skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't just use a freemium model and expect it to work; there are a lot of considerations. Paying users will see your product almost as an investment, regardless of the amount they actually pay - that's why these people are so much easier to deal with. They feel like they have a stake in your product. The problem is, in order to find these people, you need to let everyone (for freemium) test it.

Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers.

They can be at times. Yet, if what you're describing is true, then it's probably your own fault. Do you really expect people to click a FAQ link when it's so much easier just to hit reply? Do YOU even read FAQ links other companies send you? I consider myself decently competent, and sometimes I tremble at the thought of plowing through an unorganized FAQ page. A better solution? Have the contact form auto-suggest answers with a double submit, filtering by keywords in their help request. "Does this answer your question? ..."

Many free customers flagged the email as spam!

I'm sorry. If you sent me one of these for a seasonal product, I'd probably mark it as spam as well, if I couldn't find an unsubscribe link. Did you have a link in there? Was it easy to find? Did I need to log in just to unsubscribe? Did you think that just because it's a seasonal "thank you", that you wouldn't need an unsubscribe link? I used to get like 20 "thank you" emails or "happy holiday"/"happy birthday" emails every couple of months, and it's dead annoying. When I couldn't find an unsubscribe link, or it was too difficult to unsubscribe, I just marked it as spam. I feel bad doing it, but it solves my problem.

Honestly, you can get people to agree to just about anything. My last legal disclaimer said something to the effect of "if you press accept, we own your soul." Do I really own the souls (pending existence) of tens of thousands of people? No. Just because people agree to an elongated privacy statement, doesn't mean it's okay for you to take advantage of what they agreed to (-> south park Human Centipad).

So, how do you make a freemium model work? Segment your free users from your paying users. You NEED to interact with both differently. There's a lot of money to be made in freemium, but you can't approach it so recklessly.
Sounds like a problem with your choice of editor, not Python. Try emacs or vim.
Quick question: does anyone know whether it's only true for English?
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Creating Your Lifestyle Design Outline
I use emacs.

It's an ambiguity problem similar to the dangling else. There's no way to automatically tell the editor that I want the statements to go here or there.

edit: Yes, there's a reformat command in emacs. No, it does not work correctly for Python, because the lack of delimiters means it does not have the information it needs to do the job right.
No not really, although again the value of the stats all depends on what is being monitored and how, etc. For example, Pingdom can report that an SMTP interface looks just great while at the same time it is impossible to send mail on that port because of a bad disk or another failure somewhere else. We use pingdom too and it is a great tool and transparency is definitely great but any number of user impacting events can and do go unnoticed (depending on how you are monitoring and what you are monitoring...)

A great example is that as I write this, I just realized that our public Pingdom network status reports are offline... I count this as downtime against our global availability stats, but it isn't an event that would show up in my pingdom reports :)
Yep, multi-line functions (lambdas, closures) delimited by whitespace shouldn't be a problem ... but I've heard the same argument made as well. Do you remember where it was that you first read that "whitespace delimiters is the main reason why we aren't allowed to have multi-line lambdas" ?
On the contrary, it does have significance. Middle-class women don't usually date lower class men. If you live in a country or area where the class divide is significant this will obvious.

The problem is not that they care about how much money you make, but that they were too clumsy on their "investigation".
I am not convinced by one of the quiz answers:

> Our calculations confirm that a relatively short series of truly randomly chosen English dictionary words is secure; many people find these somewhat more memorable. Above we used "In the jungle! The mighty Jungle, the lion sleeps tonight!" The important thing is to choose enough words and to choose them in a random un-guessable way, such as by changing the spacing, punctuation, spelling, or capitalization.

The problem with this example is that the 10 words are not chosen independently. Type "in the j" into a google search box and the whole phrase will appear in the drop-down box. So the entropy for the choice of that phrase is about lg2(37^8) or about 42 bits.

So an approximation of the total entropy is:

Choice of source phrase = lg2(37^8) ~= 41.7 bits

Choose one of the 10 suggestions from the drop-down box = lg2(10) ~= 3.3 bits

Permutation of words = lg2(10! / 2! / 3!) ~= 18.2 bits

Spacing (assume each word may independently be precedeed by a space with probability 0.5)
=10 bits

Punctuation (each word may be independently followed by '!') = 10 bits

Capitalization: independently choose one of {lowercase, camelcase, uppercase) for each word = lg2(3^10) ~= 15.8 bits

Total so far: 98 bits.

Now consider the third option: a mixture of 16 independently-chosen letters, numbers and symbols. Assume most ASCII characters are available (lets eliminate single quote, backslash and $ which cause problems for some web apps) and we have

lg2(92^16) ~= 104.4 bits, which wins.
That location has a lot of upsides for us: most of the employees live within 3-4 miles of there, rent is affordable, and our building is next door to a large mall with lots of lunch options. For those who live further away, commutes are made easier by letting people set their working hours and work from home as necessary.

