skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pair.com has cheap shared hosting which includes email. In some ways they're more flexible than solutions like fastmail. It's a middle ground between total outsourcing and running your own server: you get a shell account, yet you don't have to keep the server up.

I used pair.com for this and other purposes for many years, happily, and I'm thinking of going back. I'm on fastmail at the moment. One surprising development: pair.com used to be freebsd-only, and now they offer ubuntu as an alternative.
It's amongst the possible prerequisites. Others include being profitable, of course. If you are not profitable, funded or part of a large corp, there is a real chance of SaaS creep from a cost angle.
Interesting article with several items that are relevant to me. I'm curious whether this service will have any open source components and whether it can be self-hosted.
Phantom Buttons on the iPad's Split Keyboard
Sorry to be rude, but not really. It turns out it is tangential to the rest of my comment and I should have edited it out :)
A Smartphone That Detects Whether Its User Is Depressed
As much as I like the basic idea, I fundamentally dislike that the control flow becomes implicit. In order to have any understanding of what is happening you need to know the effect each function has on the stack and you need a mental model of the stack or at least it's current state.

In an applicative language this is explicit and it is probably the main reason for the fact that it is relatively easy to understand code in any procedural language once you've learned one.
Factor - Slava Pestov http://factorcode.org/
Thats funny. I can't think of a single company I do business with that wouldn't piss me off if they sent me a text.
People will always pay for things of value - myself included. I run a consultancy of 10, and I love the tools I use.

- I pay $100 a month for Harvest

- I pay $100 a month for Pivotal Tracker (though we're going to be replacing that shortly with our first SaaS product, http://projectorpm.com)

- I pay $49 a month for Basecamp

- I pay $39 a month for Flowdock

Are these worth it? Absolutely. I will gladly pay for products that kill the pain of running a company (invoicing, project-centric communication) and make me more money (ability to keep tabs on all of my receivables, etc.)

I don't even consider things like Redmine because I don't want to deal with managing my own infrastructure. For example, it's up to Harvest (in order to survive) to monitor, backup and provide a reliable service.

The SaaS model isn't going away anytime soon.
First, thank you all for your comments--I just recently opened my first checking account so I am new to this whole credit/debit card business. It's great to receive feedback from people who know a lot more than I do about these issues.

Tagged contacted me today at noon (Sunday Feb 12), but NOT as a response to the direct contacts I made. They responded after reading my blog post (which I'm pretty sure they saw through HN or through Twitter). Interesting.

I have screenshots of all the transactions, which include the date/time of transaction and the order ID, and I sent this information to Tagged. They responded within 20 minutes saying that they are "looking into [their] systems to gain some clarity."

$200 of the $300 has been restored to my checking account, and I am still waiting for the final $100 to be returned. However, regardless of having the money returned quickly, I wanted to (and still want to) find out exactly who did this. That is why I contacted Tagged on top of Bank of America (which responded very quickly). Google Wallet advices to contact the seller directly about the orders, which I did.

To answer some of the common questions among the comments: yes I do have 2-step authentication for Google, yes I changed my password, and I rarely log onto my Google account on shared computers.
Infographic: How Rapidly Cities are Growing
Senate sneaks in SOPA under a new name
You can still strike big even if you're not first. Google and the iPod weren't first. Microsoft & Blackberry had smart phone OSs for years before the iPhone, etc. etc.
I assume it's Python 2 (print is a keyword, not a function).
Microsoft's India Store has been compromised. Passwords saved as plain text.
One thing i dislike about these sites is they mainly seem to deal with algorithmic problems - the sort you'd find in a typical programming textbook - rather than any genuinely interesting or fun challenge.
Stop the paranoia: it doesn't matter if Google reads our email
Just for reference, roughly how many people visit your blog per day?
Obfuscated Hello World Program in C Explained
Microsoft will host Exchange accounts for you with 25 GB mailboxes for $5 per month per user. It's an unbelievably good deal. See more at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/en-us/pricing-exchange-onl...

