skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who doesn't know much about MailChimp, the original question seems valid. A little more detailed answer (like the one by qeorge) would have helped me understand this better.

As you work at MailChimp, it would have helped if you would have given that detail.
I think most feature a "free trial" at least. I'll see about adding more info to pricing, but was more concerned with coming up with maintaining a list I could share with clients.
If they won this lawsuit, would that let Classmates.com shut down Facebook?

I love how the judges decided it was a SLAPP lawsuit, which means not only is the lawsuit baseless, but it's obviously completely ridiculous.
The Daily for iPad is launching
I don't think so. The cost of running something like Mailchimp isn't in having a couple of servers and some bandwidth, I imagine; the cost is in dealing with spammers, overzealous spam-fighters and people who'd rather hit "report as spam" than unsubscribe. Number of subscribers is not a bad metric.

ETA: Also see bjonathan's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170619: Amazon, which probably offers something closer to "server and bandwidth", is much cheaper.
It should also be done at any point where your responsibilities change ie. you are training junior developers where you weren't before or people have left and now you are the senior developer on a project.

This is the best time to negotiate a raise because you were hired for $X to do Y and now you are doing Z so the pay should change to reflect this new job.

I would also suggest that you treat any employment situation like an ongoing 6-month contract. After 6 months, figure out for yourself if the pay is still fair and talk with your employer about it. Basically treat it as if you were being hired for the first time. If you are not interested in continuing at that level of pay, then you should turn down continuing to work there. Of course, if you're happy then continue on.
The manifesto and principles should be required reading for all software engineers. It's really great to see how widespread adoption has been.

In the early 2000s I helped National Academies/CSTB workshop on creating dependable software, and put Kent Beck and a formal methods advocate from Praxis on the same panel. We expected fireworks but they were actually in agreement on most things :-)
Did anyone else start experiencing physical pain when the hacker accessed the right file in the wrong place for the hundredth time without typing "ls" ONCE?

I had no idea the reflex was so strong, but I almost starting twitching. I caught myself reaching for the keyboard to hammer out "ls -l". What a tragedy.

(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether the tragedy is the hacker's incompetence or my reflexive neckbeard response to it.)
> The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time

Final denouement? Man, I gave up trying to read it after what felt like seventeen chapters of "they walked through a field."
No fine-print. Our high volume plans for large email lists are not unlimited, but smaller lists are completely free to send as much as they want. In practice, you'll hit our anti-spam limits long before you hurt our profitability if you try to send lots of email to a smaller list.
Is Object Oriented Programming Too Complicated?
I love the terms "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer archeologist." I wish more people read this book, so I could use the term and not have people look at me with a blank look in their eyes.
One tends to hear mention of logical fallacies in any intellectually-focused forum, not only HN. HN happens to be intellectually-focused, so the straw man and other fallacies will see frequent mention here.

However, this is unrelated to the grandparent comment, which was (perhaps facetiously) primarily discussing feminism and political correctness, not logical fallacies.
Is this true? I never heard of Facebook being seeded with other site's data.

I also don't see how Google could have even made use of a raw dump of any other site's data at the time. They would need to crawl the sites anyway to fill out their PageRank data. Do you have a citation that says differently?
Record Screen Activity with the script Command
What I'd "call even money on" is that patent holders who are looking for a piece of the video decoding royalty pie would have jumped on the MPEG-LA gravy train already. I also would bet that Google's legal team knows what they're doing.
Murdoch: The Daily Will Cost $0.14 Per Day Or $1 Per Week
Is this unpaid? Pretty hard to bootstrap enough money to live in NYC.
I actually had not thought about it before. You are right though I enjoy reading about other peoples successes and failures. Thanks for the inspiration to write!
Microsoft has a really good point here. Google might be fine with phone manufactures getting sued over patent violations in Android, but that is not how Microsoft conducts business. If they included VP8 support in IE9, them and their partners can be sued for patent infringement, so the best they can due is work with Google to make a plugin. If Google offers indemnify over VP8, Microsoft can pass it along.
Maybe we should change that.
I'd pay $200-400 for the TOS/PP. Maybe more if my business were on the more complex/risky side.
Google Search is the bulk of Google's revenue and power. The idea that Microsoft may be "stealing" it IS a Big Deal.
They're using http://www.stagehq.com/ this year for managing tickets. Currently the only payment gateway they support is Paypal.
Top Quora Questions
alter table accounts
add column confirmed_not_a_fraudster boolean
not null
default false;
I've often wondered why MailChimp doesn't offer more support for transactional mails. I know there is some stuff in the API but it seems bolted on (am I wrong?). I would really like to use the standard templating for email campaigns that MailChimp has, and use it for transactional mails. An API call to MailChimp with some some arguments would then send a template, the variables (dynamically) filled in, to the user.