Public transit in LA is poor, so can't disagree with you there.
How to grow taller fast
What's the performance penalty like? That's pretty much the only thing holding me back.
I think the reason for asking for the patch was the [PATCH] in the subject.
Multiple return points are a signal to me that I'm usually (though not always) trying to encapsulate more functionality into a function than I should, or I'm using returns when it might be more semantically correct to use exceptions. I'm a big fan of the "each function does exactly one thing" rule of thumb, and when I start returning all over the place, it usually means that I'm starting to violate that rule. Except in the simple cases, multiple return statements usually means that I've got a function that's composed of multiple micro-functions, and can/should be refactored. Guard statements are an obvious exception.

Sometimes you can't avoid it, especially if you're working with duck typing functions (which are a whole 'nother discussion), and it's not a hard-and-fast rule that multiple returns are evil. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to use them - performance being the primary one - and I would absolutely take them over an 8-deep nested if structure. But, they're often a warning sign that I'm putting too many eggs in that one basket.
Yeah, that's definitely a more reasonable way to implement the above example. I didn't put much thought into the specifics of the code, since the specifics have nothing to do with what point I was making. I was responding to a question about multiple returns; the simple example was supposed to illustrate my opinion on multiple returns, not how to return a boolean value given a boolean condition.
Oh man, LOVE Apple's walled garden:

http://weekly.ascii.jp/elem/000/000/067/67077/
I'm concerned about privacy too but none of the worrisome areas would be improved by FDE. Facebook/Google, tracking, keyloggers etc is where the main problem lies.
He should be done with freemium business model for this one particular business instead. It just do not fit it.

May be try to send e-cards for free and offer to send similar physical card for a fee?
Vim has this problem also.
it probably makes sense to sell the basic feature at low cost, but not completely free. People spend easily up to $10 without too much thinking.
It's interesting, I would have thought something different. I'd have thought that people who are more capable of adapting to the communication style of their peers had a subtle advantage (though that may not reveal pecking order).

I've always thought of a person that can hold a high level, technical conversation one moment, then adjust their vocabulary and speaking style to communicate with some neighborhood children the next, then adopt a pidgin to communicate better when dealing with a non-native speaking friend, then switch to a local drawl when getting their car fixed by the local mechanic, to have a special sort of power w/r to communicating effectively with their audience.

People who don't seem capable of adjusting their patterns based on audience seem more..."brittle" somehow.
Umm, you bury your intent to send emails in your privacy policy, how is that not morally spam?
Well because you are just helping customers implement certain small features, I'd say you might have a niche consulting position here. Market it like that 1 feature = $X, any 2 features = $Y, and 3 or more features implemented = $Z

From your use case it just seems like you know how to add a few features and will be implementing with companies/sites that need them.
The atrocious design almost forced me to close the tab even before the results were completely loaded.
In Vim, just select the text (with V), then use < or > to deinter or indent resp.
3-step authentication? Which bank offers that?
Hold your ground zds! Let's just skip the argument about which language is best [for beginners]. :)
This is actually old. I experienced it myself a few weeks ago. It only happens if you're not logged in, otherwise you see the normal bar across the top.
The main (and only?) argument this poster gives for adding braces is consistency with other languages.

Which is a silly reason. Why not add other things from other languages all to keep 'consistant'?
Oh, man. I only just bought a .by Belarus domain six months ago (as a vanity domain, my surname ends in 'by'). I hope it doesn't effect that.
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I've been arguing for ages about that on #python/freenode. Otherwise, I don't know. Different attempts have been made to include lambdas but it always feel wrong and unpythonic.

I believe it's not so much about multi-lines but more about how the standard library is designed. It's mostly imperative/OO and use really few callbacks. Thus, when you try mixing long lambdas, it feels wrong. Unlike in CS with node.js or jQuery (for example), where callbacks are really the way to go.
The patch is a red herring. Braces have been explicitly rejected in the past. He needs to convince people that they're a good thing, and a patch isn't going to help. (At least not much compared to the time investment.)

> I think Haskell's way of having curlies and semicolons in the core syntax and adding layout as a sugar coating hits a particular sweet spot.

I agree with this.
IEC 62684, Interoperability specifications of common external power supply (EPS) for use with data-enabled mobile telephones, is an international standard - and is basically micro USB. Even Apple is supporting it.

Some quick looking doesn't show any details of the max power rating unless you buy a copy of the spec for 45 Swiss francs.
Sponsors of SOPA Act Pulled in 4 Times as Much from Hollywood
That's what he meant by "manually".
The point is that "In the jungle" etc can actually be reliably remembered by a large portion of the population, whereas 16 independently chosen letters/numbers/symbols usually can not.

