skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A survey we ran at https://starthq.com confirms the points the post brings up. We are looking to add pricing and trial duration info to our SaaS directory, but I was wondering: what does everyone think would be the best way to display this information & how should we go about collecting this data?

When it comes to displaying the info, I was thinking of using two sets of tags, one for the pricing model, i.e. "Free", "Freemium" or "Trial" and the other for the starting price per month once you do start paying: "<$5", "<$10", "<$20" etc. perhaps with an option to say that you pay per use such as when sending transaction emails or infrastructure.

As for collecting the data: the only thing I can think of is that we either do it ourselves, which would be time consuming for the 700+ apps we've got in the directory, or get the SaaS providers to register and do it themselves. Perhaps there's some way to automate this or crowd source it, but I can't seem to think of anything sensible.
Good catch. I certainly phrased that wrong. What is allowed, and open to anybody, is the kind of service that is charged strictly by time unit (usually by hour), and (as far as I know, at least) they don't need a taximeter. I think this is a healthy restriction, but obviously Uber hasn't considered using that payment model here.

So, yes, if they're insisting on using the "hybrid" payment model, they need a permit which is restricted to extraordinary events (essentially events where the customer won't care about the price, no matter how outrageous it is). In hindsight, I agree that calling it a lie is incorrect, I should have phrased it better. It does not, however, make me more forgiving w/r to their press release, as it's deliberately written as a factually lacking, misleading appeal to emotion.
You're correct. This was a (very) unfortunate typo. We had changed from x + 5 to x + 4 during the design phase to try and lessen the mental burden without making it too easy.

Thanks to you and a few others, I'm making corrections and will be uploading a fixed version of the paper soon.
Making Server Management Services Your Thing
Someone somewhere at a hedge fund just chuckled and said "ya think?"
Break the fan/performance thing out into a separate event entirely? Playlist Live/Playlist Creator?

Some fans would undoubtedly still buy tickets for the 'creator' event, but I've got to imagine their willingness to pay is mostly a function of "no other good way" to ever get access to the creators they enjoy. If there was another way, a way that was geared to their interests (performances vs powerpoint) I'd imagine the numbers of fans willing to sit through a talk on SEO for an autograph would dwindle.

I mean, how many fans are trying to scam press passes to E3 anymore, now that there are things like PAX?
Clojure is not a Lisp [2009]
TL;DR: use Amz S3 to host static content for cheap
Hacking V8: 'yield' and 'await' in node.js
"hyperbolic scream fests"

Hyperbolic, you say?

"tea-party style paranoid right-wing anti big evil government organization"
"culturally insensitive American douchebags"

Also, thanks US government. Because of you, this is what the rest of the world thinks of us.
Unzipping and parsing XML with javascript doesn't sound like a very hard task, why isn't there a simple web-viewer?
SLA's - Be wary of startups that offer them
Holy crap $560K coffee...and counting.
This exact same problem has existed with music concerts for years. Many solutions have been tried, none have worked yet. The main problem is that the people selling the tickets don't care who buys them.

I know, there'll be arguments that Apple should look after it's most devoted fans, but the same applies to any band / artist. If the current biggest fans don't get tickets, the band / artist don't really care as they've sold the tickets to people who will be the next biggest fans. What the companies / artists / promoters are forgetting is that their customers now have the ability to communicate very quickly and effectively with each other. This leads to lots of public, negative feedback. This isn't currently a large enough effect to change system.

Thankfully, with this problem existing in a much larger space than software developer's conferences, the negative feedback effect should become quantifiably apparent to various music promoters well before it becomes apparent to any developer's conference promoters, and the pattern will change.

In both cases I see this being a variant on some form of loyalty reward. Maybe, if you buy the album / release an app, you get (for example) 10 minutes advance notice for ticket purchases. I can see this working, but it will take a while for the ecosystem to work out the correct ratio of loyalty to reward.

I hope it happens soon, I'm sick of missing out on concert tickets because they sold out in half a second. (slight exaggeration, but it won't be long before it's reality)
The 'humble' beginning of ROP - Return On Project
Really long post claiming, basically, that Uber needs a sticker and to charge a certain way for consumer safety. Neither really makes any sense. I know how Uber charges when I call a car, I don't need a sticker on the window. It's useless. Taximeters are also useless with Uber, it takes care of all the payments and tips for you automatically. I hate it when I have to cab with someone who insists on paying then takes ten minutes digging through their wallet and screwing around. With Uber I just hop out of the car and it's done. I wonder if the writer has ever even used it.
With just a balloon, no.

To get something into a stable orbit you have to get it high enough to avoid significant atmospheric drag. In practice this requires an altitude of at least 200km [1] - although even at this altitude an orbit will decay fairly rapidly. The IIS orbits at 400km and most remote-sensing satellites are at 500km+.

