skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7 support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked out of their Google Apps accounts.
Latest James Hague and/or Michael O. Church blog.
>When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.

And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
I don't even see ads when reading email for my basic gmail account on my phone, so IME there's zero difference between the two except that one is tightly integrated with my domain name and the other has a terribly ugly username @gmail.com ...
How so? It's essentially the same service as gmail, only with a different domain. The incremental cost to them is zero, and they make the same revenue as they do from a gmail user.
Office 365 is much cheaper now - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...
Ask HN: Tons of ideas, zero products.
Hi.

I have a problems which I don't know how to solve. I consider myself a creative person and some time ago I had 2 ideas which I think have potential to succeed (I did short evaluation of those ideas: there is a market, there is no/very little competition, people I talked to say good things about my ideas). However, I don't know how to/where to start.

My first problem is my personality: I always procrastinated a lot, I always had ideas which I dind't implement, very often I started project and abandoned it, I always had a lot of dreams and done just a few of them. Some time ago I decided to change this and I'm really doing this with my life. I procrastinate very seldom, I'm very motivated to succeed, I study a lot (I'm in college), every day I'm a better person. But I still can't find cure for my "not-starting"/"starting-and-abandoning" project problem. I really want to change this, I'd really appreciate your ideas/suggestions. I'm sure I'm not the only one with such issue.

My second problem: I'm located in Eastern Europe, which is not the best place for startups. I don't need much money to implement my idea(s), but I have no idea how to promote it. I think USA (and SV especially) is the best to start a company not because it's easier to find investors, but because of connections/people you can meet which can be very helpful to promote your products. YC companies succeed because of the attention they get from the tech/business world (at least in my humble opinion). So: let's say I build my product - what's next? How to promote it (with no/little money)?

I'm young, I'm ignorant, I have a lot of flaws. I've been reading HN for more than a year now, I know most of you are waaay intelligent than me (and it's very good for me -- I love learning from people who are better). I hope you can help me. Posting here is my first step to defeat my biggest flaw and, maybe, changing my life.

Thank you.

(Sorry for bad spelling, feel free to correct my errors).
I wonder how this will affect the various hosts around who offer easy "free" google apps integration.
Amen. Except its a lot worse in cases I've encountered. No one wants to hear the truth. They just want validation of what they believe. When you tell them honestly, some just get royally offended by methods or things you suggest that works. It's annoying. I've concluded it's not worth helping people like that.
If someone's already committed to paying, they can be convinced to pay more. It's hard to convince someone getting something for free that they should start forking over dollars.
I posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very "free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on it yet.
So for hackers it's what? $50 a year for hosting + $10 a year of domain registration for vanity URLs - that's $5 a month.

Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
If the government is forcing you to hand over your possessions (or provide services) it does not matter what currencies they can or cannot print. There is no limit to the strategies available to them...

Example 1

"We're buying your house (whether you like it or not), how many Bitcoins do you want for it?"

"10,000"

"Great. By the way, we just made a new law that says we can pay you in peanut shells as a substitute for Bitcoin, at the same rate."

Example 2

"We're buying your house (whether you like it or not), how many Bitcoins do you want for it?"

"10,000"

"Ok here's your 10,000 Bitcoins"

(10 minutes later...)

"By the way, under the PATRIOT act, we're ordering you to hand over all your encryption keys. Including the private key of your Bitcoin wallet. If you don't make a fuss, we'll be nice and let you keep 1%, and not throw you in jail."
FCC to FAA: Allow 'greater use' of electronic devices during flights
I doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your question".

And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
I understand you're upset, but that's probably a really naive view. Maybe it seems to you that there is no DIRECT upside for you personally, but there's always an upside, just like there's always a downside for every good thing that happens.

This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.
I found Rejection Therapy to be an excellent way to recalibrate the way I think and get out of my comfortable stupor: http://rejectiontherapy.com

The new year is coming up. Might be time for the Rejection Therapy 30 Day Challenge again.
Rackspace has Hosted email for 2 dollars per month per user. but then there is also a 10 dollar a month minimum.
If you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server and web-interface.