Humans are great at remembering phrases, quotes, etc. Think about how widespread referential humor is, where the joke is just a reference to/quote from another work. That's something the brain is great at. Random or semi-random jumbles of letters? Not so much.
It's very difficult to say, given that we've got much better branch prediction, caching, pipelining of instructions, SSE (4 float ops at once), etc.

On top of that, different rendering algorithms, optimisations, biased-vs-unbiased.

http://imgur.com/MIFWC

For example, took 12 seconds to render on a quad core i7, but that's 512 unbiased samples per pixel, and 5 bounce global illumination, so that's around 2,013,265,920 rays sent in 12 seconds, which isn't bad.
...and everything else they “maintain” is CODE

Boy have I been bitten by that one before. I've learned after some time that punting the logic into customer-controllable data doesn't absolve it of all the problems that traditional code has.

In one system, we built the DSL for rules AND a DSL for declaring test cases so the analysts could write new rules and write tests for them.

Can you elaborate on how your DSL looks? How does one structure it to be powerful enough to encapsulate logic and simple enough for analysts to use?

Is it just simplified mathematical expressions? Or something more elaborate?
It's easier said that done.

At the end of 2009 I dropped form 240lb to 180lb by a combination weight training and switching to a low-carb high protein diet for 6 days a week with the 7th day being a pigout (to trick your metabolism out of starvation mode).

I managed to maintain my weight around 185lb throughout 2010. With a big drop in the summer (cycling a total of 70km every day to work and back works wonders).

The problem is that the diet is really hard to stick to, so in 2011 I gradually switched back to a mixed diet. Which meant that sweet stuff was back on the agenda.

Fast forward to 2012 and I'm back at 230lb (although more muscular). I'm switching back to a health diet but I'm not cutting the carbs as much.

This time I'll eat more low GI carbs and less protein. Going for something similar to what Jeremy is doing (eating better, but nice food).
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Families got in debt trouble because they relied on their salaries (equivalent to government's tax base) increasing faster than their indebtedness. The problem was salary stagnation and layoffs broke this assumption. The government is at risk of the same thing happening: their tax base has not been increasing due to the economy stagnating.

I see people over their heads in debt who added to their debt when they were in their 20s and 30s when their salary was increasing as a matter of course because times were good and because they were young and learning new skills. Unfortunately, they continued increasing their debt at the same rate but now their salaries stopped increasing.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

I own a chunk of U.S. debt and I will NOT be happy if the U.S. government says "thank you for your donation."
Stats are back... weird :-) http://about.hover.com/networkstatus (as an aside, making it easy for customers to see uptime/downtime and network events eases the burden on customer service and makes it much easier for potential customers to check your credibility. easy to implement and definitely a plus for the business overall).
I mention Codecademy & Khan Academy in this post on the 'Learn it Yourself movement' http://bit.ly/sReK6m

It seems to me that making educational material free & widely available is the first step. That's the equivalent of putting textbooks in anyone's hands.

The next (massively exciting!) step will be when online learning becomes measurable and demonstrable. See the Khan Academy tools video [http://bit.ly/rVFlsE] for a peek at how much is possible on that front.

In the case of teaching people to program, I'd like to see lessons, videos, and exercises become the onramp to a system where students can connect/collaborate (think GitHub + StackOverflow for beginner/intermediate coders). I know from my own experience that there's nothing like a little positive peer pressure to keep you on track and that sharing your progress with peers is fun and keeps you motivated.
GoDaddy, SOPA, and how Namecheap failed to capitalise
As a Vim / ST2 user I've never once had to fight with indentation levels. The only time I ever have to even think about them are when cut/copy/pasting code around. And even then it's just a quick re-highlight and spam the indent key one way or the other.
Yeah, I found the following quote,

>Many free customers flagged the email as spam! So let me get this straight, you just used my service to make something for your kid for free and then you nail me with a spam complaint?

To be astonishingly tone deaf. Way to not understand how people are using your service.
Intermittent fasting is the greatest thing ever. In fact, I do eat 5-7 meals a day. But they're all squeezed in a 4-6 hour window. The remaining 18-20 hours I "almost fast". Almost meaning: water-teas-coffees (no milk/sugar in either) all allowed, a-very-few-fresh-veggies-or-fruits too, but fresh is the key here and it's not for the energy -- just for loading a few enzymes/vitamins/minerals.

