skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen a few sites like that over the years but they die fairly quickly. This is not to say it's a waste of time, but to point out some basic problems such a site needs to overcome.

One problem is that a general forum is not attractive to specialists (who might have to invest time just to explain why something would be useful in the first place), with the result that suggestions trend towards a blend of trivial and naive. Another is the nagging sense that the more well-specified an idea is, the more likely it is to be be exploited for private gain, and since one can't patent or copyright an idea per se, and building a prototype plus filing an application for a patent is quite expensive, there's not much economic incentive to develop ideas to that point, even if the goal is to make the patent public domain (so as not to allow private monopolies).
How much time are you spending on these people? If they've forgotten about the charge, they're not likely to be customers anyway, so inconveniencing them slightly in favor of active customers who are actually interested in paying yearly might be worth it, especially if you implement the e-mail reminder.
Returning to my earlier example: suppose I spend 30% of my income on a mortgage with fixed payments, and 70% on Stuff. If I have wage inflation of 7%, and the price of Stuff goes up by 10%, then I have to spend a higher proportion of my income on Stuff, but I am spending a lower proportion of my income on my mortgage, so it precisely balances.
Depending on your fit/needs, it may be worthwhile to check out if the end client would like to maintain this box. That way, you are on their network. The disadvantage is of course the administration.

We did this on a pilot project with one of our clients with hipaa requirements. We asked for box with the minimum requirements with admin/firewall setup and used this server as our end point for our app. hope this helps.
No, but it's probably used to sign cookies and other requests, which means one could hijack someone else's session.
You can compose queries like this:

query = myModel.all().filter("property_1 =", value)

query = query.filter("property_2 =", value)

Here's a gotcha... be sure to have a space between "property_1" and "=", "property_1=" won't work (but it won't raise an error either).

Be aware that the Datastore has very limited support for querying in general, and you will certainly not have anywhere near the kind of power you are used to when composing queries in .Net with something like LINQ.

GAE is a good start if you want to learn Python, but it is a terrible platform for web development. You will find yourself stymied and frustrated by its inflexibility, the need to give up your normalized data model from Day 1, lack of referential integrity, and the awful performance compared to a real SQL database.

Oh, and the constant outages, the scheduled maintenance that borks the whole system for a week, the backup tool that takes 4 hours to run and then crashes trying to restore the backups... I have a long list :)
> 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.

Selling a billing logic service to businesses isn't exactly high risk. Their customers' users' payments do not go through Spreedly/Chargify... they just talk to the API of the customers' payment gateways using their customers' credentials. Any end-user chargebacks related to the subscriptions are on the customers, not Spreedly/Chargify.

> 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)

You misunderstand what these services are. They do not provide payment processing in any way. They are only selling business logic the app developer would normally have to write.
As a Chargify customer from very early on & having been in a paying position since early March (we launched in mid-January & it took a month & a half to hit a paying level) would we have used Chargify from the get-go if we had to pay for it? I can't say for certain but it's quite likely as it still would've been cheaper than moving development cycles into building a billing system (as it is we're still backlogged in that dept).

If I was running a business that relied on a lot of freemium customers I might think twice, but then unless you're asking for credit cards up-front just don't put them into Chargify until they upgrade and give you their CC details. We handle gift subscriptions this way, unless they convert to a 'real' subscription when their gift is up they never go through Chargify.

For what it's worth, it's safe to say after using Chargify for almost a year and having an active site using it for 9-10 months, the level of service and support we've received has been more than worth what we're paying — our development backlog is already a pain-point, I can't imagine what it'd be like if we were rolling our own billing system.
Ask HN: Add fallback font to HN stylesheet
The new Ubuntu 10.10 has beautiful new fonts, but none of the Microsoft core web fonts. Since the HN stylesheet does only specify Verdana and no fallback, I'm currently looking at the website using an irksome serif font.

I've updated the HN CSS file to include the "serif" and "monospace" fallback fonts. Would you consider adding them?

http://dpaste.com/hold/256499/
Has it even been settled who Banksy is at this point? I hope not. I very much enjoyed the idea that was thrown around that Banksy was never a single person.
The duration of the grandfathering is unspecified.
Does anybody care to explain the strange indentation I see in the Arc code? I know Lisp a little (mostly Clojure), but I don't get the indentation of the code at the bottom of the algorithm where it looks like it's branching in two parts. Is this peculiar to Arc? Or to other Lisps as well?
It would make sense that he would, both commercially and criminally, though there are still pieces around London just sat there on walls.

Kind of gives the lie to his whole counter culture personality, though I think that status has been questionable for some time now.
You may want to know that input isn't filtered: http://idealogue.heroku.com/ideas/54

Look page source Line 70 to 94.
Ask HN: When to buy vs rent servers?
I am wondering, at what point does it make sense to own your own servers (and switches, routers, whatever) as opposed to rent them monthly through a VPS service?