I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it.
And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.
The only way I've found to get around the starting and abandoning problem, is to actually FINISH something.

Next idea you start, cut it in half. Make it the smallest thing possible. Just FINISH it. That will get you motivated and the next time you can go bigger and bigger.

Don't worry about promotion yet. Just try and make something cool. Putting a post on HN or Reddit or something can go a long way.
Google's cost != Value to You.
It seems like the current free customers are just fine ("Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."), so how would it cause you to distrust their offers in the future?
Well, that's certainly going to be a huge money grab for them.
> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.

Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.

It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.

As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
That's the pattern that has happened to map base-layer tiles since Google started charging: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/daily-report-some-s...
This is a pretty pessimistic view. Customers are self-interested too: they want free content and services, but they also want absolute privacy, to ad-block everything, and generally cut off any possible revenue stream. This seems like it leads to a sort of local maxima where you produce the minimum quality required to drive users, with as little cost as possible.

By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.
The cheapest plan (email/calendar/contacts) is only $4 cheaper per year than Google Apps.
whoa whoa whoa, but now its not FREE, and I'm entitled to awesome products for FREE.
Compared to what? You can provision your own apps and run your own services for less?
I can easily identify this source of anxiety of mine, because it is the same anxiety that is the driving factor behind my own sometimes neurotic pursuit of health. Unfortunately this is something very personal so I hope you will forgive me for not going into detail on what exactly it is.

Oh also, I'm not sure how much it matters, but this person has already expressed the desire to become a bit healthier but had lamented his lack of time for doing so (he travels extensively for business and is out of town easily more than half the year).
You guys should have tried to get back the logback author and his project back under the Apache umbrella instead of creating yet another loging implementation. Your "improvements" could have been labeled as logback 2.0.

Yet another implementation causes only more fragmentation (the only real pain w.r.t to logging) and in almost all cases the existing solutions are totally sufficient.
This. As a non-US entity, we pay a substantial tax to PayPal/Visa/Mastercard for US-denominated payments. I don't mind paying taxes to the government for civilisation, but I do object paying large corporates for what is in essence toggling two numbers in the bank's database. Bitcoin could potentially increase efficiency of almost every business by up to 5%.

From my (admittedly naive) viewpoint, the elephant in the room is the anonymity. Governments won't like this because it makes it harder for them to monitor and catch bad people, and to ensure I'm paying my taxes. So when governments become aware of bitcoin there is going to be huge pressure to shut it down. And they could do it, no matter how decentralised and trans-national bitcoin is. Imagine MAFIAA tactics but ten times worse, with constant media reports of how bitcoin is the currency of the terrorists and child pornographers.

But that's where this announcement is exciting. By tying your bitcoin address to a bank account, you lose anonymity but gain legitimacy. And governments then have the option to selectively legislate, instead of simply killing bitcoin completely.

Interesting times...
There are no such companies.

The problem is that you said "monetize later" rather than "become profitable later".

For example, someone else suggested that Google was an example of a company that had no way of monetizing their original product. That's false. In the earliest days of Google it was obvious that there were tons and tons of ways to monetize the product -- hence the very early-stage investment -- though there was uncertainty of which ways of monetizing were best for growth and profit.
Build some cool stuff and send out your resumes if you want a job. Smaller startups are going to be harder to get in with if you don't know someone, but not impossible.

A really great way to differentiate yourself is to build and publish an app. It doesn't have to be popular or even that great. Just showing you can build something from start to finish is a big deal.
>> Extremes at either end are bad.

> That doesn't seem correct either.