Contrast this with Helium balloons, which usually top-out at an altitude of 35-50km with the record being 53km [2].

To stay in low-earth orbit you also need an orbital velocity of 7.8km/s. A balloon launched at the equator has about 0.5km/s horizontal component of velocity due to the earth's rotation and will not gain any as it lifts.

What you could do is use a balloon to carry a rocket up to its height ceiling before igniting [3]. This saves on fuel, but there are safety issues caused by the non-steerability of the balloon.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record#Unmanned...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch#Balloon
Apache CouchDB is supporting the Google Summer of Code
Recently a customer posted a very bad review of my app on a public app store. They called me personally a liar, claimed I took weeks to respond to email, that my service lost their business sales and they paid for a service I didn't provide.

This review caused my established app of nearly two years, more than 90% positive reviews and decent revenues to be pulled from the app store for two days.

I attempted to reach out to the customer to see what I had done wrong, but no reply on any channel (email/twitter/phone). I just wanted to understand what had made them so mad and to rectify it or at least stop it happening again.

With my app reinstated in the app store the worst was over, but still that stain of a very bad review. Thankfully I have great customers who love what I do and it's now been drowned further down. However my installs were substantially down and revenue somewhat.

As both the customer & my company are in England I considered legal action under our libel laws. But after speaking with a lawyer it was clear this would cost me tens of thousands of pounds and the process was far from straightforward for this kind of action. It would need to go to the High Court for judgement.

Now that publicly publishing statements about individuals or businesses to a wide audience is accessible by anyone for no money we need a more accessible legal system to stop harmful and untrue statements floating around for perpetuity on the web.

In my layman's reading this bill seems to edge it forward to cope with the difficulties of 'publishing' user generated content, but there's nothing for victims of untrue statements here. We need this moved forward too.
1) This has been around for many, many years.
2) No free lunch.
I was going to include my subtitle, but the HN title limit got the better of me. It is a little bit of a clickbait headline, I'll give you that. Just no-one tell HuffPo Spoilers: https://twitter.com/huffpospoilers

(side note: this blog post isn't hosted on S3. If it goes down, I will eat a big slice of humble pie)

(side note #2: the title has since changed to make this post make no sense whatsoever)
this looks sweet. gonna try it out.
It's important to note that the studies show that the short term effects of sleep deprivation can reduce the symptoms of depression. The long term effects are the opposite and being chronically sleep deprived can aggravate and severely worsen someone who is suffering from depression.
Eric Schmidt admits talking to Google Glass can be weird
These are great points, and speak to why measuring the impact of email is really, really important. Until you're holding your emails accountable to performance (whether it's getting someone to come back or to buy), you're just throwing darts in the air and potentially annoying someone.

At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - and we definitely find that some emails don't work. You've got to test different emails and strategies, see what works - and then ideally optimize and personalize what (or even whether) you are sending based on individuals' actions.
Diebold voting machine key copied from photo at company's own online store

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066#more-4066
Maybe the glasses can display a phone symbol on the lenses or something.
I hope we dont start this Java hate circlejerk again. While Maven has its downfalls (So does everything else), Its WAY Better than what existed before. Needing a folder in source control just for your jars so ANT could compile your files, and hope it never gets out of sync because then people can't but it was ludicrous. Is Maven perfect? No. Is it better than the above method? Hell yes. Nothing is perfect, but we can gradually improve a problem (Dependency Management Hell), and iterate on it until it is good enough. Right now, people use Maven because its just that: good enough.
Twitter cannot call this oEmbed. Their API documentation is lying.
linked wikipedia article clearly supports that there is no clean solution, imo.
Don't think it's that simple. Example: There's a sudden burst in searches for "Macys". They could have started a huge advertising campaign. Turns out that campaign costed them billions of dollar, and didnt have high ROI.
Can you expand on that? The article is about a man who enjoys meditation and brazilian ju jitsu. What in this article makes you think he's bat-sh*t? I did not catch any such vibe.
I'll agree that its simplified, but it almost might be the spark that gets me to use that free account that's dwindling away. Seems pretty simple. Setup static site/DNS/turn off listing in bucket.

Amazon products create insta-fear in me. It seems very overwhelming. I usually just fall back on DigitalOcean/Linode whenever I consider using S3.
"Color" is slang for opinion or prediction in finance, e.g. a trader could ask an analyst for some "color" on a company before he goes and buys its stock.
How does this particular article make him look / sound / appear irrational ?
For more on patio11's thoughts on pricing and conversions, please listen to his MicroConf lecture: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who...
Has someone implemented the same subset of CSP as in Go, but done it in Lua? Could it be done? Does concurrency in Lua depend on everyone calling yield when they're supposed to?
From what I can tell, VCs don't care much for SF as a place to live. They do like the Valley, though. They live in places like Atherton and Palo Alto. It's the young employees who live in the Mission. It's true that the extended area has significant appeal, but I'm not sure it's due to its niceness as a place to live, so much as just that it's where the action is, for historical reasons dating back to the '50s.
Let’s build a business with our laziness
Crowdsourcing in Manhunts can work
Sometimes validation can be done without knowing the actual algorithm or being able to rerun it.