Email campaigns are so easy in MailChimp and I'd like to maintain the look of those mails in my transactional mails. Nonetheless, you guys provide a great service!
"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the music industry screwed itself by raising rates until they all but killed the most profitable, popular and legit outlet they had?"

This may be the case. But, I don't believe that people pirating music ever wanted to actually buy the music. You can now get 99 cent songs without DRM and there are tons of services like Pandora, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (where you can preview entire songs before buying). Both of these were points brought up as a reason for piracy around the time of Napster. Piracy is still worse than ever.

I'm still waiting for the new set of excuses.
The Future of Cheap Androids Begins Now
Necessary Elements of a Blog Post
I also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ which is "space opera" written as intelligently as possible by "someone who should know better." (Vernor's words)
Inheritance isn't the only way to re-use code. Using inheritance won't solve your problems, and it tends to give you new ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_base_class
People in the second half of the alphabet buy things more quickly.
I am neither a member of match.com or OKC but I just hope OKC guys continue their awesome analytics on user data in their blog.
Probably worth relinking their excellent blog post "Going Freemium: One Year Later"
http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.
We do have transactional support via Amazon SES now:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches-transactional-e...

It rolled out this very week.
I think the reason this got rejected was the fact that it has commercially dubious aspects to it which would probably have lead to several customer care complaints to Apple, had Apple accepted it and published it.

I don't think the "joke" aspect has anything to do with it. We recently had a joke app published on the app store with no problems at all. In fact the first submission of the app came after the rule clarifications they did (last Sept? Oct?). Of course the humor(?) in our app doesn't revolve around ripping people off ("Ha ha...you bought our in-app purchase. Jokes on you!").

I'm actually a little sorry I clicked the original article link. It sounds like they spent two days on something with the specific purpose of getting some publicity around a rejection. Mission accomplished, I guess.
I might be a little slow, but I didn't understand. What is "this"? What do you hate people using? Prayer, Islam, Christianity, or people professing religious harmony for maybe sorta political ends?
That's not quite true - I'd research that a little more.

As far as taxes, a single member LLC can be classified as a "disregarded entity". In that case, the taxes are treated exactly as they would be for a sole proprietorship. The additional complexity of an LLC is just the state franchise taxes (which are usually quite low or zero at first) and a couple of documents - it's not a big deal.
It seems like most messages of this type try to pretend that it's not about money. The worst is when a company uses lines like "mutually beneficial" or "we're confident this will be better for our customers." When I read that, I'm not just getting unpleasant news -- I'm getting unpleasant news from someone who thinks I'm stupid.

Redgate's message is candid and addresses me like a grown-up. I think that's much better.
Windows Phone 7 data usage: finger-pointing and bad communication
Social bookmarking sites. digg, reddit, etc. If you have new content every day you can post them there in the appropriate categories. A twitter account will help too.
The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.
The above excerpt is actually an accurate description of what I do at my day job! ("program archeology") My coworker, who's been working on and off with this code base for over 12 years, never fails to point out if any of my ideas was already implemented once before. So far, everything I've suggested since starting this job 3 months ago has already been done in the past.
I think he feels that that was one of the most moving and important pieces of information in the letter.

I'm not religious, but that's how I felt.
Ask HN: What's your biggest programming mistake?
After reading Flickr's accident deleting user's photos, it got me thinking of my own mistakes running a startup.

About 5 years ago I created my first startup, it was my first time building a application for users and didn't expect it to gain any traction. After the first month it received about 5,000 users. Naturally, I decided to focus on security a bit more and convert all user's passwords to a encrypted version in the database. As I was re-building one of the components (reset password page) I was preparing all the needed queries when I accidentally wrote a MySQL UPDATE query and forgot to put a 'LIMIT 1' at the end. =x Yep, I reset all 5k passwords to the same thing. I remember having a panic attack shortly after as I struggled to think of a remedy. It was a pretty low point in my career as a programmer but I learned quite a few lessons that day (like the importance of backups for starters). In the end, I ended up emailing all our users asking them to update their password via secure link to their email and no harm was done.

What was your biggest mistake as a programmer?
If I'm google and I block /search I want no company to collect the data.

