skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they'll be spending a lot of money on airline tickets to warm and sunny places trying to get merchant accounts from banks

The merchants bring their own merchant accounts. Chargify doesn't give you a merchant account; they use the one you bring.
They operate under exemptions from registration offered to accredited buyers of companies that don't solicit investments; even then, it's a bit of a legal high-wire act.
Maybe what's hidden is the code for determining what counts as a vote. e.g., multiple votes from the same IP may be discounted or simply counted as a single vote. Or a bunch of votes coming from fresh accounts created at or after submission time.
Ok, so you're an IPSP with segregated accounts. That at least is one worry less.

That means you don't have all your eggs in that one basket.

Do you do scrubbing / anti-fraud ?

(bin checks, geo-ip checks, black list checks etc ?)

Or does your upstream service take care of those?
That algorithm has been in the source for a while. What is unknown is the current constants and if he changed it at all since first publishing it.
Ah, I do love scala.
On the one hand, I agree with you - Spreedly's not as feature rich as some of the competition. On the other hand, we have a lot of very happy customers, so that doesn't mean we're not a good fit for a significant set of startups.
That's a good thing.

There are companies that will use a single merchant account across all their merchants. Essentially you pay for the privilege of not having to get your own account.

Typically these services grow like mad and then explode. Happy to hear that chargify at least is not one of those.
I'm just curious, how much does Jimmy take away from this?
I feel like lots of big stories have managed to last overnight, so at least 12 hours, so I don't think this can be true. I've no idea how I would prove that though.
Clearly. The reason they weren't mentioned is because nobody makes the claim that the bank bailouts served to generally improve the economy; they were primarily an attempt to loosen up the credit market.

They are not a very useful form of "stimulus," and it wouldn't make any sense to judge the efficacy of tax cuts, or that of government spending on jobs, based on the results of TARP.
HTML5 slides covering async i/o & node.js
IndexTank (Reddit's search provider) is hiring
Something similar is bookcrossing.com.

You read a book, then 'release it in to the wild' by leaving it in a public place with a sticker and unique book-crossing ID. Other people can then pick it up and pass it on, leaving a trail online of it's travel across the globe.

It can be entirely free, although there is a store where you can order the stickers, and unlock 'pro' features on the website.
I got this e-mail today and was totally floored.

This is going to turn into a marketing/PR disaster for Chargify. They even sent out another e-mail to try and make up for their initial "mistake".

Customers are very sensitive to pricing changes. The minute you decide to change pricing you should be thinking about it long and hard. While you are doing it you should be communicating to customers that you are thinking about a pricing change and solicit feedback. You need to be gently breaking the news to them.

I signed up for Chargify to check out their pricing. I liked the fact that you could have 0-50 without paying anything. Considering development for a specific platform is not free this sudden pricing change has forced me to consider alternatives.

As a customer who was just considering using them I feel kind of violated.
I hate App Engine, but unfortunately I will probably be doing at least a few more projects on it, so thanks for the link to tipfy, maybe it'll help.
Our experience building GlobalFolders.com using Rails 3
Is this clever reverse marketing?

You might be interested in this site:
http://clientsfromhell.net/
particularly the Twitter one.
40% bureaucrats. That's Forty Percent!

You seem to be assuming that there are only two types of employees in NYC schools - teachers and bureaucrats. There are in fact many types: teachers and bureaucrats sure, but also janitors & maintenance staff, security, IT staff, librarians, health staff, sports coaches, etc.

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

http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whhbcu/edlite-index.html

International Affairs Office - For what?

http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/internationaled/index.html
Even if the SEC registration rules were thoroughly relaxed --- which they won't be any time soon, and which we could spend a thoroughly engaging several hours debating (plus side: rational market for startups, downside: hedge funds gone wild), it wouldn't matter.

That's because we're talking about closely held private companies. There is more to being a private company than simply not having public shares; in particular, private companies are typically very careful about who they permit to hold equity, because:

* Company shareholders can more easily sue the company

* Shareholders may be entitled to information the company doesn't want to disclose (the big one being: revenue)

* Shareholders may have enough control rights to foul up investment and M&A activities, which competitors and bad actors might want to exploit.

I'm sure there are other reasons too.

Long story short: even if there were no SEC regulations, it doesn't seem likely that everyone's employee stock would suddenly become transferable. Employee stock isn't transferable because companies don't want it to be; they use options to express "incentive interest in a future liquidity event of the company", not to distribute ownership of the company to the broader market.
You don't think five books of your work commercialises it? That's not exactly being in it for the love of it is it?
Ask HN:  Landing page / coming soon saas app
Wanting to get a coming soon page up for StartupMonth.org today (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398), and I seem to recall seeing a saas app that hosted "coming soon" pages. Anyone remember the name of it/them?

