skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't people make backups anymore? I know that using Google Apps is much easier than running your own stuff in-house. It requires much less time and resources, but at the same time there are still best practices and disaster recovery plans that should always have something about backups in them. And just having them isn't good enough. They also need to be followed. Having worked at a place without these ( and attempting to get them implemented ) versus where I currently work that has them and follows them, I have to say, there are a lot fewer times where I feel like screaming here. Do it, and stop expecting 100% uptime and availability of all docs/important information from any service, internal or external. Nothing is 100% but there are many ways to make it less stressful.
...Short of estimates, and GOOG is down almost 5% in after-hours trading.

(Of course that doesn't mean much, it could be completely different by the time we wake up tomorrow.)
At my last startup Outspokes, our product was an embeddable JS-widget. While we did load jQuery after initializing the widget, we still used basic Javascript to load the initial widget (think bookmarklet-like code). Because so much of our app was written in JS, we put more effort into structuring models and creating tests for our widget. This was pre-backbone days, so we built out a set of conventions for ourselves.

I agree that jQuery is almost like a superset of JS, and it hides a lot of the nastiness of some day-to-day chores. But it's still good to understand the underlying JS that powers jQuery.
They're $8.99/year now? I can't believe I am still using namecheap. I watched NearlyFreeSpeech go to bat for a friend that was being sued over a trademark dispute. Even though he was prevented from using the domain commercially in a court of law, NearlyFreeSpeech still registers it for him and lets him have a blank page. The people suing him were pissed off.
I think this offer happened before the #dickbar debacle.
Logos' Secret Messages
No Nametags: David Tisch, TechStars
IOS doesn’t have Flash because Steve Jobs is a dick.
Redis Servers with Node
Hey HN, I created a Node.js framework that helps you build servers that adhere to the redis protocol. Tell me what you think!
Find a small local IT company to use. It's been my experience that they are very responsive and do really care and many of them are very high-quality (old Unix guys). Google are just so large and so far away. They can't be everything to everybody (try as they might).
That's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops..

But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.
I need this. I never really cared about ads and them showing up on websites, I dont mind if that is the way that the site makes its money. However, about two months ago I got a flyer in the mail for a local dentist, so I went to their website. Now every site that I go to has that dentist as the ad and I cannot figure out how to clear cookies/cache whatever to change it (it only happens on my laptop in a certain browser). Anyway, I welcome "do not track" and will definitely use it.
The White iPhone Is Finally Here
Apple takes a bite out of PC market
I'm quite content with versio.nl (sadly only for dutch-speaking folk).
It costs me around 8~9€ for a .com domain for a year, and around 15€ for a year of hosting (1.5G space, 20G bandwidth, 25 subdomains, etc).

/notanemployee
You're right, doing it yourself requires PCI compliance. I've done all that work and my servers get a compliance scan every quarter. That's just tangential to patio's argument (that it's technically difficult to offer a better billing experience than an outsourced service).

Thing is, everything PCIDSS says you have to do when payment data passes through your servers is security 101. If you're not already doing 90% of these things, you're just waiting to be hacked anyway. Instead of thinking of it as a burden for payment processing, think of it as something every professional online business should have been doing anyway.
When your hosting company goes down, you're basically stuck waiting for them.

The only way to ensure that you never have downtime is to not use the Internet, and keep all your servers connected to a nuclear reactor, all inside a mountain. That covers power and not being flooded or hit by a tornado, anyway.

Even then you'd better be careful not to trip over any of the power cables or type "rm -rf /" as root.
Website Optimization: First Link Priority
Rephrase: what does Ghostery get me that ABP + NoScript (which does get Google Analytics) doesn't?

(Serious question, just trying to keep my FF4 install somewhat lean.)
He's talking about founders, not employees.

Made up numbers, but say you get 500,000 from investors. And the going rate for engineers is 100,000. Two founders can take a salary and hire two, maybe three, employees. If they can afford not to take a salary, they've doubled their staff size. Since each one of them owns 25% of the company, it may be worth the risk to them. It's obviously not worth the same risk to the first round of employees, who each end up with 2.5% of the company.
Well, we all work for someone. I work for our investors. But yes, I'm the founder of my company, so I work for myself and because I love what I do. Realistically I'd say I do about 80 hours per week. But when you love what you do it's not work.
I use omnis.com, and I wish they promoted the domain name angle of their services separately from the rest of their hosting.

The purchase process is straightforward, little upselling (no, I never want hosting or privacy protection!), and the prices remain the same each year, unlike godaddy which gets you at a low price then has higher renewal prices. Example - all my renewing domains are >$10 at godaddy, but omnis.com are $8.25. I'm getting a discount from omnis because I have >50 with them now.
REAL mobile growth numbers or just marketing bull?
Real mobile growth numbers - looks pretty explosive or just marketing bull?
Mac App Store is not even related with portable devices synchronization or media playing and purchasing, areas that's traditionally iTunes covers, why would Apple even consider including it as a feature of iTunes?
At least make sure users can turn it off.