If I'm a site that blocks /dynamic because I want to make sure my stats are accurate, not factoring bots, and I want to keep the load down on slow-generating pages, then I'm perfectly happy with the data being collected.

Is it the intent of robots.txt itself to block the clickstream data, or is it just google's intent?
Thanks for the explanation. I'm glad you stopped lurking, and to have tripled your karma!
Regarding Apple's "highly tuned sw tools for H264", you know that their H.264 encoder in Quicktime/iTunes is abysmal, right?

There's an x264 plugin for Quicktime which is much preferable to the encoders built into most proprietary products, but Apple's is particularly bad.
When WooMe launched they got a lot of attention. They thought they were going to take the world by storm. Unfortunately their product is a novelty.

They took $17.4 million dollars of VC with no real hope of showing a return to their investors. They got desperate and this is the result.
I live in Ozone Park and like it a lot. Rent is $1150 for a one bedroom.
Their web page has a box on it; how quaint. I remember getting software in boxes.
(an ad for an html-based ebook app, with little explanation of how it works or what the tradeoffs are)
Agree 100%. It's really none of your customers' business how much it costs you to run or do things. If people are complaining to you that you're charging for things that are cheap (ie. "that's only a record in a database" or "google does it for free") then those aren't the customers you want.

Sometimes it's right to charge for something that took you 1 minute to write, and sometimes it's right to give away a feature that took weeks of development. It all comes down to what makes the most sense for your business.
Carriers will put it back.
I agree. I usually don't allow an application to sign me in through a third party. Something about it conjures up images of someone trying to access all my personal information and paranoia kicks in.
I think he meant that he hates when people use only the single statement, "This," as commentary.
Want to be a VC? Sometimes all it takes is to be the last man standing.
Great post, well worth reading. But blackmail's such an ugly word. He should have called it the Fishpaste/Extortion Business Model. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackmailIsSuchAn...
Serious bonus points for the musical score. Anyone know what it is?
The tear gas company referenced above, which is located in Pennsylvania:: http://combinedsystems.com/
Your interpretation doesn't match those of people who have analyzed it. The problem with WebM is that it may infringe on H264 patents! And its not clear they have done enough to avoid the problems. H264 has come together to form a very strong patent pool. None of the patents can be asserted against H264 (nor can the partner companies in general), but any of them can be asserted against WebM.

Read JGG's account, which is still the best account to date at:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Some quotes:

"But as noted in my previous post, merely being published by Google doesn’t guarantee that it is. Microsoft did similar a few years ago with the release of VC-1, which was claimed to be patent-free but within mere months after release, a whole bunch of companies claimed patents on it and soon enough a patent pool was formed."

"VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be "H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder". Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents."

"Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is."

And not about patents, but the quality of the spec:

"The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code up to and including TODOs, optimizations, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone."

But maybe Google will fix it? Ummm think again;

"Update: it seems that Google is not open to changing the spec: it is apparently "final", complete with all its flaws."

I just don't see how one can feel equally comfortable with WebM.
Using the word "this" after a quote is kind of internet short-hand for saying "this is super significant and bigger than any individual."

He said "this" but then said he doesn't like using it but had to in this case because it just fit. I think this usage may have come from Reddit?
He hates when people use that method of drawing attention to things -- quoting something then saying "this". I think it is popular on Reddit, but I am not too sure.
Google is the one creating the association, not the user. The relationship between term a and page b was created by Google, and confirmed by a user. People don't click on search results that aren't there.
The ripoff is in the fact that they have added nothing significant to the product other than making it more difficult for people to obtain.
Javascript Collision detection
Can you use mailchimp to send dynamic emails with their API? For example, from a PHP script when a new user joins your site?
Indemnification is unheard of in codecs. Microsoft and SMPTE don't indemnify users of VC-1. MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify users of H.264. Google offering indemnification for WebM would effectively be suicide. They'd be painting themselves with a giant target and taunting every money-grubbing patent troll in existence.
I will keep that in mind, fishpaste business model.
DEMO Presenting Company Contract vs. LAUNCH Presenting Company Conference 
I think this speaks for itself.

$19,495 vs. $0.00.<p>

Any feedback?
any feedback on this Google Doc? I'm editing right now. :-)
It was played at the end of Portal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(video_game)). It's also available as a song in Rockband.
> Since large segments of H.264 were simply dropped for WebM, apparently there's only about 49 H.264 patents total (out of over a thousand) that could even remotely apply.

