skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. What a kick in the nuts.

UsabilityHub has just shy of 10,000 users. The VAST majority of those are free users, and a fair percentage of those are inactive. My Chargify bill would've just gone from $50p/month to $999p/month! And pretty soon I'd be looking at having to NEGOTIATE my pricing. What the fuck chargify?

Fortunately for us, we saw the potential for asshole acts from Chargify and never registered our free users with them. If we had...well...we'd be royally screwed. $50 to $1000 with one newsletter.

I feel like a moron the number of times I pointed to Chargify as a great way to do business. They were startup friendly, they helped you grow your business to the point where you'd be happy when you start paying them. I know we were! Most of all, Chargify were the beacon of freemium pricing. Not only were THEY freemium, they were very freemium friendly.

In one swoop they've gone from the cheapest part of setting up your billing to being BY FAR the most expensive part. What a bunch of suckers all your customers are...us included.

Chargify, you will NEVER under the hate you've just brought on yourselves.
Looks like there is a built in max lifetime of about 5-10 hrs.
What's the enterprise-level feature differentiation he's referring to? Surely the point of Java having a reference implementation is that any JAR will run on any JVM?
Paying just the interest on the debt takes a significant portion of government revenue, although I don't have citations handy.

As that proportion increases (that is, how much of government revenue is spent just on paying for past debt, rather than anything productive), the likelihood of some threshold being crossed increases. But until that point, the government is able to sweep it all under the rug.
I've been frustrated by short URLs in my Twitter feed too. So frustrated, in fact, that I wrote an app to "peel" them. It's a Chrome extension that shows you where the link is going before you click. Google App Engine fetches page headers on your behalf and gives you back the real link.

It's called LinkPeelr, and you can check it out here: http://linkpeelr.appspot.com
I'm not sure why I can't seem to edit my previous comment, or what happened to it.

We contracted a law firm specialising in foreigners running companies here in Spain. They're really good, but the amount of running around I have to do is still huge and some things really are impossible (e.g. getting a foreign contract talking about monetary amounts notarised). I would certainly never incorporate here by choice.
Full disclosure: I run Spreedly, an earlier to market but much less funded competitor to Chargify.

Here's the dirty little secret that Spreedly discovered about 18 months ago, and that I'm sure Chargify - like Recurly before them - has now found out for themselves: there are plenty of people who want to start subscription businesses, and out of those, the vast majority will not succeed and will actually end up costing more than they ever bring in. That leaves businesses in this space two options: either focus on successful startups and actively filter out the "losers" (by charging a minimum of $99/month, for instance), or minimize costs for "low probability" businesses - and they're all low probability early on! - and use "cheap to try things out" as a star search for the few businesses that will end up getting big.

Note that Chargify paired this price increase announcement with two other significant announcements that have largely been overshadowed by the hullabaloo: PCI Level 1 compliance, and 24/7 phone support. This pairing is not coincidence - I'm pretty confident that the pricing change is very firmly tied internally to these two new "features". PCI Level 1 compliance is a hefty upfront cost plus a large ongoing price tag. Good 24/7 phone support is crazy expensive to provide, and means that free customers would eat their lunch since so much of the support needs for one of these businesses is on the front end.

The ridiculously huge mistake I think Chargify made here was something I thought was just a given these days: they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well. When Spreedly made our last pricing change - from percent of transaction fee to flat per transaction fee - it was a price drop for most of our customers. But not all: anyone with super low prices would've ended up paying us more, so we explicitly made it the minimum of $0.20 or 2% of the transaction. There's just no excuse for ticking off existing customers - it makes you look like a cell phone company. Even if you absolutely have to raise prices across the board, I think three months of warning is the absolute minimum amount of time to give a customer base before you hit them with the increase.

So, that's my $0.02 - hope it helps folks understand why I think this is happening. Questions, feedback, etc., welcome.

P.S. I think in some areas Chargify's definitely ahead of Spreedly Subscriptions in terms of functionality - all of that extra capital definitely shows in the end product. But that's because we've been focused on "what's next" after you figure out the naive business model doesn't work in this space. I said above that there are two options. That's a lie - we're working on a third option. If there are any angels reading this that would like to invest in a team that's been thinking deeply about this space since before Chargify and Recurly were a twinkle in their founder's eye, drop me a line.
The Joys and Woes of HTML5 Sound
Haha. Well, during my six years as a graduate student, the CPI went up 8% per annum, and my salary went from 24k to 27k. Show me some data that there isn't a lag between wages and prices. As far as I know, typically the way that people get their wages to keep up with inflation is by shifting jobs horizontally or vertically. All evidence shows that that's not working so well. In the 50s a family could survive on one salary working a 40-50 hour work week. We're increasingly seeing families requiring two breadearners pulling 50-80 hour weeks.

