skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: 30, 45 or 60-day free trial conversion rates?
Has anyone done any A/B testing on SaaS conversion rates for the number of free trial days, e.g. 30 vs 45 vs 60-day trials?

FogBugz and Basecamp both offer 45-day trials, but 30 day trials also seem common.

I'd argue that 1 day should be enough to demonstrate your product's value, but I have no data to back this up with.

Is there some aspect of hitting/missing a billing cycle? Why is a 45-day trial the sweet spot?
Async/await is mostly a C#5 rather than .Net 4.5 thing. They could allow it to work against .Net 4 and even 3.5.
Unfinished products, ie kits are generally exempt. This came as a leaflet with a TI dev-kit I just bought:

This EVM is provided to you by TI and is intended for your INTERNAL ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT OR
EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY. It is provided ”AS IS” and ”WITH ALL FAULTS.” It is not considered by TI to
be fit for commercial use. As such, the EVM may be incomplete in terms of required design−, marketing−, and/or
manufacturing−related protective considerations, including product safety measures typically found in the end
product. As a prototype, the EVM does not fall within the scope of the European Union directive on
electromagnetic compatibility and therefore may not meet the technical requirements of the directive.
I am the author of this post (and the blog). Had no idea it was posted on HN until this turned up in my analytics :)

Thanks for submitting.
Why jump through hoops to make a suboptimal solution half-viable, if we got a solution that just works and works well: native apps.

Seriously, all that cloud stuff is overrated nonsense. There's some areas where it might sense, but stop trying to put every fucking thing on the cloud.
It just doesn't work. End of story.
What time is it? 
The funny way to know what time it is!!
That operation also needs to be async itself, and ultimately it needs to be implemented as running on a separate execution queue.

Yes, but this is the relatively easy bit. It's writing comprehensible code around and about that underlying async operation that is the hard bit.

Ultimately, `async` and `await` still are nothing but sugar over the Tasks API.

The tone here implies that sugar is not an important thing in programming languages. These keywords do a great deal for you, under the bonnet. Everything is 'sugar over the assembly language API'.
Is Python inch deep and kilometre wide : Web dev
I am trying to shift from Ruby on Rails to Python on Django framework .
My peers say, its waste because django is only for making smaller web apps for larger ones we have ruby and rails . Also a lot of development has been pulling ruby towards web development , so can i get something like rails guides to take on django easily?
Nice and simple, would use it more if it were a browser extension.
I'm particularly impressed by this:

> While we do not emulate threads, we still wanted to handle blocking operations, particularly for standard input. Since the browser DOM is largely asynchronous, blocking operations have to be emulated via async callbacks. We solved this by implementing a 'yield' construct: upon encountering a blocking function, we throw a YieldException to pause the VM. This exception would also contain the asynchronous function that we are waiting on, which eventually calls the VM and resumes the program.

Absolutely brilliant work guys
Moneyshot
Show HN: Best way to respond to Facebook birthday wishes
It might be useful 5 years from now. There was another story a few weeks ago about Mozilla implementing a JavaScript interpreter inside JavaScript itself for security and sandboxing. This could lead to same thing. Although it's literally 100 to 200 thousand times slower than native code right now, but that might not be a big problem a few years from now (in the next few years we will probably see a huge increase of attention towards web app security).

Oh, and if this thing catches on, we won't be seeing another FlashBlock again :)
Rubber Wholesalers.
Businessimpex is a extensive online b2b directory of rubber manufacturers, rubber suppliers, rubber exporters, rubber products manufacturers, rubber wholesalers.
This is seriously awesome. I don't have a 3D printer or any real facilities for making electronics, but I can't wait to see what kinds of things people make. :)
I hope that isn't a serious response... really?
Where's My Billion Dollar Check, I Wonder
It is well known (but sadly still surprising for many) that capitalists are some of the biggest enemies of capitalism.

