:

https://secure.grepular.com/Apple_Mail_Privacy_Hole

https://secure.grepular.com/iOS4_iPhone_Email_Privacy_Leak

https://secure.grepular.com/DNS_Prefetch_Exposure_on_Thunder...

I created a web application which crafts an email with lots of tests and sends it your address. When you open it, it tries to "call back" to my server and the web page shows you the results. If you see anything on there before hitting "Load Images" your client has a problem. You can access the app here:

https://secure.grepular.com/email_privacy_tester/
Re backwards compat... I think MS did the right thing here making the applications have to be managed. The WP7 managed stack seems really well-tuned (especially for a mobile device).

Removing native code from 3rd party apps gives them several things:

1) Reduces incidence of memory leaks.

2) Less buggy apps w/ better type safety than C/C++.

3) Improved security. No buffer overruns or out of range subscript class of vulns.

4) Can more easily statically analyze to determine resource usage and inappropriate usage.

5) Can change the underlying HW platform and apps continue to run.

The only real issue I've seen with managed code in the past is perf. And from the game demos I've seen, I think they may have fixed that issue.
It's not so much as the money that's upsetting, as much as the broken trust when prices are adjusted upwards so dramatically. For example, our monthly prices will go from 0 to $99/month. You can say that may be a good thing, forcing us to focus on customer acquisition. But the point is that a service we budgeted X dollars for suddenly, dramatically increased. Of course $1200/yr is not life threatening. However, the trust is gone (or, at least it's dissolving quickly). As I wrote in my email to Chargify, if they're experiencing increasing costs, let us (their customers) know and be sincere - we are their fans! I WANT to pay them, because they have a quality product. But right now, it looks like a money grab after locking in developers. That part is upsetting.
I find more usefull to set title of each window manually because such titles makes more sence to me, especially with lots of windows.
I wouldn't know, but I would imagine that they might find it hilarious.

It's always nice to make a cameo appearance, even in extreme caricature. (Which is generally the only way one gets to make a cameo appearance on The Simpsons.)
Göteborg, Sweden

This is monthly expenses in euro. 1 EUR = ~1.4 USD
.
Rent: Sweden is rent controlled. Expect €200-500 for 1 BR apartment in a large city depending on if you live on the outskirts or right downtown. The problem is the queues. If you want to live very central you can stand in line for many many years. Around €100-300 per month if you own a condo and only pay the condo association fee. Around €150-200k to buy a 1 BR very central condo.

Electricity: Around 10 euro cents per kWh.

Internet: €30-40 for 100/10Mbps cable or 100/100Mbps FTTH(whatever is available) or ADSL (24/3Mbps) if you live in a house. I get 100/10Mbps for free and 100/100Mbps for €20 extra per month.

Phone: €10 if you make a few calls and send a few SMS per day, I pay €6 for flatrate 1Mbps data per month. €15 for 6Mbps flatrate and €20 for 10Mbps. (I'm writing this message riding a train with my laptop and cell phone in tethering harmony)

Food: €150 I make my own food to 99% and don't buy much meat. Double it if you eat like a regular person. :) A lunch is €6 for kebab/McD and stuff like that, €10+ on restaurant. Expect €30 per person to eat dinner and drink wine/beer on a nice restaurant.

Beer/Alcohol: Expensive! €1.5 for 50cl beer of the cheapest kind in the state owned alcohol monopoly store. In clubs/bars it's around €5 for ~40cl beer. €10 for 4cl shots.

Ramen: 20 euro cents for a package of noodle (80gr). You can buy 500gr of pasta for €0.5-1.

Transport: €2 per ride on the tram with SMS ticket (How many rides you want within 90min). I take 5-10 rides per month and walk every where I need to go otherwise.

Shopping: iPad €550. Xbox 360 slim 250GB €230. Clothes are europy-pricey I guess...

Insurances: The only one you need to have is home insurance. Mine is €10 per month.

Wages: Around €2500-3000/month for entry level programmers with a uni./college degree.

I don't know if I've forgot something important but my living expenses are around €500 per month total.
That is what I found when I last looked at Spreedly as well. Good opportunity for them to beef up their API to attract defectors.
"List comprehension: great in Python, easily added to Java, once it has closures" - yep, that kind of article..
"The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it"

I don't think any irony or toleration is going on here, at least not more so than the players in Madden "tolerate" being forced to play football again and again. The players in Madden also fail to express concern about overpopulation but I think that's just the nature of a limited simulation. I'd love to play more sophisticated games, but SimCity just isn't there yet.
The only thing that has improved my posture (other than concentration and awareness, which are usually engaged with other things) is exercise. For me, running helps a little, but the best by far is lifting weights. After I lift weights, my posture takes care of itself for the next 12-24 hours. Lifting weights also helps me learn what a strong, healthy posture feels like, so when I consciously try to stand up straight, it's easier to achieve a relaxed, natural-feeling position instead of straining and feeling unsure.

I expect this advice only applies to exercises done on your feet with free weights, such as squatting and overhead pressing, not to bench pressing or machine work.
The problem with charging for actual usage is that most of Chargify's support costs are probably incurred while their customers are setting things up. And that is when they don't have any users. Once you get chargify set up you don't have to touch it too much.

Regardless though, this was a bad way to handle the price increase.
I admire what he did, and the freshness with which he did it. Disclosure was important as highlighted by the uncertainty about Steve Jobs and his illness.

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; it is learning to dance in the rain."