Of course, this is brought to you courtesy of competition from Google but this blows the doors off Google Apps. Don't need a separate synchronizing application to keep Outlook synched. Everything works just as if you had local Exchange except you don't need a local Exchange server or anti-spam or anti-virus solution.

Surprisingly, Microsoft has become very competitive in hosted email.
Many independent high schools throughout the country (mostly boarding schools) have similar Internet policies, mine included.
Links, please. I believe that rackspace servers are cheaper/more powerful per box, but an order of magnitude on both sides is absurd.

What you are claiming is that $100/month on AWS would cost $1-2/month on SoftLayer. That's just not credible to me without a citation.
If it's important it might be worth paying for. Fastmail is $40/year for the full fledged personal plan w/ your own domain etc etc. The filtering support is better than Gmail and if you want to write your own Sieve rules you can get very specific about it. Happy customer of about seven years.
More likely it has changed over time.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=135...

I'll admit, I'm old and my learning (through bartender's school, no less) reflects that. Most shot glasses will hold a jigger, but you don't fill it for a shot. Further down the page you linked, under "jigger," shows a tool we use(d). A "shot" was a drink, the "measure" was a jigger (1.5 oz) or a shot (1.0 oz). In programming terms, the word "shot" was overloaded.
It's good to stay away from an organization that rewards lying. You're lucky to have found this out before working there.
Why wouldn't you just use Microsoft if you want hosted Exchange?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/en-us/pricing-exchange-onl...
How about moon terraforming? Just a couple of days for an out of this world getaway.
History is on infinite repeat, unless....:

Tesla Plunges After Morgan Stanley Reduces Automaker’s Price Target by 37%

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-08/tesla-plunges-after...
Graphics in todays games is poor in terms of realism. Content is simply made of polygonal silhouettes - no modeling of anything internal, maybe in top of the line there is some hackish muscle/bone animation system and artist tweaked special case shaders to account for subsurface scattering in skin but nothing generic. In order to get realistic content we are going to have to switch to procedural modeling, there's no way to generate that much information manually with the pedestrian tools we have.
As for rendering, there is no global illumination other than crappy techniques like precomputed light-maps or ambient occlusion, maybe one bounce image space (IDK if this has been used in a game). Even the materials use simplistic BRDFs. There is a lot of room for improvements and a wide gap to close between realistic and current generation. But in 20 years there's no doubt that it will be done.
New Error-Correcting Codes Say "When", guarantee fastest possible data transfer
I don't see the control flow as more implicit than in applicative functional languages. I agree control flow is more explicit in procedural languages, but in, say, Haskell, control flow seems implicit in approximately the same way as in Factor, in that what you would do via explicit control flow in C, you do instead via functions/words that do control-flow-like things, like "map" or "iterate".
Agreed. And you can't even do that test with a scam, which was my point.
> What things today are the way they are, merely because things were the way they were when the canonical instance was produced?

Almost everything we interact with is completely path-dependent: our mathematical notation and the organization of our mathematical abstractions, our weights and measures, our language, our cultural institutions, &c.

Or when you get down to it, everything about our bodies and ecosystems.
My impression is that's largely a nickle-and-dime business (at least on the production side), but the lifestyle attracts people.
The game you're referring to is Messiah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)

The tech you're referring to was to increase or decrease polygons based on the power of the users machine. The big benefit to this tech would be that when you got a new graphics card the graphics would scale up to match the number of polygons generated for the models. Not sure about the photo realistic part but I do remember them talking about how this tech was going to be the best looking because of the increased polygon count.

Considering the jump graphics hardware has taken over the last decade, I don't find Tim Sweeney's prediction that photo-realism within our lifetimes seems like an impossibility. Barring some kind of physical limitation with the hardware I think his assumption isn't that crazy.
Have you read his other blog posts?