What you are describing is regulatory capture, and is caused by government power, if government didn't have so much power there wouldn't be such a great incentive to corrupt it.
Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again.
It's not just the source. A lot of the documentation is only available with CS examples (even though they provide a switcher at the top of the page), which also means the ecosystem (in terms of people writing blogposts about Spine) is divided in Javascript and Coffeescript examples.
Quote from link:
"That you can only guarantee two of Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance is real and evidenced by the most successful websites on the planet. If it works for them I see no reason why the same trade-offs shouldn't be considered in everyday design in corporate environments."

Whoah. This is a type of sociopathic reasoning applied to data modeling. The premise is based on accepting compromise knowing fully the consequences of data corruption and yet failing to address the actual rider: data shall not be left in an inconsistent state. An argument turned on its head.
Much like asking the question “is it ethical to be deliberately inaccurate on your IRS returns” is answered with “this is not a question about ethics”.
Is it not a gigantic assumption to claim:

1.	The compromise has “worked” for others (“most successful websites on the planet” [sic]) without providing any real evidence supporting this claim? What does “worked” mean? Is Twitter “ok” with providing suggestions for Followers which contain people already in the user’s follow list? What were the consequences of data inconsistencies in matters related to financial transactions? Was every requirement able to simulate a catch-all “place a back-order” solution? These are real questions that have to be answered before evangelising the compromise.

2.	If it works for others (meaning: if you are willing to accept compromises about data consistency) this compromise ought to be brought to your garden-variety corporate environment? Gasp! As it is, volumes or scalability issues aside, corporate environments suffer from data inconsistencies, poor or no transactional control, ineffective referential integrity etc. There’s very little positive impact of encouraging this habit as an overt practise under the false generalised promise of “you will eventually need to scale to millions”.

They can keep their CAP theorem or BASE principles for the likes of social toys like Twitter and Facebook. When credit card companies and banks start accepting compromises on their transactions, I’ll start paying due attention.
How to send a text message using ASP.Net/Twilio Video
Is 2.6k really a difference nowadays?
Create-your-own-android-apps-without-any-coding-skills
Lua is used largely in AAA development. Most famously, it powers the UI for World of Warcraft, and users are able to write their own complete UIs in Lua.

Many other games use it for scripting. When I worked at Sony, we were using it on quite a few PlayStation games.
Also, isn't the "4G" it has on AT&T in the US not really 4G though? I mean the faster 3G, not LTE of course.
Django is used on some very large and high traffic websites and is just as capable (if not more so) of scaling to large applications. Arguably, you could say that learning Django is a waste as it may not provide you with much advantage if you already know Rails - however, if you are looking to move away from web development perhaps, there are more jobs in Python and learning another language is always a good thing anyway.

The Django documentation is fantastic and I recommend you give the introduction a go: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/overview/
The 5 stages of coping… with user research
The Great Indian Safari takes you to the Wildlife Sanctuaries of India
I totally disagree with your peers, Django is very well suited for larger apps.

As for guides, I cannot recommend something specific. Take a look at the docs, they had nice tutorial last time I checked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge shows Stanford and Carnegie Mellon switching places between the 2005 and 2007 versions. Also, in both cases, I would say the top three are so close together that chance may have affected the rankings more than 'being ahead'. For example, if the course would have been slightly different (tighter corners, different road signage, whatever), would the teams have finished in the same order? Also, in both challenges, I would say the third-placed team had similar performance as the top two.

