skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey...my name is Ed and I'm the founder of Aria Systems (www.ariasystems.com) which we started based on my experience building a very large subscription based service (2.5 Million users). I'd encourage you to think about a few things when creating a subscription based service:

1. Think beyond taking people's money. Consider all of the use cases (credits, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, partner commissions, activation etc.). This way you can create a great customer experience, reduce cost of acquisition and maybe more importantly reduce the cost of owning a customer.

2. caveat emptor with payment processors and payment methods. Make sure you understand things like processor fees, reserves, chargeback fees, chargeback disputes and window for chargebacks. Also, please please please treat processors and payment methods separately...almost like different layers in your application. The timing of fund settlement is critical...it may be worth it to pay a little extra in fees for faster cash.

3. Scale. Volume and velocity of transactions. Some pay methods and merchant account providers only offer a best effort service. Think deeply about your projections, response times of each step in the process vs. your needs. Ask for latency SLA's if you think you'll spike volume at launch or PR etc.

4. Security. Think about security from a process perspective and don't rely solely on your processor's PCI compliance. Compliance needs to be END TO END!

I hope this was helpful.
You're probably thinking of http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/; You're right, though, continuous monitoring would be very handy for some sites.
Scoble is treating this issue like it's black and white, when in fact it's more complicated. In reality, Zuckerberg should ignore some of his users, and listen to others.

People who complain about these types of changes generally fall into one of two categories:

1) Stubborn people who just hate change. They are used to something being a certain way, and are inconvenienced by having to change their thought pattern, even if it has an overall positive effect.

2) People who dislike the change for specific, actionable reasons, and would not be opposed to the change if their issues were resolved. These issues are often related to the inability to do something that was possible in the previous version, or legitimate usability issues which were not tested thoroughly enough before making the change.

Facebook should listen to the people who fall under category 2 and ignore category 1. A few minor changes to the new format would go a long way in making the majority of users satisfied.
Yeah, that's the one ..
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/news.ycombinator.com

It was developed by Alex Payne of Twitter (@al3x), in the days when twitter had about 90% uptime, if I recall correctly.
People should vote that story up! I was looking forward to the discussion on that, but now it's slowly falling down the front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527064
actually they do...they just don't listen to the 1% that bitches and moans.
Make a free, ad supported version. Make a paid, ad-free version with extra levels. No need to worry about which version is more successful; you're covered either way.
I agree it's generally best to not "play prostitute" to most anyone.

However, regarding "balls": I think VCs are in the "balls business". It is a hard/risky way of making money. (Personally, this is why I'm always looking for reasons to say "no", versus why to say "yes"... I'm looking to be compelled.)

Something to consider:

Entrepreneurs have their one horse.
VCs have their stable of horses.

So, one view is: VCs don't "have balls" because they don't commit. Whereas the entrepreneurs are "all in". In this view point, the "balls award" goes to the entrepreneur because they're the ones taking the all the risk.

But: the VCs aren't in complete control of their destiny. They may be backing many horses, but they're not ever truly riding one. For highly capable and smart people this also takes large balls. You have less risk per venture but not necessarily across all your ventures.

Side-note:

The point Dave is trying to make with his presentation is how to communicate in such a way as to get above the radar while trying to keep the VCs attention (meaning, they've stopped thinking about all the reasons to say "no" and moved to "maybes"... )

Dave is good at this - look at his presentations compared to others. Generally people don't talk about VCs and raising capital this way :)
Colleges look beyond grades and test scores
I'm not a huge Facebook user, but I don't get what the big deal with the change is. They just made the news feed a little more prominent. The older design from a few weeks ago emphasized that already.

Whenever I logged on, that was the main thing I checked anyways - updates about what my friends were up to.

If anything, I think it's good. It'll give me more opportunity to keep in touch with people in little ways hear and there.
Well I guess I was wondering how these various portions are contributing.

I know it's unlikely -- But it would be interesting to see an exit survey from this or YC's current round.
I tried checking if "downforeveryoneorjustme.com" was down using itself. Looks like the developper saw that coming :)
Many thanks for all answers so far!

I talked to a Ukrainian programmer and a friend of mine, who said he knew the guy who programmed nginx. He said that nginx was designed as a load balancer for Apache. I've been reading its docs for two days now and I can't find anything like that, but then again most of the docs are in Russian.
Am I missing something? Is nginx a stand alone server or an addition to Apache?
Two words: Vocal Minority

This happens every time Facebook (or any other major site for that matter) makes a change. A few months from now everyone will forget about it and get on with their lives. At least until they change it again, when everyone flips out and wants the 'old' layout back (eg, the one they're complaining about today).
If this is the best that Apple criticism gets, then I'm all the more convinced that being a Mac user is the right thing. Heh!