Thanks!
You should mention the salary figures are per month, not per year.
You're right and all, and I more or less agree, but it's still private property we're talking about, isn't it? If I don't want someone to stick gold onto my property, I shouldn't have to put up with it. It just so happens that most people are OK with free money, though.

That said, I was under the impression that he asked permission first, at least recently?
Replace the word "government" with Microsoft. Why is government spending necessarily non-stimulative but the same isn't true for Microsoft?

We get inflation only if taxes aren't at a later date raised to pay for the new spending. Right now we have very low borrowing costs as a nation. Therefore, if we are ever going to shore up our infrastructure now is the time to do it. It has the added benefit of employing lots of people and causing a stimulus to the economy. Taxes on the wealthy are at very low rates right now and there is no reason to suspect that regressing to the mean of tax rates on the wealthy will have a detrimental effect on the economy in the future.
Does anyone else generate ideas like this? And if so, what percentage turn out to be good?

Yes, though regrettably without your level of discipline and patience, so reviewing my old notebooks makes me feel scatterbrained. One thing I'm going to steal from you is the practice of numbering concepts: quantifying them is a great way to mitigate over- and under-confidence.

Of course, a lot of 'bad' ideas only seem so because it's not obvious at the time how the cost of implementation would justify the benefit. For example, I like your idea of pausing the music when the headphones are off. Downside: the requirement for sensors in the headphones, signal infrastructure going back to the sound source, and so on. Possible workaround: ability to measure micro-variations in power consumption consistent with worn/unworn pressure differentials.
Trying to write on a regular basis, need advice on topics
Good idea, I will try that. However, I read on WikiPedia: "Some people recommend sitting on an exercise ball instead of a chair (for example, an office chair). This is based on the theory that the abdominal and back muscles are constantly engaged and active in order to maintain proper posture and balance on the ball. There is no scientific evidence of those benefits occurring by just sitting without additional exercises. However, some people warn against using a Swiss ball as a chair due to ergonomic considerations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_ball
Very true, please count me as one of your satisfied customers. In a different comment, I did say Spreedly would be a great fit for those who just want a straight forward recurring billing solution, without deep API integration and other features offered by Chargify/Recurly. I forgot to note that here.
I recently used a corporate travel booking system for the first time.

What a terrible terrible experience. I ended up doing exactly what the post says - I searched for flights in Kayak, found them, and then massaged the search criteria until I found the right flight in their system.
This is also anecdotal but I think TechCrunch's "AngelGate" article was on the front page for almost 3 days.
I was curious what $845/month got you, so just for fun I looked. From the features part of that page:

1. Log Monitoring and Management: Not sure what they mean by this; surely it's something more complex than logrotate. Maybe rsyslog or something?

2. Continuous Vulnerability Monitoring: So, they follow the usual script sites & mailing lists.

3. Managed Anti-Virus Protection: I hope they aren't running on a Windows platform, and if they aren't, I'm not aware of very many current in-the-wild viruses for the various Linux distros.

4. 1 Gigabit Networking Infrastructure (Public and Private): Heh.

5. Two-Factor Authentication: I see this a bit, and it's usually mis-used. Unless they require you to physically submit a fingerprint, DNA sample, retinal image, or some other such thing, then it's not two-factor authentication.

6. Application and Database Server Isolation: They're running the application and the SQL instances on different servers, but if the application server gets compromised, then so does the SQL server, since the application needs automated credentials for the SQL server.

7. Managed SSL Service: Once a year they make sure your certificate is up-to-date.

8. Business Associate Agreement Friendly: What?

9. Managed Redundant Firewall Protection: Not sure what they mean by this. Either your firewall works, or it doesn't. Layering them doesn't do squat. If they mean that they have a hot spare ready to go in case of an outage, then that's a little better -- but still not that helpful if the app server or db server falls over for any reason.

10. Managed Redundant Web Application Protection (Port 80/443): What?

11. Managed Redundant DoS/DDoS Mitigation: This is nice, at least, since it requires a bit of infrastructure to do it right -- assuming that they can stand up to a multi-terabit-per-second hit, since that's what the botnets are packing these days.

12. Managed and Monitored Intrusion Detection: So, run-of-the-mill IDS + Nagios + remote logging.

13. Managed Proactive Operating System Security Patches: This is a lie unless they're personally writing and submitting patches. The most "proactive" you're likely to get otherwise is running a nightly update.

14. Managed Weekly Full Backups + Daily Differentials (Encrypted): I want to take just a moment here and toot our own horn: we do weekly fulls + daily differentials for our regular web hosting customers, for a heck of a lot less than $845 a month. They aren't currently encrypted, but that wouldn't be all that challenging to add on.

15: Highly Secure Data Center Environment: You can probably get the same "highly secure data center environment" from Rackspace, Hurricane Electric, or any of a number of other really big hosting providers.