Emmm, the fact that they dropped stuff and implemented it in a clean house way in no way does guarantee that the new implementation is not patent encumbering.
Hmmmm. A forum ostensibly targeting people who want to be in the business of making money with software up in arms about a company trying to make money with software. Am I allowed to call this ironic?
Ben from MailChimp here. We invested a lot in abuse prevention, well before introducing any freemium plans. The problem ESPs like us face isn't so much the "evil" spam, but the "fuzzy" spam (from clueless marketers).

Our approach to dealing with fuzzy spam is here:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/project-omnivore-declassified/

an update was posted here:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/update-on-omnivore-new-3-strikes-r...

Probably shoulda brought that up in my blog post (it's usually the first question techies ask), but it's something our customers are pretty familiar with, so I left it out.
NAT64 works fine if you have an ipv6 client and want to talk to ipv6. That's just regular old network address translation. But if your server is on ipv6, NAT64 still needs an ipv4 address so that people there can get to you. The ipv6 address is pointless-- it's easier just to put your server on ipv4 and not mess with NAT64 or ipv6.
collaborative filtering with clicks ... you don't see the clicks,
and you can't have the quality

So why build just a "me too" product instead of finding a way to make "collaborative filtering with clicks" irrelevant?

This is so typical of Microsoft btw.
Microsoft adds H.264 support to Google Chrome
Egypt Goes Online Again
Who is to say the "legitimate" startup deserves the money in the first place? The way I see it, if you're legitimate you should be at break even, investment isn't to dig a company out of a hole but rather to accelerate growth and development. I remember the Twilio CEO saying on Mixergy that they needed investment because without it they wouldn't have been able to grow/build as fast. They didn't need it to stay alive, but they wouldn't be where they are now without it. If a startup dies because of a lack of capital that's their own fault and they probably didn't have a company worth investing in in the first place.
Visualising the Iraq War Logs
Eh, who the * cares about Linux on the Desktop and its puny market share?
OS codecs are an unquantifiable security risk, since their source code is not available to Mozilla.
patent holders who are looking for a piece of the video decoding royalty pie would have jumped on the MPEG-LA gravy train already.

They have... they're called members of the pool. The same ones that came after Microsoft when MS did VC-1. The same ones who will come after WebM.
Paypal lost millions of dollars every month to fraud in the beginning. Not a lot of companies can afford to loose thousands of dollars let alone millions.
Suggestions for alternative "fun" beginners Econ books?
For profit corporations staying out of politics as much as possible, regardless of which side they take on an issue. Especially when the issue has to do with society in general and very little to do with their business as in the Visa Paypal case.
I feel that almost all "...and money will come" statements are missing some words.

"Create value, CHARGE FOR IT, and money will come" or "Do what you love, AND A LOT OF CRAPPY BUSINESS STUFF, and money will come"

It's very uncommon for revenue to come to you without some work and thought on your part. It's like the lottery. Sure, some people win, but you won't!
Well, as I have learned, anyone can sue you at any time. I could file a lawsuit against you right now, and you'd have to answer it in court. I've also learned that there are no absolutes. An LLC/S-Corp/C-Corp does not offer absolute protection, but it's not worthless either. There are "tests" that pass or fail, and that determines your individual liability.

In our case, the impression I have developed is that if you're acting in the course of business, and you're acting in good faith, your corporation stands a good chance of protecting you. If you set up a corporation for the purposes of protecting yourself while screwing people over, your corporation probably will not protect you. The possible number of scenarios is far to broad to express as a "protection/no protection" dichotomy.
He probably hates when people confirm an excerpt of an article by just saying 'this' instead of elaborating about their opinion, but felt it's a good occasion to just do that, because that quote speaks for itself.
Oh snap, you have just saved Paypal millions of dollars and cut several jobs at their fraud desk.
Reflector is a great tool, no denying it, but it's been fairly buggy for me since Red-Gate took it over.

Also, yes, $35 isn't much, provided the license is per-user. If it's per-machine, it would cost most devs a lot more (I'd need at least 5-6 licenses for all my VMs + desktop + laptop). That's a whole different story.

I will say, though, that I have no interest or desire in the debugging or VS integration features; those are useless to me.
My job title at a previous job was Software Archaeologist, inspired by ADitS. Though my boss then went on to explain it to a customer more as an Indiana Jones of programmers than as someone working on old and crufty systems.
Are you trying to imply that the post has wrong information because of this fact? If so, attack the wrong data. I don't care who posts facts, as long as they really are facts.