I found Mark's blogs to be very informative. They contained actionable insights that I used often as I launched my start-up.
A similar question then:

1. What are the most important problems in your life.

2. Why aren't you working on them?
For anyone who’s never read it, I strongly recommend Thinking Forth. The style of thinking is surprisingly relevant to programming in other kinds of languages.

http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

Also see
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389286
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378062
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884131
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2585750
I agree, but even without IDE assistance, many concatenative languages either suggest annotating your code with stack effect diagrams[1] or refuse to compile without them. (StrongForth, Factor)

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-oriented_programming_lang...
The only thing that still annoys me is that you can't rename the tabs (without doing some silly work-around). I have 10 tabs in Terminal.app with "bash" written in them.
Taking advice from Sebastian Marshall is dangerous. Seriously, are his articles being upvoted by trolls or are there actually that many morons in this community now? The kid wouldn't know the difference between a billion dollar business and a steaming bag of shit, and 30 seconds on his blog will prove I'm right. Shirtless homemade videos of yourself scribbling "business strategies" on a whiteboard and insulting every major company you've come in contact with? Classy.

I would say I pity him, but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who publicly ridicules his colleagues by repeatedly calling them all "fucking jokers" in a 10,000 word rant on his blog.

Downvote this if you're stupid enough to take advice from a tactless wannabe with the business sense of a doorknob.
20 Creative Examples of Typography in Print Ads
That is the beauty of typography in advertisement. With creative and exclusive typography you don’t need to have stunning images or any celebrity in your advertisement.
Get 500 people to pay you $30 a month. Now you're making close to $200k a year - most likely a lot more than you would make consulting or playing the startup lotto. That's the basis of Amy's 30x500 course (disclaimer: I gladly paid > $1000 to take it).

Think about it: 500 people. That's fucking nothing. My upcoming niche project management tool has more people than that on the pre-release list (granted - only a percentage of them will turn out to be paying customers), but it's a great start.

Simply find some pain that needs to be solved, build a product around it, create an offer (give me $X and I'll give you Y) and profit. Take Amy's class if you want a kick in the ass to help realize that.
Boundary has open sourced a bunch of libraries they've created like Folsom, Flake, Ordasity and Scalang: https://github.com/boundary
People who use facebook are harmless sheep. Most have nothing dangerous to do and whatever they share is probably never gonna be used against them. On the other hand, not having a facebook account might at some point become suspicious in itself.
Netflix Pays $9 Million To Settle Video Privacy Lawsuit
Boundary already has a bunch of open source stuff and more coming soon. https://github.com/boundary. Our first offering will be as a service. If you want to talk more ping me cliff@boundary.com.
Being social and using social are not the same thing. You use Facebook/Twitter, are you a social app?
Very cool.

One thing I would recommend is making sure the problem descriptions are extremely clear, clarifying bounds, etc. For instance, "Using the JavaScript language, have the function jsChallenge() add up all of the numbers from 1 to 1000." This should probably read "... numbers from 0 to 1000 exclusive" or something similar. Looking at problems from programming competitions such as ACM ICPC would provide really great reference material, at least in terms of how to describe a problem.
I love the Android / Amazon model - hit the store on a desktop browser, select a device to send the content to, hit buy, and relax knowing that the app or content will be downloaded to said device within seconds. I'm genuinely surprised Apple haven't done this.
Ah, my fellow geeks. Excellent discussions on replacements for the backend infrastructure and handling. :)

Now, does anyone have a replacement for the UI/client? Something good and multiplatform that a) deals well with multi media (images, attachments, etc) and b) still retains MH semantics?

The use of MH style semantics is what attracted me to the whole thing back in 2004.
I ran a site once with lots of community content. Moderators worked for free and were just picked from the forums. Site was able to use as much bandwidth as I could get. We even started letting people donate hosting accounts and had a mirroring script they could run to help handle the bandwidth consumption.