I think my argument is sound. All I'm saying is that the blanket statement that inflation is beneficial to poor people is flat out wrong. Consider also that poor people aren't getting fixed rate mortgages (more like variable rate ones - which are worse) and aren't investing in stocks or bonds which at least have a chance of beating inflation (if you play it right and get out before crashes). If you want to critique my argument, plug in real numbers and show me I'm wrong in our current situation. I believe that the numbers will hold up in my favor.
There are plenty of companies that will do this for you, probably from about $250 per month; what I would recommend is a reasonably powerful dedicated machine on which you install your own VPS solution.

Give one large VPS to your production app, and create other VPSes for testing or development purposes.

The reason you want to use a VPS on top of your own dedicated hardware is to gain the benefits of VPS control, including easy archiving of the entire system, snapshots, easy moves to new hardware even if the hardware is different, etc.
The company we use, Rimuhosting, has sysadmin services available at $40/hr, which is pretty reasonable. Their dedi-server plans are reasonable as well.
I posted this because its an elegant code snippet. Maybe the majority of users here are already familiar with this pattern, but being fairly new to programming I found it to be a good solution. I read a blogpost by Jake Voytko last year that had a similar goal but cast the strings to integers and was much more complicated. The SO algorithm is probably less efficient depending on the implementation of the subString method, but I imagine it is pretty close to optimal, does anyone know of a better algorithm?
Django and PHP (CakePHP, Codeigniter, etc), and obviously RoR.

My current favorite is Python/Flask.
This is an incredible story. Can't believe you hang in there for so long. Glad you log and share all these details. Will be a great moral support for all the wannabe entrepreneur out there. Good luck to your twins. (My second one is due this month :)

I'm also working on a data driven application. So far I see 0 revenue potential in the current form but it is incredibly interesting problem to me. I guess I will run it by you when it is showable. I thought it is likely a 2 months project but this is its 6-th month already :( Making very nice progress and a lot of learning though.
They've indicated that alternative arrangements can be made with existing merchants (not free, but not $99 either). We'll wait to see what those are before making a decision.
PHP is the quickest to get up and going and will probably be the cheapest to host. Unless you go the Google App Engine route. PHP is probably the most promiscuous though.
Thanks for pointing this out. There is one major difference, Mindspread is suppose to be completely altruistic.
japanese people eat maruchan too, just they have places that serve fresh ramen (not factory made).
How I got a preview of the Kindle 3 – and totally geeked out
If you have any good ideas for how to discern those categories, I'm always trying to think of new ideas for http://langpop.com .
braintree looks like the best option then. They are PCI Level 1 compliant and they are too big to go belly up and they have a great reputation.
Strangely, the pre-video ads are never unavailable in my region.
Maybe they didn't want to potentially get hit by a Oracle lawsuit like Google did.
At Knewton, we recently developed a jQuery plugin called Gatling that makes any JavaScript tracker asynchronous. It's now live on GitHub with documentation and some commonly used trackers ready to go. We're ready to help with adoption by translating more trackers into Gatling Trackers.

Here's the introduction: http://tumblr.com/xfale042b
With Patrick, I guess I understand the screams of pain on the unlooked-for price hike, but, even at the lowest non-developer level, you're only paying $0.20/month per customer. Assuming you're charging your customers at least $5/month, that's only $.04/customer/month, or less than 1%.

Seems like a reasonable amount to pay for removing all the pain of recurring billing.
I don't know of a specific rule that prevents shared hosting - and if you do, I'd love to see it (as I mentioned, by company is in the middle of a similar process).
What is clear is that you have to document access and changes, which could be trickier in a shared hosting environment. But if the host itself has processes in place, and documents them to you, you should be fine.
You can easily tunnel rsync over SSH. You can configure even the simplest routers to do port-forwarding, e.g. your friend's external IP on port 2222 is redirected to port 22 on an internal host.

Rsnapshot (rsnapshot.org) is a free rsync-based backup system; it is very efficient in terms of disk space and keeps full backups, but only keeps 1 copy of each file.
so this means you'd be best served to submit something at or nearest peak hours?

what are the peak use hours on HN? since everyone is a hacker, i'd assume it was evening hours on east and west coast US as heaviest load? not 9-5 ET?
IBM joins the OpenJDK community, will help unify open source Java efforts
Is that being addressed?
Tornado, Postgres, sqlalchemy, nginx, fabric, PyDev(Eclipse)
I [heart] Sidereel: http://beta.sidereel.com/tv/the-simpsons/season-22/episode-3...
I have spent last 30 minutes trying to figure out teacher vs bureaucrats ratio for NYC Department of Education. [They really make it hard to figure these things out]

What's your best guess about the ratio?

Total Employees: 135,000 (from: http://schools.nyc.gov/Employees/default.htm)
Teachers: 80,000 (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Department_of_Edu...)