There are a plethora of reasons why someone would not want the absolute newest version of a browser every time a developer releases a single patch to the code.

Users should have control over their own computers and what they install.
Depends. Are you writing Haskell at Galois or JanRain?
"but that's not what's going to drive serious entrepreneurs to Portland" - have to disagree with you on that one.

In particular, non-20-somethings who understand about life balance and that "life is short" but still have the entrepreneurial drive are going to consider quality of life more than "live your startup" type younger folks. Though I've noticed a lot of younger people move to portland for the recreational opportunities and social scene.
I have yet to register a domain through them but the DNS services are fantastic.
One of the system admins here made a comment about how important backups are for a business. He said the only time he ever saw someone get fired immediately was when they screwed up the backup system.

He talked me through all the design considerations they had to do for their backup system for the datacenter here. It's a lot of work, but there is a lot of business value in having a working backup system.
Ask HN: Is it too bad to incorporate a startup in California vs Delaware?
So your reply about atrocious customer service (i.e., a post about a PAYING customer being unable to get access to his file) is to say "well, you should have backed up"?

The real story here is that a paying customer was unable to get anything better than a free user.

FWIW, I must be lazy or something, but I don't think the user of a VERSIONED online document storage service should be reasonably be expected to also have his/her own backups. What the hell am I paying for then?
For mission critical things, you want to reduce the points of failure, and ensure that when things DO go wrong, you have a reasonable escalation path.

It's now been over 8 hours since it went down, and no fix from Google yet. 4+ days on the missing file.

If I was running in house, I could have entirely restored the mail server from tape by now. I could have swapped over to a hot-spare in a few minutes. I could have failed over to our backup internet service. I have a lot of options.

With Google, my option is to wait.. And hope my business doesn't lose too much money while Google gets around to fixing it.
In that paper he is not arguing that L2s suck. It is a much better analysis than that.

"The bulk of arguments that focus on clean semantics and notational simplicity tend to favor uniting the function and value namespaces."

These are the first 3 points about notational simplicity and referential transparency.

"In spite of this, there are those who hold strongly to a belief that a two-namespace system affords useful expressive power that they are unwilling to do without."

These points are contested by some.
(overall it seems a matter of aesthetics, objectively single namespace is more elegant).

"In the end, practical considerations favor the status quo for Common Lisp."

Practical considerations, being the other 10 or so points about implementing and using it relatively efficiently, and using macros. Some of which are a toss up, others are in favor of one or the other...

"There is a large number of improvements beyond a single namespace that could be made to Common Lisp that would clean it up and simplify it. We feel that the time for such radical changes to Common Lisp passed, and it would be the job of future Lisp designers to take lessons from Common Lisp and Scheme to produce an improved Lisp."
(Clojure)

I'm okay with your informed opinion, what I have a problem with it is you putting it in such a stark relief with little to no stated basis for the opinion.
Would you recommend The Little Schemer as a book for teaching programming/computation concepts to kids?
The BlackBerry PlayBook Review
Following several recommendations I got on HN, I've moved all my domains to Namecheap. It's been pretty solid thus far; haven't had any real issues that I can think of. It'd be nice if their site was a bit less spammy, though.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html

Support and reliability

24/7 phone and email support for critical issues

99.9% uptime guarantee SLA
Rhetoric for Engineers
great. another troll article
A lot of people asked us when signing up how EffectCheck works. Hopefully this blog post helps answer that a little bit. This demonstrates the kind of analysis and optimization that someone could do with our MVP.
PC sales 'have passed peak'
More buttons. Clicking on anchors is very anti-fitt's law.
The part about that "just being a game": Could you please explain that to my teenage self that bought 2 Games for 60 Dollar each (which was basically my gaming budget for a year) and then falling prey to a scheme that is really "defective by design"? In the case of Operation Flashpoint, it actually meant buying a new DVD drive that was compatible with the games copy protection as well.

Sorry, gamers are costumers, too. More so: they are premium customers, buying one of the most expensive entertainment products that you can get. No, I don't want to discuss this: If I bought a game and the developer takes actions that may incorrectly flag me as a pirate and then decides to _play games with me_, he is a selfish smart-ass that doesn't know a prime rule of software development: your clever scheme almost certainly has failures. Which for me as a customer means: sorry, I'm not going to buy from you again. Garry might be in the position to do so, but its still bad.

And if Garry wants to vent his frustration, he can do so in other ways, instead of firing a shotgun blast that may mostly hit pirates, but some if his fans as well.

And as shown below: there are cases where legitimate customers must work around that 'bug' to play the game.
UFO sightings have been made public by the FBI
Tow things:

no longer automatically remove posts that have been flagged - but show the ad and note to the user that it had been flagged N times.

