skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason is because it's a very difficult and competitive market and the step up from good to excellent customer service isn't worth the extra cost.

You can go for low-cost, high-volume (GoDaddy and most others) or high-end, higher cost, lower volume (Network Solutions and a few more).

Because the end user experience of getting a domain - as you point out - is pretty much of buying and then only very occasionally making changes, there is no real middle market. Every registry charges a wholesale price and you can charge only a tiny margin before you are priced out the market.

The reason that good registrars get worse, ironically, is because they become successful. Once you start dealing with larger and larger volumes, it gets harder to maintain your customer service and price.

And the one thing that you don't hear about - but registrars will tell you privately - is that as soon as you get broader public awareness you end up with really difficult customers who chew up alot of time, are usually wrong, or have a complete misunderstanding of how it works, and make life difficult for your customer service teams. It's the curse of being popular in a commodity market.

In that sense, GoDaddy does a good job balancing price with level of customer service given the huge numbers of interactions it has to deal with.

Personally, I have my domains split over a number of different companies: GoDaddy (US), Heart Internet (UK), Network Solutions (US) and Blacknight (Ireland). If anything I'd give Heart Internet the edge.
At 15c/GB/mo Rackspace Cloud is the most expensive option at $75/month
I pay $1 per mailbox per month. The current price is $2 per month per mailbox, still a deal. Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust) is incredibly reliable, backed up daily, good spam filters, and excellent 24/7/365 support. In the past ~3 years I've only experienced a single downtime incident of about 10 minutes.
Internet.bs is great, I use them too! Private whois is also included in the already very low prices
Asia just ran out of ipv4 addresses
How does Rackspace compare with say Joyent? I'm cross shopping for some more CPU. I've been a very long EC2 user/developer.
"a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

Undergraduate education has broadened, but with all due respect to my peers, that sounds rather like an apt description of present-day grad students. (s/ecclesiastical/academic)
Yeah, it seems like SF is very comparable to Brooklyn in prices.
+1 for Dynadot. I've used them for a few years now with no complaints. Clean simple web interface, good DNS features, volume discount. They do have 9/6 phone support rather than 24/7.
Isn't "New Jersey Lisp" a contradiction in terms?
It wasn't clear to me how fully supported this is. Lots of people have had issues with this, see the comments: http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for...
Before even experimenting with this for patient data, I'd be interested in answers to at least the following basic questions:

- what logging and auditing is in place for telling a physician (who is ultimately responsible to his/her patients for their data) who accessed and/or changed data?

- are routine logs provided to users?

- how are backups done, and where do backups of data live?

- who, if anyone, at "drchrono" and/or any server farms used has access to my patient's data and/or backups?

- what is the retention policy for data? How do I get rid of data if needed (drilled all the way down through backups)?

- regardless of any verbiage about "never sharing data with a third party", what policy does "drchrono" have around dealing with subpoenas for patient information?

- what special precautions, if any, are in place for additional privacy around mental health and drug dependence issues?

The mashable advertisement indicates "All the data storage is HIPAA-compliant, as well." Is it? I'm a little confused by the following (difficult to parse) fragment on the website:

"The environment at drchrono currently encompasses the highest level of security as well as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) security tenets that of the proposed regulations."

Perhaps someone from drchrono could let a potential user know if they actually claim "HIPAA compliance", and if so, reassure the user with details of how "compliance" was determined (ie via audit? - and who exactly is the "team of security experts" advertised?)

Less marketing-speak, more facts would be helpful.
When Cloud Servers work, they work great.

The pricing and build-out structure is linear when looking at RAM & disk space, so this may or may not fit everyone's requirements. There is no EBS-equivalent, and load balancing has just been introduced formally into the control panel recently. The persistency is something I've taken advantage of, compared to EC2's ephemeral nature (unless one employs EBS).

As for cloud servers going down randomly, Rackspace Roulette can be tough, and the only silver lining is it provides a good incentive to build (or at least, to think about) applications which work around failure.

There is one other lesser known gotcha which is max RAM capacity per account; I think the default is something like 50GB and if you require more (for burst perhaps), you have to get this amount pre-approved. Apparently this is to safeguard against (accidental) abuse of the Cloud Servers API, but it's probably also a good mechanism for capacity planning on their side. At any rate, I've seen/heard the turnaround to be about a couple of business days.

One the flip side, there was a very active thread a while back about how Mixpanel moved away from RS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884685

EDIT: One more note about RS -- resizing cloud servers. It's a great ability to have, but it can be slow. It tends to take longer the more data you have (not too surprising). A good practice is to wipe unnecessary log files before resizing, as I've been told that each resize action actually causes the cloud server to jump to another physical host. Don't quote me though, I'm just on the Internet :)
One of the most useful things I've found with spotify is the fact that everyone I know has it — and I can link any song or album, or playlist that I just created and anyone can listen.