16: VPN/SSL Provided for Server Management (RDP/SSH/FTP/SQL): Nice, but again, really not that hard to set up, especially for a turn-key environment.

TL;DR: I'm really surprised both at what qualifies as "HIPAA compliant hosting" as well as at the price charged for it. I wonder if the bulk of the cost goes towards paperwork or some other kind of administrative overhead? I certainly don't see the price reflected in their technical offering.
I suppose I use screen heavily — I run it a lot, but usually forget that I am. When I connect to remote hosts, I use a script (which among various other things) runs:

ssh -t remote.host.net screen -D -R -S "$(hostname)_$PPID"

Then if/when I lose the connection I hit [Up][Enter] to run the previous command. I get logged back in to the same screen session where my terminal session will still be running.

My screen configuration is mostly set up to hide that I'm running screen as much as possible. Rather than using screen's multiple windows I tend to ssh in multiple times and use a tiling window manager to manage the terminal windows. ssh ControlMaster stuff means I can still do everything over one network connection.

PS Whenever screen comes up on HN, someone mentions tmux. I haven't checked it out because my setup works for me, but new users might want to.
(2) the social safety net, so people aren't homeless or starving (the people who receive these payments are also, as a bonus, nearly guaranteed to spend all of the money).

False. Middle and upper middle class individuals [1] are the most likely to spend, the poor are least likely to spend.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/TaxRebates.pdf

[1] The actual rich are not separated out by this study, the highest cutoff is $70k/year+ income. This group, and the $50-70k/year group are the most likely to spend stimulus money.

[edit: fixed link. My bad. Thanks solutionyogi. Weird, 2 upvotes when I'm providing no evidence whatsoever. Herd behavior in politics articles, I guess.]
So, you don't think capitalists (in the sense of business owners, industrialists; not the philosophical position) have the same attitude towards fungible, unskilled labor? At what point will internet startup VCs start to take that attitude towards commodity coders? Aren't we already seeing coding jobs escape to hyderabad?
36/yr? Who?
Eeeewww, "spinal shrinkage"!
How to Solve Hard Problem Sets Without Staying Up All Night
Giving people the freedom to screwup is what got us in this mess. If my neighbor makes a bad decision and buys a house he really can't afford and the bank makes the bad decision to give him the loan then it can't affect me, right? Well, it can if it's repeated millions of times.

On the whole, we are irrational creatures most of the time. Humans are easily manipulated and duped. None of us is an expert in everything and so proper regulation of markets is necessary.
That sounds like a lot of risk from the investors' point of view. I know these companies are awesome and good but should we be worried about god knows who is doing what trade. If these are not bound by rules, it is so easy to rig the stock price.
You can watch it here:

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/1151381/d293ebcd/simpsons_ba...
I've worked and consulted in over 15 very large enterprises. While it may not constitute a survey of the entire Fortune 500+, I've come into contact with enough business & IT professionals to know that is is - in fact - not a well-received feature. It's used by either underperforming folks as a CYA measure or other folks who have side-swiped by self-serving individuals.

There is no legitimate use or business-case for a read-receipt service, especially ones that use the same techniques as malware writers.

I fully support your third-party "who responded to me?" reporting & reminder tool, as I can see that being incredibly useful - especially to those who are not adept at scripting and/or using mailer APIs.
Thanks for the info! now I need to get my son to explain to me. :)
'Exit Through the Gift Shop' is indeed an interesting piece of art work from Banksy. The video is not really about him but just a way to divert the media attention to a "creation of his own". In the video, he created a fake/pseudo artist (Thierry Guetta) to show the "media" or the art market or even to see us being lost in his maze.
Seeking Alpha launches app store for investment-related web apps
So, what was the response of the audience?
If you are bootstrapped and need low cost recurring payments capabilities here are a few fully outsourced and PCI compliant services you could consider:

PayPal Website Payments Standard: 2.9% + $0.30/trans
https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...

Google Subscription Payments (experimental): 2.9% + $0.30/trans
http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...

Aria SubscriptionPlus (via PayPal partnership): Free trial, then $40/mo
https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...
CSS Vendor Prefix Lists
"I'm really not a monumental Gore fan or detractor, but I find your insistence that he's unethical puzzling. Usually the left is decried for not taking business considerations into account. Gore is doing the opposite, and being pilloried here even though he's publicly stated his intentions have been to make investments and start companies that would encourage actual change in the market."

I'm all for business. If he wants to invest in carbon credits, I'm happy for him. However, pushing to get cap-and-trade laws passed that would require companies to buy carbon credits from many of the companies he is invested in just sounds down right unethical to me. One then has to question: is he doing it to help the environment or line his pockets?

"He's asking for government intervention because thats a major piece of the puzzle, but not focusing solely on it."

Why would he want people to notice the fact that these laws will make him a billionaire?