Also, which Windows VPS provider do you recommend?
Student Upcycles Solar-Powered Motorcycle
> Does it make sense to spend $4K (for example) on legal fees for a deal where I am getting an $8K investment. These aren't the actual figures, but I imagine the legal fees would be at a similar ratio.

Does it make sense to risk your startup over an $8k investment?

> But I am simply looking at the economics of it.

Are you looking at economics or merely comparing two numbers, whether or not they're the right numbers? The cost of doing it wrong is not limited by the amount invested, let alone the amount of money you "save".

Yes, there's some chance that you might not screw it up, or that your company might fail anyway, rendering the whole thing moot.

How much is the additional risk actually worth?
Why not simply do the right thing, instead of watering it down.

Grow some balls and grandfather in the old accounts under the old conditions without limitation and let them die in peace or grow until they are good customers.

You don't wipe away a cock-up like this with a band aid solution, you wipe it away by going the extra mile. And if you can't go the extra mile because you really have to do this in order to survive (and apparently there was at least $60 play in there) then you should publish your figures.

Painful, but it will create the understanding required to make the merchants swallow the bitter pill.
Fox Pulls Down Banksy Video From YouTube
Sigh. Isn't this always the case. Good entrepreneurial spirit gets crushed as corporations grow. We need more Bill Lears and Burt Rutans in this world.

I chuckled out loud when I heard Tier 1 Systems House. Thanks for that.
Be wary of competition from the well established HARO (Help a Reporter Out) http://www.helpareporter.com/
"Status: Unfortunate"
Paradise by the Stashboard Light
Tips to Avoid Disaster When Changing Your Product/Service
Exactly: Diagnosability and serviceability features (especially when deeply integrated with the underlying OS), code generation algorithms optimized for specific hardware, GC algorithms tuned to specific memory hierarchies, etc.
I haven't used GAE, but if I generalize your question a little bit then I can answer it in the context of Django. You run a WSGI server that receives HTTP requests. It uses the regex-based URL mapping you write in your Django app to work out which view function to call (and, optionally, with which parameters). This function talks to the database, runs whatever logic you need, collects the relevant data for the UI and uses it to render a template, the result of which is then returned to the user.

Django templates look a lot like HTML, but with special Django stuff in them. You can get the general idea from this page: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/

And yes, you write in JS pretty much the same stuff that you'd always write in JS.
imho, you should try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savasana

worked for me - better sleep 'quality', no more waking up feeling tired or those sudden jump from the bed from a nightmare.
their list of benefits is laughable

especially "fully coming out of beta in order to serve you better", because that beta logo really hindered the user experience
More often than not it seems to popup in interstitial spaces and public areas. For example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4748063.stm
Appreciate the thoughtful response and great to see a competitor growing in the space, brings everyone up.
Driving cross country last summer from San Diego to DC I ran through no less than 8 cone zones.

Stimulus or no stimulus, cone zones are a part of ongoing maintenance, emergency repair, or infrastructure expansion. We could outlaw all construction, but in 10 years or so, you won't have any roads left to drive on.

(isn't there a reason why trolleys became obsolete in the mid-20th

Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...
I think he asks permission when it suits him. Given his profile as an artist, I'd imagine he mostly wants to work on projects of the sort of scale that require permission from an organisation of some sort. I don't think he has an objection to tagging the streets of London still, but his most high-profile works now would be impossible without permission.

I'm still impressed he managed to do stuff like his Bristol exhibition with the knowledge of only three staff members at the Museum http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/bristol/hi/people_and_places/art...
Your post did a good job of pitching chargify, I was passing it around the other day for justification to go with them. Such a bummer that they pulled this
I don't know trademark law very well, but the article implied that you might have problems with that phrase. And then there's the issue of Apple's trademark giving them plausible deniability WRT filing a bogus lawsuit; they don't have to win a decision to win by outspending you.
As a very old fan of The Simpsons (including the newer seasons) I couldn't be more pleased. The recent Zuckerberg cameo was brilliant as well:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/video/item/mark-zuckerberg-on-t...
Gawker’s Nick Denton: “I’ve created this monster”
looks interesting! thanks for the tip.
Yes, I think you're right about not looking at per-user costs while you're in the very-few-user stage. And if one doesn't grow to the point that these services are worthwhile at $100/month, then it's probably the case that one didn't get to a sustainable place, anyways. The $40/month offer that they added for existing customers is also a more accessible price point for those bootstrappers just getting started.
Price increase from $0 to $39 without a long transition period still does not work. If this came out at the start of the day, the outcry would've been same as $99. Feels different with the "change" but don't be fooled.
BTW, who the heck are these people? I don't see any contact form, contact email, contract phone or anything.
Good point. Definitely don't buy a device that isn't already popular with the rom making crowd.
I donated last year, everyone should... I am a bit dismayed that they have "all" info out there. And by ALL, I mean porn.
I've barely looked at Arc[1] but as far as I remember, the if macro/special form allows an arbitrary number of argument forms, a bit like a combination of Clojure/CL's if and cond:

(if
cond1 expr1
cond2 expr2
.. ..
condN exprN
else-expr)

With an even number of arguments, there is no else-expr (the same as CL/Clojure cond).