So no, I do not think that that shows Google is far ahead of the field. Or did Google hire both teams? Even that would not totally convince me., as it looks as if only US teams took part in those races.
Weighted Vest: What Are the Benefits?
I wonder if there's an analogous hack for social news?
Australian Billionaire To Build Titanic II, Set in 2016 Between...
A post by one of TechStars mentors: http://casnocha.com/2009/06/understanding-what-keeps-a-perso...
"the year of Linux on the desktop" is not the year in which installing Linux actually works for the first time (gasp). I installed Redhat on machines in 2002 where things worked, too. "Linux on the desktop" is about Linux taking a significant market share of desktop installations. The fact of the matter is that Linux is confusing to users ('distributions'? 'desktop environments'? and that's just the start), there is very little software for it (relative to what is available for Windows), a moving target (both for users and developers - radical changes in UI from one year to the next, libraries that aren't ABI stable for a year let alone 2 decades) and because it's too hard (approaching impossible) to make real money from Linux software.
You can use Lua to generate content for Nginx.
Why Instagram turned out to be so successful
Always aliased? I often make 1-pixel or 3-pixel cut off corners. It's not strictly round since I'm not aliasing it, but it looks nice.
You're conflating two different things: Local Storage/caching, and the medium it is stored on, spinning disks.

The data may live in the cloud, but it will be heavily cached locally. We'll still need several GB or TB of local storage, be it spinning disks, SSDs or permanent RAM.

Grandparents won't want to be without the home video of their grandchildren just because their WiFi router stopped working or their ISP is having problems. And it will be a long time before mobile coverage reaches everywhere you might take your computer: communications black spots, rural areas, Planes, Tunnels etc.
> Even if we assume a magical device that stores nothing, cloud storage is still backed by guess what?

You store that in the cloud too, of course! It's turtles all the way down.
Agreed with the OP. The following is a shameless plug:

Python's ConfigParser module is a pain to use. It provides no validation, only supports a limited number of types of data you can retrieve, etc. Similarly, getopt vs optparse vs argparse is a mess. getopt is universal: not only is it going to be in all versions of Python, but it is also the same library available in virtually every other language. The problem with it is that it is not declarative, so you will typically see a giant if/elif statement that goes with it. argparse/optparse are better, but aren't universal even between versions of Python, though argparse has been backported and is available via pypi.

To unify all this into one convenient module, I ended up writing http://ipartola.github.com/groper/. groper lets you specify your parameters declaratively, and if you specify defaults, use them right away without having to create/modify a config file. It automatically figures out the priority of arguments: cmd > config > defaults. It also has some niceties such as the ability to automatically generate usage strings, give the user intelligent error messages, generate sample config files, etc.
I think it's a bit binary to suggest that everything's going to the cloud and nothing will be local any more. I rather expect we're heading toward the more robust, resilient approach of local storage with seamless cloud synchronization, dropbox-style.
Yeah, but JSON is a data interchange format. It's like adding the ability to add comments to arbitrary binary data, it's rather pointless.

It's supposed to be human readable, but ultimately it's for machines. It's just easier to debug.
Exactly. It's easy to tout this 'cloud' based world as a looming, common-place utopia when you're an uber nerd who is completely detached from everyday 'normal' people who barely understand the basic concepts of the internet/web, or who have severely lacking bandwidth and data usage quotas.
It would not have been able to monetize itself anyway!
You're assuming people will take his advice. By removing them, he ensured nobody would use them, at least for "pure" JSON.
It really depends on what kind of value that your service is offering.

For instance, Pivotal Tracker offers a 90 day free trial. Their product requires that the users/teams become dependant on their service so that they can't live without it.

Offering a 1 day trial here, when it works on weekly iterations just wouldn't work. Equally, offering a 30 day trial, really only provides 4 iterations, or probably about 20-30 stories. This definitely isn't enough to "hook" the users and lock them in due to the amount of time that they have invested.

If you are in it for the long haul and your service really does provide great value for the users then getting your users invested in the product might come at the cost of giving more free trials away for free.

Some services are freemium remember. They are unlimited trial times in effect, because the upsells and bolt ons are where they make money.

Equally, however, some services 45-60-90 days would definitely be too much, and you could be losing money.

You can't just say in isolation, 45 days is the sweetspot for 100% of startups, because it ignores any other factors such as the service value that the product fills.