A rule that's always appealed to me is "Everything in moderation, including this rule."
Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support. Maybe you would know that if you actually used Google Apps for Business or read the blog post.
I'm thinking nothing if you require things like Google Apps instead of just Gmail. If you're talking about a "Gmail for your Domain" alternative, just look to other email providers:

https://www.fastmail.fm/

http://pobox.com/

http://www.gandi.net (includes some amount of email w/ domain registration)
I'd imagine this would be ad-free, too..
Efficient Incremental Change
"Everyone messes up" is fine if your job is creating systems where security is largely a secondary concern. If security is the whole point of your product in the first place, and your product is actually completely insecure, that's not messing up, that's gross incompetence.
We are planning to offer business communication features in the future.
What's the "nines" of uptime on a typical corporate desktop? By my back of the envelope calculations it's worse than 3.
Plenty of services will let you forward your mail to a normal GMail account. Without an SMTP server, your GMail account will still be visible to your recipients, but it's not so bad.
This is to kill the competition; At minimum to gain a competitive advantage.
If long term assets have trading restrictions they're not marketable. I get that it isn't cash cash in the most literate sense, it's liquid assets, which is nearly equivalent to cash, just like the "cash" in your bank account.
> Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support.

Not for the free version.
Dreamhost has added a disclaimer:

(Google may charge you to use this feature.)

Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.
I was responding specifically to the 'It clearly costs money' statement. It definitely costs them $0 more than gmail.
by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options.

I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.
Same with Google Reader. After they shut down Google Reader social features most heavy users flock to newly created services.

When Google Reader was social & free (and without ads) it wasn't perfect but it was good enough to destroy competition.
Frankly, I read the blog post and I have Google Apps for Business at work (and use the free version for my domain), and I missed this. It's kind of buried in the middle paragraph, and I don't remember it being trumpeted on the upsell page when I signed up.

If it's anything like the Play Store phone support, it's basically a placebo so you feel instantly gratified, while the CSR sends an email to the real support team ( with ~48 hour turn-around).
Be glad it came when it did. It would suck to just get all setup then find out the service has been deprecated.

For everyone with an account, I suggest looking for an alternative soon.
> probably money laundering.

If you want to launder money, it's extremely stupid to use a form of digital cash in which all transactions are public and any amateur data miner can have a go at tracing the transactions.
because I was about to be a free user but they cut this process off between me checking it out at the end of work and me getting home. All I wanted was a custom email address but I'm not paying 50 dollars a year for something I can manage on my own and thus I'll never be exposed to whatever else was in Google Apps.
New Human Lunar Expedition Company announced
"I am 18, and a freshman in college as a CS major, but I am open to taking a hiatus..."

Finish school first. The degree (and the knowledge you'll gain while you pursue it and the free time you'll have to pursue other avenues of interest) is priceless. It's easy to want to rush through college and be a Gates or a Zuckerburg but realize that there are tons of people that dropped out of college and are worse off for it.

Working at a start-up is a very risky venture and you're only going to drastically increase your long-term financial risk by not having a degree going into it. One may argue that the knowledge you'll gain at the start-up will be worth more than a degree but my counter is that you'll be closing doors to other (more-traditional) opportunities by not finishing (it is substantially harder to go back to school if you take a hiatus for a number of reasons beyond admissions).

As far as "getting noticed" goes, scrub that mentality right now, prove yourself first. If you spend 10 hours a week the next 3.5 years writing apps (and polishing your abilities) and giving them away for free without ads you'll have proven yourself, getting noticed at that point is just pointing to an existing body of work. (If you don't know what app to make just clone every game you've ever liked but make sure it has an awesome UI).

Mind you, these are just my two cents. In my life I've found that as long as I set a metric for "progress" and work to meet it I've been able to accomplish my goals. Best of luck.
I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year.

If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.

I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.

I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.

Anyone working on something like this?
Of course it matters, because decisions like these don't exist in a vacuum. The rest of the world has an effect on what decisions get made, (well, in the countries we're talking about anyway), so if if a government has to resort to much more drastic measures to take your money, these measures are less likely to happen.