I can't recall an anti-Apple rant with any substance to it since that diveintomark guy switched to linux.
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They've done a lot more than that. Most significantly:

1. There is no more news feed, they've eliminated it! What you now see on the homepage is basically a "status update feed". While they've enhanced status updates so that they now combine the former share/post functionality, every other kind of action that used to go in the news feed is no longer there. This has a lot of corrolaries. For example:

2. Apps can no longer be viral. When you take an action in an app that causes it to post to your profile wall, that action will not appear on your friends' homepages, so they won't see it unless they go looking for it.

... the same is true for other things: For example, when someone tags a photo of one of your friends, you'll no longer see that on your homepage. You'll only be notified of the new photos if the person who posted the photos is your friend.

There are a lot of other bad changes and features removed, but that's probably the biggest problem.
no QWERTY!
Your analysis is much too simplistic, and lumps a number of very different episodes of Facebook change into one common pattern when in fact they differed significantly, and what happened after was different.

See my comment in reply to devicenull for more detail.
I'd say that's a sign you probably should block yourself from HN for a while. Any time that I notice that I'm getting too compulsive about a particular site I add it to a blocked list and leave it there for a week or two. I'm also a huge fan of Freedom.app for disconnecting my internet for blocks of time where I notice that I'm too easily distracted.
I use http://mon.itor.us/ to track our status.
It's standalone. Nginx really shines as a reverse proxy, but it has an fcgi module that can be used to do that as well.
Frankly, I do not think very highly of _why's writing style. I find the book to be very difficult to read.

If you want an example of excellent technical writing, consider Paul Graham's 'On Lisp' or 'ANSI Common Lisp'.
Hi jdileo, I'm an east coast hacker who has lived in very rural areas and has not had the opportunity to hook up with reasonably-financed partners because of the location of where I live.

I'm looking to move to the Valley for my next startup, however, and my expertise is not only on hacking internet applications together its also on growing small teams into large organizations. My day job is advising large organizations how to run their teams like startups. I've written several web applications as startups in the past but never seemed to make it past the first stage. I've also consulted with a few startups and know their pains.

I also like bunnies and puppies and long walks in the park.

(grin)

Good luck to you, my friend. I've been actively seeking a cofounder for about a year. I'm not sure what the magic formula is. Perhaps it might be best to get out there, set up shop, and do some networking for a month or two.

As to hiring and percentage ownership and such, put your checkbook away. If you're serious about a startup, go 50-50 with whomever you hook up with. Startups are inherently risky. You need another brain that's in this struggle with you 100%, not some schmuck looking for a paycheck. Don't get me wrong -- there are great employees out there. But what you need is technical vision, not just technical execution. You don't know what you don't know. And employees aren't going to fix that.

Having said all of that, you come at this in a severe disadvantage -- you've already had a successful business. That means you're not as hungry as the average person. The next startup I'm in, I have to make it work or go back to consulting. You can always hang out for another year and see how things go. At some point, your "runway" can be too long. I really believe you can have too much money for this sort of thing. I'd also think about a three-person team just to balance it out and prevent deadlocks. I can't overemphasize how critical people selection are to team performance. It's critical enough in any kind of business endeavor, but in startups? Having the right folks that mix the right way is gold -- literally.

Hope that helps you. Glad to continue a conversation if you'd like. Just drop me an email.
Totally agree with your point. The new design is actually a lot better. In the older design, I had to wade thru a lot of visual crap before I got to stuff like news feed or my own wall. but the new design has made it easier.
Admittedly, I'm somewhat confused why you posted this here.

You're not accepting new accounts, and the blog post is a couple of paragraphs saying that you wanted to re-invent the to-do app, but there is nothing concrete.

I wish you luck, it sounds like there is a lot of potential, just nothing verifiable yet.
You might hurt yourself if one is much more profitable than the other. e.g. if you could charge $20 for the app, but no one pays that if a free (much less profitable) ad supported version exists.
For Palm, Some Tough Smartphone Acts to Follow
Not really worth the time to read, same stuff that's been said before. Showing a user an ad while they're searching for something works amazingly well -- any other time it's a crap shoot.

For the foreseeable future I think the best way to advertise any web app or other online service is with a blog and as many helpful, informative, thought provoking posts as you can find the time to write. There are plenty of examples of successful companies that have used this model -- building a brand and a network simultaneously -- and there's no reason to think it's going anywhere.
Is a Food Revolution Now in Season?
Just slightly biased.