Basically you can feast on as much food as desired and even any kinds of carbs etc. and never get too fat / always stay skinny! Quite amazing. Now calories-in-vs-out still holds but no-one on intermittent fasting will consistently eat 3000-5000 calories day in, day out -- plus the body is tuned and trained to burn body fat for energy on a daily -- daily -- basis.
Why I'm considering Not giving to beggars anymore.
I agree.. it's not like a monthly subscription to something like SendGrid or Pingdom... it's just a fun thing to do once, and forget about. Why would someone want to start paying? I think the OP created something that would solve a business need vs just fun once, he would have had better success
Combined with a firmware password, it makes a MacBook impenentrable.
We understand the tuning parameters for these processes a bit more since this post was written a year and a half ago (We hit a magic phase shift for our other FastCGI processes, at which point our servers started falling over from 4000 users worth of FastCGIs. "Good thing we didn't listen to Geoffrey when he suggested we run an Apache for each user.")

FastCGI static-cat should work (indeed, one of the original design intents was making this switch easy, if we decided to do it). But I disagree that language becomes irrelevant in this case: you still care about memory usage (since this will influence how many users you can support) and loading an entire interpreter can be pretty costly. I do agree that IO should be essentially comparable.

As for the reinvention, all of these features are what you would normally find in Apache. But Apache is a large, complicated piece of software, and we don't want it to have access to arbitrary user files if it is compromised.
Do you have the appropriate emacs plugins for writing Python? I'm a bit surprised that the code isn't formatted properly with emacs out of the box. Then again, many editors need some sort of addon to be able to cope with whitespace sensitive syntax.

If it were an actual grammatical ambiguity, any editor couldn't get it right but it can't be since the Python parser can understand it.
It should happen by accident, when one person says "lunch" and the other person thinks he said "launch".
Lectures are a great idea, when the professor is an expert talking about something only they know about. If they are just rehashing Newton's laws 101, there's no need. It's an outdated tradition dating back to when all university classes taught stuff that was cutting edge.
Kuala Lumpur requires WiFi in restaurants by April 2012
Source: http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/SoShiok/Story/A1Story20120102-319472.html
"Funds raised in this campaign will be used to .... provide legal defence for the projects .... "

It depresses me that an institution such as Wikipedia which relatively speaking achieves so much with so little money will have to spend what I expect is a none trivial amount of its limited funds on legal defence.
> One caveat with EVERY “end users maintain this” system is that workflow rules, tables, DSLs, and everything else they “maintain” is CODE. It may not look like code, but if it drives the behaviour of the system, is code.

In some ways the problem is much worse than for plain old code written by plain old programmers. Once a problem has been analyzed and the structure of its solution has crystalized, table-driven code can often be the right way to factor out the messy ad-hoc business requirements--there's a cool war story about that in Programming Pearls. But just throwing tables at everything for the business analysts to sort out is almost certain to lead to a combinatorially explosive mess of case analyses that's wholly unmaintainable. As you'd know if you've dealt with end-user programming, whether in the form of tables or visual scripting, non-programmer power users are perfectly willing to crank out reams upon reams of case analysis code when left to their own devices.
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Shifting To External Dependencies
You can't be detained indefinitely under the detainment provisions of the 2012 NDAA for arguing with a flight attendant.
1080P HDMI SD/USB HD Mini Media Player MKV/RM/RMVB
USB HOST: can drive external USB storage devices such as USB HDD or USB pen drive, and play or manage files on them.
Build-in USB 2.0 storage, with 10MB capacities.
SD/SDHC reader: directly read SD/SDHC card, and play or manage files on TV, can read SD/SDHC card also on computer.
Support HDMI, CVBS, and YPbPr video output.
Support AV audio output.
Video decoding formats: MKV/AVI/TS/TP/MP4/M4V/MOV/V0B/PMP/MPG/M2TS/FLV/WMV/RM/RMVB/MPEG1 2 4/DIVX(HD 1080P)/WMV9 VC-1/H.264 SP MP HP/H.263 BP
Video definition: 1920x1080P Bit rates up to 80Mbps
Support audio types: MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, FLAC, APE, AC3, DTS, ATRA.
Photo: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP.
Support Repeat, Zoom, FF, BF, Rotate functions.
Resume play function: auto play from the break point.
File management: can manage the files in devices connected to, manage delete or copy between each others.
Support external subtitles: SRT/ASS(UTF8, GBK, BIG5, etc.)
For convenience, a remote control is provided.
OSD Language: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese.
I tried Haskell but it doesn't cut it for me. So I switched to Go and have been very happy so far. I dig channels and co-routines. Type inference is great. I still wish some generics would happen in 2012. The lib is great for doing what C libs do in a more readable way.
The Big List: The Best and Worst Startup Stuff In 2011
Is that the bar? Doesn't every popular Internet meme cross that bar too?
Can you not see where the first character on a line is?
That's nice but feels more like a status page to me than a way to gauge long-term uptime (which is what we were going for here).

For our application outages, it's been pretty well correlated that if pingdom can't get a 200 OK on the test pages we've set up, it's been down. And I don't think we've had much if anything slip in under a 200 OK but still being down.

I'm sure we're still off by a couple of minutes here and there, but the big picture should be quite accurate.