Yes, that would still be possible if they have the new, restricted version — but there's no guarantee that they will. By vastly reducing the number of free users, they have also reduced the value (for me) of having a premium account. Not sure if I'll keep paying for a premium account in 6 months...
CakePHP is what we swear by at work. Still works for us, and we can't wait for 2.0.
I did use an Amiga, but not long enough to really get a feel for it.

Gmail was so much better than the competition — Hotmail and Rocketmail — that Microsoft thought it was an April Fool's joke and advertised that new Hotmail users would get something like a terabyte each.

It's disappointing that you deleted your post, because I hadn't heard of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_1604 before. The way that I heard the PDP-1 was significant was that it was something like 100 times the speed of any machine within a factor of 10 in price. But I can't source that in any detail. Is it possible that that statement was true but only until the 1604 came out in the same year?
Interesting. So Ghostery users appear to opt-in to being tracked, then Ghostery shares that information with others.

http://news.ghostery.com/2011/03/04/ghostery-helps-the-bbb-t...
We've moved from Google Docs to Dropbox, at least as a placeholder; We're still trying to find a better long-term solution. AeroFS is leading the pack, once it is out of beta.

For Email, we plan to, but it's a bit more complicated.

I'll need to imapsync each account, so it's going to be messy, so I'll need a week or two to plan it out, and build/test a new Zimbra server.
Paraglide and Paragon looks pretty terrible. Honestly, I don't see it as a great PHP5.3 framework. In fact, it looks pretty terrible.

Lithium would be a better choice, if you think that you can't do OOP in PHP5 without 5.3, or you think that all other frameworks suck for this/that reason:

http://lithify.me/

Personally I use CakePHP for side-projects, and it suits me just fine. But honestly, PHP development isn't that bad, even with a 3 year old version of certain frameworks...
Sorry, deleted my last post. Thought I was a bit snarkier than I usually am. :-)

I will say that I thought Yahoo was almost strictly better at Gmail launch, except one thing... storage. And Yahoo was actually reducing the size if I recall correctly.

I do use gmail now, although I still find the UI, on the web at least, to not be to my liking.
sweet! thanks :)
+1 It looks pretty easy to figure out, but documentation is always nice.
waaaait for it...
this is good information, however I was looking more for stories about how FB was a waste of money with regards to advertising..any ideas?
Common Lisp has multiple looping constructs, and tail recursion is NOT part of the Common Lisp spec.

The functional programming of Scheme is a Scheme thing, not a Lisp thing.
Education has always been radically affordable, what European democracies have done is allowed students to have their children and grandchildren pay for their schooling by offloading the cost of that schooling onto the state debt.

"It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come."
Whilst I agree with you that schooling (not education) does this, please look at the percentage of people employed by small business in the US vs. 'European Democracies' I think you'll find that many more Europeans have corporate overlords than Americans.

"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library "
Their company culture sucks, but there isn't anything wrong with their interview process. They communicated exactly what it was like to work there, and you decided that as a person who expects respect and civility, you didn't want the job. Wasn't that the best possible outcome?
Another fun fact related to this story: Snoop Dogg tried to rent Liechtenstein in the past, but was not able to. (source: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2010/07/snoop-d...)

He should try using AirBnB next time!
Yahoo:Delicious = Cisco:Flip ?
Groklaw isn't shutting down because SCO became irrelevant. It seems Gloklaw continues with a broader scope of interest.
I thought Groklaw was to cease publishing?
I have to agree with you regarding the way everything is going. Grad school is a very common for everyone to have so being part of something like YC or TS is just another avenue to expand your education in exchange for a piece of equity.
We use s similar setup to what they are using. We use in house built MVC framework though. Our Model is a lacking but still works. We do still use Memcached and I don't see how they can skip that. I don't know what their user numbers are like for even 1-2k concurrents that many Mongo queries could be deadly.
In fact, the AES-256 bridge possibly means even -faster- adaption as opposed to all native apps. Big corps would insist on all sorts of due diligence and ridiculous testing for a brand new model connecting to their BES (I've seen how long a certain company to get the 9700 approved...). With the BB bridge, way less silliness to go through.
R5RS is famously shorter than the index of the ANSI Common Lisp spec.
I more or less understand the reasons, but I do think it unfortunate and weird that the companies offering cloud services price them on some combination of RAM, disk space and bandwidth--CPU performance doesn't really figure, except occasionally in vague terms, and neither does disk access speed.

RAM is important, sure, but there should be some way to quantify the expected CPU performance as well.
Well the best possible outcome would be they call me back and pay me 200,000 a year to fix the company culture.