For example, if a paper publishes a multiple sequence alignment of 100 sequences, then all you need to do is verify that it's at least as good as what other MSA programs generate. You don't need to be able to rerun the program.

Indeed, sometimes you can't. Someone could have manually aligned the sequence, and that process isn't reproducible.

You see this as well with fold prediction software, where it can be easy to show that a predicted fold is likely correct (ie, matches experimental observations), and where you don't necessarily care about the method used to get that fold prediction.

A genetic algorithm might be very sensitive to the compute environment. For example, the order of float operations generated by two different compiler settings, or by network traffic timings in a distributed system. This can lead to different minima, where the overall effectiveness is the same but the actual configuration is different. The GA search doesn't need to be reproducible; it's only the final effectiveness which is important.

For those cases, I don't see the need for access to the underlying software in order to validate the result.
Can we please stop using "tea-party" as a derogatory term? Not only is it needlessly offensive (and I'm not even a member of the tea-party), it doesn't even make sense. Since when did "strict adherence to the United States Constitution" and "reducing U.S. government spending and taxes" (see Wikipedia) mean "retarded" (as in, "full retard", as in where you got the "full XYZ" template)?
Perceived Growth Could Be Bullshit
What a lame twist of ageism NPR added to that story. Stay tuned for part two, where the kids teach Crockrell how to tweet and check his email.
You ascribe honourable motives and noble behaviours to all actors. You are demonstrably wrong where human behaviour is concerned.

Then by this definition, you should be more concerned with giving the power to a monopoly which is a state. People would surely be very likely to abuse this kind of power. When you a have a private company, it goes out of business the moment its customers stop paying money. Government doesn't have to worry about that happening, because it can force you to pay. And you can only vote once in a number of years.
Wolfram Research blows up Google deal
Some who worked with him claimed he gave off an impression of an "extraordinarily intelligent" man.

http://www.quora.com/George-W-Bush/What-is-George-W-Bush-rea...
Yeah -- I really thought about providing a "4 hours of actual usage" trial instead of a 14-day trial for a product of mine -- thinking that they could sign up immediately, not worrying that they don't need to fully try it within the next 14 days.

But the problem is, users don't understand it. The think it's 4 hours from when you sign up. The amount of text it takes to explain that it's actual cumulative usage, is so much that they don't read it. They just see 4-hour trial, and think, that's weird, and I don't have time for that right now.
7 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail)
How good is the camera on the Samsung Galaxy S4?
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة واتلتيك بلباو بث مباشر
New USAA Banking Design
I'm not familiar with the full range of Harris' writings, but I found it interesting that as an explicit and unapologetic 'atheist', Harris actually says at one point:

...we don't know what happens after death.

It is in the context of discussing death with a child, but still... the hardcore atheist position would seem to be that we do know what happens: nothing, the total cessation of experience. To say "we don't know" seems to allow for some tiny shred of religious mystery, which I didn't expect from Harris.
"my friends were beat up to surrender their pin numbers. One of my friends was held for 7 hours [...] He lost all of his money."

That's horrible. Not to try to minimize, but something doesn't sound right, though (in the US). Risk of loss on debit cards should be up to $50, if you notify your bank within the first 48 hours, under the Federal Electronic Fund Transfer Act.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debit_card#United_States
Google joins Fido Alliance to move beyond passwords
That's true. Super!
Neighborhood Mapping with Dynamic Vector Data Layers | MapBox
The Django ecosystem is almost entirely made up of BSD/MIT licensed software. My guess is that licensing this as LGPL is going to hurt its adoption.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has a good talk on licensing here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhuF0oalOi8
I'm not sure the author quite understood the seeing Star Wars thing was a super low bar fitness test. Once long ago my new wife asked me why geeks always wear tshirts with obscure references that no one gets. I was slightly put out by the question until I figured it out. They're a uniform. It's how we id the friendlies on the battlefield.
3 Things You Wanted to Know About ZenPacks (But Were Afraid to Ask) [Part 1]
Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?
1.8% is a very good rate. It's not clear how in-store purchases would be handled through this.
What is your source for the ole' "derivatives reduce volatility in the spot market" assumption?
Without really knowing how many or how often, the man does seem to receive enough death threats that some 'craziness' might be understandable, or even warranted.
Any decent martial art will take pains point out the difference between art and science though. I practice kenpo for instance and my sensei is crystal clear about how stupid it would be to use anything in a kata in real life.