The indentation is probably to distinguish between condition and conditional expression - the second column is what could be evaluated and returned from the whole expression.

[1] I too use Clojure
SOLEX College
GM Lied: Chevy Volt Is A Conventional Hybrid
The School of Massage Therapy at SOLEX Medical Academy
i'm wouldn't be sure about this. banksy and thierry did _not_ comment this in public. all speculation. although if it's true it would be genious...

great movie btw.
Right now government prevents parents from trying to toughen up their 13 year old child by making him work in a coal mine. Parents who want to do such a thing are being prevented from making this bad decision by government.

It would be a bad decision on my part if I knowingly made unsafe products and sold them to people. Government does its best to prevent me from making this bad decision.
This is what not being evil looks like. Imagine the howls if Microsoft had steamrollered over a small developer who'd spent 10 years working on M#.
> 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.

How about some historical data on this ratio? (I'd agree that the security needs may be higher now, but IT is supposed to reduce the number of people needed and the others should be flat.)
Review My App: A Sprite Generator
After seeing DHH's keynote at RailsConf and http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2336-using-css-sprites-with-rails-helper-methods, I decided to try and build a better Sprite Generator. I don't want to bias any potential reviewers, so that's all I'll say for now. If this gets a good response, I'll post some further details in a few hours.
If your employer considers you “fungible, unskilled labor”, then you have a lot more to worry about than inflation.
Thanks for the advice. My program wont be doing any heavy lifting, it's just a simple tool to guide the SQL-writing process and save the user typing everything out down to the last semi-colon; a visual aid really. All I need is a tiny bit of graphical whizzbang, so it's not a totally static form - the labels/menus change somewhat, more fields/labels are added, according to the user input.
Doesn't stray that much from clojure, so I think it's a lisp thing. To keep bindings in clojure with different length names more readable, people tend to indent like this:

(let [really-long-name l
score (get-score x)
position (get-pos) x)
test test]
(...
....)))))

Sort of the same effect in the arc snippet in OP.
Not a problem. Just wanted to give people who are afraid of shorteners the full url.
On the one-hand I feel for the developer who originally named his language "Go." On the other hand I've never heard of it... Who does HN think is right in this case and why?
Unfortunately, I believe that option is only available to YC teams?
A rising tide lifts all boats. I'm gratified by (a) the introduction of your new lowest-tier plan within only hours of the outcry; and (b) two competitors speaking quite well of one another in public.

I expect nothing less from people who get to touch my financial transactions, but it's still a pleasure to see.
That's because of the way Arc does if-expressions. In Scheme and Common Lisp, you have two conditional forms: 'if and 'cond. 'if takes three arguments (or two, with an implied nil, in CL), and is analogous to an if-then-else in other languages:

> (if #t 'then 'else)
then
> (if #f 'then 'else)
else

'cond, in contrast, takes as many branches as you like, but they're parenthesized like so:

> (cond (#f 'a)
(#t (display "I can have a body here!\n")
'b)
(#t 'c))
I can have a body here!
b

In arc, there's just 'if, which is like 'cond with a lot of implicit parenthesization and else-branches:

arc> (if t 'then 'else)
then
arc> (if nil 'then) ; if no else-branch is given, nil is implied
nil
arc> (if nil 'a
t (do (prn "'do is like Scheme's 'begin or CL's 'progn.")
'b)
'else)
'do is like Scheme's 'begin or CL's 'progn.
b
May I suggest a relevant narrative under the screencast, instead of that horrible music?
I don't like the idea of such stealth read-receipts too. I would expect that sooner or later tricks which allow implementation of this feature will be blocked in most email clients as security holes because as many others pointed out it can be used by spammers to verify email addresses.

Why not to use real read-recepit requests (MDN, DSN) and respect someone's rigth to disable it in their mail client?
One has to wonder why it isn't standard nowadays to just let people reimburse - given that 99% of the time it results in a better experience at a lower price.