40% bureaucrats. That's Forty Percent!

And for Federal Department of Education, look at the org chart:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Ed_gl_org...

From the org chart,

WH Initiative on Historically Black Colls & Univs Staff - What the heck is that?

International Affairs Office - For what?

And there are two more offices, Office of the Under Secretary and Office of the Deputy Secretary! This is worse org structure than I would have imagined at a Fortune 500. [BTW, this does look like successful job creation to me, though I am not sure about the value add]

And despite having the highest spending per student, everyone still complaints about the US public school system.

In closing, Sir, you simply have too much faith in government's ability to spend money wisely.
So this is the new tactic? The reason it hasn't worked is because we haven't actually DONE it? So where the hell did all my tax dollars go?
Omitting it only changes the 'relative magnitude'. So, what let's say wage inflation is 5%. So then there's effectively a 5% inflation. The poor person goes from 90% to 94.5%, rich person 20% to 21%. Are you seriously going to argue that you'll take 10% inflation with a 5% wage inflation over a general 45% decrease in ability to pay debts off? i don't know anyone who claims that wages don't lag behind inflation. Even Krugman argues that that's the whole point of inflation - to make it easier for employers to stealthily get around that pesky problem of sticky wages, make the relative cost of labor cheaper and keep the rubes employed.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/why-is-deflation...

Also please consider that I'm not taking into account the mechanism of inflation, just inflation as a policy. I don't care if it's done by printing money or by relaxing reserve requirements, or by smelting impurities into the gold.
Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes on Gladwell, Palin, and His New Startup
Depending on traffic, those costs seem like they might be great deals.

In any case, the money paid to people for infrastructure, results in those people spending the money, that (a) helps lift the economy (b) increases tax revenue, which results in more state/local funds to hire teachers.
For more details on the algorithm, see my article "Inside the news.yc ranking formula" from last year: http://www.arcfn.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.ht...
What big tax increase did you see?
Chargify just sent an email offering existing customers a "Bootstrapping" plan. $39/mo for up to 100 customers.

http://grasshopper.com/email_assets/chargify-bootstrapper.ht...
I regularly record my ideas like this. Most have never been implemented, but I find the exercise of writing them down and thinking them through helpful and rewarding in itself.

If anyone is interested, the site is free and hosted here: http://idealogue.heroku.com

Source here: http://github.com/robinator/ideas
There's fairly little difference between someone who gets two questions wrong on the exam and someone who got one wrong. There's usually a fairly large difference between someone who gets two wrong and someone who got them all right.

On the modern (post-1995) SAT, 1600 is a fairly wide range, from people who got 1-3 questions wrong to people who breezed through the whole test, double-checked everything, and didn't miss a single question. If you're talking to one of the latter, you'll know it.
When poor people get money they spend it. Almost all of it. Very little goes into a bank account. This increase in spending leads to more jobs for obvious reasons.
It's only $0.20/month/customer if you have 500 customers. If you have one customer, then it's $99/month/customer.
If you read his columns, he's pretty explicit about what government should spend money on

But that's a huge part of the problem with his arguments (and that of many others sharing the same political views). If we gave this {money|power} to the government, they could do these wonderful things.

Maybe they could do wonderful things, but by-and-large, they don't. They find some way to mess up the details. Perhaps they'll simply be mistaken about the end effects; or maybe they'll implement it badly; at best, a few years down the line, regulatory capture will ensure that the good that was intended is turned around, and the program is turned into a tool for the establishment's rent-seeking, rather than of benefit primarily to the people.

I'm sure I sound cynical and jaded, but I challenge you to cite something -- anything -- that the government has done, that's more than a couple of years old that's an unqualified success.
Have we killed the angel investor?
> And almost all of those non-Keynesians [perhaps a better term would be anti-Keynesians] are wrong.

Hmm, you seem to be claiming a either conclusive proof that Keynesianism is correct or disproof of Monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, and the Austrian school, etc. Either of these would be news to me. Am I reading you wrong?
Setup:
* Pylons+SQLAlchemy+formencode+Mako+WSGI apps
* PostrgeSQL
* Nginx

Tools:
* Virtualenv
* Fabric

Best combination.
Zope, Django, Web2py, web.py are just not that flexible & reliable for advanced web applications (IMHO).
New Bronze Age civilization discovered in Russia
Gates puts $20M up for grabs in quest for education technology
Tornado, nginx, MySQL.
I thought the "secret sauce" was hidden from Arc sources..?
> here are plenty of people who want to start subscription businesses, and out of those, the vast majority will not succeed and will actually end up costing more than they ever bring in.

That's not exactly news, that's why you try to get a good grip on the life-cycle of a cross section of your potential customers before you set a pricing scheme.

A free customer should work out at any level of scale and any life cycle that that customer can go through, the fact that there are 'many of them' or that the distribution is not what you expected points to a lack of research of your prospective customers.

Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers.

> Note that Chargify paired this price increase announcement with two other significant announcements that have largely been overshadowed by the hullabaloo: PCI Level 1 compliance, and 24/7 phone support.

Wait until they start getting in to more and riskier transaction volumes, they'll have to add up to 30 cts per transaction worth of fees for various services to help with scrubbing the bad stuff from the good stuff to keep the chargeback rates in check.

Otherwise they'll be spending a lot of money on airline tickets to warm and sunny places trying to get merchant accounts from banks that mere mortals would rather not deal with just to stay in business.

> they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well.

100% agreed on that one, I really can't fathom with they decided to shoot themselves in to both feet at once like that.

Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)? If not how will you deal with a merchant account issue once your volume is larger and you start to attract 'bad apples'? (like everybody else that ever did multiplexed merchant accounts)
Krugman details exactly where he claims most of the stimulus money went. Go read the link.
Django, though I've realized that certain projects of ours could be implemented better with a more lightweight framework. Other than that, not much besides Komodo Editor and Kate and of course the rest of the usual LAMP stack.

I'm quite satisfied with Python. I can't see any reason to move to another language for general web development, but while Python is quite current and modern, it isn't esoteric, geeky or on the cutting edge. So, I'm dabbling with Clojure and Scala, specifically Scalatra and Compojure.
Dude, you were a GRAD STUDENT. The fact that your wages went up at all is a miracle. Everyone knows that grad students are basically free labor.
GAE confuses me. How does one create a dynamic user interface? Does Django cover that? I'm trying to build a simple program that's a sort of GUI/wizard for composing SQL queries. It would be dead easy in .NET but I don't know where to start with GAE/Python. Is the idea that you build the front end in Javascript/HTML and your Python code does the processing behind the scenes? This is probably a n00b question but I'm finding it hard to get answers.
Chargify News: New Pricing
> I am tired of Krugman's Op-Eds

I certainly don't think they belong on Hacker News. Any more than mises.org or reason.com or other political/economics opinion sites.
My understanding is that the actual HN implementation is heavily customized and not public.
The Math IIC is easier than than the SAT-I-M, but requires more subject knowledge. They test different things: the SAT-I is primarily a speed test, measuring how quickly you can reason under pressure, while the SAT-II is primarily a content test, measuring how much you've managed to cram into your brain before taking it.
Candidly, you already know who wants to opt out: they have images blocked. If you really want to do the right thing, don't add more tricky tracking mechanisms than hidden images.
I have a fundamental question. How are these companies allowed to trade off the market? As whole point of free/open market(stock market) is to have companies follow the regulations and guidelines protected by someone like SEC. Are these protected? Or just blind bets on the company? How does one protect insider trading/rigging - if at all it is relevant?
Wow. That's really interesting. Where did you learn that?
He would be my vote.
Fish, Birds and Bats Inspire Navy’s Next-Gen Drones
> Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers.

Not trying to justify, just inform.

> Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)?

We don't do merchant accounts at all - that's pretty much a constant across everyone in this space. Businesses plug in their own merchant accounts - Spreedly just handles all the billing logic.
So we are getting there, at last :)

http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/5/11/disneys-magic-high...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6pUMlPBMQA
Congrats! Keep creating your luck by contacting other reporters/media outlets and mention that you were featured on CNN. That instantly legitimizes you. They might be missing something, you know?
I think the point that Krugman makes, and those of us with similar beliefs, is that gov't is willing to spend money to put people to work on projects that help the greater good. But these projects don't have to necessarily pay for themself.

For example, gov't will build a bike trail. The private sector is a lot less inclined to, unless the trail goes through shopping center or is a toll trail.

There's just different types of motivations. And in a recession where ROI is hard to get, gov't can be more effective in putting money back in the hands of people who will spend it.
"bureaucracies which waste our hard earned money" have lead to clean water, safe working conditions at factories, dramatic decrease in child labor, no lead in paint, a fairly safe food supply, etc.

If government spends wisely then it can lead to more jobs, a better society, and a more secure future for the country. Of course, government might spend unwisely and have the opposite effect. It depends on the quality of the leadership of the government.

That an investment into the country's infrastructure might lead to misguided projects is not an effective argument against the belief that proper investments in our infrastructure will pay off.
I'll rephrase my statement that it's "anti-employees".

If you go by currently admitted practices, then it's completely fine. But if you raise your standards to figuring out what the future should look like, I'm hoping that 10 years from now, people will wonder why such restrictions were ever in place. Because really, why, at a fundamental level, can't an employee who has vested some shares, not sell them?

If I told you that you couldn't spend the cash salary I'm giving you, you'd think I'm crazy. So, if the employee has earned the stock, why is it restricted? I understand the nitty-gritty SEC issues, but fundamentally... why not?