So anyway, in my experience, traffic was easy to get and you'd make money if your revenue was greater than your bandwidth costs. Revenue came in from ads, donations, premium memberships with access to restricted areas and status in the forums, etc.. Re ads, pay per click is low, but affiliate stuff pays a lot - getting someone to sign up for a subscription to a high quality porn site nets big $$$ and there are always some people that have plenty of money and will pay more for better quality.

So anyway, if you see any good deals on bandwidth with no adult content restriction, I say go for it! :)
Yes, agreed. "Connections" was an extremely interesting discussion of exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29

However, at some point conditions may emerge that allow you to leave the trodden path, which I think is where you're looking now. These are not our dad's computers.
The next two paragraphs are quoted from http://www.wageproject.org/files/tart_mart_Interview_Questio... :

In the Second Circuit (CT, NY, VT)[13] and Eighth Circuit (ND, SD, NE, MN, IA, MO, AR)[14], courts have found that an employer violates Title VII when they ask questions about childbearing plans, pregnancy, child care, and/or whether their husband approves of the job and its requirements. Courts in these circuits have found that those types of interview questions are discriminatory and directly affect the hiring decision in violation of Title VII.

However, courts are not as friendly in the Seventh Circuit (IL, IN, WS). There, a woman applied for a paramedic position and was asked during the interview, she was asked about the number of children she would have, her child care arrangements, and how her husband would feel about the job. The interviewer admitted that he did not ask male applicants the same questions. However, her claim failed because the court found that the evidence did not support the finding that her sex was a determining factor in the decision to hire a man. She failed to show substantial evidence that the interviewer relied on the gender stereotyping questions when making its decision not to hire her.[15]

So, check the court circuit you're in before you ask the questions which a large number people and online-resources assert is "illegal." Even if it isn't illegal in your state, you're going to run across candidates who think it's at least immoral and prima facie indication of discrimination.
Exactly. The key difference is how advanced the statistics that matter are in the different sports. Only very advanced stats will really tell the story in basketball whereas it is much easier to see in baseball with just baseline stats. Most laymen take that to mean that watching games is the only way to tell when, in reality, they just need to get the right stats and formulas.
in a purely functional language, you don't need to think about the stack any more. your code expresses its dependencies via composition and the order in which things happen becomes the compiler's concern. you don't need or want to have an understanding of what's happening in an imperative sense. bam, a whole class of bugs made impossible. [edit: you're right though, if you actually do need to understand things in an imperative sense, e.g. for performance optimizations, things get complicated.]
Absolutely, I'm sure that in a lot of case SaaS makes perfect financial sense. I'm just saying it's not ALL the cases.

For example, would it make sense to run Bingo Card Creator as a SaaS?
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Freemium
Erlang: Dan Aykroyd drives it!
Awesome website! Just one thing. Before signing up I tried one of the javascript exercises, when I submitted it I was taken to another page describing the benefits of being a member. After signing up, I noticed that I lost my working solution to the first exercise I tried. It would be nice if you guys found a way to save first-time users code. Looking forward to using the site!
The way of reasoning about `2 3 x` that it presents is extraordinarily confusing, I can't really comprehend it as it is described.
* Rackspace Email ($20/mo)

* SnapEngage ($19/mo)

* ZenDesk ($9/mo)

* RepositoryHosting ($6/mo)

* PayPal Website Payments Pro ($30/mo + per-trans)

* Authorize.net ($40/mo + per-trans)

* Merchant account ($30/mo + per-trans)

* Softlayer ($600/mo)

* Linode ($19/mo)

* Kall8 ($2/mo)

I think that's about it for the monthlies.