I have to give them credit for being honest. I should probably title the post "how to discourage people from working for you." Plus, they gave me good fodder for a blog post.
I wrote about this topic a long time ago and as part of my reporting put together a list of tips^: http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/01/stock-photography-cash-tech...

^They are in slideshow format. Sorry!
Have you got a reply?
nope, I imagine I won't get one.
Typical Day of a Cartoonist
Last time I checked, about a year or so ago, they weren't very keen on people using them only as a registrar. Not "you'll get your account terminated", just a "please don't do this if you don't have to". That said, I've got a domain (or two?) registered there. Yes, I do feel guilty about it!
Rackspace cloud servers are basically what slicehost offers. They don't have cpu bursting. Instead each slice on the host is guaranteed a minimum amount of cpu and any unused capacity is available for other slices to use.

So if you have four slices on a host and 3 slices only use 10% each of total cpu capacity. Each slice is guaranteed 25% but they aren't using all of their guaranteed cpu. Your slice can then consume the remaining 70% of the cpu on the host. (Minus virtualization overhead)

Unlike bursting, you don't get throttled until other slices need cpu. Your slice can happy keep consuming 70% until the other slices start asking for their share.
The point is that some marketers are still honest

So DNT is a mechanism for blocking the honest marketers that we trust to respect our communicated wishes, while still permitting the dishonest marketers to do what they will? As far as I can tell, DNT requires enforcement legislation to be effective.

some also realize that it's smart to not piss off people

How would someone tell that an advertiser is not respecting DNT and therefore be pissed off? Looking for suspicious cookies from third-party sites? The ads seem too personalized?
It could be.
We're still at a very early stage and the traffic is definitely not what it's gonna be in the future yet. So far, Mongo has held up beautifully in real-life situations and benchmarking, and we can deploy new boxes infinitely to beef up our replica set with Amazon EC2 when we reach our limits—but Memcached is not out of the picture entirely. So far there's been no need for it (which would not be the case with MySQL) but if future traffic starts to call for it, we'll definitely add that to our setup.
This is also good advice, though having a registrar that does not bend over at will is nice, too.
Drawter.com - DrawAble Markup Language
Talent is Not Universal
Thank you, ill try that out
Out of curiosity, when a hot tech startup is going to IPO - what difference does it make which investment bankster does it?

For example, if there were 1 million people who wanted in on the deal - would there be less if the deal were led by some random bankster?

Further - what does Goldman get for leading this -- it would seem that they simply get to pick who gets in on the opening price, including their own staff/cronies.

So, it would seem that, at least for Goldman, the game really is fixed in the favor. The effectively get guaranteed returns on every single dollar they put out.

Pretty farking disheartening.
They ARE what Slicehost offers. Same company, IIRC.
A conversation on TED.com: The Global Village Construction Set
Tangentially, I was just looking at the possibility of hosting a file on Amazon S3, and it's astonishing how expensive it is. They want $0.15/GB for bandwidth.

In contrast, Linode sells bandwidth for $0.10/GB, and that comes with a whole VPS. So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage (oh, and Linode pools your bandwidth across all nodes). On S3, $160 will buy me a little over 10TB of bandwidth, nevermind storage or anything else.

I understand that these cloud services are the most convenient way to scale, and probably the best way to absorb an unexpected spike in usage. But they seem to charge a roughly 50% premium for every resource, as compared to a reliable VPS provider with great customer service, an API that lets you set up temporary servers, etc.
You should always have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site (disaster recovery) these are completely separate from "it's in the cloud so I don't have to worry about it." And this is why I personally dislike "the cloud" because too many people rely on it and don't have a proper plan in place. You can rely on it sure, but don't only rely on it.
I can see it now:

$10 Billion in common stock for $1 Billion! 90% savings! Click here to buy now.
It's short and it's definitely worth a read. I had no idea that there were airports without control towers.
Ok, now that does indeed make sense if true. Thanks.
And to address who does it, it doesn't matter. Someone in the company should be in charge of doing the backups. If no one else will, then take it upon yourself to do so. If you have a medium sized company, someone in your IT department should be doing it. And if you are a large company, there is simply no excuse.
> So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage.

In Linode, for $159.95 you get 1.600GB or 1.6TB of bandwidth. Not 16TB.
Linode to S3 is not apples to apples. If you want to compare to S3 you would need multiple linode boxes and a system for redundancy in the face of image corruption or hardware failure.

One of the things you are paying for with S3 is a pretty solid guarantee that your files will A) not get lost and B) always be available.
Well, I didn't get that out of point 4. Here is the exact quote:

Making your startup succeed requires you to have a lot of faith and dreams about your project, and a weekly lunch is probably a good environment for having this kind of team “bonding” around a common vision / dream.