This is due to the flag for removal abuse that people use to block others from seeing items for sale or places for rent to prevent competition.

Allow me to expand images on items.
Apple woos data center guru away from Microsoft for cloud services
Aren't the Google Docs GDATA enabled? [1] If so then it should be pretty straightforward to write a script which would pull down copies of any file that had changed for local backup.

[1] http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/service_docslis...
We've had no issues and enjoy the WebEngage platform. Dependable way to harness consumer feedback. Keep up the good work folks!
I think Egg (Emacs Got Git) is really slick: https://github.com/byplayer/egg
CloudPull is an app that backs up Google apps data.
Been using namecheap for years, i'd recommend them to anybody.
Again, the idea is that a 'paying' customer should not have to deal with this.
It is the most annoying feature possible.
Some of the webserver log analysis tools I use, Analog and Visitors among them, show huge, huge discrepancies in numbers culled from the actual logs vs. what Google Analytics shows me. By that token I have concluded that people are already pretty successful at evading GA tracking to a large degree, though probably not to supercookie levels.
"Irony" is not what you think it is.
Great article, I've often considered building a similar interface. However, I disagree with "I don’t care about the past". There are many events which, though they happened in the past, have a direct impact on my future schedule.

For example, one of my biggest weaknesses is making sure I've replied to all e-mails which require follow-ups in a timely manner. Lately I've been using Outlook's "Follow Up" flag for this purpose with some success. A calendar program which showed me all of my un-followed-up e-mails, including a visual cue to remind me of how long ago it was sent, would be ideal. Also, ongoing events/projects would benefit from this style.

I think my ideal calendar interface would be a screen split into thirds, with the middle representing today, and the left and right sides representing the past and future, respectively, on a logarithmic scale. Maybe someday I'll get around to building it.
We have that ;)
I called them, emailed them, and asked for updates in as plain of terms as possible.

4+ days on the missing file, 8+ hours on broken email.
I wonder how many people on HN have WoW subscriptions they never log into...
Here is a particularly good resource on this aspect of Spotlight:

http://hints.macworld.com/dlfiles/spotlight_cmds.txt
Why RIM's Open Source Pisses Me Off
Bamboom brings over-the-air broadcast TV to the cloud
Ganhe Premio
Is there any reason microsoft doesn't bundle firefox with their operating system, and just EOL Internet Explorer?

Despite common belief, MS actually wants the best browser in the world. But they want it to be noticeably the best.

The fear MS would have if FF did their browser is that the FF browser for Windows offered no advantage over the one for Linux or the Mac. Or even worse, the Linux version of FF was substantially better than the Windows version.

Now you can argue that IE isn't as good as Chrome or FF, but at least MS knows that's their decision. They've allocated their resources and made their business case. If FF is providing the browser then MS could end up in a situation where the most visible end user feature is out of their control.

Let me flip the question on you. Do you think Apple ever would/should simply let FF or Chrome be their iOS web browser and stop doing Safari mobile?
get married... the entire institution is negotiation.
Image Composite Editor - Panoramic Image Stitcher
I don't agree so much with point 2, but I do think that it's smart to figure out what people actually need to be in the office for and plan around that, rather than assuming some kind of window. Maybe the lunch meeting at one startup is the 4pm at another.
Startup Founder Lessons:Jason Fried On Company Culture
It is an example of the "active" cookie based approach to this same thing mentioned in the article. The "Keep My Opt-Outs" extension is linked at the bottom of the article.
I've had nothing but good experiences with iWantMyName [1]. My experience with them and GoDaddy has been like night and day. They provide simple, reasonably priced and to the point registration and management. Couldn't be happier with them.

[1] http://iwantmyname.com/
YouTube sending repeat infringers to copyright school
How to Get a Real Education - By Scott Adams
I'm moving my family and business to Portland, OR in order to grow. 4 days in Portland and I was able to meet with a couple of dozen people. I haven't seen a better city in this country ready to grow, try new things and be willing to support themselves and others become successful.

Portland Seed Fund is another win for everyone in Portland and Oregon.
Lessons learned from Japan for Scientists & Engineers...
Google’s Profit Falls Short of Estimates as Employee Costs Rise
Bing Lays The Smack Down Part 2
EaselJS: The HTML5 canvas library behind worldsbiggestpacman.com
Platforms and Networks: Launching Tech Ventures
An analogy for messaging and positioning at many companies
Holy Crap, Flipboard Just Raised $50 Million At A $200 Million Valuation
edit: nm, thanks bbatsell

original comment:
Yeah, except if you use them for dns -- which I prefer to leave on my registrar -- they're assholes who spam everyone who mistypes a subdomain. Better yet, they throw ads on there and pocket the money. Cute, right?
That is a huge blind spot in libertarian thinking: the failure to realize that a lot of "private" industry is not actually private.
I am implementing some domain monitoring tools on my site, ParkedAvenue, and this gives me a good idea. I will monitor my customer's domains, and then will be able to let them know when they are up for renewal, and hopefully offers an easy for them to migrate to better registrars!