Also fails to understand how internet advertising is completely different.

>> "Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads."

TV advertising is an annoyance. It stops you from watching the program you were watching. Advertising on the net is just extra data you can choose to take advantage of, or ignore. Add to that the fact that much of the internet advertising is commission based on sales which is completely trackable.

For a start, why would something like the Amazon affiliate program 'fail'? Will people stop buying things from Amazon? Will they suddenly stop buying them through affiliate links? I'd say probably not.

Don't believe the hype.

Also:

>> "My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor"

Doesn't really make sense, since TripAdviser gets a cut of each reservation - so it may be 'community content', but it's all still just advertising links.
You need a lot more downloads of the ad-supported app to equal even a small one-time charge of a paid app
I read that article and was going to reply earlier, but HN was down... (all because of you, writing that recursive article...)

You make a very interesting point there (more than in this article, in fact, imho). My thought on it is that there is a spectrum of techniques to "engage" groups of people and elicit desired behaviour. Some of them work, and some of them don't. Some of them are towards the Dark Side, and some of them closer to the Light Side.

I think it's incorrect to suppose that only the techniques on the Dark Side work. Light Side techniques work too, but differently. And Dark Side techniques have a cost too, which is not always obvious. Raelians may be very good at generating agreement and coordinated behaviour, but what creativity do they have? The brainwashing ensures that there is little original, individual thought left.

For example, the technique used by your synagogue seems like a good technique, not unethical, but very effective.

I haven't given it too much thought, but I suspect that a good way to draw the line is to examine whether a technique merely encourages or whether it coerces.

Finally, do we "atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc" fail at organising ourselves? I don't think it's fair to say that. Considering the cooperative achievements we've achieved, starting with the operating system that this site no doubt runs on, I'd say we're doing quite well on the whole. And in the long run, that matters more.
Hi - I posted the blog post vs. the direct link thinking the blog post is a decent intro to the app, and people could click through to signup if they so chose.

The signups were limited to 15 per day, but I bumped that to 250 (that should be live now).

I think the gist of what I want to do is not so much re-invent the wheel, per se, but simply re-imagine my own to-do system into a web app, and share that with others; perhaps someone else will find it as useful as I have.
Or you could just knuckle down and work. I cant think of many times a site justified more than a few visits a day
I've said this before but I'll say this again because it's keeping us more profitable than most. Run your own ad system, use LinkShare for your links (earn 5% on sales), advertise your own apps for free, add a few banners for apps/games you think your visitors will like b/c you'll likely over-expose your visitor if you only have a few ads running.

Our # of downloads and usage is about 10x's less than this case study, but our advertising revenue (5% from LinkShare) is roughly the same. And, we've correlated that roughly 25% of our premium app sales is due to the banner ads in our free app (which we pay $0 to advertise through).

I love AdMob for what they are trying to do, but the economics of the AppStore (as stated by many people) is broken for most indie shops who don't have a bankroll to throw at advertising/customer acquisition. The 30% apple takes off the top is traditionally a healthy marketing budget, without it most devs are left to "AppStore-marketing" after bills/costs are paid. The ROI on admob just doesn't make cents (:P) for most people.
>Advertising on the net is just extra data you can choose to take advantage of, or ignore.

Huh?

When I'm reading an article and there's big flashing graphics on either side of the text, that's an annoyance.
doesn't seem like a huge amount. How many startups do they accept each batch?
The phone certainly looks exciting, but there's one thing I've never seen anyone discuss: Synchronization software. Palm's desktop software has historically, IMHO, sucked. And they have never played well with others. I don't want a Palm calendar and address book. I just want to it work with the tools I already use. I want my iCal, iTunes (for non DRM tracks) and iPhoto libraries to sync seamlessly and without issues. If they can do that, then I might be tempted away from my iPhone. Great synchronization, on the Mac anyway, is a big part of what makes the iPhone experience great.
"I told him he was brilliant and that his moves this month would be remembered for decades. Decades."

I'm amazed Scoble's been able to keep his tall talk intact after this many years of announcing next big things that never go anywhere. But I'll say this for the guy -- he's perky.
the freedom app seems interesting, does it have windows/linux equivalents?
It's like a global noprocrast. Let's take the next leap and add support for a 'global noprocrast vote'. If more people vote 'yes' than vote 'no', the site goes down for an hour.
Pfft. I can (and do) easily cope without Ad Block Plus, but until there's a Vimperator alike Chrome won't get a look in for me..
Have you tried the Firemacs extension for Firefox? I use it with Emacs bindings, but I think it should be able to do an approximation of vi bindings as well.
I don't think all internet advertising will fail - there is often an ad that I want to see on Google. I agree that obtrusive, tricky, seizure-inducing display ads are no replacement for anything, but I don't buy the basic premise that advertising on the internet is flawed.