If I didn't own them, I'd also be paying $9.95/mo for W3Counter, $69/mo for w3roi and $20/mo for DialShield based on my own usage.
When you have bills to pay, having to deal with the worst case is not a fun prospect.
If I got a do-over this would be the first thing I changed. I thought teachers would rebel against recurring billing because every other education product did it. It took me five years to spot the logical flaw there...
"This Developer's Life" is my new favorite podcast. It's introspective, and covers the mental, emotional, and personal side of the life of hackers. And it has great background music.
Ask HN: What would you do with the domain PERSONALMAINFRAME.COM
A few years ago I registered personalmainframe.com on a bit of a lark, with a vague sort of notion of what it might be useful for. In reality, I have yet to actually do anything with it, but given the current popularity of all things "cloud" I have this buzzing in my head telling me that this would make a good spot for some cool service. But I'm interested to know what the HN crowd thinks... if you saw this domain, what would you think of first? What would you expect to find there?

Also, while I'm not actively shopping the domain, if somebody were to see it and immediately have a billion dollar idea for it, I wouldn't be opposed to selling it. Ping me if you're interested.
But that isn't at all relevant to hiring

Agreed.

Having had a flashback once -- 30 years ago, I hasten to add, for benefit of my future employer who has dug up this comment :-) -- I think it was endogenous.
Productivity tip: can you measure your work 4 times a day?
Apple has done this. "iTunes in the Cloud" causes purchases made on any device (Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) to be downloaded automatically on all devices which automatic downloads have been enabled on. Purchases that are automatically downloaded include music, apps, and books. http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/
It's ridiculous to assume that such a screening will reliably exclude drug users. It's also quite plausible that the screening will increase the number of heavy drug users you hire. Consider:

1. Some people haven't ever used drugs. These people can safely answer honestly.

2. Some people have experimented with drugs in the past, but were never heavy users. These people may naively assume that your screening criteria align with modern societal norms that smoking pot in college is forgivable, but you shouldn't continue to use drugs once you move into the real world. These people will answer honestly and be excluded.

3. Some people may be current users, or former heavy users, and expect that they would not be hired if they answer honestly. Given that they are already active criminals (drug users) they may be more likely to lie.

Net result is that you exclude only 2, and your workforce is populated only by 1 and 3. I think most people, even those who created these policies, would prefer a workplace populated by groups 1 and 2.
I see the same with wireless Internet. Every wifi device should be programmed to contribute to ad-hoc networks for eventual near-universal free access, but ISPs would never stand for it.
Google's Hidden Authorship Search About You
We can't pinpoint why Clojure is hockey-sticking but Common Lisp didn't.

That's exactly right. But then you go on to do just that ("from this we learn...") in a bogus way. We don't know what drives these things. All we have are competing arguments from personal preference.
Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leader podcasts are great. Each week a new person tells their story of building a company or related topics. Leadership is a common theme. I used to listen to the Manager Tools podcast which had some good information but was decidedly less inspirational.

Harvard Business Review on Managing Yourself was a good book. Managing yourself is the first step to managing others. I also enjoyed Persuasion: The Art of Influencing People, A Sense of Urgency, and Good to Great.
This bit is inaccurate, as far as I can tell:

> it was also transmitting the data in “plain text.” This would be like mailing a private letter to someone without the envelope.

My understanding is that the data was transmitted over https, which is decidedly not like mailing a letter with no envelope.
I thought about that when I moved (in progress) to my own 'place on the net'. I went with a different provider, took the name from a recent discussion about cheap VPS solutions.

I have 2 cores (well, shared box..), 1GB of ram, 20 GB of hdd. I don't quite remember what option I selected for bandwidth, but the hoster's TOS say 'if you exceed your bandwidth limit, we'll throttle you to 10MBit. No additional charges apply'. Uhm.. Fine.

I pay 11 EUR, which is awfully close to your price without any commitment (I can cancel every month) and with better specs.
" it was tricky in Gmail to import a complicated set of folders like I have and retain the structure"

I did it through a client (mail.app), synching with IMAP. It worked flawlessly.
Makes me look back at www.ClassParrot.com, we should have focused on something more general like this, instead of just teachers...
What I've Learned About Smart People.