Equally, if your product takes time to kick in, you wouldn't want to offer 30 day trial. For instance, if you were a marketing platform like HomeAway or a paid version of AirBnB. Offering a short trial might not be the best idea because it takes time for the value of the service to really kick in.
This sounds like the sensible way for a company to pick up an attractive team. Picking up a junk product along with the team is a horrible thing to do to shareholders in my view.
Wish I could, I don't really know any more than what Steuard posted. Perhaps he could expand on it a bit, if he sees this.
Facebook: Organ Donation: Friends Saving Lives
It's just an opinion.

Plenty of people don't think the added safety of seat belts is worth it, the minor fine related to not using them seems like a tiny risk in comparison to dismemberment or death. However, many of those same people fear the fine more than physical harm which seems silly to me. Perhaps, if I was more empathetic I would 'get it', but I don't run things so I don't really feel the need to.
It was probably an innocent mistake, he most likely put it there for debugging.
CrestaTech Grabs $13M To Bring Region-Free TV Reception To Any Device
It could have given premium filters
Yep, I learned this trick on my first go-around. The problem has occurred when I've tried to run scripts with dependencies which somehow are only available in mutually incompatible versions of Python. I'm not sure how this is possible (it's baffling -- it shouldn't be possible), but it's happened three out of four times that I've tried to use a Python script of any real consequence. Usually after half a day of futilely trying to find an environment which will actually accommodate all dependencies, I end up having to port everything to whatever version of Python appears to be the most common denominator. In all fairness to Python, this is relatively easy to do (except in one case, when I had to hire a Python-expert friend to do it), but it still means that what should've been a five-minute affair (less the dependency hell) turns into a full-day affair.

Like I say, I've probably just been unlucky. But at this point it's given me a pretty serious aversion to Python. Will probably have to get over that someday, I suppose.
There's no one standard definition of "4G". A myriad of differing technologies all claim to be 4G, which is why it's just about impossible for a vendor to produce a device compatible with every one worldwide. If "4G" had a solid definition, and everybody was using it, but iPad didn't support it, then it would be understandable.
And cue the commercials cloned off this.

Absolutely brilliant. I couldn't find any background on it though - looks like a Czech project?
Improve your emacs even more...
The concept is simple: organize your complex life in a simples plain-text file. EAsy!
Awesome. Closest affordable equivalent is the Stonehenge clock http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH0HLXnXljY
IndeHost Web Hosting Bagus dan Murah Indonesia 
IndeHost Web Hosting Bagus dan Murah Indonesia
Clickable: http://fititgame.com/
>Now if someone were to design a modern Lisp based around tables...

Check out clojure - advanced data structures/primitives + immutability(functional programming)
> 9. .NET Micro Framework – a version of the .NET Framework related to the Smart Personal Objects Technology initiative

What are those?
Doodle Music - Vi Hart on music, doodles, and transformations (video)
low-dose aspirin for over a decade now. --> please enlighten me. I am curious why would you do that ?
How I screwed up my first business (model)
I am surprised I haven't seen more people talking about the potential of Nook moving to Windows Mobile platform. Especially given Microsoft's latest work in getting WM to run on low end devices and the generally average Android experience.

If they could maintain the existing level of polish it would be a huge win-win for both Nook and Microsoft.
I thought .NET types were optionally nullable? I don't think they are by default.
2007: Young, gifted & not getting into Harvard
10 Popular WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Performance
Well Java has its Java Rings...
Yes, for a language as widely deployed and used as Python, retaining backwards compatibility and stability is more important than adding new and shiny tools to the stdlib at a faster pace. Users rely on the fact that a module in stdlib will remain there and will remain stable for a long time. More modules means more maintainers, and Python is an open-source project developed by volunteers. It's that simple.

I'm not sure what the solution this article proposes is. The tradeoff between "coolness" and "stability" is inherently difficult, and I'm sure Python is not the only language "suffering" from it.

After all, it's quite easy to install a new Python module, and not much harder to distribute it with your application (for web apps it's even easier), so what is the problem?
Considering how much work was put into this, the novelty is lost very quickly, for me at least.
So is this a clever split frame trick or did they actually spend an entire day doing that?