"I'd think that a reasonable business person would be able to appreciate this effort as holistic."

I suppose organizations such as the RIAA/MPAA might appreciate his efforts, but not me.
Deep API integration translates in to 'more lock-in'. Better try to handle as much of the business logic other than the initial add, the rebilling and the deletions upon account expiry yourself.

Keep your interface to services like this as thin as you can get away with without compromising customer comfort, in the long run you'll be very happy you did.
" leaving it to do its horrible inflationary magic"? The inflation rate is very low.

"Now, if I were an employer, and got a fat wad of cash to do X, would I really distribute the money to create jobs?" That depends on the situation and climate you are in. You would spend the money to create jobs by expanding your business if it made sense to do so.
It’s Not Just You: 71 Percent of Tweets Are Ignored | Epicenter | Wired.com
Alexis Ohanian Speaking at MIT Startup Bootcamp
I think there are conflicting goals regarding monitor height. Higher helps your posture, but lower keeps you eyes from drying out and straining because they are not as wide-open.
On the Origin of Foods
monitoring, perhaps interesting memory reclamation issues, GC tweaking, yadda yadda. there are lots of features that have absolutely nothing to do with formal language semantics.
I hope that TypeKit will lower barriers to greater font adoption. Pricing for an individual is out of reach.
While Malaysians Are Social Butterflies, Japanese Are Online Loners
Don't forget employed people with ADD, or people who are bored at work, who stroll over here when they need a break from their job.
I've never had a good experience with corporate travel agents. Normally it goes, several weeks in advance, I need to be in this city on these days, here's the billing code. Silence. A week before, hello, did you book this? A day or two before I travel they get back to me, having booked me onto Aeroflot and into a Motel Six 2 hours away from the work site - and for the price they could have got for BA and the Four Seasons one block away if they'd pulled their fingers out of their arses when I told them.

Any organization is better off letting their people just book their own travel and expensing it, I can only assume they do a much better job for the CEO's travel (or his PA does it and expenses it and he never sees them).
> how can APC, the market leader, be so overwhelmingly lame in this day and age?

Precisely because they are the market leader.
I'll be there! Can't wait to meet other Hners!
Google closes Issue 9
Good point, but if I were starting something that depended on recurring revenue, I wouldn't really begrudge $100/month to one of the most critical parts of the whole solution.

Compare it to the $65/month I pay for a single Verizon Mifi data card, and it doesn't seem bad at all.

Maybe you can't really look at per-user costs when you only have a handful of users. Everything looks badly distorted as you head up asymptotically from zero users.
The plan all along so $39 doesn't seem so bad compared to $99?
Lotschberg Base Tunnel and Gotthard Base Tunnel

Apples and oranges. Yes, they're all train tunnels, but the Lotschberg and Gotthard tunnels were/are being built using tunnel boring techniques in relative remote areas. ARC is going to require tunnel boring and submerged tunnel techniques in one of the densest and busiest city and waterway in the world (not to mention that the Lotschberg tunnel is single-tracked).

Exactly how many jobs do you think infrastructure jobs will create? And what about all those people who are not in infrastructure sector?

Large infrastructure projects suck in people from a variety of sectors including construction, engineering, architecture, IT, GIS, environmental, archaeological/historical, construction materials, office supply, delivery services, transportation, PR/media, law, police & fire, security, retail, and food preparation (and that's off the top of my head).

What about the school teachers which he keeps talking about?

Again, infrastructure projects get money moving again, which increases tax receipts and provides more budget for essentials like schools.
So, if you're implementing this in a framework like Django or Rails, can you get a result set in this order directly from a query? Or do you have to query then sort?
Try unbounce.com
Maybe 'half life' is a better way to put it. Looking at the graphs, the score drops to ~1 in 5-10 hrs, unless the points are very high.
That's interesting. Could you post a screenshot and the URL that you are accessing?
Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, or VSS Enterprise
This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it.

The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.

The (very good) reason why the ARC sources do not give out the real ranking algorithm is to make it a bit harder to game the system.
No, grad students hold a special place in society. Your role is to work 18 hours per day, at what amounts to below minimum wage, while submitting your finest intellectual achievements to journals that no one will read, nor will compensate you for your publication.

I read, in a reliable journal, that Kunta Kinte, was accepted at Harvard for a PhD program. He turned it down and was quoted as saying, "There's only so much you can ask a man to do for nothing in return."
Implicit in your reply is the idea that government can help shield us from harm by preventing such bad decisions.

Do you have any basis for a belief that the government will make better decisions than the people? Part of any answer to this must be an explanation about how those regular people, subject to being "easily manipulated and duped", will wise up and do the right thing once put in power.

Second, it should be obvious to members of a community such as HN, that progress demands the freedom for people to try out new solutions, risking failure. Protecting us from this will, at best, impede progress.