There must be some mad kickbacks or some other nefarious forces at play whenever such ludicrously terrible technology is being used for no apparent reason.
I can't think of any good way to say this without sounding like an arrogant bastard (but hey, I'm a programmer so that's assumed :-) ...). The author states:

I used to prefer Python to Java. But then
along came Eclipse with its refactoring and
code browsing and afterwards, I could not
go back to simpler editors.

I'd rather choose a language that lets me write code that won't need refactoring, rather than choosing a language and editor based on the assumption that I'm going to botch things and need help getting out of the ditch I'm going to dig myself into.
Here's an explanation of other ranking algorithms, including Bayesian average, Wilson score and the ones used on HN, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us:

http://blog.linkibol.com/2010/05/07/how-to-build-a-popularit...
After seeing DHH's keynote at RailsConf and http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2336-using-css-sprites-with-r..., I decided to try and build a better Sprite Generator. I don't want to bias any potential reviewers, so that's all I'll say for now. If this gets a good response, I'll post some further details in a few hours.
Just the other day someone was saying this wasn't the time to fork Java because there was no group to lead it.

I wonder what kind of bird they're having for dinner tonight?
Google has the mightiest search engine ever created and they couldn't check there wasn't already a programming language by that name? It would just have been polite.
http://www.spaced.com.au/
Do you think they have janitors on their payroll on full time basis? I don't think so. Also, I know for a fact that NYC Dept of Ed outsources a lot of their IT work. [I know because I contracted for a project for them and don't even get me started on how those projects were cost overruns.]

To be honest, I don't know the breakdown of the 135k numbers. Could you please find the breakdown for me? Also, why is it so hard for me to find this information? Why can I not see a simple, easy to see employees and budget numbers.

E.g.

Teachers: 85,000

Officers : 30,000

IT Staff: 15,000

Others: 10,000.

Total: 135,000

Expenses:

Teachers Salary: 6200 million

Other Salary: 3000 million

Infrastructure: 5000 million

Others: 4000 million

Total: 18.5 Billion

Total Budget Amount from http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/funding/overview/default.htm

I could not find that information anywhere. I would really appreciate if anyone can find that information for me OR give me some pointers about where I can find it. I think once everyone gets to see those numbers, they will change their mind about government spending. I am willing to spend my own personal time to find the breakdown of the numbers but I am not sure where I should start.

And about WH Initiative, thank you for linking to that page. From the link to Budget on that page:

They have a budget (http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget10/summary/ed...) of half a billion dollars with line items like:

Strengthening Institutions: 80 million

Strengthening Historically Black colleges and universities: 238 million

Other line items...

Total: 588 million.

So the main initiative (Historically Black colleges and universities) takes up 40% (238 million out of 588 million) of the budget. Where does the other 60% go? Who approved it? And if certain colleges were 'historically' black, why do we have to spend 240 million in 2009 to strengthen them?

And here's my biggest concern: How do you evaluate if you are getting worth for your 538 millions? There is no way you can evaluate how successful someone is at 'Strengthening' something, anything.
Your web application looks quick, simple and to the point. I like it!
In Django, you could make the ranking score a property of the model and then do query.order_by('-score').
So the 2001st customer costs you $650 - how much they're paying.
Still, that's probably > $600 for most startups, especially when you include trialing or 0-cost plan customers.

I'd much prefer a graduated system, with different overall price deltas for each subsection (Dev/Start/Grow/Max) per member.

For comparison:

The first customer costs you $100-$price,

The 501st customer costs you $250-$price,

The 2001st costs you $650-$price
" The inflation rate is very low."

No doubt. Government spending and debt expansion has up till now largely been counterbalanced by private debt contraction. Also, as a poster below explained, it takes time for money expansion to manifest itself as increased prices. (hence my statement "coming down the pike").

Of course, private debt contraction will become increasingly harder as inflationary pressures raise the cost of living and make borrowing money (apparently) less painful over the short-and-medium runs.
Don't forget "and listening to your Uservoice feedback to develop Spreadable". How could that possibly be listed as a benefit for chargify users affected by this pricing change?
It's not a tradeoff, but an externality paid with time instead of money. Facebook won't suffer any inconvenience, only non-users of Facebook will.

Add this to their opt-out by default when adding new features, and Facebook is becoming more and more a spam platform.
There is the http://ideaaday.org/ site. You can comment the ideas. Knowing that there are a million ideas out there keeps me off the brain crack. http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html
I think they both chose a terrible name.
The Simpsons has joked before about being made in Korean sweatshops.

But more importantly this is a big win for Fox. They get the cred for getting Banksy (whatever that is worth), and more importantly loads of talk & coverage for their show.

Whatever downside there is (which I think is pretty insignificant) is easily outweighed by the upside.
"Resolution: Get over it"
"If government spends wisely"

That's the BIG 'If' right there. If wishes were horses....(fill in your own dream..)