Would this be a good addition to http://ParkedAvenue.com?
In house or external doesn't matter. You always backup.

Because it seems to be a foreign concept in this day and age, I will repeat it again.

You always backup.
in other words: if google goes down, you can do other work meanwhile or go to lunch, if your system goes down, you have to spend your time/money to fix it.
Exactly the same argument is continuously happening about OOP, because the terms themselves are fuzzy and people argue past each other.

I think "Scheme is a Lisp dialect" is clearer. "Does Scheme have enough Lisp-iness?" avoids the semantic trap of "is", but in doing so, shows how vague the question is.
Displaying Data Using Server Controls
I would think that 'roots' would be a big drag on mobility in pretty much any city. So I don't know if that's a factor in Portland's unique 'problem'.

And someone who never thought to question their salary level is by definition someone who couldn't be conscious of any trade-offs that might be in play.

Is everyone aware? Almost certainly not. But if you ever had cause to look at salary data, I don't think you could miss it.
TIL! It does look almost exactly alike, and most of the keyboard shortcuts work in about the same way. I cannot judge the picture quality, but they both look very nice!
Not really. GCal will show you yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.

What the poster wanted was "today" set wider so that you didn't get "multi-appoinment-squishes-text-into-unreadable-jumble" columns, then a two days in the future (no Yesterday), in a narrower column, and then a fourth column with things that are more than 3 days away but presumably less than a month or maybe a couple of weeks away.

That is a much more intuitive way to think about scheduling for some people. And one that I would use if GCal supported it.
At least they had released an app before going for funding.
This article doesn't mention it directly, but after reading the bit about the FlipLive makes this more likely to me: the wrong people in Cisco finally realized what Flip might be able to do. Which is replace Cisco's teleconferencing enterprise business. And doing so even a little bit would probably cost them a pretty penny, so they're dumping it to protect what they see as their "core" business.
That's a fair point. Customer segmentation can be overdone.

There was an interesting article on HBR about research Clayton innovator's-dilemma Christensen was doing into customer segmentation vs. a job-to-be-done approach (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html).

Once someone clicks on a link that calls out to them as a customer, you need to tell them pretty quickly what you can do and how you can do, i.e. what job you can help them do.

On brandregard.com we simply moved the discussion about features down one level, behind a customer segment link. We also discuss features in length below the fold on the landing page.
It's a building material.
You can even choose 1280! Gorgeous!
Back in February I met with the Dean of CECS and Chair Harris of the CS department. One "good" problem for them is that nearly all (but few exceptions) are hired after graduation by the existing large businesses in Portland.

I don't hire strictly based on paper and education (being a high-school dropout type) but for many bright people, that is their best entry into CS and engineering. We'll have to work with PSU to increase the breadth and depth of their students - the really good news, no disagreement from them!
If the FlipLive was to debut yesterday, certainly there was inventory to back that up. What kind of lead time does production of that have? How much extra $$ did cisco blow by killing an in production product the day before it launches?
So would I, I always want to know how they made the initial connection with the wholesalers and not get crap like odd sizes or odd designs.
> "Irony" is not what you think it is.

Well, maybe. In English it seems that "irony" conveys only a rhetorical effect.

In Latin derived languages (Spanish, Portuguese), however, it also conveys a situation that turns out to be not what it seems at first sight; as in the Greek root eirōneía (dissimulation). We call it ironia del destino (destiny's irony). E.g.: one would expect a site that publishes news concerned about privacy not to collect information about visitors without them knowing it.

But I concede that English restricts the meaning of this word. Thanks for the correction.
100% agree.
We are developing service which tries to solve some of these problems, so I'll do a shameless plug here.

One way to address these kind of problems is to use cloudHQ to synchronize your Google Docs with SugarSync (clickable: http://cloudHQ.net/sugarsync). (We are releasing dropbox this weekend).

Here is our idea: there are many different cloud storage services and each of them is very good for a particular use case but not so good for other use cases. For example, Google Docs service is excellent for collaboration but not so good for storage. On the other hand, Dropbox or Sugarsync service is excellent for storage but not so for collaboration.

So if data is continuously synchronized between Google Docs and lets say SugarSync storage, then you can always fall back to SugarSync when Google Docs becomes unavailable and vice versa. In order words, you can use other service as a standby site in case of service unavailability, malicious or accidental deletion of files, etc.
...it can't be both? :)
or you hired the right people, but cannot bring yourself to trust them and let go of micromanaging
I use Domain Discover. They seem ok and their DNS panel works pretty well.