This doesn't mean that something like this will never happen, but I don't think anyone's expecting a perfect solution.
But that is what CDNs do. A content provider, such as Apple, will pay both for their upstream carrier access, AND for the CDN access. And the CDN will effectively pay each network on the way to the destination, by renting their lines and hosting servers at their PoPs. CDN is a QoS service, it's just that the access networks feel they aren't getting part of that cake.
On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start.

Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
And then a few hours later, the CO2 leaks into his house.
> The disbelief came when it was time to listen to singular
> words. With the screen turned off, I got 0%. With the
> screen turned on, I got 8%. That’s crazy!

It's really amazing how pervasive (putatively Bayesian) multisensory integration of information is in the brain. Even individuals without impaired hearing have their auditory perceptions strongly a affected by other inputs. The McGurk effect is a great example of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
Interesting -- I'd never heard of this battery tech -- but I thought most personal off-grid battery banks were lead acid. Google "lead acid vs nickel iron" and you'll get some discussions on solar power / off-grid forums. I skimmed these, and it seems like any advantage nickel iron has doesn't justify their greater cost.
So simple, heh. Thank you for this advice, I'm going to try and check if it works for me.
I meant Git to SVN is backwards.
Yes I'm sure people will appreciate getting email back from <stupid_username_because_they_were_all_taken_234234>@gmail.com
Keep meeting developers in your area. meetup.com and google and yahoo groups are good. Sign up for linkedin.com and add your contacts. Start shipping apps. The developers you meet will lead you to paying gigs.
I just helped several companies move to Google Apps from Rackspace over the weekend; their web interface is horrible and Google provides a much better experience on mobile (both iOS and Android) than Rackspace ever could.
To be clear, I'm not so upset about them killing the free version (although I do think it's sad - all the startups I've been in got our google apps accounts before we even had a bank account - because it was free! I wonder what will happen in the future). I mainly dislike the style of communication here. It really wouldn't be so terrible for Google to say:

While it was very popular we found it was quite costly and
we are not able to justify offering it as a free service on
an ongoing basis. Further we found that people who signed up
under free accounts often had false expectations about the
level of service and support we were able to give them and it
contributed to a negative overall perception of the service.
We apologize to those who are unable to use Google Apps in the
future because of this, but we feel it is an important change
to keep the service profitable and well supported into the future.
whats wrong with 1
Jeesh that's a lot of hours. That's like 75,000 people each playing 40 hours a week for a year.

I read Ben Franklin's biography a while back and got the impression that he had an advantage over many of his contemporaries because it was the custom to drink beer all day. Many would be useless by noon.

I think video games might be the modern day equivalent.
What he's talking about about is not Google's new pricing/business model, or even how they treat their customers. What he is talking about is that this announcement contains several statements that are complete bullshit. But, that is pretty much required for big corporate PR people. It isn't their fault that this is how they have to express themselves: " but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group."
They can play the game though, too. Offer good discounts for onloading users; First year or two free, etc.. Hell, first 5 years free. What do they care if they get you used to their products, and then stay a client for 15 years after the 5 year trial?
Apple does little to prevent theft.
Apple does little to prevent theft, and even exchanges stolen phones for new ones at Apple Stores so the thief can get rid of the stolen goods.
Well, that's for now. How is it going to be in 3 years? Is this just a grace period? Obviously it affects new signups first, they can't just cut off everybody and force to migrate to the paid version.
That only matters if you care about the web interface. Lots of businesses don't, they're all on Outlook. I use Thunderbird (IMAP); I've literally never logged into Rackspace's webmail client.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere, but as someone who has used Java more client-side than server-side, I'm not familiar with the problems everyone's else been through. I would love for you to enlighten me, if you could!

Also, what would you substitute in place of StaticLoggerBinder? It did strike me as somewhat janky to rely on a class with a matching name and class just existing.
Expeditions to the Moon … For Sale to Countries, Corporations, and Individuals.