I also don't like when academics ramble for pages and pages, without being able to succinctly express their ideas. This guy should do a tour in writing ad copy - I think that would have a very positive effect on his writing.
Not really. I've looked at the ctypes bindings (I've got a set of incomplete patches to them), and they lack diff and replay support, which makes them basically useless for building a client. Git uses the perl bindings, so I can't speak to the quality of those. Bazaar uses a library called subvertpy that they wrote when they got tired of the suck and pain that is the Python SWIG bindings for Subversion. I'm about to switch to using that for hgsubversion, since fixing up the ctypes bindings has proven to be nothing more than a monumental pain.
yeah, i liked it too.. app seems OK to me, i like the burn down chart as well
PLT Scheme Blog: PLT Scheme v4.1.5
Displays are tricky. A 1280x960 is four times the 640x480 that was typical some years ago. We need more memory, more buses bandwidth, bigger and faster everything in different levels (without talking about colour depth), so I'd say that the power needed would be 20x or 30x. My gut feeling is that displays only have consumed Moore's gift for the last ten years.
Wait, what? He's disappointed because his announcement of his wife's pregnancy did NOT release a howling horde of marketeers trying to sell him more shit? Jesus, what a sad sack.
Hmmm, so the authors are worried about potential vulnerabilities in connected, embedded systems? The electrical grid already has many connected, embedded systems - and I've not heard of any significant hacks, probably because electrical utilities are actually pretty good at securing their devices and networks. I think embedded systems are easier to protect than general purpose PCs. Companies like http://www.Mocana.com make security components for embedded systems, which are highly likely to be adopted by smart grid manufacturers (if they haven't been adopted already). Overall, I'd say this is much ado about nothing.
Not that I know of, but it's a pretty trivial app. It just removes all of the default routing. Sure, I could probably add them back, but I've intentionally never learned how to use the BSD route that comes with Mac OS for that reason. :-)

With Linux, actually, you could probably go one level lower by writing a small kernel driver that you could signal from user space to disable networking for a given period and then do some goofiness so that it couldn't be unloaded effectively and still get networking back.
What gets measured gets managed. :)
I use the Mouseless Browsing add-on in Firefox. It basically adds a number next to all the links on a page, for example you press ctrl + 21 and the link opens. It also can be turned on/off with a shortcut.
You might find it an annoyance, but it doesn't stop you reading the article. If you're one of those people that can't just ignore it if it doesn't interest you, you can block it pretty easily - small minority do.

I obviously disagree with the article, I find interesting things from adverts all the time - competitors, services I didn't know about, products I might think about buying some day. I want to see adverts. Unobtrusive, targeted adverts that show me stuff I want.

Obtrusive flashing banner advertising makes up a tiny proportion of advertising, and isn't that effective at all.
It might be useful to add what timezone that time actually refers to. Unless we sometime soon have downtime which spans several days which makes the +-12 margin irrelevant.
Ask HN: What's your favorite beer?
I enjoy Ipswich Ale or Sam Adams Black Lager.
The latest builds of Chrome support greasemonkey scripts: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/18/google-chrome-adds-greasemo...

There is also greasemonkey support in safari (with greasekit) and opera (no extension needed).
The real question is: who has nothing else better going on in their life that they must complain about a FB redesign?
Out of curiosity, why did you limit sign ups?

Other than that, I like your approach. I find a lot of to-do apps out there have a lot more in mind than just keep track of what you want to get done.
I like how simple it is. Well done.
I used to think that the problem with newspapers and journalism was a revenue problem. (e.g. CL took their classified ad revenue). Like a lot of people, I thought that eventually someone would figure out a new source of stable revenues and all would be fine. I now see that the problem is much bigger than that.

I think the important point that is easy to miss is that we are in the very early stages of a major social revolution, probably the biggest in human history. Institutions like the Catholic church or the NYT and the MSM (today) are what communicate and sustain the culture (whether you agreed with them or not). This is what the internet has broken. It takes time for new institutions to form but that is the process that is underway right now and that process will probably take decades.
I think it's rubbish. Probably just fine for a complete novice into program design, but utter rubbish to learn anything substantial from.
My name is not a URL
I limited signups while I make my hosting set up a bit more robust. Dev server can't handle too much.

Thanks very much! I found that too. To-do apps have a habit of trying to be too much.
Indeed, Graham's prose is very clear and simple to incorporate.
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