EDIT: Actually, the lighting would be really difficult if it was a trick so I'm going to say it's real.
OpenX CSRF Vulnerability Being Actively Exploited
I forgot to mention, your comment about the average number of years as an astronaut reminded me that I needed to use the right probability argument to get the statistics, rather than the coarse equation I used earlier. (HN ate my math: pow((1-p), 10) = (1-0.056) ) Thanks for pointing that out!
Quench your thirst with ready-to-use water coolers in Australia
Unlimitedwater offered multi quality filtered water coolers and water dispensers with many varieties like hot and cold function facilities,powerful compressor,low-high tempreture,easily handle,super cooling system and more stylish at very affordable prices.You can choose as well as drinking fountains for your home and workplace.
Unfortunately money isn't the thing holding back UK 4G adoption. You can read more about the delays here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17853286

But even then because no two countries will be using the same spectrum my understanding is that UK 4G will be incompatible with US 4G.
I think I still have one...
advertisements could have been done too
There is a LOT of in-between.

All the main switches at my house are Insteon based.

I use Indigo as an automation platform (it runs on OSX) on an old Mac Mini.

Lights, HVAC, multi-room audio, and several other things are controlled/managed through this system. I can access it remotely with a native iOS app and/or with custom control pages. With some applescript it can be extended to all sorts of other devices and purposes.

Check out http://www.machomestore.com/catalog/ for Insteon/Indigo products.
With the Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz in the background, I'd rather wager Berlin?
Be aware that there also exists a "NET Compact Framework" used on the XBox, Silverlight and Mobile devices. This caught me off guard when I tried to get JavaScript running on the XBox[1], since it has a different, stripped down feature set than the real NET Framework.

[1] http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/04/javascript-on-the-xbox-...
They are optionally nullable. Unfortunately, people seem to think that making use of them everywhere is cool :(
The location seems to be Berlin, but the domain is Czech.

It would be cool to have this in different timezones with corresponding backgrounds!
The extended video version (Complete Secrets to Success! How bad do you want it?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM_7j6t9IyU&feature=relat...
Complete Secrets to Success! How bad do you want it? (video)
SEOmoz Memenounces $18 Million in Series B Funding
Google spy case shows why you need to encrypt your  Wi-Fi
you may be better off reposting it as "Show HN: FitIt - multiplayer puzzle game" I think then it may show up in http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
What about premium filters?
SEOmoz Raises $18M
Show HN: FitIt - multiplayer puzzle game
I went to the ADVANCE Hackathon in Cologne, Germany last weekend and this is a project I created together with @snnd and @newmetl. We used node.js and socket.io in the backend and HTML5 + JS in the frontend.
The rules are simple: Make your and your teammates' gaming pieces fit into the highlighted area without talking to your mates.

The levels are generated randomly, so they might be too easy or too hard from time to time. I'd like to emphasize that this game has been created within less than 24 hours!

http://fititgame.com/ http://hackathon.advance-conference.com/

Feedback and criticism are appreciated! :)
Basic types are optionally nullable. int? is nullable, int is not.

It is a fantastic tool in many cases where a null is much clearer than something like -1 to denote a missing value.

However, I can see the issue with some developers using nullable types for everything. But any sufficiently powerful/flexible tool is always going to be misused by some.
7 Success Maxims from Savvy Business Leaders
Not sure about it
Skype investigates tool that reveals users' IP addresses
Free EBook from Apress - Windows8/JS/HTML5 - today only.
Why would that be a win for B&N? Nokia got a lot more for ditching it's own OS. And my Nook Color has always been smooth, both with its original software and after having Cyanogen installed. It now runs Nook, Kindle and Google Books very well. I can't imagine WP7 would be an improvement.

Besides that, you forget the e-paper model, which is selling very well - WP7 can't run on those.
I'm not yet fully leaving of it but, http://www.feedsapi.com is steadily growing and generating some profit.