It's more to build muscle memory, self awareness of the body and a knowledge of the mechanics of combat. For the most part, I think traditional martial arts can be seen as a form of dance. It's not something to be applied as much as interpreted. Many of these disciplines were used to train actual soldiers, warriors, and peasants after all. I think their real value comes in not taking them at face value though.

Obviously ymmv in regards to any particular art.
With 3D printing coming mainstream in the next decade, combined with high resolution cameras being common on smartphones, it's going to be important to start hiding the teeth of keys.
A bit of programming poetry
the paper tiger
the card castle
is so real
that you spend months inside your head
and in the end
you can't believe
that it actually works
My lunch with Dieter Rams
Anyone know the pricing for this within the US? 1.8% + €0.18 (23 cents) sounds too good to be true...
Manly Man Passwords
In addition to being cheap it is reliable. I haven't had any downtime on my sites since switching them over to s3.
Civility is not as important as free expression.
Sure, I'm going to submit my twitter password to some random website (not even served over SSL). Nice try. So that guy now has 100k twitter passwords?
honestly, just make up some fake info to see why everyone enjoyed the site.
Your entirely uninformed comments which you make without providing an ounce of information backing your claim is what is useless. This whole thread is ridiculous. Has anyone upvoting these comments ever used Uber and do they understand how it works and it's niche within the industry? Because I see a lot of hyperbole and about zero facts.
You know any way I could access databases through a static page? I mean, I wanted to have an "open to read, but not write" database to feed contents to a static HTML through javascript, would be neat.
> Lobbying isn't really a thing here, and is actually considered to be corruption.

As an american, I would agree wholeheartedly that lobbying is most definitely corruption.

> Whenever that sort of thing happens (which is pretty rare), the press is having a field day.

Oh how I wish the US news would report something like this. Just once. But our media is in the government's pocket. Or, rather, big business' pocket, and the government in theirs. I guess that means I'm wearing a "tin-foil hat". Although I can't see it. Must be one of those government sponsored, brain-altering, invisible tin-foil hats. Bastards!

EDIT: Also, I've seriously considered moving to Sweden or one of the other Nordic (as we call them; don't know if it's the same over there) countries. Are Swedish people generally welcoming to newcomers or not? (And, yes, I know I'm generalizing; sorry.)
Actually, Khan Academy is outperforming face-to-face remedial math only.

What KA is doing and Coursera isn't, is diagnosing student progress and misunderstandings by utilizing a tree of knowledge. KA is actually testing students and pointing to where they should go next.

It's trivial to test for example foreign word spelling in software: Just ask the student to type a word and see if it's right.

Peter Norvig recently talked about using Udacity's massive data on students to predict what misunderstandings students have about programming, much like a face-to-face teacher might do.
Read the blog post and visit the site. He's not storing the passwords.
"Most martial artists get illusions in training,” he said. For example, if you are trained as a boxer, you come to trust that an opponent won’t try to tackle you to the ground—because that’s not what people do in boxing rings. Instead they hit each other, with gloves on (another condition that is not very realistic).

BJJ also assumes a set of rules, not unlike boxing, wrestling or karate. You're not allowed to take a bite out of your opponents arm while they are choking you, or pull their ear off, or stick your thumb in their eye.

BJJ is also often practiced wearing a gi which allows for different techniques than if your opponent were wearing say, a t-shirt (or no shirt at all).
By "confirmed" do you mean we've directly observed the planets as opposed to calculating that they exist due to changes in the light from their stars? Regardless I'm very excited about increasing our understanding of these planets.. Sounds like NASA is planning to launch a telescope specifically for discovering more about planets as well[1]

[1]http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_13-088_Astro_Exp...
I used to feel the insta-fear. All those EC2 configuration options, not to mention LBE, and separate services for everything I could manually set up.

But S3 is simple. Big buckets, tons of files in flat order. No magic involved. I've been very happy with it and you can still take your computing needs elsewhere.
MSFT's web version of office (office.live.com) actually handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in web browsers without any plugins. I am not sure why Google had to write this.
100K users can't be wrong. I tried it a couple days ago and it worked, as I have not been hacked since. You should just at least try it.
I find it rather ironic that with higher resolution screens we are seeing more simple, minimal, and orthogonal designs. Straight lines and solid colors aren't going to have a recognizable difference with a retina screen. And I found that the only place I really recognized the retina-ness of the iPad 3 was with the complex icons that Apple had designed for the device... every other icon and interface that was simply increased to 2x didn't appear to utilize the benefit of the retina display.

So I'm really conflicted with this retina trend and how designers are (not) utilizing it. I don't think information density should increase, but certainly more complex artifacts could be used rather than these simplistic ones.
Martin Thompson - Mechanical Sympathy and High Performance Coding [video]