It's not merely a good environment for bonding, sharing a meal actually causes some bonding all by itself, whether you discuss business or not. Humans are at their most vulnerable when eating and food sustains life itself. There are some very powerful psychological and emotional forces at work when you sit down and break bread with another person. It isn't merely "nice atmosphere".

I used to feed the single soldiers who came to my apartment in Germany to play role playing games with my husband. Every last one of them came to say "goodbye" to me when they got their orders to go back home to the US. And some of these strapping young soldiers cried as they hugged me goodbye, though their relationship had not really been to me, it had been to my husband. But I was the one who played hostess and cooked them Christmas dinner and put my kitchen at their disposal every weekend, not him.

Peace.
Anyone not invited to YC still want to spend the summer in San Fran?
I am wondering if there are other people that applied to YC but didn't get an interview, who still want spend the summer in San Francisco?

I still want to be there for the summer to gain mentorship opportunities and grow my relationships in the valley. My thought is for a group of like minded people, renting a large space (home/condo) for the summer and creating the environment for ourselves. While we have to pay our own way, we can still take advantage of the many opportunities the valley has to offer.

Anyone else interested in this?
Hey I'm a director at the Dojo. Please ping Katy@ if you want to start something up in Chicago that is similar to the Dojo, we'd love to see the community grow.
You can't really compare S3 to a VPS. S3 offers redundancy and scalability that nothing running on a single VPS could do.
Voting rights in a corporation don't have to be proportional to ownership (see Google for a giant example). Of course, that makes the set-up a little more complicated (read: more legal fees).
You should be able to carry the buzz through for a while, if you have to delay shipping. i.e. keep people updated via your blog/email list with promises that the wait "will be worth it" etc...
AA Gill does Dubai - a response to the Vanity Fair Dubai article
Many don't employ bulk purchasing in the traditional sense.

RueLaLa for example is actually run by GSI Commerce, the largest end to end ecommerce provider. They have existing distribution contracts with hundreds of companies.

When a product reaches its end of life period, GSI Commerce either buys it from the retailer and adds it to RueLaLa or the product goes into "overflow" where it is moved to RueLaLa but GSICommerce now takes a more significant percentage of the income.

The reason it is so profitable is because no additional infrastructure nor purchases are needed. GSICommerce keeps the old inventory in the same warehouse, reclassifies it as RueLaLa material, and removes it from the client website.
If you want to integrate with Spreedly, I'll do it for $500. Just say you saw this post here on HN
Phil Torrone at Make made a passionate if somewhat optimistic call to Cisco to open source the Flip tech now it's being killed off:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/rip-flip-camera-hey...

Although if it was a technology acquisition, as TFA speculates, they're even less likely to do that.
There's one of these every week. Someone is using either Rackspace or EC2, switches to the other, and talks about how the original is terrible.

It seems pretty split as to who likes which provider. Don't let one blog post sway your opinion too much.
Youtube Live Stream to iOS devices
Why Apollo 12 Was Amazing
That is an interesting statement. I'd estimate that the sample would show that alcohol was used by people with a broad range of income levels. However, the only way a hunter-gatherer (as described by Diamond) would obtain alcohol is to trade with a farmer or someone who can do the meta-work required for alcohol and supported by farming.
Is there an easy way to stay abreast of upcoming ipos? I'm kicking myself for missing this one.
And the best part? Google Calendars can be synced with OSX/iOS Calendar apps so they can be available offline.
20billion divided by 60million is $333per user. That seems high.
Acquisition and Activation, Personified (AARRR Metrics)
I've used both fairly extensively now and there are definitely pros and cons to each. I haven't done any solid benchmarking, but RS feels faster. It's also much easier/faster to get up and running whereas AWS has a bit of a barrier to entry. While at times I've been given incorrect info from them it's great to be able to get support staff on the live chat.

I wouldn't necessarily choose it for all applications though. The AWS architecture is far more flexible in general. Elastic IPs are invaluable when it comes to creating a system that can grow over time (seamlessly switch from a single instance to several fronted by a load balancer in a couple of minutes). Being able to take complete snapshots of your system on an hourly basis could well save your business one day. Being able to make a couple of API calls to attach an extra 1 TB drive to your instance? That's worth losing a little horsepower over.

It all depends on what you're after; with Rackspace you probably get a faster machines, but that's at the expense of being able to build a more robust generic solution for your needs.
Off-topic, but how do you always know the best books for each historical topic? I've tried looking for books on specific topics but there seems to be no good way of finding the gems (amazon and other recommendation sites of its ilk have not yielded any successes for me).

Also, how do I know which books are most accurate? Looking at current political or biographical books, I see how slanted almost all books are because I have many other sources to go on and the relevant context to judge a book's accuracy. But all of this context is missing for historical books so I have no way of judging how biased or inaccurate they are.

What if I were learning history from the equivalent of a Glenn Beck?